“I heard you was an Indian, Spur. I don’t want no part of you. Give me a horse an’ leave me ride. I ain’t got the stomach for this.”
Spur smiled.
“You thought of that a mite late. You ride with us an’ while we’re travelin’ you think about that hot iron, boy. Ever been branded with a runnin’ iron. I specialize in Mex brands. They’re mighty fancy an’ they take a time to do.”
“Jesus God ... no.”
The girl came back with the two horses and Spur told her that the stud was over the ridge. She went off again. Spur told the man to mount. The fellow dragged himself to the horse and leaned weakly against it. Spur said: “Go ahead.”
“Can’t.”
“Do like I say.”
The man turned, gripped the saddlehorn with both hands, put one foot in the stirrup-iron and strained. He grinned in agony, the sweat poured from his face and slowly he lifted himself into the saddle. He sat still for a moment, getting a grip on himself before he said: “I’ll kill you for this.”
“Sure,” said Spur.
“I wouldn’t treat a dog this way.”
“Neither would I.”
They waited till the girl clattered up on the black. She swung down, gave Spur a look and mounted the bay horse she had been riding when Spur first saw her.
“Head down the trail a-ways,” Spur ordered. “Inez, you keep clear of me and clear of him.”
The man urged his horse forward and they went down the trail at a walk. Spur rode up close to the prisoner and slapped his horse across the rump; the animal lifted its pace into a trot and the man clung on. When they had covered about half a mile, Spur ordered them west and they turned aside, climbing to higher ground among piñon. Deep in the trees, Spur called a halt and stepped out of the saddle.
“Get down and build a fire, honey,” he said. “You, on your feet.” The man kicked his feet free of the stirrup-irons and almost fell out of the saddle, his legs crumpled under him and he hit the ground.
“Sam,” the girl said, “this man is badly hurt. He’s bleeding and he could die.”
“That’s a fact,” Spur said.
She had an odd expression on her face, as if she were both worried and puzzled at the same time.
“Before I build the fire, let me bind his wounds.”
“No. He talks first, then you can fix him.”
“It could be too late then.”
“See here, Inez. This varmint’s goin’ to talk, he’s goin’ to tell me everythin’ I want to know. He does that, sure, you can fix him. He don’t, he can die. But first I’m goin’ to burn my brand on his hide.”
She drew in her breath sharply horror in her eyes.
“You could do this?”
“And laugh.”
“¿Dios, do I love an Apache?”
Spur took two strides and prodded the wounded man with a toe.
“You see this?” he asked. “Take a good look. He walks an’ talks like a man, he eats an’ sleeps like a man ... but he ain’t a man. This sonovabitch is lower’n a wolverine. This thing massacred a whole burro-train for gold. Men and beasts, he slaughtered ’em. Ten men butchered like they was hogs. An’ my brother was one of ’em.”
The man turned his eyes up to Spur.
“Godamighty,” he whispered, “you’re wrong, Spur. I’m just a posseman. Gomez swore me in an’ I’m just doin’ my duty.”
Spur kneeled down by him.
“You’re goin’ to bleed to death like the pig you are,” Spur said.
Inez came up and placed a hand on Spur’s shoulder. “Sam, this cannot be true. I know this man. This is Al Shroder and he runs a business in town. He is a respectable man.”
Spur stood up, looking grim-faced and patient.
“Give me five minutes,” he said, “an’ I’ll prove you wrong.”
“He will confess to anything if you burn him.”
“It’s worth it for ten dead men. Most of ’em Mexicans. Don’t that mean anythin’ to you?” He pushed her aside and started gathering kindling and needles. He worked quickly till he had the fire built, took a lucifer from his pocket and quickly had a fire going. When he had it red, he took the single-shot rifle from the saddleboot and pushed into the coals.
Shroder got to his knees.
“For God’s sake,” he said.
“For your own sake,” Spur told him and struck out hard when the man launched himself weakly, screaming. The blow put him on his back and he lay whimpering.
Inez ran forward to hold Spur. “I cannot watch this, Sam. Please, for my sake.”
Spur said coldly: “He only has to talk.”
The girl turned to the fallen man. “Mr. Shroder, please, if you know anything, speak. Save yourself.”
Shroder whispered: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say. I’m just one of the posse. Gomez told me to take you to town. I was only carryin’ out orders. This Spur, he killed Brown and now he’ll kill me. For God’s sake, save me, girl.”
Spur walked to the fire, bent and examined the rifle barrel. “Not ready yet.”
The girl and Shroder watched him, fascinated.
“You will not do it, Sam,” Inez said. Spur didn’t say anything. After a while, he walked over to Shroder and ripped open the front of his shirt. He said: “You’re right, Shroder, you could bleed to death before I finished with you. You must be crazy; you don’t owe Gomez a thing.”
“Gomez?” the girl said. “You must be loco. What has Gomez to do with this?”
“A couple of minutes and you’ll find out.”
He went back to the fire and pulled the rifle from the fire. Shroder gave a yell and started to crawl away; Spur went after him without hurry and turned him over onto his back with a toe. The girl ran at Spur, clutching at him and screaming: “No, no, no.”
Spur flung her away from him and held the red-hot muzzle at Shroder’s naked chest. The man drew his breath in violently and tried to shrink away from it. The hair on his chest sizzled.
“I’ll talk,” he almost shrieked. “Take it away. For God’s sake.”
“Talk.”
“It was Gomez. Always Gomez. He heard about Randerson. You know about Randerson? He’s a bank robber, a gold thief. You heard about all them robberies up in Colorado and over to New Mexico. Randerson done ’em all. He shipped the gold into Mexico. Gomez heard of it.”
Spur said: “So everythin’ is Gomez’s fault. You didn’t do a thing. A couple of dozen men’re dead and you didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
“Sure, I rode with Gomez. Like a whole passle of others. But so you would of if you’d of had Gomez on your neck.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You ain’t guessed? You so Godawful smart an’ you ain’t guessed? Gomez put the pressure on us. Aw, maybe some of us done a thing or two we didn’t oughta. It begun with us doin’ little things for him. Then they got more and bigger. We ended up with this.”
Spur dropped the rifle on the ground. The man hadn’t taken his eyes from it all the time he talked. Now he started to breathe a little easier.
“Rick an’ the preacher’re in on this too, huh?”
The man nodded.
“Yeah. Both of ’em.” The man gave a wry nervous grin. “An’ that preacher sure preaches a real dandy sermon. To look at him you’d never guess he could cut a man’s throat and crack a joke about it.”
Spur heard Inez draw in her breath.
She came and stood by his side, holding his arm.
“I didn’t know,” she said. “Sam, I thought this man was just one of the posse. No more.”
Shroder said: “You ain’t goin’ to let this man o’ yourn kill me, are you, miss?”
“This man of mine will do what he thinks right,” she told him steadily.
The man got to his knees and put his hands together. It was like watching a defeated villain in a stage play.
“Spur, I ain’t a bad man. I only done what I had to. I didn’t have no c
hoice.”
Spur said: “A man always has a choice. I have a choice right now.”
“Don’t kill me.”
Spur looked at the girl; her eyes pleaded with him.
“Get on your feet, Shroder,” he said.
The man stood up, visibly shaking so violently that he could scarcely stay on his feet.
“I’ll pay you anythin’ you say, Spur.”
Spur asked: “Do you have any family?”
“A wife an’ one kid. No more’n a shaver. A good kid. Mister, if you let me live—”
“This is what you do,” Spur told him. “Get on your horse an’ ride into town. Collect your wife and kid and git. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t tell anybody what happened today. Just light a shuck and don’t show yourself in this part of the country again. I get a smell of you an’ I kill you. Hear?”
“Yes,” Shroder said. “I hear.”
He looked from Spur to the girl, then stumbled to his horse, untied it, stepped clumsily into the saddle, gave Spur a last unbelieving stare and rode away. Spur and the girl watched him out of sight.
“I’m real sorry you had to watch that, honey,” Spur said. She squeezed his arm and smiled up at him. Stepping up on tip-toe, she kissed his cheek.
“If it means you not being chased by the law,” she said, “it was worth it.”
“That ain’t the point,” he told her. “All I want is to finish Gomez. He owes us a lot - my brother, Jim Lowe’s brother, Enrique and his man. There’s only one way a man can pay for that.” His mind flitted, checking off the events of the last few days as he spoke. His papers. “The papers you sewed into your skirts - do you have them still?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have them back.”
She sat on the ground and ripped at the hem of her wide skirt, producing the papers and handing them to him. He put them inside his shirt.
“They are very important?” she asked and that was as far as her curiosity pushed her.
“I reckon.” He sat beside her and put an arm around her. “You might as well know. You think you took up with an owl-hoot trail rider, an outlaw. That ain’t so. When I knew for sure that Ben was dead, I contacted a friend of mine, a friend from way back who’s a deputy federal marshal. A good man. You’ll meet him pretty soon. I propositioned him. He went to his boss and this feller fixed it so I saw the governor. There was a deal of talk and finally the governor agreed I’d be given a pardon if I brought in the killers of the smugglers. Nobody cared too much about the smugglers bein’ killed, but it was gettin’ the territory a bad name. So I have a special commission, the authority of a United States deputy-marshal an’ I reckon if I pull this off, I’m a free man.”
He said this soberly and quietly. She leaned her head against his arm and said: “You know what this means to me, Sam.”
“I can guess.”
“I would love you whatever you are, you know that. But this means, we can have a home and children and not be forever looking over our shoulders. I am so happy.
He turned her head and kissed her on the mouth.
Suddenly, he lifted his head, alerted by sound. Faintly, brush crackled; horses sounded. Spur thrust the girl away from him and drew his gun. They waited. In a few minutes, a man and a woman came into sight.
“Spur.”
It was Jim Lowe and Pilar. Spur let his breath out with a sigh. The two hurried forward.
“Thank God it’s you, Sam,” Lowe said. Pilar and Inez rushed into each other’s arms, embracing with noisy Mexican delight in rich Spanish. Jim Lowe stood there, slapping his thigh with delight.
“What in heck’s been happenin’?” Lowe demanded. “We heard shootin’ a long ways off.”
Briefly, Spur told them both what had been happening and Lowe did not seem overly surprised to learn about Gomez and Hardwick. They didn’t waste time discussing the full meaning of the developments, but moved further west through the piñons and camped a couple of miles from the ridge. While the women prepared some food over a smokeless fire, the men discussed what their next move should be, both agreeing that for a while they must find a safe place for the two women that would enable the men to go into action without having to worry about their safety. They spoke in Spanish so the women could follow what they said. When they had done, Pilar said in some disgust: “¡Por Dios! it is fine for you men. Don’t you think that we women won’t be worrying what happens to your worthless hides?”
Lowe laughed. The women went to muttering between themselves about the stupidities of men. Spur said that they had no time to waste; it was a case of eat up, mount up and ride. Before dark, they were moving into the hills, looking for a safe place for the women.
Chapter Eleven
Randerson sat on his stoop, drinking. He had been doing more drinking than was good for him lately. He was a worried man and had good reason to be. The result of six months’ work had disappeared into thin air. All the careful planning, the riding and the desperate risk had been wasted. This had hurt his pride and his pocket. It had also brought with it an acute sense of danger. Somebody had carefully planned to rob the smugglers of his gold and they had managed to carry out the plan. This gave him more than a feeling of being robbed and humiliated, it filled him with a physical dread that he had never known on his daring raids when each time he had taken his life in his hands. Somewhere, maybe quite close to him, was a man, with others at his back, who knew his business, who knew that he had stolen and killed for the fortune he had amassed. Randerson felt naked, defenseless.
He started violently when somebody moved softly at his side and automatically his hand went to his left side where the heavy Colt’s gun hung, butt forward for his famous cross-draw.
“Honey—”
The girl’s voice was soft. He let his indrawn breath out with a sigh.
“My God,” he said, “I thought—”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked. She knelt down at his side, took both his hands in hers and looked up into his face. He took a good look at her, savoring her beauty, her youth. She was a symbol of what his money had bought him and he wondered in that humbling moment just how much of her he had bought. If his empire crumbled, would she stay with him? He knew the answer to that, but he refused to face up to it. For a couple of years now he had convinced himself that this beautiful young girl he had found penniless in Denver had fallen in love with him. This was one of his props. If he did not believe himself capable of arousing love and passion in Lucinia, what else could he believe himself capable of?
“Nothing’s really wrong, child,” he said. “We’ve had a couple of set-backs. Nothing for you to worry your pretty head over.”
“Why must you treat me like a child?” she said. “You think I’m just a pretty kid. I’ve got some brain and you know it. I’ve heard talk and I’ve added it up.”
He looked at her in a new light.
“And what does it add up to?” he asked.
“Don’t get mad at me, now.”
“Try me.”
“You’ll tell me to mind my own business. You’re the big successful man with power and influence.”
He smiled indulgently. How was it that he could be so patient with this girl When every other human being who crossed filled him with the rage of frustration?
“Let’s hear it.”
“There’s always a time when you have to cut your losses.”
He stared at her, astonished.
“Is that all?”
She smiled. “Well, don’t you agree?”
“Sure. That makes sense. Where does that get us?”
“Maybe it’s time to cut our losses now.”
He went still. How much did the girl know? He had told her only what was good for her to know. When he had met her in Denver, she had known that he was a man who gained a living on the wrong side of the law; but she knew few details. She knew that some of the men who rode for him, ostensibly as cowhand
s, were men who lived by the gun.
“How much do you know, Lucy?”
“Enough.”
“How much is that?”
“I heard the men talking in the yard one night. Something about the smugglers being killed and our gold being taken. They sounded like they had the daylights scared out of them.”
He patted a hand absently.
“We’ve had heavy losses. You could be right. Maybe this is the time to cut and run. If you thought I was finished here, what would you do?”
“Do?” The question surprised her. “What do you mean: what would I do?”
“Without all this,” he waved a hand to indicate his range and the house, “would you want to go along with me?”
Again she showed surprise. “Are you forgetting what you’ve done for me? What I was when you found me? You think I’m crazy or something? Even if we ride out of here with nothing, you’ll find something. We could go away someplace and start out afresh. You’d amount to something wherever you went.”
He was touched as he had not been for many years. She had not said she loved him, but this was a kind of respect that she was offering him. He turned and kissed her on the forehead.
“Lucy,” he said, “we won’t find it too difficult to start over. We have plenty cached away. Don’t you fret, honey. If we rode out of here tonight, we’d have a king’s ransom waiting for us.”
She broke into a throaty chuckle and flung her arms around him. He laughed in sudden delight, feeling a kind of deep happiness and satisfaction that was foreign to him. He stood up and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, let’s go to bed. We’ll talk about this more in the morning.” Her arm in his, he led the way into the house.
They stepped from the stoop into his big living room that ran almost the depth of the house, a room that he was proud of, reckoning there wasn’t another like it in the territory; rich, comfortable, a surprising oasis of luxury in the range country. A lamp lit it with a soft warm glow.
He stopped in sudden alarm.
A man stood in the lamplight and there was a gun in his hand.
At his side, Lucinia clutched tightly at his arm in sudden fright. The lamplight hit the face of the man with the gun from below and cast it in devilish lines.
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