“Yes.”
“You will not be happy at what Eric found out, or the result of your having made it.”
“What happened?”
“Eric went to Cromwell and asked to get the affidavit back, as you suggested. Cromwell hemmed and hawed until Eric became suspicious and demanded it. Cromwell made more excuses, and so Eric took him by the collar and led him to the bank and made him produce the envelope.
“Mr. Webster, there was nothing but blank papers in the envelope which Asa Cromwell deposited in the bank. Eric was never so surprised in his life as when he found out that Mr. Cromwell was crooked.”
“What did he do?”
“He took Mr. Cromwell back to his own office, and locked the door, and he roughed Cromwell up until the old lawyer cried like a baby, and blurted out the whole story. He had been deeply in debt to Faulkner, and Faulkner had made him do a lot of unlawful legal work for him—whatever that is—and he wanted to get out of Faulkner’s clutches. He knew that he had Faulkner in a bad spot, so he used that paper to settle his debt. He gave it to Faulkner.”
Webster thought this over. “That explains it,” he said vaguely.
“Explains what?”
“Faulkner tried to have me killed, I believe. And I was wondering if he’d have done that unless he knew that my affidavit wouldn’t come to light. I’m glad I sent Dick to check up on that. Where is he now?”
“He’s with Eric.”
“And where are they?”
“You’d better let me tell you what else happened. Eric had to get some cattle to Kansas City to fill a contract, and he had to take a chance driving them up to the railhead at McAlester. This, and his learning about Cromwell’s betrayal, came at about the same time, you understand. He had just got the cattle started out in charge of his range boss, when he discovered the Cromwell business. He realized that Faulkner had regained the upper hand, and he became worried.
“He got to making inquiries, and learned that Faulkner had suddenly left town. Having learned from Dick that you and Emory had taken the crew away from that hideout ranch, he suspected that Faulkner knew this also, and was rounding up another crew to make an attack on him. He had always had his suspicions that a man named Cloyd Martin who ranches down on the river wasn’t honest. He kept too large a crew of tough men for the size of his herd. So he went visiting, and Cloyd Martin wasn’t at home either. Martin and his whole crew were gone.
“By then Eric was convinced that Faulkner had taken Martin and his crew and gone out to waylay that herd of cattle. So Eric got together all the men he could trust, and he’s out now trying to find out what if anything has happened to his herd. Dick is with him.”
Webster turned this over in his mind, visualizing the tragic possibilities in the situation. “How many men did Swanson have with him?” he asked.
“He said he had about six who would go. Not counting himself and Dick, of course.”
“They wouldn’t stand much of a chance,” Webster speculated, but he did not say this aloud to the woman.
“I’ll go along and give them a hand,” he said. “I was going to leave this money here, but if Faulkner knows about things, then I’d better take it somewhere else. And those guns. He might try to get his hands on them.”
“Eric put the guns in a safe place as soon as he saw that it might be dangerous for me if they were left here.”
Webster was wondering where he could leave the money, when they both heard the front gate slam and footsteps on the stone walk.
Mrs. Halsell showed her concern, glancing around the room quickly.
“Come in here,” she said, moving toward the door to the kitchen.
Webster picked up his hat and saddlebags and moved into the dark kitchen, and closed the door behind him. As he groped for a chair and sat down, he heard Mrs. Halsell going to the front door, and then heard voices. He recognized Emory Dustin’s voice as he spoke to Mrs. Halsell, and then Sonia Swanson’s voice.
“I met Emory on my way from Miller’s,” Sonia explained. “He came along. He said he had something important to talk over with you.”
“What is it, Emory?” Mrs. Halsell asked.
“This embarrasses me,” Dustin said. “But I don’t know how to say it except just to state the facts. You see, Faulkner runs a trading post up in the Territory, handling merchandise and cattle. I am interested in the project with him. Now it seems that this fellow Webster, who has been creating so much excitement since he showed up in these parts, managed to get into Faulkner’s confidence, and worked his way into helping manage the business up there. As I told Sonia once before, I felt that the man was crooked. Well, this is what he did, and I am in a position to know for certain this time that he did it. He managed by a clever scheme to steal every cow and every piece of merchandise that we had. Wiped us out, clean as a whistle.
“His scheme was fantastic. You wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t actually happened. He posed as some kind of law officer after a bunch of crooks, and I understand that he roped a number of people into believing it. He even went so far as to manufacture a lot of fake evidence against several respectable citizens. He even fooled Asa Cromwell, a very astute lawyer, for a while. But Cromwell got suspicious of him and checked on him down in south Texas. The man is an extraordinary person. Seems to delight in hoodwinking a whole community or something.
“At any rate, he sold out all our merchandise and our livestock, and he came back here with the money. I understand that he managed to pull the wool over Eric’s eyes, and yours. I heard that he’d even become so bold that he was using your house as his headquarters.”
“Who was telling you that?” Mrs. Halsell asked.
“I got it indirectly from Asa Cromwell, himself.”
“Indirectly from the man himself,” Mrs. Halsell repeated. “Does that make sense, Emory? Did you get it indirectly, or from the man himself?”
“Well, I got it from the man who heard him explaining things.”
“Who was that?”
“Pardon me, Mrs. Halsell, but I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Then what did you want to see me about?”
“I wanted to ask you to cooperate with us in catching Jim Webster. First, I’d like to pick up that fake evidence, those guns and so forth. Then, I’m sure he must have left the money with you for safekeeping. I know, of course, that you don’t want to be helping a crook rob your friends.”
“No,” Mrs. Halsell answered slowly. “I certainly don’t want to be helping a crook rob my friends. What do you want me to do?”
“I’d like you to give me those guns so that I can destroy them, and I’d like you to give me the money that he gave you to keep.”
“I have no guns here,” Mrs. Halsell said.
“Well, that’s not important,” Dustin said. “But the money is; part of it is mine, the rest Faulkner’s. I’m sure you won’t want to keep stolen money from its rightful owners.”
“Of course not, Emory. But I have no stolen money.”
“Do you mean to say that Webster did not leave any money in your keeping?”
“Why, yes. I mean to say exactly that. Are you doubting my word?”
Emory Dustin was silent for a moment, then turned on his best smile. “I don’t like to doubt the word of a lady,” he said, “but I believe that Webster has fooled you so completely that you’re trying to be loyal to a trust. So, with no offense, I don’t believe you.”
“In that case,” Mrs. Halsell said coldly. “You may leave.”
“I can’t leave without that money, Mrs. Halsell.” Dustin’s voice was a little higher, more edged. “I know Webster brought it here, and I know that he wouldn’t have been wandering around with it later.”
“I suggested that you get out of here, Emory. You’ve said enough.”
“I am sorry, but I am not going without that money.”
“I’ll get it if I have to tear this house apart.”
The girl had been silent all the while, spellbound by what she was hearing. Now she cried out, “Emory, have you lost your mind entirely?”
“I’ve lost over twenty thousand dollars,” Dustin said sharply. “It’s in this house, and I’m going to get it.”
“I wonder if you’d try it if a man were here,” Mrs. Halsell said calmly.
“I’d get that money if a regiment were here.”
“If Webster were here?”
“I wish he were here, the dirty thief!”
Mrs. Halsell turned her head slightly.
“Mr. Webster,” she called. “There’s a man here who wants to see you!”
Webster came out of the darkened kitchen and closed the door behind him, backing up against it.
“All right, Dustin,” he said quietly. “I guess this is it. I gave you money to leave the country. You should have done it. Now get your hands up.”
Dustin’s eyes widened. Two pink spots burned on his cheeks, and then his face became a livid mask of frustration and hatred. He looked around as though seeking a means of escape, but there was none. Then he turned back toward Webster, and there was frantic haste in the way he slapped his gun out of its holster.
Webster shot him through the heart, and he fell head first on the white handwoven rag rug.
Sonia Swanson screamed and dropped into her father’s chair, and put her hands over her face while her shoulders shook with her sobs.
Mrs. Halsell stood by the center table, the light from the lamp shining on the face of a kind woman who was trying to fight back her natural sympathy for a man she knew to be completely bad. Dustin’s whole nature had shown on his face for that brief moment before he died.
Webster was quick to speak. “I’ll take you and Sonia wherever you want to go,” he offered.
“We’d better go to Doctor Benson’s. He can look after Emory.”
Webster crossed the room and stood over the girl. He laid a hand on her shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
The girl gathered herself together and looked up at him. “It’s not what you think,” she said. “I never did intend to marry Emory. At first I thought he was nice, but I gradually learned that he could think only of himself.”
“I didn’t know, and I don’t think anybody else knew. You were still seeing him.”
“Until I made Dad tell me about him. He didn’t want to do it, but I knew something terrible was going on, and I made him do it. Why didn’t somebody tell me before? Cora, why didn’t you tell me what he was? Why didn’t Dad tell me? Why didn’t Dick tell me? What am I? Didn’t I mean anything to any of you?”
Mrs. Halsell was over across the room now, trying to soothe her. “We didn’t tell you because we thought you were old enough to know your own mind,” she explained.
Webster said, “Mrs. Halsell, you’ve been called a liar once tonight. Probably for the first time in your life. Now I’m going to have to do it again.”
“Sonia, Old Jim Webster is always meddling in other people’s business. I’ve meddled in yours before, so once more won’t hurt. I think the reason you kept on going with Dustin after you saw through him was this; I’ve got a hunch you think a lot more of Dick than you let on, and there’s an old idea floating around that the way to make a man propose is to make him think he is going to lose you to another man. Ever hear of that?”
Now the girl lifted her face out of her hands, and it was pink back to her ears. She looked as though he had caught her cheating at cards.
“And,” Webster went on relentlessly, “these people love you. Dick loves you, and they all know it. And Dick loves you so much that he felt that if it took Dustin to make you happy, then he wanted you to have him. He thought more of your happiness than he did of his own, and that is a kind of love that doesn’t grow on every bleeding-heart bush. And Mrs. Halsell is the kind of person who wouldn’t do a mean thing just to steer you away from the man she thought you wanted and toward Dick, as much as she thought of you both. That’s the works, girl, and you should be proud of such people.”
The girl looked at him seriously, then squared her shoulders. “I don’t know who you are, Jim Webster. I haven’t seen you very often, and I don’t know how you learn so much. But thanks a lot, just the same.” She got to her feet, and there was a spring in her step.
“Are you ready to go, Cora?”
CHAPTER XVII
High Valley Gun Thunder
J.B. Faulkner was a man who had always been ruled by vindictiveness. To him life was a battle of man against man, and the smartest and most ruthless was the one who won.
He had a deep-seated sense of his own inferiority because of his poor physique and background, and he spent his life compensating for this with an insatiable craving for power and money. Money meant power, and with power he could control other men, he could be indifferent to them, and thus in a sense he could drown his own sense of being less than they.
He was a smart man, and thus he recognized and had contempt for his own weaknesses. But this self-contempt was too much for a man to stand, and he unconsciously projected it outward, where it expressed itself in an unadmitted envy and an admitted hatred. He hated men like Swanson, who seemed to get some joy out of living. He hated everybody who seemed to have a healthy sense of moral values, and he vented his spleen on them for being what he could not be. And in order to hide his own knowledge of his inferiority, he had developed such an arrogant pride that he became venomous at the thought that anybody could get the better of him.
Thus when he learned that Webster and Swanson were working together to crush him, his rage was so great that it made him physically ill. For the first time he discarded his rule of making others pull his chestnuts out of the fire. Instead, he was driven to go out himself and bring his wrath down on the heads of those who had so nearly destroyed him.
He had had little difficulty in rounding up Cloyd Martin and his men. Having been buying stolen stock from them regularly, it was a simple matter to make them help him, partly through blackmail and partly through promises.
Then, realizing that Webster, Dustin and the whole crew might sell his stock and keep on going, he brought up a new idea.
“How about you running that high ranch?” he had asked Martin. “You could do a lot better for yourself and the boys.”
“What about Dustin and that new man?”
“They’re no good. They’re both crooks. They’d steal from me as quick as they would from somebody else.”
“That’s a shame, I hate a crook,” Martin answered, enjoying the prospect of moving into Dustin’s job. “Maybe we can get together on it.”
“If they do come back, they’ll probably put up a fight,” Faulkner cautioned him cagily. “You’ll have to shoot your way into the job, maybe.”
“Don’t worry about me holding what I get my hands on.”
So they had agreed. They had moved over mountains, and on the morning of the second day, just before daylight, they had found Swanson’s herd camped on a flat prairie beside a creek. They descended on it and drove the regular hands off without firing a half dozen shots.
And now they had the herd back in the deserted valley ranch, and Faulkner was sitting in the empty storeroom, watching Martin’s men drinking some of the whiskey that had been left there.
“What do we do now?” Martin asked. “When do we get out and sell these cattle? Maybe we ought to drive them on down to some of those customers of yours.”
“I’m going to wait here. We have some business to settle first.”
“What kind of business?”
“The business of teaching that crew that they made a mistake in driving that stuff away and selling it.”
“They probably w
on’t show up here again.”
“Yes, they will be here. They took cooking utensils, but they left a good stock of food here. That means they will be back.”
“And what do we do when they do show up?”
“We get rid of them. You wanted to take over with your men, didn’t you?”
Martin digested this news. “That sounds pretty cold-blooded to me.”
“That is right. You cannot run a business like this any other way. If you intend to handle this end, then you’ll have to show me that you can do it my way. Is that all right with you?”
“Yes, if you say so. The idea just hit me a little sudden, so to speak.”
“That is the way we will hit them when they show up. Sudden, so to speak.”
“Have you any idea of when they might show up?”
“I’ve got it figured out approximately. I have a notion that they took the goods and sold it around to my regular customers. Allowing that to be the case, and if they take a couple of days off to throw their money away on liquor and women, they should be likely to show up any time after tomorrow or next day. We will wait for them.”
“They could slip up on us.”
“Put a man down the trail about a quarter of a mile. Have him relieved every four hours.”
* * * *
Jim Webster had left Woodbine immediately after seeing Mrs. Halsell and Sonia to the doctor’s, and had again taken the trail across the river and over the mountains. It was the next day before he came upon Swanson and Dick Hammond and his party.
There were now fifteen men with Swanson, who had trailed and found his trail crew making their way back home with one wounded man, the only one who had suffered from the raid on the herd. And having confirmed his suspicions that the stolen herd was being headed back to the high ranch, Swanson was on his way there when Webster encountered him.
He and Webster had a talk, in which Webster reported his own actions. He watched Dick Hammond when he reported Dustin’s last acts, but Hammond kept a straight face, revealing nothing of his feelings.
Then Webster, Hammond and Swanson sat down apart from the rest of the crew, and Webster outlined his plan to Swanson, convinced that if Swanson went on to the place as he had planned, he would run into a trap.
The Fifth Western Novel Page 39
