The Fifth Western Novel

by Walter A. Tompkins

  When hunger pangs roused her the sun was poised like a gold ball over the peak of Mount Adams. She ate her meal and saddled up, riding to the highest ground in the vicinity to study the sunset-reddened hills between her and Satus Pass through Duke Perris’s field glasses.

  Nothing moved on that sage-spiced landscape. If Cleve Logan had been on her tracks, he had lost them in the Pass; that she felt with a definite assurance.

  According to the map she had brought from her office, the site of Fort Rimrock was still forty miles away to the east.

  She was in no danger of getting lost in these trackless hills; Ringbone’s drift fence was a guide on her left and the bleak country was smooth and rolling, promising no canyons or other barriers to night travel.

  Giving the roan its head, Opal Waymire pushed on into the heart of the bleak and desolate terrain, fast browning under the summer’s heat. Toward dawn a slim sickle of moon put the landscape in harsh relief before her, making it seem doubly formidable and endless.

  At midmorning she reached the dry bed of a creek which the map identified as Rattlesnake Creek, which drained this portion of the Horse Heaven watershed into the Columbia.

  On the east shoulder of this canyon, where the creek met the gorge, would be the location of Fort Rimrock, which the army had maintained between Fort Walla Walla and Fort Simcoe during the Indian wars.

  Hunger and fatigue prompted her to camp in this defile, but the knowledge that high noon would see her at Perris’s rendezvous caused the girl to cross to the far rimrock at the first break which offered itself, and turn directly south.

  Being ignorant of this country, she had no way of knowing that the map’s paucity of detail had given her no warning of the rough scab-rock character of this high mesa, so that the sun was far down before she discerned the squat shape of Fort Rimrock’s blockhouse on the sky line ahead.

  The old outpost seemed near enough to touch, its naked rafters etched like black bones against the pearl sky, its loopholes and weather-grayed logs plainly discernible in this crystalline atmosphere.

  But, in common with other parts of the West, distances were deceptive, and solid objects had a habit of melting into mirage-like forms; and it was a full hour before she sent her tentative halloo toward the ruined blockhouse.

  Getting no answer, the girl knew a moment’s panic, wondering if Perris and Marengo had somehow failed to find the hide-out without a map to guide them.

  Then she heard a horse whicker in a stand of cottonwoods around the spring which had been the genesis of this frontier army bastion. As her own mount scented water and broke into a trot, she glimpsed Blackie Marengo’s face framed in one of the upper-story loopholes, on lookout duty.

  Duke Perris, his jaws covered with a quarter-inch growth of cinnamon stubble, stepped out of the blockhouse doorway in time to help the dazed and thoroughly wearied girl out of stirrups.

  Perris kissed her and carried her into the ruined building, lowering her to a rawhide-latticed bunk which formed the only undamaged furnishings the building offered.

  Blackie Marengo swung down a ladder from his lookout post and, bending his lascivious stare on the girl, went out to the water hole where the girl’s roan had plunged its muzzle. He returned a few minutes later with the gunny sacks filled with food and ammunition, to hear Duke Perris explaining their next move.

  “We’re directly above Winegarten’s wood camp and horse ranch,” Perris told the girl, who was revivifying herself from the promoter’s bottle of whisky. “We won’t wait here any longer than it takes you to rest up and get some food in you. Blackie says he saw a rowboat on the beach by Winegarten’s wharf. We’ll cross the river tonight and catch ourselves a train on the Oregon side. By tomorrow we’ll either be in Portland or Walla Walla.”

  The three fugitives devoured their meal as full night descended on the Washington hills. Blackie Marengo, always as restless as a panther, saddled their horses for the short ride down to the woodcutter’s camp and led them around to the north entrance of the fort.

  Myriad stars laid their unearthly beauty over the land and put shadows on the weathered walls of the blockhouse, shedding enough light for Opal Waymire to see the gray trace of the trail which dropped down the steep lava wall into the black unknown of the Columbia.

  A thousand feet below the rimrock, a single light told them the location of the woodcutter’s cabin. The shuttering glare of that light and the wood smoke from Winegarten’s chimney touched their nostrils with an earthy, reassuring promise of refuge waiting for them down there.

  Opal had brought with her the week’s cash receipts of the Palace Casino, amounting to several thousand dollars.

  Perris transferred that money from her saddlebags to the carpetbag which had belonged to Jubal Buckring.

  “All right,” Perris said at length. “We’re ready to ride. We’re shaking the dust of Washington off our boots a good three days earlier than I’d anticipated.”

  Saddle gear creaked as Blackie Marengo was the first to mount, moving clumsily because of his broken arm. As Opal settled herself aboard the roan, Duke Perris rounded the rump of his horse and paused to grope for the rawhide thongs which would secure Buckring’s carpetbag behind the cantle.

  A shooting star made its dissolving spectacular scratch across the zenith. The night breeze whistled its sedative tune through the rafters of the blockhouse overhead. Somewhere down on the river a steamer’s whistle reached their ears in distance-thinned ropes of sound.

  Perris was in the act of fastening his carpetbag to saddle when a gunshot’s flatted roar breached the peacefulness of this night scene, and a bullet thudded into the silvered lintel of the door at his back.

  Opal Waymire, alone of the three, located the ambushed rifle beyond the crumbled ruins of an adobe barracks building fifty yards north of the blockhouse.

  Her eyes retained the burst of the gun’s flash as she sat staring that way, frozen in stirrups by terror.

  On the heels of the rifle’s slamming echo off the wall of Fort Rimrock came the hoarse but unmistakable voice of Cleve Logan, hidden behind the barrack adobe pile, “Hold it, the three of you. You’re surrounded.”

  As if to prove Logan’s words, the heavy bark of a six-gun broke from the ebon blot of the trees rimming the water hole, at a quartering angle from Logan’s location. This bullet made its banshee wail over the heads of the trio.

  Blackie Marengo was the first to break the paralysis which surprise had put on them.

  * * * *

  Wheeling his black mustang sharply, Marengo raked its flanks with steel and rocketed past Opal and Perris, heading for the mesa trail beyond the near corner of the blockhouse.

  Hitting the open compound, Marengo drew a responsive crash from Cleve Logan’s Winchester. The whack of copper-jacketed lead striking Marengo was a distinct sound to Duke Perris and the girl; they saw the rider rock violently in saddle but recover his balance by clawing the black’s mane with his free hand. Wounded, Marengo vanished around the corner of the fort on his stampeding mount, without drawing another shot from the lawman.

  Perris’s bay reared in panic as the speculator hit the saddle. He kicked Opal’s mount to send it stampeding in the direction Blackie had taken, the girl clinging to the pommel to keep from being unhorsed; but, sure target though she was, Logan held his fire.

  From his armpit holster Perris jerked a Colt and drove five fast-triggered shots at the barrack ruins to force Logan back. A gun in one hand, Buckring’s carpetbag in the other, Perris hooked an elbow around the saddle horn and leaned Indian-style to the off side of his horse to present a more difficult target.

  Before his mount was past the neutral background of the fort wall, in the zone of fire covered by Logan’s .45-70, the gun out by the water hole broke the night’s blackness with its orange flame, and Perris felt the heavy shock of that following bullet as it drilled his horse in the
base of the skull.

  The shad-belly bay went down as if a scythe had lopped off its legs in the middle of a stride. Hurled violently from saddle, Perris kicked his Hussar boots free of the oxbow stirrups without conscious volition as he hurtled through space.

  He struck the heavy logs of the blockhouse corner with shoulder and skull, and bounced off to lie motionless on the hard-packed gumbo.

  Perris’s lax fingers still clutched his smoking six-gun and the carpetbag of loot which had within it the sum and substance of his long conniving, the lodestar he had followed to this ultimate end of his trail.

  He was lying like that, without movement and without feeling, when Cleve Logan crossed the starlit compound and squatted over him, hauling Vick Farnick’s big handcuffs out of his hip pocket.

  “It’s all over, Alva!” Logan called to the girl whose gun had dropped Perris’s horse. “We’ve got to get away from Fort Rimrock before Marengo and Opal come back to side Perris.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Sky-Line Rider

  With Perris’s limp bulk jackknifed like a dead man over his shoulder, Logan made his way down into the creek’s canyon to where they had left their horses. Alva Ames walked behind them, carrying Perris’s money-laden carpetbag; and Logan would never know whether this mild-mannered girl—the daughter and the sister of preachers—had aimed her shot for the rider or the horse back there at the Fort.

  From the moment that Alva Ames had caught up with him at the entrance of Satus Pass, Logan had been aware of the futility of trying to persuade the girl against accompanying him on this chase across the Horse Heavens. And Alva had carried her own weight, proving more of an asset than a liability to him.

  It was Alva whose sharp gaze had spotted Opal Waymire’s distant shape limned against the stars of the Pass summit yesterday, where she had left the stage road without leaving visible clues behind her.

  From then on, she had relied on Logan’s superior tracking skill and experience to trace the route of Opal Waymire’s trek across the hills. What sleep they had had was snatched in saddle; where Opal had camped, they had kept relentlessly on, sparing neither themselves nor their horses.

  The grueling toll of this manhunt was on them now, their bodies crying out for sleep; but Logan knew the danger of being stalked by Blackie Marengo or Opal Waymire, knew the desperate lengths that pair would go to wrest Perris out of his custody.

  Perris, his wrist manacles flashing in the starlight, was still unconscious from the effects of the fall he had suffered.

  Logan boosted him into his own saddle and, forced with the necessity of riding double on their return to Owlhorn, mounted behind the dun’s cantle.

  It was an hour later, when they gained the west rim-rock of the creek’s defile, that Logan turned around in saddle to catch a glimpse of a following rider on the sky line between them and Fort Rimrock.

  That would be Blackie Marengo, most likely; and the knowledge that they had a desperate gunman on their back trail made Logan more acutely aware than ever of the responsibility he bore to Alva Ames.

  Marengo was committed to rescuing Perris before Logan could turn the outlaw over to Marshal Stagman in Owlhorn; not through any great loyalty to Perris, but because of Buckring’s money, now in the carpetbag Logan had lashed to his pommel.

  In the cold hour of the false dawn, as they were following the Ringbone drift fence toward the west, Logan halted and dismounted to put his ear to the ground. He caught the telegraph of horse’s hoofs, and knew that Marengo or Opal, or both, were pressing their pursuit.

  “We’ve got to keep awake,” Logan told the girl. “It’s possible that Marengo may try cutting around in front of us to pick us off from ambush. I’m sorry, Alva, but that’s the way it has to be until Perris is safe in Farnick’s jail.”

  An hour after dawn broke across the Horse Heaven country found them tipping down into a canyon. A trickle of water kept verdure green in this coulee’s depths and their horses broke into a stumbling lope as they scented water.

  Following Ringbone’s fence down into this canyon’s cool depths where the sun had not yet penetrated, they smelled wood smoke and later came in sight of a bearded oldster in a buckskin jacket who was cooking breakfast on a ledge overlooking the stream’s pebbled ford.

  Duke Perris was conscious now. He spoke no word as he discovered that his legs were roped to stirrups and his wrists manacled with heavy steel bracelets.

  At their approach the oldster hobbled out to meet them, waving them away from the clearing in the trees.

  “I’m settin’ my trap line hyar for coyotes an’ timber wolves,” he explained, his truculence abating when he spotted the law badge on Logan’s shirt. “Can’t have the varmints scairt off by man-smell or hoss-smell, so keep out o’ this clearin’, savvy?”

  Logan dragged a hand over his sleep-heavy eyes.

  “What stream is this?”

  The trapper gestured toward the summit. “Source o’ Rawhide Crick’s up yander a ways.”

  Logan’s eye was on a clearly defined trail which looped off to northward, following the canyon’s course.

  “Rawhide, you say? That trail leads to Owlhorn?”

  The trapper nodded. “If Owlhorn’s where you’re goin’ you’ll save twenty-odd mile on that trail, as compared to ridin’ west till you hit the Satus road.”

  Logan turned to Alva. “We’ll camp across the creek for a couple hours’ sleep,” he said. “For you, that is. I have a hunch Marengo may show up here anytime now.”

  The girl nodded indifferently, too far spent to discuss any plans with Logan. For Alva, only the duty of burying her brother could take her back to the Owlhorn she hated. Now that he had Duke Perris in his custody, Logan found himself sharing the girl’s aversion to the boom town which had been the scene of the past week’s momentous happenings. Along with Perris, Logan would turn over his law star to John Stagman for the last time; already he was eager to get back to his little ranch in the Blue Mountains, and pick up life where he had left it to accept Stagman’s assignment of this manhunt.

  They crossed the Rawhide and off-saddled, Perris standing by without expression and without speech as Logan spread their saddle blankets on the pine needles to serve as Alva’s bed.

  * * * *

  She curled up there and was instantly asleep; and without words of explanation, Logan unlocked Perris’s handcuffs, led him over to a loblolly-pine snag and, forcing his prisoner to put his arms around the tree’s bole, snapped the cuffs over his wrist.

  After picketing the horses in a patch of lush bluestem, Logan took his Winchester from its scabbard and waded back across the stream to the trapper’s camp, his departure watched closely by Perris’s bloodshot eyes.

  For the better part of the following hour Logan kept his vigil on the far bank, his rifle ready to cover the upper rim should Blackie Marengo appear on the trail there. Off in the clearing, the buckskin-jacketed trapper was busy with his trap-setting, his feet wrapped in gunny sacks to kill the man-spoor.

  When Logan returned to their camp on the opposite bank he found Perris asleep, or feigning sleep. Logan untied Buckring’s carpetbag from his pommel, opened it to inspect the packets of greenbacks it contained, and then, his face wearing a taut expression, recrossed the Rawhide.

  The trapper had packed his belongings on a jenny mule and was preparing to head upcanyon toward the Rawhide’s source. He got his parting promise from Logan not to contaminate his trap line, and vanished southerly into the timber.

  When he was long gone, Logan went over to the ashes of an old campfire and, digging a hole there, buried Buckring’s carpetbag containing Perris’s loot, carefully concealing what he had done.

  For another hour, Logan fought off sleep while he kept watch on their back trail. He saw no trace of following riders, but he could not be sure that Marengo and Opal had abandoned Perris to concern t
hemselves with their own getaway.

  Returning to where Alva and Perris were sleeping, Logan saddled up the horses before rousing the girl and his prisoner.

  As they started into the perpetual twilight of the canyon’s timber, Alva Ames spoke sharply. “The carpetbag, Cleve. You’ve lost it somewhere!”

  A crooked grin plucked at the corners of Logan’s tired mouth as he saw Perris’s sharp reaction to the girl’s discovery.

  “I buried it back down the canyon,” Logan said. “We’re prime bait for an ambush between here and Owlhorn. If worst comes to worst, at least Marengo won’t get the loot. Plenty of time to recover it after Perris is behind bars.”

  Alva Ames spurred into the lead as the pine-hung trail followed the contours of Rawhide Canyon’s twisting course. Whippy undergrowth made riding a tedious business here, making Logan wonder if they had been wise in taking this Owlhorn cut-off.

  They had covered another quarter of a mile when Duke Perris, refreshed by his sleep, broke his silence for the first time since his capture.

  “You’re a dead pigeon and don’t know it, Logan. You’ll never turn me over to John Stagman tonight.”

  Before Logan could make answer he saw Alva Ames rein up abruptly, causing Logan’s following dun to collide with the paint horse’s rump.

  Simultaneously a woman’s voice lashed sharply out of the dense salal thickets of the trailside. “Put your arms up, Cleve, or Alva’s a dead one.”

  Logan heard Duke Perris’s grating laughter echo that voice. At the same instant he caught the subtle fragrance of an alien odor in his nostrils: a woman’s expensive perfume.

  Then it was that Cleve Logan saw the barrel of the .54 Ballard carbine which was thrust through the oily leaves of the salal, its muzzle aimed inches from Alva Ames’s body.

  Alva’s pinto side-stepped as a Ringbone-branded blue roan edged out into the trail, and Cleve Logan saw the dappled sunlight and shadow playing on the gaunt, twisted face of Opal Waymire.