The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  Circling away from the barnyard area toward the ranch house, Logan caught sight of a group of men lounging in the shade of a sod bunkhouse.

  Their idle attitude struck him as queer for a cattle ranch at the tail end of calf roundup season; until, seeing their whiskered faces at closer range, he recognized them as the riffraff passengers Duke Perris had rounded up in Lewiston and shipped down-river on the Sacajawea.

  The men, recognizing Logan as the rider who had beaten a law posse into Riverbend on the Columbia three days ago and who had literally lassoed a steamboat, waved a greeting to Logan as he cantered past the bunkhouse.

  At the end of the lane Logan swung out of stirrups in the welcome coolness of the box-elder shade and dropped his reins over the neat pickets of a fence which surrounded a velvet lawn as level and green as the top of a gaming table.

  A curving, pebbled pathway bordered with flowers riotously abloom led Cleve Logan to the deeper shade of the ranch-house gallery. Climbing the steps, Logan saw a big redwood door swing open to reveal a tall, silver-haired man in a boss-type Stetson and batwing chaps.

  There was no mistaking the look of authority in the bright eyes which met Logan; there was power and arrogance written in every line of this face.

  “You’ll be Jubal Buckring, sir?”

  The big rancher nodded slightly in affirmation. Not far past forty, Logan realized that the white hair was a natural hue, and not due to advanced age.

  “I heard in town you were hiring riders,” Logan said, mounting the last step to face Buckring. Here the disparity in their heights was apparent; this cattle king had the physique to match his role in life, standing a good six feet six.

  “I’m sorry you had the trouble of riding out here,” Buckring said gravely. “Ringbone has a full bunkhouse.”

  Logan grinned. “So I noticed riding in. Must have finished your calf branding early, judging from the inactivity of those buckaroos out yonder.”

  A frown carved its notch between the cattle baron’s frosty brows. “You might try Lazy Ladder, twelve miles farther east,” he suggested. “Ringbone isn’t hiring.”

  Having dismissed this stranger, Buckring stepped back indoors. With the door closing in his face, Logan played his ace.

  “Duke Perris sent me here, Mister Buckring.”

  As on the Sacajawea, the name of Duke Perris had its magic impact. The door reopened, and Jubal Buckring stepped out on the porch, sizing up Logan with a lively interest.

  “That’s different. And,” Buckring added after a moment’s scrutiny of the rider before him, “you’re different from the other misfits Perris sent me.”

  Buckring was smiling now, extending a hand to Logan.

  “I’m Cleve Logan,” the rider said. “Uh, Perris didn’t tell me much about the work Ringbone had to offer. Being broke, I was in no position to press him for details.”

  Buckring stepped aside, motioning Logan to enter. This Ringbone living-room was furnished in lavish Western style, with coyote pelts and Navajo-loomed rugs on its oaken floor, walls decorated with the stuffed heads of moose and elk, its main wall dominated by a native rock fireplace large enough to have barbecued a full-grown steer.

  “Perris will give you your working-orders later on, I imagine,” Buckring said. “Until then, the fewer questions you ask, the better Perris and I will feel about it. You’ve met Toke Grossett?”

  Logan’s eyes, accustoming themselves to the dimmer light of this massive beam-ceilinged room, caught sight of Perris’s bodyguard seated on a horsehide sofa to the left of the hearth, in the act of pouring himself a glass of whisky from a bottle provided by their host.

  Grossett glanced up, acknowledging Logan with the briefest of nods, his eyes hot-bright in their cavernous sockets.

  “This man,” Grossett spoke to Buckring, “ain’t one of the bunch out at the bunkhouse, Mister Buckring.”

  Logan accepted a glass of whisky poured by Buckring, tipped back his head, and downed it at a gulp. He seated himself at the opposite end of the sofa from Grossett, closely observing Buckring’s reaction to Grossett’s statement.

  “So?” echoed the cattleman. “Then why did Perris send him out to the Hole?”

  Grossett eyed the amber shine of whisky in his shot glass, his shoulders hunched forward.

  “Perris didn’t send him out,” Grossett snapped bluntly. “This man jumped the boat at Winegarten’s landing and must have cut acrost the hills to Owlhorn.”

  A wary look crossed Jubal Buckring’s face.

  “This is strange business, Logan,” the rancher said. “I dislike mysteries. You told me Perris sent you here. Was that a lie?”

  Logan helped himself to another drink, aware that undercurrents of menace were flowing through the room now. He surprised Toke Grossett’s close and calculating look on him, and, recalling that Opal Waymire had branded this man for a bounty hunter, he believed he guessed the run of the man’s thoughts now.

  “I don’t cotton to mysteries myself, Mr. Buckring,” Logan said coolly. “Perris told me to leave the river boat where I did, as I imagine Grossett knows.”

  A renewed clamor of dogs outside distracted Buckring’s attention and sent the big rancher to the front door once more. Logan and Grossett sat drinking in moody silence, mutual dislike forming an invisible fence between them.

  Buckring was on the porch now, greeting someone who had just ridden up. Logan remembered the following rider who had left Owlhorn behind him, and had his answer to that a moment later when he heard Duke Perris’s voice.

  “It’s all right, Jube. Logan had a brush with the sheriff back in town this morning. He let me know where he was riding, which is why I’m here.”

  A moment later Buckring ushered the speculator into the cool sanctuary of the ranch house. Crossing the room, Perris nodded to Logan and went straightaway to Toke Grossett.

  “The dodger, if you please, Toke,” Perris said. “We might as well smoke this thing into the open now as later.”

  Logan and Buckring watched this byplay with the same puzzled curiosity, sensing that a dramatic development was about to take place. Toke Grossett pawed in a pocket of his Rob Roy shirt and brought forth a folded placard of dirty cardboard, which he handed to Duke Perris.

  Perris, in turn, unfolded the placard and handed it to Buckring, who read the inscription thereon with a studied indifference stamped on his face. When he finished he returned the card to Perris and then put the sharp stare of his eyes on Cleve Logan.

  “That has the looks of a hole card,” Logan said stiffly. “Does it concern me?”

  Without speaking, Duke Perris handed the card to Logan. It was a reward poster signed by U.S. Marshal John Stagman of Pasco, offering a $2,000 reward for the capture of an escaped convict from a road gang of the Montana Territorial Penitentiary, one Trig Fetterman.

  Logan gave the poster the briefest scrutiny, as if its context was familiar to him. Turning to Grossett, he said in a voice that held its note of danger, “Toke, you’ve got the rotten stink of a bounty hunter all over you. Don’t let this back you into the wrong stall about me.”

  Grossett’s hand dropped instinctively to his gun.

  “I have only this to say,” Logan went on. “The reward is payable alive, not dead. I’m telling you that to discourage you from putting a shot in my back.”

  Grossett said nothing, his face bleached white as if every word Logan had uttered was a physical slap.

  Logan turned to Perris as the promoter said softly, “We all know where we stand now. Your secret is safe with us, Fetterman.”

  Logan’s mouth whitened. “You’ll call me Cleve Logan.”

  Perris’s smile mocked Logan. His tapering fingers were rubbing the gold-bullet charm on his watch chain as he replied, “Very well. Logan it is. And now, I think, is as good a time as any to divulge the nature of the job I hired you for, Log
an. I congratulate you on your patience.”

  A pulse hammered along the bronzed column of Logan’s throat. It was cool in this room, but beads of moisture glistened from the pores of the rider’s cheeks.

  “You have no love for Stagman, or any other man who wears a law badge,” Perris said. “Is that correct?”

  Logan laughed harshly. “Come to the point, Perris.”

  Perris took time out to accept a drink from Jubal Buckring, and lowered himself carefully into a rawhide chair facing the others.

  “Logan, I told you that Owlhorn was a town without law, a hideout made to order for any hunted man. This morning you ran afoul of a sheriff. I want you to know that I did not intentionally mislead you. Vick Farnick is a stove-up cripple who will not last long when the fireworks start.”

  Logan waited, tension building up in him like a steel spring wound too tightly, but none of that showed outwardly.

  “What I did neglect to tell you the other night on the river boat,” Perris went on between sips of whisky, “is that the United States Government, anticipating war between the Horse Heaven cattlemen and the homesteaders you saw in town, is sending its ace marshal to Owlhorn. He will arrive Sunday night, on the eve of the land-rush opening. And that marshal is our mutual friend—John Stagman of Pasco.”

  Logan released a controlled breath. A bitterly sardonic note touched his voice as he commented, “You waited a long time to spring Stagman on me, Perris. He’s the one man you knew I hoped to avoid by holing up in Owlhorn.”

  Perris nodded gravely. “I know that. But Mr. Buckring and I are about to embark on an enterprise in this valley, the success of which depends on seeing John Stagman shuffled out of the deck early in the game.”

  Perris stood up, staring down at Cleve Logan.

  “That, friend Logan, is your job. I will turn over $5,000 in specie to you upon proof of John Stagman’s death, providing his death cannot in any conceivable way be traced to Mr. Buckring or myself.”

  Logan absorbed Perris’s cold-blooded proposition in stony silence. Inwardly, he felt the emotional strain of a man face to face with one of life’s biggest moments.

  Finally he said, “And if I don’t take the job?”

  Perris shrugged. “Toke Grossett is in the business of cashing in the bounties of wanted criminals, friend Logan.”

  It was Logan’s turn to get to his feet. He turned his gaze on Toke Grossett, the sheer ferocity of his eyes forcing the gunman to avert his gaze.

  “Grossett,” Cleve Logan said, “you are a blood-sucking, money-mad rat. But I’m telling you this for whatever it’s worth to you—I am not Trig Fetterman, and you’d never collect a penny of Fetterman’s reward even if I was.”

  Then, turning to Duke Perris, Logan said, “I hate John Stagman as I’ve hated no other man alive. You want him killed. Your price doesn’t enter into it. I’ll take the job.”

  Chapter Nine

  Bounty Hunter

  In saddle for his return to Owlhorn, Duke Perris waited in front of the soddy which Buckring had converted from a tool shed to a bunkhouse for the temporary use of the Lewiston hoodlums. A good half of these derelicts were still in their blankets, exhausted by their night ride through Satus Pass to reach this place.

  Toke Grossett, who had been assigned the role of foreman over these newcomers from Idaho, was inside the shack now, rousting the sleepers outdoors to hear what Perris had to tell them.

  Scenting the moist stench of unwashed bodies, stale whisky, and tobacco fumes which emanated from the soddy, Cleve Logan shuddered at the realization that for the remainder of the week he must share this hole with Perris’s heterogeneous crew.

  Perris, sensing the revulsion in the man who stood by his stirrup, belatedly offered a suggestion.

  “You don’t belong with this collection of rats, Logan. Tell Buckring I said for him to put you up at his main bunkhouse.”

  Logan glanced up at the speculator, roused from his own thoughts by the man’s hardly audible remark.

  “How long have I got to lie low out here on the Ringbone?”

  Perris leaned from the saddle, his voice low and confidential. “Till John Stagman shows up on the Pasco stage. That will be Sunday night. Don’t show in town until I send for you.”

  By now Grossett had the twenty-seven Lewiston toughs assembled outside the sod bunkshack.

  “All right, men,” said Toke Grossett, in the domineering tone of a cavalry sergeant addressing a platoon of green rookies. “Mister Perris wants to say a few words to you roughnecks. Pipe down an’ listen.”

  The derelicts became silent, shifting their feet on the dirt, some of them masticating their tobacco cuds, all of them manifesting an underlying nervous tension.

  “You’ll be spending the rest of the week here in the Hole-in-the-Wall, men,” Perris said. “You’ll take your orders from Toke Grossett. The important thing is, I don’t want any of you sneaking off for a trip to town to buck the tiger or get drunk. My reasons for bringing you here by such a roundabout route as the Columbia River was to keep you from being seen in Owlhorn.”

  One of the Idahoans, a peg-legged prospector with a brush of carrot-colored chin whiskers, spoke up querulously. “You ain’t told us what’s expected of us, Mister Perris. Some of us-uns are gittin’ a mite narvous, wonderin’ what the deal is. Now you got us here, how about dishin’ up a little more details?”

  Cleve Logan took a sharp interest in what this spokesman had said. Tex Kinevan had intimated, back on the Sacajawea, that none of Perris’s bunch had any idea why they were being transported to Washington Territory. The old mucker’s words confirmed this.

  “The less you know for the time being, the less chance there is of anything leaking out prematurely,” Perris snapped. “I’ve already shelled out one hundred dollars apiece to you, with the only stipulation being that you are all able to sign your own name and your oath to keep your mouths shut until I’m through with you.”

  Old Pegleg shifted his tobacco chew to another corner of his jaw and persisted doggedly. “Us-uns ain’t complainin’ about the pay, Mister Perris. But we ain’t nowise anxious to git messed up in somethin’ afoul o’ the law.”

  Perris’s eyes snapped with impatience. “I assure you,” he sneered, “that you’ll become involved in nothing the law can pin on you. Just sit tight until such time as I’m ready to give you your instructions. Meanwhile, I’ll shoot down the first bucko I see sneaking into Owlhorn before I send for you.”

  Perris wheeled his horse around and roweled into a gallop, leaving a long feather of dust down the poplar-bordered lane.

  Logan saw the sullen group break up as several more enterprising members who possessed dice and decks of cards drummed up a few games of chance. Before the week was out, Logan thought cynically, the hundred dollars apiece which Perris had doled out to these men back in Lewiston would be in the pockets of a scant three or four gamblers.

  Knowing of the range war which was impending, Logan had at first assumed that these men were gun-toters whom Perris was importing to back up whatever show of force Jubal Buckring intended to make against the influx of homesteaders.

  Now, watching these men resume their poker and dice games in the shade of the bunkhouse porch, Logan knew these derelicts were not cut out to burn gunpowder. None of them, so far as he could tell, bore arms. Half of them were too palsied by age or rough living in mining camps to be of any account in a fight, even against tenderfoot sodbusters.

  No, they had been brought to Ringbone to perform some other function than fighters in the big deal Perris and Buckring were hatching. He recalled Blackie Marengo, who had been one of these men Perris had rounded up from the deadfalls of Lewiston a week ago. Marengo, now, would have fitted the role of a hired gunnie; but not these broken-down drunkards.

  He put his mind to this riddle as, keeping aloof from the bunkhouse games, he kille
d time currying down his dun saddler over at the Ringbone barn. From a roustabout he learned that the Ringbone crew, for the most part, was out in the hills rounding up the calf crop, which accounted for the lack of Buckring cowpunchers around the home ranch.

  The clang of a triangle broke up the gambling at noon, sending the bunkhouse loafers hurrying to the Ringbone cookshack. Joining them at the long table in the mess hall after washing up, a practice which no one else besides Toke Grossett indulged in, Cleve Logan felt his stomach knot as he saw Perris’s men wolf down their food. Ringbone set a good table, and Cleve Logan was beginning to enjoy his beefsteak and new potatoes when a clamor of dogs outside heralded the arrival of another at Buckring’s home.

  Shortly thereafter the cookhouse’s screen door opened and the lean figure of Tex Kinevan was ushered inside by Jubal Buckring himself. The hum of conversation lulled as the Ringbone boss addressed himself to the Chinese cook.

  “This man rode out from town looking for work, Lee Fung. We’re not hiring, but I never turn a rider away with an empty belly. Fix him up with a plate.”

  At the head of the table, Toke Grossett glanced around, recognized Kinevan as a fellow traveler from the Sacajawea, and moved his chair over to make room for the new man.

  Kinevan glanced up and down the double row of men who were shoveling down their grub with ravenous appetites, most of them having survived for months on the free lunches served by Idaho saloons.

  The lean Texan knew these toughs by sight; but he made no attempt to conceal the contempt he felt for them. Not until he caught sight of Cleve Logan, midway down the table, did any sign of interest show in the cowpuncher’s lance.

  “Howdy, Big Slim!” Kinevan called out. “I thought you were over in Montana.”

  Like a rock thrown in a pool of smooth water, the ripples of this casual greeting flowed down the length of the table and brought utter silence in its wake.

  All eyes were turned on Cleve Logan as he straightened up, his mouth going unaccountably taut.