by Alan Lemay
"For God's sake shut up!" said Kentucky. He was feeling not less than two thousand years old, and very weary of the world. But he did not hesitate over his decision. "Have you got any money?" he said in a dead voice.
"No.
"Take your saddle on your bade," he told St. Marie. "How far is it to the nearest place where a man can borrow a horse?"
"Nine-eleven miles."
"Take your saddle on your back and walk. And your bed-roll too. Borrow you a horse. See that that horse dies running and never let me set eyes on you again."
For a moment St. Marie sagged, the steam taken out of him by the sudden realization that he had got out of his box. But true to that dark strain in his blood, he had no word of thanks, no word for his luck; his next remark was in the form of a complaint.
"I can't walk all that," he said. "That's a long day's walk. And carrying a saddle and a bedroll"
"You've got better than two hours before morning," said Kentucky. "You'll borrow that horse as the sun comes up. Have they got a phone there?"
"No."
"Good."
"But look-if they ever catch up with me they'll have me back here for horse stealing."
"Yes," said Kentucky. "I wouldn't trust you loose if I didn't know there'd be hell on your heels as you go." Kentucky pulled off his gloves and looked through his pockets. He found six dollars in silver cart wheels, and tossed them onto St. Marie's blanket. "I've got just one more thing to say to you," he said. "If ever I see you in this country again-go for your iron, because I'm going to gun you down. And if ever Campo Ragland is tried for murder, no matter on whose say-so-even if you've kept your mouth shut I'll hunt you down if it takes a lifetime. You hear me?"
"You'll have to come deep into Sonora," said St. Marie, "if you want to see me again."
"I don't. Help me get this horse off the trail. That bullet through his withers is going to make him draw unfavorable notice, if he's found."
Kentucky got the steel-dust pony; he put his lass rope on the dead horse, and with the assistance of Joe St. Marie on foot dragged the carcass to a point from which it could be pitched over a drop, out of sight of the trail until the coyotes had time to do their work.
"Give me my gun," said St. Marie. "I'll have to tell them I broke my horse's leg and had to shoot him and what will they think if I have no gun?"
"Tell them you had to take your rope and hang him!"
Kentucky wheeled his horse to the trail, and began the long return plod to the Bar Hook; and the first faint greyness of another day was showing at the earth's edge as he came out of Hightman's Gap.
T WAS noon when Kentucky got back to the Bar Hook. When he had unsaddled and fed his ridden-out pony he lost no time in heading for the kitchen. Here he was wolfing cold meat and equally cold French fried potatoes, washed down with coffee from the pot that always waited on the back of the stove, when Jean found him.
The pallor of fatigue increased the look of fragility that had altered her since the death of Mason; but her self-sufficiency seemed to have returned overnight. Perhaps she had been able to present that illusion to the others all along. For a little while she had allowed Kentucky to see what a blind drift of doubt, fear, perhaps despair, had possessed her; but now the bars were up, shutting him out again.
She said in a flat, incurious voice, "Have a good ride?"
That stopped him for a moment. Last night he had held this girl in his arms not momentarily, but for what might have been an hour; and later, in a burst of smoking temper, he had left her standing in the snow with tears upon her cheeks. He had ridden all night after a fugitive perhaps a murderer; she did not know whether he had found the man, or killed him, or what he had learned if St. Marie was taken alive. Yet the indifference of her voice suggested literally that Kentucky might have been the horse he had ridden-or some other horse.
"I rode through mile after mile of buttonhole bushes," he told her, "all blooming in the snow. And it looks as if it might not rain, I hope. Did your father get back?"
"No. He's still in Waterman. So is Harry Wilson. Doe Hopper came out. They've brought Billy up here already."
"The devil! Where is he?"
"Here, I said." Her voice took on a faint edge. "Do you want to see him?"
"In a minute. Where's Lee Bishop?"
"He rode out again."
She stood waiting, wattching him without warmth, without dispraise, without any expression whatever. He gulped down the remainder of his coffee in silence. And when he had finished she led him through the house to the room where Billy Petersen lay.
Billy Petersen was propped up in a four-poster bed that must have been hauled into the rimrock long ago, in the early days of the brand. It could have belonged to no one but Jean's mother; and the room it occupied was obviously the most favored room in the house. The walls were hung with pictures, and a gayety of hooked rugs and cretonne curtains was augmented in warmth and color by the crackling blaze in the fireplace.
In this environment the unshaved cowboy in the bed looked extraordinarily out of place, as if he not only had been put here against his will, but felt pretty sure that he would be kicked out as soon as the old boss got back. A book, face down in a chair by the bed, told Kentucky that Jean had probably been reading to Billy. Undoubtedly, the youngster was mystified by all this attention. Kentucky, however, was not mystified; the whole thing suggested that Jean had been moved to try to make up to Billy Petersen what could never be made up to Jim Humphreys, who was dead.
"What are you doing up here?" Kentucky demanded. "Doc Hopper should have left you down on the Bake Pan!"
"It wasn't Doc Hopper," Billy told him. "I didn't get no sleep last night. About four o'clock this morning I made Lee saddle up and bring me. About half way I wished I'd stayed where I was. It sure didn't do me no good."
There was a moment's pause while Kentucky Jones waited for the inevitable question about how he had come out with Joe St. Marie. Yet the question did not come; and Kentucky abruptly recog nized that Billy Petersen had not been told anything about where Kentucky had gone.
"Do you know where Lee went?" he asked Billy.
"He's gone gunning after Bill McCord."
"Gunning after-" Kentucky turned on Jean. "Why didn't you tell me this as soon as I came in?"
"I didn't know it," she said, the flat indifference of her voice unchanged.
Billy Petersen said, "Lee told me not to say anything about it until he was long gone. I wouldn't say anything now; except I sure don't like this business, Kentuck-I thought maybe you'd want to go and side him, or something."
"Dear God!" Kentucky exploded. "Right into their hands! How long has he been gone?"
"About two hours."
"Was he going straight to the 88?"
"No; I don't guess he was going to the 88 at all. He figured he'd go over in the West Cuts. He figures Bill McCord has been over working in there. Naturally, he was hoping for a chance to get McCord alone."
"And I'm supposed to be able to go over and pick him up in the West Cuts," Kentucky raved.
"Well, he didn't ask no one to pick him up."
"Next thing we'll be tying him on a pack mule," Kentucky growled, and went out like a long-horn bull on the prod.
Going through the kitchen Kentucky Jones caught up his sheep-lined coat with one hand, and a handful of cold French fried potatoes in the other, for he was wolf-hungry yet, and didn't know when he would get a chance to eat again. Out at the corral he picked out a blocky zebra dun horse, dropped his rope on it, and swung his saddle aboard. Two minutes later he was riding westward at a light trot.
In that country of canyon-slashed rimrock no part of Wolf Bench could be called unbroken; but to the stranger the branching and forking canyons of the West Cuts presented a discouraging maze. The abrupt walls of the canyons, dropping sheer hundreds of feet from the levels of the bench, offered a series of appalling barriers, repeatedly demanding detours of unknown length. Riders long in the rimrock learned a thousan
d ways to get into those canyons and out of them again; but to the rider who did not know them it too often appeared that there were no ways at all.
Kentucky Jones was anything but familiar with the intricacies of the West Cuts. But he knew the general lay of the land and the typical tricks of canyons; and he knew what men were likely to do who were working stock. He estimated that he had one chance in ten of coming upon either Lee Bishop or the men Lee Bishop sought.
This one chance in ten was, as Kentucky saw it, Lee Bishop's chance for life. He did not believe that Lee Bishop could out-gun Bill McCord, nor that McCord's men would award Bishop an even break. Unhurriedly, Kentucky Jones set out to find Bishop if he could.
For three hours he followed Bishop's trail, sometimes through horse paths that were so dense an overlay of tracks that he could not tell what he had, again for distances where the trail of Lee Bishop's horse lay plain and clear. Then at last a smother of cow trades blotted out Lee Bishop's trail for a quarter of a mile, and Jones never found where Bishop's trail branched off. He cast ahead, trusting to the general lay of the country to bring him across Bishop's trail again; but though he crossed many a horse track, he accepted none of them as the trail of the horse he sought.
All afternoon he worked through the long lonelinesses, covering many a weary mile. Twenty riders besides himself might be working the West Cuts for all Kentucky knew; the West Cuts could have hidden a thousand more. Their illimitable emptinesses made a man on a horse seem to crawl like an ant, descending deep hour-long declivities, only to climb again eternally.
He was a long way from home by the time that he decided he must have overshot. Once he had seen two riders, whom he recognized as 88 men, working 88 stock; but Bill McCord was neither one of them. Lee Bishop continued to elude him, lost in the maze. The sun was setting; above Wolf Bench the wrinkled peaks of the Maricopas seemed to float detached from the earth, vast delicate traceries of pale blue shadow, set off with crooked red-gold tracings where the westering sun poured golden light upon the snow. Across Wolf Bench, already in the shadow, a dark bitter-cold breeze began to blow, smelling of frost and blown snow. Kentucky Jones sat his horse upon a high point, and wondered if Lee Bishop were dead.
The frozen wind, forecasting the night, always brought to his mind the things to which a range rider has a right to look forward at that hour: the gleam of a little golden light at a cook-house window, far across the snowy reaches, winking and almost lost in the twilight purple; and the things that the light, seen far off, meant to the rider coming in on his tired horse the warmth of stove heat, friendly yellow lamp light, the crowding in of red-faced hungry riders, very merry over being done with work; the smell of frying meat and hot fresh bread, and the steam of coffee; and afterward an hour or two of drowsy loafing in the warmth, wise-cracking the day's work, spinning lies maybe a game of sevenup, and somebody making music for a little while with banjo, mouth organ, or Jew's harp.
And at the Bar Hook the cold long twilight, which always made the simple realities of food and snug warmth seem so good, and so well worth living at the Bar Hook these things should also have meant seeing Jean Ragland again, this girl who, even in adversity, was like no other girl. As Kentucky Jones sat his horse, letting it blow a little from a long climb before putting it upon the long round-about trail home, he was thinking that this range could have been a great range for cattle, and a great range for men, and that maybe having ridden it he never would have wanted to ride another, had things broken as they should. It was a hidden malignance, working under-handedly in the dark, that spoiled this range.
He put the zebra dun into a canyon and out again, and to the rim of another; and there, long after he had let all hope slide, he sighted Lee Bishop at last.
What he saw at first was only a far-off dot creeping across an up-canyon snow-flat; but presently his stock-trained eyes recognized the foreman's horse. He put his pony down into the canyon, then upward through the canyon's notch; and a furlong into the widening valley hailed Lee Bishop across the snow.
"Lee," he demanded as they came together, "what's all this? You gone crazy, man?"
"I dunno, Kentucky," said Lee Bishop wearily. "Sometimes I think I am. I'm plumb mystified, that's sure."
"You damn fool, you think you can-" A queer look in the other's face stopped him. "What's the matter, Lee? What happened?"
"Well, nothing much; only it's doggone funny!"
"What's funny?"
Lee Bishop pulled up his horse and turned in the saddle to look back. "You see this canyon, Kentucky? I've known this canyon for years. It's called Trap Canyon, because you can't get out the upper end. Over there-and there and there-" he pointed "you can get out all right. But the upper end you can't get out. I saw two riders come in here. I'm pretty sure one of 'em was Bill McCord, though I couldn't swear. I followed 'em in. And, by God, Kentucky they disappeared into thin air!"
"Maybe," offered Kentucky, "they dropped into one of these little coulees. That way they could have worked up to the upper end, where that little drift of timber is."
"Kentucky, I've been to the upper end, and they're not up there, nor any place between. And if they'd gone up them side trails I'd have seen them. You can see a rider two miles as he goes up them long slants."
"Seems kind of peculiar," said Kentucky.
"You're damn tootin' it's peculiar," said Lee Bishop. "I'm plumb confused. And likewise I'm disgusted, and likewise I'm sore. Let's get home." He kicked his horse ahead.
"Wait a minute!" said Kentucky. He held his voice low. "In God's name, Lee-stop your horse."
"What's the matter?"
"Do what I say," said Kentucky without raising his voice, "and don't ask why. Turn your horse and come back to me." Kentucky Jones turned his own horse so that it was headed back the way Lee Bishop had come. "Now bring your horse alongside of mine, easy," he said. "Walk your horse slow alongside of me."
"Where the devil we going?" Lee Bishop demanded.
"You see that coulee up ahead of us there, about fifty yards? Lee, how deep is that coulee?"
The drainage feature which Kentucky indicated was a shallow twisting cut that wound its way across the floor of the mile-wide canyon, a creek during the rains, a dry wash in time of drought.
"Maybe five or six foot deep," said Bishop. Y•"
"Walk with me slow and easy until we get to the edge of that coulee," Kentucky said. "Then slap hooks to your horse and jump him into it. Soon as he's in, duck out of the saddle and get down."
Lee Bishop half drew up his horse as if he would stop. "What's got into you, Kentucky?"
"Come on, you fool!"
"See something?"
"I'm not dead sure I did. But, Lee, I'm not going to bet your life I didn't see."
Lee Bishop brought his horse along reluctantly. "Then what the devil was it?" he demanded irritably.
"Don't look back," said Kentucky. "But where the canyon narrows down right down there where I just rode in, and on the left hand side, it's kind of shelving, and not so very steep; and there's a few junipers there. And I'm not right sure, Lee, but what I saw a tied horse up there; and if it is a horse, he's got his head snaked low to the ground, such as will stop the average horse from whinnying when another one comes along."
Lee Bishop swung in his saddle to stare back at the canyon wall three hundred yards away. Kentucky snarled at him, "Don't turn, you"
Suddenly Bishop gave a queer gagging cry and snatched at his saddle scabbard. A rifle had spoken from the upper rocks.
The gun above spoke a second time, and a third; Bishop's horse started abruptly. The rider, his gun clutched across his breast with both hands, toppled sidewise and pitched headlong into the snow.
Kentucky Jones dropped out of the saddle, one hand taking his bridle reins close to the bit. His pony reared away from the fallen figure; but in another instant Kentucky had the animal under control. He lifted Lee Bishop, and got the foreman over his shoulders. Running diagonally to keep the pony betw
een himself and the ambushed rifle, he tried for the lip of the coulee.
A fourth time the rifle In the rocks spoke, and this time Kentucky's horse plunged, jerking free the reins, and went to its knees. Bishop's rifle fell to the snow and Kentucky turned back two paces to snatch it up. The edge of the coulee was ten paces beyond. As he ran, chest to the ground, the rifle chopped at them once more from the ledges of the notch, and Kentucky felt: Lee Bishop's body jerk. Then he lowered Bishop over the edge by the arms, and leaped in after him.
"Lee! Lee, where are you hit?"
Lee Bishop's eyes were squinted shut, and he groaned through set teeth as Kentucky tried to straighten him out upon the bottom of the arroyo. "They got me, Kentucky," he managed to get out at last.
"The hell they have! You going to please that bunch by making a die?"
But when he had examined Lee Bishop he did not know. The first shot Lee Bishop had received had been an angling one, in the back; he could not tell whether the bullet had lodged at the bottom of the lung or some place else.
Catching up Bishop's rifle, Kentucky threw a shot into the general vicinity of the ambush, and instantly drew fire in return. Apparently their attackers were not attempting to close.
Kentucky immediately set about the improvisation of bandages. Twice a minute he interrupted his work to sight across the valley floor for sign of approach. Occasionally also he set his ear to the frozen ground in the bottom of the coulee, but could detect no sound of advance in the cover of the cut.
Still keeping constant lookout, he prepared for the night, Lee Bishop's horse had gone to grazing a quarter of a mile away; he believed he could catch the animal under cover of the dark, but this would do him little good. Bishop appeared to be too seriously hurt to be moved without aid.
Already the light was uncertain; the molten gold of the last sun still touched the upper peaks of the Maricopas, but the wide reaches of Trap Canyon were pooled in blue dark. Dragging Bishop's rifle with him, Kentucky Jones went out to his dead horse and got his saddle blanket, and the saddle itself to prop Lee's head. He shucked off his sheepskin coat and used it with the blanket to make Bishop a bed in a snow-drifted angle.
