by Luke Short
“He’s bringing gunmen in.”
This was what Lufton was getting at. Jim could tell it from the way the crew looked at him, from the way Lufton waited, from what had gone on before.
Jim’s cigarette was dead. He tossed it into the fire and then said equably, “Nobody can blame you for being careful.”
“You don’t get it,” Lufton said.
Jim looked squarely at him. “Get what?”
“This: It’s work for Blockhouse, for me, or ride on out of the country. That’s your choice, Garry.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“I’ll give you time to get a shave and drink and night’s sleep in Sun Dust, and then you better drift.”
Jim’s glance shuttled from Lufton to his men. In their faces was the same iron challenge. If they could prevent it no man would stay in this country unless he was a Blockhouse man.
Lufton said mildly, “Sleep on it, Garry,” and left him.
Morning brought a cold sunrise, but no rain. After a hasty breakfast the crew rode off. Bart, Jim’s companion of last night, left to pick up his yesterday’s gather and shove it down to the herds that would move into the Basin. The crew didn’t talk much, and Lufton didn’t give any orders. The men seemed to know their job and want to finish it quickly, so they could face the real job.
Jim borrowed a rope, caught his horses and led them back to the camp. He fashioned a hackamore for the saddle horse, and when he was finished he came over to where Lufton was saddling up.
“Much obliged,” he said.
Lufton nodded. “Working for me, Garry?”
“I don’t reckon. I’ll ride on through.”
“It’s your choice,” Lufton said. “I take it you’re heading for Sun Dust?” When Jim said he was, Lufton went on, “Mind leaving a note at my place with the women-folks? It’s on your way.”
“I’ll leave the rope too,” Jim said.
Lufton went over to the fire, tore the label off one of the cook’s cans and wrote a note on the back. He handed it to Jim, gave him directions, said, “Good luck,” and watched Jim ride off, leaving his pack horse. There was an expression of grim and sardonic humor in his eyes as he watched.
It was an October mountain morning, and Jim had found his camp of last night, salvaged what he could of his outfit and was below the Blockhouse camp before the chill was really out of the air.
By midmorning he’d tied his sheepskin behind his saddle and when, around noon, he slanted down into the dry canyons that let onto the Massacre River the sun was hot on his shoulder blades.
He picked up a wagon road on the flats between the river and the canyon mouth, and before it had taken him to the river he had a long look at the yellow-stippled rolling reaches of Massacre Basin to the east. Unless his directions were faulty, the patch of green far across the river and to the south against the white-hooded limestone outcrop was the Blockhouse, Lufton’s spread. The river was the east boundary of the reservation. According to Lufton, the left-hand one of the forks in the road across the river would take him the five miles across the Basin and to the rim below which, on the Basin floor, was Sun Dust.
At the river Jim’s pack horse was already drinking. He rode out into the river, shallow and wide here at the ford and fringed with the willows of the dry country, and let his horse drink.
He stretched in the saddle, feeling the welcome sweat that replaced the chill of last night. And now he faced the decision he had been postponing all morning. He was carrying a note from John Lufton to his ranch, and it might well be that this note held information valuable to Tate Riling. He would read it, and if it contained orders that affected Lufton’s plans he wouldn’t deliver it. Otherwise he would, since it would insure the day of grace in Sun Dust Lufton had promised him.
His hand rose to his shirt pocket and then paused. A faint stirring of shame halted him, the memory of eating a man’s grub, of sleeping in his camp, of violating a trust, of all the shabby dishonesties of these past years. And then his hand moved on to his pocket.
The hard, unechoing crack of a rifle exploded the stillness, and a geyser of water leaped up beside his horse.
Jim sat motionless, hand half raised, his glance searching the thicket of willows for the telltale wisp of smoke.
He located the place in the willows from which the shot issued, but he didn’t move. His horse stood alertly, and the sound of its slobbered water alone broke the stillness.
Jim called out, “Put it up. I’m ridin’ through.”
The second shot at his horse’s feet sent water in his face. His pack horse turned and sedately retreated.
A slow anger narrowed Jim’s attention. Whichever faction was stopping him, Blockhouse or nester, he had a passport if he could only speak.
“Come out and talk!” he called.
The third shot followed on the heels of his call. It flicked his Stetson, hit the rocks behind him and whined off in ricochet. Plain sense made Jim yank his horse around and rowel it toward the bank from which he had come. The horse lifted sheets of water in its flight, while Jim yanked his carbine out of its scabbard. As the horse hit the shore and lurched up the bank Jim rolled out of the saddle, staggered and landed sprawling on an upjutting of shore boulders. His horse stopped immediately, missing the weight in the saddle.
Levering a shell into his carbine, Jim laid a sight on the far trees opposite and then fired. He shot six times, fast, laying them two feet apart and at the same level. Whoever it was across there had chosen a fool’s shelter, for he was screened only by trees. The rocks were above and behind him up the slope.
When his hammer clicked on empty Jim reloaded, his glance searching the shore. He heard a snort over there and again he raised his carbine. This time he widened his aim, searching patiently along the shore.
At his fifth shot he saw a horse break out from the trees and lunge up the far slope. On its far side the rider was holding onto the horn, running bent over, shielded from sight by the frightened horse.
Jim didn’t wait to see more. He vaulted on his horse and put him into the river at a lope. By the time he had lost sight of the lone horse and runner over the ridge he was in the shelter of the screening shore willows and coldly angry.
He reined in and turned his horse upstream at a slow walk, listening. Presently from downstream the shooting began again—at what, Jim didn’t know, since it wasn’t at him.
He hugged the willows for a quarter mile, then put his horse into them. He rode through the thicket, reined up and peered out. The rocky lift of the ridge screened him from sight. He ground-haltered his horse, patted his coat pocket to make sure he had shells, took his carbine and then moved downstream again in the willows. Presently he crawled up on the ridge and dropped on its far side.
The shooting, stubborn and senseless, continued. Jim worked his way over the broken ground toward it until he was very close. It seemed over the next low ridge. Pulling off his Stetson, he bellied down on the loose gravel and carefully edged up to the hump and peered over.
There on the near side of the slope toward the river the rifleman was bellied down, methodically putting shots across the river. Jim looked closely and then swore softly under his breath.
The rifleman was a woman.
Her hair was the giveaway; it lay with the sheen of wheat down to her shoulders, where it was caught by her Stetson, which had been lost in her retreat and now hung down her back from the chin strap. Otherwise, at this distance she could have been mistaken for a man with her worn levis, flannel shirt and man’s coat.
Jim’s gaze narrowed and his eyes grew oddly hard. She was shooting methodically at something—at him, she thought—as if this were sport. His gaze shuttled to her horse ground-haltered behind her, and he saw the Blockhouse brand on the left hip. One of Lufton’s womenfolk playing at being a man.
Slow wrath stirred within him as he watched her. She’d kill a man, and gladly, it seemed. Shoot first, ask questions afterward. It didn’t matter to her if she k
illed a man; it wasn’t worth the trouble, apparently, to find out if the man she was killing was friend, enemy or U.S. marshal.
He glanced down at his Stetson. There was a notch bitten out of the rim, fraying the felt, where her bullet had touched. His mind was suddenly made up, the result of a stubborn conviction he did not even put into words to himself.
He crawled up to the ridge and laid out his cartridges on the ground beside him. The girl was still shooting as fast as she could lever the shells into her gun.
Jim calculated the distance to her, his eyes hard and cold and wicked, and then drew his bead. He held his breath and made it careful and fired.
The heel flew off her boot as if expelled by a spring. The girl whirled to a sitting position, and Jim shot again. The dirt beside her leaped in a little geyser of dust. He shot again, and on the other side of her, closer yet, leaped another spurt of gravel. She came to her feet in panic, and Jim laid a shot at her feet. She started to run for her horse now, stumbled, missing her heel, and fell sprawling. Jim laid a shot not six inches from her head that plowed dirt into her face and hair.
When she rose this time she had given up the idea of reaching her horse. She turned and ran for the rocks she had been hiding behind, and Jim laid three shots behind her close enough to hurry her. When she disappeared over the ridge and down the slope to the river he moved with her and put a last shot beside her as she made the willows.
He came erect and slipped down the ridge to her horse. Swinging into the saddle, he rode over the ridge and picked up the trail he had come afoot. At his own horse he dismounted and found that his hands were shaking, his knees oddly unsteady. The backwash of a tension he hadn’t understood had its way with him for a minute as he slowly realized what he had done. What if he had hit her? In that momentary anger he had forgotten that she was a girl and remembered only that she deserved a rough scare. And scare her he had, heedless and unthinking, in the same way he would scare a man in a reckless and savage brawl.
Standing there in the willows, he had a rare, blinding moment of self-judgment that comes to a willful man, and it turned him sick with loathing of himself. When it was gone and pride had come back he knew he wasn’t going to try to remedy what he’d done. It was finished, gone, like all the other mistakes.
Soberly he mounted and headed away from the river, leading the Blockhouse horse. He had no intention of riding back to pick up his pack horse and run the risk of meeting the girl.
Swinging south and east, he was soon in a rolling, open, grama-grass country; hummocks of sage broke its rich golden monotony. To the east, running southeasterly, was a low rim with more of the broken grasslands running off into mountains that were barely visible in the blued distance. Autumn haze touched the land, and off below the rim he could see the square sear patch of a homesteader’s planting. When he reached the road he turned the Blockhouse horse loose and kept south, and presently the bright yellow flag of the autumn cottonwoods pointed out the Blockhouse.
It lay, when he at last saw it, at the heel of a low thrust of limestone that spilled in a five-mile tongue from the rim to the east. A stream, following the edge of the limestone, now took off for the distant Massacre, rearing this thick stand of cottonwoods at the parting. They were old and thin leaved and a gaudy yellow now.
The house itself, a one-story, flat-roofed stone affair with a long, deep veranda, squatted under the big trees. Off closer to both creek and the shelter of the limestone there were clustered the barns and corrals and sheds that made up the working ranch. It had the rich, worn look of something used and old, and as Jim rode into it he understood why Lufton supposed this country was rightfully his. No raw nester shacks could ever lay the claim to this land that this place could.
He rode past the house, judged a second stone building midway between house and barn to be the bunkhouse and headed toward it.
A girl’s voice at his back called, “Don’t go over there, please.”
Jim reined up and turned in his saddle. The girl was standing on the edge of the veranda, leaning against a pillar. Dutifully Jim swung his horse around and rode up to her, touching his hat as he pulled up.
“The men need sleep,” she said. Her voice was careless, slurred, indifferent. He noticed first that a rifle was leaning against the veranda railing beside her, and then his gaze lifted to her face. He was immediately aware that this was a woman who knew she was beautiful. Everything about her told him so—the cut and the stuff of her dress, which was a strange green color that matched her eyes, the searching arrogant stare that summed him up, judged and dismissed him. It was the look of a woman who could afford to hold men in gentle contempt. Her auburn hair, thick and silky and alive as light, had been pinned up off her neck in back. She had that drowsy and impatient look about her of a bored woman who has been waked from sleep only to be bored again. And yet Jim Garry thought she was the most beautiful woman he had ever looked upon, and he knew she thought so, too, and was not interested.
Jim climbed stiffly from the saddle and brought the note from his shirt pocket. He handed it to her, suddenly aware of his shoddy appearance.
“From your father.”
The girl took it, asking indifferently, “You’re working for us now?”
“No.”
She read the note. Her expression didn’t change, and yet the way her long lashes were shadowed on her cheeks as she read the note seemed to Jim something to admire.
“Will you eat?” she asked.
“Much obliged. I’m on my way to Sun Dust.”
“Did Dad say when he was coming down?”
“No ma’am.”
“Thank you,” she said.
That was all, and he was dismissed. He touched his hat again and reluctantly turned toward his horse.
“Stop right there!”
Jim’s gaze whipped around to the rear corner of the house. The slim yellow-haired girl of the river shooting had her rifle trained on him. Behind her was Jim’s pack horse. If he needed any more proof of her identity the heel on her left boot was missing.
Jim drew a long breath and waited, his attention narrowed on this girl as she came two steps closer to him. She was in the grip of a fury that made her lower lip tremble. That and her dark eyes that were black with anger were the first things Jim noticed.
Noting, too, that she cradled her carbine against her hip with the unconscious negligence of a person used to guns, Jim had a fast, hard intimation of trouble.
“You’re the man that shot at me at the river, aren’t you?” she demanded.
Jim thought: “Slow her up or there’ll be hell to pay.” Under the golden sun brown of her face she was pale, and Jim could even see the thin dusting of freckles across the bridge of her small nose. The malevolence in her brown eyes jolted him and made his speech mild and without expression.
“I reckon I am.”
“I’m going to show you how it feels.”
The girl on the veranda said sharply, “Put that gun down, Amy!”
Amy fired. The shock of its swiftness held Jim motionless, at once surprised and incredulous.
The auburn-haired girl screamed, and Amy said wrathfully, without looking at her, “Keep quiet, Carol! I’m going to do it again!”
Jim began to sweat. Behind thought, he knew he’d have to bluff this out. If he didn’t move she couldn’t bring herself to shoot him. If he lunged for the house and shelter he knew she’d hound him clear to the river, as he’d hounded her.
She started to raise her carbine to her shoulder, when the pounding of running feet made her turn her head. This was the time for him to break if he wanted to. He only stood there, watching the three men running toward them from the bunkhouse, the man in the lead calling, “What is it? Who shot?”
Amy turned back to Jim, her face grim and its expression urgent. She raised her gun to her shoulder, and Carol screamed again. Amy shot again. This time Jim’s hat was lifted from his head and fell in the dust behind him. Amy levered the gun frantic
ally and was lifting it to her shoulder again when the first man reached her. He batted the gun down, and it went off at her feet.
She fought frantically for a second and then saw that struggle was useless. By the time she had relinquished the gun Carol had reached her.
“Amy, Amy, have you gone crazy?” Carol asked. She put her hands on Amy’s shoulders and shook her.
Roughly Amy shrugged her hands off and looked bleakly at Jim. There was a wildness and a pride in her face that burned passionately, a kind of fierce exaltation that made her at that instant more alive, more beautiful, than her sister.
Jim stooped and picked up his hat and looked at the hole in its crown and then at Amy.
“Ask him!” she said furiously, pointing at him. “I was doing to him what he did to me.”
The man who had seized the gun laid his curious, truculent glance on Jim. He was a middle-aged man, heavy chested and thick jowled, with a blocky, bulldog breadth of body. His thin saddle of sandy hair was awry, as if he’d been wakened from sleep.
He said to Jim, “What about this?”
“She’s right.”
The man turned to confirmation from Amy.
“After I spelled you, Cap, those rocks got hot, and I moved down into the willows. Then he came along and stopped in the river to let his horse drink. I put a warning shot close to him, and he didn’t turn back. I put another closer, and he went back to the other bank and started shooting at me. I didn’t have any protection there, so I went back to the rocks. I don’t know how he got across, but suddenly he started shooting at me from behind. He almost hit me too! And stole my horse!”
Her words poured out in bitter and outraged anger, and when she finished there was utter silence. The man she had called Cap slowly turned his head to regard Jim. The other two punchers came over closer to him.
“What about it?” Cap said.
“That’s the way it happened.”
“You knew it was a woman?”
“Not till I got behind her.”
There was another silence while the men looked at each other. Cap said unbelievingly, “You mean you tried to hit her?”
