by M. K. Wren
“All right, George, you’ve hired yourself an investigator, but I want a couple of things understood. First, the odds are against my coming up with anything conclusive, and even if I do, you may not like it.”
“Maybe, but I don’t like what’s going on now, either.”
“I know. Another thing: I’d rather you didn’t spread it around that I’m there as a private eye.”
For once, George’s laugh came easily.
“Yes, I know; you take that ‘private’ seriously. I’ll do my best to keep it in the family.”
“I hope the family goes along. On that and my mission in general.”
“If you’re worried about Pa, don’t. He’ll holler about callin’ in an outsider, but I can talk him around.”
“Do you have any influence with Sheriff Tate?”
“Enough. But I can’t help you with Alvin.”
“I didn’t expect that. All right, this is…Thursday?” He’d lost a day in his peregrinations across the international date line. “I have a few loose ends to tie up here before—”
“Conan, please—I mean, I know I’m already asking a lot, but I…I need you here tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning? But it’s a six-hour drive, and I—”
“We have an airfield. It’s not fancy; no facilities except a fuel pump. But there must be someplace out there where you can charter a plane.”
His harried insistence was disconcerting, and Conan relinquished the prospect of a recuperative late rising in the morning.
“The plane’s no problem. Times have changed at the Ten-Mile, too; we have a plane, a helicopter, and a full-time pilot. But what’s happening tomorrow that’s so important?”
“Nothing, I mean, nothing connected with the feud, but I have to leave tomorrow afternoon for Portland. There’s an Oregon Cattlemen’s convention, and I can’t very well get out of it since I’m treasurer of the damn thing. That’s why I was tryin’ so hard to get hold of you. I wanted you here and dug in before I left. I’ll be gone a week, and I—” There was an odd, tight break in his voice. “I guess I’m afraid to be away from the ranch that long without…I don’t know. Makin’ some sort of provision, I suppose.”
A provision for disaster, Conan realized, and wondered what George expected him to do to avert it.
“All right. I don’t know when I’ll be arriving, but I’ll make it as early as possible.”
“Thanks, Conan. You don’t know what this means to me. It’s helped already just to—well, to talk about it.”
“I charge extra for therapy, but don’t get your hopes too high.”
“Any hope is a relief now. I’ll see you tomorrow, then, and get you set up here. Better dig out your boots.”
“I will, but unfortunately my saddle’s in storage in Pendleton.” He paused, the forced humor fading, and wondered why it was he who had to ask the question. “How’s Laura?”
“What? Oh. She…she’s fine. Pretty as ever. She’ll be glad to see you.”
Conan was on the verge of asking if there was a George or Laura fils or filles, but thought better of it. That news would have been heralded with engraved air-mail fanfares. Besides, something in George’s noncommittal tone discouraged further questions.
“Well, give her my love. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
After he hung up, he sat immobile in the twilight gray for some time, enduring the creeping doubts and second thoughts that came inevitably at this stage of the game. At length, he reached over the bar for the bourbon bottle and added a little color to his drink; quite a little color.
CHAPTER 3
Johnnie Moss was one of those graceful, golden young men of twenty-five who, entirely unwittingly, could make a man of thirty feel old and incompetent. The great passion of his life was flying, and it was typical that he made an enviably good living doing exactly what he most enjoyed.
Johnnie had one characteristic that particularly endeared him to Conan: he didn’t find it necessary to talk about his passion, or anything else, while indulging it. He spoke only those words requisite to his function or to basic courtesy, a profound relief to Conan, who considered flight an aesthetic privilege wasted on the bird brain.
The Cessna 150 took to the air in a lavender dawn from an airstrip near Holliday Beach, turned sunward over the Coast Range where wizard worlds of mossy rain forests smoothed the contours of the hills, then idled across the wide trough between the Coast Range and the Cascades. The Willamette Valley, incredibly green through drifts of cloud, patched with multitudes of small, rich farms; the Promised Land at the end of the Oregon Trail. Most of the residents of the state crowded into this valley, their cities proliferating like intricately structured fungi.
Then the plane nosed up through the clouds, striking out with a certain bravado toward the bulwarks of the Cascades. Set against the dark velvet of the forested foothills rose the glacier-carved peaks, pearls unstrung along the spine of the range. In their youth they had shaped themselves with awesome outpourings of lava, but now they entered middle age serenely, crowned with white. With occasional and ominous exceptions—like Mount St. Helens.
Beyond the crest of the Cascades, the forest changed color and texture, fir and hemlock giving way to ponderosa, that in turn surrendering to the tenacious, tough juniper. The land seemed to stretch itself to a retreating horizon, the sky became more intensely blue, the sun a dry, white glare that made dark glasses a necessity and bleached the colors of the land to subtle, grayed siennas and ochres. Even the juniper at length retreated to the heights, giving way to sagebrush. There were always mountains in view, low ranges of hills or fault block ridges, but the expanses between them reached into flat, blued distances; old lake beds, many of them, floored with alkali like unseasonable snow.
On the map, Harney and Malheur counties made two vertical rectangles side by side in the southeast corner of Oregon. The Forgotten Corner, it had been called; twenty thousand square miles, a fifth of the area of the state, yet it supported only a small fraction of its population. This was a Promised Land only for the hardy, courageous, persistent, and lucky. It was the kind of land Conan had grown up in, and he respected and even loved it, but he’d left it by choice because he understood the demands it made on the human psyche; because survival required too much of a man’s resources and left too little of his soul intact.
It was exactly 9:00 A.M. when they passed over Burns, the seat of Harney County. With a population of less than four thousand, it contained more than half the county’s inhabitants. Its main distinction in Conan’s mind was that some literate pioneer founder had named it for Robert Burns. He always wondered how the poet would have felt about having this outpost in a land he’d never seen—and probably couldn’t have imagined—named in his honor.
Past Burns, Johnnie took the plane down to a lower altitude, following the fragile line of Highway 20, Burns’s link with both east and west, drawn ruler-straight across the fossil lake bed of Harney Valley, then curling up over a range of hills named Stinkingwater Mountain. Singular. Then the highway straightened again, striking north-northeast across another basin, through which the Malheur River threaded its way eastward toward Hell’s Canyon. A lonely cluster of houses and trees on the river marked the site of Drewsey, but Johnnie turned due east before they reached it, following a dirt road that struck off the highway. He gestured downward once, shouting the word “Drinkwater” against the roar of the engine.
Conan nodded, looking down at the tiny patch of trees and buildings, the headquarters of the Double D. This survey was part of the flight plan he had outlined on Johnnie’s navigational maps before their departure. Three miles past the Double D was the border between the two warring domains, marked by the thin line of a barbed wire fence. It was a long border, stretching south ten miles, and north five miles to the Malheur River. A long border to patrol or defend.
A flash of light reflected from an oval of dull copper to the south caught his eye. That would be the Spring Creek
reservoir George had told him about. It was on Drinkwater land, but within a mile of the property line.
Then he frowned, shading his eyes with one hand. The reservoir seemed nearly empty, a brown puddle ringed with darker brown, wet earth. And the dam—
He touched Johnnie’s shoulder, shouting his instructions, receiving a wordless nod as the right wing tipped down and the plane made a long arc over the reservoir.
And Conan stared numbly down.
The reservoir was nearly empty, and soon would be entirely empty. Dark earth sprayed in radiating lines that converged at what had once been the center of the dam.
It had been blown up; dynamited.
A minor disaster it might seem. It had been a simple earthen dam no more than fifty feet across; the reservoir couldn’t have been more than half a mile long.
But in a land with an annual rainfall of ten inches, and in autumn, when there would be little precipitation except in the form of snow until the following spring, it was a disaster of major proportion for the rancher who depended on it to water his cattle in their winter pastures.
George had told him that only the burning of the Black Stallion stackyard put them ahead of the Double D in total damages sustained in this miniature war. Now the score had been evened. With a vengeance.
Conan gestured to Johnnie to continue their course, grateful for his reticence and the engine noise; he was too distracted by the implications of that disaster to discuss it.
It was only seven miles via the dirt road from the Double D’s headquarters to the Black Stallion’s. He saw the trees first; an improbably lush grove, green shading to gold with the season. Cottonwoods, most of them, but soaring over them, the golden plumes of Lombardy poplars, as nobly defiant as Cyrano’s white plume. They shaded every ranch house more than fifty years old in the region, lovingly nurtured in a land where water was precious. Untended, they died and their white skeletons marked the graves of countless homesteads. Well tended, they flourished, creating green oases, barriers against dust, sun, wind, and snow.
In and around this grove was a small community, its prosperity evident in its orderly arrangement and white-painted buildings and fences. The main house and the barn were separated by an open graveled area perhaps a hundred yards across, the house putting its side to it and facing west, the barn opening onto it, facing north. These and the pump house were the oldest structures, but the windmill atop the latter had been rendered impotent by the advent of electric power, the vanes gone, and the rudder only an indicator of wind direction. The cookhouse, bunkhouse, and three private residences for familied employees were more recent additions, but still verging on middle age. The newest additions were three house trailers, two matched pairs of tall metal cylinders—silos and propane tanks—and a large building housing the shop, a totally modern, elaborately equipped automotive repair depot Conan remembered well from his last visit. The sun glared from its metal roof, glittered on the machines in the yard behind it; pickups, tractors, road graders, backhoes, and the mechanical dinosaurs that harvested, baled, and stacked the hay and alfalfa crops.
Johnnie made a circle into the wind as Conan looked down at the main house, wondering at the number of cars parked in front of it. From the air, it looked like a child’s building block to which had been added a low, pyramidal roof, but on the ground, he knew, it was quite impressive despite its prudent austerity; two stories high, built of beautifully dressed tan stone, fronted with a wide porch, it was a rare example of ostentatious display for the area. Few families of its period were prosperous enough to build stone houses, usually satisfying themselves with clapboard copies of the houses left behind east of the Mississippi.
The airstrip east of the buildings was only a bulldozed length of ’dobe, but Johnnie Moss put the plane down as smoothly as if it were new paving and taxied toward the only observable gate.
“I thought your friend had a pump. Oh—there it is.”
Conan scarcely heard him, but not because of the engine noise. There was no one in sight. Yet, George was expecting him, and the approach of the plane couldn’t have gone unnoticed.
“Are you low on fuel?” Conan asked absently.
“Yes, but I can make it to the Burns field if there’s a problem here. It’s only thirty miles.”
There was a problem here; one that had nothing to do with the availability of fuel. The conviction was only reinforced when the plane came to a stop near the gate and he finally saw a sign of life.
It came in the person of a uniformed man who approached at a measured, determined pace. The uniform was brown and tan, and included a flat-brimmed Stetson and a .38 revolver in a belt holster. From the county sheriff’s office.
Johnnie asked dryly, “That the kind of welcoming committee you were expecting?”
“Not exactly. Will you get my luggage out while I see how welcoming this committee is?”
Conan’s ears rang in the baked silence as he went out to meet the uniformed man. The light wind was cool, but it had only to stop for a moment and the heat of the sun closed in. The man squinted at Conan, his arms hanging in a ready curve. When they were within six feet of each other and came to a mutual halt, he turned his attention to the plane.
“You from the Circle-Ten?”
The Ten-Mile Ranch name was also lettered on the plane, yet he chose the brand by which to identify its owner. But Conan didn’t smile at that; he was too overwhelmed with a sense of dread to notice colloquial subtleties.
“Yes. I’m Conan Flagg. Where’s George?”
The man gave him a look in which suspicion vied with shock, then glanced back toward the ranch buildings.
“You mean George McFall. He…he’s dead.”
CHAPTER 4
Deputy Sheriff Harley Ross’s refusal to answer any questions was not to be construed as discourtesy to a stranger. He made that clear by offering to call someone to refuel the plane and by helping Conan with his luggage. Duty stilled his tongue. It was up to Sheriff Tate to decide whether Conan’s questions should be answered.
After the first shock, Conan accepted that. He sent Johnnie Moss on to Burns to take care of the plane, then walked beside Deputy Ross past the house trailers, the bunkhouse, the cookhouse, and through the graveled yard between the barn and the main house, seeing nothing and feeling nothing except the breathless heat of the morning sun.
It seemed a long way and a long time, yet he was grateful for Ross’s silence. It gave him a chance to gear his mind to rational function again; to pass the “only” stage. “If only,” and “only yesterday,” and “only thirty years old.”
Deputy Ross took him around to the front of the house, past the white picket fence, and up the five steps to the porch. The door was open, and the foyer seemed crowded, but when Ross disappeared through the double doors on the right into the living room, Conan realized there were only two other people in this shadowed passage.
He took off his sunglasses, meeting the curious stare of another of Harney County’s finest, posted by the front door. At the foot of the stairs, a dark-haired girl sat hugging her knees, black eyes mirroring the outside light. She was Chicano, and he wondered how much English she spoke, and how much of the tragedy visited on this house she understood.
More than he, perhaps.
There were voices from the living room; Deputy Ross explaining the visitor, then a rush of footsteps, and Conan turned to see Laura McFall in the doorway, gazing at him in bewilderment.
He looked for symptoms of shock and grief, but found them hidden. Pretty as ever, George had said, and it was true; the kind of perfectly structured face that makes models famous with the right lighting, yet in normal contexts attracts little attention. One was more likely to notice her copper-red hair, or her translucent, amber eyes. She wore her hair short now, and it seemed paler, faded.
“Conan? Is it—oh, Conan…” She moved toward him in an unthinking rush, but stopped short of his offered embrace.
“No, I…I’m all right.”
She wasn’t all right; it was only that she had herself under control now and knew that a sympathetic embrace would be enough to jeopardize it. The girl on the stairs had risen.
“Señora?”
“Oh, Ginger…where’s Mano?”
“Outside with one of the sheriffs, I think.” Then, unexpectedly, tears spilled from her dark eyes. “Señora, I have no words…”
Laura could risk a comforting embrace with this young woman; she was giving as much as accepting the comfort.
“I know; I understand.” Her reassuring smile was almost convincing. “You’d better go out to the cookhouse and help Mrs. Mosely. She’ll need…someone.”
“And you?”
“I’m all right. I’m fine. Thank you, Ginger.”
She nodded, then turned and nearly ran to the door at the far end of the vestibule.
“Her name’s Gabriella,” Laura murmured absently in the wake of her retreat. “I nicknamed her Ginger, or Irene would’ve called her Gabby. Oh, Conan—” Abruptly, she turned away, hands making small fists. He reached out to her, but at the tense negative shake of her head, he withdrew his hand, watching helplessly until she had restored her stern self-mastery. She looked around at him perplexedly. “But, Conan, what are you—how did you find out?”
“About George? Deputy Ross just told me.”
“Then, you didn’t know he—he was…”
Voices were still audible from the living room. One, in its cutting asperity, carried over the others; Aaron McFall’s.
“No, I didn’t know. Didn’t George tell you I was coming? That he asked me to come?”
“What? No. He didn’t say anything about you at all; not recently. Conan, I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I.” Then he glanced at the attentive deputy by the door and added vaguely, “He thought I could help him with something.”
