L'Amour, Louis - Novel 06

by To Tame a Land

  The horse that carried me right up to the ranch where I’d met Liza.

  And he knew me. Don’t you ever tell me a horse can’t remember! He remembered, all right. He came up and I went over that rail fence and put my arms around his neck. And he nuzzled me with his nose.

  “Where is she, Blue? Where’s Liza?”

  And if he could have talked, he would have told me.

  I believe that. If he could have talked. Only he couldn’t.

  Or . .. could he?

  A man was coming down the lane toward us, a tall old man with gray hair, just such a man as Hetrick himself had been. Gave me a start for a minute, only when he came nearer I saw it wasn’t him. Nor even much like him.

  “Knows you, doesn’t he?”

  “He should. We went through it together.”

  “So I was told.”

  “Told? By Liza? Where is she?”

  He drew on his pipe. “No idea. I told him,” he gestured at Mustang Roberts, “I’d no idea. Only the horse was left here.

  “A man came up one day with the home. I knew the horse because I’d seen him with the girl. She had brought him with her behind the stage. All she had left, she said, and she was going to keep him.

  “This man who was with her, he said to keep the horse. He said to take good care of him. He said one day you’d come along to claim him.”

  “That I would?”

  “What he said. That you would. Named you to me. He said Rye Tyler would be along. That if you wanted him, he was yours. Otherwise I was to give him a home here until he died. With the best of care.”

  Now that was funny. That was most odd. What would anybody care about my old horse? Unless . .. maybe he was doing it to please Liza. Right then I felt sort of sick.

  Maybe he was in love with her, and her with him. Why else would a man care about another man’s horse?

  But this was getting mixed up. Maybe this gent had n o connection with T. J. Farris at all. Maybe he was just somebody who met Liza and fell in love with her. Maybe Liza was happily married now. Maybe she was in a good home and I was wasting my time, and Mustang’s too.

  Why else would a man think so of a horse?

  “This man. What did he look like?”

  “Quiet-looking man. A cowhand, but no kid. He said his boss wanted the horse left here.”

  “His boss?”

  “Uh-huh, that’s it.”

  So it was another blind trail. Who might the boss be?

  “This cow hand. Where was he from? Who was he?”

  “Gave no name. Never saw him before. He gave me a hundred dollars and told me to take care of the horse. I’m a man who likes horses, and he knew it. And any man would like Old Blue.”

  None of this made sense. In one way, I wasn’t so much worried. A man who would think that much of another man’s horse wasn’t the sort to be mean with a woman.

  Yet in another way, I was worried. That sort of man might be the kind she could love. And that bothered me.

  I guess Mustang was right. I was in love with Liza.

  And this was another dead end. Or mighty near it.

  The thing that had me wondering was why Billings would not talk about his connection with the girl. Especially when he must have known I’d get out of his wool if I took out after Liza.

  Yet two months later I was no nearer finding her, and on the day when I again heard of her, I killed my eighth man.

  We had occasional trouble with drunken miners, but we usually put them in jail to cool off and sober up.

  Otherwise it was almighty tame. Then one day a man tried to hold up, of all places, Billings’ saloon.

  Shouldn’t say he tried. He did it. Me, I was back of the office saddling the gray when I heard a shot. I stepped around the horse and was looking along the back doors of the buildings when I saw this door burst open and a man lunge out with a sack in his hand.

  He had a gun gripped in the other hand, and I could see a horse waiting. He was headed for that horse when I yelled at him. I told him to hold up there, and be quick.

  At that, he might have got away. There were a couple of wagons and a wagon yard betwixt us, and he would have been behind them in two more jumps. But when I yelled he skidded to a stop and came up with his gun.

  My bullet nailed him just as he fired. His shot went whining off overhead, seeming closer than it was. Always that way with a bullet when a man is shot at. Always seems close.

  When I got to him he was in bad shape. The bullet had hit him in the side and gone through both his lungs and he was breathing blood in bubbles. All the fight was knocked out of him. His gun had fallen where he could have reached it, but he didn’t try.

  When I leaned over him he spoke mighty bitter. “You! That … that stopped me! I … I had to make my try!”

  The holdup man was Ollie Burdette. He looked older, grayer. Yet it had been only a few months since I’d run him out of Mason Crossing.

  Yet there was a glint in his eyes, a kind of fading triumph. “I seen her!” I could barely hear the words. “Seen her! You’ll never get her now! You’ll … better man!”

  “What?” I grabbed his shoulder. “You saw who?”

  He was going fast, and folks were coming, but he was having the last laugh. “I … seen Liza!” He spoke with that ugly bubbling sound from bleeding lungs. “Better man than you … got her!”

  And he died.

  Ben Billings scooped up the spilled money. He looked at Burdette, then curiously at me. “You know him?”

  How much had Billings heard? What was he thinking?

  “Ollie Burdette,” I told him, “from over at the Crossing.”

  Billings looked at the dead man, a curious, thoughtful look on his face. “Strange… . A man would think he was fated to die by your gun. You didn’t kill him there, so unexpectedly you kill him here.” He looked around at me. “Makes a man wonder.”

  It did, at that.

  And was there some other meaning behind the words of Ben Billings? Was he, too, fated to die by my gun? And that night, back at the office, I thought about t.

  Who could have guessed such a thing would happen?

  That from the day Burdette saw me on the street, I was marked by some fate to cut him down? Did he know it in some queer way? Me, I don’t set much store by that sort of thing, but it does beat all.

  Billings could have killed him, or a dozen men. Yet it was me. And he was my eighth man, and I had never wanted to kill even one.

  Sometimes when I got up in the morning I hated to belt on my gun. Sometimes I just looked at it and wished I could be shut of the whole thing, that I could get clean away from it all, and go someplace where men did not pack guns or shoot to kill.

  Maybe you think I could have left my guns off, but I wouldn’t have lived an hour. Not one. Too many of that Billings crowd around, or others who wanted my hide.

  When Mustang and me took over there had been robberies and murders every night. It was the law of the gun that we brought to Alta, but it was law. Ours was a time of violence, of men fiercely independent, of men who resented every slight and whose only recourse was to the Colt.

  It is all very well for those who live in the East to talk of more peaceful means, or for those who live in the later, gentler years, but we were men with the bark on , and we were opening up raw, new country, mustang country, bronco country, uncurried, unbroken, and fierce.

  Because of the guns I wore, women walked along our streets now, children were going to a small school nearby , and people went to church on Sunday. I wore my guns and the thieves and murderers sat in the shadows and waited for me to fall or to have a moment of carelessness.

  I thought of Liza. A better man, he had said. A better man had won her. But better in what sense? What sort of man could be friendly to Billings and be a good man?

  One thing I had in that town, I had a friend. No man was ever more understanding or a stronger right hand than Mustang Roberts. He had only three short years of schooling. He read
, but slowly. He could write, though not well. But there was in him a purpose and endurance such as I have seen in few men, and a kind of rocklike strength that let me go ahead knowing he would always be at my back, ready to back me up with his guns.

  He came in that night after the killing of Burdette and I told him about the last words of the man from Mason Crossing. Then we started talking, as we often did, about the gun fighters who were making names for themselves , about Hickok, Allison, Ben Thompson, and King Fisher.

  “You ever run into Ash Milo, the Mogollon gunman?”

  “Never did. He wasn’t one of the Market Square crowd in Kansas City. That was where I saw Hickok.”

  Mustang rolled a smoke. “He’s a mighty mean man.

  And pure poison with a gun. I never did see him, either , and never heard tell of him until about two years ago. In those two years he’s made a name.”

  He tipped back in his chair. “He killed six men last year. Hunted down two of them, two big names. Deliberately hunted them. He’s mean, he’s reckless, doesn’t seem to care … or didn’t at first. This past year he’s tapered off a little. Maybe he found something worth living for.”

  “Don’t know much about him. Outlaw, isn’t he?”

  Seemed to me as I spoke that I’d seen his name on some of the circulars we got in the mail.

  “Uh-huh. Stuck up a payroll in Nevada. Then a train, some stages. Killed the marshal at Greener.”

  “Hope he doesn’t come this way,” I said. “I want no truck with him. I don’t want to kill anybody, not ever.”

  We talked and loafed through the night and finally when daylight began to show we called the day watch and turned in. After I got into bed I got to thinking about Mustang asking me if I’d known Milo. Maybe the question had been more pointed than I’d believed… .

  No, I was getting too suspicious. Finding double meanings everywhere.

  By then I had saved eight thousand dollars. Not so much, maybe, but a sight for a kid with no education who was just twenty-one years old.

  Folks in town seemed to like me. And I was getting to know them. The toughs passed me by, glad to be unnoticed, but the businessmen often stopped to talk and their wives would bow to me on the street.

  I’d always kept the office looking clean and dusted, but lately I’d taken to dressing up a little myself. I’d discarded the old buckskins, and had taken to wearing tailored black or gray trousers.

  Also I’d started a move to clean up the back yard s and junk heaps. Not that I needed any help. All I had to do was drop a word here and there.

  But always in the back of my mind was Liza, and I knew I would never feel free until I knew she was all right, and until I was sure she was happy. Sometimes I got to studying about it and trying to put it all together: the fact that Billings knew something about her, that Old Blue had been left at a nearby ranch, that Ollie Burdette had known something.

  We had tried to find out where Ollie Burdette had been hiding out before he came to Alta, but we got nowhere. His trail vanished utterly. For two months there was a complete blank space in his life.

  Mustang never stopped digging around. Sometimes he would come up with odd comments that started me thinking. Mustang was a patient man, and when I said he would make a good Pinkerton, I was right. If I was a crook I’d not want him on my trail.

  One day he came into the office just after I got up.

  It was right after lunchtime. We had stood the night watch, as usual.

  “This here Ash Milo,” he said, “he killed another man. Killed an outlaw named Ruskin.”

  “Heard of Ruskin.”

  “Uh-huh. Bad man. Woman trouble. Ruskin never could leave them alone.”

  “Where’d this happen?” I was just making conversation. I didn’t care where it happened. Or anything about either of them.

  “Thieves’ hideout. Place back on the plateau called Robbers’ Roost.”

  Of course, I knew about the place. There was an area out there several hundred miles square that was a known hideout for thieves and killers. We had no big crime in Alta, so it didn’t affect us, but every time a bank, train, or payroll was taken, the bandits took off for the Roost.

  And no posse dared to go after them. Only one ever tried. The two men who survived had been shot to doll rags.

  “This Ash Milo is the boss back in there.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You never knew him?”

  “Not me.”

  Mustang, he let his chair legs down to the floor. “That’s funny, Rye, because he knows you.”

  Chapter 15

  THAT TOOK a few minutes to make itself felt. Then I said, “By reputation, you mean.”

  “No. He knows you.”

  I scowled, thinking back. There was no Ash Milo anywhere in my memory. Of course, a man meets a lot of folks, time to time, and back on the cattle drive there had been a lot whose names I never knew. The same was true of Wichita, Dodge, Uvalde, and Kansas City.

  There had been a lot of gun-packing men at Red River Crossing, too. But no Ash Milo that I could remember.

  “What gives you that idea?” I said at last.

  “Because the word’s out. None of that gang are to start any trouble over here. They stay out of town and they pull nothing crooked in this town. He told them flatly you were bad medicine and to be left alone.”

  “Good for him. Saves trouble.”

  Mustang Roberts wasn’t happy about it, I could see.

  Something was biting him, eating at him. He got up and paced the floor and he was studying this thing out. He had a good head and he thought of a lot of things.

  “This may be it, Rye. This may be it.”

  “What?”

  “The tie-up. The link between Billings, Liza and Old Blue.”

  “No connection that I can see.”

  “Me, neither. But it’s got the feel. I think it’s there.”

  That night I made my rounds about eleven o’clock.

  That was the best time, because by then the boys would be liquored up enough to think they were mighty big, but knowing my gun was around usually kept them mighty sober. Most times all I had to do was walk around and show myself.

  While I was walking, I got to thinking. It might be.

  Maybe there was something to this idea. It might just be the connection between Liza, Billings, and the fact that Ollie Burdette had seen Liza recently.

  Pausing against the side of a building, I thought that over. Ollie Burdette had dropped from sight for several months, and during that period he must have seen Liza.

  On Robbers’ Roost he would be out of sight and so would she. And nobody would do much talking about it.

  And Burdette had said a better man had Liza. Had he meant Ash Milo?

  Of course, I knew a little about Milo. And since Mustang had mentioned him I’d begun remembering things and hearing more. I expect I’d been hearing them before without paying them no mind.

  Many considered him the most dangerous gunman west of the Rockies. And they weren’t giving him second place to Hickok, Earp, or any of them.

  Returning to the office, I went through the files. The holdup in Nevada seemed to have been the beginning of his Western career. It had been a job with timing and finish. It had been planned carefully and had come off without a hitch , and must have taken place while I was on that cattle drive.

  The killing of the marshal revealed another side to his character. The account in the files told of Milo’s literally shooting the marshal to rags. It had been the act of a killer, of a man in the possession of terrible fury or a homicidal mania … or of an extremely cold-blooded man who wanted to shock people into absolute fear.

  The marshal before John Lang had kept careful files, and reading what I could find on Milo gave me a picture of a sharp, intelligent, thoroughly dangerous man who shot as quick as a striking snake and asked no questions.

  The picture was not pretty. At least twice he had killed men because they got in the way
at the wrong time. And when they were only too anxious to get out of his way.

  He was a man utterly ruthless, but also a man who seemed driven by some inner fury.

  Ash Milo shaped up like no easy proposition. He was a very dangerous man, but he did not fit the description of any man I knew. So that part could be ruled out.

  Nevertheless, the thought that he might have Liza worried me. And where else could she be? Thinking of Liza made think of Old Blue. When I awakened the next day at noon, after working the night hitch, I saddled up and rode out to see him.

  He trotted to the fence to greet me. It was good to see the old fellow. I fed him some sugar, slapped him on the shoulder, ran my fingers up through his mane … And stopped.

  My fingers had found something. Something tied or tangled there. Slowly, knowing it was by the feel, I parted the long hairs of the mane and looked at a folded square of paper. Untangling the mane, I untied the knots that held it in place.

  It opened out, and I knew the handwriting.

  Liza!

  My heart pounding, I held it a moment before beginning to read. Then, finally, I lowered my eyes.

  Dearest Rye:

  Please don’t try to find me. Go away. To find me will only bring you heartbreak and misery, and possibly death. I am all right, and I am happy to know you are well, and away from here. Go! If you love me, please go!

  Li.

  So … at last a message. The gap bridged by a few simple words. But she was sending me away.

  That I did not think of at first. Only that she had to be close. She was near.

  Vaulting the fence, I stepped into the leather and went to the ranch house at a dead run.

  The old man had been washing dishes and he came to the door drying his hands on a towel. “Figured to see you,” he said. “That girl was here.”

  “When was it?”

  “Two days ago, along about sundown. She come with that puncher and two others. Looked mighty mean, they did. She went down to see the horse and two of them stayed close all the time. She asked if you had been around and seemed pleased when I told her you was some happy about the horse.”

  “How’s she look?”