Savage Range

by Short, Luke;

  A man swung out from behind the bar, a man Jim had not noticed before. He was a mountain of a man, his bones smothered in great folds of flesh that caricatured every line of him. He lunged out into the clear, and Jim saw that his right leg was gone, the empty trouser leg pinned up. A thick oak crutch was propped under his arm, and he strangely contrived to move with an agility which was as swift as it was ponderous. He shouldered a loafer out of his way, sending him spinning, and then he plowed into the handful of men who had crowded around the quarrel. They parted for him, and he stopped under the lamp, his shaven head round and set stubbornly on his shoulders and beaded with a fine sweat.

  He reached out and yanked a thick-bodied, bearded puncher up from the table and spun him against the wall. A slim, gangling young man whose back had been pinned on the table top rolled off and stumbled to his feet. A smear of red crossed his mouth, and he was breathing deeply.

  “Keep out of this, Cope!” the puncher against the wall said mildly.

  The heavy man swung ponderously on his crutch. “You take that row outside,” he replied just as mildly.

  The kid, hardly more than eighteen, scoured his bleeding mouth with the back of his hand and glared beyond Cope at the puncher. It was this man the room watched, as if expecting him to give the cue. He was almost middle-aged, heavy in a way that was overmuscled, brutal. There was a kind of cheerful cruelty in his face that played in his eyes, his twisted, amused mouth behind his beard, and in his manner which held an exuberant arrogance. He rubbed the flat of his square palm across his beard and laughed. Then he hit Cope on the side of the head. It made a dull, solid, smacking noise. Cope’s head did not move. He shook it a little, then lifted his crutch and brought it down at the stocky man, who dodged and missed it. Cope put the crutch under his arm again.

  “Don’t get me mad, Will-John,” Cope said gently. “Take it outside like I said.”

  Will-John smiled lazily and looked over at the kid. “Sure,” he murmured. “That kid had snaked six sleepers off me tonight. I’ll put up with five. Not more, though.”

  He walked over to the kid and grabbed his shirt in his fist. The kid bit him in the face, and he laughed. The kid tried to stand his ground, but he couldn’t. He was pushed down the barway by Will-John’s lazy strength and then out the door into the rain. The curious crowd followed. Cope loafed down the room behind them and took his low seat behind the bar.

  Jim murmured, “This Cope isn’t a man to ask for help, is he?”

  Bonsell smiled faintly and rose. “Come and meet him. If he likes a man, he’s a friend.”

  Cope, still seated behind the bar, looked up at their approach and Bonsell said, “Cope, this is Jim Wade, the new boss at the Excelsior.”

  Cope’s veiled eyes regarded Jim closely, and he put out a big hand which was not flabby. “Howdy,” he said. He nodded toward the door. “Don’t let that bother you, Wade. My tables are square, and I serve all comers. But I won’t allow a fight here and I won’t take a side.” He pulled up a bottle. “Have a drink.”

  Jim and Bonsell accepted the drink. It was strangely silent here in the saloon now, so that the silence outside was even more pronounced. Threading through it, barely audible, was the sound of muffled sobbing, nothing more.

  Jim, curious, looked at Cope, a question in his eyes.

  Cope said, “This Will-John can be pretty rough sometimes.”

  Jim set down his glass and strolled to the door. He shouldered through it and paused on the single step. The crowd, unmindful of the rain, lined the walk of the street that led to the plaza. The lamp in the lobby of the hotel across the street laid a dim light out on the shining mud of the street.

  The kid was down in that mud, crawling. When he would fight to his knees, Will-John would stomp him down again. It was patient bullying; Will-John was absorbed by it.

  He would stomp the kid into the mud and then he would raise his head to look across the street at someone in the shadow of the hotel.

  “Here he is,” Will-John called, his voice almost quiet in the silent rain. “I’ll help him over. But he’s got to crawl.”

  There was no answer from across the street, and Jim watched the kid drag himself to his knees, only to be stomped down by Will-John.

  “He’s a tinhorn, but he don’t ring,” Will-John observed, looking across the street again.

  Jim felt that old feeling gathering inside him that might have been a warning if it didn’t always come too late. He shouldered through the crowd, ducked under the tie rail, and walked through the sticky mud to Will-John.

  “He’s had enough,” Jim said quietly.

  Will-John did not turn at the sound of Jim’s voice; he didn’t even look at him. He simply wheeled and hit out. Jim, almost surprised, chopped down on the blow, so that it hit him in the chest and sent him skidding back against the tie rail.

  Will-John said, “I don’t take Excelsior pay, mister, and I don’t take Excelsior lip,” and turned and stepped toward the kid.

  Jim said quietly, “Turn around.” Will-John lifted his leg to tromp the kid again. Jim’s kick got in ahead of it. It sent Will-John ahead to trip over the kid and sprawl in the soupy mud.

  He rolled over easily and rose and came toward Jim, fists at his side. “You got warned,” he murmured, laughing a little. “Don’t ever say you didn’t.”

  His rush was swift, seemingly propelled by flailing arms. Jim hit out, beating down, so that his left arm hooked into Will-John’s right and tangled, and then he rolled to the side, driving in his right arm and straightening it. He felt and heard the blow, which missed the shelving jaw and hit the neck. Almost gracefully, Will-John wheeled to the side, his head up now. Jim hit him in the face on the way down. Will-John sat there a moment, hands in the gummy adobe, and then he rose.

  There was no speech this time. He set himself firmly in the mud, then leaned off balance forward, arms raised, and dug in his heels in a heavy, driving charge. Jim met it with his shoulder turned, and with his right hand he reached out and grabbed Will-John’s hair and yanked his head back. With his left, he smashed down on Will-John’s face three times before he released his grip and let him fall. This time he did not wait for Will-John to rise. He stood over him and, by balling up his shirt front and heaving, he lifted him to his knees. He knocked him down again and then stood there, breathing deeply, wet and furious.

  “Get up,” he said.

  “I’ve had enough,” Will-John mumbled. He pushed himself to his elbow, and then Jim lifted him to his feet again. He hit him twice and then caught him before he fell, and with a savage, rolling heave he threw him into the tie rail. It splintered and broke with a flat crack, and Will-John caromed into an onlooker. They both went down. The onlooker got up quickly, swearing, but Will-John lay there on his side on the wet sidewalk, face pillowed on his arm.

  Jim raised his glance to scan the crowd, who eyed him silently.

  “I don’t like this town,” he drawled quietly. “Anybody object to that?”

  There was a faint stirring among the onlookers, and then they broke up. Jim stood there in the muddy road until they had either gone into the saloon or down the walk. He saw Cope then. Cope was standing on the step of his saloon, leaning lightly on his crutch. He looked down at Jim and then at Will-John and then said musingly, “You ain’t the first man that thought that, Wade, but you’re the first that said it,” and went inside.

  Something stirred behind Jim, and he turned. A woman had come out of the shadow across the street and was bent over the kid. She rolled him over and was feeling gingerly along his ribs.

  “Where does he live?” Jim asked.

  “I can do it,” the woman said, not looking up.

  Jim said, “Let me.” Gently he pushed her aside and picked the soaked kid up in his arms. His body was slack, limp as thread.

  They faced each other now in the rain, and Jim saw that this was a girl. Her slim, rather hungry-looking face was twisted into a sardonic smile, and as her glance touched Jim
’s face for a moment it was hostile, bitter. Then she gestured lazily down the street.

  “I’ve done it enough,” she said quietly and turned. “Come along, then.”

  She kept ahead of him. They passed down the side of the hotel, in front of a blacksmith shop where two men were shoeing a span of mules, and turned in on the other side of it.

  It was a mean shack of logs set back from the road and abutting the frame blacksmith shop. The room he entered was low-ceilinged, clean, jammed with rickety furniture.

  The girl indicated a sofa, whose plush was worn and blackened, and Jim said, “He’s pretty wet. You better put a blanket over the sofa.”

  “Do you think it could look any worse?” the girl asked in a dead voice. “Put him down.”

  Jim did, asking, “Your brother?”

  “Yes,” she said wearily, indifferently. She disappeared through a door that was hung with an army blanket. Jim heard her pouring water into a basin, and presently she appeared with it and a towel and set to work on the kid. Beneath the hard and alert bitterness that shaped her face she was pretty. Her wet dress was of sun-faded blue calico. It was plain, clinging wetly to her and showing the slim full-breasted figure that somehow did not seem mature.

  Jim’s knuckles were smarting from mud ground into a cut, and he wrapped them in a handkerchief, watching her deft ministrations.

  “What does he hold against you?” Jim asked suddenly.

  The question startled her. When her face turned up to him, its reserve had dropped. “Will-John Cruver?”

  “If that’s his name, yes.”

  Her face veiled over, walling out his curiosity and any kindness he might have intended. Her glance dropped. “He wants me to live with him,” she said quietly. She went on with her work, and then added, “He has a way of making people do what he wants. You’ll find that out, maybe.”

  “I’ll never see him again,” Jim answered. “That’s my hope.”

  “You’re the new Excelsior foreman, aren’t you?” she countered dryly. In explanation, she said, “He’ll call the turn for Excelsior and he’ll call it for you, too.”

  It was a plain statement, as if there was no room for doubt in her mind. Jim shifted his sogged boots, faintly irritated. Then Will-John Cruver must be one of the men whom Max Bonsell was trying to run off.

  “You like the idea, maybe,” Jim suggested meagerly.

  Her head rose again, and there was a brash defiance in her eyes. “Yes. I don’t like Will-John Cruver, but he’s not a company man.”

  She turned back to her work. This time she felt the kid’s ribs and then looked at the dirty bump on his temple again, where Cruver had clouted him.

  Jim said thinly, “You need a dozen good meals and a new dress, maybe. Good night, miss.”

  He wheeled and went out into the rain, stooping low for the door. He heard her run after him, and he stopped and turned, regarding her as she stood framed in the doorway.

  “I haven’t forgotten all my manners,” she said quietly. “Thank you for helping him.”

  “He’s welcome,” he said, and turned to go. He heard her walking after him, and he stopped again, and she came alongside him. The wet darkness seemed to lower the barrier of her hostility; she was so close to him that he could smell the warmth of her, and it made him impatient to be gone.

  “Maybe you’re right,” she said in a low voice. “A dozen good meals and a new dress would make a difference.” Her face tilted up to his. “There’s only one way for a girl to live better than an army mule in this place, and I won’t do that. But sometimes it’s hard.” She hesitated. “You’re a kind man, I think. Maybe you understood my sharpness.”

  Jim stood motionless, trying to see her face. He reached for his cold pipe and put it in his mouth. “Your brother,” he said. “Is he any good?”

  “Not much. He’s never had a chance to be.”

  “Has he ever worked cattle?”

  “Yes. But his jobs never lasted.”

  “I’ll need riders,” Jim said in a matter-of-fact voice. “If he’s any good, I’ll pay him forty a month. Ten of that I’ll send to you.”

  “I don’t take charity!” she said sharply.

  “That’s the way it’s got to be,” Jim said brusquely and turned away.

  He heard her quiet, resigned, “Thank you,” and she went into the house.

  Max Bonsell was waiting under the awning in front of the saloon. He tendered Jim his soaking hat and then drawled, “You sure get acquainted easy, Jim.”

  “Who was the kid?”

  “Ben Beauchamp.”

  “And his sister? What’s her name?”

  “She’s Tom Beauchamp’s girl, Lily. He has the blacksmith shop.”

  They tramped silently down the walk, and then Jim said, “This Will-John Cruver, he claims to make pretty big tracks around here, eh?”

  “About the biggest,” Bonsell said dryly. “He heads that bunch of squatters.”

  Jim said nothing. They cut down the side of the plaza toward the stable. Jim said suddenly, “I wonder.”

  “What?”

  “I had a sort of tangle with another hombre earlier in the evenin’. I wonder if he—”

  “He was one of your own men,” Bonsell said dryly, and let it go at that.

  Chapter Three: MAN WITH A REPUTATION

  His name, Jim found out the following day, was Mel MaCumber, and he was a fair sample of the Excelsior crew. After breakfast, served in the log cookshack, Jim went back to the house for a dry pipe in his war bag, reflecting on the strangeness of this outfit.

  The crew had been quartered in two rooms of one of the biggest houses Jim had ever seen. The main part was adobe, two stories high with a white-railinged gallery around all four sides. The wings, two of them, were of square-hewn logs, and these had formerly held the ranch office, a kitchen, a gun room, and storerooms. Mighty cottonwoods raised an arch over the house and shaded it, but it was a magnificent old ghost of a house, nothing more. The deep-set windows were paneless, and every third spoke was missing from the gallery railing. Here and there a door sagged off its hinges, and rank buffalo grass grew right up to the house foundation of field stone. The old place was dying, and the Excelsior, under Max Bonsell, had done little to revive it.

  The two rooms of the lower story—where the Ulibarris had entertained Governors General of Mexico, bishops, and perfumed grandees from Castille visiting the colonies—now echoed to the rough jests of a ranch crew, for this was the bunkhouse. East, sloping toward the swift creek, were the outbuildings, the cookshack, wagon sheds, barns, the blacksmith shop, and the corrals. Beyond them was a vast stretch of rolling country of wooded buttes and mesas, where the dark green of big piñon and cedar shaded into the lighter green of greasewood.

  Jim found his pipe and came back to the door where he packed and lighted it, his glance on the crew clustered in front of the bunkhouse.

  He had worked on enough spreads to know a fighting crew when he saw one, and a faint feeling of disgust welled up within him at sight of this one. Often enough such a crew was necessary, but he hated the idea of heading one. They were riffraff, composed partly of men on the dodge, out-and-out killers, and partly of men who would soon be on the dodge. They didn’t like him, and he didn’t like them, but there was never going to be any doubt in his mind as to who gave orders to the fifteen of them.

  Having Bonsell’s orders of last night in mind, Jim tramped down to the cookshack. They were gathered there, waiting for him, and fell silent at his approach. MaCumber, slight and with an unhealthy pallor to his face, stood off a little way, eying Jim with shrewd, unblinking black eyes that distilled the poison for his glance.

  “Ball,” Jim said.

  “Yeah?” This was an older man, grim-jawed and suspicious and quiet as death. Jim hoped his age had given him a little judgment.

  “I’m givin’ you the instructions, Ball. Miles, you and Pardee listen, because they’re yours, too.” His level eyes sought out the other
two, and they nodded. “There’s three spreads east of Mimbres Canyon. That’s your territory, Ball. Miles, yours is west to the line and south as far as Wagon Butte. Pardee, yours is the rest of the lease. I want you three to ride to every spread in your territory. Tell them they’ve got till Sunday to get a man to me saying they’re going to move. This is Tuesday. If they haven’t a a man in here Sunday by midnight, we’ll move against them. That’s the warning and say it that way.” He paused. “Also, you’ll ride unarmed.”

  There was a moment’s pause, and then someone said, “What the hell for?”

  “Because you’re told to,” Jim answered quickly. “Any objections?”

  “I ain’t been without an iron since I was sixteen,” Miles said surlily. “Send someone else.”

  “You’ll ride out of here without a gun, or you’ll ride out of here for good,” Jim said. “What’ll it be, Miles?”

  Miles’s glance slid over to Max Bonsell, who was smoking quietly a few paces away on the cookshack porch.

  “How about it, Max?” Miles said.

  “He’s givin’ you orders, I’m not,” Max said quietly.

  Miles looked back at Jim. “All right. Only what’s the idea?”

  “My idea of you, Miles,” Jim murmured, “is that you can’t talk without a gun to back you up. Well, you’d better start learnin’. As long as we’re in the right here—and any court of law would bear us out—we’ll go about this like white men, not Apaches. Those people deserve a warnin’ and time to discuss it. Whatever they decide to do after that is on their own heads.”

  He paused, watching them.

  “Another thing,” he said slowly, his temper prodding him. “I haven’t said this to Max Bonsell, but I’ll say it to him now, in front of the whole crew. You take orders from me. There’s no appeal to Bonsell. As far as you’re concerned, there’s one boss around here, and that’s me.” He looked over at Max. “That right?”

  “That’s right,” Bonsell said.