the Tall Stranger (1982)

by L'amour, Louis

  The door slammed open, and Mort Harper shoved into the room. Behind him were four men, their faces hard, their guns ready.

  "What was he doing here?" Harper demanded. "That man's a killer! He's our enemy. Why should he come here?"

  "I don't know why he came!" Crockett said coldly. "He never had a chance to say. Zapata had been waiting for him all evening. He seemed to believe he would be here. When Bannon came in, he fired and missed. He won't miss again."

  Harper stared at him, his face livid and angry under the glistening dampness of the rain. "You seem glad!" he cried.

  "I am!" Crockett said. "That Zapata was a killer, and he deserved killing."

  "And I'm glad," Sharon said, her chin lifted. "I'm glad Bannon killed him, glad that Bannon got away."

  There was an angry mutter from the men behind Harper, but Mort put up a restraining hand. "This sounds like rebellion. Well, we'll have none of that in this camp. I've been patient with you, Sharon, but my patience is wearing thin."

  "Who cares about your patience?" Anger rose in Sharon's eyes. "Your soft talk and lies won't convince us any longer. We want our oxen back, tomorrow! We've had enough of this. We'll get out of here tomorrow if we have to walk."

  "No, you won't," Harper said. "Come on, boys. We'll go now."

  "Let's teach 'em a lesson, boss," one man said angrily. "To blazes with this palaver!"

  "Not now," Harper said. His nostrils were flared with anger, and his face was hard. "Later!"

  When the door closed after them, Tom Crockett's face was white. "Well, Sharon," he said quietly, "for better or worse, there it is. Tomorrow we may have to fight. Your mother helped me fight Indians once, long ago. Could you?"

  Sharon turned, and suddenly she smiled. "Do you need to ask?"

  "No," he smiled back, and she could see a new light in his eyes, almost as if the killing of Zapata and the statement to Harper had made him younger, stronger. "No, I don't," he repeated. "You'd better get some sleep. I'm going to clean my rifle."

  Chapter VII

  Rock Bannon's steel-dust stallion took the trail up the canyon at a rapid clip. They might follow him, Bannon knew, and he needed all the lead he could get. Some of those men had been in these hills for quite some time, yet if he ever got away into the wilderness around Day's River, they would never find him.

  Shooting it out with six or seven killers was no part of his plan, and he knew the teamsters who had come to Poplar were just that, a band of renegades recruited from the scourings of the wagon trains passing through the fort. After the immediate dash, however, he slowed down to give the steel-dust better footing.

  He turned northeast when he came out of Poplar Canyon and rode down into a deep draw that ended in a meadow. The bottom of the draw was roaring with water that had run off the mountain, but as yet it was no more than a foot deep. Far below he could hear the thunder of Day's River, roaring at full flood now.

  The canyon through the Narrows would be a ghastly sight with its weight of thundering white water. Always a turmoil, now it would be doubled and tripled by the cloudburst. Rain slanted down, pouring unceasingly on the hills.

  The trail by which he had come would be useless on his return. By now the water would be too deep in the narrow canyon up which he had ridden. He must find a new trail, a way to cut back from the primitive wilderness into which he was riding, and down through the valley where Freeman had been killed, and then through the mountains.

  Briefly, he halted the big stallion in the lee of a jutting shoulder of granite where wind and rain were cast off into the flat of the valley. Knowing his horse would need every ounce of its strength he swung down, and, his shoulder against the rock, he studied the situation in his mind's eye.

  His first desperate flight had taken him northwest into the wild country. Had he headed south he must soon have come out on the plains beyond the entrance to Bishop's Valley where he would have nothing but the speed of his own horse to assist his escape.

  He was needed here, now. Any flight was temporary, so in turning north he had kept himself within striking distance of the enemy. His problem now was to find a way through the rugged mountain barrier, towering thousands of feet above him, into Bishop's Valley, and across the valley to home.

  No man knew these mountains well, but Hardy Bishop knew them better than anyone else. Next to him, Rock himself knew them best, but with all his knowledge they presented a weird and unbelievable tangle of ridges, canyons, jagged crests, peaks and chasms. At the upper end of the valley the stream roared down a gorge often three thousand feet deep, and with only the thinnest of trails along the cliffs of the Narrows.

  The isolated valley might have been walled for the express purpose of keeping him out, for as he ran over the possible routes into the valley, one by one he had to forget them. Bailey's Creek would be a thundering torrent now, water roaring eight to ten feet deep in the narrow canyon. Trapper's Gulch would be no better, and the only other two routes would be equally impassable.

  Rock stared at the dark bulk of the mountain through the slanting rain. He stared at it, but could see nothing but Stygian darkness. Every branch, every rivulet, every stream would be a roaring cataract now. If there were a route into the valley now, it must be over the ridge. The very thought made him swallow and turn chill. He knew what those ridges and peaks were in quiet hours. They could be traveled, and he had traveled them, but only when he could see and feel his way along. Now, with lightning crashing, thunder butting against the cliffs, and clouds gathered around them, it would be an awesome inferno of lightning and granite, a place for no living thing.

  But the thought in the back of his mind kept returning. Hardy Bishop was alone, or practically so. He had sent Red to the line cabin nearest Harper with most of the fighting men. Others were in a cabin near the Narrows, and miles away. Only two men would be at home besides the cook.

  Rock Bannon did not make the mistake of underestimating his enemy. Mort Harper had planned this foray with care. He would not have begun without a careful study of the forces to be arrayed against him. He would know how many men were at the line cabin, and the result of his figuring must certainly be to convince him that the ranch house was alone, and Hardy Bishop, the heart, soul and brain of the Bishop strength, was there.

  There was a route over the mountain. Once, by day, Bannon had traveled it. He must skirt a canyon hundreds of feet deep along a path that clung like an eyebrow to the sheer face of the cliif. He must ride across the long swelling slope of the mountain among trees and boulders, then between two peaks, and angle through the forest down the opposite side.

  At best it was a twelve-mile ride, and might stretch that a bit. Even by day it was dangerous and slow going. And he needed only his own eyes to convince him that lightning was making a playground of the hillside now.

  "All right, boy," he said gently to the horse. "You aren't going to like this, but neither am I." He swung into the saddle and moved out into the wind.

  As he breasted the shoulder of granite, the wind struck him like a solid wall, and the rain lashed at his garments, plucking at the fastenings of his oilskin. He turned the horse down the canyon that would take them to the cliff face across which he must ride. He preferred not to think of that.

  Drawing near, the canyon walls began to close in upon him until it became a giant chute down which the water thundered in a mighty Niagara of sound. Great masses of water churned in an enormous maelstrom below and the steel-dust stallion snorted and shied from its roaring.

  Rock spoke to the horse and touched it on the shoulder. Reassured, it felt gingerly for the path, and moved out. A spout of water gushing from some crack in the rock struck him like a blow, drenching him anew and making the stallion jump. He steadied the horse with a tight rein, then relaxed and let the horse have its head. He could see absolutely nothing ahead of him.

  Thunder and the rolling of gigantic boulders reverberated down the rock-walled canyon, and occasional lightning lit flares that showed him g
limpses of a weird nightmare of glistening rock and tumbling white water that caught the flame and hurled it in millions of tiny shafts on down the canyon.

  The gray walked steadily, facing the wind but with bowed head, hesitating only occasionally to feel its way around some great rock or sudden, unexpected heap of debris.

  The hoarse wind howled down the channel of rock, turning its shouting to a weird scream on corners where the pines feathered down into the passage of the wind. Battered by rain and wind, Rock Bannon bent his head and rode on, beaten, soaked, bedraggled, with no eyes to see, only trusting to the surefooted mountain horse and its blind instinct.

  Once, when the lightning lifted the whole scene into stark relief, he glimpsed a sight that would never leave him if he lived to be a hundred. For one brief, all-encompassing moment he saw the canyon as he never wanted to see it again.

  The stallion had reached a bend, and, for a moment, hesitated to relax straining, careful muscles. In that instant, the lightning flared.

  Before them the canyon dropped steeply away like the walls of a gigantic stairway, black, glistening walls slanted by the steel of driving rain, cut by volleys of hail, and accompanied by the roar of the cataract below.

  Two hundred feet down the white water roared, and banked in a cul-de-sac in the rock was a piled-up mass of foam, fifteen or twenty feet high, bulging and glistening. At each instant wind or water ripped some of it away and shot it, churning, down the fury of raging water below. Thunder roared a salvo, and the echoes responded, and the wild cliff-clinging cedar threshed madly in the wind as if to tear free its roots and blow away to some place of relief from the storm.

  Lightning crackled, and thunder drummed against the cliffs, and the scene blacked out suddenly into abysmal darkness. The steel-dust moved on, rounding the point of the rock, and starting to climb. Then, as if by a miracle, they were out of the canyon, but turning up a narrow crevice in the rock with water rushing, inches deep, beneath the stallion's feet. A misstep here and they would tumble down the crevice and pitch off into the awful blackness above the water. But the stallion was steady, and suddenly they came out on the swell of the mountain slope.

  The lightning below was nothing compared to this. Here darkness was a series of fleeting intervals shot through with thunderbolts, and each jagged streak lighted the night like a blaze from Hades. Gaunt shoulders of the mountain butted against the bulging weight of cloud, and the skeleton fingers of long-dead pines felt stiffly of the wind.

  Stunned by the storm, the stallion plodded on, and Rock swayed in the saddle, buffeted and hammered, as they walked across that bare, dead slope among the boulders, pushing relentlessly against the massive wall of the wind. A flash of lightning and a tree ahead detonated like a shell, and bits of it flew off into space with the wild complaint of a ricocheted bullet. The stub of the tree smoked, sputtered with flame, and went out, leaving a vague smell of charred wood and brimstone.

  A long time later, dawn felt its way over the mountains beyond and behind him, and the darkness turned gray, and then rose as flame climbed the peaks. Rock rode on, sodden, beaten, overburdened with weariness. The high cliffs behind him turned their rust-colored heights to jagged bursts of frozen flame, but he did not notice. Weary, the stallion plodded down the last mile of slope and into the rain-flattened grass of the plain.

  The valley was empty. Rock lifted his red-rimmed eyes and stared south. He saw no horsemen, no movement. He had beaten them. He would be home before they came. And once he was home and could stand beside the big old man who called him son, they would face their trouble together.

  Let Harper come; he would learn what fighting meant. These men were not of the same flesh or the same blood, but the response within them was the same, and the fire that shaped the steel of their natures was the same. They were men bred to the Colt, bred to the law of strength. Men who knew justice, but could fight to defend what was theirs, and what they believed.

  He was not thinking that. He was thinking nothing. He was only moving, and the steel-dust walked on into the ranch yard. Rock fell rather than stepped from the saddle. Springer rushed out to get his horse.

  "My stars, man! How'd you get here?"

  "Over the mountain," Bannon said, and walked toward the house.

  Awed, Springer turned and looked toward the towering, six-thousand-foot ridge. "Over the mountain," he said. "Over the mountain!" He stripped the saddle from the big horse and turned it into the corral, and then almost ran to the bunkhouse to tell Turner. "Over the mountain!"

  Hardy Bishop looked up from his great chair and his eyes sharpened. Rock raised a hand, then walked on through the room, stripping off his soaked clothing as he went. When he reached the bed he pulled off one boot, then rolled over and stretched out, his left spur digging into the blanket.

  Bishop followed him to the room and stared down at him grimly; then he walked back and dropped into the chair. Well, he reflected, for that he could be thankful. He had a man for a son.

  It had been a long time ago when he first came into this valley with old John Day. They had come down through the Narrows and looked out over the wide, beautiful length of it, and he had seen what he knew he was looking for--he had seen Paradise.

  There were men in the West then, men who roamed the streams for beaver or the plains for buffalo. They lived and traded and fought with the Indians, learned their ways and went them one better. They pushed on into new country, country no white man had seen.

  There were men like John Coulter, who first looked into the Yellowstone region, old Jim Bridger who knew the West as few men did. There were John Day, Smith, Hoback, Wilbur Price Hunt, Kit Carson and Robert Stuart. Most of them came for gold, but there were a few even then who looked for homes, and of the first was Hardy Bishop.

  He had settled here, buying the land from the Indians, and trading with them long before any other white man remained in the region. Once a whole year had passed during which he saw not even one trapper.

  The Kaws were usually his friends, but the Crows were not, and occasionally raiding parties of Blackfeet came down from the north. When they were friendly, he talked or traded, and when they wanted to fight, he fought. After a while even the Crows left him alone, learning friendship was more profitable than death, and many had died.

  Bad days were coming. From his seat in the hidebound chair, Hardy Bishop could see that. The trouble with Indians would be nothing to the trouble with white men, and he was glad that Rock was a man who put peace first, but who handled a fast gun.

  He raised his great head, his eyes twinkling. They were keen eyes that could see far and well. Even the Indians respected them. He could, they said, trail a snake across a flat rock, or a duck downstream through rough water. What he saw now was a horseman, riding toward the ranch. One lone horseman, and there was something odd in the way he rode.

  It was not a man. It was a woman--a white woman. Hardy Bishop heaved himself ponderously from the chair. It had been almost ten years since he had seen a white woman! He walked slowly to the door, hitching his guns around, just in case.

  The sun caught her hair and turned it to living flame. His dark eyes kindled. She rode up to the steps, and he saw Springer and Turner in the bunkhouse door, gaping. She swung down from her black mare and walked over to him. She was wearing trousers and a man's shirt. Her throat was bare in the open neck. He smiled. Here was a woman!

  Sharon looked up at Bishop, astonished. Somehow, she had always known he would be big, but not such a monster of a man: Six-four he stood in his socks, and he weighed three hundred pounds. His head was covered with a shock of iron-gray hair, in tight curls. His eyes twinkled, and massive forearms and hands jutted from his sleeves.

  "Come in! Come in!" he boomed. "You'll be Sharon Crockett, then. I've heard of you. Heard a sight of you!" He looked around as she hesitated on the steps. "What's the matter? Not afraid of an old man, are you? Come in."

  "It isn't that. Only we've come here like this--and it was your
land, and--"

  "Don't explain." He shook his head. "Come in and sit down. You're the first white woman who ever walked into this house. First one ever saw it, I reckon. Rock, he's asleep. Dead to the world."

  "He's safe then?" she asked. "I was afraid. I saw them go after him."

  "There was trouble?" He looked at her keenly. "What happened?"

  She explained the killing of Pete Zapata, and what happened afterward. "That's why I'm here," she said. "In a way, I'm asking for peace. We didn't know. We were foolish not to have listened to Rock in the beginning, when he told us about Mort. My father and the settlers want peace. I don't know about Pike Purcell and Lamport, but I can speak for the rest of us."

  Bishop nodded his head. "Rock told me what he was goin' for. So he killed Zapata? That'll please the boys." He turned his head. "Dave!" he bellowed.

  A face covered with a shock of mussed hair and beard shoved into the door. "Bring us some coffee! And some of that cake! We've got a lady here, by--" He flushed. "Excuse me, ma'am. Reckon my manners need a goin' over. We cuss a sight around here. A sight too much, I reckon. I ain't never figured on gettin' into heaven, anyways. I been pretty much of a sinner, and not much of a repenter. Reckon they'd have to widen the gate some, anyway; I'd be a sight of weight to get in. Most likely they'd have to put some cribbin' under the cloud I set on, too."

  He chuckled, looking at her. "So you're the girl what's goin' to marry Rock?"

  She jumped, and flushed. "Why! Why, I--"

  "Don't let it get you down, ma'am! Reckon I'm a blunt old codger. It's true enough, the boy ain't said a word to me about it, but I can see what's in his eyes. I ain't raised the lad for nothin'. When he took off on this rampage, I was hopin' he'd find himself a gal. You like him, ma'am?" He looked at her sharply, his eyes filled with humor. "You goin' to marry him?"

  "Why, I don't know," she protested. "I don't know that he wants me."

  "Now listen here! Don't you go givin' me any of that demure, folded-hands palaver. That may go for those young bucks, but not for me. You know's well as I do if a woman sets her cap for a man he ain't got a chance. Only if he runs. That's all! Either give up and marry the gal or get clean out of the country and don't leave no address behind. Nor no trail sign, either!