The High Graders

by Louis L'Amour

  Anger filled him. Ben was a damned fool. Didn’t he know a man like Mike Shevlin would take a lot of killing?

  There were some who might low-rate Mike Shevlin, but Gentry was not one of them. He had always known there was a tiger in Shevlin, and he had seen it loosed a time or two. And this Shevlin who had come back to Rafter was a far cry from the tough but unseasoned boy who had left.

  Red was a stupid man, and a talkative, boastful man. As he finished his second drink he realized that he held an enormous piece of information, and it was too much for him. Deep within him he understood that he should repeat nothing of what he knew—but wasn’t Gentry one of the outfit?

  “Gib,” he said, leaning closer, “you don’t figure me for knowing anything, but I bet I know something you don’t. Ben has him a little list, a death list. And Shevlin is number one on that list.”

  Red put down his glass, waiting for some kind of reply, but Gentry waited, seeming to ignore him.

  “You’ll see, when Shevlin turns up missing.”

  Red walked outside, the batwing doors swinging behind him. Within a few minutes he would be on his way, and he would have forgotten his loose-tongued talk. But Gentry would not forget it, for Gentry knew who was at Boulder Spring.

  He had stumbled on the knowledge by accident, and had kept it to himself. He had used his head in not mentioning it to Stowe, but now he realized that he was starting a bit late to use his head.

  He was, he reflected bitterly, just beginning to grow up, and he was coming to realize that he had spent most of his life being something of a damned fool. When the country was overrun with cattle, many of doubtful ownership, it had been fun to brand a few head, drive them to some out-of-the-way market, and then spend the money on a big wing-ding– come riding horses into saloons and shooting out a few street lamps or windows had been part of the fun. And when the high-grading started it had seemed no different from the rustling.

  Befuddled with drink as he was, his mind began to gnaw slowly at the problem, puzzling over it in a way he never would have done if cold sober. Red had said that Shevlin was first on that list, but who else was listed?

  Ray Hollister?

  He sorted around in his mind for other names.

  Shevlin and Hollister, both logical enough. But a list implied more than two. Who, then, were the others?

  Gentry himself was to come in for a large share of that high-graded gold when it was finally disposed of ... but suppose, just suppose, that his name was also on that list?

  He tossed off the rest of his drink and turned from the bar. His shoulder collided with the doorjamb as he went out, lurching across the walk to the edge, where he stared up the darkening street.

  That man out at Boulder Spring was Lon Court

  . Gentry, who fancied himself good with a gun, was simply a hell-for-leather, draw-and-blast-‘em type of fighter. Lon Court

  was a killer for pay. He was a meat-hunter, a man who worked with a long-range rifle and careful planning, who killed the way some men branded stock or stacked wheat. He was cold, deadly, and efficient.

  Standing alone on the empty street, Gentry suddenly knew he was no longer in a quandry. For the first time, his life held definite purpose.

  In that stark moment on the street his mind cleared. When most men had gone to their suppers he stood there alone, and was aware of his aloneness; and he realized that in all his careless, heedless young manhood the closest thing to a friend he had ever had was Mike Shevlin.

  The rest of the old crowd were gone. They had drifted away, become family men, or had been killed at work or died at the end of a rope or by the gun. He and Shevlin were the only ones left.

  There was Ben Stowe, of course, but where the others had been wild and reckless, Ben had always been cold and ruthless, working for every last buck, and the hell with anybody who got in the way.

  Of just one thing Gentry was sure now. Mike Shevlin was too good a man to be shot from ambush by a man like Lon Court

  . He strode down the street to the livery stable and claimed his horse.

  “You seen Shevlin?” he asked Brazos. His speech was thick, but to himself his purpose was clear. “I got to see him. Right away.”

  Brazos threw him a sharp glance. Gentry was drunk, yes, but he wasn’t fighting drunk. What showed in his eyes was anxiety, not animosity.

  “He headed out toward Parry’s claim,” Brazos said. “Over in the box canyon.”

  Gentry stepped into the saddle and rode into the night. Drunk or sober, he had always been able to ride anything he could get astride of. Now the night air began to clear his whiskey-fogged mind. One thing stood out; Lon Court

  had a little list.

  Shevlin, Hollister, Babcock ... who else? Why, you damned fool, he told himself, your name will be on that list!

  After all, what was he to Stowe? There had never been any sentiment in Stowe, but always plenty of greed; and now when Gentry’s mind was capable of thinking, and he remembered that his own share of that gold would come to more than a hundred thousand dollars, he had the answer. Ben Stowe wouldn’t share that kind of money with anybody.

  Somebody, Gentry had never known who, must have mortgaged everything he owned to put up the cash to buy the gold from the stores, an operation handled by Stowe himself. Only Stowe, his unknown backer, Ray Hollister, and Gentry himself knew the setup.

  Ben Stowe had been hot to have Hollister hunted down and killed; then it would surely be Gentry’s turn. After that, who would be the next target in the shooting gallery?

  Chapter 8

  THE SOFT desert night, dark beneath the stars, seemed still, yet it was a night of restlessness, a night of movement.

  Ben Stowe had returned to his desk, irritable at the necessity for rearranging plans because of Mike Shevlin, but not actually worried by it. Within an hour Lon Court

  would have his message, and the message called for immediate action.

  In his room in the jail building, Wilson Hoyt lay awake. He had made his final rounds, and all had been in order, yet his instinct warned him that behind the soft darkness and the quiet, trouble stirred.

  Throughout his life he had ridden on the side of the law. Of course, in every community where he had held office there were certain things he was expected to overlook, because the town gave its tacit consent to them. There had been towns where men carried guns because it was the thing to do; there were other towns, in more thickly settled communities, where guns were not allowed to be carried, and in those towns he had forbidden strangers to carry them within the city limits.

  His role, as he saw it, was not to take care of morals but to keep the peace. In a life on the frontier he had come to accept rough living by rough men, and he interfered only when such a way of living threatened the peace of the town and its citizens. He was here to prevent disorderly conduct, within reason, to prevent theft or murder, and to punish the offenders if such things were attempted or carried out. Here, the town had accepted high-grading as a fact of its community life, so he had done the same.

  He had been warned that a man named Ray Hollister would come to town one day and try to cause trouble, and he had been told that Hollister was a dangerous man. Wilson Hoyt had checked the records and the memories of Hollister and had found this to be true. The man was undoubtedly a trouble-maker.

  But now this man Shevlin had appeared in town and had laid it on the line for him. Wilson Hoyt knew that the time had come when he must take a stand.

  Trouble was surely here. It was being brought about by high-grading, and the peace of his town, quiet until now, was to be ripped apart. Shevlin had given him a choice, and Wilson Hoyt lay awake this night, trying to make up his mind what to do—and how to do it.

  His instinct, and his better judgment too, told him that the thing to do was to end the high-grading and deliver the gold to its owners. He would, of course, promptly be fired, but that did not especially disturb him. He had been hunting a job when he had found this one. He could lo
ok for one again.

  As Hoyt lay on his cot trying to make up his mind, Ben Stowe chewed on a dead cigar; and at Dr. Rupert Clagg’s, Mike Shevlin was sitting down at a table with the doctor, his wife and daughter, and Laine Tennison.

  Not many miles away, Red was arriving at Boulder Spring with a message for Lon Court

  ; and Gib Gentry, wishing to warn his friend, was taking the trail to Burt Parry’s claim.

  Ben Stowe foresaw no interruption in his plans that could last more than a few days. Shevlin was a dangerous obstacle, but Lon Court

  would remove that obstacle smoothly and efficiently. Ray Hollister was somewhere around, but the ranches of his friends were watched day and night, and when he was located he would be picked up.

  But even as he sat alone in his office, Ben Stowe had no way of knowing that there was a meeting at the Three Sevens.

  The ranch house was ablaze with lights, and Hollister was there, seated at the head of the table. Eve Bancroft was watching him with admiring eyes; Babcock loitered at the back of the room. The others at the table were ranchers or their foremen, and they were listening to Hollister.

  On the rugged slope of the mountain, half a mile or more away, Ben Stowe’s watcher lay sprawled on his back staring at the stars with wide-open, unblinking eyes. There was little about him that resembled anything human, for he had been roped and dragged for two miles along the rough mountain through broken lava and cactus, bunch grass and cat-claw. Ray Hollister had done the dragging, then had shaken loose his loop and ridden away. Babcock, more merciful, had paused by the man who looked up at him, ruined beyond recovery, but still conscious. “That draggin’ wasn’t my idea,” Babcock said, and fired the bullet that put the dying man beyond misery.

  The riders at the Three Sevens all wore guns. On their horses there were Winchesters. They had come prepared to attack the monster that was destroying their cattle business. They would blow up the mine and drive out Ben Stowe and his crew; then the ranchers’ water would be pure again, their business would once more be the focal occupation of the Rafter country.

  They were, on the whole, honest, forthright men, protecting their livelihood by the only means they knew, protecting, as they believed, their range land from destruction. They were men born to a life of violence, men who did not approve of violence but who had been led to its use by a fanatic, a fanatic who was also an envious, embittered man, fighting tooth and nail for a position in the world that nothing fitted him to hold.

  Dr. Rupert Clagg faced Mike Shevlin across the table, over their teacups.

  Dottie and Laine sat with them.

  Dr. Clagg, who had seen others like Mike Shevlin in many places in the West, knew what a force such a man could be. On his occasional journeys back to the East, he had become impatient with those who spoke with tolerant smiles of the West, or of what they referred to as “the western myth.” Back of every myth there is a stern, harsh reality shaped by men and women of truly heroic mold. Those soft-bellied ones who come later find it easy to refer to things beyond their own grasp as myth; but the men Dr. Clagg had known were men who created myth every day of their lives, usually without any consciousness of doing so, but quite often with awareness that they were experiencing a life that was extraordinary.

  Dr. Clagg had been in Dodge when the twenty-eight buffalo hunters who made the fight at Adobe Walls against more than a thousand Indians, returned from their fight. He was familiar, as were all western men, with the escape of John Coulter from the Blackfoot Indians, a run compared to which the run from the battlefield of Marathon pales to insignificance. He knew the story of Hugh Glass and the grizzly; the story of the ride of Portugee Phillips through a raging blizzard and thousands of Indians to bring help to Fort Phil Kearny; and he knew well the story of the Alamo.

  The stuff of which such myths are made was born every day in the West, but at the moment of birth they were not myth; they were hard reality, the very stuff of life itself.

  Dr. Rupert Clagg, who was more of such a man as these than he himself realized, recognized another in Mike Shevlin.

  “I’m sorry to be so blunt,” Shevlin said, “but there’s no other way of putting it. Ma’am,” he turned to Laine—“I want you to leave town. I want you out of here on the first stage in the morning, at the latest, but I’d prefer that you’d let me drive you out in a buckboard before daybreak.”

  “It’s as serious as that?” Clagg asked.

  Mike Shevlin outlined the situation as he saw it. He told them what he had done about both Ben Stowe and Wilson Hoyt.

  “And the gold?” asked the doctor. “You still don’t know where it is?”

  “No. I’ve got a hunch, but it doesn’t shape up to much. Only I think they’ll make a break to get it out of here. I think they will figure it had better go now, for they may not get another chance any time soon. And they won’t.”

  “I will not go.” Laine Tennison spoke firmly. “I have business here, and I refuse to be run out of town. I shall stay right here and see it through.”

  “Now listen—was Mike began.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Shevlin.” She smiled suddenly. “I think you knew all the time that I wouldn’t go, although I know you had to try. ... No, I shall stay.”

  She glanced at his cup. “Mr. Shevlin, you aren’t drinking your tea.”

  He gulped it down, burning his mouth a little, and wanted to swear, but refrained.

  “You do not know who is in this with Stowe?” Clagg asked.

  “I have an idea.”

  “Clagg Merriam?”

  Shevlin looked hard at Dr. Rupert. “That’s who I had in mind.”

  “So had I,” Clagg said, and added, “My remote cousin has always been well off. But I know he has been strapped for money for some time now, and he is not the man to mortgage anything unless the return promises to be more than adequate.”

  For a few minutes, nobody spoke. They sipped their tea in silence, and then Laine said, “Mr. Shevlin, I am afraid I am going to discharge you.”

  “Why?”

  “You mustn’t risk your life for me.”

  He grinned at her. “Ma’am, you’ve made a mistake. I am not risking it for you, but for ten per cent of half a million dollars, and for Eli Patterson.” His eyes twinkled. “Although I’d say if I was planning on risking my life for anybody, you’d be about the prettiest reason I could find.”

  Laine flushed, but she was not to be turned aside. “A foolish reason, Mr. Shevlin. A girl would want a live man, not a dead one.”

  “We have simple feelings out here, Miss Tennison,” Shevlin said. “We’re not a complicated folk. If a man wants to be bad or mean out here in the West, there’s not much to stop him if he’s big enough and tough enough to get away with it.

  “On the other hand, if a man is honest it is because he wants to be. It isn’t like back east, where there’s the law and all. Out here there’s mighty little gray, it is black or white, because there’s no restraint, not even much in the way of public opinion—except as to cowardice or the value of a man’s word.

  “And when it comes to a fight, a man can’t walk away from it if he’s made it his fight. Not and continue to live in the West. You would want a live man, I’m sure, but you’d also want one who lived up to what he believed. Ma’am, I think this here is my fight now, just as much as it’s yours, and I don’t want a dime of your pay.”

  He got up and took up his hat. “I’m going out there now and build the biggest fire anybody ever built. I’m going to bust everything wide open and scatter the pieces so far Mr. Ben Stowe will never be able to put them together again.

  “I’m not a smart man, Miss Tennison, so I’m going to charge in, head down and swinging. You just keep out of the way.”

  Brazos was dozing in his chair when Shevlin came up to the door of the stable. Startled, the old hostler stared up at him.

  “You see Gib Gentry? He started out your way, a-huntin’ you.”

  “I didn’t go out there.�
�� Shevlin glanced up the dark street, then stepped into the stable, away from the light. He had left his horse a few yards up the street in the shadows.

  “Brazos, where does Mason live?” he asked.

  Brazos looked at him slowly, carefully, then indicated an alley across the street. “About a hundred yards back of that alley, in a long shack with three windows on this side. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks,” Shevlin stepped outside.

  “He won’t be alone,” Brazos spoke after him. “Deek Taylor will be with him.” Deek Taylor was a tough man, a very tough man.

  Mike Shevlin mounted his horse and rode across the street and up the alley. He stopped near the long cabin and got down. He went up to the door and tried it. It did not open, so he put a shoulder against it and smashed in.

  “Who the hell is that?” Mason’s voice said sleepily.

  Shevlin stood to the right of the door, listening. He had heard a sharp cessation of breathing somewhere ahead of him. “Strike a light,” he said. “I want to talk.”

  But at the same moment he struck a match himself, and saw a coal-oil lamp on the table before him. Lifting the still warm chimney, he touched the match to the wick. Mason had his head lifted and was blinking at him.

  Shevlin looked toward the other occupied bunk. Deek Taylor, a lean, lantern-jawed man with hard eyes, was there and he was looking at Shevlin with no pleasure.

  “I’m talking to him,” Shevlin said, jerking a thumb at Mason. “Are you in this or out of it?”

  “Well, now, that depends.”

  “Not a damn bit, it doesn’t. You speak up now. If you’re in it, you can have a belly full. If you’re out of it, you keep your trap shut and lie quiet and you won’t get hurt.”

  “Hurt?” Taylor swung his legs to the floor. “Well, now—was...”

  As his feet hit the floor, Mike Shevlin grabbed the front of his long-johns and jerked him up out of the bunk. As he jerked, he swung a rock-hard fist. Taylor tried to straighten up, he tried to turn, but the fist smashed him on the jaw, and again in the face, then jerked him back to meet the punches. A hard slug in the belly pushed him into a corner.