by Lou Cameron
Old Pete said, “We all did. But there ain’t no house left, down yonder. Both sides got burnt out as well as shot up before the Pleasant Valley War was over.”
Lawyer Addams added, “Anyone who’d be down there now would be more likely a stray Indian or an even less friendly outlaw seeking solitude. Pete’s right about the valley’s sinister rep. We might be able to scout up some adventurous youths to ride along with you if you just can’t stand not going. But it’s my duty as your attorney of record to warn you not to go alone.”
Stringer didn’t answer. He’d been brought up not to argue with his elders when he didn’t have to. The notion sounded sort of dumb to him as well. But he’d already made up his mind that if he survived a whole night with old Madge, he’d just head down that way come morning.
CHAPTER
FIVE
*
He did. Old Madge said it had been a night she’d never forget, either, and Sam Barca, bless his crusty heart, had wired the money for the useless Chinatown feature via night-letter rates.
Stringer believed in traveling light. So he hired two tough-looking cow ponies and a center-fire saddle at the livery stable. One was a barrel-headed buckskin gelding, and the other a friskier paint mare. He meant to pack most of what he might need on the trail aboard his saddle and let the spare mount tag along free of care until he needed a fresh brute. The water bags he picked up at the general store figured to stay aboard the spare mount without a clumsy pack saddle he’d have to mess with. He bought a gunny of oats for the ponies and some trail grub he could eat cold, save for the coffee, of course. He hadn’t brought a saddle gun along from Frisco. So he picked up an Army surplus Krag .30-30. When the shopkeeper tried to sell him a Winchester instead, he said he was more interested in accuracy than rapid fire on wide open desert or semidesert range. A sword bayonet came with the Army rifle. Stringer started to tell the shop keeper not to be silly. But as long as the deal cost the same either way, he decided to pack the wicked blade along. He’d discovered in Cuba that a Krag bayonet was good for opening cans or splitting kindling.
He was well on his way before nine, riding the paint and leading the buckskin. It only took a few minutes to ride clear of a town the size of Holbrook, and the day was shaping up as pleasant. The thin dry air of the Colorado Plateau was making short work of yesterday’s unseasonable rain, but to do so, it had to cool some. There were still puddles here and there in the deeper ruts of the wagon trace he was following, and the overgrazed range this close to the tracks would no doubt green up a mite by the time he got back this way again. But otherwise the view was uninteresting.
Had he been riding north he’d have been entering the Painted Desert. Had he had any reason to ride east, he’d have been headed into the Petrified Forest, if one wanted to call a mess of stone logs stretched flat in the dust a forest. But this particular mess of nothing just lay gray and mostly flat as far as the eye could see. The cactus desert Arizona Territory was so famous for, lay miles to the south. There wasn’t even a cow in sight, considering this was supposed to be cow country, and he seemed to have the wagon trace across it all to himself this morning.
He did, at least, until an hour out of town he heard hoofbeats behind him and turned in the saddle to see a gal chasing him at full gallop, sidesaddle. As she waved, he reined in, wondering why. He’d already told old Madge she couldn’t come along.
It wasn’t Madge. It was Patty Stern from the law office. She sure sat a horse well, he thought, and the palomino she was riding was almost the same shade of blond. She was wearing a whipcord riding habit and a dinky little derby that had to be pinned on good. As she slid her palomino to a stop she said, “I was so afraid I’d miss you. You should have dropped by the office before you left. That horrid woman at your hotel said she didn’t know where you’d gone. But fortunately they were able to tell me at the livery.”
He raised an eyebrow and observed, “You must have wanted to catch up with me bad. I thought all that trouble about Blue Streak had been settled, at least as far as I was concerned.”
She said, “That’s not why I rode after you. Are you really on your way to Pleasant Valley?”
He said, “I am, if I don’t get lost. They told me I just have to follow this trail to the Pink Cliffs and west to a creek they call Chevelon.”
She reached in her saddle bag as she said, “I brought you a map and some other things you might find useful.”
As she handed over a well-stuffed manila envelope, she explained, “I dug all I could about the Pleasant Valley War out of the old county records. Carbons, of course. You may find some pages hard to read, and I fear they may be incomplete. You see, the county lines have been redrawn more than once in recent years, and Holbrook wasn’t always the county seat. They may have more records on file over at Saint Johns. When this country was less settled, it was all one monstrous county, and—”
“They told me Sheriff Owens was casual about jurisdiction,” he cut in, taking the envelope with a nod of thanks and putting it in his own saddle bag. He added, “I didn’t think to bring any other reading material, so I’m sure grateful, whether there’s anything here I can use or not. Was this your own neighborly notion or did Lawyer Addams send you after me?”
She said, “A little of both. It was my idea to look through the county files. When I told W.R. I’d found a few items that might be of interest to you, he thought it was a good idea too. I wish I could get you to read them now. It might save you a long dull ride to nowhere.”
He smiled crookedly and said, “I’m not headed for nowhere. I’m going to have a look-see at Pleasant Valley. But I’m all ears if you can tell me a better place to go.”
She sighed and said, “I read everything I dug out for you, of course. Frankly, I found the old charges and countercharges depressing. Both the warring clans were trash whites who just seemed to enjoy fighting. The point is that I saw nothing mysterious or even new about that long-dead feud. Neither a Graham nor a Tewksbury is likely to be anywhere near Pleasant Valley now. Sheriff Owens hasn’t been down that way for almost ten years. He’d have surely said so, if he thought there was a hidden treasure or a gold mine, wouldn’t he?”
Stringer shrugged and told her, “I can’t say. I came all this way to interview him, and found him missing. Since nobody can tell me where he is, and somebody else doesn’t seem to want me to talk to him, anyway, all I can do is follow his footsteps in the hope of stumbling over whatever in thunder they don’t want Owens to tell me.”
She shook her head and said, “You’re not being logical. Can’t you get it through your head that the Pleasant Valley War ended a good ten years or more before Pear lost that recent election?”
Stringer said, “I can count. There’s nothing mysterious about the last few years of his career. For one thing, he hadn’t done much. What he did do is well documented, in and about the county seat. Nobody would have reason to gun me over a matter of common knowledge. So it has to be over something Owens did, or saw, well away from civilization.”
“Some crimes he never reported?” she asked with a frown.
He shook his head and said, “Not if he was the sort of lawman everyone who knows him says he is. But with all due respect to a rough-and-ready old cuss, he might not have recorded what he might not have thought important at the time.”
She sighed and said, “I wish you’d read those carbons I just gave you. Between the Pleasant Valley and Hash Knife wars, Pear and his deputies rode all over the Tonto Basin.”
He nodded and said, “That’s why I’m headed there.”
She protested, “You must like to ride, then. We’re talking about hundreds of square miles!”
He said, “I know. That’s why I’d best get on down the road. It’s been nice talking to you, Miss Patty.”
She called him a fool again, wished him luck, and turned back. They hadn’t been parted long before he sort of missed her, not so much because of her trim figure—although that was something to feel a mite wistful about
as well—but because the dull gray open range all about looked lonesome as hell. As the sun rose higher, even the lizards stopped amusing him by trying to spook his paint.
He cheered up some when they topped a gentle rise and he saw what had to be the pink cliffs they’d told him about. He figured they had to be no more than four or five miles off, keeping in mind how desert air could fool human eyes. He stopped to water and swap his ponies. He was glad he had, a quarter mile on, when a snake or a mighty big grasshopper buzzed at them from a clump of trailside yucca. The buckskin was steadier than the paint. It just cocked one ear at the buzzing and plodded on.
Stringer made a mental note, in case he ever had to fire a gun aboard either pony. He didn’t want to when he spooked a pair of wild burro a few miles on. Wild burro knew they were considered good eating as well as range pests. So they lit out to the west cussing him in jackass as he laughed. There was a haze of dust stirred up by other hooves in the direction they were running. Most range stock grazed untended at this time of the year.
For once things viewed through thin dry desert air were not much farther off then they looked. By mid-afternoon he was following the old wagon trace west, with the pink cliffs looming to his left. The eroded escarpment rose more salmon than baby pink, but the color was close enough, and whoever’d run all those wagon wheels this way ahead of him had no doubt known where they were headed. Going straight up those rocks would have been a chore in any case.
The break in the cliffs, where Chevelon Creek punched through to flow north to the Little Colorado, was said to be about six or eight more miles. They’d make it easy before sundown, and see how far up the creek they could get before it was time to call it a day.
But they’d only gone three or four before Stringer began to have second thoughts about this whole deal. The afternoon sun was shining in his face now and not getting any cooler as it worked its weary way west in a cloudless cobalt sky. He told himself it would set and things would cool off soon. But another part of him asked, Then what? Come morning, we won’t be a quarter of the way there, and tomorrow has to be hotter than it was today.
He told himself to shut up. But the more he rode, the more he thought, and it wasn’t as if he knew there was anything ahead but more of the same. The notion that Pleasant Valley held some deep dark secret nobody local had noticed for a good ten years had made a lot more sense in the Bucket of Blood than aboard a pony, inhaling dust for hours. The late Blue Streak Bendix hadn’t tried to run anyone out of Pleasant Valley, where nobody lived any more. He’d wanted a nosy reporter out of Holbrook, which was still full of folk, many of them from the old days and any one of whom might have learned anything the missing sheriff might know.
Stringer rode on a ways, wondering more and more just what he thought he was doing. He saw no break in the cliffs ahead. He thought about beer, and old Madge’s bed. Then he muttered aloud, “Hell, the farther I am from town when I finally decide to turn back, the farther back I’ll have to ride. And it’s not as I had more than a half-assed hunch to follow all that tedious way.”
Stringer was a man who took his time making up his mind, but once having done so, acted directly. So the first shot went wide when he’d simply reined in and swung his mount around on its hind hooves. As the second shot sizzled past him, closer, Stringer threw himself out of the saddle, drawing the Krag from its saddle boot as he did so, and landed in the dust on his shoulder.
He rolled behind a trailside clump of prickly pear that wasn’t near as substantial as he’d have chosen, if there’d been time to make a choice. His spooked ponies ran off as the bushwacker fired a third time and spattered pear pulp all over Stringer’s Stetson. Stringer worked the bolt of his Krag and fired back at the faint blue haze of gunsmoke he’d spotted among the salmon rocks near the top of the cliff in front of him. The rascal had obviously ridden along the flat top above to work down afoot into the eroded clefts of the rimrock. There was no easy way up from the trail Stringer had been riding. He fired again for luck as he licked his dusty lips and muttered, “Well, of course the son of a bitch has to know this country better. The question before the house is what’s to be done now.”
It was a good question. Stringer was pinned down good. He had reason to suspect he had his enemy in the same position, albeit the bastard was forted better. There was no way even a loco bushwhacker was going to charge down the cliff at him and reach the bottom alive. If he’d done enough, there was no way he could roll back over the rimrocks without outlining his fool self against the sky, and Stringer’s Krag was sighted for well beyond that easy range. As if great minds were running in the same channels, the bushwhacker peppered Stringer’s position with a fusilade of rapid fire. Stringer held his own fire as he watched the smoke drift off. He nodded grimly and said, “That was dumb. No long arm but a Winchester repeats that pronto, and so guess who’s got the range on whom, even if you do have a mess of rocks to duck among up there.”
He knew nobody with a lick of sense would stay put in one spot after firing, if he could help it. But he had no choice. So he knew his own best chance was to wait with a round in his chamber for a flash of hat or pants, then make it count.
Stringer craned his neck to see where his ponies might be now, if anywhere. He saw them a few hundred yards off, grazing. The lead rope, bless it, had hung up on a small stout bush, and once nobody had been shooting at them directly, they’d settled down. He could only hope the son of a bitch up yonder wouldn’t think of the position he’d be in out here with two dead mounts.
As another .44-40 slug tore up the desert crust to his right, Stringer spoke as if his treacherous foe could hear, growling, “You know I could walk back from here if I had to. But you don’t aim to give me the chance, right?”
As if in reply, the distant Winchester cursed him again, and again, the shot went a mite wide. Stringer knew that if the other exposed himself for a stand-up shootout, the Krag would have the best cards. Unfortunately, that other rascal seemed to know it.
Stringer got out the makings and proceeded to roll a smoke, one-handed as he muttered, “All right. Who would have told them I was headed out this way with a longer-ranging rifle?”
There were too many answers. He’d made no secret of his plans at either the livery or the general store, and besides, he’d just pegged a .30-30 round at the son of a bitch.
He licked the paper secure and lit the smoke. It helped, even if his canteens were aboard that distant buckskin. He hoped the rascal up above was feeling thirsty by now. But, of course, if he’d planned all this fun in advance, he’d likely brought his own canteen down over the edge with him. Stringer thought about the way he’d been set up for the same fate as the late Tom Graham, a few years back and farther south. It was possible he was swapping shots with the same disgusting gent. Stringer knew it was only one he had to deal with. Had there been two or more, they’d be trying to cross fire him by now. He nodded and muttered, “Right. That dust off to the west before was you, going lickety-split for the far end of that cliff to get up top and into position for me. So it’s you and me alone out here, and ain’t this fun?”
A Winchester round whizzed over his head. Stringer knew the rising smoke from his roll-your-own had drawn fire. He took a deep drag and tossed the cigarette off to his left to smoke all it wanted over there as he drew a bead on the last place he’d seen smoke above him.
It only worked part way. His foe among the ruddy rocks fired again after a time. But not from the same spot. Stringer cursed and held his own fire, knowing now that Swiss Cheese Cliffs had been the name they’d been groping for way back when.
But the so-called pink cliffs were getting ever pinker as the sun kept sinking in the western sky. He could now make out the glow as well as the rising smoke from his cast-away cigarette as the shadows across the desert crust grew longer and more purple. He rolled over more, to pick out a man-sized clump of ungrazed cheat grass about as far from him as he was from the sniper up above. He knew that when he could no l
onger make it out, there was a good chance he’d be invisible from up there as well.
Meanwhile there was nothing much either could do but wait. So Stringer and no doubt the polecat up above got to enjoy one of the slowest sunsets either remembered. The first stars were winking in a now purple sky, and bats were flittering out of the rock clefts to confuse the issue further, when Stringer tried a lit match, flung wide, and nothing happened.
He started easing back, rose to his feet when he’d worked them into that cheat grass, and finally found his ponies in the dark.
As he watered them and changed the saddle back to the paint, he told them, “I reckon we won’t be headed back to town, after all. I suspect that bastard left you both alive so I might, if he failed to cure my curious nature entire.”
He remounted, staring up at the now black and featureless rock wall as he nodded and growled, “There must be something someone doesn’t want me to see on that haunted range to the south, if they went to all that trouble to keep me from getting there. So I’m sorry, pards, but that’s where we’re going for sure now.”
It was easy enough to find Chevelon Creek in the dark. For thanks to that recent rain, it was growling like it thought it was a river. By this time the moon was up, glinting on the white water of the creek and painting the wagon trace dull silver.
Stringer knew horses could see even better in the dark, and as long as one could see at all, crossing country like this by night had daylight riding under the hot sun beat. So though both ponies were tired and Stringer wasn’t feeling so hot himself, he pushed on, planning to camp by moonset, anywhere along the handy water of the trailside creek.
He was getting sort of tired of waiting for the moon to set, too, by the time they got to the best campsite he’d seen since leaving Holbrook. It was a willow-hedged hollow between the creek and the wagon trace. The bottom of the bowl lay above the flood line, but just enough to hold grass and sedge, still edible, this late in the year. By the moonlight left, Stringer rubbed down both ponies, gave them each plenty of water and a few handfuls of oats, and left them hobbled to graze, knowing neither would stray from such a horse heaven, hobbled or not.
