The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  “What’s the matter, Bert?” the sheriff asked worriedly.

  “I’m a man that can’t drink whisky.”

  “You’ve done all right,” Dort said, eyeing the half-empty bottle. “Not that I’m against hard drinkin’, but—”

  “Me and Doc Snider. At least he makes a business out of it a couple times a year. But I’ve always got my feet draggin’ in a whisky vat. At least so it seems lately.”

  Ward came in then and said, “Buy you a drink, Stallart, to bind our deal.”

  Stallart looked around, seeing the dapper, smiling man who was slowly ruining his life. Suddenly he turned his back on Eric Ward and asked Allie Grindge, behind his own bar, for a piece of paper and a pen. When this was supplied Stallart cupped a hand around the paper and wrote laboriously:

  Ellamae:

  I am sorry about what I done to you. Come to Anchor and I will give you one thousand dollars when I sell cows.

  Yr. Uncle Bert

  Stallart folded the note, handed it across the bar to Allie Grindge. “See that Ellamae gets this,” Stallart said.

  Grindge looked unhappy. But before he could carry out Stallart’s request, Meade Jellick came down the narrow stairway at the end of the bar. There was a hard glint in the pupils of Jellick’s discolored eyes. He grinned at Bert Stallart. The rancher had lifted his shaggy head to stare. Eric Ward, standing on Stallart’s right, had stiffened, also looking at Jellick, as if sensing what was to come. Sheriff Dort muttered an oath and turned to Stallart and started to say something. Tension was on his face and Stallart could see the sudden spreading stain of sweat across the front of the sheriffs shirt.

  Jellick came up to Stallart and gave him a twisted smile and helped himself to the bottle. Allie Grindge, looking pale around the mouth, set out a fresh glass for Jellick. It became so still in the place that a woman’s shaky laughter upstairs sounded almost as loud as a gunshot.

  Jellick drained his glass, the thick muscles working in his throat. “Your niece is a fixture here.”

  Stallart said, his lips barely moving under the tangle of mustache, “You mean—”

  And then Stallart’s gaze caught sight of something on the stairway. A pale-haired girl in a gingham dress, the sleeves cut off to show her bare arms. The bottom of the dress cut high to show her knees. Around her waist was a wide leather belt studded with conchae.

  Jellick leaned close, whispered, “It was me put the idea in her head, Stallart. How’d you like to sweat a little bit more than you have been?”

  There was a sudden avalanche of sound in Bert Stallart’s mind. His right hand shot out, gripping the neck of the whisky bottle. Jellick, half-turned to grin at Ellamae on the stairs, did not see Stallart’s move. Stallart swung the bottle at Jellick’s head. The bottle shattered, throwing whisky across Jellick’s face. Only the whites of Jellick’s eyes showed as he crumpled with a jarring crash to the floor.

  It was a blow that would have smashed the skull of an ordinary man. But Jellick, in that moment of stunned silence, stirred, then sat up. Blood streamed down the side of his face, across the front of his whisky-soaked shirt.

  “You’ll never live to hang, Stallart!” Jellick cried, and started to get up.

  Stallart, standing there with the neck of the smashed whisky bottle in his hand, seemed unable to move.

  “They’ll never get you back in Kansas now!” Jellick bellowed and got his hands under him, and lurched shakily to one knee.

  Ward pushed himself between Jellick and the pale, sweating Stallart. “Shut up, Meade!” he cried at Jellick. “Shut your mouth!”

  “I’ll kill him—”

  “You’ll ruin everything!” Ward snapped. When he saw Jellick trying to get to his feet, Ward drew his gun and stepped behind the big man. He brought the long barrel down on Jellick’s head. Jellick’s head swiveled as if trying to see who had struck him down. But his eyes were already blank. He fell and this time he didn’t move.

  There was an audible exhalation of held breaths in the big shadowed room. A wedge of sunlight, spearing through a narrow side window, fell across Jellick’s closed eyes.

  Sheriff Dort turned and looked at Stallart. “What did he mean about a hanging, Bert?” he asked quietly.

  But it was Eric Ward who cut in. “Jellick doesn’t know what he says half the time when he’s drunk.” He laid a ten dollar gold piece on the bar. “Drinks on me.” He holstered his gun and wiped his moist face with a blue bandanna.

  The men came slowly to the bar, and Sheriff Dort, a thoughtful look in his eyes, poured a drink and turned to hand the glass to Stallart. But the rancher was gone. Through the windows they could see him mounting up, holding the sack of gold coins in one hand. He rode out of town on the Anchor Bar road.

  Allie Grindge said in a shaking voice, “Somebody better fetch Doc Snider.”

  Sheriff Dort came back from the front windows where he had watched Stallart ride out. He looked down at Jellick, who was already beginning to stir. “How much can one man take? Rim Bolden beat him up. And now he’s had a whisky bottle and a gun laid across his skull—”

  Eric Ward said quickly, looking around, “I’d appreciate it if you boys didn’t tell Jellick that I’m the one who hit him that second time.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Last night Ed Rule had left roundup camp to return to Anchor headquarters for additional supplies. It was shortly before noon that he arrived back in camp, driving a buck board. Rim was helping some of the men haze down a dozen or so fractious cows from a thicket where they had taken sanctuary when he saw the old cook standing up in the wagon, waving his hat to get attention.

  Rim spurred ahead, feeling apprehension tighten in him. “What is it, Ed?” he demanded when he reached the wagon with its foam-flecked team.

  “It’s Mrs. Stallart. I’m scared of what she—she might do to herself.”

  Rim felt a catch in his throat. “You mean—suicide?” It was incredible, Rim thought, that such a thing should even be uttered in connection with Marcy. She always seemed so poised, so filled with an inner strength.

  “—Bert left early this mornin’,” Rule was saying. “Don’t know where he was headin’ for. Mrs. Stallart sent the cook to town and locked herself in the house. I tried to get in the kitchen to get an extra sack of flour we need out here. But she wouldn’t let me in. I peeked through the kitchen window. She was settin’ at the big table with one of Bert’s guns in front of her. She just sat there starin’ at it.”

  “Why in hell’s name didn’t you stay there, Ed?” Rim demanded, concern for Marcy a flame in him now.

  “What could I do. I asked her to let me in. She told me to go away, that she would be all right. But I didn’t like the way she sat lookin’ at that gun. Scared hell out of me. I told them three hands left at the place to keep their eyes open.” Rule looked around. “I figured maybe Bert was out here—”

  Rim had spent the morning on an Apaloosa, cutting cows out of the hills, bringing in some from the high reaches of the Mogollons. The horse was jaded. Quickly he shifted his saddle to a dun and rode out.

  He took a shorter, steeper trail to Anchor headquarters, pushing the horse. His heart was pounding, and at each lunge of the mount he silently cursed Bert Stallart.

  When at last he came to the ranchyard he saw the three “pensioners” in front of the bunkhouse, looking worried. Rim leaped from the saddle, looked toward the house. The kitchen door stood open.

  “Where’s Mrs. Stallart?” he demanded.

  “Gone yonderly,” one of the old men said. “Toward the Rock, likely. Leastways that’s the way she headed.”

  Rim swallowed his anger. “Why didn’t you go with her?” he demanded.

  The men exchanged nervous glances. The spokesman spat through his gray beard. “We tried to, Rim, honest to Gawd. But she told us to stay put.”

  “Damn
it, you could have trailed along.”

  “She’s the boss’ wife. We’re only cowhands, Rim. It’d be like a rifleman tryin’ to tell the colonel’s wife what she oughta do. You just can’t do it.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  “Most half an hour.”

  Rim took another horse, rode out, sweating. The Rock was a sandstone spire some four miles to the north. It had once been an Indian lookout post. It was high and it was a place where a person contemplating self-destruction could leap. The thought put a twisting agony through him—

  He found her sitting high above on a shelf of the Rock. Her horse was tied to a stump at the bottom of the spire. She wore a boy’s shirt and denim pants and boots. At the sound of his approach she looked around.

  He left his mount beside hers and climbed the steep path to the shelf where she sat. “Hello, Rim,” she said in a dead voice.

  He stood there, rolling a cigarette. His fingers trembled. The paper broke under his clumsiness. He threw it away and watched the air currents sweeping through the deep canyon below catch up the piece of balled paper. He stared out at the vast wilderness, seeing the green of aspen and the deeper color of pines and junipers. There was a stillness that made a man feel insignificant; made his problems seem so unimportant.

  “I like to ruined two good horses getting to you, Marcy,” he said, and looked down at the dark head with its clean white part.

  “You’re the only one, it seems, who cares what happens to me.”

  “I was worried about you.”

  She turned her head and looked up, her dark eyes studying him. “You mean worried that I’d take my own life?”

  “I did consider it, Rim,” she went on and looked out across the hundred miles of rugged forested mountains. “Willie’s death—and everything else—” She picked up a twig and broke it. “But you’re right. When it came right down to the act I was revolted at such a sign of weakness in myself.”

  “Where’s it going to end, Marcy?”

  “Have you seen Bert yet?”

  “No,” he said roughly, and wanted to add that he didn’t care much if he ever laid eyes on him again.

  “Bert has a plan,” she said. “He told me last night that Sheriff Dort suggested he borrow money from Eric Ward. And with the money buy out your interest in Anchor Bar.”

  “Going to Ward is like trying to offer beefsteak to the she-bear that has you pinned in her cave. Ward is Bert’s enemy.”

  “I know,” she sighed.

  “You mean Bert will do anything to dissolve our partnership.”

  “I tried my best to make him understand the truth about—us. You and me, Rim. But he wouldn’t listen. I feel there still is a lot of good in Bert—”

  “That I’m beginning to doubt.”

  “—but how can he believe a man like Meade Jellick? He knows what Jellick is and yet Bert will say that Jellick saw you at the house, or Jellick saw us in a wagon together, or riding together.”

  “If Bert was my age I’d thrash him.”

  “There is a lot of good in Bert,” she said again. “But he’s suffering because of some past mistake.”

  “I’ve guessed that. But what mistake is it?”

  She shook her head. “He refuses to discuss it.”

  Rim was silent a moment, watching a hawk, its dark wings rigid, ride the air currents out of the deep canyon.

  Marcy said, “Are you going to accept Bert’s offer to buy you out?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes.”

  “I planned to wait until after roundup, but—” He picked up a handful of gravel and felt it grind into his fingers as he clenched the fist he had bruised on Meade Jellick. “I suppose with me gone it would make things easier for you.”

  They rode back to the house together. And at the kitchen door Rim said, “Are you all right now?”

  “I’ll be fine. I guess it’s facing one crisis that gives us strength for the next one. Good-by, Rim. You deserve the good things of this world. I hope you find them.”

  When he got back to roundup camp Bert Stallart was waiting for him. Stallart sat on an upended keg of horseshoe nails. He had a bottle. His eyes were red-streaked, glittering.

  When Rim dismounted Stallart tossed a heavy sack at his feet. “Three thousand,” Stallart said. “It’s what you put into Anchor. There ain’t no interest to go with it, but maybe you took the interest in other ways.”

  A quick rage flushed through Rim and he wanted to smash Stallart in the face. But he knew what must be done. For his sake, for Marcy’s, he had to get out.

  “I’m doing this for only one reason, Bert.” Rim said, and the men crowding up, looked on tensely. “If I don’t go I’ll have to take a gun to you. I don’t want that. For even as much as you’ve changed I remember that once you were a man I could like.”

  Stallart reacted as if he had been quirted across the face. For a moment he glared, then his eyes went dead. “I figured you’d cuss me. I never figured you’d say that.” He took a long pull at the bottle.

  Rim picked up the heavy sack, loosened the draw strings, saw the gold coins. He didn’t count them. He drew the strings tight again. He wanted to get out of New Mexico, fast. “You’ve got a paper for me to sign?”

  Stallart’s voice shook when he said, “There’s a paper at the bank. Sign it there if you’re a mind to.”

  Rim said, “I came to Anchor with three horses. I’ll rope out three before I go. I’ll want a bill-of-sale, Bert. I don’t figure to have somebody’s rope around my neck for horse stealing.”

  “You must think I’m almighty low.”

  “You can answer that for yourself.” Rim pulled his saddle, and walked down to where the hundred-head remuda was held in a rope corral. His practiced eye ran over the horses bunched there and he began to make his selections.

  On his way out of this country he’d face up to Meade Jellick and Ward. He would do it for Marcy, not for Bert Stallart.

  Then he thought of Ward’s sister, April. It was the first time her image had crossed his mind in many hours. Was that the reason he had fought against going away with Marcy? Was it because of this redheaded girl he had only met once?

  But he would bring her much sorrow, and how could there be any feeling at all in such a circumstance. She would always remember Rim Bolden as the man who killed her brother.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Rim Bolden roped out his first horse and saw Stallart ride up to some of the men who were standing around uncertainly. “Get to work!” Stallart shouted. “I ain’t payin’ you to count the wrinkles in your boots!”

  Ed Rule, standing in the group of men, said, “You ain’t much of a man to tie to these days, Bert. If Rim goes, I go.”

  “Rim’s already gone, so far as I’m concerned,” Stallart said. “I bought him out.”

  “You drove him out.”

  “Watch your tongue, old man!” Stallart said. “Or I’ll fry it for breakfast.”

  Ed Rule just looked at him, and made a great show of removing his dirty apron and hanging it over the tailgate of the chuckwagon. “You’ve done turned against everybody, Bert. You turned against your partner. You turned against your wife!”

  “My wife!” Stallart said, his lips twisting.

  “You believing men like Jellick and Eric Ward. Believing them instead of trusting the people who are on your side of the fence. Who were on your side of the fence,” Ed Rule corrected.

  Stallart seemed to be having an inner struggle. “Damn it, Ed, don’t quit on me in the middle of roundup.”

  “Then ask Rim to stay.”

  “I’ll see hell’s door froze shut before I’ll do that!”

  “You might see hell a lot closer than the door, Bert,” Ed Rule said. “Before this thing is finished off.”

  “If that�
�s how you feel,” Stallart said, his voice breaking, “get out!” He neck-reined his horse, facing the men grouped around the branding fires who were silently watching. “How many of you boys are stickin’ with me? Let me count hands.”

  Most of them signaled their intention of staying. Rim, watching from the edge of the rope corral, knew it was because jobs were so hard come by. He could see, however, that none of them seemed particularly joyous to be staying with Anchor. Ed Rule and six others made ready to quit the camp.

  “Let’s get them cows down outa the hills,” Stallart said to the others. “Come on, boys. Spread out. Each man bring in six head if he can.”

  Stallart galloped past Rim without looking at him. It seemed to Rim that Stallart’s face was jerking, and he appeared close to tears. Although even the thought of a tough rancher like Bert Stallart shedding tears for anything at all seemed ridiculous. And yet—

  Rim started to saddle one of the horses he had chosen. He wanted that bill-of-sale for three head of horses. He intended to get it.

  By the time he got the horse saddled Stallart was out of sight, but Rim had seen which way he had gone. He cut for the timbered hills, following Stallart’s tracks. He passed some of the Anchor hands chousing cattle down to the holding grounds. These men lifted their hands to him, not yet knowing that he was through at Anchor. He didn’t bother to tell them. All he wanted was that bill-of-sale out of Stallart. Then he’d push on.

  Maybe with him gone Stallart would be able to clear the fog of jealousy from his mind and make a semblance of a life with Marcy, at least. But it was out of Rim’s hands now. At least he had his three thousand dollars which he had spread out in his saddlebags, so as to distribute the weight. It was a lot more money than most men had these days.

  The payment in money was something he could thank Stallart for, no mistake about that. No matter how the man had acted these past weeks. Had Stallart been a different type, Rim knew full well, the payment might have been a rifle bullet between the shoulder blades.

  Rim was so engrossed in his own thoughts that as his horse climbed through the junipers, he came suddenly upon three riders some distance ahead. The size of one of them alerted him instantly, for although they were a hundred yards away or more, half-screened by brush, he easily recognized Meade Jellick. The big man wore no hat. There was a dirty bandage around his head. One of the men with Jellick was Tut Tyler, the Anchor hand Rim had fired. All Rim could see of the other man was a thick brown beard. He didn’t know him. The three men were sitting their saddles, peering downslope at something that evidently moved below.