The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 2

by Louis L'Amour

  Walt Borrow was undisturbed until he saw the bank’s door ajar. Pushing it wider, he found Josh Phillips lying in a welter of gore, and the banker just managed to gasp out a few words before he died.

  “Forced me!” he gasped, and lifted a hand horribly blackened by fire. “Threatened to burn … Mary, too!”

  A question from Borrow elicited a few more words.

  “Strangers! A … hawk …” His voice broke and he struggled for words. “Red!”

  The town was enraged, but the rage was tempered by wonder, for there were no tracks, and nobody seemed to have seen anything. The outlaws had come and gone unseen, unheard. Only the body of Josh Phillips, the safe they forced him to open, and the forty thousand missing dollars proved their visit.

  Stabling his horse in the livery stable an hour after his arrival, Bowdrie seemed not to notice the saddle tramp currying his horse in the next stall.

  “Forty thousand was the most money the bank had in four months.” Coker spoke softly. “How does that sound?”

  “Like somebody was tipped off,” Bowdrie agreed. “Keep your ears open.”

  John Bishop intercepted Bowdrie as he was entering the hotel with his saddlebags. Bishop was a tall young man with a crisp dark beard and an attractive smile.

  “I led the posse that hunted for tracks,” he said. “I’d be glad to help in any way.”

  “You found nothing?”

  Bishop had a fine-featured but strong face. He looked like a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it. “Nothing I could swear to. There was some wind that night, and blown sand would make the tracks look older.”

  Bowdrie thanked him and went into the hotel. He wore a black flat-crowned, flat-brimmed hat, a black silk neckerchief, gray wool shirt, and black broadcloth trousers over hand-tooled boots with California spurs. His two guns were carried low and tied down, a style rarely seen. His eyes, as they slanted across the street, missed nothing.

  Leaving his saddlebags in his room on the second floor, he returned to the lobby and passed through the connecting door into the restaurant adjoining. Only two tables were occupied, the nearest one by a man wearing a black suit, his hair plastered down on a round skull and parted carefully. His face was brick-red, his eyes a hard blue.

  The girl who waited on Chick had red hair and a wide, friendly smile. She put down a cup of coffee in front of him.

  “I always bring coffee to a rider,” she said. “My pop taught me that.”

  “He must have been a wise man as well as an Irishman,” Bowdrie said. “May I ask your name?”

  “Ellen. And you are right about the Irish. My other name is Collins. My father was a sergeant in the cavalry.”

  A shadow loomed over the table. The big man in the black suit stood there, a napkin tucked under his chin, a cup of coffee in his hand.

  “Howdy, suh! Mind if I join you?” Without waiting for a reply, he seated himself. “Name’s Hardy Young. Cattle buyer. Ain’t so young as I used to be, but just as hardy!”

  He laughed loudly, then leaned over and whispered hoarsely, rolling his eyes from side to side as if to see who might be listening.

  “Heard you was in town, suh! Frightful thing! Frightful! Always aim to help the law, that’s what I say! Now, if there’s anything you want looked into, you just ask Hardy Young! I know ever’body hereabouts!”

  Bowdrie measured him for a cool half-minute before replying, and the hard blue eyes became uneasy. Hastily the man gulped a swallow of coffee.

  “Thanks,” Bowdrie replied. “This job will not take long.”

  Young stared, momentarily taken aback.

  “None of them are very complicated,” Bowdrie replied. “The ones planned so carefully are often the easiest. This case doesn’t appear to be as difficult as many we get.”

  Hardy Young mopped his mustache with the back of his hand and sucked his teeth noisily. The blue eyes were round and astonished.

  “That sounds like a Ranger!” he said. “It surely does!”

  Bowdrie was irritated. He was nowhere near as confident as he sounded, but the man angered him. Yet he knew that once a job was complete, thieves were always somewhat worried. Had they been seen, after all? Had they forgotten some vital thing? In a robbery so carefully planned, the planner might have overlooked something. Hardy Young was obviously a busybody and a talkative man. If he repeated what Bowdrie had said, it might lead the thieves into some impulsive act.

  If they acted suddenly, they might betray themselves, and without doubt they had a spy in the town. Somebody had informed them of the amount of money in the bank.

  “Then you figure to close this case right up?”

  Bowdrie shrugged. “No great rush. This is a nice little town and as soon as I report back to Austin they’ll give me another job, maybe tougher than this.

  “This case won’t be tough. Their boss forgot one important item, and it will hang them all.”

  “Hang them?” Young looked startled.

  “Phillips was killed, wasn’t he? We’ll hang them all—except,” he added, “the man who gives us information. He’ll get off easy.”

  Young clutched his knife and fork desperately. The food he had ordered brought to Bowdrie’s table lay untouched before him.

  He leaned forward. “There is such a man, then? You already know such a man?”

  Purposely Bowdrie hesitated. “If there isn’t,” he said, “there will be. There’s always one man who wants to dodge the noose.”

  After Young had left the table, Bowdrie lingered over his coffee. Something about the man disturbed him. At first he had believed him an irritating busybody; now he was not so sure.

  Despite his comments to Young, Bowdrie had literally nothing upon which to work. Bishop had found no tracks, but as suggested, the wind might have wiped them out. Phillips’s last words seem to imply the outlaws were strangers, and then there were his incomprehensible words about a “hawk … red.”

  The thieves had known when to strike and their clean escape seemed to indicate that they had covered the distance to their hideout under cover of darkness.

  There seemed no answer to that, unless … It came to him with shocking suddenness. Unless they never left town at all!

  Strangers, Phillips had said, and in a town the size of Kimble the banker would know everyone, and Sheriff Borrow had told him there were no strangers in town but the saddle tramp called Rip who had arrived after the robbery.

  Ellen returned to his table with the coffeepot and sat down opposite him. “You should be careful,” she warned. “Men who would rob a bank and torture a man as they did Mr. Phillips would stop at nothing.”

  “Thanks.” He glanced at her thoughtfully. “You must see everything and hear everything in here. Have there been any strangers in town? They all come here to eat, don’t they?”

  “No, not all. But there was a man … I used to see him around San Antone when I was a little girl. His name was Latham, I think. He was here, but I saw him only once.”

  “What became of him? Did he have a horse?”

  “I don’t think so. He walked along the street, then he stopped outside and smoked a cigarette. After that he went around the corner and down the alley. I did not see him again.”

  Bowdrie’s dark features revealed nothing, but his heart was pounding. This might be the first break.

  Latham, the man she had seen, could have been Jack Latham, one of the Decker gang of outlaws.

  Standing in front of the restaurant, he would have had a good chance to study the bank. Yet he had been on foot and he did not disappear in the direction of the livery stable or the town corral. Behind the double row of business buildings that faced Main Street there were only dwellings. If Latham had turned down an alley it could only have been to go to one of them.

  Jack Latham was on the Fugitives List as a cattle rustler, a horse thief and killer. He was known to have worked with Comanche George Cobb and Pony Decker.

  Ellen was right, of course. Such men wou
ld stop at nothing. They were utterly ruthless, dangerous men. Yet this robbery was unlike them. Behind this one was a different kind of intelligence, someone with new techniques, a new approach.

  He talked for a while to Ellen, simply the casual conversation of the town, the restaurant, the people. He learned nothing new but did acquire some knowledge of the community, its thinking, and its ways.

  Returning to his room, Chick dropped on the edge of the bed and pulled off his boots. Then he sat very still, thinking.

  And in the stillness of the unlit room he heard a movement.

  His eyes went left, then right. Nothing. The hair prickled on his scalp and then he felt rather than heard a stealthy movement.

  He sprang from the bed and turned swiftly, gun in hand. The rising moon illumined the room, but he could see nothing. It was empty, ghostly in the moonlight.

  Once more he glanced around the room; then very cautiously he lighted a lamp. He had started to move away when he detected a faint movement among the blankets on the bed. Gun in hand, he reached with careful fingers and jerked the blanket back.

  There, in a tight, deadly S, lay a sidewinder, one of the deadliest of desert rattlesnakes, a snake that does not coil but simply draws back its head and strikes repeatedly.

  The snake’s gaze was steady, unblinking. Man and reptile watched each other with deadly intensity. The room was on the second floor and the chance that such a snake had come there of its own choice was next to impossible.

  Moving carefully, Bowdrie got a broom left standing in a corner, and a broken bed slat standing beside it. Using them as pincers, he lifted the snake and dropped it from the window. He heard the soft plop when it hit the ground.

  After a careful examination of the room he undressed, got into bed, and went to sleep. He slept soundly and comfortably.

  The sun was chinning itself on the eastern mountains when he awakened. His door was opening softly, stealthily. A big, carefully combed head was thrust into the room. Hardy Young found himself staring into the business end of a Colt.

  “Stopped by t’see if you was havin’ breakfast! I’m a-treatin’, such! I was tryin’ to be careful so’s if you was still asleep I’d not wake you up.”

  The blue eyes roamed uneasily over the room. Chick sat up and reached for his pants with his left hand. “Mighty kind of you.” He invited, “Come in an’ set. I’ll get dressed.”

  Young was manifestly uneasy and kept looking around as Chick dressed. “Sit down on the bed,” Bowdrie suggested. “It’s more comfortable.”

  He slung on his gunbelts and dropped the free gun into its holster. As he did so, he brushed lightly against Young, enough to make him stagger and drop to the bed.

  His face gray, Young bounded to his feet as if stabbed.

  Bowdrie smiled pleasantly. “What’s the matter, Hardy? Scared of something? You needn’t be. I threw it out of the window.”

  “Threw what out?” Young blustered. “I got no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

  The man’s guilt was manifest and Bowdrie gripped the front of his stiff collar and twisted hard. His fingers were inside the collar and as his hand turned, his fist pressed against Young’s Adam’s apple. He shoved Young hard against the wall, still twisting.

  The man’s eyes bulged, he gasped for breath, and his face began to turn blue. Bowdrie slowly relaxed his grip, letting Young catch his breath. Then with his free hand he slapped Young across the face.

  “Who’s in this with you, Young? Talk, or I’ll skin you alive!”

  Bowdrie relaxed his grip a bit more. Gasping hoarsely, the big man said, “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about! Honest, I don’t!”

  Bowdrie jerked him away from the wall and kicked him behind the knees, and let go. Hardy Young hit the floor with a crash that shook the building.

  “You’d better talk while you can. If you don’t, Latham or one of the others will!”

  Young’s hand was at his throat but at the mention of Latham’s name a kind of panic went through him. Bowdrie could almost see the man’s mind working. If Bowdrie knew about Latham, how much more did he know?

  “Get up!” Bowdrie said. “Get up an’ get out! You’ve got until four this afternoon to talk. After that you hang with the rest of them!”

  He was pushing his luck, he knew, but he had a feeling that Hardy Young was genuinely frightened. If the man would talk, it would save time, much time. Had the snake been Hardy’s own idea? Or had somebody else done it or put Hardy up to doing it?

  By riding Young, he might force them into a revealing move. When such men moved suddenly, they often made mistakes. Obviously somebody was worried or they would not have tried to get him killed by a rattler. Undoubtedly they believed he knew more than he did, which had been nothing.

  Following a hurried breakfast, Bowdrie saddled the roan and rode out of town. His theory of the previous day, that the outlaws were still in Kimble, was still valid. Yet it would be impossible for a group of men to remain hidden for long in such a small town. Certainly there could not have been sufficient food for more than a few days, and he suspected they had already been in town longer than planned.

  Drawing rein under some trees on the slope near the edge of town, Bowdrie sat his saddle, studying the place. His view was a good one, and as he studied the layout his eyes turned again and again to a large ranch house almost hidden in a grove of cottonwoods.

  A huge barn, several corrals, various outbuildings. The barn backed up to an arroyo that wound through the low hills on the edge of town.

  It was very hot now and the air was breathless. Chick mopped his face and neck. Squinting against the glare, he used the trees as a screen and rode down, crossed the trail, and entered the arroyo. He found no tracks and scowled with disappointment.

  Yet he knew no track could long endure in this sand.

  He was riding along immersed in thought, and the sharp jerk at his shoulder almost failed to register until he heard the metallic slam of the gunshot.

  A frail tendril of smoke lifted from a rocky knoll, and touching a spur to the roan’s ribs, Bowdrie sent him up out of the arroyo and on a dead run for the knoll itself. Another rifle shot rang out but the bullet missed, and the roan went charging up the knoll. Bowdrie’s gun was in his hand, but the knoll was empty!

  Amazed and angry, he took a quick swing around among the rocks. If the shot had come from here, the marksman was gone.

  Perplexed, he looked all around. The grass was disturbed but he found no distinguishable tracks. Horses and cattle had been on the knoll, and there was a confusion of tracks, scratches, and scuffed earth.

  His shoulder was smarting by the time he reached town. The shot had merely split the fabric of his shirt and scraped the skin.

  He swung down at the livery stable and glanced over at the two or three loafers. “Anybody want to make a half-dollar caring for a horse?”

  Rip Coker was seated on a box. “How about me? They cleaned me at poker, and a half a dollar would buy me a couple of meals.”

  They walked into the barn, Bowdrie giving instructions.

  “Who owns the big house over by the wash?” he asked when they were alone.

  “I thought of it, but that’s the Bishop place. He’s well off, and one of the leading citizens. He and his brother put up money to help build both the church and the school. John Bishop is the mayor.”

  “What’s his brother do?”

  “Red? He ranches down in Mexico. He’s never here, and hasn’t even been here so far as I know, even though the Bishops sort of regard this as their town, and always contribute to worthy causes.”

  Bowdrie outlined all that had happened and what little he had learned, adding what Ellen had told him about Latham.

  “Sounds like him. From all I hear, that banker looked like a Comanche had worked on him. He was badly used.”

  Ellen came immediately to his table when Bowdrie seated himself in the restaurant a few minutes later. “Does Sheriff Borrow eat here?”
he asked.

  “He was in, looking for you, perhaps an hour ago. It might have been two hours. I’ve been pretty busy until now.”

  “Thanks. If he doesn’t come in, I’ll look him up.”

  The outer door opened and when he glanced up, the newcomer turned out to be John Bishop.

  “Any luck, Bowdrie?” His eyes went to Chick’s shoulder. “Don’t tell me you’ve been shot?”

  “I didn’t tell you,” Bowdrie said sharply. “It seems you’re a good guesser. From where you stand, that could be a thorn scratch or a barbed-wire cut, but if you’d like to believe it was a shot, you’ve the choice.”

  “You seem to be touchy. Is the case getting on your nerves?”

  “Of course not. You haven’t been a Ranger, Bishop. Most cases are routine. All a man needs is a little time and patience. All this case needed was a fresh viewpoint. It’s like I told Hardy Young, the boss in a case like this always overlooks something. That’s a beginning. Then somebody gets scared and they talk so they won’t have to hang like the rest of them.”

  “At least you’re confident. That’s more than Borrow can say.”

  “He doesn’t know all that we know, and his experience in crime has been local. In the Rangers you run into everything. But even Young was surprised when I mentioned Jack Latham.”

  Without seeming to pay attention, Bowdrie was watching Bishop for a reaction. If there was any, it was well hidden.

  Bishop’s eyes were on him and Bowdrie felt a tide of recklessness welling up within him. He had no evidence at all, but regardless of what Coker had said of Bishop, that ranch was simply too well located for what had been happening. He pushed his luck.

  “The well-planned crimes are often the simplest. A plan is a design like that of a weaver, and all you have to do is get hold of one of the threads and it all begins to unravel.”

  “And you’ve found the thread?”

  Bishop’s eyes reflected his skepticism, but under that lay something else. Apprehension, maybe?

  “I’ve got two or three threads,” Bowdrie said. “The trouble with well-planned crimes is that the planner is never content. He always wants to take another stitch here or there. The first thread was that this mysterious crime was simply too mysterious. It was overdone. Nobody saw anyone entering or leaving town and there were no tracks. The second thread was the hour of the crime and the way it was done.