Again, when he reached the house, he met a welcome which did not surprise him, but which would have knocked a stranger backwards. On a rickety table in front of the house was a meal all prepared since Talbot had spotted McAllister at a distance. McAllister knew that the steak on the cracked plate would be prime and the potatoes, grown in Talbot’s own truck garden, would be new and tasty. There were even some of the fried onions which McAllister relished so much. McAllister smiled to himself. He had never known a man so generous with other men’s beef. They sat down and ate without a word between them. Such was their custom. They washed the meal down with some of Talbot’s own whisky — which, said legend, even Talbot found so powerful he was forced to dilute it with raw bourbon. Be that as it may, the drink he downed, McAllister found good.
They pushed their plates away and loaded their pipes. McAllister offered his host tobacco. As usual, Talbot put aside his pipe and produced one with a bowl twice the size. He filled this monster with a handful of tobacco and fired it with zest. When the air around them was suitably blue, McAllister said: “I came to ask your help, Greg.”
Talbot looked up at the cloudless sky with an air of utter despair.
“Christ,” he said, “nobody don’t never come a-callin’ without they want somethin’ from me.”
McAllister said: “A hell of a lot of people come around here, callin’.”
Talbot looked injured and muttered: “I got friends.”
McAllister let that idle boast hang in the air for a while. Then he said: “The Bar Twenty burned me out.”
Talbot sat up in alarm. He cried out: “Are they headed this way? If they come near here, I’ll cut ’em down like swathes of corn.”
McAllister looked modest—“Right now, they’re a mite occupied by me.”
Talbot looked intrigued. “Is that a fact?”
“I winged a few. Nothin’ serious.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“I have most of my stock out on the range. They’ll have to look out for themselves for a while. Can I leave my breedin’ stock with you while I get all this settled down?”
Greg Talbot owed him. They both knew it. McAllister had cared for him one winter after he had been caught in a bear trap. Which meant that he owed McAllister his life. The only time when Talbot left his own area was when he went on his beef-stealing forays. Otherwise he shunned any sign of his fellow humans. McAllister had acted as his go-between, brought him supplies up from town, sold cows for him, even once collected and mailed a letter for him. McAllister had him in a cleft stick all right.
Talbot sat there, looking like a man cornered.
He peered furtively around as if looking for an escape. They both knew there was none. Not even Talbot could refuse.
“By God,” he said, “you presume, McAllister. You presume like hell. I could be in a heap of trouble if that Tallin comes looking here and finds me with your horses. That ties me in with you.”
“Not on your life. I’ll sell you the horses.”
Talbot wrung his hands and cried: “Where would I find that kind of money? What would I want with a bunch of fancy horses?”
“I’m askin’ one dollar for the whole bunch.”
Talbot stared at him. “You are? Bill of sale?”
“Sure.”
Light dawned on the man. He poked the air between them with a filthy forefinger— “Then when all this has blown over, you come around and buy them back again.”
“Right.”
“Only thing is: if the Bar Twenty have burned you out, this thing will never blow over. Not in your favor. You can kiss your pretty horses goodbye.”
“Which means you win ’em all.”
“Yeah, it does at that.” He gave it great thought and finally said softly: “All right. I’ll do it.”
McAllister found a stub of pencil and Talbot rummaged in his shack for a half-hour and came up with a piece of creased paper. McAllister wrote out a bill of sale and gave it to Talbot. The man gave him one dollar and he looked desolate as he parted with it. McAllister said that he would be in with the horses tomorrow.
Talbot cackled a little and said: “If that Tallin don’t find you first. By cracky, old Larned might be giving him hell.”
McAllister rode away with some peace of mind and a very contented stomach. He must have been eating Lazy Y beef because they were the only outfit in the country with Durham cattle and that was Durham beef he’d eaten or he was a Dutchman.
Five
Edward C. Larned was a straight-thinking, clean-limbed, clean-minded, God-fearing honest man. Or at least that was how he saw himself. His second name was Christian.
And that was how he saw himself too. He was forty-five years of age, handsome and powerful both in physique and presence.
He could be a very frightening man and he knew it. He regarded the fact as an asset to be used as often as he thought fit.
And that was pretty often.
He might treat the world a little roughly, but he did not regard his daughter Helena as a part of that world. She was something to be cared for and protected. Mostly from men. His wife, though beautiful and inclined to be frail, he did not treat so tenderly. That was because he did not love her. He had married her for her money and for the social prestige she would bring him. Once he had obtained both, he promptly despised her. Though frail and looking not strong enough to resist a light breeze, she was a woman with a character in her own right. Her strength mostly lay in her silences and her husband hated and was infuriated by them more than anything in the world. She knew this.
When Si Tallin arrived in town with his dire news, Edward C. was engaged in his daily reading. This consisted in his reading from a classic chosen by himself while his wife and daughter listened. He read very badly in a wooden and halting voice. To Mary Larned this imposition was a misery and torture which somehow she had to endure each day like some dreadful penance. Maybe, she would think, it was penance for marrying a man her father approved of and whom she did not love. And bad luck to you, ma’am, she would think.
Today, he was reading from Shakespeare. Of all the hams who have destroyed the Bard’s immortal beauty none ever did it so thoroughly as Edward C. When a secretary knocked and came in to announce that Mr. Tallin (sniff) the cow-person was here to speak privately to Mr. Larned, it was to Mary Larned as if she had been saved just in time from screaming. She happened to love Shakespeare.
“Have him wait,” commanded Larned, “can’t you see I’m busy right now?” He was proud of his reading. He loved it almost as much as the sound of his own voice.
“Forgive me, sir, but Mr. Tallin insists that it is of the greatest urgency and he would not dream of—”
“Oh, very well. Excuse me, my dears, I’ll mark the page. I’ll see Tallin in my office.”
He rose, the secretary held the door wide, risked a look at Miss Helena, thus making this moment the highlight of his day, and retired.
“My God,” said Mrs. Larned, “which of us has the courage to burn that damned book?”
Helena laughed.
In his office, Edward C. seated himself behind his desk and waited. A moment later a knock came on the door. He barked: “Come,” and Tallin entered.
The range boss was wearing his best bib-and-tucker, on the off-chance that he might run into Helena, of course.
“Sit down, Tallin.”
Tallin sat and turned his hat a few times. Larned sniffed the air a few times and said in a tone of soft menace: “Tallin, have you been drinking?”
“Just …” Tallin looked caught. “Just the one, Mr. Larned. Reckon I’m coming down with a cold. Just the one.”
“If you drink off duty that is your affair. But I will not have you appearing before me drunk.”
Tallin sat there keeping his mouth shut. Larned said in a kind of cold fury which was his normal manner: “You have had the temerity to interrupt me in the middle of something of importance. Would you be kind enough to have the courage to tell me why y
ou had to have an interview so urgently?”
Tallin looked straight at him. He knew he would make out all right once he got started. He had right on his side, didn’t he? He said: “We have trouble, Mr. Larned.”
“Trouble? Do you mean you have trouble and you’ve come to me to bail you out of it?”
“When you hired me to be your ranch manager, Mr. Larned,” Tallin said, feeling a rush of relief for he knew he was launched, “you gave me specific instructions about how to deal with rustlers and the like. You knew as well as I did what that entailed. The range is a rough place. We carried out justice as best we could. Men got hurt. It’s like a war that goes on all the time. A few men were hung.”
“Hanged,” corrected Mr. Larned.
Tallin looked at him, puzzled, then resumed. “You made it pretty clear that you did not want any trespassing on the free range Bar Twenty cows ran on. We cleared out a good few families of nesters and such. A few days back we told a mustanger to shift himself. He had a place at the far end of Black Horse Valley. He fired on three of our men who went to warn him off. This seemed not enough to get all riled up about. I rode down there with six men and we burned the place.” Larned nodded approvingly and Tallin was encouraged to go on. “After we burned the place, we were fired on.”
“Impudent devils,” said Larned. “I hope you settled their (what is your expression?) hash.”
“We didn’t have a chance, sir. They were in the rocks and they had repeating rifles.”
“Couldn’t you charge them and get them out of the rocks?”
Tallin hesitated. “We … we had three men wounded, sir.”
For a moment, Tallin thought the owner had fallen asleep. But Larned was merely deep in thought. When Larned spoke, it was in that very gentle voice which signaled that real danger was on its way.
He was no fool. This story was not good enough for him and he was going to probe.
“How seriously were the men wounded?”
“They’ll all live.”
“You seem confident of that?”
“I am, yes.”
Tallin was slightly startled when Larned came wide awake and looked at him hard, his finger-tips together. “It may interest you to know I received a personal report from Doctor Robertson who you called to the ranch to doctor your three wounded men. He told me a curious thing. All three men were shot in the legs. Does that not tell us something? It told me, and the doctor confirms it from information provided by the wounded men themselves, that they were deliberately wounded and not killed. It was also the opinion of the wounded men that they were shot at by one man and one man only. This man was Remington McAllister, Tallin. I suggest that what you have really come here to tell me is that you have bitten off more than you can chew, my boy.”
Even Tallin could not deny that that was a fair assessment of the situation, whichever way you looked at it. He wished he’d had two drinks instead of one.
“That’s about the size of it, Mr. Larned,” he said.
Edward C. Lamed was musing. He muttered under his breath to himself. He smiled once, then put on a face like thunder. Finally, he said: “I don’t consider that McAllister is a rustler. I regard him as a horse-breeder. That adds a different tone to the affair. I tell you what you do — this could become an unseemly affair — get word to this man that I would like a word with him. Never fight if it’s cheaper to talk. There are more ways of skinning a cat than by drowning, eh, Tallin? I’ll buy him out.”
This shocked Tallin. It showed on his face, that was how deep the shock was.
Larned said: “You’ll learn, Tallin, in time. I hope.”
Tallin left the hotel a disappointed and bemused man. He had not gotten to see the object of his passion and ambition, and Mr. Larned had sadly not come up to scratch in his opinion.
Back in the office, Larned rose from behind the desk and went to the window. He looked out over Black Horse’s main street and thought: They should have called this place Larned. They will, too, before I’m through. He sighed. Before I’m through, too, I shall have to hang this man McAllister.
Six
McAllister drove his breeding stock through the hills to Talbot’s place. His old grey bell-mare led them. The stud, Don Juan, helped keep them together. For the time being, Talbot would hold them in a side canyon, out of sight. Later, he would put them in a pen below his cabin. McAllister rode off on Oscar and, for the first time, realized what those horses meant to him.
Now he had to make up his mind what he meant to do next. He had to measure himself, a solitary man, against the strength of the Larned empire. Although, on second thoughts, maybe it had not quite come to that yet, in spite of the burning of his house and barn. Maybe at this stage Larned would have the sense to talk. In McAllister’s opinion talk would only cause delay in the finale of the drama developing. Larned and men like him always thought they talked from unbeatable strength. Somehow, McAllister had to show him that he was not as strong as he thought, even that he was vulnerable.
But first things first. He rode down to the ruin of his place to see if there was anything that could be salvaged. Any tool or article of furniture had an inflated value this far from civilization and he did not have money to throw around. The cabin had been almost totally burned. Nothing stood more than a foot or so from the ground. The squared logs had almost burned through and lay in a charred heap. The frame of the barn still stood, though too damaged by fire to be used again. The raiders had painstakingly broken up the corral fence, piled it in the yard and burned it to ashes.
He searched through the charred wood and ashes. A cast-iron skillet had survived; a pitchfork’s metalwork; the iron of a shovel with the wooden handle burned away. The stove could be used after a clean. Outwardly, McAllister behaved with absolute calm. But this was the first place to be called home that he had ever built himself. The cabin had been a symbol of the end of his racketing around. The cabin had been a sign to the world that he was now a serious man. Here was the place where he would make a name for himself with his fine roan horses.
As he headed for the open valley, having in mind to make a check on his range horses, he decided that it was time to stop himself being hasty. In the past, he had always moved quickly and violently against his enemies. If a man made a move against him, McAllister would counterattack with a speed that would take the quickest man unawares. Speed and the committing of the unexpected were the two best weapons in a solitary man’s armory. The prize went to the boldest. To prove it, he was still alive when a good many men had wanted him dead.
He found the horses near the lake, to which they were walking to drink. The canelo mare was out in front. Behind her came two young pregnant mares, followed by several fillies. McAllister sat Oscar in the shade of the trees and watched them come. The old mare spotted Oscar and whistled. Oscar rumbled back. The stallion galloped out to one side, found high ground and sniffed the air, ears forward. McAllister watched him with pride. He could remember the year he had driven this one and three mares all the way from California. That had been quite a trip. He thought back how he had started here, the first hard year. Till now it had all been worth it. He asked himself, not for the first time, why Larned had picked on him now. He should have done it sooner, before McAllister had put his roots down. Maybe if the Bar Twenty riders had come in the first weeks, McAllister would have thought the game not worth the candle and would have moved on. Maybe.
There were several geldings there, all good horses. He noticed there were a couple of strangers in the bunch, one of them a mule. He would have to sort them out later. Bringing up the rear were a half-dozen mares, all of them heavy with foal. That pleased him. He wondered how he would manage with foals if this trouble extended itself. He swore quietly to himself. He had wanted to bring in the pregnant mares so that the foals could be born in the barn near at hand. He did not want to lose one of them.
Why now? he asked himself again. What had he done to urge Larned so suddenly into action? Did they share
something in their pasts?
He started to circle the manada, but the stud horse took fright and he raced around his mares, getting them on the move, snapping at a rump here and there. The old mare set off down the valley at a long steady lope. The younger animals whirled, light as deer, and ran after her. McAllister reined in his mount to watch them go. A band of running horses, he thought, was the most beautiful sight in the world. The grass was so long in places that he could see little more than waving manes and tossing forelocks. He turned towards the trail and headed for the saddle.
Up on the pass, he reined in to turn in the saddle and look back over his valley.
Maybe not my valley much longer. Maybe not mine even now. No damn use to sit around bellyaching about it. Whining never got a man anything. He began to skirt the edge of the larger valley, riding the high trails, not wanting to meet any of Larned’s men.
It was dusk when he sighted the few twinkling lights of town. Oscar’s hoofs struck a hollow note going across the wooden bridge over the creek. He did not enter Black Horse along Main, but turned aside to come at it through the backlots. He did not want to be seen until he was ready. This was not Saturday night, so Larned’s men were unlikely to be in town. But Larned himself was here, he knew. He came out on Morrow by a back alley and rode straight into Mose Copley’s barn. He stepped down and tied the horse to a support in the depths of the big building. He could hear Mose’s hammer on the anvil in the smithy.
He went into the smithy and found Mose at work with his boy Lije working the bellows. Mose stopped hammering and stood looking at the big man stooping under the lintel of the door.
“Howdy, Mose.”
“Howdy.”
“Lije.” The boy ducked his head. “You heard about my place Mose?”
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