Clay flung out a strong brown hand at the trail ahead. “Maybe we’ll find grass up there somewhere.”
“We’ll find grass,” Alford said, the worry deeper in his voice now. “I hope we will.”
Behind them, ropes popped against cowhide as the six riders they had picked up at the border pushed the cows through a rocky pass. The cattle might be trail-weary but they were primed for running. Yesterday small bunches had broken free and it had taken all the savvy of the two partners and their men to keep the entire herd from bolting.
“I never seen the country this dry,” Joe Alford said.
“Let’s face facts,” Clay said. “If we don’t find grass at your place we’ll be selling this herd for bones and hide.”
“Spade has always got grass!” Alford said.
Clay grunted. Alford Talked tough but Clay had seen the big man’s inner softness. He wasn’t soft fighting a man with his fists. But when it came to guns Alford was something else again. As they kicked their horses up a steep canyon Clay hoped their entrance into this country would be peaceful. If it came to shooting he didn’t know how much he could depend on Alford.
“This time tomorrow you’ll be shakin’ hands with Nina,” Alford said, and beat dust from his hat on a heavy thigh.
Clay felt uneasy. According to Alford his wife Nina was a looker. You didn’t leave a handsome woman alone for fourteen months, Clay believed, without her getting around. She might welcome Alford home. Again she might not. And it was her ranch.
As Clay waited for the herd to catch up to them he removed his dusty hat to smear a forearm across his moist forehead. He was tall with a Texas solidness about him. The sweat-soaked shirt was tight across the shoulders and revealed the depth of his chest. As his gray eyes studied the gaunt steers toiling up the grade, he thought of Alford’s glowing tales of this country. Fatten the Chihuahuas on Spade grass, instead of splitting the herd at the border and going their separate ways. Double their money, Alford said. At the time it had sounded like a good idea. After all, they had been through hell to get this beef. Every dollar they could realize from the sale of the herd had been earned with their own blood, the months in prison with the constant threat of death hanging over their heads.
This wasn’t the first time he and Alford had worked together. Seven years ago when both were just past twenty they had worked for the Rail J outfit in West Texas. They had not met again until fourteen months ago, when they started this mad venture that had nearly cost them their lives.
Shortly after noon they ran into a shaggy-haired peddler who had a wagon-load of tinware and two yellow-toothed hounds. When the outfit drew up Clay spurred ahead and warned the man to keep the dogs in hand. A yapping hound at the heels of cattle as tired as theirs could start a stampede.
The man said the dogs would stay with the wagon. He passed a bottle to Clay. It was rotgut but it cut the dust. Alford spurred up and had a pull at the bottle. The peddler sourly commented on the bad times. The drought had pulled down a lot of the little outfits. He said he hadn’t taken enough orders the past month to pay for mule feed.
The peddler spat through a gap in his teeth. “Things ain’t bad enough. Now the country’s about to blow up on account of a forty-mile fence.”
Joe Alford looked skeptical. “There ain’t enough timber to build a fence that long.”
“Who said anything about a wood fence?” the peddler muttered. Then, sure that he had caught the partners’ interest, he went on to expand on the story. “It’s a new kind of fencin’ called ‘bobwire.’”
“There’s no wire made that’ll hold cattle,” Clay said.
“Up north a ways there’s a fella named Byrd Elkhart who proves you wrong,” the peddler said. “He’s the one that put up that forty-mile fence—”
“Elkhart!” Joe Alford exclaimed. “He’s my neighbor. Wasn’t no fence there when I pulled out last year.”
The peddler gave the big redheaded Alford a speculative look. And when Alford took a final pull at the bottle, thanked the man and turned his horse back to the herd, the peddler said, “Is that Joe Alford?”
“Yeah,” Clay said.
“I figured he must be if he claims to be Elkhart’s neighbor. I heard about Alford, all right. Big and redheaded and with a good-lookin’ wife—” The peddler broke off.
“What else have you heard?” Clay asked sharply.
“Folks think he’s dead. He ain’t been seen or heard from since he left for Mexico to get some cattle.
“Then he’ll surprise some folks,” Clay said.
“His wife mostly. She’s aimin’ to marry Elkhart.”
Clay sat stiffly in his saddle as the peddler drove off, his two big hounds flanking the rear wheels of the wagon.
Clay’s apprehension deepened as he rode back to the herd, toiling across the basin under the hot New Mexico sun. It had been a long trail from the rat-infested dungeon at San Sebastian Prison. Now they had cattle and no water and apparently no grass. And on top of that Alford was about to lose his wife. Not that Clay considered that any great blow. A woman who wouldn’t wait long enough to make sure her husband was dead before she fell in love with a neighbor wasn’t much of a wife.
Through the years Clay had kept his eye open for the right woman for him. So far he hadn’t found her. Maybe he was too fiddle-footed to be anchored to one spot. He was nearly thirty now, and ten years back he had decided that aside from this girl he kept looking for, the rest were easily bought. Either with money or the promise to lead a settled life. Like the girl back there in Texas he was going to marry. At the last minute the girl married a widower, twenty years older. But the widower had money.
Since then, with his rugged good looks, Clay had found his pleasure whenever he sought it. And then drifted on.
Now, riding stirrup to stirrup with Joe Alford, Clay felt a premonition of disaster. To Alford a straying wife would be a tragedy. And it could very well throw them into a fight with this Byrd Elkhart who had put up the forty-mile fence. If that happened they stood a good chance of losing their herd.
But it was too late to turn back. They had to get the herd to Spade grass. Providing this ranch of Alford’s had any grass.
To the north, the sky had darkened. “Lightning!” Alford yelled. “Maybe it’ll mean rain.”
“The rain I’ll take,” Clay said, and watched the mid-afternoon sky for another flash of lightning. “Thunder and lightning could spook this herd.”
“I’m hoping they’re too tired to run, Clay.”
“Sometimes it’s the weary herds that spook the easiest,” Clay said.
He wheeled his dun horse and rode back through the swirling dust to warn each of the six riders to be on the alert. The storm seemed too distant to be much of a threat, but you never could tell. Their last dollar was riding on the hoofs of these steers.
It had been a gamble all the way, starting last year when Monjosa, the Mexican brigand, propositioned Clay to bring him rifles and ammunition in exchange for Mexican cattle. Clay was one of the few Anglos Monjosa would trust. They had met some years back when Clay was trying his hand at mining silver near Chihuahua City. The mining venture did not pay off but his friendship with Monjosa did. When Monjosa started what he termed a revolution he got in touch with Clay about locating rifles and ammunition. Clay managed to find the weapons but lacked the necessary cash to complete the deal.
Discouraged because no one would lend him money, he ran into Joe Alford on the streets of El Paso. He had not seen Alford since they had worked together at the Rail J. On the chance that Alford might know where to raise some money, Clay outlined the proposition. Alford bought the idea with enthusiasm. He had married a girl in New Mexico who had been left a ranch by her father. Certain he could raise the cash, Alford made a hurried trip north.
Inside of two weeks he came back with the money. Pooling their cash, the two pa
rtners loaded the rifles and ammunition on pack mules and crossed the border to meet Monjosa. But Monjosa had suffered a bad beating at the hands of the Federals and couldn’t keep the rendezvous. With the countryside swarming with Federal troops Clay hid his contraband in a cave. Hardly had this been done than they were taken prisoner and hurried south to the prison of San Sebastian. There the commandant tried to force them to reveal the hiding place of the weapons.
They refused to co-operate. Clay knew that once they revealed the hiding place he and Alford would be shot. They spent many months in the prison. Then, with the revolution finally going his way, Monjosa suddenly attacked the prison to free them. But it might have ended differently had it not been for Joe Alford. As Monjosa’s men hammered at the gates, the officers in the prison decided to kill all prisoners. They started methodically, using their cavalry swords because they were out of ammunition. When they reached the dungeon Clay and Alford fought them off, parrying the sword thrust with three-legged stools, the only furniture in their cell. In the battle Clay took the flat of a saber blade across the top of his head. On his knees, dazed, he saw an officer lunge at him. And Clay could almost feel the officer’s naked blade slice through his chest.
But Joe Alford, unmindful of his own danger, stepped between Clay and the officer. Using one of the stools for a shield, he let the point of the saber bury itself into the wooden seat. Then, before the officer could withdraw, Alford smashed him in the face with the stool. The officer went down. Alford beat back two more who were crowding into the cell, and by that time Clay had regained his feet.
Monjosa’s men swarmed through the prison. Clay took them to the spot where he had hidden the rifles and ammunition. And Monjosa, according to their agreement, turned over sixteen hundred head of Chihuahua steers.
Clay, knowing Monjosa’s generosity might pale if he suffered reverses, suggested to Alford that they get out of Mexico quick. They got the herd to the border, and hired enough riders to push the herd north to New Mexico…
* * * *
For an hour lightning played intermittently around the craggy peaks of the Sabers in the distance. They could hear the distant boom of thunder. The storm was getting closer. Clay glanced back at the herd, his nerves tightening.
Suddenly a woman and three riders appeared on the trail ahead. The women must have ordered the three men to stay behind, for they drew up and she came on alone. At first Clay thought it might be Nina Alford, having learned somehow that her long-missing husband was near home. But as she drew closer he saw that she could not be more than twenty, with blue-black hair pulled back severely from a high forehead. Clay remembered that Alford had said his wife was a blonde.
The girl reined in, staring at the steers coming up through a pass lined with towering sandstone peaks. Then, as Joe Alford came spurring up, her mouth fell open.
“Kate French!” Alford boomed heartily. He moved in close and shook the hand of the stunned girl. “Clay, you remember me tellin’ you about Kate.”
Clay removed his hat and nodded. During the long months of their imprisonment Alford had often talked of the plucky Kate French who ran the KJ outfit next to Spade. She had ramrodded the place herself, ever since the death of her brother Jonathan some years back.
Kate’s dark blue eyes studied Alford’s face. “I heard you were dead, Joe,” she said in a husky voice.
“Don’t look much dead, do I?” Alford laughed.
Kate bit her lip. She was a pretty girl, her face lightly tanned, her small nose turned up. “The least you could have done was let Nina know you were coming home.”
“She’s his wife,” Clay said. “She’ll be glad to see him whether she knows he’s coming or not.” He sensed now, from the girl’s worried expression, that the peddler had given him facts, not gossip. Thinking of how much he stood to lose, Clay knew he would have to talk sense to Nina Alford. Make her realize that her future as well as Joe’s lay in this herd. They had to get it north to the railroad. But first some meat had to be put on the bones of the gaunt Chihuahuas.
Kate’s full mouth tightened a little as she studied Clay. “So you’re the gunrunner,” she said.
“If Clay was a gunrunner, so was I,” Alford put in.
“You’ve helped to stir up a lot of trouble in Mexico,” Kate said.
“The peons need help,” Clay said, shrugging. “Maybe Monjosa isn’t the answer down there, but it’s a start.”
“I suppose,” Kate said. She leaned her long body forward in the saddle as if to get a better look at Clay, and even in her levis and shirt she was nicely built. “Is it your fault that Joe was away from home so long?” she asked.
“Joe’s over twenty-one,” Clay said. “He knew what he was doing when he went in with me.”
“It wasn’t nobody’s fault,” Alford said. “How’d you know we was comin’, Kate?”
“I saw the dust,” she explained, still watching Alford worriedly. “I thought it might be a stranger driving a herd north—and not realizing you’ can’t get to the railroad this way any longer.”
“What’s to stop us?” Alford demanded.
She told them about Byrd Elkhart’s forty-mile fence. “Of course it isn’t forty miles of barb wire like he claims. But it could be when the fence is finished.”
“Forty miles of fence,” Alford murmured.
“You should have let Nina know you were coming home,” Kate told him. “You really should.”
With that she turned her horse, gave Clay a lingering glance, and rode off toward the three riders who waited for her up the trail.
Alford rubbed his heavy jaw. “Guess I should’ve got a letter to Nina,” he admitted. He flushed with embarrassment. “A man that never learned to write is sure hard put, Clay.”
Clay squinted at the dust left by Kate French and her riders. It had drifted higher against the darkening sky. “We’ve got other things to worry about. That storm is getting closer. Can we make Spade tonight?”
“No chance of that,” Alford said. “But there’s a good holding grounds about two miles north.”
Clay rode back to the herd to have a word with Sam Lennox, the man he had appointed segundo for the drive. Lennox was a big loose-jointed Texan with a shock of thick black hair and a spike beard. He was about forty. He knew his business, but when a U.S. marshal had taken supper with them just north of the border, Lennox had stayed quietly in the background.
Clay warned Lennox about the possibility of stampede now that the storm was nearly upon them. “If this herd runs,” Clay said, “they’ll lose the little flesh still left on their bones.”
Lennox nodded. He and Clay understood each other.
They were Texans. Lennox turned his horse to pass the word on to the other men.
Within the next few minutes the storm potential increased. Dark clouds scudded across the junipers that crowned ridges on either side of the immense canyon they were crossing. A flare of lightning tightened the flesh at the back of Clay’s neck. He saw the Chihuahuas begin to get edgy in the booming thunder that followed an instant later. It began to rain and the men put on their slickers, tense now in the saddle.
Clay knew a moment of relief when the herd cleared the canyon. The steers seemed docile enough as they streamed across a flat stretch of country. But lightning flashed again above a high mesa and the ground trembled. Probably struck a tree, Clay thought. He held his breath, but the herd did not run.
Then a new sound came to him. Turning in the saddle, he peered through the screen of rain and saw a flat-bed wagon coming along the road. A big man wearing a slicker was humped over in the seat, driving a four-horse team through the mud. Piled high on the wagon bed were coils of some kind of wire. As the vehicle approached the sound of wheels squeaking increased. Clay swore under his breath at this driver who hadn’t taken time to grease his axles.
Some distance behind the wagon, four riders
pulled up to watch the Chihuahuas moving across the flats. But the wagon came on, swaying from its top-heavy load as the wheels dipped into ruts. Already the lead steers had flung up their heads to stare at the wagon.
Clay turned to Joe Alford, who had reined in beside him. “I’ll ask ’em to stay put till our cows clear the road.”
“Better go slow,” Alford said nervously. “That’s Byrd Elkhart’s outfit.”
“Slow, hell,” Clay snapped. “Those cows are already half spooked from the lightning.”
“Don’t get us in no trouble.” Alford flung out a big freckled hand to indicate one of the riders beside the wagon. “That’s Lon Perry, Elkhart’s foreman. A bad man with a gun.”
Clay peered at the slender yellow-haired man Alford had indicated. The rider was astride a sorrel horse.
“Don’t be so damn gun-shy,” Clay said, and then contrition gripped him. After all, Joe Alford had saved him from being run through by a saber blade back at the prison of San Sebastian. “I’ll speak to ’em soft,” Clay said, and rode toward the group.
Alford shouted for him to come back, but Clay ignored it. He reined in beside the wagon.
“Can you hold up here till we get the herd by?” he asked the big brown-bearded driver. The man nodded and hit the brake.
But the pale-haired Lon Perry came spurring up to wave a gloved hand at the driver. It was his left hand, however. He carried his right hand sling fashion inside the front of his unbuttoned shirt—to keep it dry, Clay supposed; to keep the long, sensitive fingers warm and supple. Perry pulled the ungloved right hand out of his shirt and dropped it to his belt, above the butt of a bone-handled gun.
“Keep movin’, Bailey!” Perry shouted at the driver. Then his small, close-set eyes turned to Clay. “This here is a public road,” he announced coldly. Wind stirred the hair which curled out from beneath the brim of his soiled hat.
The Fifth Western Novel Page 41
