by Paul Lederer
‘No, I’m not,’ Laredo said evenly. ‘If you think there is someone else handy to help you out of your predicament, tell me. Go to him. Although by now I imagine there’s a price on all of your heads and if you leave the Tanglewood, you’re in serious danger of being arrested – or worse,’ he said turning his cold eyes now on the very young-appearing Kate Cousins who had come forward to cling to Dan Sumner’s arm.
‘He’s right, I’m afraid,’ Trace Dawson said with some weariness. By an unvoiced vote he had assumed the role of leader of the gang. As a former cavalry officer, he was simply more experienced than the others, but this was beyond his experience. Robbing the Lordsberg bank had seemed like a fine idea, but now Trace could see that it was leading them no closer to a solution to their problems. ‘Let Laredo have the legal documents – maybe something can be done,’ he muttered, his voice falling to a near whisper.
‘They’re all we have,’ Ben Torrance complained.
‘None of them is of any value to us. They’re all in Blakely’s or Ross’s name.’
‘We could—’ Curt Wagner began, but it was going to be a futile suggestion. What could they do? Petition the court in Lordsberg? ‘Ah, hell, Laredo, take them and see if there’s anything to be done.’
Laredo placed the handful of documents in his saddle-bags, swung aboard his thick-chested buckskin horse, touched his hatbrim in farewell, and turned away silently in the Tanglewood.
‘I don’t like this,’ Johnny Johnson said bitterly. ‘We don’t even know who the man is.’
‘Forget it, Johnny,’ Dan Sumner said, placing a friendly arm across Johnny’s shoulder. ‘The legal papers weren’t doing us any good anyway.’
‘The idea was to get Prince Blakely and Storm Ross honking mad,’ Curt Wagner said. ‘And you can bet they are by now.’
‘The bank won’t be doing much business today, that’s for sure,’ Trace Dawson said. He crouched down and tipped his hat back. ‘I guess the question is – what do we do next?’
‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ Johnson said with a sly grin. ‘We could ruin their water supply. Find some arsenic and put it in Ben Torrance’s well.’
‘Poison my well!’ the bald man was aghast.
‘It was yours,’ Johnny said with a dirty little smirk.
‘That’s flat-out murder,’ Kate Cousins who had been holding her tongue, said.
‘I don’t like that idea,’ Curt Wagner added, and the tall man crouched beside Trace Dawson, sketching figures in the dry earth with a twig.
‘Nor do I,’ Trace agreed. ‘We’ll say that one is voted off the table.’
‘It would work!’ Johnny protested loudly, but the others ignored him. He stepped away from Dan Sumner’s friendly arm, but kept his more-than-friendly eyes on Kate Cousins who was well-aware of the kid’s gaze. She had seen the same kind of look a hundred times in the Wabash Saloon.
‘I’d like to know what Blakely and Ross figure on doing about this,’ Dan Sumner said. ‘And I think we ought to move our camp. If this Laredo found us, so can someone else.’
‘You mean go deeper into the Tanglewood?’ Ben Torrance said with apparent alarm. ‘Some of it is almost impenetrable!’
‘That’s why I think it’s a good idea,’ Dan replied. He glanced at Kate who was already trembling. Perhaps she had over-estimated her nerve. He bent his head and whispered. ‘You don’t have to be here, Kate.’
‘I know where I have to be!’ she said so strongly that everyone heard her.
‘Want me to ride into town and find a preacher to bring out here?’ Johnny Johnson asked in a near sneer, watching the two of them.
‘We’ll find our own when the time is right,’ Dan Sumner said coldly and Johnny slunk away, having received notice.
‘He might be the one who has to go,’ Curt Wagner whispered to Trace as the young man moved away into the concealment of the blackthorn brush.
‘I know,’ Trace said heavily, rising to his feet. ‘If it works out that way – well, I think we should not move our camp until after he’s gone.’
‘You think he’d turn traitor?’
‘I don’t know. I just— I’ll try having a talk with him.’
‘All right,’ Curt said, stretching his long arms. ‘You know, Trace, we still haven’t decided on a plan, and I think it’s important to keep the pressure on Blakely and Ross if we’re to have any hope of winning.’
‘I haven’t forgotten,’ Trace said as the two young lovers wandered off and Ben Torrance began morosely searching their stores looking for something to eat. ‘I think I’m going to go into town to see how things stand.’
‘You can’t possibly!’
‘I think I can. What if they’re mounting a posse of twenty men or more and they storm upon us? We have to know.’
‘Where would you—’
‘To the Wabash. Word will already have spread to the saloons if they’re mounting a posse.’
‘You think that Gentry Cousins would let you shelter up there?’ Curt asked in puzzlement.
‘No. But I think Ruby would,’ Trace answered.
‘Oh,’ Curt said carefully. ‘I see.’
‘I doubt that you do, but there’s an outside staircase to her room. And she’ll let me in.’
For a moment Trace studied Curt Wagner’s face which had become unreadable. ‘It will be all right, Curt,’ Trace assured him. ‘And I can at least get word to Gentry Cousins that his daughter is safe.’
The two men walked to where they had left their horses, and once in the shelter of the scrub oaks, Trace asked, ‘Where did you ever learn how to open a safe, Curt?’
Wagner laughed. ‘Along my backtrail,’ he said. ‘You people elected me marshal, remember, and I was grateful for the job. I didn’t feel that you needed to know everything about my background.’ He clapped a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘I’ll tell you all about it one day.’
Johnny Johnson sat brooding in the shelter of a tiny bower surrounded by sour oaks and blackthorn. For a while he had followed Kate and Dan Sumner furtively, like a shadow on their trail, but their whispered conversation, the occasional hugs and tender kisses had made his stomach turn with jealousy. What did Dan have that he did not?
Well, Kate Cousins for one thing.
He’d bet that if he was fixed up better he could have her. Hell, he could have other girls just as good, better than Kate.
Johnny lifted his eyes as Trace Dawson walked his gray horse away from the camp. Where was he going? It seemed that the older men, Trace and Curt Wagner, were reluctant to let him in on any of their plans. Old, bald Ben Torrance knew little more than Johnny did, but that was different. Ben was going to fat, cowardly, whereas Johnny was ready to go, to enter the fray with Prince Blakely and Storm Ross, but nothing was being done.
Maybe it was time to pull up stakes and head south into Arizona. But what would he have there? Without money – but there was money. A lot of it.
Johnny sat in the copse, breaking small twigs into smaller pieces as he thought. To hell with the Tanglewood. He slapped at a swarm of gnats that had decided to gather around his head. To hell, with Dan Sumner and Kate Cousins! His own horse farm and cabin along the Wakapee had been stripped from him, but who was to say he couldn’t start anew? If he only had some money – and didn’t he deserve a cut of the proceeds from the Lordsberg bank job?
Trace and Curt Wagner hadn’t even brought up the subject of splitting the loot. Perhaps because they had no intention of doing so. Maybe that was why they were so silent about their intentions – they meant to keep it all for themselves. Dan Sumner was too hypnotized by Kate Cousins’s skirt to know what was going on around him. Ben Torrance was too old and cowardly to object. Besides, Ben had lost nothing but a water-well in the takeover of the Blakely-Ross group. He could always go out on to the desert and dig himself another hole in the ground.
Johnny rose, dusting his hands on his jeans. Then he started back toward camp. He meant to keep a close eye on the stolen
money and, if the opportunity presented itself, to make his own cut of the loot. He knew of a good little section of land down Flagstaff way.
Ruby Rose Lee, or so she had named herself since coming West, slept late if not well in her room over the Wabash Saloon. Morning was the only hope of getting any sleep. Until well past midnight the saloon was filled with the roaring, rambunctious, raucous uncouth men drinking away whatever money they had in their jeans. And it was Ruby’s job to stand around, smile, be manhandled and watch as they grew progressively drunker and more belligerent. It was the smiling that wore thin as the night rolled by and she was mauled, propositioned and fondled. That was all supposed to keep her smiling cheerfully, she supposed. As if that sort of activity could make any woman feel comfortable and friendly.
There was no end to the innuendo as she brought trays of drinks to their tables.
The cocky bastards.
Most of them stank. It was a rare thing to find a man who had bathed in recent memory, liquor being more important than a bathhouse. Those who did have a recent shave and tub-soak considered themselves to be irresistible after a splash of bay rum.
Ah, it was a hell of a way to make a living, Ruby thought as she lay half-awake in her sunlit room.
In her year in Lordsberg she had only met one man who even approached her expectation of what a man should be, and he.…
There was a tap on the pane of her half-glassed outer door, the one leading to the balcony and down a flight of steps to the alley below. She frowned and turned over in bed, not wishing to answer it, but the knocking was persistent and finally she rose, slipped into her candy-pink silk wrapper and walked suspiciously to the door. Peering out, she straightened up in surprise and reached immediately to unlock the door. The man with coppery hair and wide shoulders entered quickly, smelling of sagebrush and long travel.
‘Trace!’
‘It’s me, Ruby.’ He did not offer his arms, but she embraced the former town marshal uninvited.
‘I thought you’d have fled to the far country,’ Ruby said, taking his hand to guide him into the room after closing the shade.
‘There was the temptation,’ Trace admitted, sagging on to the familiar bed, tossing his hat on to the brass bedpost.
Ruby sat beside him, sweeping her wrapper and nightgown between her knees with both hands. ‘Life’s gone to hell around here with you gone,’ she said with a small, practiced flutter of her eyelashes. She forced herself out of the expression. The coquettish look made her a lot of money with the drinking men, but this was Trace Dawson.
She went on, ‘Kaylin Standish! They call him a lawman!’ Her hand rested on Trace’s briefly. ‘Now Kate Cousins is missing.’
‘I know,’ Trace replied. ‘That’s one reason I came into town. I wanted to tell Gentry that his daughter’s alright. We have her with us in the Tanglewood.’
‘With Dan Sumner – well, I suppose she’s safe enough,’ Ruby said dubiously. Her lower lip was thrust out a fraction of an inch.
‘She is,’ Trace answered. ‘You know the girl didn’t belong in a place like this. If you’ll get word to Gentry Cousins—’
‘Gentry doesn’t own the saloon anymore,’ Ruby told him. Trace Dawson’s eyebrows drew together in disbelief.
‘I mean,’ Ruby said, spreading her hands, ‘he doesn’t on the books. He was served notice that the Wabash Saloon was constructed illegally on land belonging to the township of Lordsberg.’
Trace rose to his feet and replied angrily, ‘How can they say that! There was no township of Lordsberg when Gentry built the Wabash. Only empty land and a fur-trading post.’
Ruby shrugged. ‘That’s what they told him. They had some sort of legal papers to justify eviction.’
‘Who,’ Trace asked slowly, ‘now owns the Wabash?’
‘How many guesses would you need?’ Ruby asked with a fleeting smile.
‘Well,’ Trace said, wondering if they had also taken the papers signed by Blakely and Ross’s hired judge during the bank hold-up. ‘Maybe their case isn’t as strong as they believe.’
‘They’ve got the law on their side,’ Ruby said.
‘For now.’ He asked, ‘Where’s Gentry Cousins now?’
‘I couldn’t tell you. The last time I saw him he was drunker than any of his customers, threatening to kill Marshal Standish, Ross, Blakely and Judge Weems.’
‘That’s not the way to go about it,’ Trace Dawson said. Ruby’s small hand had returned to rest on his. Near to her now he could almost taste the faint woman-scent of her.
‘What is the right way to go about it?’ Ruby asked. Her eyelashes did not flutter; her dark eyes remained fixed on Trace’s.
‘I don’t know. I wish I did. We’re kind of trying to figure that out – me and Curt Wagner and Dan Sumner.’
‘And Johnson and Ben Torrance?’
Trace’s eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know about them?’
Ruby laughed, but not with amusement. ‘It’s kind of hard not to figure it out when they’ve got reward notices on all of you posted around town.’
‘Have they?’ Trace asked, putting his other hand over Ruby’s.
She nodded, turned her eyes down again and asked, ‘Did you have anything to do with the bank robbery, Trace?’
‘Me! Of course not,’ he said, his falsehood so transparent that it was not intended to be believed.
‘It’s very dangerous for you here. Why did you ride into town, Trace?’ Ruby asked with concern.
‘Well, I wanted to see Gentry Cousins or at least get word to him that his daughter was alright. Secondly, more importantly, I guess, was I wanted to see how much of an uproar we had caused and try to figure a way to hit Blakely and Ross again so that next time, if anything, it would hurt them even more.’
‘Anything else?’ Ruby asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ’You know I was wondering if we’d done right by young Dan Sumner. I was watching him and Kate Cousins together. Just a couple of kids with miles and miles to go in their lives.’
Ruby lifted her dark eyes again to Trace. Her lips were parted slightly, hesitant, before she smiled at him. ‘I’ve got a few miles left in me, Trace.’
‘I know you do, Ruby. That’s the other reason I rode in here.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Curt Wagner felt weighted down by a settling uneasiness. All morning he had had the uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong. Since Trace had ridden off toward Lordsberg the feeling of menace had grown. And why had Trace made that dangerous ride? Only to see Ruby? If so he was acting the same way, making the same mistakes, as the kids were.
Curt, too, loved the women but there was a time and a place for them. The Tanglewood was not the place, and this certainly wasn’t the time. He kept a curry comb in his saddle-bags and he walked to his dun horse now to smooth the faithful animal’s coat.
‘I don’t like the way this is shaping up,’ he said and the dun horse’s ear twitched toward him. There were suddenly too many uncertainties: for example, should they expel Johnny Johnson from the gang or not? Was Dan Sumner to be relied upon now that he was caught up in some youthful romantic fantasy? Trace was – well, Trace was their leader but what was his plan? Ben Torrance only sulked now, looking as if he regretted ever having joined the gang.
Curt continued to brush his horse wondering about the fix they were in. They were now burdened with gold they had sworn not to spend but which they could not return. The bank job had seemed a grand idea at the time, but what had it actually accomplished? They had to worry about toting the gold, currency and court papers around with them unless they left them in some pit to molder. It seemed they had made only a futile gesture of defiance.
And what about this man called Laredo? Curt asked himself. Who was he, really, and why had they trusted him? He had shown them no badge, no warrants, no proof of his identity, but now he held the deeds not only to Trace Dawson’s cattle ranch, but to Johnny Johnson’s small spread and Ben Torrance’s water right
s. Dan Sumner’s place as well. Hell, half of the outlying Wakapee Valley! They might as well have let Blakely and Ross have their way, Curt thought angrily. All they had achieved was outlawing themselves.
‘Oh, well,’ Curt said softly to the horse, ‘I suppose it’s what we bargained for.’
Just when do you intend to do something about it, Standish!’ Prince Blakely demanded angrily. The stout little man paced the floor of the marshal’s office like a marching general. His aide-de-camp, Storm Ross, was not there in the sun-heated room. Ross was still at the bank, estimating their losses.
Kaylin Standish, who was not a quick-moving man, stretched his legs and rubbed his lantern jaw. ‘I’m still trying to come up with a plan, Mister Blakely. It’s no easy task going into the Tanglewood.’
‘Burn them out! Burn the whole Tanglewood. What use is it to man or nature anyway?’
‘That’s a thought,’ the dark-eyed marshal said without rising from his chair, ‘but if the fire got out of hand it might shift toward the prairie and the wind would drive it straight on to Lordsberg. I don’t think that’s a workable plan.’
‘You’re afraid to go in there, is that it?’ Blakely asked, wiping a hand across his thinning blond hair.
‘I don’t know if that’s the right word, Mr. Blakely. Afraid? Not really,’ Standish said shaking his head. ‘But there’s roughly a thousand square miles of the Tanglewood, and there’s places a horse can’t penetrate. Places where nothing larger than a rattler can slither through. We don’t know where they’ve got their camp. We could spend days, weeks, even months looking for it.
‘The best thing to do is wait until they come out – they’ll have to eventually.’
‘By then we’ll be ruined,’ Blakely said, leaning his fists on the marshal’s desk. ‘With the bank now raided.’
‘You’ll make it fine, Mr. Blakely,’ the marshal said lazily. ‘You always have.’
‘I suppose we will,’ Blakely replied, his face turning stony. ‘How will you make it when we no longer have the funds to pay your salary? Listen to me – I want those men and I want what they looted from the bank. And I want it now!’
