Outcasts of Picture Rocks

by Cherry Wilson

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE PAWN

  Race Coulter was watching the closing races from the paddocks and cursing the heavy track that had caused his favorite to be nosed out in two successive events, to the serious impairment of his bankroll and disposition. It was raining, not a rain to drive people in, but a chill, penetrating drizzle that cast a gray pall over the scene, wilting spirits as it did the jockeys’ silks, blending the enlivening sounds of running, band-playing, and human enthusiasm into something curiously like a moan—all sounds except the drip, drip, drip from the paddock’s roof and the monotonous coughing of the young fellow at the fence beside him, who was, many tragic circumstances to the contrary, as indisputably a cowboy, as Race, sleek-haired, shifty-eyed, thin-lipped, and flashy, was the racetrack gambler.

  Annoyed by both sounds and unable to stay the rain, irritably Race broke out: “Confound it, kid, I can’t stand that cough.”

  René Rand looked up. There was a smile on his lips. There usually was—although nobody knew what he had to smile at. “Sorry, Race,” he said in his husky voice, “it’s the best I got.”

  Brutally, Race reported: “You’ve got it bad. Why don’t you do something for it? Go some place and cure it. Some high, dry climate … out West. Ain’t that where you came from?”

  “Yeah,” René owned, and he wasn’t smiling. His boyish face, so tragically thin and drawn, was whiter, if anything. His fine black eyes, by far too bright, were brighter, if that could be, and his frail figure, hunched there against the drizzle, expressive of more than physical misery.

  Struck by a sudden curiosity about him, Race asked: “Kid, what brought you East in the first place?”

  The young man shrugged. “A horse … You wouldn’t savvy, Race.”

  Not savvy? When he’d gone into the very jaws of death for a horse! “It’s the one thing I can savvy,” Race assured him. Insisting, as the boy said nothing: “Come on, kid. Let’s have the story.”

  Swayed by an impulse he could never understand, for he did not like or trust this man: “It was only a cayuse,” the young man began slowly, his eyes with their telltale flame fixed on the slippery track before them, “but the first horse I ever owned. I … I thought a heap of Flash. But I left him in the home corral when I hired out on a roundup one fall. And when I come home, he was gone. My stepdad had sold him to a tenderfoot, who’d shipped him East. Well, after the fireworks, I followed my horse. Two years ago, that was. You see,” he smiled apologetically, “I was just a fool kid then … nineteen and plenty stubborn.”

  Stubborn? Yes! Like Race was about that horse in the Picture Rocks. Eagerly, as though he might find hope for himself in this boy’s experience, he asked, “Did you find your horse?”

  “Easy,” was the slow response, “when I got so I could hunt. I was laid up a long spell first. Pneumonia. Sleepin’ out in the wet, I guess, and short rations. You see, I come on a shoestring, and … it left me bad. Anyway, I located Flash right here in Cleveland. But Major Reeves …”

  “The polo player?”

  “That’s him. That’s why he was so crazy about my horse. Greased lightnin’, Flash was. I’d trained him. He could turn on a dime and give you change. So the major, he wouldn’t give him up.”

  Leaning toward him, Race demanded harshly: “What did you do then?” He had to know what other men did when they ran against a stone wall—just as he’d run against the fortified walls of the Picture Rocks.

  “Oh, I hung around, where I could see Flash now and then, and workin’ for a stake to go home. Workin’ in a roller mill down the Cuyahoga. And the dust … I got no better fast. They let me out. Said it was against health regulations to hire a man with … what I got.”

  Dismally, the rain dripped. The young fellow coughed dismally. But no longer conscious of either sound, Race quizzed, “Why didn’t you go home then?”

  There was pain in every line of that young and wasted form; pain in the eyes lifted to the overcast sky west and then dropped as from something eyes may not look upon; pain in the low evasion. “I like it here, Race … on the tracks. I pick up a little work with the horses. When I get a tip, I bet my nickel’s worth, and get by fine.”

  Race had noticed how everyone around the tracks fell for this sick Western lad. That’s why he had struck up an acquaintance with him—in the hope of having a live tip relayed to him. He could see now why it was. Something about the kid got a man, made you want to help him. The pitiful look of him, that game grin, could get him into anything, might even get Race. It came to Race, then, in a white-hot flash of inspiration. It might even get him into the Picture Rocks Basin!

  Mastering his excitement, warily feeling his way while details of his inhuman scheme took form. “You may get by,” he told René Rand, “but you won’t get well. You won’t last a year here.”

  “Six months,” was the cheerful correction. “The doc’s held a stopwatch on it. It’s the gallopin’ kind … that’s one consolation. Six months, unless …” his voice trailed off.

  “Unless what?” Race pressed.

  “Unless I do what you say … go West.”

  “Well, why don’t you? What’s holdin’ you? Not that cayuse?”

  The young fellow denied this. “I give Flash up long ago. The major treats him fine. He’s livin’ off the fat of the land. He’s made a name for himself. I couldn’t drag him down to a common cow horse.”

  “Then,” probed Race, “what in the name of …?”

  Passionately, René whirled on him, pleading: “Oh, for the love of peace, Race, shut up! Shut up about home! When I can’t even think of it, broke and down!”

  Ignoring this appeal, going more surely toward his goal: “Wire your stepdad,” suggested his tormentor. “He’ll come across.”

  “When he sold my horse?” flashed René furiously. “When I know he’d sell me, if he could! When he always put money ahead of even his own flesh and blood! Worships it, like most men worship their gods! I’d … I’d die first! I broke clean when I broke with him. And if I don’t see him till the Resurrection, it’s plenty soon.” Then, the strength of hot anger spent, he fell weakly against the fence, trembling, coughing.

  Certain of his ground, Race bent over him. “Listen, kid. What would you say if someone offered to pay your way?”

  The young fellow replied fiercely, choking over the words: “I ain’t takin’ charity!”

  “Sure not. I don’t mean that. But suppose some man showed you how you could earn your fare to Arizona, and earn your keep till you got well, and … well, a mighty big stake from there? What would you say then?”

  The young man drew a sharp, rattling breath. Tensely he cried: “I … I’d say my prayers to him.”

  Moved as he never believed he could be moved, gloating over the young fellow’s emotion, thinking how it would have affected a more susceptible man than himself, Race said self-consciously: “We’ll dispense with the prayers, kid. But all the same, I’m hirin’ you to go home.”

  Callous as he was, Race felt a sense of shame at the speed with which the rapt light died out of the young fellow’s face, at his hopelessness. “Yeah? What’s the catch, Race?”

  “There ain’t none, kid. Nothin’ you need to balk at. But there’s risk. You’ll earn all I’m givin’ you. You may be killed. But you’ll go out quick and clean, like a man. Not by inches like you are here. Listen.”

  There in the drizzle, time and place forgotten, Race told the sick fellow of the Picture Rocks Basin, of that stronghold of the Jores, which few men had ever seen, battalioned by mountains that shot into the heavens, rent by rugged canyons, embracing wild forests, of the lake it wore upon its breast, blue with the blue of fathomless depths, the purple blue of the signal rims, the blue of the eyes of the girl named Eden.

  Awesomely telling how the blue waters of this lake lapped the foot of a stupendous cliff, on the sheer face of which
a people, long vanished in antiquity, had crudely painted in eternal red, brown, and blue scores upon scores of gigantic, lifelike figures of warriors with bows and spears—a mighty host that struck awe to all beholders, so that the very rocks of the land were in league with the Jores.

  Of that fortune in horseflesh going to waste, he told him; and of his two attempts at salvage; his two defeats at the Jores’ hands; trying, utterly failing, to describe the stallion.

  “I can’t put him into words,” he raved, memory lifting him to poetic heights and bearing the sick fellow along. “There ain’t words for him. But if there’s a heaven, and horses in it, he’d be king of them. He’s like a horse you’d dream. Black Wing, that’s how he was registered at birth. But he ain’t black. He’s white … no, for white’s cold, and he’s warm, warm as sunshine. Pale cream, you’d call him. With just that little black wing on his hip, the mark, kid, that’s been on every colt of the Crusader strain to upset track dope.

  “And he’s runnin’ wild. Not a mark on him. You know the law of the range? He belongs to the first man to put a brand on him. The Jores … I can’t savvy it. But they’ve left him run. If I can get a rope on him … get him out of that basin … he’s mine. But I can’t even try for him. The Jores would shoot me on sight. But not you, kid. You …”

  “Ain’t worth their lead?” Bitter the smile on René’s lips.

  “You’re sick!” cried Race, exulting in it. “They might take you in. You ain’t anything to be afraid of. See?” Oh, he made it very plain. “Your weakness is my chance. You might get in, when nobody else can.”

  Dropping his voice needlessly, for the last race was run, the crowd gone, and the track left to them, the mud, and the rain. “There’s a secret pass into that basin,” Race rushed on. “It ain’t guarded. No need to guard it. Nobody’ll ever find it from the outside. Pat Dolan’s made one grand try. He’s the sheriff. A smart guy, with ambitions. He’d do his part, if the pass was found. For he can’t get the Jores as it is. Even if he was to get by Sentry Crags, they could slip out the secret pass. But if … listen, kid.

  “Show me that pass, and I can work it slick. I know where I can hire some mighty tough riders, handy with their guns. I’d slip them in the basin to hunt that horse. Meanwhile, the sheriff is tipped off and follows us with a posse. He’ll take care of the Jores, while we round up the stallion.”

  His voice dropped another octave. “See why I’m payin’ your fare West? To find that pass! Go out there, get thick with the Jores, worm your way into their confidence, find how a posse can get in, and then …”

  “Play the Judas.” The young man smiled his scorn.

  “Well,” countered coldly the racetrack man, “ain’t your life worth it?”

  Ask any dying man what life is worth. Yet René Rand resolved not to do it. If he listened, it was for the thrill of hearing someone speak of the Far West—home. Thrilling to the red history of Jores, dead and living, because they were of home, he yet listened, untempted, to Race Coulter’s tempting, “Life, if you win! If you lose, a quick out!”

  His heart quickened at Race’s talk of Eden, Joel Jore’s girl—“a mighty inducement. She’ll be sweet to you, kid, for she’ll pity you. And you know what pity is akin to.”

  He was even fighting back the fury of tortured pride to prolong this talk, wondering at the terror in Race’s eyes as he told of Eden’s mother, Revel. “A thoroughbred, gone wild herself. They’re all afraid of her. She’s got second sight! Savvy? Something guides her, so she can pick up the Bible and open it to the very line that tells you what is to be. And she told me …”

  A shudder went through him, remembering. His small, pale eyes held the glitter of fear. “I’ll never forget it!” he cried shakily. “They had me, the Jore men and that devil, Shang! I thought my time had come. Then she come, walkin’ through the trees. Walkin’ like she was in a trance. She made them free me. And she took the Book out of her dress and read.”

  He swallowed hard. “I’ve had my fortune told with cards, the stars, the lines on my palm, what they see in crystals, and everything. I don’t lay much store by it, although some of the things they told me … but Scripture, kid, you can’t get away from it. And she … she read …” He licked his thin, parched lips.

  Breathless, René cried: “What, Race?”

  “This … ‘And I looked, and behold a pale horse! And his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him!’”

  Although yet to learn in agony how true this prophecy, the young fellow was awed. “Race, the pale horse was …”

  “Black Wing?”

  * * * * *

  That night, alone in the stable room, that wasn’t charity because he kept an eye on things, René Rand knelt over the one bit of home to which he’d clung, the one thing to which any cowboy clings although he lose all else, his saddle. There on his knees, through a sudden mist that quenched the raging fire in his eyes, he looked at it, battered and service-scarred, coated with dust, the killing dust of peopled places. Lovingly, his wasted hands passed over the horn, creased deep that time Flash sat back against a steer at the rodeo in Winnemucca; over the furrow cut deep in the skirt the day he and Flash rolled into the canyon when he was running mustangs; over the scratches inflicted by years of happy, healthy cowboy life; each tear and dent evoking a memory and memory acting as a magic carpet.

  For the low ceiling seemed to rise above him, high as the stainless Western sky. The four walls spread from horizon to horizon. The close, damp air became a dry, warm wind, whose only burden was the invigorating tang of sage and pine. And the joy of living coursed through all his being, as he seemed to feel the lift and rhythm of a horse beneath him.

  Then a paroxysm of coughing seized him. When it passed, he lay crumpled on the dusty saddle, confined by walls and roof again, the taste of blood upon his mouth, and in his heart, mocking its mighty longing, the awful conviction that this chance had come too late. He couldn’t get well.

  “But,” with piteous effort his lips smiled the cry of his heart, “I could … die there!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  STOLEN THUNDER

  Old Dad Peppin’s memory wasn’t what it used to be. “War a time,” he’d boast wistfully, “when I could recollect and greet by name every man who ever stopped at Trail’s End. But faces slip me of late, and the names and facts concernin’ ’em. And I git my dates mixed. Ask me what day of the month the Fourth of July comes on, and I’ll tell you the seventeenth of Ireland, like as not.”

  But it was no trick at all for him to recall the face, name, and facts concerning the man now signing the register, a flashy, horsey hombre, Race Coulter. He had stopped there last fall, a short visit; something fishy about it. He had asked where he could hire a riding outfit, had hinted he was going to prospect, and rode off toward the Montezumas; out just two days and came tearing back, looking like he’d struck a vein of pure trouble; checked out right after.

  Even as these reflections passed through his mind, Dad was amazed to see Race’s face taking on the same expression it had worn when he checked out of Trail’s End. His pen had barely scratched the sheet, dated May 7th, when, suddenly, he stopped and stared, as if he’d hit the mother lode of dire calamity.

  “What’s wrong?” queried Dad curiously.

  Without lifting his eyes, Race pointed to the last signature, harshly demanding: “He’s stoppin’ here?”

  Nearsighted, the old man bent to the page. “Luke Chartres?” Honest pride fired his face. “He is. He allus stops with us when he’s in these parts. Which ain’t often. Not as often as we’d wish. Still, there’s little to bring him to Big Sandy. His interest is racin’ in a big way. Luke’s produced some of the fastest horses in the West on his big Val Verde ranch. You’ve heard of him? One of Arizona’s best-known citizens. Fine old family. The Chartreses hailed from Louisiana originally. Southern aristocrats … like you read about
. And Luke …”

  Rudely interrupting what promised to be an unabridged history of the Chartres family, with which he was perfectly familiar, Race asked: “What’s his business here?”

  “Dunno.” Dad’s wry smile took the edge off the rebuff. “But it’s his, I reckon.”

  “Sure.” Race achieved a grin.

  But once in his room, he cursed the fate that had brought Luke Chartres on the scene at just this time. What business could he have here except to reclaim the horse he had lost? Not Sahra! Even if she had survived the rigors of wild life, the years would have made her valueless. But Black Wing? Why, after all this time? What circumstance had changed? If he had come for the stallion, how did he plan to get him out of the basin? This Race must find out, and soon. He had two days before René came—lucky he’d thought to come on ahead to get everything ready so the kid could get out of town without attracting too much notice. Now, he’d just lay low and find out what the game of Luke Chartres was.

  * * * * *

  Possessing a singular talent for ferreting out information, Race soon discovered that the business of Chartres seemed to be entirely with the sheriff’s office. This bore out his worst fears. Pat Dolan’s one ambition was to raid the Picture Rocks. If Chartres had come for the horse, he would naturally join forces with the sheriff. Just as he had planned on using the law when René found the secret place into the basin.

  But this didn’t prove anything. He had to know more, had to be sure. If Chartres was after Black Wing, he must find some way of queering his game. So he shadowed the racehorse man but without success, until the morning of the day René was due. Then, by sheer luck in which his sleuthing played no part, he got it all in one stunning earful.

  He was at breakfast in the Trail’s End dining room when the two men most in his thoughts walked in. One, tall and stern, with a jaw that shot out, cheeks that sunk in, and, from under his broad-brimmed hat, a white forelock showing that was in striking contrast to his black mustache. He wore a star on his calfskin vest and a holstered six-gun at his hip. Pat Dolan, sheriff.