by Nelson Nye
If Gert had gone through his pockets, such an expedition might very well have considerable to do with her too obvious anxiety to enlist his aid on behalf of Boxed Y. He was pretty well heeled, having all that money he had taken from Breen save the six hundred bucks he’d left Turner for the roan. Twenty-four hundred simoleons in the pockets of a wounded saddle tramp would go a long ways towards interesting a girl who was scrambling to save a busted cow outfit.
And Gert was plenty cute. She could sure crank out the chin music and he acknowledged to himself that if he hadn’t run across black-haired Marta May first she would probably have succeeded in talking him around. She was stacked up proper with plenty of bulge in all the right places but — compared to Marta May — she had no more chance than a prairie dog running a race with a greyhound.
Marta May was CLASS. She had everything that Gert could show plus culture and refinement. Nor did he consider it any drawback that her old man owned a couple of banks and was well on the way toward annexing two counties.
Lamtrill probably had other plans for her but now that he knew more about her old man Reifel felt no cause for worry on that score. He had been involved with crooks before and dealing with Lamtrill should be like playing poker. Marta May’s autograph ought to be good for any damn raise her old man felt like making.
He must have covered ten miles before he thought of that paper. The thought brought a cold sweat out on his cheeks and he pulled up, frantic, and snatched out his pistol. His hands shook like a drenched dog in a norther. But he finally got it open, snapped a bead on a star and took a squint through the barrel. One look was enough. He ought, by God, to be bored for the simples. He had left that damn paper under his pillow and if he didn’t go back Gert would have it by morning.
He didn’t have to ask himself what Gert could do with it. She wasn’t no fool!
He had left the Boxed Y in a roundabout fashion calculated to mislead anyone who sought to trail him into thinking he’d been aiming for the Pineleno Mountains. He had held to that direction until a series of bare ledges had given him the chance to swing first east then sharply south. It hadn’t mattered then that this had consumed considerable time.
But now it mattered plenty for he had no more time to waste. In much less than a couple of hours it was going to be broad daylight and it would be chewing it pretty goddam fine to go traipsing back there now and get away without detection. He didn’t want no more arguments with Gert and she was generally up at the first crack of dawn.
But he had to have that paper and that was all there was to it. He needed it to strengthen his own hand with Lamtrill. He certainly couldn’t afford to have it fall into Gert’s possession. It wasn’t Lamtrill he was worrying about — he was scared of what it would do to Gert if she found it under his pillow. She’d go up in smoke if she thought, by God, he was quitting Boxed Y to throw in with Lamtrill. She’d be wild enough to put the law on his trail….
He didn’t wait any longer. He sent the roan west at a good fast clip, determined to pick up the Dry Bottom trail — the shortest way to Boxed Y that he knew of. He cut into it ten minutes later and followed it northwest without any easing of Bugler’s pace. The roan was strong and full of oats and willing. In less than an hour he sighted the Kavanaugh ranch cutoff through the oakbrush and juniper. An ancient live oak grew beside the rutted wagon tracks and a weathered board nailed across its trunk had what looked like the Kavanaugh brand burned into it. It was, all right, but Reifel had to make sure. Riding closer he lifted a match in cupped palm — and that was when he caught sight of the handbill.
$500 REWARD, it was headed. But the part that really stopped him read: Wanted for the murder and robbery of Cy Turner.
He stared at the thing until the match burned his fingers, and he still couldn’t get it. If the name had been Schmole he could have savvied the burro; but Turner — shoot fire! All Ben had done had been to bust the guy’s arm.
He was reaching to tear the sheet off the tree when a voice drawled quietly: “This is Burt Mossman talkin’. I got you covered like a tent. If you don’t want to find yourself under a lily, let go of them reins an’ make a grab for the stars.”
Burt Mossman!
That tore it.
Reifel hoisted his hands.
He would sooner have argued with the whole U. S. Cavalry than have waggled one whisker with that jigger on his tail.
Burt Mossman. Oh, Nellie!
12. “DON’T CRY IF YOU GET HURT!”
ARIZONA in ’91 was the wildest region of the entire West. In the decade since the death of Billy the Kid its 114,000 square miles had become the last outpost for all those persons which progress had driven from more civilized places. Its rock-ribbed mountains were crammed with precious minerals, its rolling ranges belly-deep in grass. The silence of its sun-scorched deserts could swallow a man without a trace.
It was the cowman’s paradise, the miner’s mother lode, the bandit’s Valhalla. It bred and gave nourishment to a tumultuous breed of swaggering, swearing, sombreroed centaurs who acknowledged no law save that one forged from steel which they packed on their hips in tied-down holsters. Until lately this product of Mr. Colt’s ingenuity had been all the credentials its denizens found need for; a handy article used both as passport and court of last appeal.
It was final arbiter of many a man’s destiny. It spoke with a vast authority. But in the hands of the average user it no longer provided that measure of security which men in this country had come to depend on.
The telling blow had been struck when Governor Murphy, with little fanfare or warning, hired their range boss away from the Hashknife outfit to put the fear of God on a more solid footing than the local array of owlhooters permitted. This gentleman had done wonders for the Aztec Land and Cattle Company and the governor thought he should be able to work up some kind of organization which would be equally efficacious on behalf of the Territory. This man, said to have cut his teeth on the butt of his daddy’s sixshooter, was Burton C. Mossman. He was hell on rats and in eleven short months, with the aid of thirteen men, had succeeded in making them scarcer than hen’s teeth in well over two thirds of the governor’s jurisdiction. He was Captain of the Rangers and the most legendary lawman in the West of that day.
• • •
“Well,” Mossman said, “what’s it going to be?”
Reifel, facing him across a table in the smoky back room of a Dry Bottom bar, angrily answered, “You don’t give me much choice.”
“Any choice at all is more than you deserve.”
“But I’ve told you,” Reifel growled, “I never killed that bastard. All I did was break his damn arm — there was nothing else ailin’ him when I pulled my freight. Hell, you’ve said your own self he wrote my name with his right hand! How in God’s name could he? I’ve told you twenty times that’s the arm I broke!”
“Yeah, you’ve told me,” Mossman nodded, “but the report I got said nothing about any busted arm.” He looked at Ben sharply. “You’ve got a pretty tough name in the Cherrycows. But I’ll say this for you — up until right now I never heard of you killin’ anybody.”
Reifel grunted.
Mossman said, “How’d you happen to get to wrangling with this feller?”
“We had a little argument over a horse I was buying. That roan outside.”
“Got a bill of sale for it?”
Reifel shook his head.
“How long you known that feller Breen up at Paradise?”
Reifel looked at him carefully. “Not very long.”
“Ever heard of him bein’ called ‘Kid’ or ‘Badger’?”
Reifel’s eyes jumped wide open. Then, abruptly, he snorted. “You’ve got your trails crossed someplace. Breen’s just a two-bit four-flushin’ piker who might snatch the pennies off a dead man’s eyes but — ”
“One of my boys trailed Badger into those mountains. His description fits Breen.”
“Then why’n’t he grab him?”
“Mayb
e he will. He’d lost the trail last I heard. I got Breen’s description from the sheriff up there. Funny thing about that. It seems this Breen has pulled out. Hasn’t shown his face since a guy on a buckskin horse took the Crown King payroll off the El Paso stage.”
Reifel met Mossman’s stare and lacked a whole lot of liking it. Suddenly his eyes were like bright buffed bits of gun steel and the Ranger’s cheeks were too bland by far.
Reifel remembered the lies he had told Lafe’s posse; and the only good thing he could think of right then was the lucky way he had blundered in coming away from Boxed Y without that damned paper. Sheriff Lafe must have known of it. So why hadn’t Mossman searched him? What kind of slick game was this Ranger playing?
He kept his mouth shut and Mossman, continuing to watch him, said: “According to you all you did was to break Turner’s arm. Why have you been hiding out? Why’d you run in the first place?”
“I didn’t run,” Reifel growled. “I ain’t been hiding out.”
“You’ve been at Boxed Y for two weeks.”
“So what? I been flat on my back in a bed!” Reifel told him. “Where the hell did you think I’d be with a hole like that — ”
“That’s the point,” Mossman smiled. “You wouldn’t have covered more’n a hundred miles with a hole like that without you’d damn good reason. I’d like to know what that reason was.”
Reifel kept his lip buttoned.
“Did you expect to be framed for the murder of Turner?”
“Since I didn’t know Turner was going to be murdered how could I expect to be framed for it?”
“Why did you get out of the Cherrycows? You told Lafe you was working for the Rocking Arrow but that outfit never heard of you, feller.” Mossman tugged one of the ends of his mustache. “That’s a pretty good horse you bought off Turner. Must have set you back plenty. He’s no run-of-the-mill cowhorse. He’s a gambler’s horse — the kind a man would want if he was figuring to make a quick getaway. Too, it seems kind of odd that you would hang around Paradise for five or six months and then suddenly pull out on the same night Breen did. The same night that smelter payroll was lifted.”
It was coming now. Reifel braced himself and tried not to cringe from the little cold something that was climbing up his spine.
“You told the sheriff the guy who shot you was on a buckskin horse. You said he had yellow eyes. According to Lafe this guy Breen has yellow eyes. Another coincidence?”
When Reifel didn’t answer the boss Ranger said, “There’s some kind of connection between you and Breen. Why don’t you talk? If Breen put that slug in you why don’t you say so?”
Reifel wondered himself why he didn’t. It was a cinch it was Breen who had knocked off Turner. No one else would have dipped Turner’s hand in that blood to have written Ben Reifel’s name on the floor. That was just the kind of thing Breen would think of because, in addition to putting the law on Ben’s trail, it would convince the gang Ben had plundered the cache. Not one of those bastards would ever doubt he had done it and they would gun him on sight, which was what Breen wanted.
Ben kept his mouth shut. He had told enough lies. Those yarns he had spun for the sheriff had convinced this Ranger that Breen was the man on the buckskin horse. If he admitted to Mossman that Breen had shot him the law would want to know why, and it would want to know too why he hadn’t told the sheriff it was Breen in the first place. And if he told the whole truth he would only be swapping the witch for the devil. Any guy connected with that damned stage robbery would swing sure as shooting if the law could prove it.
Mossman drummed his fingers on the table top softly. He didn’t look much older than Reifel and might have seemed to have been cut from an identical pattern. Each had a certain jauntiness of demeanor, a kind of chilled-lightning stare which could be very disconcerting to the recipients of their attention. Mossman was wirier and half a head taller. But about them both was that same cat-quick litheness, that same grace of motion, the same hard competence and paucity of expression. Products of their age, each reflected his environment and the habit of his thinking in his own particular fashion. They were very human men, quick to anger and brash to recklessness, but there was greater control in the set of Mossman’s lips — a kind of dedication, a singleness of purpose which Ben Reifel’s did not show. And there was the key to the essential difference in their characters. Burt Mossman believed in the laws of the land; Ben Reifel believed laws were made for the morons and that it was all right to break them if you didn’t get caught.
He was a lot less sure of that now than he had been. His experience with Breen had given him cause for a lot of hard thinking. He was willing to admit that he might have been wrong. He had had the right hunch when he’d decided to go straight only, like Black Jack Ketchum, he had waited overlong and done one job too many.
Something of this thinking was in his tone when he said, “I ain’t never cried out of anything yet and I’m not about to start now. If you’re offerin’ me an easement to spill my guts you’re wastin’ your time. I didn’t kill Turner but if you think I did go ahead and take me in.”
“It’s not a question of what I think but of seeing justice done,” Mossman answered. “I think you were lying when you told the sheriff you were shot by a man on a buckskin horse. I don’t think Breen was ever on that horse, but I think he knows who was and I think you know it, too. I think the both of you know who was riding it when that payroll was lifted and I think you think Breen killed that marshal.
“But that’s enough about thinking. Thoughts don’t cut much ice in this country. It’s actions that make the wheels go round, and I’m not askin’ you to rat about anyone. When I want ratting done I’ll hire me some rats.”
He hitched his chair closer, leaned forward across the table with his narrowed eyes very bright and very earnest. “I’m willin’ to believe you didn’t kill Turner. I’m willin’ to believe that you would like to go straight — that, given the chance, you would go straight. If I put a pardon in your hand — if I give you a clean slate — will you bind yourself to do my bidding — to do anything I ask of you?”
Reifel stared at him, stunned.
Mossman repeated it.
Reifel’s tongue licked dry lips. His eyes searched the Ranger’s face incredulously. “My God, Mossman — you don’t mean that, do you?”
“Certainly I mean it. I’m up against a tough deal and I need help bad. I will clear you, Curly, if you’ll do what I ask.”
They looked into each other’s eyes and in the Ranger’s Reifel found honesty, assurance. Twice he tried to speak before he could bend his mouth around the words. And then, before he could frame them, doubt got into his mind with its poison. He had ridden the owlhoot for too long a time to have any real belief left in anything.
His eyes turned ugly and he kicked back his chair. “What kind of a fool do you take me for?”
Mossman’s eyes never wavered. “If I take you for a fool it will be your own fault. This deal is on the level.”
“Yeah? And how long will this pardon be good for? For just a couple of months until the next election? Until I’ve got your chestnuts raked out of the fire? You ain’t kiddin’ me, Ranger! The only pardon I’ll get — ”
“You can read, can’t you?” Mossman asked curtly. He took a leather case from his pocket, poked around in it a moment and extracted a paper which he slid across the table. “Read that.”
It was a pardon, all right, bearing the governor’s own signature and stamped with the official seal of the Territory. Hope leaped in Ben’s eyes and when he’d quit reading Burt Mossman said, “It lacks only your name. Your name will be put on it when you’ve done what I’ll ask you.”
Reifel’s knees felt like rubber. His mind couldn’t grasp it. “And what will it cover?” he asked in a voice that trembled in spite of him.
“It will cover everything you’ve done up to now — except murder. I’ll go to bat for you on Turner. If you’ve told me the truth I’ll see th
at it’s proved. If the coroner’s report shows a broken right arm you’ll get your chance to start over.”
“And if it don’t?”
Mossman’s grin showed the gleam of white teeth. “If it don’t, by God I’ll have the guy dug up! Now what do you say? Will you shake on it, Curly?”
Reifel, about to grasp the Ranger’s hand, drew back. He was suddenly recalling there were conditions to be met, that this coveted pardon would have to be earned. Suspicion turned his voice as grimly bleak as his stare.
“Before we lock hands I better hear the rest of it.”
“You don’t get it on that basis. The governor’s on a spot. As you’ve already pointed out, there’s an election coming up. Murphy has been steppin’ on too many guys’ toes. There’s a lot of hostility to the Rangers in this country and it isn’t all coming from the places you’d expect it.”
He met Reifel’s look straightly. “The governor isn’t dishing out immunity for nothing. What you’ve got to do won’t be by any figuring easy. You’ll live in constant danger. You may be shot. You might be killed. You’ll get no public thanks or credit. But if you come through on this job you’ll get your pardon, Curly. You won’t be asked to account for that long green in your pockets, or for that money you’ve got in the Douglas bank. You won’t be questioned about those Crown King payrolls, or your connection with Breen, Snake Frenston and Crowdy.”
Reifel was amazed at the extent of Mossman’s knowledge. Alarm chased cold chills up his back and fear for a moment almost paralyzed his thinking. But then his wits started working and he saw that — in part, at least — Burt Mossman must be guessing. It was not at all likely, if these things could be proved against him, they’d be offering him a pardon. This made him feel a little more confident until Mossman said, “Well, what’s it to be? Will you take the job or won’t you?”
“I don’t know yet what you’re wanting me to do. I ain’t about to buy no pig in a poke — ”
