Earl came in just as I was finishing the book. I tucked the loose pages into place the way you straighten up a deck of cards, dropped it back into its drawer, and rose, my backside feeling as if it had been slapping a saddle all day.
“How do I get to Périgueux’s ranch?” I adjusted my hat.
He checked the stove, decided it didn’t need stoking, and pushed the lid shut. “Ride due east from anywhere in the world and you can’t miss it. Why?”
“I’ve got poker fever. Think I’ll offer the Marquis a piece of Pardee’s action.”
“Huh?”
“Mind the store.”
I was riding a white-faced roan stallion that year, with one walleye and a disposition like a trodden snake. The old Negro who looked after the livery stable appeared glad to see me and rolled back a checked cotton sleeve to show me two semicircular bruises on his forearm where he’d been bitten while strapping on the feedbag. I paid him for the horse’s care to that point and tipped him handsomely. He couldn’t write, so I scribbled the transaction on the back of Blackthorne’s last telegram and got his mark.
The roan made a halfhearted attempt to reach back and nip me as I was mounting, but I ignored it and he didn’t follow through. He remembered the first time he’d tried that and the taste of blood on his tongue when I kicked him in the teeth. We understood each other.
It was shaping up to be a fine spring day as I cleared the city limits and swung east. The air was crisp—my breath was a quick gray jet that vanished as soon as it left my mouth—but the sun was pasted alone on a construction-paper sky and hills of dead grass described wavy lines of fuzzy yellow crayon between the mountain ranges to east and west. The scenery looked like a child’s drawing.
The sun was an hour down when a solitary rider crested a rise a couple of miles ahead, moving fast across country. He dropped out of sight behind the next hill, reappearing closer a few minutes later as he came to the top of that one, then vanishing again. By the time he came over the fourth swell I could see that he had a rifle crossed behind his saddle horn. I loosened the Deane-Adams in its holster and kept riding, cursing myself for leaving behind the Winchester.
He pulled up four hundred yards short and sat waiting. He had a buttermilk horse with a white mane like you see in the Wild West shows, that lashed its head up and down on a long neck, shaking it with a wobbling motion.
The road swung right past him. When the distance closed to a hundred and fifty yards the rider brought his rifle upright, bracing it on his pelvis. I slowed up after another fifty and stopped. My roan shied toward the road edge and the new grass beginning to poke through the surface. I reined its head back to face the other rider. His horse pawed the ground and looked bored. He didn’t.
“This here’s Périgueux land,” he announced in a high, clear voice that rang like a new penny on a polished counter.
He was even younger than Earl, about eighteen. His yellow hair was long as a girl’s and he wore rimless spectacles that flashed white in the sun. His Stetson was the color of dried sweat and dust and his jeans had faded to match the hide of his fleece-lined jacket. The only thing bright about him was a red bandana knotted loosely at his throat. His rifle was one I hadn’t seen before, which for me was going some. A single-shot from the look of it, it had a long barrel and a lever shaped like a question mark, and looked about as native as his employer’s accent. For all I knew it could fire out both ends and never need cleaning.
“I’m Murdock, here to see Périgueux,” I explained. “Likely he’s mentioned me.”
He chewed on that for a space. He had thick lips that slacked open and a gap between his front teeth. “Let’s see something.”
Keeping my right hand hidden, I dug the first two fingers of my left into my shirt pocket and flipped the star over his head like a coin. He lost it in the sun for a moment, then spotted it on the way down and snatched at it with his free hand. It sprang out of his reach with a twang that was swallowed by the accompanying report. The echo growled in the distant mountains and died hissing.
His reflexes were fast. He swung the rifle down between the shot and the echo, but I recocked the Deane-Adams and he froze with his finger on the trigger.
He said, “That ain’t necessary. That there’s a double-action, it don’t need recocking. I seen it in Thorson’s shop.”
“I didn’t want to chance your not knowing that. The rifle.” I held out my empty hand.
He stalled as long as you’re supposed to in his situation, then extended the weapon butt first shamefacedly, like a boy handing over his slingshot to a sharp-eyed schoolmaster.
“Nice,” I said, balancing it on top of my wrist. “What is it?”
“English. The Marquis gave it to me.”
I looked it over and lowered it to the throat of my saddle. “I know you’re doing your job, but I don’t like rifles pointing at me from horseback. You never know when the animal might jar your finger on the trigger. Let’s go talk to your boss.” I holstered the revolver.
He swung the yellow horse around and started walking. I left the road to follow. At length I spied my badge gleaming in the grass and leaned down to pick it up. There was a dent between two of the points where my bullet had glanced off, not its first.
CHAPTER 10
“You need those glasses?”
We had been riding side by side for half an hour. The scenery hadn’t changed and the silence, together with the constant hammocking between the rolling hills, was stultifying. I’d about given up on getting an answer when he said, “Beats walking into doors.”
“Don’t they get in the way of the little holes?”
He turned that over and studied it from both sides before responding. “Holes?”
“The ones you cut in the pillowcase to see through while you’re wearing it. It’s a mystery to me how you can see to sling a rope over a branch. Or are you the one that holds the horse?”
Our mounts’ fetlocks swished through the grass, the only sound for miles. He was either slow or cautious. I had my money on the latter. “You been talking to Pardee.”
I shook my head. “His mind is made up it’s Mather’s men doing the harassing. I think it’s spread around a little more than that.”
“Don’t believe I’ll say anything more.”
“About time, chatterbox.”
Two hours out of Breen we topped a rise higher than most and the framework of a huge building sprang into view atop a graded hill on the horizon. It was taller than it was wide, towering forty feet over the ranch house sprawled an acre away. The outbuildings in between looked like children’s scattered blocks. Here and there across the rippled vastness that separated the Big and Little Belt Mountains, cattle grazed alone and in clumps. Squinting, I could just make out men crawling over the half-finished roof of the skeletal structure like termites.
“That’s some barn your boss is building,” I commented.
“Barn, hell.” For once he spoke without hesitation. “That’s his new headquarters.”
“What’s he need a castle for way out here?”
“He calls it a chateau.” It came out “shat-oo.”
A couple of lanky cowhands were leaning on the corral fence, smoking and watching as a third sidled up to a black mare in the enclosure with a coil of rope in hand, making kissing noises to calm the skittish animal. The pair turned their heads to follow our progress to the ranch house. They were young, but their faces were brown and cracked at the corners of their eyes and mouths from months of squinting against harsh sunlight.
As we neared the long front porch, a maple block of a man came out and rested the barrel of a Remington rolling-block rifle on the porch railing. He was dressed in colorless jeans and a red-andwhite plaid shirt that had bled pink from too many scrubbings.
“Who we got, Arnie?” His pleasant baritone didn’t go with the steel in his eyes. Hatless, he was bald to the crown, but the blond handlebar that swung below his cheeks more than made up for the dearth of hair topsi
de. He looked forty and was probably closer to thirty.
“Who’s got who is open to question.” I held up Arnie’s English rifle. “Just for the record, though, the name’s Murdock.”
He studied me. “I heard you was mean-looking. You don’t look like such a much to me.”
“That’s what a good night’s sleep will do for you. Is he in?”
“To you maybe. Not to all that iron.”
I thrust the foreign rifle into Arnie’s hands. He flushed beneath the older man’s angry gaze.
“Sorry, Uncle Ed.”
There was a brief silence, and then the other’s face clouded suddenly and he clomped off the porch carrying the Remington, reached up and wrenched the English gun out of Arnie’s grasp by its barrel. The pretty horse flinched snorting and backed up a step. Its master looked even more frightened.
“You just let two men take it away from you in one afternoon.” The blocky man was breathing heavily, his chest pumping as if from a great effort. “You’ll get it back when you learn to hang on to it.”
I said, “Do you do that often?”
“Do what?” He was still glaring at the abashed youth.
“Grab a loaded rifle by the muzzle and yank. I knew a deputy sheriff who used to do that with pistols. He’s got a pretty widow.”
He grunted and turned away, carrying the rifles at his sides like buckets of slop. As he walked he swung his left leg in a half-circle without bending the knee. The limp was more noticeable when he wasn’t in a hurry. “Wait here.” At the door he turned to nail Arnie again. “You tell Kruger to get someone else to ride line. Man can’t drive off rustlers without no gun.” The door banged in its casing.
The boy pressed his thick lips tight and wheeled, kicking yard mud over my roan’s flanks as he cantered off toward the long low bunkhouse on the other side of the corral. I dismounted and hitched up to the porch railing. The man with the handlebar came out while I was yanking the tie. He was still carrying the Remington, but he had ditched the foreign piece.
“He’ll talk.”
I stepped onto the porch. “Lead the way, Uncle Ed.”
“Name’s Strayhorn.” He braced his right foot on the threshold and vaulted the other up and over.
We passed through a shallow entrance hall into a large room with a redwood floor and two large windows in the south wall made of rows of eightinch-square panes that let in plenty of light. Quiltedleather chairs squatted around a fireplace of whitewashed stone big enough for a man to crouch in. Above the mantel, a painting of Napoleon I on horseback scowled from a heavy gold frame, but aside from that, there was nothing French about the room save its owner.
The Marquis was standing in gartered shirtsleeves and a red silk vest to the right of the fireplace with his hands clasped behind his back like a St. Louis shoe clerk and Arnie’s rifle on a low mahogany table in front of him. His forelock and pointed whiskers looked even more preposterous in these surroundings than they had in my hotel room.
“Dear me, you have had an accident,” he observed.
I’d forgotten about the cheek scratches. “I’ll live.”
“In my country, marks like those are considered a measure of one’s manhood.”
“In my country they’re considered evidence of rape.”
“Oh, but they are not so deep as that. Perhaps just a little rape. Thank you, Edward.”
It was a dismissal, but Strayhorn hesitated. “I still think I should take his gun.”
“Nonsense. Assassination is not Monsieur Murdock’s way.” His tone held a sarcastic edge. The other man raked his hard eyes over me as he limped out, still holding the buffalo gun.
“That’s a fine rifle,” I ventured, nodding at the weapon on the table. “Balanced like a clock.”
He picked it up and cradled it lovingly. In his small hands it looked like a cannon. “It is a Martini light four hundred, presented to me by the Empress Eugénie at the time I left Europe. At one hundred yards it has a striking energy of one thousand four hundred and forty-three foot-pounds. It is the only thing of any worth that the English have ever produced, and it comes as no surprise that it was designed by an Italian. The first Napoleon was Italian, you know.”
“As I recall, it was an Englishman who defeated him.”
“Well, you have not come to discuss history.” He replaced the rifle with a startling noise. I had drawn blood.
“I met Pardee last night,” I said. “Terwilliger’s foreman. He swears neither he nor his boss sent for Chris Shedwell.”
“Were I in their position, I would swear as much.”
“I believe him.”
“My compliments. Your faith in your fellow man is to be admired, if not imitated.”
“His reasoning was sound. Why were he and his men in town last night to start something with Mather if he’d arranged for Shedwell to balance the account?”
“Then perhaps you can tell me why he is coming?” When I didn’t answer he frowned exaggeratedly, pushing out his lips. “Let us say, just for the sake of argument, that Monsieur Terwilliger has not engaged Monsieur Shedwell’s talents and that he is coming only to visit his dear mother, assuming that he has one. How does that change anything? The small ranchers continue to swell their herds at the expense of their larger neighbors.”
“How can you be sure they’ve been rustling Six Bar Six cattle?”
“It is not just Mather’s misfortune. The spring roundup has begun, and already the tallies are falling behind estimates. We expect a loss of a thousand calves. Perhaps more.”
“Estimates based on book count,” I said. “We may be talking about calves that never existed.”
“It would be a very large error, would it not? Unpardonable.”
“Even if you’re right, that’s a lot of rustling for one man. He wouldn’t have any time left to run his ranch.”
“He is not the only small rancher in the territory, monsieur. I do not claim that he alone is responsible for the loss. But he is the leader.”
“Let’s talk straight,” I said. “It wouldn’t matter if not one calf came up missing or if you found a thousand more than you estimated. You’d just find some other way to justify clearing out the small fry and claiming the open range for yourself.”
I had raised my voice without realizing it. Now I heard footsteps behind me and turned to see Ed Strayhorn standing in front of the door with his ever-present Remington in both hands. I backed away at an angle, resting my right hand on the Deane-Adams.
“Call off your foreman.”
“Bookkeeper,” Périgueux corrected. “The leg, you see. But it does not hinder his aim. Please leave.”
“Not until I’ve said what I came to say. Last night I made a deal with Pardee to let me handle the situation my way. I was going to cut you in, but since you’re not interested, I’ll say this: if Terwilliger or Pardee or any of their men is hurt or killed while I’m marshal, even if it’s from falling off a horse—hell, even if it’s from smallpox—I’ll know right where to go. And I’ll have help.”
“Are you finished?” asked the Frenchman, after a pause.
“Not quite. I need directions to Terwilliger’s spread. I want to ask Dale Pardee about some night riders that have been bothering him lately. You wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“I have heard rumors.” He pointed at a framed parchment map on the west wall. It was shaped roughly like a water jug with a chipped neck. “That is my ranch, and that”—he indicated the missing piece—“is the Circle T, belonging to Monsieur Terwilliger, twelve miles west by northwest.”
“That must be like a splinter in your ear.”
“It itches from time to time. Au revoir, Monsieur Murdock. That means—”
“I know what it means.” I shouldered my way past Strayhorn.
CHAPTER 11
I hadn’t time to ride to the Circle T, interview Pardee’s brother, and get back to town before nightfall, so I postponed that trip until morning. Night was the time whe
n all hell broke loose in cattle towns. A mile out of Breen I got out the bottle I’d brought in my saddlebag from Helena for the cold nights and drained the eighth of an inch of colored liquid left in the bottom. The temperature had hovered around thirty most nights, and as I said before it was a long ride. I swung out of the saddle and set up the empty on the spine of a low ridge. It was time I found out how much I could expect from the new gun.
I rode out forty yards, dismounted again, passed the Deane-Adams up and down the length of my sleeve just to hear the cylinder clack around and took aim at the neck of the bottle while the roan, ground-trained but pretending not to be, wandered off after new grass. Sunlight glared off the smooth glass, but I didn’t change my angle. It glares off a man’s belt buckle the same way, and he isn’t likely to wait while you find a better location.
I stood sideways to the target because I’m harder to hit that way, sighting down the length of my outstretched arm the way they don’t in the dime novels, and was squeezing the trigger when the bottle separated into two pieces with a hollow plop. The neck and the base tilted away from each other like halves of a wishbone, and then the shot crashed, its echo retreating toward the mountains like rumbling thunder. I hit the ground for the third time in two days and rolled behind a clump of bramble.
After half a minute I used the barrel of the revolver to part the brush and peered out. To the west, a man on horseback nosed a carbine into a before-the-knee scabbard, smacked his reins across the animal’s withers, and came galloping straight at me.
The sun at his back was blinding. Squinting, I hunkered down with my shooting arm resting straight out in the bramble’s crotch and waited for him to move into pistol range.
A hundred yards off he reined in and leaned on his fists on the pommel of his saddle. He wore a linen duster over a town suit and his face was in shadow beneath the brim of a black hat I thought I’d seen before.
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