“You heard what he said last night,” Reefe persisted woodenly. “He can do what he likes on his own land. If that damages you, you can sue him. Dunno if that does you much good, after the damage is done. An’ if we go in on his land to interfere with him, that’s trespassin’, an’ maybe he can sue you. Guess that wouldn’t help him so much either, if we had him stopped.”
“So he wouldn’t let us stop him,” said Jean. “He’d fight.”
“Sure,” Reefe agreed. “But he’s not the only one who can do that.”
“It’s ridiculous,” Morland said. “Things like that just don’t go on any more. I’m going to town and talk to the sheriff.”
Reefe nodded.
“You can try that,” he said expressionlessly, and shaped the brim of his hat as he straightened up. “I’ll get on with my job.”
They watched him walking away down towards the corral, the well-worn cartridge belt drooping under his right hip and the holstered Colt purposefully tied down to his thigh. He could so easily have looked melodramatic, and yet the stoical naturalness of him made that word impossible.
Morland turned to the Saint with a little bewildered gesture, as if all these things were too much for him.
“What does he mean? Does he think the Sheriff would be on Valmon’s side?”
“You can never tell,” said the Saint philosophically. “Such things have happened.”
Morland’s lips tightened.
“Well, I’m going to find out!” He stuck his pipe in his mouth at a stubborn angle which to Simon had the ironic pathos of unconscious futility. “If…if I could borrow your car, I could pick up my wheels on the way in and have them fixed, and then someone could fetch the station wagon in this evening.”
“Help yourself,” said the Saint cordially, and held out his keys.
Jean Morland came slowly back to the porch after she had seen her father start. She turned again beside the Saint, who was smoking a cigarette there with one hip hitched on the rail, and looked down the canyon where Morland’s dust was creeping down towards the desert.
One of her hands curled into a small fist, but it was much longer than that before her eyes moved. And then suddenly she turned on him, almost savagely, and said, “Why are you all so cruel to him?”
“Nobody’s been cruel, Jean,” he said steadily. “The boys are ready to fight for him. Hank Reefe is toting the old family six-shooter for him. They just don’t talk a lot.”
She brushed back her hair helplessly.
“Oh, I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ever have said that. But it seems cruel. As if you were all laughing up your sleeves at everything he says.”
“We could be, in a sort of way. If he had some of these boys back on his home ground in Richmond, Virginia, he could probably make them look pretty naive. Well, out here he looks pretty naive to them. But it isn’t unkind. He seems to have a lot of ideas of his own, so they figure the best thing is to leave him to it and let him find out for himself. Then he’ll get it out of his system. You see, they know.”
“And you think you know, too.”
“I don’t know much. I’ve only just arrived. But if I have to take somebody for an authority, I’ll take Hank and the boys. After all, they’ve been here for a while…I only want to do the best I can for you.”
He smiled, and the Saint’s smile could be as quietly irresistible as it could be quietly deadly. Quite naturally he touched her arm.
“Why don’t you show me around this morning,” he said, “and let me get my bearings on the battlefield?”
“Of course,” she said, and she went on looking at him with that open-eyed straightforwardness that was more baffling than any coquetry. “Yes, I’d like that.” And there was nothing but the sincere direct statement of fact in her voice. But it was as if she was realising, with a little surprise and puzzlement, that they were not new acquaintances any more. Or had they ever been strangers?…“You could go on ahead and saddle the horses, and I’ll be ready as soon as I’ve cleared up some of these dishes. Mine is a pinto—the only one in the corral. You can choose your own.”
“Okay,” he said.
After he had saddled the pinto his own choice was immediate—a beautiful golden palomino with lines that would have stood out in any company. He was just tightening the cinch when he heard the girl’s step behind him, and turned to find her standing with her eyes fixed on the horse in an uncertain kind of stillness.
“I should have known you’d pick Sunlight,” she said slowly.
Simon unhooked the stirrup from the horn and returned her gaze innocently.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s the horse that killed my uncle. Nobody else has ridden him since then.”
The Saint paused to light a cigarette, and then he deliberately put his foot in the near stirrup and swung lightly into the saddle. The palomino didn’t stir. Simon stroked its sleek neck.
“It seems like an awful waste of a good horse,” he murmured.
“Let’s follow the brook up to Valmon’s boundary and see what the scenery’s like around there.”
The stream crossed the boundary line near the north-west corner of the Morland ranch. For a full mile around that corner the country was a cluster of tall rolling hills, but it seemed to Simon from where they halted to survey it, with Jean Morland pointing out the landmarks, that all the higher crests were on the Circle Y. She confirmed this.
“But the spring starts lower down,” she explained. “It rises on Valmon’s side. Then it does a horseshoe turn back on to our land.”
“Which I suppose makes it easier for Max to turn it back again,” said the Saint.
He gazed thoughtfully at the painted grandeur of the landscape, wishing that he had nothing else to look for than the beauty which Nature had squandered there in a riot of heroic sculpture. He had a passing notion that with water established in that sort of formation it should have been possible to tunnel or drill on Morland’s side of the hills and bring a new stream gushing from the same buried reservoir, but he was not much of a geologist, and anyway the point was not instantly constructive or even closely related to his original quest. He wished too that he had been free to share the spell of the scene, with no other consideration on his mind, with the girl who had so simply and so unaccountably, in less than a day’s span, become one of his oldest friends, but that also was just an unprofitable dream, so long as Dr Ludwig Julius was in Arizona. His face was a tanned mask studying the terrain, and his right hand rested unconsciously on the butt of the Magnum that he had belted on that morning as automatically as Reefe had put on his Colt.
“Let’s ride on some more,” he suggested.
He turned the palomino into a trail that looked as if it might find a way to the top of one of the higher slopes from which there should be a fair panorama of Valmon’s property. As they climbed, the wild brush-pocked hills opened and spread below them, pushing back the rugged horizon to let broad tablelands press up to the north-west. The trail, if it had ever really been a trail, petered out unobtrusively, until the Saint was breaking new ground all the time and his eyes were kept busy in search of ways to circumvent steeper slopes and increasing obstacles of tumbled rock. Presently he was on a spoon-shaped ledge from which at first sight all progress seemed to be blocked by a precipitous mass of broken boulders.
He reined his horse there and turned cross-saddle to estimate the view, as Jean Morland urged the pinto’s nose up to his knee. Below and to the left, near the foot of the hills which they were climbing, he could now see some of the scattered buildings of the J-Bar-B, looking like toy models at the distance of two miles or more. There was one section of shallow canyon behind him where he could see a stretch of water sparkling in the sun, but he couldn’t locate the rest of its course.
Then something said BOOM! in a thick throaty cough like the bursting of a giant drum, and the sound went echoing and rippling through the hills in a thinner diminuendo of repetitions. The horses started and
moved nervously, their ears rigidly cocked, and Simon’s face hardened.
“Max isn’t wasting any time,” he said.
But Jean Morland was frowning at the settling cloud of dust that had mushroomed from behind one of the rock castles some way to the north.
“The stream doesn’t go there,” she said.
“Maybe that’s where Max is planning for it to go,” said the Saint. “He’d get his new channel ready in advance, but he won’t set off the last blast that would turn the stream until his ultimatum has run out.”
The girl turned to him with her lips and eyes divided between fight and pleading.
“But why do we have to let him do it—get everything so that he only has to press one button to ruin us?”
“It won’t hurt him or his men to put in an honest day’s hard work,” said the Saint calmly. “They haven’t pressed that last button yet, and what makes you think that we’re going to let them?” He reached for her hand, and took her fingers lightly into his. “Let’s go on a bit and see if we can’t see some more.”
“There might be a way over there—”
She urged her horse on to squeeze past him, and forced it out on to a narrow shelf that looked as if it might sneak around the barrier. It was foolhardy riding, for if the shelf had proved to be a blind alley there would have been no chance to turn round and come back, and he wondered whether she did it in ignorance or recklessness. But he followed her because it was too late to argue, and was relieved to find that in a few yards the sheer drop that fell away from the ledge eased into a less perpendicular slope of rubble—still dangerous enough to navigate, but not offering the same prospects of instant and irrevocable disaster. He kept close behind her, skirting a pile of smaller boulders; she seemed quite unperturbed, and she kept looking off the trail towards the point where the blast had been, as if there was much more on her mind than any casual risk of the route.
Perhaps that was why she never saw the rattlesnake curled sleepily on a rock that rose waist-high from the slope as she rode past it. The Saint saw it, and his hand went like lightning to his gun, but from the start of that movement everything seemed to happen at once. He saw the rattler’s tail dissolve into a quivering blur of warning, but before the sound even reached his ears the pinto had heard it and lurched sideways, losing its foothold on the treacherous scree. Simon thought that he fired at the same moment as the snake struck, but he had no chance to meditate about it just then. He had had no time to wonder whether the horses were gun-broke, and it would probably have made very little difference if he had. It turned out that they weren’t. His palomino reared up on its hind legs like a tidal wave, twisted wildly as its rear hoofs skidded and took a half-sideways leap into space that landed it twenty feet down the slope. Through some incredible agility it remained upright, but there were seconds of frantic scrambling and sliding after that before the Saint had a chance to realise that he was still definitely in the saddle. It was a feat of horsemanship that an audience of bronc riders and mountain cavalry could have stood together and cheered, but he was less concerned with that than with the slim figure clinging to the slope above him.
“Jean—are you all right?”
It sounded to him like particularly stupid dialogue, but it was the only thing to shout as he drove the trembling palomino back up a ladder of precarious zigzags. Then as he reached her he saw that she was shaking half with laughter.
“I can’t help it, Simon! You floated gracefully through the air on a flying horse, while I was landing on my behind…Oh God, the romance of the great open spaces!”
He lowered himself from the saddle beside her, and helped her to sit up.
“You’re sure you aren’t hurt?”
“Only some undignified bruises.”
But she looked at the rattlesnake writhing and lashing a few feet away, its back almost cut through by the Saint’s bullet. He edged over and crushed its head with a stone, and looked at her more closely when he came back.
“ ‘I’m hoping it didn’t touch you,” he said.
The tone of his voice made her raise her right arm slowly to see where his eyes were fixed. There was a tear in her shirt—two tears, actually, close together and parallel, near the firm swell of her breast. Simon knelt beside her and opened one of the rents with steady impersonal fingers. He saw golden skin, softly rounded, unmarked.
“Another half-inch would probably have done it,” he said. “You’re going to make me believe you haven’t got any nerves.”
She met his eyes with sober directness.
“I just didn’t want to be sloppy about saying thank you.”
That was when it seemed so natural to kiss her.
He stood up abruptly.
“Hold on a minute and I’ll get your horse,” he said.
He led the palomino up the slope first, to a more level stretch of firmer ground. Then he went back for the pinto which by some other miracle seemed to have also avoided rolling over or breaking a leg. He stroked the animal’s nose and talked to it until he had calmed it down enough to struggle back up the incline with the reins in his hand.
Beside Jean Morland again, he gave her his other hand and got her to her feet. She stumbled at once, almost into his arms, as another patch of loose surface slid from under her, but as he steadied her, somehow, he was not looking at her but over her shoulder at the ground behind her, where the weathered surface was freshly scarred and churned up by the varied scuffles of feet and hoofs. Then, quietly, he bent and picked up a broken chunk of red rock and squeezed it into his pocket before he gave her his hand again and helped her up on to where the palomino was waiting.
Even after he had turned the pinto loose there, it still seemed spontaneously inevitable for their hands to stay linked together until they sat side by side on a bench of rock and he had to light cigarettes for both of them. There was nothing to say about it. All their lives it had been certain that this would happen if they ever met.
With the smoke from his mouth curling and vanishing in the lazy air, Simon Templar took out the piece of rock he had picked up and turned it in his hands, while the girl glanced at it curiously.
“What is it?” she asked. “A souvenir? Or are you going to find gold in these hyar hills?”
He shook his head.
“No, darling. Not gold. That would have been rather corny, somehow. But some people would give a lot of gold for it. It’s more useful, in certain ways…I think I’m beginning to get somewhere.”
He turned the rock this way and that. It was heavier than one would have expected for its size. One face was caked with brown limestone, that matched many of the surrounding formations. But the rest of it was a hard greenish-grey, quartz-like stone, faintly dappled with darker shadows. And in this quartz ran veins and beads of bright magenta.
The Saint, as had been admitted, was no great geologist, but there were a useful few ores which he could recognise at a glance, and he knew now why Dr Julius must be greatly interested in Max Valmon’s feud with the Circle Y.
4
“They’ve rounded up some cattle for branding in a canyon a couple of miles over that way,” Jean Morland said. “I think I can find it, and we can have lunch with them.”
They had found another way down through the hills without any more accidents.
“Just one thing,” said the Saint. “Don’t say anything about my mineral studies yet. I’d like to get a few more ideas and do some figuring first.”
Her eyes were clear and level.
“Okay.”
Hank Reefe straightened up from untying a calf and held her horse while she dismounted. Away from the branding fire, there was another fire where three pots stood steaming, and Nails was stirring one of them experimentally with a large ladle. Reefe’s tanned face was lighted with a quiet smile of pleasure when he saw her, and just as quietly the smile went away when he saw the rent in her shirt which she had roughly pinned together. His glance shifted evenly to the Saint.
; “A rattlesnake did that,” Jean explained, and told the story.
The foreman’s steady gaze only left her again when she had finished. Then it went back to the Saint and he smiled again, but differently.
“That was nice shootin’, Simon,” he said. It was as if he had shaken hands. The Saint grinned and said, “We’re starving.”
“We were just goin’ to have a bite.”
When they were sitting on a rock with fragrant bowls of stew balanced on their knees, Reefe said, “I thought I heard a shot once, but they’ve been blastin’ too, so I wasn’t sure.”
“They’ve been blasting, all right,” said the Saint. “We saw one charge go off. But they haven’t touched the stream yet, and until they do that we’ll have to be careful how we interfere. Max Valmon can blast holes all over his property if he wants to, and we haven’t any right to stop him until he does us some harm. In fact, if he’s got the sheriff in his pocket it’d only make things worse for us. We might give them an excuse to lock us up legally and keep us out of the way until the damage was all done. Valmon might even be playing for that.”
“All the same,” said Reefe, “that feller I was talkin’ about last night—the Saint—he wouldn’t ’ve sat around doin’ nothing.”
“Too bad we can’t send for him,” said the Saint. “He might be handy to have around.”
He went on eating without saying any more about it, and Reefe seemed to draw back into himself in a disappointed way, as if Simon had let him down. Presently he began to talk to Jean in a rather strained manner, making stiff and trivial conversation. The girl answered him more easily, but every now and again her eyes turned back to the Saint in silent puzzlement.
Simon was too preoccupied with his own speculations to do much about it. They finished eating, and one of the cowboys brought mugs over and poured them coffee. The conversation of Reefe and Jean dried up again, and again they seemed to be waiting for the Saint’s lead. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared frowning at the tinted hills.
The Saint Goes West (The Saint Series) Page 3
