High Desert

by Wayne D. Overholser

  There were a dozen riders strung along the bar, and another group at a poker table. Turkey Track men, Morgan knew, for they were not squatters, and there was no other spread within fifty miles or more of Irish Bend. If there was a fight they would back their boss, and that made odds that gave Morgan no chance at all.

  The Clancys and Jaggers Flint were standing at the street end of the bar. Morgan paced slowly to them, feeling again the covert scrutiny of every man in the room, exactly as he had felt it when he had first ridden into town.

  Broad Clancy was not over five and a half feet tall and spindly bodied. His face was as wrinkled as the last overripe apple in the barrel. He had placed his expensive wide-brimmed Stetson on the bar and his head, Murdo saw, was entirely without hair. He turned, green eyes staring briefly at Morgan from under hooding gold-brown brows, then coldly gave Morgan his back.

  Short John, Clancy’s oldest son, now about thirty, was the way Morgan remembered him. He was smaller than his father, but he was much like the older man, with the same green eyes and the bushy gold-brown brows. There were differences that Morgan noted — wavy brown hair worn long, mutton-chop whiskers that seemed out of place on so young a man, and an intangible something that gave Morgan the impression that Short John had never lived his own life, but that he was forever under the shadow thrown by his father.

  Short John turned his back to Morgan with the same contemptuous indifference Broad had shown. The slow smile that spread Morgan’s mouth did not lighten the gravity of his face. He recognized this for what it was. The Clancys didn’t know him and they pretended not to care. They were the king and the crown prince; he was a stranger approaching the court. Let him bow and scrape the way other strangers did.

  Anger stirred Morgan, but he kept it masked with an urbane expression. The great pride he always associated with small men was here in Broad Clancy, and to a lesser degree in Short John.

  Uncertainty had always been Morgan’s lot; trouble as natural to expect as the sunset. He had been taught by the very circumstances of his life to learn to read men. He came to the bar now and stood beside Broad Clancy, knowing that any way he played this would be a gamble, but that if he pegged Clancy right, there was one way that offered a fair chance of winning.

  “You’re Clancy, ain’t you?” Morgan said, his tone a cold slap at the man’s dignity.

  Broad Clancy stiffened. Short John turned, an audible breath sawing into the sudden quiet. Jaggers Flint, standing beyond Short John, exploded with an oath.

  “That’s him, boss. That’s the huckleberry who held the gun on us last night at the Smith shack.”

  It was the gravelly voiced man who had been with Rip Clancy the night before. He stepped away from the bar, cocked and primed for sudden and violent trouble. Trouble was his business; he made his living that way. He was waiting to kill now, waiting only for the signal from the man who had bought his gun.

  According to Jewell, this was the man Broad Clancy had hired as insurance against Morgan’s return. Morgan knew the breed. Flint had a streak that was mean and cruel, but if he was like a hundred others Morgan had known, he had another element, a weakness that would break under the pressure of hard courage. Now Morgan searched for that weakness.

  “That’s right, Clancy,” Morgan said. “I met up with this man last night. I think you cheated yourself when you agreed to pay him fighting wages.”

  Quick interest brought a bright glint in Clancy’s green eyes.

  “Why?”

  Morgan waited, letting the tension build, watching Flint’s muddy brown eyes grow wide and hard and wicked, watched desire grow until it had brought him close to making a draw.

  “When you pay a good price, Clancy,” Morgan said with biting contempt, “you deserve a good product. All you got is a phony. Just big brass buttons and an empty holler.”

  Desire faded in Flint’s eyes. He swallowed and choked.

  “Nobody talks that way...not to Jaggers Flint,” he finally said, in a vain attempt to sound tough.

  Morgan waited for the signal of his intent, the down drop of a shoulder, the tightening of his lips, the fire glow in his eyes. But Flint stood motionless, glowering, and Morgan prodded him with a laugh.

  “It’s been a long trail, Clancy,” Morgan said. “Things ain’t the way they used to be. You didn’t hire men like this when you cleared the valley of the Morgans.”

  Clancy’s eyes narrowed. “What do you know about the Morgans?”

  “I know quite a bit about the Morgans, but that ain’t the reason I’m here. I want to talk to you. I don’t take to being jumped by a gun dog. Tell him to draw or drag.”

  Clancy was frankly puzzled. He nodded at Flint without taking his eyes from Morgan. The gunman muttered an oath as if reluctant to drop the matter, but he moved back to his place at the bar with greater speed than the occasion required.

  He had cracked. Morgan doubted that the man would ever have the courage to make a face-to-face draw against him, but he would be a constant threat as long as he and Morgan were both in the valley. Morgan had aroused the hate that Flint and men of his kind hold for another who has broken them. There would come a day when that hate would find expression.

  “Your business?” Clancy asked in a dry dead tone.

  “I’m Murdo Morgan...representing the....”

  “Morgan!”

  The word was jolted out of Clancy. He stood stockstill, eyes twin emeralds sparking under the bushy brows, stiff-shouldered as if the temerity of Murdo Morgan in coming here had stunned him momentarily.

  “I don’t think you’ve forgotten the Morgans, Clancy.”

  “Murdo Morgan.” Clancy seemed suddenly to come awake. “You came back to kill me, didn’t you? Go ahead...but if you down me, you’ll have a rope around your neck inside of five minutes.”

  “I didn’t come to kill you, Clancy,” Morgan said patiently. “What’s been done has been done. I’m representing the....”

  “I don’t give a cuss what you represent!” Broad Clancy bellowed. He jerked a thumb toward the street. “Get out! I’ll give you two minutes to dust out of town.”

  The men at the poker tables had risen and moved to the bar. More than a dozen guns. Morgan knew he could take Broad Clancy and perhaps Short John. He couldn’t take them all. But Clancy made no motion for his gun. There had been a time when he would have, but the years had slowed his draw and he had no desire to die.

  “All right,” Morgan said with biting scorn. “You’re not as bright as I remember you. I came here to talk over a proposition that’s got to be settled before the summer’s finished. There’ll be lives....”

  “Turkey Track stomps its own snakes!” Clancy bawled. “We make our own laws and we enforce ’em. I’ve got nothing to talk over with any blasted stranger, and least of all a Morgan.”

  Short John and Jaggers Flint had moved up to stand close behind Clancy, the others forming a packed triangle farther along the bar. Morgan was entirely alone. A strong current ran against him, a current that would have washed a lesser man through the door and into the street.

  “Forget I’m a Morgan,” he said. “Put Smith or Jones or Brown or any handle onto me you want to. If you’ll listen you might be able to save the Turkey Track. If you don’t....”

  “You’ve used up most of your time,” Clancy said coldly. “Ride out of the valley.”

  For a moment Morgan had forgotten the barkeep. If he was shot in the back, there would be no avenging justice. Only a quick burial. They would plant him below the east rim beside the three Morgans who had lain there for sixteen years. He backed along the bar until he could see the apron. The man straightened and laid a shotgun on the mahogany.

  Morgan’s smile was a cold straight line that toughened his bronze face.

  “You used to be a fighting man, Clancy,” he said coldly, “but you’re old and you’re afraid, so you h
ire lobos like Flint and wink at a barman to shoot a man in the back. I’m not here to argue. I came here to find a way to stop a fight, but if it’s fight you want, it’s what you’ll get.”

  Morgan backed out of the Silver Spur and slanted across the intersection formed by Main and the side street. He paced along the front of the Elite Saloon and past two empty buildings, moving with challenging slowness.

  Stepping into the livery stable, Morgan paid the hostler and got his black, ignoring the open malice on the man’s face. Mounting, he rode across the street, stepped down in front of the post office, and tied his mount. A hasty departure from town would mean that he had been stampeded by Broad Clancy, an advantage he could not afford to give the cowman.

  Morgan paused in front of the post office, shaping a smoke and lighting it, eyes on the pine-fringed slopes of the Sunset Mountains. A white cloud bank lay above the pines, slowly building into grotesque shapes.

  When he had shown his defiance, Morgan tossed his cigarette into the street and turned into the post office. He bought a card from the white-haired postmistress, scratched a line to Grant Gardner in San Francisco, and mailed it.

  “Murdo.”

  It was Jewell Clancy’s voice. He wheeled back to the wicket. The girl was standing where the old lady had been a moment before, her gaze speculative and interested.

  “Do the Clancys run the post office along with everything else in the valley?” he asked.

  “No. It’s the only place where I could talk to you without Dad seeing me. When I saw you come in, I ran around the back.”

  “I had a notion you didn’t want to talk to me,” he said.

  Still, her gaze was held on him as if trying to cut away the tough exterior he showed the world, as if pondering the real motives that had driven him back after all the years. He saw no fear of him in her eyes, no bitterness, no hatred.

  She was grave, not even a hint of a smile lingering at the corners of her full red lips.

  “I was outside the Silver Spur,” she told him, “and heard what you said. I...I was wrong about you. You didn’t come back to kill Dad.”

  “Thanks for the confidence. I didn’t expect to hear it from a Clancy.”

  “Why did you come, Murdo?”

  He took off his hat in a quick gesture as if suddenly remembering it was on his head, a gesture of gallantry that plainly surprised her. He held his silence for a time, pondering her reason for asking him. Perhaps Broad Clancy, regretting he had not listened, had sent Jewell to find out his mission.

  “I’ll tell your dad when he’s of a mind to listen,” he finally said.

  “They say all Clancys are stubborn,” she said, “but Dad is the stubbornest of all of us. If he wasn’t, he’d have seen what I did. When you backed Flint down, you could have forced a fight on Dad and killed him. That’s how I knew I was wrong.”

  “If I’d come here to do a killing job,” Morgan murmured, “I wouldn’t have used the Morgan name.”

  “I thought of that, too.” Her smile brought back a little of the warmth he had first seen on her face. “You see, I’m almost as lost as you are. Dad can’t understand how a Clancy can see two sides to the trouble.”

  “Can you?”

  “Yes, but it wasn’t all Dad’s fault. Or did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “Someday I’ll tell you about it. That isn’t important now. If you aren’t here to kill Dad, you’re here for another reason. If I knew what it was, I could help you.”

  “No, you can’t help.”

  “Dad will keep on thinking you’re here to kill him,” she urged, “so he’ll kill you first.”

  “I reckon he’ll try.”

  “Auntie Jones is the postmistress. If you want me, get word to her.”

  “Thanks.”

  Morgan left the post office. Again he paused outside to build a smoke. He was still there when Jewell came through the doorway behind him and walked gracefully across the street, a hand lifting her skirt from trim ankles as she waded through the dust.

  V

  The afternoon sun pressed against Morgan’s back as he took the east road out of town. The miles fell behind, miles that were monotonously alike; flat sandy earth, sage, and rabbitbrush, an occasional juniper that seemed to huddle within itself to hold the small moisture that its roots drew from the arid land.

  Then Morgan topped a ridge and came down to Paradise Lake. It was no thing of beauty. Tules grew profusely in the muck along the west end of the lake. A long-snouted hog, suddenly aware of human presence, snorted defiance and crashed into the swamp growth.

  On the north shore of the lake the alkali flat, entirely without life, shimmered in the sharp brightness of the sunshine. It was worthless, but the south side of the lake was the most valuable part of the valley. Here were thousands of acres that could be farmed without water, for it would always be moist from the lake. Pete Royce’s place, the only farm in this part of the valley, took up but a small fraction of the rich black soil that stretched south from the lake.

  The road skirted the front of Royce’s farm. A brown haystack from the previous year bulked wide in the field between the road and the lake. Around it, grass, belly-high on a horse, bowed in long rhythmical waves before the hot wind. Southward, gray desert stretched in sage-studded ridges toward the buttes.

  Presently Morgan came to Royce’s cabin. It was made, he guessed, of lodgepole pine brought from Clancy Mountain. There was a scattering of sheds and corrals and, what was most surprising, a well-kept yard between the cabin and the road. Even without the obvious evidence of the washing on the line, Morgan would have guessed a woman lived here.

  Dismounting, Morgan watered his horse at the trough. A saddled bay gelding was racked at the hitch pole in front of the cabin. The door was open and, as Morgan turned to step back into the saddle, he heard a laugh, gay and feminine. With a sudden sharpening of interest, Morgan realized that the girl, Peg, was inside.

  Morgan would have ridden on if he hadn’t heard the girl ask: “What are you going to do about the company man when he shows up, Rip?”

  “I’ll fill him so full of lead he wouldn’t float in the lake,” Rip Clancy’s voice said. “It’ll take more’n a company gunslinger to run us Clancys off our range.”

  Stepping around the trough, Morgan walked up the path that cut across the lawn. Something was wrong. Only Ed Cole and Gardner and his organization knew that Morgan was coming to Paradise Valley.

  Morgan paused in the doorway, an angular shape nearly filling it, right hand idle at his side. I’m the company man you’re expecting, Clancy,” he said coldly. “Now what was it you were going to do?”

  Young Clancy and the girl were sitting on a leather sofa pushed against the north wall. Grabbing his gun, Clancy came up from his seat as if a giant spring had shot him upright. Then he froze, color washing out of his scrawny-thin face. He was considering the black bore of Morgan’s gun.

  “You’re plumb fast with the talk,” Morgan said contemptuously, “but a mite slow on the draw.”

  Morgan would have recognized Rip as a Clancy. He had the same arrogance and exaggerated pride, the green eyes and bushy brows, but they were red, not gold-brown, and his hair was red. He straightened, slender hands moving nervously as he sought a way out of this.

  “I know your voice!” he cried. “You’re the hombre who covered up for Buck last night, ain’t you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I should’ve plugged you,” Rip said regretfully. “Flint talked me out of it. I didn’t think he was that short of nerve.”

  “A Clancy wouldn’t be short of nerve, would he? Want me to put my iron back and give you another chance to draw?”

  Rip ran the tip of his tongue over thin lips. He shot a glance at the girl, his sharp features growing sharper as hate pressed him, as the humiliation of this moment c
ut deeper into his pride.

  Morgan let the tension build until Rip flung out: “You’ve got the edge now, mister! Go ahead and walk big. There’ll be another day.”

  “I’ll wait for it, sonny.”

  Morgan remained in the doorway, gun hip-high, watching young Clancy narrowly. He sensed a cold courage in the boy that had been lacking in Broad and Short John. As he watched, a wicked grin broke across Rip’s narrow face.

  Without turning, Morgan saw he had made a mistake. He had seen only the one horse, and it had not occurred to him that Rip would have another man with him. Now, from the mocking triumph in the boy’s eyes, he knew someone was behind him.

  There was no time to think about it, to let it play out. He whirled with the unexpectedness and speed of a striking cougar, his gun lashing out with a ribbon of flame. A bullet burned along Morgan’s ribs, but the man in the yard didn’t fire again. Morgan had moved with perfect co-ordination of instinct and muscular speed. His bullet had knocked the man off his feet as if he had been sledged by an axe handle.

  Time had compressed and run out for Murdo Morgan. Rip Clancy was behind him with a gun on his hip and all the opportunity he needed. Morgan spun back. Then he held his fire. The girl had gripped Clancy’s wrist.

  “No, Rip!” she was screaming. “No!”

  Morgan reached Clancy in two long strides. “I’ll take that cutter. I didn’t think the Clancys would whipsaw a man like that.”

  “The man you shot wasn’t a Clancy,” Peg said without feeling. “He’s Pete Royce.”

  Clancy stood still as Morgan took his gun. He stood with shoulder blades against the wall, face bone-hard, eyes frosty emerald slits.

  “What kind of a woman are you, Peg?” he asked hoarsely. “I’d have killed him if you....”

  “I know,” the girl breathed. “And I’ve got an idea about any crawling thing that would shoot a man in the back.”

  Red crept into Clancy’s cheeks as he felt the girl’s scorn. He held his position, saying nothing. Morgan holstered his gun and knelt beside the man in the yard. The bullet had creased Royce’s skull. It was a shallow wound, enough to knock the man cold, but unlikely to be dangerous. Morgan lifted him and carried him into the cabin.