by Zane Grey
“Son, then why did you ask me for the job?” queried Latch.
“I knew damn wal I could ask so you’d refuse.”
“The boot’s on the other foot now. I’ll gamble on you. Come.”
The cowboy made a gesture of despair, singular in one who seemed so mature in harder ways. But it had an air of finality. Latch thrilled again at some nameless quality familiar to him in other days.
“Wal, dog-gone!” drawled the cowboy, tossing his cigarette and facing Latch with all fire and hostility and aloofness gone. He seemed very young then and singularly winning. “You an’ your daughter are shore chips from the same block. You win, Latch. But, heah’s my condition… I’ll come to you presently, an’ work faithful an’ true, an’ stick till hell freezes over. Only there’s somethin’ I want to do heah first. Never mind. You gotta trust me. Meanwhile tell your daughter I am no-good atall. But you’re not to believe that or anythin’ you heah aboot me. Savvy? Is that clear, Latch?”
“No. It’s not. But I’ll agree and I’ll gamble on you, whatever you do. I’ve had some dealings with men in my day. You’ve got something up your sleeve, son.”
“Aw, it’s only a gun, Latch.”
They shook hands without more words and Latch mounted his horse to turn thoughtfully homeward.
“Wait, boss. I forgot—I shore forgot,” drawled that soft voice over the hitching-rail. “When I first went trail drivin’ they called me Slim Blue.”
Latch had been too generous with gifts of money, cattle, land. He had staked more men than he could remember, only a few of whom stayed on the range. This was in the heyday of his prosperity in 1875 when the number of cattle marketed at Dodge City had grown exceedingly large. The rancher who raised his own stock made enormous profit. Latch, driving thousands of head to market every season, believed his business would increase for years, and hence spent and gave prodigally.
But the years following had been increasingly evil ones. Leighton put on the screws in his demands for money. First he had borrowed and then he had extorted. Satana was easy to appease until all the rum stored in Spider Web Canyon was gone. Then Latch had to buy more and freight it in across the Journado del muerto at enormous expense.
Every year Blackstone and his gang had wintered at Latch’s Field along with other outlaws, some notorious and many unknown. They all came to Latch for money. He was a friend. He had to give to save himself. They knew he had been one of them in earlier years and with the honor of thieves they had never betrayed him. When Blackstone and many other of the leeches who preyed upon him were wiped out in the Point of Rocks ambush, where Buff Belmet turned the tables on the ambushers, Latch was freed of much of the drag upon his resources.
But for him, at least, the advent of the buffalo hide-hunters on the range brought a most disastrous period.
Most of the great cattle barons were located on accessible ranges where cattle-rustling did not become wholesale. Jesse Chissum, of the jingle-bob brand of cattle—a peculiar way of cutting the ear of a calf so that the flap would dance up and down—was located on the Pecos River with other ranchers. He was the only rival of Latch’s in that country, but he suffered comparatively little from rustlers, while during the rise of the hide-hunters to excessive numbers, Latch was hard hit. Among the hordes of these hunters there were many rustlers who profited mostly by their opportunity. One band would ride up from the Canadian River or the Red, make a raid and never come back or leave a trace. Then another band would do the same. Latch felt that he would be reduced to grazing small herds on close ranges that could be patrolled by vaqueros. This would not do for him, nor half pay his expenses.
His call upon Mizzouri, Seth Cole, Bain, and Johnson, increased his suspicion that some one in Latch’s Field was cooperating with the fraudulent hide-hunters or else was rustling on his own hook. Latch employed only Mexicans, in charge of Reynolds and Simmons, and they were not the fighting breed of cowboys. He formulated a plan of combining forces with his old comrades to make a stand against this evil. But he abandoned it when he became convinced that it would bring ruin to them. The amazing fact was that neither Bain, Cole, Johnson, nor Mizzouri was losing any stock. This revelation caught Latch by the head. On any raid of rustlers from the hide-hunting camps below these ranchers would surely lose a few straggling head of cattle. It added to Latch’s problem.
A year or more before he had banked ten thousand dollars in New Orleans for the purpose of making a cherished cattle deal and driving a new herd up from Texas. He had abandoned this, sent word and papers for Estelle to fetch the money, which he thought he had better use to pay long-standing debts.
Minor troubles added not a little to Latch’s worry. Poisoned water, burned haystacks, broken irrigation ditches, cut fences, stolen horses and saddles, disappearance of faithful vaqueros, despoiled orchards, an increasing difficulty in hiring Mexican labor—all these and many more incidents of a rancher’s life began to have a look far from accidental.
Lastly, and more disturbing than all else, of late he had observed a coolness in the attitude of Rankin, the blacksmith, and in Jud Smith, trader and storekeeper, both reliable and honest men who had chosen to settle in Latch’s Field. Also Hep Poffer, the farmer and fruit-tree grafter to whom Latch had paid much money, had been decidedly uncivil of late. Latch had no false pride. He could not chafe under these real or imagined indignities. If they were true they were justified, and they meant that the old suspicion formed at Fort Bent and Fort Union had taken root in the very town Latch had founded, owned, and given away.
So in reality that old specter had never vanished. For himself he cared little about ruin, disgrace, or death—though he would never die at the end of a rope! It was for Estelle that he minded. How poignantly he regretted not having sold out long ago and taken his lass to some distant place! But he loved Latch’s Field and Spider Web Canyon. He had vacillated and lived on until too late. Some day his range would be worth a fortune—one that he swore to leave to Estelle. He must retrench, gird up his loins again, and beat down these baffling unknown foes for the sake of Cynthia’s child.
CHAPTER
14
CORNY in his six years of intensive trail driving had met thousands of men who lived one way or another on cattle. His had been a long search and for every stranger he had at least one question. For a long time he had not been conscious of a singularly acute intuitive genius. Knowledge came to him first through the rare gift of the gunman—to read the intent, the stimulus to action, in the eyes of his opponent. Thereafter he developed the power consciously. He was essentially a lone wolf in soul. But continuous contact with thousands of men along the trail—drivers, cattlemen, buffalo-hunters, scouts, soldiers, adventurers, pioneers, and a horde of the outlawed, had trained him in a marvelous school.
A shadow of the range hovered over Stephen Latch. Corny had sensed this in Estelle’s vague dread—of something, she knew not what—in her simplicity and earnestness to secure his championship of her father. With it returned gossip of the Old Trail. Rumor of Latch’s Field as a rendezvous for outlaws had drifted from camp to camp along the hard-beaten path of cattle empire. Where there was smoke, there must be fire. Corny’s aggressive interest leaped on behalf of Estelle Latch. Just one shadow in her violet eyes—the shadow that hovered over her father—was enough to start the flame always smoldering in his breast. But there seemed to be other incentive, what he could not grasp, unless it was a nameless portent of a part he was destined to play in their lives.
Corny wanted a day, a week, a month, or more to probe into the dens of Latch’s Field, into the dark minds of those inimical to the happiness of the Latches. He wanted to give substance to some intangible thing he felt.
What stranger thing could have come to pass, what stronger proof of his foreboding, than the moment he entered the Hall of Chance that night to encounter Leighton, to see the disfigured face, the brooding eyes of a passion-driven soul, the furrowed brow of a man possessed by devils, to feel anew the icy
sickening freeze of the marrow in his bones at meeting another man he was going to kill. Corny had suffered it often on the trail. But in front of Leighton it was a flashing regurgitation, gone as swiftly as it had come, leaving him cold and sure, secretive and cunning as a snake.
Glancing around the big saloon, at tables and gamblers, through the wide door into the dance-hall, back to Leighton and his several companions at the corner of the bar, Corny felt transported to Dodge or Abilene. Still there was a difference. As he halted he became aware of the familiar searching gaze hard men at a hard period bent upon strangers.
“Howdy, cowboy. Just ride in?” greeted Leighton, sweeping Corny from head to foot. On the return sweep his eyes tarried a shifty instant on Corny’s guns, worn low, dark-butted, dark-sheathed, inconspicuous against his dark garb.
“Yeah. Dog-gone tired, too,” drawled Corny, lazily.
“Looking for anyone?”
“Nope. Not if nobody’s lookin’ for me…. Any sheriffs aboot this heah Latchfield?”
“That’s a good one, Bruce,” said Leighton, turning to one of his comrades, whose features would have marked him in any community. “Latchfield! Funny no one ever connected the two names. Cowboy, you’ve made a good start by naming this town…. And you can rest easy. No sheriff nearer than Dodge. And only one ever tackled the Journado to get heah. He’s daid.”
“Dog-gone! I shore am glad,” replied Corny, with his careless good-natured grin. He knew his part. It was to represent any of a hundred trail drivers he had known. It came like second nature.
“Where from?” queried Leighton’s vulture-beaked companion.
“Hell! Where do I look from?” drawled Corny.
“Hard to say. You got Red River mud on your boots.”
“Shore. I forded the old Red—a last time, I reckon. … From Findlay I rode with Bridgeman’s caravan.”
“Ahuh—Cut off at Long’s Road with the Kiowas escorting Latch’s stage?”
“Nope. I trailed that Indian outfit heah.”
“Have a drink.”
“Wal, thanks. Don’t care if I do…. But I shore gotta swear off on the bottle.”
“You look broke. But you might be heeled. What say?” returned Leighton, as he poured out drinks.
“Wal, I don’t need to be grub-staked…. Heah’s to Latchfield!”
Leighton leaned over the bar with an expression impossible for Corny to read.
“Stranger, excuse a personal question. We’re not inquisitive heah. But I’ve a reason outside of curiosity. …Is your name Cornwall?”
Corny, fortified against any intrusion, hid the leaping pang in his breast and of his amaze. “Nope, my name is Slim Blue.”
“Sorry. You look like a boy I knew years ago.”
“Where?” queried Corny, with just enough casual curiosity.
“I forget. You just reminded me…. Make yourself at home, Blue. We provide entertainment heah for any pocket.”
That had been Corny’s introduction to Leighton and to the activity of this settlement he dominated. Corny affected a natural easy-going negative character, too indifferent to make advances. He strolled and lounged around, he sat for hours doing nothing, he listened when he appeared asleep, and he waited. His part was that of another outlaw passing time.
More than at any time before in his experience, however, boys, men, girls, everyone with whom he came in contact, gravitated to him in friendliness. Corny had only to be his idle careless self. One of Leighton’s dance-hall girls swore she had seen him at Dodge and by her advances subjected him to embarrassment. But by being shy, along with his lazy way, he fooled her, intrigued her, piqued her vanity, and so began to learn the undercurrent of outlaw life in Latchfield.
He would drop into Smith’s store and spend hours over a purchase that both Smith and his pretty daughter believed was but a ruse to bask in the light of her eyes. He often stopped in Rankin’s blacksmith shop, first to have his horse shod, and thereafter to talk. He frequented other stores, always building up his part. He stopped Webb’s runaway team and made the acquaintance of Bartlett through a little kindness. Corny seemed to have an uncanny power to distinguish the honest from the dishonest inhabitants of Latchfield. He grasped that long ago honest settlers had taken up their abode there, ignorant of the nature of their neighbors. Corny had only to meet Mizzouri once to read in his speculative glance that he had a past. Bain, Cole, and the queer negro Johnson, apparently co-ranchers with Mizzouri, offered most alluring subjects for study. They had grown up with Latchfield. Corny began to dig into the origin of this settlement. He found it like digging in hard ground, until he happened to meet a man named Hep Poffer. This individual was a farmer and a grafter of fruit-trees, a genial old soul who saw no ill in anyone or anything. He had a loquacious wife who took a liking to Corny and scolded him for his lazy habits. Infrequently Corny ran into the Kiowa, Hawk Eye, to resume acquaintance with that fascinating Indian. Hawk Eye was something to Latch and nothing to Leighton, a fact Corny pondered over.
All through these summer days Corny did not fail to observe the comings and goings of the Latches and their guests. He watched from afar. He saw them drive by while he lounged on the porch of Leighton’s hall, for anyone to judge him only another questionable character. He never changed his actions one iota to avoid meeting them. Once he ran into Latch, who fixed him with doubtful eyes and said: “You—— ——loafer of a cowboy! What kind of a deal did you give me?” And Corny had drawled: “Howdy boss. Don’t you never think I stacked the cairds?”
Then the momentous time Corny had prepared for rushed upon him so suddenly that it left him breathless, his heart apparently stopped. Estelle confronted him in Smith’s store.
Without any formality of greeting she said, in guarded voice:
“You have failed me.”
“Wal! How-do, Lady,” he drawled, removing his sombrero. “Aboot that job. I’m dog-gone sorry. But I hate work these hot days.”
“Dad told me you wouldn’t come,” she went on, her face pale, her eyes dark in the shaded light of the store. “He said you were no good!… Oh, I was so sick—so furious…. But I hear things about you. Everyone runs to tell me. How handsome, how nice, how friendly you are! This Elsie Smith girl is crazy about you. They say what a pity you are only another rider on the dodge. Another hiding outlaw!”
“Dog-gone! I didn’t dream I was so popular. I shore like that Smith girl. If I wasn’t such a no-good hombre I’d shine up to her.”
“According to gossip you have done so. And she’s not the only one.”
“Who else, Lady? I’m turrible curious,” replied Corny, when indeed he was far from curiosity.
“That Fanny Hand!”
“Wal, what of it? Poor kid! She shore needs a friend. Leighton fetched her heah—promisin’ her Gawd only knows what—an’ makes a dance-hall hussy out of her.”
“I don’t want to hear,” replied Miss Latch, hastily, her chin up. “I want to say this. I told Dad it wasn’t true that you were no good. I tell you that you’re a liar.”
“Wal, that’s short an’ sweet, Miss Latch,” retorted Corny, stung through his mask. There was no use trying to resist this girl. What did those proud dark eyes mean?
“You get this straight, now,” she went on. “You promised to help me. My Dad is in trouble. You would not come. I’ve waited. To all appearances you are a drinking, gambling, flirting young outlaw, hiding away. But I don’t believe it. I shall go on disbelieving it.”
“Thank you…. How long?” queried Corny, huskily.
“I never will believe that.”
“Wal!… Do you remember what I said to you—over my saddle that day?”
“I—I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t forget”
“It’s true. An’ that’s part why I’ve taken the wrong road heah in Latchfield. My other reason was to help your Dad. To find out who his enemies are—what they are doin’…. An’ I’m on the trail.”
“Oh, Corny—forgive me!” she f
altered, her hand going out, to be withdrawn.
“Forgive nothin’,” he returned, abruptly, fighting a mad desire to clasp her to his heart. “Your friends are waitin’. Run along.”
“Will you come to my party?” she asked, eagerly. “Dad has invited everybody except you. Swears he will throw you out. Come—call his bluff. Will you?”
“Yes, on one condition. I cain’t dance much. But I’ll come if—if you’ll slip outdoors a little—so I can talk to you,” said Corny, getting the irresistible, preposterous idea out.
“What have you to tell me? Is it something about Dad?”
“Wal, yes. But that’s not all.”
“Yes, I will—I’ll meet you tonight,” she retorted, staggering him with flashing dark eyes, wide and wild.
“Tonight?”
“Yes. I couldn’t wait…. It’ll be moonlight,” she whispered, hurriedly. “Say nine o’clock! Out in the walnut grove. There’s a huge walnut tree with a crooked trunk. About three hundred yards straight out from our front porch. Adios!’
She was gone. Corny, standing motionless, aghast at his folly, amazed at a complete reversal of his original intention, watched Estelle’s trim form as she left the store with her friends. If that girl really cared for him! While Corny was playing with this passionate thought, the clerk, who happened to be the proprietor, presented himself, and Corny had to flounder around in a disordered mind to recall what he had come to the store for.
Corny had a room on the second floor at the back of Leighton’s hall. He climbed the outside stairway, went in to his room, and sat down beside the small open window. There he sat until dusk, a prey to thoughts and emotions he had never before known. Nine o’clock! He must make himself presentable. He had a rendezvous with the sweetest, loveliest, proudest little lady in all the land. At her wish! Latch would kill him, and deservedly.
