by Lauran Paine
Ray accepted the gun but stood stockstill inside the cell. Sheriff Smith started forward, then looked back and stopped, impatience in his expression.
“Well, have you taken root or something? Come on, you’re going with me. If she’s right, I’ll apologize. If it’s some kind of trick, you’ll still be close by.”
“Perry, that girl hates my guts.”
“Maybe,” Smith said philosophically, narrowing his eyes at the younger man. “But if I had a silver-mounted saddle and was a gamblin’ man, I sure wouldn’t bet it on that with any expectations of winning. Now come on, will you?”
They rode out of Welton side-by-side and traveling westerly to avoid using the main north-south roadway where their departure would be certain to arouse quick and indignant comment. Well away from town and with shadows engulfing them, they beat a steady route northerly toward the foothills. After a time the sheriff, who had been thoughtfully silent, said: “Duncan might not hit Joe’s cattle for days. I don’t cherish the idea of lyin’ out in those doggoned hills livin’ on jerky and spring water until he does, either.”
“You could just let him run the cattle off,” Ray said.
Perry muttered a dour oath. “You know better’n that. I got a job to do and I’ll do it.”
“Like the time you ambushed me?”
Smith’s face darkened. For another half mile he made no additional comment, then, drawing up in the saddle to throw a hard glance toward the foothills, he said: “Ray, if Salter really did railroad you and made me a part of it…he better sprout wings because I’m a mite sensitive about bein’ used like that.”
They hit the first rise with darkness coming down to meet them. It was not difficult to keep to the trail although the moonless sky conspired with the gloomy forest to make progress more a matter of knowing the way instinctively than being able to see it.
“Sure dark,” the sheriff said, as they left the trees and cut into Mitchell Meadow.
“There won’t be a moon for another three days, either,” Ray told him.
Smith looked around. “How do you know that?”
Ray shrugged. “Part of my plan,” he said. “Hit him in the dark, Perry.”
The sheriffs head whipped forward. He drew down holding up his hand for stillness. “Someone’s coming.”
“Not coming…following. It’s Grace.”
Perry twisted in the saddle, watching the girl take shape and substance. “You knew she was back there?”
“I only suspected it,” replied Ray. “Can’t hear anything when you’re riding over pine needles. I figured she’d meet us long before we got up where some of Joe’s hands might sight us.”
Grace was riding a dark chestnut horse that glistened darkly. He was a stocking-legged animal with a flaxen mane and tail. She walked him up close, then drew back. Instead of greeting either man, she said: “I had to tell Joe.”
Sheriff Smith said something under his breath. “Why did you have to?” he demanded in a sharp tone. “I don’t put too much faith in Joe and never have.”
“Because,” Grace flared at him, “two of his riders quit and he hired two new ones.”
“Well, what the devil has that…?”
“Sheriff,” the girl said fiercely, “if you don’t want my help, just say so. Otherwise, shut up until I’m finished!”
Ray peered at Perry from under his hat brim. The sheriffs mouth was drawn out thinly and his angry eyes sparked. He swallowed with visible effort, then said: “Excuse me. Go on, ma’am.”
“The two new men Joe hired are Salter’s riders. I know they are. I’ve seen them both in the mountains with Duncan Holt.”
Ray pursed his lips and blew out a silent whistle over the implications here. Even the sheriff’s expression changed; he began nodding his head up and down in small, choppy motions.
“That’ll make it real handy for Duncan, won’t it?” he growled. “Two hands to….” He broke off to study the girl. “Did you tell that to Joe?”
“Yes, I had to figure some way to get us help.”
“We don’t need any help,” Smith said sharply. “That’s where you’re wrong, Sheriff. You’re going to need all the help you can get, because as soon as you jump Duncan, he’s going to have to kill you both for what you know.”
“Neither Ray Kelly nor I came down in the last rain,” Smith said dryly. “We can look after ourselves with Duncan Holt.”
“Not with Salter’s men behind you, too, you can’t,” Grace retorted. “And that’s what will be behind you if there is any shooting, Sheriff. Gunshots carry a long way in these mountains. If Salter’s two gun hands are behind you and Duncan is in front….” Grace let the words trail off into silence.
After a moment Ray said: “What can Joe do?”
“He’s going to start a continuous poker game to-night and keep it going.”
The sheriff scowled. “A poker game?” he said.
“Yes. Salter’s two men will sit in. Joe will see to that. Then, if there’s any trouble, Joe will use his gun to keep them at the ranch.”
Smith considered this with a screwed-up face. He said: “Ma’am, if you’ve got this figured out right, you don’t think we’ve got much of a chance.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Grace told him bluntly. “I think you have no idea how deadly Duncan Holt and Mort Salter will be if anyone shows them up as big-time rustlers.”
Ray had been watching her, saying nothing, but now in a quiet way he said: “Grace, what will your father’s position be in this? Salter had the bank put him up here as Joe’s foreman. You knew that, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew that. I also know why Salter did that. Because he knows my father is absolutely honest, Ray, and will not permit Mitchell’s riders to ride with a long loop. In other words, Salter knew my father would not let the cowboys roam the hills like Joe used to let them do, and this gave Salter’s hands a free run of the high country ranges.”
“He used your pa, too?” Sheriff Smith asked, then answered himself when the girl kept silent. “That ought to make me feel better, but it don’t.” He regarded the girl gravely. “Does Duncan ever hit the herds at night?”
“No, Sheriff, but you’d never get up in here in broad daylight without being seen.” She reined around. “Follow me,” she ordered. “Stay close because it’ll be dark.”
As they rode upward across the meadow toward the higher, forested headlands, Perry Smith twisted and threw a look of discomfort and helplessness at Ray. The younger man laughed silently back at him, then they both concentrated on riding.
Grace proved to Ray’s satisfaction that she knew the uplands nearly as well as he did himself. She switched from cattle trails to buck runs without hesitation, seemingly knowing exactly where she would find each. And she kept steadily northeasterly toward the big, grassy meadows which, in winter, were deeply covered with snow, but which during summer remained green into late September, watered by snow run-off.
They passed from forest to glen and back into forest again. Several times they heard the startled thump of bedded deer springing up at their approach to go crashing off into the night, and they rode through equally as surprised but less agile bunches of JM cattle.
Topping out near ten o’clock along a thin and treeless ridge, they could make out a huge mountain meadow directly below them. It was faintly dotted with many dark cow shapes, a few grazing but mostly lying bulkily, shapelessly, low in the grass.
“That’s where the crew worked today,” Grace told them. “They bunched up everything they located in this area.” She motioned outward with one hand. “It’s a sizable herd,” she said, and dropped the hand, looking around past Sheriff Smith to Ray. “If they operate as I’ve seen them do before, they’ll probably ride up in here about daybreak.” She paused, glanced at Perry briefly, then back to Ray again. “You’ll have to be very careful.”
“We will be,” the younger man told her. “Now you’d better head back.”
But she did not mo
ve. “Sheriff? I could go back to Welton and get a posse for you.”
But Perry’s flinty stare was ranging easterly where Salter’s men must come up to enter the meadow. “Who needs a posse?” he said disinterestedly, studying the landfalls. “How many men will Duncan have?”
“No less than ten, Sheriff.”
“Well, that’s about right,” Smith said, finally throwing a look at Ray. “Five to one, that’s about the right odds for cattle thieves, isn’t it?”
Ray did not answer. He urged his horse forward, groped in the darkness for Grace’s fingers, found them, and closed his fist around them. “Better head back now,” he said very quietly. “And Grace…?”
“Yes.”
“Much obliged.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” she said, making no move to free her hand.
“Well,” he said frankly, “I had something else in mind to trip Salter up…but this will be a lot better and quicker, so I kind of think I do owe you something.”
She did not lower her eyes as she raised the reins preparatory to turning back. Nor did she speak again, but for the fleetingest second she returned the hard pressure of Ray’s fingers, then she drew her hand away quickly, and passed beyond sight back down the way they had come.
Without looking around, the sheriff said: “Nope, if I had me a real fine silver-mounted saddle and wanted to bet it on something …you ‘n’ that girl’d be the last thing I’d wager it on. I mean about her hatin’ your guts, Ray.”
Ray dismounted with his horse between them. As he worked the cinch loose, he muttered: “If there’s one thing I could never abide, it is lawmen with eyes in the backs of their heads.”
Sheriff Smith said no more. He watched Ray a moment, then sighed, swung down, drew forth his carbine, loosened his cinch, and sat down. It was not yet midnight; they had a long wait ahead of them.
Chapter Ten
This land of the mountain cowmen was a tumbled, upended country of meadows and forest with always the black-cut higher peaks standing darkly against the skyline. It was a cool country in summer and a frigid land in winter, but most significantly to Ray Kelly, who knew it well, it was a vast country where men could hide indefinitely with small fear of encountering others. He knew that if Duncan Holt’s riders became suspicious and faded into the forest, Sheriff Smith’s chance of capturing even one of them would be remote indeed, and it was his hope that at least one of the rustling crew might be apprehended.
He remarked on this to the lawman and Smith, with little more than a cursory knowledge of the high country, suggested that Ray take them to some site where he thought a capture might be effected. They accordingly trailed along the treeless ridge where Grace had left them, to a dusty cattle trail, descended it, struck the meadow where its forested fringe came down to the grass, rode northeasterly as far as a snow-fed tumbling creek, and there resumed their vigil upon enough of a rise to be able to see down across the meadow to the grazing cattle against the sharply standing bluffs to the south.
Neither man said much and for Ray Kelly at least the waning night was a time for hard reflection and ultimately gentle thoughts of George Fenwick’s daughter. He had not, at first, been particularly drawn to her. But he had never been a woman’s man in any case and their meetings had, until this night, been anything but conducive to romance. His picture of her now was different. Why it was he could not explain even to himself. Surely the fleeting pressure of her fingers upon his hand was nothing to build upon, yet, with nothing else actually, he did build upon it.
Tall and shapely with a manner to her that struck through a man, he remembered her direct and steady way of looking at a person, recalled, too, her full, composed lips and the strong sweep of her stride. Remembered how the sun had struck against her coppery hair, and dwelt for a time on her long silences, knowing somehow that in a woman silence could mean many things and wondering now, in her case, what it meant where he was concerned.
There was the stuff of dreams in his mind, and after the fashion of introspective men he did not check his imaginings now. Not until, shortly before dawn, Perry Smith growled deeply in his throat that a horse was coming.
They straightened up off the pine needles, turned suddenly alert and wary. The horse carried a rider but they knew this only from the way the animal approached, briskly, undeviatingly, in a purposeful manner until the paling sky backgrounded a solitary horse man emerging onto the meadow from the north.
“Scout,” Perry said softly. “Come along some easterly trail keepin’ a look-out.”
Ray said nothing. He watched the cowboy draw up and sit motionlessly, gazing slowly around the meadow. He knew the man was satisfied when he made a cigarette and lit it, making no attempt to conceal the match flame. It occurred to him there might be other riders coming along through the trees bearing on westward and he got carefully to his feet beckoning to the sheriff. When they were back by their horses, Ray made a motion with his hand as though to pinch off his mount’s wind.
“In case any others come along and get close enough for our critters to smell ’em and whinny,” he explained.
The sheriff understood and nodded, moving closer to his horse.
It was a long wait, though. They could tell that it was going to be by the way the unidentified rider swung down, squatted in the grass gazing at the cattle, thumbed back his hat, and drowsed.
“Duncan’s pretty careful,” the sheriff growled. “You’d think with things goin’ so well he wouldn’t go to all the trouble.”
Thinking back to shared campfires when he and Duncan Holt had been together, Ray recalled that JM’s ex-foreman had always been a deliberate man. It pained him now, thinking back to shared confidences, to times of pleasure and laughter together, to realize how much time had passed, so much that he stood there now, gun in hand, waiting to catch or kill Duncan Holt.
Sheriff Smith must have caught some of this, for he said faintly: “Ray, if you want to stay out of sight and keep the others off my back with your carbine, I’ll go….”
“No, Perry. What used to be is gone.” He did not enlarge upon this and exerted an inner effort to turn his mind away from the past. “Do you recognize that man?”
Smith said he did not.
Time passed slowly. The sky was brightening faintly off in the east, showing snag-toothed peaks and breaks. Around them cattle were stirring, arising to move off leisurely in search of graze. Perry’s voice came again as low and quiet as before.
“I reckon he’s in no hurry,” he opined, referring to Duncan Holt. “Can’t drive cattle through a forest in the dark anyway.”
When Smith’s final word died away, Ray saw the hunkering cowboy rise up, face easterly, and cock his head in an attitude of strong listening. He stood thus for only a moment, then stepped across his mount and reined slowly toward the forest. He had not quite reached it when a blur of dark shapes emerged, engulfed him, and stopped.
“She wasn’t wrong,” Perry said, meaning Grace Fenwick. “There’s at least ten of them.”
Ray wiped sweat off his palm along the seam of his trousers without taking his eyes off the strangers. “Do you make any of them out?” he asked.
Smith did not answer right away, not until the riders were splitting up, moving off, angling as though to ride completely around the meadow, then, as Ray thought, to begin their gradual drive northward or eastward, pushing the cattle toward the forest and some trail beyond, out of sight in the trees. He began to straighten up. Two of the moving silhouettes were coming toward the place where he and Perry waited. Then the sheriff spoke, replying to Ray’s earlier question.
“Yeah, Ray, I recognize two of ’em. The ones ridin’ toward us. That feller on the left, on the meadow side, is Duncan. The other feller is….”
“I know him,” Ray said shortly. “He must be one of the riders who quit JM yesterday. His name’s Carter Wilson.” Ray swore with bitter feeling. “He saved my bacon, Perry. It was him warned me about Fenwick’s sending Salter word
I was at JM.”
Smith hesitated briefly, then edged forward. “Can’t expect a feller to trade shots with folks he owes favors to,” he said gruffly. “I’ll handle this.”
Ray watched the riders curve along side-by-side, bending southwesterly with the forest’s contour. “Hell,” he exclaimed. “When I was at Yuma, I looked forward to runnin’ down Mort’s men but this….”
“I understand, kid. Now we’d better shut up.”
The horse men were close enough to hear voices. They rode loosely as men do that have no reasons for apprehension, and it was this very fact that permitted Perry Smith to stop them, turn them suddenly silent and staring with astonishment when he stepped out of the trees, barred their way with his cocked carbine, and said: “Not a sound, boys. Not one peep out of either of you.”
It was a bad moment and Ray, perhaps better than Perry Smith, knew how bad it was. He knew Duncan Holt too well to believe the ex-foreman would submit tamely to arrest. He looked up, watched Duncan’s familiar, dark, and hawkish face blank over with craftiness, with hard and wrathful defiance, and stepped into view off to one side, cocking his own carbine so that the sound carried easily to the motionless mounted men.
“Dunc, don’t be a fool.”
The dark man turned slowly, looking down. “You,” he breathed.
“Yeah, me. Perry, go ahead and disarm ’em.” As Smith started forward, Duncan Holt’s gaze swung to bear flintily on him. Ray spoke again softly. “Five years is a long time, Dunc. A feller gets a little bitter thinking about what put him away. He gets to believe killin’ the man responsible or those who work for him could be a real pleasure. Don’t make a move or I’ll prove to you how that is.”
Duncan did not move; he clearly believed Ray would kill him, but the darkness of his natural coloring grew steadily blacker with anger. When Perry had disarmed both men, Holt said: “What the hell do you two idiots think you’re doing anyway?”
