Rider on the Buckskin

by Peter Dawson

  A sudden premonition laid a chill through Pleasants that instant, though the next he was shrugging it aside by telling himself that seven miles wasn’t only the distance to Beavertail but also to several other places. Yet, as he thought of it, he couldn’t recall any other ranch or settlement that lay at that exact distance from Ute Springs.

  And there was a note of urgency as he called to White, now standing at the stove back along the counter: “Hurry it up with that steak, Lou. I’ve got to be moving on.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Beavertail’s clutter of sheds and shanties, its open-sided barn and pens and corrals, looked shabby even in the bright freshness of this early morning, Frank thought. The house, except for a new porch, was badly weathered and missing patches of shingles on its steep-pitched roof. One of the bigger outbuildings, probably the wagon shed, was leaning so precariously to one side that two logs were propped against its overhanging wall to keep it shored upright.

  Close behind Frank, Jim Echols clucked to his mare, bringing her up even with the buckskin. “First time I’ve laid eyes on this layout in years,” he remarked, dryly adding: “It’s run down some since old Ruthling owned it.”

  They had covered another hundred yards along the weed-grown road when the lawman abruptly announced: “There’s Charlie, the cook. See him? Walkin’ across to the house.”

  Frank had no sooner made out the man, walking toward the rear of the house from one of the outlying buildings, than Echols was telling him: “Suppose you hang back and keep an eye open while I make medicine with that China boy. From the look of it, no one else is around. But we want to be sure, and we don’t want to be together.”

  They rode on in at a jog, the sheriff pulling ahead as Frank’s restless glance roved the house’s yard, then studied the barn, the five horses in the corral, and finally a long, low structure behind the house he supposed must be the bunkhouse. Two dogs were barking viciously and had run out to snap at the hind hoofs of Echols’s horse until a call from the cook quieted them.

  Shortly Frank rode in past the house and swung obliquely across to the log buildings, his senses very alert as he reined in on the buckskin and sat, warily eyeing his surroundings. One of the dogs came across and, growling, circled him, the hair on its back stiff.

  Echols by now was out of the saddle and talking to the cook, the two of them standing on the path leading to the house’s rear stoop. Frank, made nervous by the thought that someone might be looking at him over the sights of a rifle, put the buckskin into motion again and rode over to the door of the cabin.

  Reaching out with a boot, he pushed the door open, then leaned down to peer inside. This was the bunkhouse. It was empty.

  He glanced toward the house then to see that Echols and the cook had disappeared. His nerves still on edge, he rode slowly on around to the front of the house, warily eyeing each window as he passed it, wondering if he and the lawman had played their cards wrong in so openly riding straight in here.

  Rounding the front corner of the house, he was at once struck by the incongruity of such an elaborate new porch decorating an otherwise plain, even shabby structure. The unpainted wood of the porch didn’t appear to be quite new, and he rightly guessed that it had been built a year or two ago. Pleasants, it seemed, had started to repair the house and for some reason hadn’t finished the job.

  He stiffened instinctively at the grating sound made by the front door opening and tensed his right arm, lifting hand to the handle of his Colt. Then the tightness eased from his nerves as the door swung back and Jim Echols came out onto the porch.

  The lawman shook his head. “We draw a blank. Red Majors was here an hour ago. Hoofed it across for horses, ate an early breakfast, and headed back for their camp. Charlie says Red’s feet were so swole he couldn’t get his boots off.”

  “What about the rifle?”

  Once again Echols shook his head. “Half a dozen of ’em in there. Forty-Four-Forties and one Sharps.”

  “He could have the Forty-Five-Seventy-Five with him.” Frank was feeling let-down, weary. “So now what?”

  “That’ll take some figurin’.” Echols was standing there, looking around at the porch. He came out to the railing, ran a hand along the smooth wood, absent-mindedly fingered the fluted contours of one of the posts as he went on: “First off, we could get up there on the pass trail and have a look for the mate of that shell we found yesterday. Then we might swing over and take a gander at their camp. But of course Pleasants won’t be.…”

  His words trailed off and he frowned in faint annoyance as he took in the way Frank’s glance had strayed, studying the porch. “You listenin’?”

  “What?” Frank’s puzzled stare came around to him. “What was that? Didn’t hear you.”

  “Never mind. We’ll talk about it on the way out.” Echols came down the steps now.

  “Jim.”

  The lawman looked up as Frank spoke his name. Then Frank was drawling: “That’s a fancy porch to be tacked onto a house like this. Wonder who built it?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Go ask Charlie, will you?”

  Something in the cool, wary way Frank was eyeing him made Jim Echols attach more than usual significance to the words.

  Then suddenly the lawman understood. He went up the four steps in two quick strides, crossed to the open door, and bawled: “Charlie!”

  The cook’s voice answered him from somewhere at the back of the house and he called: “Who put on this new porch for Pleasants? Enos Ford from town?

  In several more moments Charlie appeared in the doorway, his pale saffron face wreathed in a smile. “Enos Ford no good. Sam, he did it. Sam Cauble. He one hell of fine carpenter.”

  Jim Echols turned slowly to stare at Frank, incredulity loosening every muscle of his hawkish face.

  “Hear that?” he asked. “By God, you knew. You’ve found your lame carpenter.”

  “You’re wrong,” Frank told him. “I’ve found his partner.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “So you’ve finally tracked down your man.”

  Frank Rivers, roused from his preoccupation, glanced around as Jim Echols broke the long silence between them. “Maybe,” he said.

  “Only maybe? No, friend. It’s a surer bet than that. Cauble was lame. Now we know he was a carpenter. Someone took a shot at you the other night. You found out Pleasants had seen you in Summit that same night.” He nodded sagely. “It all adds up. Pleasants has got to be the sidewinder that put that buckshot into your father. So’s he got to be the one that nearly beat the life out of Bill Echols. Which’ll make it a damned pleasant chore for me to see him hang.”

  “You could be right. We’ll see.”

  They had ridden these five miles from Beavertail with scarcely a word having passed between them, each having his private reasons for being awed by the unexpectedness of their discovery that lame Sam Cauble had built the new porch on Pleasants’s run-down house. Now, riding up the pass trail with the line of the new fence already in sight in the upward distance, Frank was still finding it hard to take in the fact that his long hunt might actually be nearing its end.

  Wanting to believe the lawman’s pronouncement, he still wasn’t quite convinced. For the chain of circumstance that finally made it appear that Lute Pleasants might be the man he had been hunting all these months was too tenuous, too obscure to be grasped as a dead certainty.

  “I’ve been rough as a cob on you,” Echols bluntly said just now. “So here and now I take back everythin’. About you beatin’ up Bill, about your tryin’ to make the governor’s pardon look good.” A wry smile touched the sheriff’s hawkish face. “Guess you’d say I made a plain loco fool of myself.”

  “Which you had a right to, Jim. So let’s forget it.”

  “I’ll try, and much obliged.”

  They swung off to the south now and in twenty more minutes had rounded the end of the fence and were coming up the trail to the low bench where Frank h
ad camped his first night in this country. It was hard for him to believe that that night was less than a week gone, and, as he rode up on the blackened ashes of his fire, he was thinking of that other early morning when Lute Pleasants had led his men up this same slope to where he and Kate waited with Sam Cauble’s body roped to the gray’s saddle.

  “This is the place.” He reined in close alongside the remains of the fire and nodded up the trail. “Whoever it was took his shot from up there.”

  “We’ll go have a look.” Echols frowned thoughtfully. “Since it’d rained up here all that day before, chances are the ground wasn’t froze solid. We could be lucky enough to run across some tracks.”

  The lawman was right. For in five more minutes his methodical traversing of the slope above showed him something that made him call across to Frank: “Here we are. Come take a look!”

  The tracks had been badly washed out by the melting snow. But tracks they were, unmistakably, the line of the deep indentations angling down across the slope from the higher margin of the pines to a point close alongside a thin-trunked aspen.

  Both of them got down out of the saddle near the aspen, the sheriff opining: “If this was him and not somebody else, then he must’ve tied his jughead about here.” He looked down the slope to the place where Frank had built his fire, once again guessing. “He wouldn’t have had to move much closer to be sure of his shot.” And he began peering at the ground, moving on around the aspen.

  Frank worked the ground farther out from the tree. Three slow minutes passed, two more. Once Echols cursed disheartedly, said: “I could be wrong about this.”

  Hardly had the lawman spoken before Frank stepped on a hard object that grated metallically as his weight ground it into the gravelly soil. He looked down, saw the dull sheen of brass. He knew even before he dug the shell case from the dirt exactly what he had found. It was a .45-75.

  He called Echols across. The lawman took one look at the shell and a bleakness settled over his thin face. “Why would he do it, kill his own foreman, his partner?”

  “Let’s go ask him.”

  The sheriff sighed, turned away, and was walking across to his horse when Frank called to him: “What say we split up? You hit the fence camp. I’ll go back to Beavertail.”

  Echols stopped, looked around. “You got a hunch?”

  At Frank’s nod, the lawman said: “Then we’ll both head back to the layout.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The town road first crossed the Porcupine five miles to the north of the point where it left Squaw Creek and climbed the bluff to the bench. And it was there, as the shoes of Crowe’s roan lifted booming echoes from the planks of the bridge, that Lute Pleasants encountered the unbelievable.

  It made him catch his breath with a sharp grunt of incredulity, made him pull the horse to a stand, and stare, wide-eyed and disbelieving.

  The channel of the creek, broad and rocky, had two days ago been filled bank to bank with the run-off. Now it was bare and almost dry, littered with debris. At its center flowed nothing but a shallow three-foot-wide rivulet. The deep pool a hundred yards above the bridge, where Pleasants had many times glimpsed trout half the length of his arm, had shallowed to knee depth.

  His square face went slack, turned pale with shock as he halfway understood the meaning of what he was seeing. His fists knotted the reins with a vicious strength that cracked the dry, unoiled leather. And for once he forgot to curse as the dread meaning of what he was seeing struck home to him.

  “But the dam couldn’t.…”

  His words trailed off helplessly as he groped for some logical answer to what could have gone wrong. For an instant he halfway believed that the dam he and his crew had thrown up across the mouth of the Owl the other night might have shifted so as to block the Porcupine. But then he knew that this couldn’t possibly have happened.

  All at once a feeling akin to panic laid its hold on him. Last night he had been outwitted on one count. Perhaps this was the raw evidence of Anchor, of Rivers, having outwitted him on still another.

  For one rational moment he considered the possibility that someone at Anchor had noticed a change in the flow of the Owl. At first he ridiculed the notion. But then, when he thought of the way the weather had worked against him, when he remembered how quickly the snow had gone, the idea did seem plausible. And finally he had to admit that anyone familiar with the way the Owl might act under such conditions could easily have noticed that the creek’s level wasn’t what it should have been.

  He had gone that far in his reasoning when a sound—the faint and faraway ring of doubletree chains shuttling in across the early morning hush—intruded upon his furious and bewildered thoughts. He looked on out along the road and saw a team and wagon coming toward him a quarter of a mile distant.

  The hunched-over figure on the wagon’s seat he recognized as being unmistakably that of Charlie, his cook. With an unruly impatience he spurred the roan to a lope and went out the road with the sudden hope that the Chinaman might have the explanation of the Porcupine’s strange behavior.

  Charlie’s two dogs saw him coming and began barking, running out to meet him. He cursed them to silence as he met them and shortly reined in alongside the wagon, asking without preliminary: “What the devil’s happened to the creek?”

  The Chinaman’s round face betrayed as much surprise as it ever did. “What about creek, boss?”

  “Hell, haven’t you noticed? You crossed it back by the layout. It’s down, way down.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Part time sleep. Dream of.…”

  “Forget that and quit talkin’ like a damned Indian,” Pleasants cut in. “Today isn’t Saturday. Why’re you headed to town?”

  “No one to cook for. I go see Cousin Sam, get grub, be back by noon.” Regarding Pleasants with a narrower glance, Charlie bluntly, unexpectedly asked: “You in trouble, boss?”

  “What?” Suddenly Pleasants remembered Echols and Rivers, and the hot flare of a fresh alarm ran along his nerves as he warily countered: “Me in trouble? Why should I be?”

  “Red say you and boys catch plenty hell at camp last night. This morning two men come look for you.”

  “Who?”

  “The sheriff and a stranger.”

  Pleasants felt the Chinaman’s shrewd glance probing at him, studying him, as he loftily asked: “What could Jim Echols want of me?”

  “No say, boss. But he look through house. Then want to know about new porch.”

  “What about the porch?”

  “He say did Enos Ford build it. I tell him no, that Sam damn’ sight better carpenter than Ford.”

  Pleasants’s instinct was to reach out with rein ends and slash at the cook’s round, yellow face. Yet he managed to curb that reckless impulse and ask calmly, in apparent disinterest: “Why would Echols care who built it?”

  “Search me, boss.”

  When Charlie didn’t add to that, Pleasants put another seemingly innocent question: “They waiting for me at the layout?”

  The Chinaman grunted a negative, adding briefly: “Head for hills when they pull out.”

  “That’s all?”

  Charlie nodded, and for a moment Pleasants sat quietly trying to unsnarl the implications to the damage the cook had done him in revealing to Echols and Rivers that lame Sam Cauble had been a carpenter.

  He recalled all too vividly that Rivers’s lawyer, at the trial four years back, had attached great importance to the authorities locating as a witness the carpenter who had been working on the Wells, Fargo shack in Peak City the week before the stage hold-up and the killing of George Rivers. Also he clearly remembered what a shock it had been to both himself and Sam to learn that the Ute Springs sheriff was a cousin of the stage’s driver they had left lying maimed in the road that night.

  The enormity of the Chinaman’s unwitting betrayal of him finally struck home to Pleasants. Yet, as he felt a real and craven fear tighten inside him, he managed somehow to keep a rein on h
is unruly temper. It was, he saw instantly, important that Charlie’s suspicions of him be lulled. He must play for time, time to think out what he was to do about Echols and Rivers.

  And it was with a nicely feigned nonchalance that he told the cook: “Well, Echols’ll probably be back if he wants to see me. While you’re in town, see if the market’s got any ducks. Mallards. Been a whole year since I tasted one.”

  Charlie dipped his head in assent, said—“So long.”—and clucked his team into motion.

  As he went away, Pleasants sat watching him, for a moment coolly thinking that it would be very easy to draw the big Winchester from its sheath and send a bullet into the cook’s back. But then he understood that Charlie could do him more good than harm now, for he had quieted the man’s suspicions.

  He went on along the road still trying to fathom exactly how much Frank Rivers and Jim Echols might have guessed of his past, or if in fact either of them was even interested in what or who he or Sam Cauble had been before coming to the Ute Springs country. For minutes at a time he would feel that gnawing fear working in him. Then for equally long periods he buoyed himself up by thinking that most probably neither man suspected him of anything.

  Jim Echols’s curiosity about the porch might have been a perfectly natural one. So might this low water in the creek be explained in a perfectly logical way.

  By the time he came within sight of Beavertail, feeling the effects of his sleepless night, he had convinced himself that he had nothing to worry about. Jim Echols would certainly have betrayed it to Charlie had his visit been prompted by anything of a very serious nature, and the cook had given no indication whatsoever that that was the case, or that the lawman had been in a bad mood.

  Trying to believe this, Pleasants nonetheless reined in on the roan alongside the backdrop of the creek willows at the foot of his long meadow and for five minutes studied the upcountry distance. He saw no rider moving along the trail or hill up there, saw no one in sight around his headquarters buildings. And presently he took the track leading to the layout.