Matt glanced at him, his eyes cold. "Mr. Dunning, you look like a gentleman. I expect that you are."
Dunning flushed and started to speak, but Matt had walked away. He was standing off to one side, midway between the coach and the ranch house, when Pike Sides came out.
Pike hesitated, looking at the open space between himself and the coach, then at Matt Coburn. Deliberately, he took out a cigarette and lighted it, then he walked to the coach without another glance at Matt.
On the box when the stage was rolling, Dandy asked, "What was all that about?"
"Being careful. Pike Sides never rode a stage in his life unless there was a reason for it."
"You think he's gain' to try his luck?"
After a moment's consideration, Matt shook his head. "No. It's something else. There's too much going on, Dandy. I don't know what it is. I can't even guess why Madge is on the coach."
Burke took the stage around a huge pile of boulders while Matt held his shotgun up in his hands, eyes alert for movement. They stretched out on the trail with a straight two miles of open country before them. Matt let his eyes check the sides of the trail ... he did not trust even the empty land.
"She's packin' a gun," Burke said suddenly. "I saw it when she opened her bag at Drumright's."
Matt Corburn looked at him, his mind turning over the information, considering it. Why Madge's sudden trip? Why the gun? Was she carrying it for herself? Or for somebody else? Somebody who might want to use it suddenly?
He had known of Madge Healy for several years. She was an unusually attractive girl, in a country where girls of any kind had been few. She had come to Eureka as only a child, with a traveling show, and she had left the show there with her aunt and her aunt's lover.
For several months they had toured the mining camps, with Madge singing, dancing, and doing monologues for the miners, who had loved her and responded richly. During all those months neither Madge's aunt nor her lover had done anything. living well off Madge's earnings, and then one night while both lay in a drunken sleep, Madge bought a horse and rode out of town. In Austin she hired the widow of an Irish miner and an old Negro who drove the rig for them and played a banjo. Madge, had been fourteen at the time, prematurely wise, prematurely cynical.
Bookings or theatres were no concern of hers. For the next two years she had successfully eluded her aunt and her friend, doing her act wherever a crowd could be assembled, working from loading platforms, piles of lumber, stumps in the woods, in barrooms, cafes, even in livery stables.
She looked younger than she was; she laughed, she was gay, and she sang. She sang the songs the miners remembered from their earlier years. She brought back memories of home, and they loved her for it.
Most of the crowds had money, and they had few places to spend it. They filled the collection hat with coins, bills, nuggets, even small sacks of dust. Every boom camp in Nevada, California, Utah, and Colorado knew her in the next few years. And then suddenly she was no longer a child. She was a young woman, and it was obvious to everyone.
At that moment her aunt's lover finally caught up with her. The aunt, so he said, had died of acute alcoholism, but she had turned over to him papers which made him Madge's legal guardian. He then, as Madge told them in the courtroom later, decided to be her lover as well as her guardian. She refused, and he had moved to use force. And Madge Healy shot him.
She was promptly and enthusiastically acquitted.
Now the atmosphere had changed. No longer a child, she still received applause and money, and proposals as well, and other suggestions of a less permanent nature.
Suddenly and inexplicably, Madge Healy retired, buying a rundown ranch on the edge of Spring Valley, stocking it with a few cattle and some fine horses. Within the year she had gone off to Denver and returned with a husband.
Matt Coburn eased the shotgun on his knees. The trail was closing in. It might be coming up now. This could be the place. Strawberry was right ahead. . . .
With one part of his mind he was still thinking about Madge Healy. He had met her husband, Scollard, only once, in Pioche. He was tall, somewhat sly-looking, but handsome and with polish. He was connected with some banking family in the East, supposedly, and had met Madge through some business arrangement.
He had treated his wife with a kind of lazy contempt, had brought her to town, left her in her hotel room, and spent the biggest part of the night drinking and gambling. While drunk, he had put money on the table, boasting "there's plenty where that came from."
He lost, and lost heavily, and later that night there was a row in the hotel room, and before daybreak somebody reported that Scollard had come slipping down the hack "stairs, stuffing papers into a valise. He had rented a buckboard and driven swiftly away.
Two days later the buckboard, drawn by two gaunted horses, returned to the livery stable in Pioche. There was a pistol, a derringer known to have belonged to Scollard, lying on the floor of the buckboard near the seat, its butt bloodstained. The derringer carried two loads, one of which had been fired.
When the marshal back-tracked the buckboard he found Scollard. He was dead beside the road, shot twice in the chest. The valise stuffed with papers was gone. "Didn't you ride out with the posse?" Coburn had asked Burke later.
"Yeah. The way we figured was that somebody had stopped him, they talked it around a bit, judging by the tracks, and then there was this shooting. It didn't look like a holdup, because whoever killed him had talked to him while he smoked a couple of cigarettes. It looked like Scollard tried a shot and missed ... the other feller didn't."
"Feller?"
"Well," Burke said with a sidewise glance, "there were some who said that Madge shot him. It looked like he was rennin' out on her. His gear was in the buckboard, and it must have been all stowed there before he ever started gambling ... looked like he'd planned on pulling out all the while. Only thing missing was those papers, and at least three people saw him with that valise."
"Was there any evidence against Madge?"
"None whatever. As far's anybody knows, she never left her hotel room. If she did, nobody saw her, or if they did they won't talk. She didn't know anything about it, or any reason why he should be out on the road at that hour, so there it lays."
Coburn cleared his mind of any thought of Madge Healy. Strawberry lay right around the bend.
"Take her right on through, Dandy, at a dead run!" he said.
Burke nodded and, bracing his feet, curled the whip over the heads of the leaders with a crack like a pistol shot. They swept around the bend at a run. Strawberry consisted only of a small stone building with an awning roof, corrals, and a makeshift shed. The stage team was standing out, harnessed and ready.
Matt Coburn was not looking at the team. His eyes swept the yard. He saw the stage tender, the station operator, and another man, a lone cowhand who stood as if waiting for the stage, although his horse stood tied and ready at the rail.
The cowhand, Matt saw, was Freeman Dorset, who rode for Laurie Shannon's Rafter outfit.
There was that fleeting glimpse, and then the stage was gone in a cloud of dust, plunging downgrade into a hollow, then mounting the other side. One more glimpse, and it was gone.
Freeman Dorset stood staring, unable to adjust to the sudden arrival and disappearance of the stage. He started forward, started to yell, then subsided.
He had been all keyed up for this. He was ready. He had decided to jump Coburn, just as Harry Meadows had suggested. Now Coburn was gone, the stage was gone, and there had been no chance. His first sensation was an overwhelming one, of sheer relief.
"What happened?" he asked. "Why didn't they stop?" The hostler looked disgusted. 'They picked up a team at Silver Creel. I'd know those browns anywhere." Dorset stared after the coach. All that remained now was the dust settling ... even the sound was gone. This was something Harry Meadows had not foreseen, so what would he do now? What, in fact, would he, Freeman Dorset, do?
Gone were his dr
eams of fame and adulation, gone all that twenty-five thousand dollars might have bought. Unless... suppose, just suppose he could overtake the stage? Suppose he could beat them to the next stop?
No sooner did he think of that than he gave it up. The stage was traveling too fast.
He had missed his chance. He had missed it for now, anyway.
Chapter 9
Half a mile beyond Strawberry, Burke slowed his team for the climb up the pass. It was very hot, and the team needed a breather after their hard run. At this point there was small risk, for a cliff rose sheer from the road on one side, and the ground dropped off steeply at the other. To attempt a holdup along this stretch the thieves would have to wait for the coach right in the middle of the road.
"Strawb'ry looked all right," Burke commented. "Uh-huh." Coburn was wondering about Dorset. He was quite a distance from the home ranch.
Matt thought to himself that it was time he quit this business. He was getting jumpy. The necessity for continual alertness, the suspicion engendered by the work itself, these were changing him. He could feel it, and he did not like it; but he had the reputation and it was the best way he knew how to make a living.
Often he had wondered why others did not quit; now he could see it was not an easy thing to change the pattern of one's life. He could quit and go East, but what could he do there? All he knew was the West, stage lines, freighter outfits, and cattle. Maybe a little about mining. But what they wanted him for was his gun and his knowledge of how and when above all when to use it.
At the top of the rise, Burke drew up to let his horses catch their breath, and Pike Sides swung down, standing In the trail, looking forward, then back He looked up at Coburn, a curious grin on his face. "The worst of it is ahead," Pike Sides said. "You know that, don't your Matt shrugged. "Maybe." He had dropped to the road beside Pike.
"Whatever happens between here and Carson," Pike said, "you can count me in. I'm riding shotgun, too." The two men walked ahead a little way.
"For yourself?" Matt asked.
"Let's just say I don't want to lose anything." He turned his hard, flat eyes toward Matt "Tm ridin' herd on more than you. An' more likely to get stopped."
"Are you trying to tell me something? Or just talking?"
"Lettin' you know that you've got another gun. A good one."
"I know it's good," Matt said. "I've seen you work, and if you're riding shotgun on something, that's your business. I'll be glad of the help."
Burke started the coach toward them, walking the team to keep them from stiffening. Matt Coburn stopped where he had a view of the road ahead, but only in glimpses as it curved around among the hills. The trail appeared to be empty. There was no dust.
There would be none, of course. Anybody who wanted this coach would have been planted here hours ago, just waiting. He knew that and Burke knew it, and they only hoped, by moving fast, to come upon them before they were quite set and in position.
The coach drew abreast of the two men and Sides caught at the open door and swung in. Matt noted that he sat facing the rear. Matt swung up, and after a moment he quietly told Burke what Pike Sides had said.
Burke was as puzzled as Matt was. 'There's something here," Burke said, "something I don't read."
He walked the team another quarter of a mile and then the downward grade steepened and he started them at a trot.
"No whip, no yells," Matt cautioned, "unless you see them."
"You think it will be Meadows?"
"Maybe ... and if Pike's telling the truth we may get hit twice."
Burke's face grew taut. "I don't like that, Matt. I don't like it at all."
The coach picked up speed. Matt was thinking of the trail ahead. There were a dozen places, at least a dozen, where it might happen.
As they raced down the long hill he was thinking of Dandy Burke. The stage driver accepted the idea that they might be held up, but that they might be stopped twice worried him. It was a matter of the odds, Matt supposed. You could win once or twice, but you could not expect to win them all.
From the top of a ridge a watcher with field glasses had picked up Matt Coburn, and with a mirror he had flashed the signal to Harry Meadows.
"Wrap it up, boys." Meadows said, and walked to his horse. "We're passing this one up."
Scarf swore. "You're going to pass this one up? Are you crazy? A hundred thousand dollars?"
"What's money to a corpse?" Meadows eyed him coldly. "I say the odds are wrong. I say we don't do it. As of this minute, Scarff, the job is yours if you want to do it I want no part of it, but if you go, don't come back. Not ever."
Scarff hesitated, sorely tempted. "Damn it, Harry, I didn't mean "
"I hate to lose it, too. But take it from me, Matt Coburn won't go easy. I've seen a man like him soak up lead the way a sponge soaks up water. And when he goes he'll take somebody with him. I don't want it to be me."
"What'll we do?" Kendrick asked.
"We'll leave now, and we'll ride for Sacramento Station. We'll stay outside there in the cedars and watch what happens. If there's a chance, we'll take it."
They started, and with fresh horses and a start of five miles on the coach they made it easily. Harry Meadows was a man who knew the country, and he led them into a tiny copse well back of the station but within two minutes' riding to the station door. And the view there was good.
"Four riders," Scarf reported after a minute. "And they're no cowhands. Those men are loaded for bear meat, and riding some real horse flesh."
Harry Meadows stared at him. "You mean somebody else is going to try? But how could they know?"
He crawled up on the rock from which the station yard could be plainly seen.
The station was a long, low building. Close by were corrals, and the ruins of a stone building that had been a previous station, burned by Indians.
The horses were tied in plain sight, and they were certainly no ordinary homes. The men who rode those mounts wanted something with speed and bottom, and these were superb animals.
Only one man was in sight. Harry Meadows leveled his glasses at him, and then swore. Scarf said, "What is it, boss?"
"That's Tucker Dolan down there."
Scarf lifted his head, staring down at the dark figure that leaned against the doorpost, watching the yard. Tucker Dolan had been a deputy sheriff up in Oregon, and after that in Idaho. He had also been a hired gun for the big cattle outfits back in Texas. He was no outlaw, but his activities had often skirted the very edge of crime.
Meadows handed the glasses over to Scarf. "Somebody you know," he said.
A second man had emerged from the door, a toothpick between his lips. He was a slim man with catlike movements ... Bob Longer. Another tough man, another gun for hire, an occasional outlaw who had never been caught at it. Scarff had made a cattle drive up from Texas with him. He was a hard man, and a disagreeable one, a good worker, but a trouble-hunter.
"What the hell is this?" Scarf wondered out loud. "Somebody wants a scalp'," Meadows said, "and by the power they've got, they must want Coburn."
Two more men, unknown to the watchers, came out of the station, and after a heads-together conference one of them walked toward the corner of the corral, while the other stepped around the side of the house and waited there, out of sight from the road.
Meadows and his men heard the stage coming. "Are we in or out?" Kendrick asked.
"Out," Meadows said, "unless they take the gold. If they do that we hit them, quick and hard, from ambush."
"Them?"
"Right after a fight, in which they'll get hurt, they won't be expecting anything. We'll move against them." Scarff did not like it, but he said nothing, and neither did the others. They had learned to trust Meadows' judgment.
Of the presence of Harry Meadows, and his men, Coburn knew nothing. He had his shotgun in his hands and ready when they swung into the yard. He knew Tucker Dolan at once, and he also recognized Bob Longer. And there were four horses, which mea
nt two others somewhere about.
Half turning, he pounded three sharp blows on the top of the stage, and then as the stage drew into the yard he told Burke, "Out from the buildings, Dandy. Stop her right here. If I go down, hit them with the whip and take her out of here."
The stage swung up, the following dust cloud closing in and settling around it. In one easy movement, Matt Coburn swung to the ground.
"Hello, Dolan." he said. "It's been a coon's age."
Tucker Dolan was surprised. He had had no idea that Matt Coburn would be riding shotgun. "I didn't know you were in this part of the country," he said.
"We're changing horses, Tucker. You interested?"
"I don't know what you're carrying, Matt, and you know I'm not riding the owl-hoot. I came to meet a passenger of yours."
Madge Healy! Why?
The stage creaked ever so slightly. A shifting of weight inside? Or somebody getting down?
"I hope it isn't trouble, Dolan. I wouldn't want that. Our passengers are to be delivered in safety."
Tucker Dolan straightened up from the door where he stood and walked just to the edge of the awning shadow. Bob Longer took a long. easy step to the right.
"Is Madge Healy aboard?" Dolan asked.
The stage door opened, and Madge stepped down. She held her purse in her left hand. Her right hand gathered her skirts. All of this Matt saw from the corner of his eye. ... Did that hand among the folds of the skirt hold a gun?
"Yes, gentlemen? Is there something I can do for you?"
"You have some papers, ma'am," Tucker Dolan said. "We were sent to pick them up."
Dunning and Kearns were getting down. Charlie Kearns's face was drawn and stiff. Dunning seemed merely curious.
"Any papers I have," Madge said, "are my own. The property they represent was bought with my own money, by me. Nobody and I mean nobody has any rights or share in them."
the Empty Land (1969) Page 7
