Blood on the Moon

by Luke Short

  One of the punchers said softly, “By God, I’ll make Riling remember this.”

  Cap wasn’t looking at him. Far out from the circle of firelight he had seen the shining eyes of a horse with the fire reflected in them. He walked out toward it, approaching slowly, talking softly. The horse shied a couple of times, and then Cap caught him.

  Immediately he saw the man on the ground, one foot caught in the stirrup. Still holding the reins, Cap knelt and struck a match. It was young Fred Barden, and Cap knew dismally that it was his own shot that had knocked Barden out of the saddle. It had caught him in the chest, and the horse had apparently swerved wide of the herd and stopped immediately.

  Now the others came up and looked down at young Barden. A month ago they had been at dances with Barden, had drunk with him and laughed at his jokes and liked him. The whole bitter folly of this fight was expressed in this scene, and they all felt it and it made them angry. They had traded Daniels’ death for this Barden’s, and the exchange pleased none of them.

  Cap quietly led the horse back to the firelight and looked around the camp. It was utterly wrecked. Some grub that had been locked in the chuck wagon’s box remained. But the basin, plates, fry pans and coffeepots had been lost when the wagon overturned. They were tramped into shapeless masses of tin bedded in the torn turf. The bedrolls were rags, parts of them festooned in the brush back in the timber.

  It had been an expert job, Cap thought. The herd had been stampeded up the valley and then turned directly at the camp by the pressure of riders on the swing. Cap hunkered down by the fire now, warming his hands, eyes musing and bitter. The cook was rummaging around salvaging tin cups, while the rest of the crew righted the wagon.

  When the coffee was made and shared out of two bent cups Cap Willis rose.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. To the night herder he said, “You come back with me.”

  They reached the river before daybreak, and Cap sent the man on ahead. He traveled the wagon road that followed the banks of the Massacre for a couple of miles and then swung away. A low, rounded river bluff backed away from the river here, and in the bare dawn he paused and looked toward the base of it. Soon he would be able to make out the shack and he wondered if he should wait.

  But he went on instead. The road meandered through a big stand of cottonwoods, and presently, in that half-light, he pulled into the yard. The shack had been made of giant cottonwood trunks, three logs to a side. It made the place squat and low, so that when Anse Barden stepped out he had to duck his head to avoid the door. He was carrying a rifle, which he held carelessly in his left hand, not bothering to point it.

  The sun was touching the Braves now, reflecting a little light into the deep, dawn half-light by the shack. Cap saw Anse Barden’s face, and he felt sick.

  “He’s over there, Anse. I didn’t have a team to bring him home.”

  “Thanks, Cap,” Anse said in a dead voice.

  Cap felt closer to Anse Barden than any of these other men. Anse was an old Blockhouse hand who kept his wife and boy in town while he’d worked for the small single man’s wages that Blockhouse paid its punchers. He’d been frugal and quiet and dependable, and John Lufton had let him run his own herd on the side. Anse had sold in a good year and with the proceeds had quit to set himself up here. Neither Lufton nor Cap would ever have bothered him, but Anse had never asked for favors and never accepted them. He had joined the small ranchers because he had considered their fight his fight. Cap wondered bleakly if any range Anse ever got, however big, would compensate for last night.

  He said, “I’m sorry, Anse. Believe that if you want to.”

  “Sure,” Anse said numbly. “Sure.”

  There was a long pause, and Cap went to knee his horse around. Anse cleared his throat and said softly, “I figured that’s what happened. We scattered and was supposed to meet here. But he didn’t come.”

  Cap didn’t say anything, and Anse went on in a tired voice, “That’s a hell of a price to pay for a little peace. Does Lufton know that?”

  “Ferg Daniels was tromped to jelly last night,” Cap said quietly.

  Barden looked up at him with a searching glance, and then his gaze fell. Cap said gently, “Quit it, Anse. You’ve paid up more than Riling ever can pay.”

  Anse shook his head. He kept shaking it a long time, as if repetition would prove the point of his thoughts. Then he looked off across at the Braves and said bitterly, “No, by God. Lufton pays for this as long as I’m alive.”

  Cap rode out then, leaving Anse standing there. “We’re all fools,” Cap Willis thought dispiritedly. Men get stubborn, so their sons are killed off, and they’re lost. He thought about Anse’s threat to Lufton and knew it was not to be ignored. But maybe after last night Lufton was beaten. If the loss of a third of the reservation herd could sink him, then John Lufton was lost. Because they’d never round up that spooked herd before the deadline, and after that the army had them. It was a thought that he hated, that turned the day and the future gray.

  Chapter Six

  When Cap Willis left, Anse Barden set his rifle up against the doorjamb and went back into the shack. He sat down at the table Sweet and Big Nels and Chet Avery had vacated only a half-hour before. He was glad it was over, glad he knew for sure now. Between the time he suspected it and now, he had made his bitter acknowledgment. Once before, when his wife died, he’d had to do it, and he could do it again. It was simple; you can’t raise the dead, so you don’t have hope. Time, enough of it, would cure everything, people said, and Anse knew they lied.

  He rose and made himself breakfast and ate it, and then there was the day to think about. He went out into the clean dawn, walking toward the woodpile, thinking about Cap Willis and John Lufton. Strangely enough he found that he’d lied to Willis this morning. He didn’t hate John Lufton and he wasn’t going to get even with him. He didn’t hate anyone. His threat had been a reaction prescribed by custom and was untrue. He just felt empty, deprived of all feeling.

  He chopped wood for a while, and when there was enough he stopped. About to lug it back to the house, he paused and regarded it bleakly. This, too, was one of the small gestures of living, a voicing of the belief that you would be in your house that night to burn the wood. Anse wasn’t sure about that. He went over to the grindstone and sat on its seat and packed his pipe with thick steady fingers. Looking around him, he discovered that something had happened to this place in the night. Nothing was physically changed, but it was different. It looked like the frowsty, hard-scrabble outfit of a dirt-poor man. Affection for it had left him; even the memory of how he’d worked for it had no power to move him.

  Forgetting to light his pipe, he went into the house again, curious. He looked at everything there: the stove his wife had been so proud of, the few pieces of gay china, the pots, pans, beds, pictures and the excellent clock on its shelf. Seen now in this new mood, they provoked an obscure irony in him. This house, its surroundings and the possessions it contained represented sixty years of a man’s life, all he owned. It made a man want to smile and it was after this that Anse knew what he was going to do.

  He went to the shelf above the stove and took down the cracked brown teapot. On the table he dumped out the coins it had held and, without counting them, put them in his pocket. Afterward he went out to the corral and saddled a horse and turned the other one out, leaving the gate open.

  He rode out of the place without looking back, believing it was forever and not even sorry about it.

  An hour later he rode into the Blockhouse. There was activity out by the corral, and when he approached he saw that Ted Elser and Cap Willis were shoving some horses into the corral from the horse pasture.

  Cap spied him and came over, and they faced each other on horseback across the fence. Cap pulled down his dusty neckerchief from across his mouth and looked sharply at Anse.

  “Anything I can do, Anse?”

  “Yes,” Anse replied after a pause. “You can bury h
im, Cap. Over there, wherever it’s handy.”

  This, too, was against the rules, Anse thought. A man buries his dead and mourns them in decent gravity, just as he fights for what is his and acquires property and a good name, so he might die in bed. Anse watched to see if Cap Willis would be shocked at his request, but Cap only nodded and said, “Sure.”

  Anse said, “I won’t be back.”

  “Why would you be?”

  There was one more thing Anse wanted to say. “You tell Amy good-by for me, will you, Cap?”

  Cap nodded, and Anse rode out and on to Sun Dust. He knew every man in this town and he was hailed a dozen times. To the women he knew he spoke and lifted his Stetson, revealing his stiff ruff of iron-gray hair. There was nothing in his seamed face or in his eyes with their wind-puckered skin at the corners to show he was a changed man. He rarely stopped to gossip, nor did he today. Riding on through town, he took the dug road up to the rim and, once on top, reined up and turned in the saddle, putting a bracing hand on his horse’s rump. He had his look.

  From here a good part of Massacre Basin was visible, stretching out in tawny unbroken reaches to the far lift of the Braves. Anse had one moment of bitterness when he realized that more than half his life had been lived with a wife and son between this rim and those mountains. That was done and he rode on.

  The Bench was roughly that country that lay between the rim and the far distant Raft Mountains to the east. It was a dry country whose lower hills to the south melted imperceptibly into the Long Reach Desert. Anse crossed it that day and at night was almost into the desert. He could see the few lights of Commissary a long way off. It lay on the edge of Long Reach, abutting the low round hills that were the beginning of the Bench. Up there beyond the hills there was grama grass for forage. On the Long Reach there was nothing, and the army had dug a well here at the borderline hills. That was a decade ago, during the campaign when the Indians were pushed back to their reservation. The army wagon trains supplying the campaign had crossed the Long Reach to deposit supplies here, take on water and return across the desert.

  But even after the army left and hotel, saloon, blacksmith shop and store had risen by the well, it was still called Commissary. The place had faded while the buildings were still new, and the store was abandoned. The hotel was seldom used, and line riders for the Bench outfits avoided the saloon because of its name. It had turned into a furtive place, where a dozen dim trails out of the hills and the Long Reach met and scattered again. When a Bench rancher missed some horses he came here first and asked questions that weren’t answered and found nothing. Afterward he rode the trails until he lost them and was obscurely angry.

  It was the hotel’s light Anse saw from afar, and then he lost it as he snaked down through the bare hills. Presently he was in Commissary’s only street.

  The lamp in the hotel and adjoining saloon threw long rectangles of silver light out into the weed-stippled dust of the street. A big cottonwood by the hotel rose thick and motionless into the higher darkness, and a vagrant breeze clattered its dead leaves in a dry whisper. It made Anse feel old and tired, and he walked his horse to the trough by the dark blacksmith shop opposite the hotel. There were a couple of horses at the hotel’s tie rail. Beyond it the ruin of the abandoned store hulked lonely on its bare lot, framed against the night sky.

  Anse walked across the street to the hotel’s tie rail and left his horse, afterward mounting the porch steps. Down at the far end of the porch he saw the coal of a cigarette come alight and die. A man stepped into the doorway, hands on hips, and Anse paused and said, “Where can a man eat?”

  “It’s pretty late,” the man said. Then, as if relenting, he went on, “The old lady will fix up something. Be a half-hour maybe.”

  Anse nodded, and the man shuffled off across the cheerless lobby. He was in his sock feet, and there was a long rip the length of his vest in back.

  Anse came back to the steps, suddenly lonely. Someone in the saloon next door laughed, and Anse went down the steps, past the man on the porch, toward the saloon’s light.

  When he entered the talk between the bartender and a customer ceased abruptly. It was a small barroom and let onto the hotel lobby through a door at the far end of the bar.

  Anse came up and asked for whisky. He saw the bartender look at the customer, and the man went out the back door.

  “He’ll look at the brand on my horse,” Anse thought wearily, and he didn’t care. He wanted to be let alone—forever.

  The night silence settled on the saloon. The thin bartender picked his teeth placidly, eyes blank. It was so quiet that Anse actually heard the man on the porch rise from a creaking chair, pause on the steps, come down them and turn toward the saloon.

  He was looking in the back-bar mirror when Jim Garry stepped in. Garry didn’t look at him but came toward the far end of the bar, put his elbows on it and said, “Whisky.”

  Anse watched him in the back mirror, and he had his moment of wondering if Jim Garry had followed him. He tried to remember if he’d seen Garry since Ripple Ford and couldn’t, and suddenly he didn’t care. Since this morning he’d broken every other rule, so why not break the rule of worrying about what a man would do to you?

  Garry finished his drink and then turned to him and said quietly, “Would you be looking for me?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll only ask you that once,” Garry murmured.

  “It better be just once,” Anse replied in a voice touched with truculence.

  Garry paid for his drink and went out, and Anse bought another. He took a second drink because he’d made it a rule all his life to take just one. The compulsion to change everything in the old life was on him now. For sixty years he’d clung to that way of thinking and acting, and it had got him nothing. “Maybe,” he thought wryly, “a different way is better.”

  Jim Garry returned to his seat on the porch and sank into the creaky chair again, his mind at rest. Barden wasn’t looking for trouble: he just wanted to be let alone. The dry rattle of the cottonwood leaves came to him, and he smelled the bitter, pungent odor of desert brush that came off the Long Reach with the stirring of wind. He let the night settle on him, and it was like a healing.

  He’d shod his horse that morning, working with the blacksmith across the way. In the afternoon he settled into this chair and had only left it to eat. During those hours of indolence he had sat in slow judgment of himself and he knew now that his old life was finished. The end of it began that moment in Sun Dust while he stood there on the porch of the Basin House listening to Lufton order him out of town and watched Shotten and Riordan move toward the kill. What had prompted him to do what he did wasn’t clear yet. Even what he was going to do now and where he was going didn’t make much difference. The point was, he was through with the other.

  Back of thought he heard two horsemen coming down out of the hills at the end of the street. Leaning forward in his chair, he listened again, and now it seemed only one horseman.

  Barden’s good night to the bartender was plainly audible from the saloon, and then the swing door droned on its hinges and Barden’s thick body blocked the light.

  Barden now heard the horseman, too, and he looked out into the darkness.

  “Anse,” the horseman called.

  It was Tate Riling.

  Barden paused, and Riling rode up to him. Only his horse and his legs were visible in the light coming through the saloon window.

  “I heard about Fred,” Riling said quietly. “I’ll kill Lufton for that.”

  “He’s dead. What good’ll it do?”

  “Some. It’ll make me feel better.”

  Barden was silent, and in his silence he contrived to communicate a defiance and dislike for Riling that didn’t escape Jim, who was watching this from the darkness.

  “You come all the way over here to tell me that?”

  Riling said, “No. I missed you this morning, but I didn’t know you were here. Why are you?”

&nbs
p; “I’m leavin’ the country.”

  Riling hesitated and then said mildly, “But, man, the fight’s almost won. Both Lufton’s herds are stampeded halfway up the Three Braves.”

  “Who cares?” Anse said bitterly. “God damn you! Do you?”

  Riling didn’t answer, and Barden turned toward the porch. Riling called, “Is Garry here?”

  “Find him yourself,” Barden growled, not even turning. Jim was watching Riling now. He saw him turn in his saddle and look back in the direction from which he had come. Then he raised a hand and moved it away from him in a flat-palmed gesture, afterward riding on to the hotel tie rail. He came up the steps and went into the lobby.

  Jim sat peering out into the darkness by the hills, watching and listening. Once he thought he heard a movement out there and was satisfied. There was another man out there; he must remember that.

  He rose and walked into the lobby and found Riling standing in the doorway, surveying the empty dining room. Riling heard him and turned and smiled swiftly. “Jim. Where you been? I’ve hunted the country for you.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Settlemeir said you took the Commissary road. I took a chance.” He spoke as he came over, and now he stopped in front of Jim. The restlessness of the big man was on him; he looked around the dreary lobby and made a wry face and asked mildly, “What’s the answer? Running out on me?”

  He looked at Jim and grinned and put a hand on his arm and said, “Let’s get a drink. I’ve got news.”

  Jim led him through the lobby door and down the three steps into the saloon, his face expressionless. Riling paused at the bar and said to the bartender, “Give me a bottle and a handful of cigars and then get out.”

  Jim took a rear corner table and put his back to the door. It was a foolish thing to do, but he wanted no suspicion on Riling’s part to mar what was coming. A cold, passionless curiosity was in him as he watched Riling come over with the bottle and the glasses. Riling tossed the cigars on the table and then sank into a chair. His clothes were powdered with a fine dust that sifted out of the creases in his shirt as he moved his thick upper body. He had ridden from the Massacre this morning, but Jim knew he wouldn’t be tired.