Reynolds's face was ashen. "Forget that You're talkin' too much. Berdue was huntin' trouble and he got it. You just forget it. I need a good man and I'll pay good money."
"To murder somebody like you did your partner?
You made a deal with him and he came down here and worked hard. He planted those trees, he built that house. Then three of you went out and stumbled into a band of Indians and somehow, although wounded, you were the only one who got back.
Naturally, the ranch was all yours.
"Who were those Indians, Reynolds? Or was there only one Indian? The last man of three riding single file?
"You wanted to know why I wouldn't work for you and why you should have enemies, and I've told you. Now I'll tell you something else. I've come to the Valley to stay. I am not leaving."
Deliberately then, he handed the gun back to Berdue, who took the gun, reversed it and started it into its holster. Then his hand stopped and his lips tightened.
Bill Canavan seemed to be smiling. "Careful, Berdue. I wouldn't try it, if I were you."
Berdue hesitated. Then with an oath he shoved the gun down hard into the holster and, turning, walked rapidly out of the room. Behind him went Charlie Reynolds, his neck and ears red with the bitterness of the fury that throbbed in his veins.
Slowly, in a babble of talk, the room cleared, and Bill Canavan sat down again. "May," he said, "you've let my coffee get cold. Fill it up, will you?"
Chapter V
Those who lived in the town of Soledad and the surrounding country were not unaccustomed to sensation. But the calling of Reynolds and his supposedly gun-handy foreman in the Cattleman's Cafe was a subject that had the old maids of both sexes licking their lips with excitement. Nor was the subject ignored by others. And, the west being what it was, the news traveled.
Little had been known of the background of the man who called himself Charlie Reynolds. And being what it was, the west did not ask questions. It was up to every man to prove himself and to show what manner of man he was.
Reynolds was the oldest settler, the owner of the largest and oldest ranching operation, and he was known as a hard character when pushed. Yet now they were viewing him in a new light, and nobody liked what they had heard.
Not the last to hear was Walt Pogue, who chuckled and slapped his thigh. "Wouldn't you know it? The old four-flusher! Crooked as a dog's hind leg!"
The next thing that occurred to anyone occurred to him. How had Bill Canavan known? And what else did he know?
That thought brought Pogue up short, and all his satisfaction at the discomfiture of Reynolds vanished.
This man Canavan knew too much. ... Who was he, anyway? And what did he want here? If Canavan knew that, he might ... no, that did not necessarily follow. Still, Bill Canavan would be a good man to have for a friend, and a bad enemy.
Not the least of the comment had revolved around Canavan's confidence, the way he had stood and dared Berdue to draw. Overnight Canavan had become the most talked-about man in that part of the country.
When gathering his information about the Valley country, Bill Canavan had gleaned other information that was of the greatest interest, and that information was very much on his mind when he got out of bed the following morning.
So far he had no opportunity to verify this last fragment of information, but now he intended to do just that. From what he overheard and what he had learned before coming to this part of the country, the area north and west of the mountains was a badlands avoided by all. It was lava-flow country, broken and jagged, with much evidence of prehistoric volcanic action. Biding there was a danger, and walking was a sure way to ruin a good pair of boots.
At one time there had been a man who knew the lava beds and all that part of the country that occupied some three hundred square miles. That man had been Jim Burge.
It had been Jim Burge who had told Charlie Hastings, Reynolds's ill-fated partner, about the Valley country. And it had been Jim Burge who drove the first herd of Spanish cattle into the Valley.
Burge tired of ranching, his itching foot getting the best of him, and he headed north, leaving his ranch and letting his cattle go where they willed. He had taken with him only a few of his best horses.
He had talked to Charlie Hastings, and Hastings had repeated the story to Reynolds, but by that time, Burge was gone. Gone into the Texas Panhandle, and a lone fight with Comanches that ended only when four Comanches were dead and the fifth tied.
Bulge's scalp to his horse's bridle.
Jim Burge had talked to other people in Santa Fe, and those people did not forget, either. One of those was Bill Canavan. And Bill was a curious man.
When he threw his saddle on the Appaloosa, he had decided to satisfy that curiosity before matters went any further. He was going to find out what had become of those cattle.
Nine years had passed since Burge had left them to shift for themselves, and in nine years several hundred head of cattle can do pretty well for themselves.
"There's water in those badlands if you know where to find it," Burge had assured him. "And there's grass, if you know where to look." Knowing range cattle, Canavan was not worried about them finding either water or grass, and if he could find it he could find them ... unless somebody else had.
So he rode out of Soledad along the main trail, and a number of curious eyes watched him go. One pair of those eyes belonged to Dixie Venable, inspecting her cattle and seeing where and how they fared.
She noted the tall rider on the oddly marked horse ... and felt a queer tug at her heart at the thought that he was riding away, perhaps forever.
Yet, remembering the way he had looked at her and the hard set to his jaw, she doubted he would be leaving for good. Such a man would surely return.
... Wouldn't he?
The story of his meeting with Reynolds and Berdue had come to her ears among the first. Berdue had always frightened her, for whenever they were near, his eyes were always upon her. They gave her a crawling sensation not at all like the excitement she drew from the quick, amused eyes of Bill Canavan.
She found herself thinking more and more of Canavan. The cool hardness of him masked gentleness and consideration, she was sure, yet he had a temper, and his manner of handling Reynolds had been rough, really rough. A foolish action, some might say, making an enemy of a dangerous man when it was unnecessary ... But was that true? How could she say without knowing more about Bill Canavan?
The Appaloosa was a good horse for rough country, and now he went quickly forward, ears pricked, eyes alert. These were the sights and smells he knew best, for he had run wild upon the range nearly four years before being captured and broken by Canavan.
Whether he wanted it that way or not, Canavan knew he was now in the very center of things, with all eyes upon him. From now on he must move swiftly and with boldness, but it would be helpful to keep them guessing just a little longer. Things were due to break wide open between Pogue and Reynolds, especially now that his own needling of Reynolds might stir the man into aggressive action.
Reynolds was no fool. He would know how fast the talk would spread, and it might not be long before embarrassing questions might be asked. The only escape from those questions lay in power. He must move quickly to put himself beyond questions. Eyes squinted against the glare, Canavan tried to think what Reynolds might do. It was his move, and Canavan had no doubt he would strike. But where? How?
The trail he sought showed itself suddenly, just a faint track off through the pinons, and he turned into it, letting the Appaloosa choose his own gait.
It was mid-afternoon before Canavan reached the edge of the lava beds. The black tumbled masses seemed without trails and only the sparsest vegetation.
He skirted the end of the lava flow where broken blocks had tumbled down along the face of the flow, searching for some indication of a trail. It was miserably hot and the sun threw back heat from the rocks until he felt like he was living in an oven. When he was on a direct line bet
ween Thousand Springs and the lava beds, he rode up the slope of a nearby mountain until he found an area of shade. And there he swung down to give his horse a rest While the Appaloosa cropped casually at the dry grass, he got out a set of field glasses he had purchased in New Orleans a year earlier. Then he began a systematic search, inch by inch, of the lava beds.
As yet he had but the vaguest of plans. But if the cattle he sought were there, he hoped to brand them and slip them out into the Valley, using that method to make his own bid for Valley range.
From previous experience, he knew that such lava beds often had islands of grass in their midst, places where the flow had been diverted by some obstruction and the lava had flowed around, walling in patches of pasture sometimes of considerable extent. Ice caves were not infrequent And often there were long tunnels where the outer surface of the lava had hardened, while molten rock continued to flow beneath the hard outer shell until it had passed on, leaving a natural tunnel. Some he had known were several hundred yards long, and he had heard of one that was several miles in extent.
To look at the lava beds, they seemed barren but empty, and to the casual passerby, a place without mystery or attraction. The end of the flow was abrupt, a wall some fifteen to twenty feet high. Beyond it the surface looked ropey, in some places like great masses of congealed molasses. After a half hour of study, he remounted Rio and walked the horse slowly along the side of the hill, pausing from time to time to renew his study of the lava beds.
It was almost dusk when he pointed the glass toward a tall finger of rock that thrust itself upward from the beds. At the base of the rock was a cow. And as he watched, she slowly began to drift off toward the northwest.
Try as he might he could find no trail into the beds, so as dusk was near he started back toward Thousand Springs. He would try again. At least he knew there was one cow in that labyrinth. And if there was one, there would almost certainly be more.
The trail he had chosen led him up the mesa above Thousand Springs by a little-known route. He wound around through clumps of pinon until he topped out on the relatively flat surface.
After that he rode slowly, drinking in the beauty of the place he had chosen for his home. Purple haze had thickened over the distant hills and gathered shadows around the trees in the forested notches. The pines fringed the sky with blackness, and a star appeared. Then another.
Below him the mesa broke sharply off and fell for over a hundred feet of sheer rock. Thirty feet from the bottom of the cliff, the springs for which the place was named trickled from the fractured rock, covering the rock with a silver sheen of water from which many small cascades fell into the pool below.
Beyond the pool's far edge, fringed with aspens, the Valley swept away in a long sweep of grassy range rolling into the dark distance against the mystery of the far-off hills. Bill Canavan sat his horse in a place rarely visited by men, for he doubted if anyone had climbed to the mesa's top since the last Indian had done so. At least, he had found no tracks nor sign nor horse, no cow nor man, and nothing but the fallen ruins of an ancient stone house or houses that seemed to have no connection with any of the cliff dwellings or pueblos he had seen.
The range below him was the upper Valley, supposedly controlled by Charlie Reynolds. Actually, he rarely visited the place, nor did any of his riders. It was far away from any of Reynolds's other holdings, yet the water below was available to cattle when they wished to come to it, as did the deer, antelope and wild horses.
Just back from the rim in a grove of pinion was where Canavan had started to build his house, using a foundation laid by the prehistoric builders, part of their floor, and many of their stones. The floor covered a wider expanse than he planned for his first house, so he swept it clean, paced it off, and planned what he would do. For the moment he was intent only on rebuilding a part of the old house to use as his claim shanty.
There was water here, bubbling up from the same source as Thousand Springs. He knew the water came from the same source, because several times he had dropped sticks into the spring only to have them appear in the pool, far below.
From where he sat, he could with his glass watch several miles of trail and see all who approached him. The trail up the back way was unknown so far as he had been able to discover, and the only tracks he had found were those of wild game.
To the east and south his view was unobstructed.
Below him lay all the dark distance of the Valley and the range for which he was fighting. On the north the mesa fell sheer away into a deep canyon with a dry wash at the bottom. The opposite side of the canyon was nearly as sheer as this, and almost a quarter of a mile away.
The trail led up from the west and through a broken country of tumbled rock, long fingers of lava, and clumps of pinon giving way to aspen and pine.
The top of the mesa was at least two hundred acres in extent and impossible to reach by any other route but that he had used.
Returning through the trees to a secluded hollow, he swung down and stripped the gear from the Appaloosa and turned it loose. He rarely hobbled or tied the horse, for Rio would come to him at his call or whistle and never failed to respond at once. A horse in most cases will not wander far from a camp fire, feeding away from it, then feeding back toward it, seeming to like the sense of comfort a camp fire offered as much as a man.
He built his fire of dry wood, keeping it small.
Down in the hollow as he was, there was no danger of it being seen and causing wonder. The last thing he wanted now was for anyone in the Valley to find him out After he had eaten, he strolled back to the open ground where the house was taking shape. Part of the ancient floor he was keeping as a sort of terrace from which to view the Valley below.
For a long time he stood, looking off into the darkness and enjoying the cool night air. Then he turned and walked back into the deep shadows where the house stood. He was standing there, considering the work yet to be done, when he heard a low, distant rumble.
Suddenly anxious, he stood very still, listening.
The sound seemed to come from the very rock on which he stood. He waited, expecting the sound to grow. But after only a minute or so it died away to a vague muttering, then it ceased. Puzzled, he walked around for several minutes, waiting and listening, but there was no further sound.
It was a strange thing, and it left him disturbed and uneasy as he walked back to his camp. Long after he lay in his blankets, he puzzled over the sound. He had been a boy of five in California when the greatest earthquake in Southern California history hit in 1857.
This had not felt like an earthquake, yet it was something deep underground.
He noted with an odd sense of disquiet that Rio stayed close to him, closer than usual. Of course, there could be another reason for that. There were cougars on the mesa and in the breaks behind it. He had seen their tracks, as he had seen those of elk, deer, and even bear.
The country in which he had chosen to settle was wildly beautiful, a strange, lost corner of the land cut off by the rampart of Thousand Springs Mesa.
He awakened with the sky growing gray, and found himself sitting bolt upright And then he heard it again, that low mounting rumble, far down in the rock beneath himas though the very spirit of the mountain was beneath him in his sleep. Only here the sound was less plain. It was fainter, farther away.
"It's all right, Rio," he spoke quietly.
"It's all right"
And he hoped it was. ...
Chapter VI
When he awakened again the sky was light. He rolled out of his bed, started a small fire and put on the water for coffee. While eating, he puzzled over the strange sounds of the previous night. The only logical solution seemed to be that the sounds came from the springs, from forces of some kind that were at work deep under the mesa.
Obviously these forces had made no recent changes in the contour of the rock itself. So they must be insufficient for the purpose, and probably of no immediate danger. When he had finished br
eakfast, he packed up and made ready to travel. Only then did he return to work on the house.
Unlike many cowhands, who preferred to do no work that could not be done from the back of a horse, Canavan had always enjoyed working with his hands.
Now he had the double pleasure of knowing that what he built he built for himself. By noon he had completed another wall of heavy stone, and his house was beginning to take shape.
He stopped briefly to eat and slipped on his shirt before sitting down. As he buttoned it he caught a faint movement from far down the Soledad trail.
Digging out the field glass, he took a position on the rimrock And making sure the flash of sunlight from his glass would not give him away, he studied the approaching rider.
Canavan was too far to be sure of his identity, but there was something familiar about the rider. And only when he drew nearer was Canavan sure. It was Sydney Berdue.
What was the Reynolds foreman doing out here? Of course, as this was CR range he might just be checking the water or the stock. Yet he was riding at a good pace and taking no time to notice anything around him. When he reached the pool down below, he swung down, seated himself on a rock and lit a cigarette.
Waiting for someone!
The sun was warm and comfortable after the hard work of the morning, and Canavan settled himself down to wait. If Berdue was meeting somebody out here, he wanted to know who it was. Several times he turned his glass down the trail, but saw nothing.
Yet when he swept the glass to cover the country around, he found another rider, a man on a sorrel with three white stockings, who must have come up through the timber, as he was not in sight until the very last minute. He rode up to the pool and stepped down from the saddle. Puzzled, Canavan shifted his glass to the brand.
The sorrel wore a W on his shoulder. A
Venable rider meeting Berdue of the CR at what was apparently a secret meeting place. Now he saw two more riders approaching, and one of them was the big, slope-shouldered man he had seen in the restaurant, and he rode a Box n horse. The last man rode a gray mustang, wearing Star Levitt's Three Diamonds on his hip!
Where the Long Grass Blows (1976) Page 4
