King Colt

by Short, Luke;

  Johnny stood up. “Good. I want one thing more now.”

  The major looked at him quizzically.

  “I’m not right always—maybe not half the time,” Johnny said stubbornly, “but if I get in office I want to be nearly right. I want to know the names of the men you’d like warned out of this county.”

  The major was about to voice surprised protest, but Johnny held up his hand.

  “I know. It could breed a dozen gun fights if it ever got public, but it won’t. When you make that list, it’ll include the men you suspect but can’t prove anything on. You’re too fair to make it a grudge list, and I reckon all the rest of our decent ranchers are. I’m goin’ to get a list from each one of ’em. When I compare them, it’ll give me a pretty good idea of what’s right.”

  “But what if the lists were stolen from you, Johnny? It would take fifty years for the smoke to blow away.”

  “They won’t be. You’ll mail them to me. Print them, and don’t sign them.”

  “Then what?”

  “The day after I’m elected, I’ll give these unwanted hardcases just twenty-four hours to leave town.”

  “And get blown off your horse for your pains.”

  “That’s my chance,” Johnny said stubbornly. “Besides, I owe it to Pick.” His voice fell suddenly, and he said in a grim tone, “Major Fitz, as long as I live, I’ll be on the trail of the man who murdered Pick. Maybe this list will help to find him.”

  “True enough.”

  “Another thing,” Johnny went on, “I reckon I was Pick’s heir.”

  “Of course.”

  “All right. Some way, somewhere, Pick was bound to leave a clue to where he was workin’. The jasper that murdered Pick will know that, and he’ll think likely Pick told me the location of his claim. So this jasper will try and beef me, won’t he?”

  “It’s reasonable—too reasonable,” Fitz said dryly.

  “Then the first jasper that shoots at me will be the man I want. And I’ll get him,” Johnny said grimly. He rose, about to speak, then paused, as if searching for a way to say what he wanted to. “Reckon you’d turn me loose in your tool shop for a while, Major?” he asked finally.

  “I think I know what you want, Johnny. I had the blacksmith make the coffin this morning. I’ll have the buckboard hitched and send a driver to town with it.”

  Johnny shook his head. “Thanks, but Pick wouldn’t have wanted that. There’s a little patch of young Navajo pines out on one of them rises to the east. Pick liked it. It’s on Bar 33 range. Would you give him land to lie in?”

  “Of course,” Fitz murmured.

  Twenty minutes later, Johnny drove quietly from the ranch buildings. The day had turned hot and clear, and the Nations a hundred miles off looked close enough to shoot over. The last fresh whisper of spring was in the air as Johnny pulled the team up on the crest of the knoll and climbed down.

  The job was quick, for the ground was soft and the box small. By dinnertime Johnny was back at the Bar 33.

  Chapter Four: HARDCASE DEPUTY

  Johnny and the major ate with the hands in the cookshack adjoining the bunkhouse. Only a sporadic visitor to the Bar 33 these days, Johnny was nevertheless surprised to see so many new faces among the hands. Hank Bunker and Morgan, blacksmith and water-mason, were the only familiar faces. Johnny asked the major about why the old band was gone.

  “Simple,” the major said. “How did you feel when you were working here? You resented company rules—like no drinking, pay check every two months, no gun totin’, and such. There isn’t the freedom here of the old independent spread, and some of the men resented it. I didn’t blame them much, but then I’m only the manager. They got fed up and drifted on.”

  “Speakin’ of guns,” Johnny said, “I come off without any. Reckon you could lend a pair till I get back?”

  The major nodded. “Get back from where?”

  “Campaignin’. I’m ridin’ over to Crockett at the Stirrup Bar, then I’ll drop down and see Kennicott. The whole bunch. I’m puttin’ them the same proposition I put you, and I’ll use your name for a starter.”

  An hour later, Johnny and Soot, his black, were headed up for the trail under the Kiowa rim which would bring them to Crockett’s spread north of Cosmos by late afternoon. Another hour’s ride put him off the lush San Dimas into the rocks and, farther on, into the Snake Pit—this a corkscrew tangle of wind-and water-eroded sandstone, which, when viewed from the Kiowa rim, seemed a tangle of snakes caught writhing and petrified for eternity.

  Johnny gave Soot his head and, reins over arm, rolled a cigarette. Pick always liked this stretch, said it had more color in it than his mother’s sewing-basket. Pick and color, they seemed to like each other. Color in rock and sky and life, even in mineral. Suddenly Johnny paused, match poised to discard. Color! If Pick had been working on one location and thought it good, certainly he would have packed some ore down to Hugo Miller’s in Cosmos. The color of the rock and ore might give a clue to Pick’s claim. The Calicoes held a hundred shades of red and purple, sullen grays, rusty orange, blacks, yellow and white sands and quartzes, miles of black malpais, miles more of these bile-tinted sandstone scarps, pinnacles, gargoyles, cattle rocks, and buttes that he was riding through now. Johnny didn’t know them all, but he knew a good many of them through his childhood years spent with Pick. It was a long shot, and would take an eternity, but if by some blind chance it should guide him to an encounter with the claim jumper and murderer, then he shouldn’t pass it up. If Pick only brought Hugo his—

  Whang!

  It scorched across his chest, slammed into his arm, and kited him out of the saddle onto the rocks, face down, before he could cry out. Play dead! something warned him. His mouth was bleeding, but he lay quietly, kicked one leg twice in a studied convulsion, then subsided.

  His back loomed as big as a corral lot to the sky, inviting another shot. It crawled, shrunk, channeled sweat, but he did not move, waiting for that last blast to blow breath and life out of him.

  Soot, good horse, stood still, and Johnny could hear his bridle chains jingle. He listened. No other sound. The seconds, loaded with lead, dragged by. Still no sound, and still Johnny did not move.

  He’s waitin’, Johnny thought. He’s got a tip of that Buckhorn rear sight on each of my shoulder blades.

  His ears began to ring until he was sure its rhythm made him move. He opened one eye, hair-width by hair-width—and looked at dirt. The man was on the other side of Soot, that much he was sure of, else why had the shot knocked him off to the left? He was up there in those rocks, and if Johnny stalled long enough, it might toll him down.

  So he waited, listening. He waited and waited and waited until he could feel his arm aching painfully and his chest wetting his whole shirt front. He felt the sun hot on his neck and head, and sweat was soaking his hair. Still there was no sound, no noise of a gun being levered, however softly. Soot whickered a little in friendly protest, then subsided, and the quiet of the afternoon flowed over again like still water.

  Had the gulcher gone, confident that his first shot had done the work? Johnny didn’t know, but he did know that he had to find out, to get off the ground before he bled so much he couldn’t make for help.

  I’ll count sixty slow just fifteen times, then I’m movin’, gulcher or no gulcher. The counting helped to pass the time, and he clung at it doggedly, listening meanwhile with the other half of his attention. When he was finished, he had not heard a sound.

  He let his head roll over until he was resting on his cheek, and it was done so slowly that it took almost fifteen minutes more. Six feet or so to the side of him was a low, flat sandstone slab that tilted up a little at the far side. It would be enough to shelter him. He gathered himself for the effort, took a deep breath, then rolled over swiftly, and lunged for the rock, sprawling on his face behind it.

  No shot, no sound, even, except Soot’s slight shying at Johnny’s sudden movement.

  Maybe he’s tol
lin’ me out in the open, he thought. Determined to find out, Johnny first stuck his guns out from behind the rock, and getting no shot, his hand, then both hands, then his arms, then his boots. Finally, disgusted, he decided to take a chance. He raised his head, kept it there for several seconds, then lowered it.

  If there was a man there, he had the patience of an Indian. The thing to do was to get it over with.

  So, gun in hand, he drew his knees under him, then leaped from his rock to another one. No sound yet. In short zigzags, always keeping to shelter, he worked his way around the stubby butte where he figured the shot had come from. Once behind it, he could see there was no one on the sloping top. Carefully, he walked up to the rim where the man had hidden. One burned match lay on the rock; that was all. Johnny squatted and looked at it.

  He couldn’t have been here long—not even long enough to smoke down a quirly. And he was so sure of his first shot that he didn’t even eject the empty.

  His first impulse, colored by a hot, smothering rage, was to ride the Snake Pit until he had found the man, but his judgment told him it would have been futile. The three quarters of an hour he had lain there waiting for the second slug had given the man time enough to lose himself in this mass of twisted rock. Then, strangely, for the first time he wondered who the man might have been. And fast on the heels of the question came suspicion.

  “The Bar 33?” Even as he said it, he felt ashamed. No. Simply because several men at the Bar 33, including Fitz, knew where he was going, the blame for the gulching didn’t lie with them. Any clever killer could have followed Hank and him out from town, hung back out of sight at the ranch, seen the course Johnny was taking after dinner, and cut across to the Snake Pit to fort up and beef him. Of all the men he knew, Major Fitz was the most friendly and helpful and, looking at it in a cold, practical light, had the most to gain by preserving his life.

  Could it have been Pick’s killer, skulking in the vicinity since Pick’s death and confident that sooner or later Johnny would show up to claim the body? That was more like it.

  He took a whole hour out to examine the ground, looking over every inch of it for tracks. In a deep arroyo, forty yards behind the butte, he found what might have been tracks. The sand and rocks had been disturbed, but the arroyo was so rocky that he could tell nothing. It might even have been a stray beef. And all around it was rock, none of it scratched. Evidently, the gulcher had been at pains not to ride a shoed horse.

  His face grim and hard, Johnny returned to Soot. This, then, was a foretaste of what he might expect.

  “All right, pardner,” he said to Soot, his tone quiet. “Just once their luck is goin’ to trip. And if mine holds out to then, we’ll know a lot of things.”

  He bandaged his arm, which had only a flesh wound, and mounted. The bullet furrow across his chest smarted a little; that was all.

  Between the day Pick’s body was found and election, there remained seven days for Johnny to campaign. In three of these, he contrived to see ten ranchers, and they listened to his plan with an open-minded, if dubious, attentiveness. Things were too far gone, they said; there were too many bums in the county to hold an honest election. There was more of this talk, but each man pledged his support, and the support of his men and his friends. Moreover—and this was what Johnny was most concerned with—they agreed thoroughly with his suggestion that they mail in the names of the men they thought should be run out of the county.

  Back in Cosmos, Johnny stabled his horse, got a shave, had Doc Palmer put a fresh bandage on the slight flesh wound across his chest and arm, and went over to see his Nora. She was folding napkins in the dining-room, and she greeted him warmly, concern in her eyes.

  “I—I thought maybe something had happened to you,” she told him. Johnny sat down lazily and rolled a smoke. “You’ve changed, Johnny,” she told him suddenly. “I heard about your talk with Blue.”

  “He’s told it, then?”

  Nora nodded. “A few people in this town are going to vote for you—the decent ones.”

  “And a few more aren’t,” Johnny said grimly.

  “Nothing more about Pick—about his killers?” she asked hopefully, and Johnny told her no. He neglected to mention that he had been shot at. He listened to her chatter about Pick. She was recalling the many things done for her and others that showed Pick had not been the crotchety old man he was thought to be by some. Johnny knew she was trying to comfort him, but that part of him that had to do with Pick was buried deep within him, untouchable even by her. He would never feel he had done right by Pick until several things were squared. So he told her suddenly of what was uppermost in his mind now, but he went at it obliquely, starting with a question.

  “If I’m elected sheriff, Nora, what do you think I ought to start out by doin’?”

  Nora looked at him, puzzled. “But you said what you were going to do, Johnny—clean up the town and county.”

  “How?”

  “By hiring honest men, incorruptible men for your deputies.”

  “Know any?”

  “Fred McLain,” Nora suggested after a pause.

  “He’s honest. He’s also dumb. How long do you think he’d stack up against a handy gunman?”

  Nora frowned. “Not long, I’m afraid. He isn’t that kind of a fighter.”

  “Know any of your honest men that are?”

  Nora ceased her work and sat back in her chair, her serene face almost scowling. “Outside of yourself, no, I don’t.”

  Johnny leaned forward, grinning. “How would you like to marry a sheriff that had the short end of a ninety-ten chance of livin’ a week?”

  Nora smiled back at him, but her smile was not without apprehension. “Maybe I will marry you some day, Johnny—after you’ve proved you’re worth it.” And she added hastily, “Not because I think I’m a girl in a million, Johnny, but—”

  “I do,” Johnny said, and rose and walked around the table and kissed her. Nora laughed, flustered, and pulled him into a chair.

  “Not because I think that, but because I only want a few things—and I don’t guess I can be happy without them. One is a husband who won’t stand by and see the innocent trodden on and the decent, helpless people put in the wrong. How would you like to marry a wife and never be sure that she was safe? How would you like to have children grow up in a town like this—at the mercy of any drunken wretch with a gun? My husband’s got to be a fighter—and that’s the only thing worth fighting.”

  Johnny nodded, grinning. “You’ll get him. Only, how do you expect to marry a saint and have him sheriff and still keep him alive?”

  Nora looked worried now. “What are you trying to tell me, Johnny?”

  “That I’ve got to have hardcases for deputies. They’ve got to be tough and hard to kill—and not pillars of the church.”

  “I can see that,” Nora said slowly.

  “Other folks won’t,” Johnny pointed out. “The day I’m elected sheriff, I’m goin’ to appoint some deputies that will get this whole county on my neck. And when I say the whole county, I mean it—good people and bad.” He looked steadily at her. “I just didn’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m out to clean up this county. If I do it kinda’ rough, it’ll be because I have to, understand?”

  Nora patted his hand. “You know I do.”

  With that encouragement, Johnny went ahead with his plan. Out on the porch of the Cosmos House, he surveyed the town with a kind of impersonal criticism. Its wide street, flanked by twin rows of unpainted, weather-scarred, false-front buildings, was always fetlock-deep in rutted dust or mud. Cans and paper littered it. Each of the dozen saloons in town was easily recognizable by the slatternly stack of empty beer barrels on its front boardwalk. Ore wagons, four teams to the wagon, plodded down the street in an almost unbroken line between the mines up the slope back of Cosmos to the stamp mill below the town. Saddle horses, buckboards, and spring wagons helped to clutter up the street. To a stranger unused to a modest boom town, it wo
uld have seemed a madhouse.

  And to Johnny, his gaze skeptical, it seemed almost that now.

  He picked his way across the traffic of the street and turned into the Kiowa Head. It was thronged, as usual, but the man he was looking for was not there. He proceeded down the street, stopping at the Melodian, the Legal Tender, the War Bonnet, the Drum Head, the Dry Camp, the First Chance. That put him at the head of the street. He crossed and went into the Gem, Prince’s Keno Parlor, and finally the Palace. Possibly because it was the largest and toughest of all the saloons, the Palace wore its name with a little more splendor than the others. Johnny saw the man he wanted standing over by a poker game in the far corner, watching the players. He was a burly, squat redhead, with a full, square jaw, cold blue eyes, and freckles that almost dyed his face the color of his hair.

  Johnny walked up beside him and watched the game and, after a pause, looked up. “Hello, Turk,” he drawled, and Turk Hebron nodded curtly.

  “Got a minute?” Johnny asked.

  Turk looked at him suspiciously. “All day.”

  Johnny flagged a waiter and ordered drinks, and they retired to a corner bench, well out of earshot of the main crowd.

  Turk did not try to hide his skepticism. He drawled, as he sat down, “You must want somethin’.”

  His blue eyes chilled a little as they looked at the deputy.

  “I do.” Johnny grinned. “I wouldn’t buy a saddle tramp like you a drink if I didn’t.”

  Turk grinned back. If he did not have any affection for Johnny Hendry, he at least respected him as a lawman who was blunt, to the point, and no pussyfooter. Turk said, “Is it about them horses that I stole from Cass Briggs?”

  Johnny shook his head and frowned a little, “No, not about that. But now that you mention it, did you steal the horses?”

  Turk looked around him and then said, “There ain’t a witness here to hear me. Sure I took ’em. I’ll take his hide some day and nail it on the fence, too.”