The mustang was dead. He looked down at the little gray horse and found tears in his eyes, though he wasn’t a crying man.
“You had nerve, boy,” he said softly. “You wasn’t much, and I hadn’t had you long, but you had the heart of a champion!”
His rifle was in the boot, and he got it out. Then gently he worked the saddle loose. Shouldering it, he staggered painfully to a clump of juniper and dropped the saddle out of sight. For a minute he hesitated, staring down at the heavy saddlebags. He touched one with his toe and it jingled faintly. Gold. Well, it wouldn’t do him much good.
DOWNHILL HE HEARD metal strike against metal, then the sound of a bucket being dipped into the water—the splat as the side of it struck the surface, then the heavy gulp as the bucket filled. It was a still, cool night. Chambering a shell in his rifle, he started downhill.
No dog barked, and he was puzzled. A ranch in this lonely place would certainly have a dog. When he got closer he could see the house, small and neat, could see the rail corral, the log barn. But there was no bunkhouse. That simplified matters. Bill Carey wasn’t wanting any shooting now.
He crossed the hard-packed earth, puzzled by the lack of light. It was early, judging by the stars, and he had been unconscious only a short time.
Something moved in the doorway, and he froze, his rifle covering the bit of white he could see.
“Stand still,” he said, his voice low and hard. “I don’t want to shoot, but I will if I have to.”
“You don’t have to shoot,” a girl’s voice replied. “Who are you? What do you want?”
A woman! Carey frowned, then he moved a step nearer. “Are you alone?” he said, low voiced. “Tell the truth!”
“I always tell the truth,” she replied coolly. “Did Ryerson send you?”
“Ryerson?” He was puzzled, yet he lifted his head a little, some response coming to him as he heard the name. “Who’s Ryerson?”
“If you don’t know that,” Jane Conway replied drily, “you’re a stranger. Come in.”
He walked forward, watching her keenly. The girl made no effort to move until he could almost touch her, then she saw the bandage on his head.
“Oh, you’re hurt!” she exclaimed. “What happened? Did your horse throw you?”
“No.” He looked at her, watching the effect of his words. “I was shot. By a posse,” he added grimly. “I robbed a bank.”
“Well”—Jane’s voice was even—“every man to his own taste. You better let me have a look at your head.”
He stepped into the darkness and waited, hearing her moving about. She went to a window, and he saw the grayness blanked out. Then another window. Then she closed the door. A moment later and a match flared.
They looked at each other then. Jane Conway was a tall girl with gray eyes and ash-blond hair. She was pretty, but too thin, a result of the heat and too much work.
She saw a big man with broad and powerful shoulders, and the biceps revealed through the torn sleeve were a bulge of muscle. His face was haggard and hard, unshaven, with a jaw on which there was a stain of blood. This had evidently run down from under the bandage and dried in the stubble on his cheek.
“Sit down,” she said sternly, “and don’t worry. There is no law here.”
“No law?” He seated himself, stared up at her. “What do you mean, no law?”
She smiled without bitterness. “These are the Shafter Hills,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”
He had heard. The Shafter Hills. A patch of wooded and lonely hills, and among them the Hawk’s Nest, the place where Hawk Shafter and his outlaws holed up. A nest of the most vicious criminals unhung.
Ryerson! The name struck him now like a blow. Tabat Ryerson! He was here! Bill Carey smiled grimly. He would be. Troubles never came singly.
“You mentioned Ryerson?” he asked. “What about him?”
Jane looked down at him. She could hear her father’s even breathing. He was resting. That was something.
“If you were one of his crowd,” she said, as though to herself, “you’d not come here.”
As she took the bandage from his head and began to bathe it with warm water, she told him, “Tabat Ryerson is Hawk Shafter’s right-hand man. He’s a killer. Some say he’s taking over from the old man. I thought he might have sent someone for me when I heard you coming. Then I knew if he had, you’d come on a horse. He said he was coming for me tonight or tomorrow—to take me to the Nest.”
The warm water felt good, and her fingers were gentle.
“You want to go?” Bill Carey asked.
“No.” Gently she began combing his tangled hair. “No woman would willingly go to Tabat Ryerson. He’s a brute. I’ll kill him if I can. I’ll kill myself if I can’t get him.”
He looked at her, shocked. Yet what he saw in her face told him she would do what she said. And she was right. Ryerson was a beast.
“He’s been running this country,” she went on, softly, “ever since the Hawk had his fall from a bronc. Shafter gave more and more power to Tabat. Every herd that’s rustled means beef for him; every robbery means a percentage for him.”
She began taking his shirt from his shoulders. There was no nonsense about her. She did what was to be done.
“He’ll kill you if he finds you here,” she said. “You’d better mount and ride when you’ve eaten.”
“My horse is dead,” he said simply. “Run to death.”
“We’ve got several. There’s a big black that will carry you. Take him and welcome.”
“I can pay,” he assured her grimly.
“I don’t want stolen money,” she replied. “Not any part of it. I’m giving him to you. A man as big as you,” she added, “should do more than steal!”
Stung, he looked up quickly. “The bank foreclosed on my ranch. It was legal, but it wasn’t right. He’d told me he’d give me more time. In the spring, maybe I could’ve made it.”
“Listen!” Her voice quickened. “They are coming!”
She looked at him anxiously.
“Go!” she said quickly. “Out the back! You can wait until we’re gone, then take the black and go!”
He stood up, huge and formidable in the darkness as she doused the light.
“No,” he said sullenly. “I don’t run well on no empty stomach.”
“Open up, Janie!” The voice outside was sharp and ugly. “Tabat sent us down to get you.”
Bill Carey opened the door and stepped outside. He stood there in the vague light of the rising moon.
“Get out!” he snarled. “Get out—-fast!”
“Who the devil are you?” a man’s voice demanded.
Bill Carey’s hand made a casual gesture, but the gun that suddenly filled it was not casual.
“You know the lingo this iron speaks,” he said. “Get out! And tell Tabat Ryerson to leave this girl alone or I’ll kill him!”
“You?” Anger crowded amusement in the man’s voice. “Kill Ryerson?”
“Tell him to stay away,” Carey continued, his voice ugly, “and tell Hawk Shafter an hombre from Laredo sent that word. If Tabat don’t understand that, Shafter will! Now get!”
The two men backed their horses, turned them. A little way off they stopped, talking low voiced.
Carey watched them, his eyes narrow. “I got a rifle,” he called drily. “If you two want to get planted, you can do it mighty easy!”
Their horses started moving, and he listened a long time. When he walked inside the girl had lighted the lamp again and was dishing up some food. He watched the steam rise from the coffee she poured into the thick white cup.
When she had put frijoles, potatoes, and cornbread on the tin plate he sat down and started to eat. He did not talk, but ate with the steady eating of a big man who was very, very hungry.
“Ryerson won’t take that,” Jane said warningly. “He’ll come himself next time!”
“Uh-huh. I reckon he will.” Bill leaned back in the chair and looked
up at her quiet, rather pretty face. “But he won’t come until morning. I know Ryerson.” He chuckled cynically. “Some men ain’t so big as the shadow they throw.”
Bill Carey got up from the chair and looked down at the rag rug on the floor.
“Better get some sleep,” he advised. “I’ll sleep here.”
She started to protest, then turned away without speaking. In a few minutes she was back with a blanket. Using his holsters and rolled belt for a pillow, he pulled the blanket over him and stretched out on the floor….
DAWN WAS GRAY in the eastern sky when he got up from the floor. After folding the blanket and buckling on his gun belts, he walked outside. Gray serpents of mist lay along the low places and wound back up into the trees along the mountain. The air was fresh, cool.
Bill Carey walked down to the barn and watered the stock. It was merely a matter of lifting a small board and letting water run into the trough in the corral. He forked hay over to the horses, and then studied the country with a knowing eye.
It was a good place for a ranch. There was plenty of water, and the gentle slope toward the creek was subirrigated by water from the mountain. There would be green grass here most of the year. A man could really make a place like this pay. It was even better than his own ranch, so recently lost.
His eyes were somber as he studied the dim trail that led toward the Hawk’s Nest. So this was to be it. The old enmity between Tabat Ryerson and himself was to come to a head here, after all this time.
It was a feeling of long standing, this between him and Tabat. Five times they had fought with their fists, and four times Tabat, who was older and stronger, had whipped him. The fifth time, in Tombstone, he had given Ryerson a beating. Tabat had sworn to kill him if they met again.
Yet Tabat Ryerson knew, even as old Hawk Shafter knew, that Bill Carey was a dangerous man with a six-gun. Had Carey been a vain man there could have been eleven notches on his guns.
Four were for members of a gang which had tried to rustle his cattle. He had cornered them, and in the subsequent fight all four had died in the mountain cabin where they had holed up. Carey, shot three times, had ridden back to town for help.
Three others he killed had been badmen who tried to run a town where he had been marshal. The other four had been gunmen, two of them Hawk Shafter’s men, who had tried him out—one in Silver City, two in Sonora, and the last in Santa Fe.
When Bill walked back to the cabin the old man was awake. Jane was working over the fireplace, preparing breakfast.
“How’s it, old-timer?” Carey asked, looking down at the grim, white-mustached old man. “Feelin’ better?”
“A mite. My heart’s bad. Ain’t so pert as I used to be.” He looked at Carey shrewdly. “You on the dodge? Janie told me some of it.”
Carey nodded. “Don’t worry. After a bit I’ll be on my way.”
Conway shook his head. “Ain’t that, son. We’d mighty like to have you stay. Place needs a man around, and like I say, I ain’t so pert no more.” His face became grave. “Them outlaws is bad, son. Ride across my place every once in a while. Regular trail through here. Wasn’t so bad when old Hawk was up and around. This Ryerson’s poison mean.”
BILL CAREY WAS drinking coffee when he heard them coming. He was sitting there without a shirt, as Jane had taken his to wash. He got up, a big, brown, powerful man, and walked to the door. He was catlike on his feet, but when he got there, he put his rifle down alongside the door and leaned against the doorjamb, watching the horsemen.
Ryerson could be spotted at a distance. He sat a horse the same as he always had. Carey watched him and the other outlaws with hard, cynical eyes. There was no fear in him, no excitement. This was not a new story, but one he could face without a tremor. He knew he could kill Tabat Ryerson without remorse. The man lived for cruelty and crime. He was nothing but a rattlesnake.
Three men. Carey smiled drily. Tabat must think well of himself. They reined in, and all three dropped to the ground. Bill did not move.
Then Ryerson took two steps, but froze and his face changed. Bill could not be sure whether it was a fear or fury that filled the man he faced as recognition came.
“You, is it?” Ryerson demanded. “What are you butting in here for?”
Carey straightened, and a slow smile came to his hard mouth.
“Maybe because I like these folks,” he drawled. “Maybe because I don’t like you.”
“Don’t ask for it, Carey,” Ryerson snapped. “Get on your horse and take out, and we’ll let you go.”
Bill chuckled and ran his fingers through his thick hair.
“Don’t wait for me to leave, Tabby,” he said drily. “I like this place. Looks like the place a man could build to something.”
“You and me can’t live in the same country!” Ryerson snarled. “It ain’t big enough for the two of us!”
“Uh-huh,” Carey agreed. “You sure hit the nail on the head that time. And I’m staying. So if I was you, Tabat Ryerson, I’d fork that mangy bronc you’re riding and take out—pronto!”
“You’re telling me?” Ryerson’s fury was a thing to behold. “Why, you—”
ALL THREE OUTLAWS went for their guns. Carey’s six-shooter bellowed from the doorway, but the thin, tigerlike man on the right had flashed a fast gun, and his shot burned past Carey’s stomach. Tabat Ryerson’s quick, responsive jerk saved his life. Carey’s second shot knocked the tiger man reeling, and a third pinned him to the ground.
Ryerson had leaped to one side, triggering his pistol. He shot wildly, and splinters splattered in Bill’s face.
He whipped back inside the door, snapped a quick shot at Tabat, then went through the house with a lunge and slid through the back window just as the other man came around the corner. Bill’s feet hit the ground at the instant they saw each other, and both fired.
Bill shot low, and his bullet hit the big man above the belt buckle and knocked him to the ground. The outlaw was game and rolled over, trying to get his feet under him. The second shot was through his lungs and the fellow went down, bloody froth mounting to his lips.
Carey slid to the corner and, crouching, looked around it. A shot split the edge of the log over his head; then he heard a sudden rattle of horse’s hoofs and rounded the corner to see Tabat Ryerson racing into the junipers.
He swore softly, knowing it had been only a beginning. Tabat knew who he was now. He would come back loaded for bear. Bill Carey walked toward the man on the ground, his gun ready.
The thin, wiry fellow who had spoiled his first shot was dead.
Carey walked back to the man behind the house. He also was dead. Bill scowled. Two gone, but they were two men who had been killed uselessly. Had it been Ryerson, these two might have lived.
Janie was beside him suddenly, her eyes wide and frightened.
“Are you all right?” she said anxiously.
Her wide gray eyes, frightened for him, stirred him strangely. “Uh-huh,” he said. “They didn’t shoot too straight. Neither did I” he added bitterly. “I missed Tabat!”
“You think he’ll come back?”
“Sure he’ll come back—with help!”
She poured him fresh coffee and he studied the red crease across his stomach. Scarcely a drop of blood showed. The merest graze of the skin. But when she saw it, her face paled.
“You and the old man better get up in the pines,” he said. “I’ll hold it here.”
“No.” She shook her head with finality. “This is our home. Besides, Dad can’t be moved.”
“You’re stubborn,” he said. “A man could like a girl like you.”
She smiled faintly. “Are you making love to me, Bill Carey?”
He flushed, then grinned. “Maybe. If I knew how, I reckon I would. I ain’t so much, though. Just a would-be rancher who got gypped out of his ranch and robbed a bank.”
“I think you’re a good man at heart, Bill.”
“Maybe.” He shrugged. “I was raised right. R
eckon I’ve come a long way since then.”
He glanced at the hills. He was worried. Sheriff Buck Walters wasn’t the man to give up. He had been close behind Bill yesterday. What had happened?
His eyes drifted down across the swell of the grassland toward the cottonwood-lined stream far below. The mist still lay in thin, emaciated streamers along the edge of the trees. A man could love this country. He narrowed his eyes, seeing white-faced cattle feeding over that broad, beautiful range. Yes, a man could do a lot here.
Regret stirred within him. That bank. Why did a man have to be such a hotheaded fool? He had been gypped, he knew. He had been tricked into asking for that loan, and he suspected there had been some rustling of his cattle. Well, that didn’t matter now. No matter who had been in the right before, robbing the bank had put him in the wrong. He was over the line now, the thin line that divided so many men of the early west into the law-abiding and the lawless.
Reason told him he was one with Tabat Ryerson and the Shafter Hills gang now, but everything within him rebelled against it.
Thinking of old Hawk Shafter, he wondered. The old man was an outlaw, but he had also been a square shooter. Maybe, if—
Carey pushed away the thought. Getting into the Hawk’s Nest would be almost impossible.
Sheriff Walters kept returning to his mind. The grim, hard-bitten old lawman would never leave a hot trail. Remembering the sheriff made Bill remember the gold and his saddle. Glancing down the empty trail, he turned and started up the mountain. His left arm was stiff, although he could use it. The bullet had gone through the muscle atop his shoulder. His head wound had been only a graze.
When he reached the junipers, he went into the thick tangle where he had hidden his saddle. The saddle was there, but the saddlebags were flat and empty!
Tabat Ryerson!
He had seen the outlaw come this way. Somehow, in hunting a hiding place from gunfire, the outlaw had found these bags, and had removed the gold.
Carey picked up the bags, and a white piece of paper dropped out. On it was written:
Thanks. You won’t need this here where you’re going.
Tabat.
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 7 Page 21
