High Desert

by Wayne D. Overholser

  Morgan was in close now, the black’s speed matching the speed of the steers. Morgan’s gun bellowed, powder flame streaking into the night, the noise of the explosion lost in the thunder above and the thunder of hoofs beside him, the blazing ribbon lashing from gun muzzle no more than a match spark in a world lighted by crackling flashes above.

  Pull trigger. Throw bullets into the lead animals. Load and shoot again until the gun is empty. Build a row of dead steers. Press and push and hope that the raging line of destruction can be turned away from the camp. Hope that the black will not find a hole and fall, for nothing but death awaited a rider who went down beneath those driving hoofs.

  It was wild and primitive, a world without order, chaos that had broken its bonds, death rolling across an earth that trembled under those hoofs with only a single man to avert that fate.

  Then the miracle! Other men rode out of the night. More guns to flash, more men to yell and strike with coiled ropes and press the end of that heaving black horde, more men to turn them into the empty land where they could run until they couldn’t run, more men to bind and lash this chaos into order. There would be safety only when breath was gone and hearts could no longer pound movement into those lumbering bodies.

  The pressure was enough. The line was turned, the direction changed. Not much, but enough. Away from the canvas-topped wagons, away from campfires that had been replenished with dry wood and raced upward into the rain with long sizzling banners of flame, away from the agony cries of mortal terror as women and children tried to flee to safety.

  The wagons flashed by. The town was behind. Somewhere out there the steers would stop when they could go no farther.

  Morgan reined away and stopped. He stepped down from his heaving horse and loaded his gun. Daylight was washing out across the valley now. It had not been long since the stampede had started, but each minute had been an eternity, minutes when hundreds of lives had depended upon every crawling second.

  There was no direction to Murdo Morgan’s thoughts as he stood there in the rain. Only a consciousness of guilt for letting Broad Clancy live, but Morgan would not be guilty much longer. Most of the riders were staying with the herd. They were not pressing the leaders, but had pulled away and slowed their mounts. Later the steers would be brought back, but two men had turned and were riding directly at Morgan.

  For a time, Morgan thought the riders were Broad Clancy and Short John, but the light was thin in the misty air, and when they were close, he saw that they were not the Clancys. They reined up.

  “Put up your gun, Morgan,” one said. “You’ll have no trouble with us.”

  “Where’s Clancy?” Morgan asked.

  “Short John’s dead,” the rider said — a Turkey Track rider, Morgan realized then. “Maybe Broad is by this time.”

  Morgan was silent for a moment, his mind gripping this and failing to understand it.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “We broke Short John out of jail,” the buckaroo said. “Purdy got tagged, but he’ll live. We left town when we heard the stampede, and ran into Cole’s bunch at the edge of the camp. Broad cussed Cole for startin’ it, and Cole said they aimed to smash the nester camp. Broad called it killin’ and pulled. Pete Royce got him. There was some shootin’. We got the Sneeds and one of ’em drilled Short John. Cole sloped out with Royce and Blazer. Broad told us to turn the stampede away from the camp.”

  XIII

  Rain was lashing Morgan’s face as he stared at the men. Slowly his gun slid back into holster. It made less than sense, but the Turkey Track man was telling the truth. Morgan saw it in his face. There was no reason now for him to lie.

  “We’ll slope along,” the rider said. “If we saw you, Broad wanted us to tell you. He’s in town now, I reckon, if he ain’t cashed in. A couple of the boys took him to the hotel.”

  “Thanks,” Morgan said.

  Mounting, he let the black take his own pace to town.

  * * * * *

  It was full daylight when Morgan reached Irish Bend. The storm was over except for a drizzle that was more mist than rain. He rode slowly along the street, saw Broad Clancy’s chestnut racked in front of the hotel, and tied beside him.

  There was a strange stillness upon the town. Morgan remembered the hot spring day when he had first returned to the valley, a day that now seemed years ago. There had been silence then, the hostile silence with which Broad Clancy’s Irish Bend used to welcome strangers. This was different. It was a brooding silence, filled with human fears.

  Morgan stepped through the mud to the wet walk and stood there a moment. The sun, low over the Hagerman Hills to the east, broke through the shifting clouds and gave a hard brightness to the street. Steam curled up from the soaked earth and roofs and boardwalks, and strong and pungent desert smells flowed around Morgan.

  No one else was on the street. No horses were racked along it but the two in front of the hotel. A rooster crowed from somewhere back of Doc Velie’s office, the shrill sound beating into the silence. Then the stillness was upon the town again. It was as if Nature, outraged for so long by the plots and counterplots of scheming selfish men, had decreed that this would be the end.

  Morgan paced toward the bank and stopped. Peg Royce stepped out of the hotel.

  “Murdo!” she called. “Come inside before they shoot you!”

  He didn’t move. “Where’s Cole?” he asked.

  “In the Elite. Blazer’s with him. Royce is dead. Jim Carrick got him. Jim’s hit, but he’ll be all right.”

  The Elite was straight ahead, past the bank and across the side street. The minute Morgan rounded the front of the bank, they would cut him down. Still he waited, considering this.

  “Where’s Buck?” he asked.

  “Still in the bank.”

  That would have been like Jim Carrick, to stay where he had been stationed until the danger was over. It wasn’t Buck’s way, and Morgan didn’t like the idea of young Carrick being behind him, but it couldn’t be helped. He started on. Peg ran after him and caught his arm.

  “They’ll kill you!”

  He shook her off and kept on until he reached the corner. There he pressed against the bank wall and called: “Cole! Come out, or I’m coming after you!”

  “Wait, Murdo.” Peg stepped behind him and into the bank. “Buck, Morgan needs help.”

  There was no answer from inside the Elite. Morgan drew his gun and sent a shot through the side of the saloon.

  “Come out, Cole! You, too, Blazer!”

  Behind him, Buck Carrick laughed. “Why’n thunder should I help Morgan? You got things plumb wrong, Peg.”

  “I won’t marry you unless you help him, Buck.”

  Morgan heard young Carrick’s long breath. “You’ll marry me if I help Morgan?”

  “I promise.”

  “Don’t, Peg!” Morgan said without turning. “I’ll wait them out.”

  “Shut up, Morgan,” Buck snarled. “I’ll make my own bargain. Peg, I thought you loved Morgan.”

  “Not any more. Buck, you’ll never regret it. I promise. Jim won’t either.”

  “Don’t, Peg!” Morgan cried out. “Don’t throw yourself away on a man you don’t love.” Then he lunged across the street, gun in his hand. He was in the open, mud sloshing under his boots. He was across to the other walk then, and Blazer and Cole were stumbling through the door. Morgan didn’t understand it. He fired once. Blazer’s gun was lifted, but the hammer didn’t fall. He bent with Morgan’s bullet in his stomach. He swayed uncertainly, hanging to life with grim tenacity, then the last of his life went into the trigger pull, his shot spilling wildly across the street.

  Ed Cole was jerking frantically at his gun. It came out from under his coat, pathetically slow, for this was not his game and he was scared. He had depended on Arch Blazer, and the big man had failed him. There was
no guile now in his blue eyes or on his handsome face. There was a wolfish rage in him, and the fear of a wolf that had been separated from his pack and can run no longer.

  Morgan’s gun was lined on Cole, finger slack against the trigger. Thoughts slid through his mind, thoughts of this man he had called friend, thoughts of the past when they had fought side by side, of his visit to Cole’s San Francisco office and the loan Cole had obtained for him.

  “Shoot him!” Peg screamed. “There’s nothing worth saving in him!”

  Cole’s gun was in his hand now. Morgan thought of the stampede, of the women and children in the settlers’ camp. He had seen stampedes. He had seen the bloody shapeless things that had been men before they had gone down under thundering hoofs.

  It was enough. He pulled trigger, felt the breath of Cole’s bullet on his cheek. Then Cole dropped his gun, hands gripping his shirt front. He wanted to say something. His lips framed a word but the sound that came from his throat was not a word. The agony of death was in his face and shock and disbelief as if he had been sure through all of it that he would never be brought to this place. He fell across the walk and his blood made a dark pattern on the wet boards.

  Then Morgan understood. Dalton and Frawley and Gardner and a dozen settlers boiled through the door to form a circle around the bodies.

  “We were forted up behind the saloon,” Dalton said, “waiting for some more of the boys. Then we saw you cross the street and knew we had to do somethin’, so we broke in through the back door.” He scratched his chin, staring down at Cole. “Queer, ain’t it? Both him and Clancy had all they needed, but it wasn’t enough. Now they’ve got nothin’.”

  “Why did Cole stop to fight?” Morgan asked.

  “He couldn’t get away,” Frawley answered. “Royce got hit when they tangled with Clancy’s bunch, and they brought him to the doc. Jim Carrick blowed Royce’s brains out and we circled the town. Cole and Blazer holed up in here.”

  Perhaps it was that way, but Morgan knew how it was with a man after he had schemed and failed and run. Any man can run so long. Then he can’t run. It had to be ended, one way or the other, and Ed Cole had died like a man.

  “Thanks,” Morgan said.

  He put his gun back in his holster, suddenly tired and sleepy and a little bitter. These men didn’t understand. They never would. Not until this morning had they tried to fight, but fighting was what he was made for. There would always be the little men who needed their fighting done for them. That was the way the world moved forward. Only now and then would he find a Jim Carrick or an Abel Purdy who had within his soul the courage to stand and fight.

  “Why,” Frawley said, pleased, “I guess you’ve got no reason to be thankin’ us. Not after what you done.”

  “We’ll get the drawing started, Morgan,” Gardner said.

  It didn’t seem very important to Morgan then. The important part had been done.

  “Take care of them,” he said, nodding at the bodies, and turned away.

  Buck Carrick was standing in front of the bank, his arm around Peg.

  When Morgan crossed the street to them, Buck tried desperately to hold his dignity.

  “Why didn’t you wait, Morgan? I’d have given you a hand.”

  “I do my own snake stomping,” Morgan said. He stared at Jim Carrick’s son who had hated him since that night at the Smith shack. Now Morgan felt sorry for Peg, he felt sorry for Jim. “She’s got no call to marry you, Buck, if she doesn’t love you. She deserves something better.”

  “Now hold on...,” Buck began.

  “I had some things wrong,” Peg broke in. She stood tall and straight, as cool and beautiful as carved ivory. “I lost my head about you, Murdo. Let’s forget that. It was different this morning. I helped you because I wanted Buck to own the land he lived on, the land I’m going to live on.” She smiled, but it was not the confident smile Morgan had seen on her lips before. “Broad died a little bit ago. Jewell will want to see you.”

  Morgan, looking closely at Peg, knew it was all right with her. Yesterday she had said she would make Buck happy and she would make Jim like her. She had meant it then and she meant what she said now.

  He went on, the desire to sleep a million years pressing him, but he couldn’t sleep yet. Jewell wanted to see him. Funny, the way it had gone. All the time he had thought he would have to kill Broad Clancy. Then Jewell would be beyond his reach, for that was a thing even love could not bridge. But Clancy had died before the guns of Ed Cole and his men.

  He was in the hotel lobby then and Jewell was behind the desk as she had been that first day he had seen her. He paused and looked at her and thought of the things he had noticed then — of the eagerness in her blue eyes, her quick-smiling lips, her throaty laugh. But nobody had laughed much lately in Paradise Valley. The years ahead would be different. He might do some laughing himself.

  “Dad’s dead,” she said. “Everything he had wanted was gone, but he said to tell you he didn’t hate you. He hoped you didn’t hate him. He brought that herd down to run through the big tent if everything else failed. He would have burned the town and your records and he aimed to kill you and Gardner, but he couldn’t stand for Cole stampeding the cattle into the camp. He said he had never fought women and children. He was honest in what he believed. You believe that, don’t you, Murdo? Can you forgive him for what happened to your father and your brothers?”

  “I didn’t come back to get square, Jewell.”

  She hadn’t been crying, but now there were tears in her eyes. She rubbed them away.

  “I know, Murdo,” she said a little angrily, “and I’m not crying for him. I’m crying because of what he might have been, and what he might have done. I think he saw it himself that last minute. He said he had lost Rip. He had lost me. Then he made Short John come to the drawing to do what Rip would have done if he had been alive, and he lost Short John. He didn’t care if he lived or died. It was too late.”

  Morgan thought briefly of his own father who had dreamed his dreams to the last. He thought of Abel Purdy who had said that time was a great sea washing around them. Now everything was different. He looked at this girl who had missed so much of the goodness of life.

  “It’s not too late,” he said.

  “What will you do now?” she asked.

  “I kept back a piece of the butte land south of the valley. We could homestead the quarters between my land so we’d have patent to enough to know we could hang on no matter what happens. Seems like this valley has got a big chunk of me. I’d like to stay here. Would you?”

  “Yes, Murdo. That’s what I’d like to do.”

  He came to her and she moved away from the desk to meet him. He kissed her and her lips were warm and rich. She had never given the fullness of her love to anyone, but she gave it now, and Morgan, holding her in his arms, had a brief glimpse of the years ahead. They were inviting years, as winey and head-stirring as the cool thin air of the valley.

  She pulled her lips away and clung to him, her body hard against his, and in all the changes that the great sea washing in around them had brought, none was as fine as this.

  The Fence

  I

  Jim Hallet could look back upon a series of decisions, bitter, sometimes brutal decisions, which had influenced the course of his life, all of them building toward the stand he must take that day. Now, his hard-muscled back pressed against the doorjamb of the sheriff’s door, the hot summer sun winking back from his star, he watched the Wyatts approach town, thinking of what he would say to Boone Wyatt. He had made his decision after a worried sleepless week, knowing what it would cost him, and knowing he could not change it.

  There was no other family like the Wyatts in the Stillwater country, nor, for that matter, in all of eastern Oregon. White-haired, old Latigo Wyatt, as slim and arrow-straight at seventy as he had been at twenty, always rode in front wit
h his granddaughter, Kitsie, when they came to town. Latigo’s son Boone, Kitsie’s father, forked a roan behind him, Kitsie’s twin brother Stub at his side. They were the Wyatts, the royal family of the valley, proud of their name, their wealth, and of Wagon Wheel, the biggest spread in that corner of the state. All of them were certain of their high destiny, and all but Kitsie intolerant of opposition.

  Gramp Tatum, younger than Latigo and looking ten years older, lurched along the path from his shack in the sagebrush west of town, reached the boardwalk, and stumbled toward Jim’s office. He sat down in the doorway as if the last of his strength had seeped out of him. He said: “I sure need an eye-opener, son. Can’t seem to get waked up this morning.”

  Usually Hallet sent the old man on about his business which was mooching drinks in the Bonanza saloon, but today was Saturday and Gramp’s luck hadn’t been good lately. “Go get your eyes opened,” Jim said, dropping a dollar on the walk in front of the old man.

  Gramp picked it up and slid it into his pocket. He muttered — “Thanks, son.” — but he didn’t stir. His eyes were on the dust cloud to the south. He said with deep sourness: “There they come just like they’ve been coming for twenty years. You could set your watch by ’em. Ten o’clock every Saturday morning, and for why? Just so folks will bow and scrape in front of ’em. Sure makes Latigo feel good.”

  Jim said nothing. He wished Gramp would move on. He had no sympathy for the old man. Gramp had made his decision years before when he had refused to fight back. Latigo had stomped on him and broken him and beaten the pride out of him. It was Latigo’s way with any man who stood in front of him, but some had fought and died. That, to Jim’s way of thinking, was better than crawling, belly-down, through the dust. For the third time that morning he lifted his gun and checked it and slid it back into his holster. He would not surrender, even for Kitsie.

  “Yeah, bow and scrape and forget you was ever two-legged and walked like a man,” Gramp said with more violence of feeling than Jim thought was in him. “That’s what I’ve been doing every Saturday just to get a damned lousy drink out of Latigo or Boone.”