“Whew!” said Bill Dorn. She slammed the door as she went in.
He turned and went down the steps and to the barn for his horse. He did not look back, did not see her face at a window, did not even think about her. His swift stride grew more and more purposeful before he came to the corral.
He went into the stable, saddled his blue roan and rode out, his spurs jingling softly, his hat cocked at an angle, a lazy cigarette dangling from his lips. He rode straight northward, toward the Blue Smokes, did not look back.
It was not quite an hour later—but there are times when an hour can seem longer than a blue moon—that a lively rat-tat-tat sounded on the door of the little house in the Valley of Palms. The girl who said that she was Lorna Kent had heard hoof beats, had peeked out from behind a curtain, her first guess being that here returned Bill Dorn. He hadn’t even said good-bye. When she saw it wasn’t Dorn she ran to fasten every door and window. Again she peeked out. And when the knocking came, she went to the door. For she had seen the man’s face and she wasn’t afraid of him. She even smiled friendlywise at him as he beamed in on her.
“Howdy, Miss,” he said. “Me, I’m Cap’n Jinks, an’ I’m come along to say howdy.”
She thought he must be a hundred years old; his face was all puckers, he was as ugly as a superannuated monkey, his skin might have been old saddle leather, dried and wrinkled and cracked in the sun, and he had as roguish a pair of blue eyes as ever twinkled on land or sea. Somehow, so did the old fellow’s lively good nature effect her that the ancient sawed-off shotgun tucked under his arm looked no more offensive than a little boy’s toy. When she had taken him all in, her smile flashed out twice as friendly.
“You see, Miss Lorny,” he ran on, “I jus’ rid down from the Blue Smokes where the boys is breakin’ their fool naiks over gold huntin’.” He had to stop and cackle at all the fuss-and-feathers those fellows were making over the new strike—just mere gold, stuff you dug out of the ground. “I meets my ol’ compadre, Will Dorn, an’ me an’ Will palavers. He tells me about you.”
“Won’t you come in, Captain?” she invited, and did want him to come in; his presence only accentuated the loneliness of the last hour, and made horrible the thought of the loneliness to come—a whole long black night of it, with coyotes howling from the hills, and strange noises bubbling up in their eerie fashion out of the silence’s void.
He shook his head, then nodded it.
“Not now, bein’ in a hurry, but shore I’m comin’ in. Me, I’m stayin’ here with you, Miss Lorny. Them’s Will’s orders. Only firs’, I got me some more ridin’ to do. Will says I’m to scare up the Injun gal, Florinda or her sister or some other gal, to stay with you. Soon’s I do that I’m to toddle back an’ visit with you. Don’t cry fer me, Miss Lorny, while I’m gone; I won’t be more’n three-four-five-six hours. Adios.”
She called after him: “I suppose Bill Dorn is on his way to the Blue Smokes?” He stopped and turned, and she saw how bow-legged he was.
“The dang fool!” he barked. “Mos’ likely he’ll be dead nex’ time we see him. He’s on his way to a meetin’ with Mike Bundy, an’ Bundy’s ready for him, an’ has tol’ ever’body he’ll shoot on sight, claimin’ he’s got to. Se’f defence, he’ll make it, the murderin’ pup!”
“But—but Bill Dorn can shoot as fast and as straight as Mike Bundy any day!”
“Hell’s bells, I mos’ forgot your present,” said the old fellow, and came back up the steps. “Will says you, bein’ alone an’ scared, ought to have it. Reckon you ought.” He dragged it out from his trousers belt and handed it to her. “Will sent it,” he said. It was Bill Dorn’s gun.
CHAPTER VI
Riding along to the Blue Smokes on a blue roan that could strike a gait between a pace and a rack, and could keep it up all day, Bill Dorn met within the first three miles the kicker-up of the puff of dust he had noted from the ranch. With an old friend, Cap’n Jinks, he paused to talk a while, gathering an inkling of what was going on ahead and in the end sending the old fellow along with an errand or two.
“You ever was a dang jackass, Will Dorn,” said the Cap’n at the parting, “an’ I reckon you ever will be, amen. Jus’ the same, after Mike Bundy shoots you up from hat to heels, don’t come aroun’ sayin’ I didn’t tell you.”
Several miles farther along, in a region of hot, rocky hills and sparse grass and splotches here and there of cactus, Dorn met the second man. This time it was his friend, Sheriff Barton MacArthur.
“I just burglarized a house, Bart,” said Dorn. “Any law against it?”
“I’ll look it up some time, Bill,” said the sheriff.
“What are you riding this way for? Why aren’t you up in the Smokes staking a claim with the rest of ’em?”
MacArthur, looking tired and dusty, eased himself sideways in the saddle, hooked a knee about the horn and started to work rolling a meticulous cigarette.
“Not me, Bill,” he said, when he had licked his paper. “I moseyed up to get a lay o’ the land, got it and am going home. Mike Bundy’s top dog up yonder. I guess he’s got a mine, all right; he’s staking his claim and he’s got fifty hired men staking theirs all around him. Then he lets the rabble in.”
“All quiet and serene up there?”
“So far, sure. But you’n me have seen crowds like this before, huh, Bill? They always blow up trouble, give ’em time.”
“And time’s what you’re giving ’em? Time and a lot of room?”
Across MacArthur’s weary face a hint of a smile flitted like a glint of winter’s sun on a rock.
“Know where Silver Creek is, don’t you, Bill?”
“Same as I know where my hat is,” nodded Dorn.
“Well, it’s right in there that Jake Fanning, grubstaked by Mike Bundy, found him his gold. It’s right in there that the boys, going pretty darn wild-crazy with the sort of expectations that used to stir folks to lively deeds up in the Yukon, already have got it figured out they’re going to build ’em a town! All in a handful of hours! Well, it’s me, taking an outsider’s friendly interest, that persuades ’em to the exact spot where they ought to pitch their camps now and, later on, raise the walls of their fair city. They’re bedding down, Bill, in that little flat with the scrub pines all around it—on the north side Silver Creek Canyon!”
He was chuckling when he got through. Bill Dorn frowned at him, mystified.
“The county just north of us is Rincon County,” grinned MacArthur. “Ever hear of it, Bill? Ever hear who’s sheriff up in Rincon County?”
Of course Dorn knew the Rincon sheriff, a fat, oily and good-humored individual, known far and wide as Slobby Martinez.
“Go ahead; you make me wonder,” he said.
“The thing is,” grinned MacArthur, “that the county line runs right through there. Where I’ve got ’em sot is up in Rincon County, sure as mud, and when the fracas blows the lid off hell, as sure she’ll blow, Bill, it’ll be over the line, an’ in Slob Martinez’s county. Which is all haw-haw-haw with me!”
“Dodging trouble, you wily old son-of-a-gun,” said Dorn.
“Same as usual, having all of that commodity that I can use handy always on tap. Well—so long, Bill.”
“So long,” said Bill Dorn.
Yet neither made the first move. They looked at each other like a couple of stolid Indians, their faces expressing about as much of their emotions as did the elongated countenances of their horses just now rubbing noses.
“I reckon you know, Bill,” said MacArthur, “that as soon as Bundy sees the whites of your eyes he’s going for his gun? He won’t have to wait for you to make the first play; he’s got a dozen and more witnesses to swear you’re out to kill him.”
“I’m not even carrying a gun, as you can see for yourself.”
The sheriff did see, and marveled. “That won’t stop Bundy from
killing you, Bill, and you ought to know it. And when he does it will be self-defense even if you don’t happen to be armed. Better do one of two things; steal a gun off me while I’m not looking, or swap your horse around end for end and ride some other way.”
“No.” Dorn who had it in him on occasion to be as stubborn as an old army mule, shook his head. “I’m going on; I want a talk with Bundy; and I mean to keep him alive.”
“Adios then,” snorted the sheriff, “I’ll send flowers.” But before he could ride off Dorn’s voice arrested him, demanding:
“Did you know old lady Kent was dead?”
“I heard.”
“Then you’ll know when she died—and why she died—and who buried her?”
“Not exactly. I heard it mentioned that she had passed along; some sort of accidental fall, I understood; fell off the porch while she was reaching out to water her flowers. About a week ago, I got the idea. I didn’t pay any particular attention. Why?”
“Haven’t heard anything about her selling Palm Ranch to Bundy, have you?”
“News to me,” said MacArthur.
This time when Bill Dorn said, “So long,” he meant it, and started on his way. But over his shoulder he called back at the sheriff who had not moved but was looking after him: “There’s a girl at the ranch now. You’re going that way, so better stop in and say howdy.”
“Hey, Bill! What the devil—”
“Adios, Viejo,” Dorn called back and rode on.
This was forlorn country, a land of desolation extending from the oasis to the base of Timber Mountain, a rugged old out-post of the Blue Smokes. Under foot was a sort of road, for teams at times came down from the ranches lying off to the northwest, cattle country there, freighters bound for Nacional or for America City, a lusty young town on the right side of the border line, or for the thriving new settlement at Liberty Springs. From a long rocky elevation that was like the petrified fin of some antediluvian sea beast, Dorn could see, very far in the north distance, a smudge of trees against the skyline, and fancied he saw the quiet gleam of white adobe walls; up there was the old Spanish grant, still held by the Villagas who had had their patent from Don Carlos way back in 1769. Bill Dorn drew rein a moment, and his eyes grew dull with unhappiness.
“I ought to go back and get my gun,” he muttered. “I ought to kill him after all.”
Those Villagas, what a fine old anachronistic family they were! Don Francisco and his wife, growing old now, and their daughter Diana and their two sons, Juan and Ramon, poor bewildered lost babes in the wood of modern money manipulations. They didn’t belong to this place and time; they should have lived a hundred years sooner. Even their glorious old home with its sturdy walls and flowery patios would be reft away from them soon. Mike Bundy’s shadow, which seemed to Bill Dorn to be spreading out in monstrous proportions, as black as ink, reached even up yonder, making dark the Villagas’ mid-day. They were mortgaged right up to the hilt, and Bundy held their mortgages—and Bill Dorn had been the man who had introduced Bundy to Don Francisco and his family, saying simply, “Michael is a friend of mine.”
Still Dorn rode on. He recalled all the things that girl had said. She had asked at the very beginning: “Did you ever see a dead man? One who had been alive a few minutes before—then suddenly dead?” He remembered Jake Fanning, a focal point for the concentric circles of drifting buzzards. Jake had finished now. He’d do no more evil deeds in a world where there were evil deeds enough without him; equally he’d never make restitution for any of his wickedness. Bundy, dead, would be like that. “Alive,” that confounded girl had said, “somehow you can make him square the deal. You can—if you’re as good a man as he is.”
Again in the open country and on higher ground he looked the world over in all directions. Straight ahead rose the barrier of the mountains, slashed deep with their purple gorges eternally thick with shadows. It was already late afternoon; he was allowing some five hours for the ride from the oasis ranch, and it would be sundown by the time he got to the new camp on Silver Creek.
When he chanced to see, off to the north in the general direction of the Rancho de Villaga, a cloud of dust which might have been stirred up by a frolicsome whirlwind or by horses’ hoofs, he merely thought: “Here come some more of them. When a gold strike is made men drop in like those damned red-headed birds to visit with Jake Fanning.” When, off to the south, he saw dust again he had no way of knowing that it wasn’t only riding men who came on from that quarter, but that his fate or destiny or good luck was about to speak up. But for what lay under that filmy dust cloud Bill Dorn would have been a dead man in another twenty minutes. The dust cloud swept on with men under it, and so today young Dorn, not so young now, is still riding bucking broncos.
They were like lazy banners, those streamers of dust, three of them, counting that which the blue roan kicked up, and they indicated lines of direction converging at that spot in the Blue Smokes where Silver Creek bickered out of its little pocket valley and started boldly into the desert only to dry up like the hopes of weak-hearted men. The creek for two miles was bright and lively and full of courage; it snaked its way through a crooked canon before it shot out into the open. It was in the jaws of the ravine where the canon walls overhung the trail like beetling eyebrows, brushy with mountain shrub, that Bill Dorn came so close to the end of his earthly career.
He was doubly watchful now, having been twice warned and having come to believe that at last he knew Michael Bundy and his methods pretty well. When he saw two horsemen coming down the trail he was swift to recognize them though the light was failing and their hats were low on their brows. Flank Smith and Mex Fontana, that’s who they were, Bundy’s pet gunmen. He saw too that they were as quick to make out who he was; in a flash they dropped their hands to the guns tied down at their thighs.
The two rode abreast, the trail being just wide enough. Dorn approached them steadily, the blue roan racking. He thought, “Here’s as nice a spot for a quiet bit of murder as a man could want.” There was no turning to right or left; it would do no good to turn back. He thought, further, with a flick of resentment, “That confounded girl!”
The Mexican, the impatient one, fired first. The pistol shot crashed into the ravine’s silence like a young cannon and the flash of fire was a tiny orange flame in the shadows. Bill Dorn promptly toppled out of the saddle, struck earth on all fours and scrambled behind a trail-side boulder, while the blue roan ran wild, whirling and dashing back down trail. Fontana, as he and Flank Smith came on, fired the second time, his bullet singing off angrily after contact with the rock behind which Bill Dorn lay.
Then it was that three riders responsible for the cloud of dust Dorn had noted in the north, cut into the ravine only a hundred yards below him, and came first to the frightened riderless horse, then next to a fuller explanation of the two shots they had heard.
They were the two Villaga boys—twin inseparables not yet twenty-five, one as dark as his father, the other as blond as his mother, two wild young devils who rode full tilt now as they did at life in general—and with them their sister, Señorita Diana Villaga, a boy like them to look at as they swept into view, wearing black chaparejos and wide-brimmed black hat like theirs except for its enormous silver buckle—a rarely lovely girl to stare at when she came close. Their abrupt arrival checked the gun play.
“Valgame!” shouted Ramon, the dark one, a man every bit as impatient as the Mexican Fontana and perhaps even more so. “What is all this? You have killed a man and still keep on killing him some more?—Ah! It is you, Fontana? You and Señor Smith?”
Bill Dorn stood up. He reached for his fallen hat and put it on so that he might take it off in the presence of his rescuers, especially the bright-eyed Diana.
“You three Villagas are most welcome,” he said, and gave the Señorita the bow which she, a regal slip of a thing somehow as bright as the slender curve of a new mo
on, would expect. “Always welcome, especially so today.”
Hank Smith, slower to shoot but quicker to think straight than Fontana, explained, and was as pleasant as a starved coyote snarling over a bone.
“We jus’ met this Dorn guy like you see right here in the trail. Lately he’s gone crazy with some sort of a killin’ idea in his head. Tried to kill Mike Bundy las’ night down to Nacional. Saw me an’ Fontana, an’ went for his gun. Fontana let him have it.”
Diana Villaga, spurring closer, the pale light dancing on the silver buttons of her little Spanish jacket, said solicitously: “You’re not badly hurt, Bill Dorn?”
Only, as she pronounced it, it was “Beel” and she put a ripple into the solitary r in his name. Dorn had once told her: “Say, if there were two or three r’s in my name, when you said it it would sound like an angel playing on a harp!” Now he said, rubbing his shoulder: “Hurt? Not any, Diana, except where I hit the ground. You see, not having a gun on me, I figured my one best bet was to roll out of the saddle pronto and hide behind a rock like a rabbit going under a bush.”
“What have you got in your hands, Bill?” said Juan Villaga curiously.
Bill Dorn glanced down at his two hands rather grimly. In each he clutched a stone about the size of a baseball. He was going to let Hank Smith and Fontana have all he had when they came close to make sure they had potted him. He said, “Well, you see, Juan—” The mercuric Diana burst out excitedly:
“Went for his gun, did he? You—you—you murderers! Why, he hasn’t even got a gun on him! Get out! Get out, get out, you—you two dirty murderers!”
Both Fontana and Smith bristled. But their bristling didn’t amount to much for, before they could make clear that it must have been a mistake, that they had thought Bill Dorn was filling his hand to burn them down, those other riders who had come along under the dust cloud from the south arrived. They were three cowboys from the Dorn Ranch, Bud Williams and Duke Jones and Curly O’Connor.
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