the Man Called Noon (1970)

by L'amour, Louis

  "Ben Janish would kill him."

  "And he might kill Janish. They might even kill each other."

  "Is that what you're hoping?"

  "Ma'am, I never had no family. None but you and your pa. All I want is to see you with this here ranch and free of them. I'd like to see you with a man ... the right kind of man."

  "Thanks, Arch." After a pause she said, "I don't want him killed."

  He looked at her. "Ma'am ... don't. He's a bad one. I can tell."

  "Just the same, I don't want him killed."

  The man who called himself Jonas rode toward the mountains. He reached for the gun in its holster and it slid easily into his hand ... too easily.

  He reholstered the gun and thought about his problem. There had to be a record. When a man turned up missing inquiries were made - unless he was one of those footloose ones with nobody to care. But somebody, somewhere, would know.

  He was feeling better. To wait here for Ben Janish was foolish. What he must do now was to get away, to find out something about himself, to discover who he was and why he had been where he was, and why Ben Janish had tried to kill him.

  He rode across the flat valley floor, where the pasture was good. The stock he saw was in good shape, much of it ready for shipping, but it was high time some of the older stuff was moved out.

  There was plenty of water in the several streams running down from the mountains, and he could foresee only two problems for the ranch. The first was the necessity for shipping. Unless the older steers were moved out and sold soon, the range would be overstocked and soon overgrazed. The second problem was the question of winter feed. Unless a lot of hay was cut they were going to have a time getting through the winter.

  On thin snow most of the stock would do all right. They would be able to get at the grass for limited grazing, but if there was any kind of a fall of snow the canyons would be snowed in and much of the range would be covered too deep. The outlaws were good hands up to a point, but they had no interest in the cattle, and they did not relish the idea of cutting and stacking hay - hard work at best.

  Nevertheless, with a few hands and some supervision the ranch would be a good operation. Because of the natural fencing offered by the mountains the stock could be controlled with no difficulty. Only at roundup time would they need outside help.

  The dun was a fast walker, and they were making good time. Looking ahead he could see no way out for a man on horseback, and only a possibility for a man afoot. The mountain before him rose in a rugged, tree-and brush-clad slope so steep a man would have to cling to the brush to climb up its side.

  When he came close to the mountain he turned the dun and rode along its base, studying the ground. If there was a way out, some of the stock would have found it, or at least wild animals would have done so. He had seen a few deer tracks ... where had they come from?

  Deer, unless driven by fire or by drought, will rarely get more than a mile or two from the area where they are born. Usually they sleep in an open place somewhere up on a slope, and shortly before daybreak they feed down toward water, drink, idle about a bit, and gradually feed back up the slope. This valley might be home to them, but they might have found a trail to somewhere high up on the mountain.

  Riding a horse alone, as Jonas was doing now, was a time for thinking, and again his thoughts returned to his problem. The questions remained. Who was he? What was he? Where was he from?

  Although he had no memory, he realized that he did have his habit responses, and this could offer a clue. Suppose he began to test himself little by little, trying different things to find out the range of his skills?

  He had already discovered that if he let himself go without trying to direct his actions he functioned fairly well. When he had saddled the dun he deliberately allowed his muscles free rein and he had worked with practiced ease. And now he thought about the dun.

  Why had the horse come to him so easily? Had he known the horse before? Had it, perhaps, belonged to him at some time? He remembered that the old man, Henneker, had said he was a bad one. Was he? Searching himself, he could find no such motivations. He felt no animosity toward anyone, nor any desire to do evil.

  Yet, did evil men ever think of themselves as evil? Did they not find excuses for the wrong they did?

  He noticed the deer tracks without paying much attention, his thoughts busy elsewhere. Only when a second set of tracks joined the first did his mind really focus on the matter. Deer were creatures of habit, he knew, more so than men. The tracks of the first deer were several days old; the tracks of the second had been made that morning.

  They disappeared suddenly, near the mouth of a canyon, but search as he might he could not find them entering the canyon. Knowing, from some bygone store of knowledge, that quite often a human or game trail will skirt the edge of a canyon, he rode back and studied the approaches to the canyon.

  At first he found nothing, but he persisted, and after nearly an hour of searching he found where a vague trail went between two close-set clumps of cedar, rounded a boulder that appeared to block any progress in that direction, and went upward under the pines.

  It was at that moment he thought of the letters.

  Chapter Five

  He drew up in the shade of some pines near the trail and took the letters from his pocket. Both were addressed to Dean Cullane, El Paso, Texas. The first was short and to the point.

  The man I am sending is the best. He knows what to do and how

  to do it. Do not interfere or try to communicate with him.

  Matherbee

  The second letter, posted a few weeks later, was from the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

  Our investigation has, I regret to say, been inconclusive. The

  man of whom you require information first appeared in Missouri,

  where he was reported to have arrived on a freight train. He

  worked there for a tie-cutting camp, where he became involved

  in a brawl with two men, who were beaten severely. The first

  shooting of which we have record took place a few weeks later

  in a saloon when a trouble-hunting outlaw from down in the

  Nation started a fight.

  Both men went for their guns, and the outlaw, who had quite a

  reputation, came out a poor second. It is reported that a

  cattleman was in the saloon, saw the action, and later had a

  talk with the man you are interested in, whose name is reported

  to be Ruble Noon.

  The next day Noon bought a complete outfit, including a horse

  and several hundred rounds of ammunition, and then he drifted.

  Stories get around. The report is that this cattleman had been

  having rustler trouble, he had lost stock, and one of his hands

  had been murdered after apparently coming upon some brand

  blotters.

  That was in western Nebraska.

  Ruble Noon was not seen around, but a few days later one of the

  rustlers was found dead in his cabin, a gun in his hand that

  had been fired once.

  A few days later two of the others were found dead on the

  plains covered by the hide of a steer with a brand half blotted.

  Both men were shot from in front, both were armed.

  A few days later the last of the rustlers, three in number, were

  seated at their fire. They were in possession of thirty head of

  stolen cattle.

  A man stepped from the trees about sixty feet away. He said, "I

  am Ruble Noon, and I killed Maxwell."

  They'd been saying what they would do if they caught him, and

  he had come to them. They went for their guns. Two died before

  they could get off a shot, but the third, one Mitt Ford, got

  into the brush, tried a shot from there. The answering shots

  burned his shoulder and wounded him in the side, and he gotr />
  away, fast.

  Mitt Ford told the story. He had not got a good look at Noon,

  for he was standing against a wall of tall trees, his

  hat pulled

  low. All Mitt could say was that he was tall, slim, and hell on

  wheels with a gun.

  There was an express company up Montana way. Too many holdups.

  They lured Noon. When the next holdup took place somebody shot

  from the brush and there were three dead outlaws. No more holdups

  on that line.

  There was more. He scanned the report with care. Ruble Noon had apparently only one contact, the cattleman who first hired him. This man acted as go-between in every case, and there had been a dozen more cases, from Canada to Mexico. There was no description beyond that given by Mitt Ford, and the tie-cutting outfit had scattered. The cattleman claimed to know nothing about him.

  There was one final note. The cattleman in question had at one time made a cattle drive with Tom Davidge. They had been friends.

  Ruble Noon folded the letters and returned them to his inside pocket. The legal document was a deed to three hundred and twenty acres of land and a cabin; it was made out to Ruble Noon and signed by Tom Davidge. Appended to the document was a small hand-drawn map showing how to get to the property.

  The dun was growing restive, and he started on, knowing no more about himself than before.

  The letters and the document had been in the possession of one Dean Cullane, of El Paso, whoever he was. Why did Cullane have a deed destined for Ruble Noon? Were Cullane and Noon the same man? It seemed doubtful.

  Was he Cullane? Or was he Noon? Or was he neither one?

  Slipping off the coat he was wearing, he checked it with care. The sleeves were too short, and the shoulders too narrow, though not by much. The coat was tailored, not a ready-made.

  "Tailored," he said aloud, "but not for me." He knew he would never have accepted a coat that fitted so badly. If the coat was not his, it must be Dean Cullane's, for the letters were addressed to him. ... Or could the coat belong to Ruble Noon? For the deed had been there, too.

  Was there any way in which he could discover who Ruble Noon was? Or Dean Cullane? Or Matherbee?

  He looked again at the map. Only a few lines on a bit of paper, but that X might be this very ranch, and the dotted line could be that faint trail he had discovered.

  Why had Ruble Noon a ranch in the area? What was his connection with Tom Davidge? He had no answers - nothing but questions.

  He was hungry, and he had not thought to bring food with him. But he did not want to go back now. There was too much to think about, too much to decide. And he did not know what awaited him back at the ranch ... Ben Janish might have returned, and it was Ben Janish who had tried to kill him.

  He swung his horse around, returned to the trail, and turned the dun up the mountain. After a dozen quick, tight turns they began to wind through the forest, climbing steadily. The mountain was steep, but the deer had found a way to the meadows below. There were no horse tracks on the trail, only those of deer.

  He kept on, studying the country as he rode. The growth was so thick that only occasionally could he see the ranch or the valley below him. He followed the dim, narrow trail back and forth up the steep scarp until suddenly a notch in the mountain, invisible from below, opened before him.

  The dun went forward slowly, ears pricked with curiosity. The notch opened after some hundred yards into a long trough down which a stream ran. It was high grassland, the slopes covered with pines, and about a quarter of a mile away he could see a small cabin, perched on a shelf among the trees.

  There was no sound, nor any sign of life there.

  Above on the mountain a rock cropped out, bare and cold against the sky; below it only a few straggling pines, wind-torn and twisted, stretched black, thin arms against the sky.

  It was a lonely place where the shadows came early and where cold winds blew off the ridges. Who had found this spot? Above all, who had thought to build here, under the bleak sky? On any cloudy day the place must be rilled with damp, clinging gray clouds, and thunder must roll down this narrow valley, leaving the air charged and smelling of brimstone. It was a place of bitter solitude .. . yet somehow it appealed to him, somehow he knew this was his place, where he belonged.

  The only sound was that of the dun's hoofs in the tall grass, and occasionally the click of a hoof against stone.

  He went up the trail to the shelf and stopped before the cabin.

  It was built against a wall of rock, sheltered half beneath the overhang, and was of native stone, the cold gray rocks gathered from the foot of the cliff. It had been built a long time ago.

  No mortar had been used, only stone wedded to stone, but cunningly, skillfully done by the hands of a master. The stones had taken on the patina of years, and the heavy wooden bench made of a split log was polished as if from much use. A stable backed against the wall where the fireplace stood so heat from the fire would help to warm the stable. A passage led from the house into the stable, and a stack of wood stood high against the stable walls.

  Dismounting, he tied the dun to a post and went up to the door. It opened under his hand, and he stepped in.

  He had expected nothing like this. The floor was carpeted with skins, the skins of bear and mountain lion. There was a wall of books, a writing table, and a gunrack holding a dozen rifles and shotguns.

  In another smaller room there was a store of canned goods and other supplies. These things had never arrived over the trail by which he had come; therefore there must be another and better route.

  Somebody had lived here, perhaps lived here still, and that somebody was probably Ruble Noon, for this must be the cabin deeded to Noon by the document he carried.

  He walked to the windows. The view from them covered all the valley below. The only blind spot lay on the steep mountainside above the cabin, a place from which one might come to the cabin unseen. Otherwise the only access to it was by coming up from the front.

  After studying the view he sat down in the chair at the desk. It was a comfortable chair and felt right to him, and the cabin felt right, too. In the winter this valley would be snowed in, closed off to the world, but in the summer it was a haven, a secure place.

  He got up suddenly. He must be getting back. In actual distance he was not far from the Rafter D, but at the pace he would have to travel it would probably take almost two hours to return.

  But first he must discover the other way into the high valley. A careful search proved only one thing: there was no easy way out of the valley, and in fact no way at all that he could find. Yet there had to be such a route. Nothing that was in the cabin could have been brought up the way he had come.

  For the first time he stood back and studied the rock-built cabin itself. Immediately he was aware that a part of it was much older than the rest. The stable and part of the cabin had been added at a later date, but that part of the stable that adjoined the house was older.

  But he realized that he could spend no more time here at present. Mounting his horse, he went back the way he had come, pondering the problem of the access route. When he had once more come to the bottom of the steep mountainside he remained under cover for some time, studying the surrounding area to be sure that nobody saw him emerge from the trees. Then he swung down and carefully removed as many traces of his passage as possible.

  The moon was up and supper was long past when he rode into the ranch yard. As he dismounted he saw a man stand up and go into the bunkhouse. Was it Kissling, watching for him?

  He stripped the gear from his horse and turned the dun into the corral, then went up to the ranch house. The Chinese cook had finished washing up and showed no pleasure at seeing him.

  "Supper all finish," the cook said. "What you want?"

  "Coffee will do-just coffee."

  Fan appeared in the door from the study. "You go ahead, Wing. I'll find something for him."
<
br />   Grumbling, Wing went off to his quarters, and Fan brought some bread, cold beef, and cheese from the cupboard. "There's some frijoles, too," she said. "Do you want them?"

  "Please "

  "Have a nice ride?"

  His way of answering was to say, "You've got some cattle that must be shipped. I'd say four or five hundred head, but there might be twice that many."

  "We haven't shipped any cattle since pa died. Even since before he died."

  "You're overstocked. The range is in good shape because you had plenty of rain and snow. But it won't be good next year until you get rid of some older stock."

  "I don't know whether Ben Janish will let us." He glanced at her. "The hell with him."

  "That is easy to say. We would have to have extra hands ... most of these boys don't dare appear where the law can see them. Word would get out, and this place would be ruined for them."

  "Did you ever hear of a man named Matherbee?" he asked.

  "No."

  "How about Ruble Noon?"

  "Everybody knows about him."

  For a few moments then they sat in silence while he ate. She refilled his cup.

  "Apparently I have forgotten much," he said. "Or perhaps there was much I never knew. Put yourself in my place. I do not know what kind of man I have been, nor how I should react. I know that men were wanting to kill me, but I do not know if they were a mob or the law. I sometimes think that I should go away from here, lose myself in the mountains, and stay there until my memory comes back and I know who and what I am."

  "I would miss you," she said suddenly, without thinking.

  "Those are the first kind words anyone has said to me, but don't think them. Neither of us knows what I was, nor what I will be if my memory returns. I am a haunted man - haunted by the ghosts of what I may have been."

  "Then make a decision to start over," she said. "No matter what you have been, you can always become something else."

  "Is it that simple? Is a man ruled by his own free will, or is he a composite of all his experiences, his education and heredity? I may not know what I am, but my flesh and blood do know, and they react the way they have been conditioned to react. My conscious mind was born only a few days ago, but the habit patterns built into my muscles have forgotten nothing."