by Lauran Paine
Rufe wasted no time. “Who’ve you been selling those Cane cattle and horses to, Matt?”
The stocky man stared steadily at Rufe for a long time before answering. “Just who the hell are you, anyway?” he demanded.
Jud spoke, from Matt’s left side. “You answer, Matt, you don’t ask. If you want trouble, you’ve got it all around you by the ton. You figure it’d bother us to kill you right here in the middle of the road of your town this morning?”
Rufe asked the question again. “Who’ve you been selling those Lance-and-Shield critters to, Matt?”
The stocky man leaned, staring hard at the scuffed duckboards at his feet. “I sell strays to any-one wants to buy’em.”
“Lance-and-shield are Cane critters,” said Rufe, “and you know it. So does Arlen Chase know it. So does the damned law you just waved to across the road know it. Isn’t that right, Matt?”
Reilly raised his face, peering across the road and slightly southward where the man with the badge had disappeared inside a handsome brick building that had close-set steel bars in front of the roadside windows.
“Matt…?”
Reilly turned toward Rufe again. He formed words with his lips but did not utter them. Rufe stared unwaveringly. “I’m not famous for bein’ a patient man,” he murmured. “And I haven’t had my man for breakfast yet this morning. Matt, I’m sure beginnin’ to take a powerful dislike to you.”
Reilly finally spoke. “Chase knew. What the hell…it was him run them Cane critters down off the mesa onto the desert. Chase and his men knew.”
“And Homer Bradshaw?”
Reilly licked his lips and continued to stare at Rufe. He was armed, but the man sitting there on his right was as close to his six-gun as he was. Reilly was no coward, but neither was he a simpleton, and that is what it would have taken for a man to try something violent against the two relaxed, bronzed range men sitting here with Reilly The longer Matt Reilly sat with those two strangers, the more it seemed to him that they would kill him.
“Yeah, Homer knew,” he admitted finally. “In fact, it’s been Homer’s deal. I just sort of shared in it with him a little.”
“Who else shared in it with you boys?” asked Rufe.
“Feller named Ed Dunway, but he left us last winter, taken his share and went back to Texas. Since then it’s been just Homer and me.”
Rufe raised an arm to the back of the bench and turned slightly so that he could see past to where Jud was sitting. Jud had been listening, but he had also been studying the handsome brick jailhouse. Now, with unlighted brown-paper cigarette drooping from his mouth, Jud said: “I figure we’ve just about got to take over that jailhouse, Rufe. We got’em chained, or buried, or something, all over the damned countryside, and we just might forget where we got some of’em cached. If we had that jail-house, it’d sure make things a sight easier, wouldn’t you think?”
Rufe considered the building with a very tall old tree out front and to one side of the cribbed old tie rack. “Homer still in there?” he softly asked.
Jud nodded. “Yup. Been watching for him to come out.” Jud arose and hoisted his britches as he looked down at Reilly. “Matt, you just sort of lead the way right on in over there, and mind your manners be-cause we’re going to be one step behind you.”
Rufe also arose. The last man to stand up was Matthew Reilly. He looked very worried as he stepped from beneath the wooden overhead awning out into the roadway, trooping on an angling course in the direction of the jailhouse. He slackened pace as he stepped up over there, then turned and with a twisted look on his face said: “Listen fellers, Homer ain’t going to just be walked in on. You can’t take him like you taken me in front of the café.”
Jud was unimpressed by the warning. With a hand lying upon his pistol butt he said: “You’ll be in front, Matt. You better hope to God he don’t get bronco, or you’re going to look like a miner’s sluice box…from him and from us.” Jud nodded. “Go on. Walk in and be god-damned careful.”
Matt crossed to the door, took down a big breath, seized the latch, squeezed, shoved open the door, and stepped inside. The constable was behind his desk looking at a paper when he saw his caller, and boomed out a rough greeting. “How the hell are you this morning, Matt? I figured you’d be sleeping in.”
Rufe and Jud stepped in, slightly behind Matt and one on each side, guns fisted and aimed. Constable Bradshaw was stunned, but that passed in moments. He started to swell in the neck and redden in the face. He looked furiously at Matt Reilly
“What the tarnation hell do you think you’re doing?” he roared.
Reilly answered truthfully. “I don’t know who they are either, Homer. They caught me outside the café. They been asking about the Cane cattle and horses.”
The moment Reilly got that last sentence out, Con-stable Bradshaw’s eyes sprang wide and his head shot up. He did not have to announce what he had just realized—that the two, faded, bronzed, capable-looking men with guns in their fists staring at him, were the two men Arlen Chase had told him about last night at the saloon. Elisabeth Cane’s new riders.
Jud said: “Tell you what, Constable. You stand just like that. Don’t you so much as take down a big breath, and you’ll live to tell your grandchildren about the time you got locked up in your own jail-house.”
Jud moved around, staying well out of reach, then he came in behind the lawman, and reached very carefully to lift away Bradshaw’s holstered Colt. He backed clear the same way, keeping out of the law-man’s reach.
None of them relaxed until after this had happened. Jud shoved the extra six-gun into his waist-band, disarmed Matthew Reilly as well, then smiled at Rufe.
The ring of cell keys was atop the desk. Rufe used these to open the cell room door and, farther along, also to open the strap-steel doors of adjoining cells. Jud pushed their prisoners inside so Rufe could lock them in. Then Jud, holstering his weapon, said: “Where is Arlen Chase, Constable?”
Bradshaw stood in the center of his little cage, legs wide, hands on hips, glaring without saying a word.
Rufe finished with the locking and did not holster his weapon; he handed it to Jud, instead, then asked the same question. “Constable, Chase came to town last night with his gunfighter. Where are they?”
This time there was an answer, but the clear menace of Rufe’s handing aside his gun as though he would enter the cell and beat the answer out of Homer Bradshaw did not seem to be the reason for Bradshaw’s re-ply. He smiled when he gave it. He was thinking of Bull Harris, no doubt, and the outcome when these two range riders went up against the professional gunfighter.
“Arlen keeps a room at the boarding house east of town, around the corner from the drayage com-pany’s yard. But about now I’d say he’s likely either havin’ breakfast at the café, or maybe he’s having an eye-opener at the saloon.”
Homer Bradshaw continued to smile savagely as he looked from Rufe to Jud. The man in the adjoining cell, though, did not smile. In fact, Matt Reilly looked dubious, and he had to understand the reason behind his friend’s smile. He also had reason to look doubtful concerning a meeting between Chase and Harris and these two strangers. The strangers had a knack for just materializing out of nowhere on either side of a man, and, if they could do that, Reilly had a strong notion they would know a few other tricks as well.
“Just set,” ordered Jud. “Don’t start hollering or rattling the doors, because if we got to come back for you…hell, it’ll be like shooting at fish in a rain barrel, won’t it?”
They returned to the front office where Rufe tossed down the gun he had taken from the lawman. There were now a pair of Colts atop the constable’s desk. He turned to Jud with a suggestion. “Suppose we go fetch Smith and Ruff down here, too.”
Rufe was not thinking about the welfare of the pair of men in the bootleg hole; he was trying to think of a way to separate Chase from his gunfighter. The idea of going up against Arlen Chase, who was no better than Rufe or Jud probably,
because he, too, was a cowman, caused Rufe no particular anxiety. But going up against Bull Harris, the professional, was altogether different, and facing them both did not appeal to Rufe at all.
“They can stay in the damned hole,” Jud growled, and went to a barred window to lean, looking up the roadway in the direction of the café and the saloon.
Rufe said: “We got to cut Chase out and get him by himself. Otherwise, the odds aren’t too good.”
“Easy,” replied Jud, so nonchalantly that Rufe began scowling. “I’ll amble around until I find them, then I’ll get Chase aside and ask him for work. He don’t know me from General Grant. While I got him to one side, you can have Bull Harris. How’s that sound?”
Rufe continued to scowl. “How’s it sound? Like you’re trying to get me killed, that’s how it sounds.”
Jud considered. “Yeah, it does sound a mite like that, don’t it? You ready?”
“Hell, no.”
Jud nodded. “Fine. Then let’s go.”
They walked out of the jailhouse together, locked the door after themselves, and paused a moment in the golden, warm sunshine.
XII
The café man shook his head. He hadn’t seen Mister Chase since the evening before at suppertime, and that black-bearded, mean-looking feller with Mister Chase hadn’t been around this morning, either. Maybe, the café man suggested, they were having breakfast at the saloon. There was a corner of the bar where folks who bought drinks up there could slice up some meat and bread and make sandwiches.
The sun was rising a foot at a time, rather than inches, the way it always seemed to do on the summertime desert. It had not yet crested above the roof peaks of the town, but it was getting close, and the lower-down shadows were getting paler and were also retreating.
The battered wagon of some cow outfit appeared in the roadway at the lower end of town, scuffing runnels of tawny dust from beneath its steel tires. Otherwise, excluding a pair of horsemen entering from the opposite end of town, up where Rufe and Jud had entered last night—or early this morning—there was only walking traffic so far. But it was early yet.
Across the road, the jailhouse was still partially in cool shadows. It was also quiet, and no one was around to try the locked door, which was perhaps just as well. Rufe said: “I don’t know how much time we got, Jud, but it can’t be a hell of a lot.”
They started in the direction of the saloon. From far off, and up along the slope of Cane’s Mesa’s easternmost side, a quick, blinding flash of intense white light appeared and was gone. Jud saw it at the same time Rufe caught the same reflection. They stopped, peering off miles northwesterly.
“Someone coming down off the mesa,” stated Jud. “Maybe those fellers in Elisabeth’s barn got loose somehow.”
Rufe nodded. That was possible, but it did not re-ally interest him very much. What did interest him was the clear fact that their advantage was finally running out. Whoever that was coming down off the mesa would surely be heading for town. And even if it took them a couple of hours or more to get here, those two men in a bootleg hole weren’t going to stay down there forever, either.
Rufe said: “Let’s get this over with before we got a whole countryside jumpin’ down our gullets.”
They went to the saloon, and Jud entered first, leaving Rufe ostensibly loitering outside, watching the roadway. Not because he felt it needed watching—not yet anyway—but because, if Chase were in there and he could be braced about a riding job, the chances of one man being hired was a lot better than two men being hired.
A pair of slouching cowboys passed Rufe, looked over, and nodded. Rufe nodded back. The man with the battered cow-camp wagon was turning down into a narrow little roadway south of the general store. No one had to tell Rufe where he was going. To the rear loading dock of the store for sacks of flour, sugar, pinto beans, most likely, and tins of molasses.
A graying, slightly stooped older man, thin as a rail and with a perpetually saturnine expression, hauled up out front of the saloon’s inviting doors and looked in over their tops, then he grunted when he saw Rufe, and said: “I’m the doctor. I look in every morning to see which of the damned alco-holics’round town are backsliding.” He turned to squint out into the sun-brightening roadway. “You an early morning drinker, by any chance, young man?”
Rufe grinned. “Nope. I’m not even a very good nighttime drinker, Doctor.”
The old man grunted again. “Good. Stay that way, and you’ll keep your liver. Bad enough, being in the saddle most of your life, young man. Most cowboys, by the time they’re my age, got a bunk-wetting problem. That’s bad enough…but heading for a damned saloon every time they hit town compounds it. A man’s not one damned bit better’n his liver, young man. You remember that, eh?”
Rufe said—“I’ll remember it.”—and amusedly watched the gaunt old stooped man go walking stiffly southward down in the direction of the general store.
A wispy, elfin figure was hurrying northward, in the direction of the saloon’s doors, head down, features pinched in concentration. At the very last minute the elfin man looked up, and saw the medical practitioner bearing down and whisked so swiftly into a store-front doorway that Rufe marveled. He had recognized the elfin man as the livery barn nighthawk. Apparently he was one of the early morning drinkers the doctor had been seeking.
After the doctor had marched past, looking neither right nor left, the hostler peeked out, made certain the doctor was far down toward the general store, stepped forth, and hurriedly came on.
Rufe pretended to be looking the other way when the elfin older man turned and disappeared beyond the spindle doors. Moments later Jud ambled out, lighted cigarette trailing smoke, his eyes narrowed in thought, and said: “They got surprisingly good beer in there. You should have come in and had one.”
Rufe frowned. “Where’s Chase?”
“Not there. Neither is the gunfighter. But the barman told me they’re due any minute.” Jud’s eyes lifted to the faraway tawny barranca where they had seen that flash of brilliant light of someone’s silver cheek piece or concha. “What’s botherin’ me, Rufe, is that maybe they took off from town, heading back for the cow camp.”
Rufe also turned to gaze out across the flat country in the direction of Cane’s Mesa. If Jud’s worry was valid, then there was going to be some serious trouble, because, sure as hell, when Chase got to his camp and found it empty, he was going to ride for the Cane place—with his gunfighter.
“Luck might be runnin’ out,” muttered Jud, and spat out the cigarette. He rallied then, and said: “You take the yonder side of the road, I’ll take this side, and by God we’d better find those two fellers by the time we get down by the livery barn, or, sure as hell they’ll be on their way back, and we’ll have to go hightailing it after them.”
Rufe shoved off the log wall and, without speaking, ambled out into the morning warmth bound across the dusty roadway.
From now on, they could not afford to be secretive and clever; they had Tomake their determination about Chase and his man killer the quickest way possible, and that meant they might also come up against exactly what Rufe did not want them to come up against—a head-on meeting, two for two. He was not a professional gunman and neither was Jud. They were fast, and they were also accurate with handguns, but they were no better than most range men, which meant they were not in the same class Bull Harris was in.
Rufe’s side of the road had about a dozen business establishments, and most of them had front windows allowing someone outside to look the length and breadth of the inside counters and shelves. One place, the harness and saddle works, had that same kind of a big window, but it had been so cluttered with heavy sets of leather and chain harness, fine driving harness, saddlery, boots, bridles, and odds and ends that it was impossible to see through.
Ruff stepped back to the doorway and sauntered into an atmosphere wonderfully fragrant of leather and harness oil and pipe smoke. The bald, grizzled man in the canvas apron at
the cutting table peered over the tops of his steel-rimmed eyeglasses, puffed smoke a moment, then removed the stubby pipe to say: “Welcome, amigo. Don’t just stand there, come right on in. Don’t make a damn whether you buy anything or not.” The old man’s shrewd, light blue eyes studied Rufe thoughtfully, then made a common enough misjudgment. “There’s work to be had around the Clearwater country, and some of the out-fits stick notices on the wall in here…except that there ain’t none stuck on the wall today. But if you care to set and talk a little, maybe someone’ll come in looking for a rider, and you’ll get hired on.”
Rufe went over and leaned upon the counter, looking at the harness maker. “I’m hunting for a man named Arlen Chase,” he said.
The old man’s face showed the faintest of very fleeting shadows of disapproval, but if Rufe hadn’t been looking squarely at the old man, he wouldn’t have seen it come and go.
“He don’t come in here much,” stated the saddle maker, wiping palms upon the canvas apron and looking down at the flat-out half hide of skirting leather atop his cutting table.
“But you know him?” asked Rufe, watching closely.
This time the shadow came and went more slowly. The old man was hostile to the name of Arlen Chase, no question about it.
“Yes, I know him. Known Mister Chase many years. Knew him when he first elbowed his way in atop Cane’s Mesa.” The pale eyes glinted behind the shiny glasses. “And I can tell you, son, if old Amos Cane was still above ground, he’d have Arlen Chase for breakfast, and afterward pick his teeth with Mister Chase’s buckle tongue.”
Rufe smiled. “I believe you. I’m not looking for him for a job. I just want to find Chase, and right quick.”
The old man reached and slowly dragged off his glasses, staring steadily. Finally he softly inclined his head. “All right, mister. All right. I seen Mister Chase and some bushy-faced, ornery-lookin’ cuss go into the abstract office down the road below the general store a couple of doors about fifteen minutes ago.”
