by Short, Luke;
“I heard about it,” Johnny said, and the trace of a grin showed on his face. “That was Leach Wigran and Mickey Hogan. They was arguin’ a little.”
“Leach Wigran!” Nora said contemptuously. “Everyone knows he’s a tough. Some say he’s a rustler. And Mickey Hogan is trash. Still, you tolerate them in town.”
“I ain’t the marshal,” Johnny protested.
“Is there one here?”
“Now that you mention it, there ain’t. County seat and all, the commissioners figured the sheriff’s office could police the town,” Johnny admitted honestly. He caught the look in Nora’s eye. “Lordy, girl, I ain’t an insurance company. That’s a natural accident, like fallin’ down on a slippery sidewalk. You want me to guarantee kids’ birthday cakes in Cosmos county?”
“You couldn’t!” Nora said hotly. “If you can’t guarantee them a decent place to grow up, you can’t guarantee them anything!”
“Wa-a-i-t a minute,” Johnny said softly, half rising out of his chair. Just then the dining-room door slammed, interrupting him.
Johnny looked up irritably. It was Hank Brender, one of the Bar 33 hands, who was already thumping across the empty dining-room. “Hullo, Hank,” Johnny growled.
Hank, a stocky, mild-looking puncher in work clothes, made a pass at tipping his hat to Nora, but he didn’t even look at her.
“Johnny, we found Uncle Pick this mornin’.”
Johnny didn’t say anything, just looked at him, but he felt something gathering inside him.
“Dead,” Hank added. “His face shot off. He was blowed clean off the Kiowa rim down onto the rocks.”
Johnny settled back into his seat, his eyes never leaving Hank’s face. He heard Nora gasp, and said, “Go on.”
“I reckon they was aimin’ to rob him up on top, but likely he fought and they had to shoot him—blew him off. Down below, around his body, there was tracks. He’d been robbed, cleaned out, and left for the buzzards.”
“Are you sure it was Pick?” Nora said.
Hank nodded. “It was hard to tell when we got to him, but it was Pick’s build and Pick’s clothes. Carmody found him. Pick was wearin’ that buckskin jacket with the square patch in the back. Couldn’t mistake it. His pipe was there and that old flat-crowned Stetson with matches stuck in the brim. He was—” Hank looked at Nora, swallowed, and left his sentence unfinished.
“Pick dead,” Johnny said dully. “It can’t be, Hank. It can’t be true!”
“It’s him, all right,” Hank said miserably. “Likely he was comin’ down from the hills with a little dust when some whippoorwill tried to stick him up.”
Johnny’s face was white. Something inside him was balled up, cold, and he rose and walked to the window. Pick dead. The man who had found him, raised him, given him a home, counsel, food and clothing, his name—dead.
As he looked over the sordid, shabby town, a hot, murdering rage welled up in him. On these streets, tonight, tomorrow, for maybe a whole year, he would be rubbing elbows with the man who had killed Pick, might even shake the hand that had held the gun. He half turned to look at Nora. She was watching him with those dark, quiet eyes, maybe reading his thoughts. He turned to the window again to try and control his face. He rubbed it with a flat, hard palm, and turned.
“I know,” he said coldly to Nora, without her saying a word. “It’s what you’ve been tryin’ to tell me.” She didn’t say anything, but he could see her eyes bright and moist. He said dully to Hank, “You had breakfast, Hank?”
“No. Carmody came in about daylight. I started right off.”
“Where’s Pick? At the Bar 33?” Hank nodded. “Get some breakfast for Hank, Nora. I’ll see you at the stable, Hank. Take your time.”
Johnny’s pace up the block to the sheriff’s office was swift, but his mind was working even more swiftly.
Sheriff Baily Blue, sixty, solid, slow-spoken, and affable, was seated at the roll-top desk. He had the calm, unruffled manner of a work-worn mule, but his eyes were like a mule’s, too—a little veiled and surface-lighted, wary. The few men who had ever seen him in a gun fight afterward treated him with a new respect. He wore a black suit four sizes too big for him, which may or may not have been the reason why he looked so unassuming. His hair was thick and white, his face broad, almost unwrinkled.
Right now he was sheafing a stack of reward posters—they had come in on the morning stage—preparatory to throwing them in the wastebasket.
He looked up as Johnny entered. “Hank told me, son,” he said quietly. “It’s tough. Besides that, it’s filthy. No grudge, nothin’ but the robbery of a harmless old prospector.”
“But was it?” Johnny said bleakly. “It was a shotgun that killed him, Hank says.”
The sheriff looked at him a long moment. “You figger it wasn’t a chance meetin’? No man is goin’ to pack a greener up in them barren damned hills unless he knows what he was huntin’?”
Johnny nodded. “There was a poke of dust on one of them burros, Baily. Besides, Pick’s body was robbed.”
The sheriff cut a sizable third of a black plug lying on the desk, licked his knife, closed it, and fondled the plug with his tongue until it came to rest in his cheek.
“You mean,” he said slowly, looking up, “that you think Pick had found somethin’—somethin’ big, maybe?”
“Sure. Whoever done it could have caught those burros if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t. He left them to go down and search Pick. What would he be huntin’ for on Pick that was so important he passed up searchin’ the burros for gold?”
The sheriff answered promptly. “The directions that would lead him to more gold, likely.”
“Location papers.”
The sheriff nodded his head. “I know what you’re thinkin’, Johnny. You figger the man who gulched Pick has got the location papers, and will get the gold. He couldn’t sell it here for fear of startin’ a rush and givin’ hisself away. So he’ll mosey over the Calicoes, drift down-country, and get rid of it in little pieces. You want me to send word out to be on the lookout.”
Johnny had been watching him quietly, and now he sat on the desk. “That’s part of it, Baily. I want the gulcher. The gold or papers don’t matter. But there’s somethin’ else.”
“What?”
“Don’t it mean anything to you when a harmless old man is beefed on the day he’s struck it after forty years work?”
Blue shrugged. “It’s his chance. He was unlucky, son.”
“Uh-huh. That ain’t it,” Johnny said softly. “It’s us, Baily. If that had happened fifteen years ago when Cosmos was a boom camp and the law wasn’t here yet, it would’ve been different.” He paused. “It’s because we’re runnin’ a robbers’ roost. Every hardcase that can kill his man and cloud up his back trail good has got fair pickin’s in this county. He’s safe here and he knows it. You know it. We both do.”
“You been, talkin’ to Nora again,” Blue said, smiling.
“No. I just come to my senses, Baily.” He leaned forward. “What have you got against cleanin’ out this county and Cosmos with it?”
“It don’t work,” Blue declared flatly. “Look at Ellsworth and Abilene. Look at any of ’em. When the law gets tough, it’s the signal for every glory-huntin’ would-be tough gun toter to drift in and limber up. It’s a dare.”
“Other counties do.”
“Not with our setup. We’re close to mountains no one man can ever know. We got company ranches. We got mines. In other words, we got dynamite. Handle it rough, and not all the deputies I can swear in will stop the hell-raisin’. Our ranges’ll be cleaned, and won’t an insurance company touch a mine payroll. There’ll be more men in the Calicoes than there are in Cosmos, and every danged one of ’em will be livin’ off the fat of Cosmos county.”
“They are now.” Johnny counted off on his fingers. “Friday night, a hundred head of Kennicott’s stuff drove off into thin air. Last month, the Esmerella payroll knocked over. Two weeks ago, a
miner found knifed, and thrown in a barranca. Two jaspers with cracked skulls dyin’ in Doc Palmer’s back room. Seventy head of horses moved off that free range out south—to where? And now Pick beefed after he cashed in on a lifetime’s work.”
“What do you aim to do?” Blue asked. “We’ve done our durndest to settle all these right, son. A man can’t do more.”
“When there’s a polecat under your shack, you don’t move out, do you?”
“Then you want to clean up the county and Cosmos with it?”
Johnny nodded.
Blue tapped on the desk absently. “There’s an election comin’ up in a week, Johnny. Maybe you’d like to try a law-and-order platform.”
“Are you goin’ to run?”
“I reckon. But not on that platform. I meant you could try it.”
Johnny slid off the desk. “That’s just what I was comin’ to, Baily. I’m goin’ to run for sheriff.” He watched the sheriff’s face for a tense twenty seconds, but it told him nothing. “I reckon you’ll want my badge,” he said finally, reaching up and unpinning it.
Blue shook his head. “Not unless you want to turn it in, son.”
“It wouldn’t look right,” Johnny said, his face flushed. “I’m gettin’ out the war paint. You wouldn’t like it.”
“Did I ever tell you to leave a man go you had somethin’ on?” the sheriff asked gently, and he saw Johnny flush deeper. “Think, son. Without that star, it may be a sight harder to make your word carry any weight. With it, people talk. You know that. And in case anything happens, you got the whole weight of the law behind you.”
Johnny hesitated, for what Blue said was true. He owed it to Pick to try and find the murderer, and he’d be a fool if he turned that help down. On the other hand, he owed it to Blue not to make a row while working under him. He let his hand fall from the star.
“I’ll be campaignin’ against you, Baily, with your food in my belly. It don’t seem right.”
“Go ahead,” Baily said. “Nothin’ either one of us is goin’ to do or say will change folks’ feelin’s about how they want this county run. You’re no liar, Johnny, and we got an honest difference. Tell folks so. Come election time, we’ll find what they want.”
“But I’m goin’ to fight you, Baily. I want to be sheriff.”
“And I’m going to fight you, too. I want to stay sheriff.” He rose, smiling, and extended a hand. “You stick. Work on Pick’s murder. I’ll back up any play you make.”
“Are those orders?”
“Just so long as you don’t stir up the county agin’ the law, they are.”
“I’ll wait to do that,” Johnny said, and took the sheriff’s hand. “I’m ridin’ out to the Bar 33 now.”
The sheriff waved careless assent and was sitting down as Johnny stepped out onto the boardwalk. Johnny’s sheepishness at having defied an old friend had left him. There was a grim confidence in his walk as he headed toward the stable.
But his purposefulness was mingled with grief, too. He couldn’t quite get used to the idea that Picket-Stake was gone. He never would get used to it.
Chapter Three: SOUNDINGS
By the time Johnny and Hank were in sight of the Bar 33, Johnny was pretty familiar with the details of Pick’s death. What Hank, in deference to Nora, had omitted in the original version, was that Pick’s body was unrecognizable. What the thousand-foot drop onto rocks below hadn’t done, the buzzards had. Before Hank left for town he heard Hoke Carmody, who had found the body, refuse a buckboard and call for a pack horse and a gunny sack.
“Did Carmody get a look at the tracks?”
“He said they was in sand, and drifted bad. You can ask him when you see him.”
The Bar 33 lay south of Cosmos some eight miles. It was a big brand, managed by Major Fitz, and included six other ranches reaching down into New Mexico. It had pre-empted the Santa Rita bench, a thirty-mile stretch of grama grass lying eight hundred feet above the desert at the base of the Calicoes. The torrential spring rains of ages past had cleaned the mountains long since of topsoil, leaving them naked rock, while the original foothills had filled in with mountain drift until they were now the vast, rolling three-sided Santa Rita mesa of the bench. In the process, the bench had kept its own plentiful water, and had soaked up the streams from the Calicoes, until the land to the west was parched and arid, while from her height she remained aloof and green and proud. To the west was semidesert, dropping into desert relieved only by the far blue-misted line of the Nation range. South, indifferent grazing-land fought for brief life on the flanks of the Calicoes. Far, far south, the rock let up, and the mountains were crowned with trees and grass. To the north, skipping the deep, sheltering pocket where Cosmos sprawled between a jumble of buttes, the rocks were less hostile, and it was here that ranchers, making the best of a mediocre deal from nature, fought drought, rains, and rustlers, and sometimes prospered. Hard to the east lay the Calicoes, colorful, savage desert of climbing, snarling rock, defiant of man and God, mute watchmen of puny fortunes, the bare cone of Monarch peak its liege lord.
Climbing up to the bench, Johnny’s black horse, Soot by name, had smelled green, growing grass. Now, as they swung through the pasture gate, he quickened his pace. Home was where they took the saddle off, but Bar 33 had been the home of his colthood, and these three barns looked just as white and spacious, the corrals as trim and break-proof, and the long, rambling, one-story frame house as cool and white under the interlaced cottonwoods, as ever.
Major Fitz was much smaller than the two punchers who joined him at the bunkhouse door and walked over to greet Johnny. Cavalry regulations would have frowned on his dress—half-boots with a three-inch stockinged gap to his tight army trousers; a hunting-coat of duck over a cotton singlet; and an oversize Stetson—but they would have commended his straight carriage, his bowed legs, his sharp, wind-reddened face, and his air of authority. His voice and his restlessness combined to give the effect of a terrier, but his heart was that of a St. Bernard, Sheriff Blue used to say, and none knew it as well as Johnny.
“He’s in the wagon shed, Johnny,” the major said harshly, “but you won’t want to see him. What a day to live. And what a man he was. And how rotten I feel, how humble before him. Get down.” He shook hands with Johnny, and Johnny felt his hand tremble.
“Now what do you want? Dinner? After a while, men? I’ll give you every hand on the place. I’ve got two out where we found the body, but it’s no use, Johnny. The tracks are gone. I’ve got my best man up on the rim, but it’s rock, and he won’t find a thing unless the killer was a fool. Carmody?” He turned to one of the men beside him, a squat man with a blank, oversize face. “Here, Hoke Carmody, meet Johnny Hendry.” He turned to Johnny again, before he could shake hands with the man. “I went out with him to get the body. Nothing. Not a damned thing to work on. Buzzards had almost finished their work. Coyote tracks, buzzard tracks—and man tracks. You could tell that by the deep dent in the sand. He’d been robbed.”
“That’s what Hank said.” Johnny looked at Hoke Carmody. “How’d you come on it?”
“I’d packed some salt out to the rim water hole yesterday. Saw tracks and spent the day cleanin’ up strays. I had to camp there last night, and got an early start this mornin’. When I kicked up about a dozen buzzards just off the trails, I took a pasear out of curiosity. There he was. I never touched the body, but studied the ground a long while. There’d been a man there, but there was no clear tracks to muss up, so I searched him. I brought back what I’d found along with this jacket. The major knowed it right off, and come back with me.”
“Good man,” the major said, nodding.
“I want to thank you for what you’ve done,” Johnny said.
Johnny and Major Fitz went into the wagon shed, and came out in less than a minute. Johnny’s face was a little pale as they started off to the house. He told the major what he and the sheriff had pieced together about the murder, and the major agreed.
On
ce in the long, low-ceilinged living-room, the major quieted a little. Back to the cold fireplace, he looked out the window a long time. Johnny idly watched his lean, sharp face and wondered what he was about to propose.
Suddenly, he turned to Johnny. “This has got to stop, youngster. I thought it before Pick died. I know it now. A vigilante committee won’t bring Pick back, but it ought to clean out the cause of his death.”
“You won’t need it,” Johnny told him, and he announced his decision to run for sheriff.
“It’s no good, son. You’d make a rotten sheriff,” the major said bluntly. “You’re too easygoing. Does the army cure disease? Partly, but it removes the cause, too.”
“I’ll run on a law-and-order platform,” Johnny continued. The major listened with interest to Johnny’s account of his talk with Blue. “If I can get you behind me, and about a dozen of these cattlemen who’ve been rustled into debt, I’ll swing it. You’ll pull a dozen votes through your hands, and they’ll pull two dozen more through their friends. It’ll work that way with all the straight ranchers. I’ll pull some of the mine vote, too—the management—but the miners will likely swing to Blue because he’s let them do whatever they felt like. I’ll get the town, because they want some peace, and if Blue don’t liquor up the Mexicans, I’ll win them. They’re tired of bein’ rawhided by every drunk in town.”
“And Blue will get the riffraff,” the major said, “and don’t forget that’s considerable. When the word gets out, they’ll know that once you’re in they’re out. It’ll be a fight.”
Johnny shifted in his seat and leaned foreward a little. “All right. I’ve learned somethin’ from Blue. Will you back me?”
“You know I will,” the major said promptly. “I believe you’ve been burned, Johnny. Not that I thought you didn’t do what you could under Blue. But you went at it wrong. Clean up the county and I’m behind you. What’s more, my word carries some weight. I’ll make it.”
