by Lauran Paine
He nodded. The statements had been made in the corral yard back at Santa Ynez and had puzzled him at the time.
“Well, the reason I said it was because I overheard the posse men that rode through town mention your name, Bright, as the renegade they were looking for.” He frowned a little, wondering, and she blushed. “I’m sorry, I jumped to conclusions. I met you right after that and I didn’t know you had any relatives in Santa Ynez. It wasn’t you, after all, it was a cousin.”
He understood and smiled with relief and was going to say something when he looked up and saw the beaded knife sheath in front of him. His eyes traveled up to the leathery, calm old face above.
Grandfather Hause knelt down beside them, his face grave. “Y’know, sometimes a man has to make himself figger things out.” Both Coke and Fidelity looked their bewilderment. The old man shrugged and settled himself comfortably on the rumpled quilts. “Seein’ as how a man an’ woman hadn’t oughtta sort o’ wonder about things after they…ah…set up in house keepin’, an’ there hadn’t oughtta be no secrets atween ’em, I just climb in here to settle som’thin’ fer ya. Recollect, Coke, when you was under that wagon lookin’ fer the rascal who was tryin’ to kill ya?”
Coke nodded.
“Well, d’ya recollect that Larson’s rifle come abouncin’ outta the wagon just before you shot at him?” Again the nod, and the old man wagged his head slightly and tapped his own chest with a gnarled finger. “I shot just before you did. It was this away. I looked aroun’, casual like, an’ took in what was goin’ on in a glance, figgered where Larson’s body would be behind that there canvas, and shot him.”
The old man’s eyes went slowly, half fearfully toward Fidelity, who was listening with a look of vast relief on her face. She nodded slowly. “Gran’pa, I saw Ab shoot at Coke, when he was loading the rifle. I was looking for him when Ab shot at him. I was horrified, and suddenly it dawned on me what kind of a man Ab was….”
Grandfather Hause’s seamed old shrewd face wrinkled suddenly as he got up. “Delia, just why was you lookin’ around fer this young buck, anyway?” He began to edge out of the wagon with a significant grin on his face. “Wasn’t just a mite worried, was ya?” His body disappeared beyond the high seat and a musical old chuckle came back to them in the strained silence.
Coke reached out with his good hand and let his fingers cover the passive head of the blushing, confused girl. “Delia, I’m awful glad I didn’t kill him.”
She nodded quickly, and her eyes, dewy with a moist light, came up and met his frankly and tenderly. “So am I. It would have been something between us.”
Gunman
Chapter One
Carefully, little by little, the stage driver let his gaze stray back to where Ray Kelly stood. Time, the driver thought, was good to some men. Ray stood there as young-looking as ever and unless a man knew he had been away for five years—the charge had been cattle stealing—and was either thirty years old or very close to it, he would guess Ray Kelly to be twenty-five years old, a decent enough cowboy with nothing in his background, the kind of man a fellow wouldn’t mind if his daughter brought to the house of an evening, except for those five years.
The driver finished gathering the lines and pushed their loop end through the hame strap and leaned there, waiting for a hostler to come forward and lead the animals away. He made a cigarette, lit up, and smoked it.
Maybe five years wasn’t really very long. To look around Welton where nothing had changed much in that time it didn’t seem very long. He stole another look at the lounging cowboy. Ray was standing in the shade of Herman’s Dry Goods Emporium, standing hipshot and relaxed, looking out over the town. What ran through a man’s mind at a time like that? the driver wondered. There would be a few of the hill ranchers who would welcome Ray Kelly back; they were a pretty salty bunch anyway, but in Welton itself…? The driver wagged his head guardedly. Folks were going to cut the kid off cold without a nod or a glance. There were lots of kinds of thieves in the West, but, next to a horse thief, the lowest was a cattle rustler. As the hostler came up to take away the teams, the driver opined to himself that, if he had been in Ray Kelly’s boots, the last town in Arizona he’d have visited would be the one where he was sentenced to prison.
He turned, after the horses were led away, struck his trousers with his hat, and started forward toward the stage company office. A soft, hard voice hit him in the back: “You got it all figured out now, mister?”
The driver turned. “Got what figured out?” he asked that slouched, pale-eyed figure.
“Why a man like me would come back to Welton?” The driver looked down at his feet. For a moment he made no reply, then, raising his head, he gazed squarely at the younger man. “No, frankly, I haven’t.” He put his hat back on. “Did it show that much?”
“It showed,” Ray Kelly said. He studied the driver through a silent interval. “But then, I guess it’ll be like that, won’t it?”
“I expect it will. It’s none of my business, but in your boots I’d have gone farther west.”
“You’re not in my boots.”
“No.”
“And I never liked running very much, pardner.” “Uhn-huh. I expect some fellers’d feel that way.” “And,” Ray said, drawing fully upright and turning to glance northerly along the plank walk toward the Double Eagle Saloon, “I got a man to kill in this town before I start figuring where I go from here.” He turned his back on the driver and went along the walkway to the saloon, entered without a backward glance, and approached the bar.
It was suppertime; there were only four men at a poker table and the bartender was leaning, folded-armed, upon his counter looking sleepy or bored or both. He nodded at Ray and straightened back with a sigh. “What’ll it be?”
“Tequila.”
The bottle came, along with a shot glass. Ray poured salt on the back of his left hand, filled the glass, licked the salt, tossed off the tequila, and tongued up the last of the salt.
“Another one?” the barman asked.
“Just leave the bottle.”
“Sure. Take your time.”
As the barman started moving off, Ray said: “Hold it, mister. I want a little information.”
“Sure. If I can give it.”
“You can. Where can I locate Mort Salter?”
The barman had a fleshy face that showed no great amount of character. Now he was looking over Ray Kelly’s shoulder at someone across the room, evidently getting some kind of a signal. Finally he edged back a little with both hands still on the counter, and cleared his throat. “Well, sir,” he eventually answered, “I just couldn’t say.”
Ray considered this, and then had himself a second belt of tequila following through with the identical salt ritual as before. Very slowly he turned his back upon the barman and looked at the poker players. They were sitting still, watching him. Each of the four cowmen was sitting erect, hands out of sight below the table, faces stonily impassive, eyes coldly, dispassionately unfriendly.
The odds were far too great; each of those men either had a palmed gun pointed barward under that table, or had a hand riding lightly upon a holstered short gun. No one, regardless of how good he might be with a six-gun, would face down odds like that, if he was in his right mind.
They knew him. He did not recognize any of them, but they obviously knew who he was, some way, and had guessed why he was back in Welton. He faced back around and picked up the tequila bottle. Well, a man who could sweat out five years on a road gang could wait another week or two with no strain. He downed the third drink, dumped a coin on the bar, and strode back out into the gathering dusk.
He rolled a cigarette, thinking that his return to Welton was not the wisest thing he had ever done in his lifetime. Those men in the saloon, for instance. They had evidently been around five years earlier when he had been tried and sentenced. They remembered him but he did not know them. He lit the cigarette. A lot of folks would remember Ray Kelly with disappro
val and the disadvantage lay in the fact that he would not know who they were.
He mused over this for a while. It would not be a simple thing to find Mort Salter and kill him. By morning everyone around Welton would know he was back; they would also guess why. The odds, he told himself, were likely to become overwhelmingly great. This did not deter him but it sharpened his senses; he could not do what he had come back to accomplish alone, therefore he would get help.
Dwelling on this improved his temper a little. The mountain ranchers for whom he had cowboyed six years before would be glad to help him put Mort Salter away; they’d tried to do it a number of times themselves but had never succeeded. He made a small humorless grin in the gloom. The trouble was the mountain cowmen had never been in prison; a man learned a lot in five years of associating with the deadliest men of the Southwest.
Cooling air crowded into town off the rangeland. Welton’s rough outline loomed largely against the darkening sky; the little town was beginning to stir again, evening was down and the business of daytime labor was forgotten now. Across the way men moved in and out of the Welton Hotel’s supper room. Farther along the opposite plank walk strollers congregated near Russell’s Café to talk and kill time before heading for the bars and poker tables.
Men strolled past where Ray stood, their voices musically soft in the deepening darkness. For a while he looked into their faces; a few he recognized but many were strangers to him. One face that pushed ahead to stop fully before him was familiar enough. In fact, he had recognized the easy walk, the wide shoulders, and the heavy bulking silhouette twenty feet away despite the darkness. Sheriff Perry Smith.
“Hello, Ray. I heard you were back.”
“Perry,” Kelly said in acknowledgement, adding nothing to it and biting the name off short.
Smith considered the even features and the steady, bold stare. He cleared his throat. “Had supper?”
“No.”
“Care to join me?”
“No.”
Sheriff Smith glanced disinterestedly up the road. “Might not be such a good idea anyway,” he said before returning his gaze to Ray’s face. “Folks might figure I was trying to get friendly with you.”
Ray’s lips drew out a little. “They’d have to be kind of stupid to think that, Perry. Either that or they’d think I forget a heap easier than I do.”
“Maybe. Why’d you come back?”
“You can guess that, Perry.”
“I thought you were smarter than that, Ray.” “Well, you were wrong.”
“You’ll never get it done, Ray. Never in God’s green world. Mort’s a lot bigger now than he was when you went away. He was too big for you then, remember? You don’t stand a chance of a snowball in hell.”
Ray’s bold stare flicked over Sheriff Smith’s face as he retorted: “I’m a lot smarter than when I went away, too. I’ve been graduated from the best school a man can walk out of…Yuma Prison.”
“I can imagine,” Perry Smith said dryly, his expression changing, the glint of his gaze firming up into a hardness. “Ray, for your own good ride on. There’s nothing for you here. You can’t buck Salter. I don’t care what you learned in prison. He’s too big for you. Another thing, folks aren’t going to wait around for you to try to kill him, either.”
Ray said evenly: “Meaning you, Sheriff?” “That’s right, kid. I’m not going to wait around, either. Things’ve been about half peaceful these last five years. You could change that if you started something. I don’t figure to let that come to pass.”
Ray troughed a cigarette paper, spilled tobacco flakes into it, and held forth the sack. Sheriff Smith began manufacturing a second cigarette. When Ray held forth the match, their eyes met over its dancing small light.
“Used to be some pretty good times here in Welton,” the ex-prisoner said in a tone different to the one he had used up to now. “Every once in a while, down in Yuma, I’d remember those times.”
The sheriff nodded soberly.
“Something I learned in prison, Perry…a man forgets the women he’s known but he never forgets the men. You, for instance…I never forgot the day you come for me.”
“That wasn’t a very pleasant day for me, either,” the lawman said quietly. “It’s never pleasant to arrest men you’ve joked with and drank with, Ray.”
“No, I reckon not. But a man’s got certain things he’s got to do.”
“That’s right.”
Ray Kelly’s tone roughened. “Then understand me, Perry. I’ve got a job to do here in Welton. It won’t make it easier if I have to buck you, too. But I’ve got to do it anyway.”
Sheriff Smith considered the glowing end of his cigarette for a silent moment, then he said: “Ray, I figure this is about the last cigarette you and I’ll share.” He turned abruptly and walked on up the plank walk for perhaps fifty feet, paused, threw away the cigarette, and walked on. Some cowboys jogging south along the roadway recognized Sheriff Smith and called greetings downward. Kelly heard Perry answer them out of the darkness.
He finished his own cigarette and moved outward toward the roadway, following the odor of food coming across to him from the hotel. He was hungry; the tequila had heightened and sharpened his appetite until a single urge impelled him forward. Around him Welton’s night life was beginning. The sounds were boisterous, loud, and uninhibited.
The hotel supper room was not full when he found a table and dropped down, and, although he glanced briefly at the other diners, he recognized none of them. One thing, though, caught and held his attention, the women. Five years was a long time and women had had no part in those searing days and long, black, weltering nights.
He ordered his meal and relaxed. One hand lay upon the tablecloth. It was good to feel linen under one’s hand, to hear the quiet voices and see the un-hurried movements. He ate his meal when it came and afterward called for a cigar, a rare thing for him, and he continued to sit there enjoying the warmth, the leisure, and the peace. He even enjoyed seeing the well-fed faces around him. This would not last, but for a while he wanted to savor it. Tomorrow would be another day—the town would know him then; he wanted it to know him—but for this hour he forgot everything excepting this time of pleasure.
The weeks since his release crowded up, little raw memories of adjustments he had made, of acquiring a fresh outfit and a new gun. Of practicing for hours on end until the old speed returned, the old accuracy. Of working here and there until he had accumulated enough money to bind him over for what he had to do. Of lying under starlight with the good smell of a campfire’s hot ashes in his nostrils, hearing again the sing of wind against mountain flanks and low across the plains.
A man did not return to the world of free men in a rush and all at once. It was a slow process, and, sitting there now with linen under his hand, with the sharp bite of cigar tobacco upon his lips, with the quicksilver, muted laugher of women’s voices around him in the dining room, he was satisfied that the patience he had learned at Yuma Prison was a good thing, because it had seasoned him so that he could wait indefinitely amid surroundings like these, enjoying them fully while he took his time and chose the place for what he had come back to do—kill Morton Salter, if not the biggest then at least one of the biggest cow barons in Arizona.
Chapter Two
The day after his arrival in Welton, Ray rode out toward the foothills. He was not followed nor had he expected to be, but all the same he made sure before heading up through the broken country for Joe Mitchell’s place. Here, where forest and hillocks and arroyos broke against the high country farther back, unless a man knew his way he could very easily become lost. Here, too, in upland parks and swales, where thick forage grasses grew, ranged the cattle of the mountain ranchers.
It was the terrain perhaps more than the people who had originally given the back country its reputation, but since then the mountain cattlemen had certainly done nothing to change things. The ranchers down around Welton lost cattle steadily and they never fai
led to blame the hill people. Five years earlier, it had been this condition that had brought Ray Kelly to Welton in irons, and it had been this same antagonism that had finally sent him to Yuma Prison. He had not then, knowing that for a hill rider to be tried by the people of Welton could never result in acquittal, expected anything different from what he got.
Riding loosely now, letting the livery animal pick its slow way along the trail to the Mitchell Ranch, he remembered how Perry Smith and his posse had lain in wait to catch him alone, and how Perry’s ultimate success had not appeared to elate the lawman very much because Perry had known Ray was not actually a mountain cowman but was simply a drifting rider who had hired out to mountain cattle interests.
Still, none of this had made any difference. Mort Salter had sworn out the warrant of arrest and people, even then, did what Mort Salter told them to do. Ray had had five years to dwell on that one hard fact of life and he considered it now as the horse picked its way through the shafted sunlight.
Deep in the uplands finally, with the sun high above stiff-topped pines, he sought out a gravelly eminence and stopped briefly there, studying the outward slope of country southward, making his final effort to determine whether he was being followed or not. Satisfied at length that he was not, and turning slightly to gaze strongly ahead where the hills and swales gradually heightened to become gray-hazed mountains, he traced out the old landmarks. It had been, he reflected, the immensity of this uplands country that had held him there so long; he had cowboyed for Joe Mitchell for a year. Longer than he had ever before stayed in one place in his life.
Reining down off the eminence, he cut a crooked cow trail, followed it to a juncture with a zigzagging wagon path, and followed this out through red-trunked pines until it topped out over another flinty ridge and descended steadily into an immense grassy park. As the horse hip-sprung itself angling downward, Ray strained to catch sight of Joe Mitchell’s buildings far off eastward, at the farthest curve of the big valley. He saw them shortly before striking level ground and eased the horse off to the right, taking a short cut away from the wagon ruts. He had progressed less than a quarter mile when a horse man appeared through the trees to his right, jerked up sharply, and sat rock-like watching him approach. Ray neither saw nor sensed this new presence; he was thinking ahead, recalling raffish Joe Mitchell, remembering the poker games during long winter nights, the difficult roundups, and the hot, dusty days trailing cattle down to the lowlands and over to Tie Siding where the railroad dead-ended. He remembered, too, Mitchell’s other riders and wondered now if any of them remained. It was not likely, he thought; five years was a long time for rangemen to stay in one place.
