So, if you wanted a man, you went to Grebb’s.
The thought was father to the act, Brack rose, shaved indifferently, dressed hastily, shoved down a breakfast that was unnoticed, told Loo he was a lazy yellow bastard. This didn’t mean much to the Chinese, for he understood no more than a dozen words of English.
Out in the yard, Brack bawled for his horse. An ungreeted man brought the sorrel and Brack mounted, as usual, without a word of thanks. He headed for Grebb’s.
He reached there shortly before noon, handed over the sorrel to a liveryman with strict instructions regarding the animal’s care and stomped, short-legged into the main building. Grebb’s was big, for Andy was a man of property and, among those on the right and wrong side of the law, was regarded as a power in the land. Grebb didn’t like Brack because he envied him. He hated the Storms because once they had threatened to burn his establishment to the ground. But he treated both clans with respect, for they were a source of income to him. When you wanted supplies in this country, you bought from Grebb.
Andy Grebb himself, looked, ate and acted like a hog. And he had social ambitions. He liked money, food and women. In that order. And he was greedy for all of them.
As Brack entered the large room of the saloon part of the establishment, he saw that business was as brisk here at noon as it was at night. With some disgust, he saw there were a heap of men around here who didn’t have anything better to do than drink and gamble. The place looked as much like a hog-house as it ever had, but Grebb had made some attempt to bring in some little luxuries. Instead of the plank across a couple of barrels which had served as a bar in the early days, there was now a fine bar of solid oak. You could now buy beer as well as whiskey. In a reckless moment, the proprietor had brought in three or four tables and had introduced a faro wheel. He wouldn’t have done this if there hadn’t been a good chance of getting a return on his money.
There were maybe a couple of dozen men present, some at the tables playing cards, others leaning on the long bar, drinking. The place was thick with tobacco smoke, the fumes of bad drink and the stench of unwashed male bodies. There were no women present at this time of day. Grebb himself presided at the bar, not serving, but leaning on it with his customers. In the last year or so he had discarded the worn and shabby clothes in which he had entered the country several years before, and now dressed, as he fondly imagined, in the height of sartorial fashion. This entailed the wearing of a claw hammer coat with beer and food stains down the front, gray pants several sizes too large even for his massive body and a vest that boasted such bright colors that it could have been sighted at a mile. He hadn’t shaved in several days and his teeth were yellow.
He greeted Brack with a hearty oiliness.
‘Why, Mr. Brack, sir,’ he cried throatily, ‘this is indeed an honor.’ He offered a hand that Brack ignored. You had to carry a lot more weight socially or politically than Grebb before Ed Brack shook you by the hand. Unabashed, Grebb cried: ‘An’ to what do we owe the honor of your presence?’
A foot shorter, Brack stared up at him and snorted out: ‘You sell drink, don’t you, Grebb?’
‘Yes, indeedy.’
‘That’s what I came for.’
Grebb signaled the barman.
‘The best bottle for Mr. Brack, Al.’
Space was cleared at the bar for the great man, a bottle and glass came. Brack poured and said: ‘I think we’ll go into your office, Grebb.’
‘If you say so, Mr. Brack,’ Grebb declared, ‘That’s what we’ll do, sir.’
In the shabby small office at the rear of the saloon, Brack took the chair at Grebb’s desk which left Grebb standing because that was the only chair. Brack drank and poured himself another. Grebb sweated a little. He thought he smelled trouble in the air.
‘Grebb,’ Brack said at last, ‘I’m looking for a man.’
‘Name?’ Grebb was the source of all gossip. Brack had never known a man who could pick up news quicker.
Impatiently, Brack said: ‘I don’t have a name.’
‘What’s he look like?’
‘How the Hell should I know what he looks like? I never saw him.’ Grebb looked a little bewildered. ‘I want a certain kind of man to do a certain kind of job.’
‘Aw.’ Grebb looked a little worried. The last time he had found a man to do a job for Brack there had been Hell to pay. The man had been paid to kill Mart Storm right here in this saloon. And Mart had let the daylights into him and crippled another man as a result. A thing like that could get the place a bad name.
‘You know a man who’s hunting the hills for gold?’
‘Jesus, Mr. Brack, half the world’s in the Colorady hills a-lookin’ for gold.’
‘I want a man who’s looked for gold for a long time. Not a pilgrim. A real hill-nutty with a reputation for knowing the gold hunting business. Maybe a man who’s made a pretty good strike in his time, just to show he knows what he’s at. You follow me?’
Grebb rubbed his hands together.
‘I could find you a dozen.’
‘Could they all keep their mouths shut?’
‘That’s a different matter.’
‘I want a man who knows how to handle himself, who has some nerve and who badly wants a stake. He has to be smart. By smart, I mean he has to be bright enough to know that if he does something for me, he crosses me and it won’t go too well with him.’
‘There’s Jake Heller.’
Brack jerked up his head and stared at the fat man.
‘Who’s he?’
‘Kin of mine, Mr. Brack. Everybody knows Jake. He wouldn’t fail you because he wouldn’t dare fail me.’
Brack nodded. That sounded like a good idea. Grebb was shrewd and he wouldn’t dare cross Brack.
‘Where’s he at?’
Grebb shrugged and waved his hand as if to take in the surrounding mountains.
‘He’s around some place.’
‘How long to locate him?’
‘A few days, a week.’
Brack poured himself another drink, tossed it off and said: ‘You find him and send me word. I don’t want him out to the ranch. Hear? This is between you and me. It goes any further and I reckon I shan’t be best pleased. Do we understand each other?’
‘You know me, Mr. Brack,’ Grebb said. ‘A clam.’
‘I know you, Grebb.’ Brack stopped at the door and turned. ‘You’d sell your own grandmother to the Utes for a dollar profit. The most important thing to remember is, you know me.’
‘Yes, sir, Mr. Brack.’
Brack walked out, searched the place with his eyes to make sure none of the Storm men were there and left the building to bawl for his horse.
Chapter Three
Pete Hasso rode for Will Storm. He was twenty-seven years old and, being an orphan, had been raised by many so-called foster parents who had varied greatly over the years. Most of them had regarded him as a source of cheap labor and paid him mostly in blows and near-starvation. This had not given the young Pete much of a regard for the human race. In his late teens, this lack of regard for his fellow men had been instrumental in his believing that the world owed him a living. The world in this case was the railroad companies, stage-lines and banks. He had gotten willingly into the wrong crowd and started to live by the gun. After a spell in the pen, during which time viciousness was knocked into him rather than out of him, he had been thrown out into the world again and told to behave.
Impressionable young men like Pete are apt to ape the habits and actions of the people they run with. That being so, finding himself working for the Storms, he found himself emulating their behavior. Though he would have been the last to admit it. He had a mind that was as tough as his body. He had risked his life on more than one occasion for the outfit he rode for. That was one code he understood. You were true to the brand you rode for. You stuck by the man who paid your wages or you asked for your time.
Pete had been three years on Three Creeks and, though he woul
d not have said so, the life suited him fine. For the first time in his life, he was saving money and had even begun to think about getting ahead. There was only one snag in life on the Lazy S and that was Riley Brack. The rich man’s son got under his skin. He acted like a burr did to a mettlesome mustang. Not that Pete had anything against Riley personally. He liked him well enough and they went drinking together when they could get the time off. They had fought side by side in more than one skirmish on the range. Riley had sand and he stuck by his word. You couldn’t ask much more from any man.
But Rile was stuck on Kate Storm.
The thought drove Pete Hasso nearly out of his mind. Rile had everything going for him. He had looks, education and the richest father in the country. If Kate didn’t look on him with favor, she wanted her brains looked at.
Now Pete had had more women in his life up and down the frontier than he could remember. They were a necessity of life and they surely eased a man’s bodily discomfort. Having a woman was the natural outcome of an evening’s drinking in a saloon. But he had never had any contact with what he termed ‘respectable’ women. Not ones who looked like Kate, any road.
She was twenty-one now and men were saying that it was high time she was married. Women were at a premium in this country and she should be cooking and raising sons for a good man. But how the hell, Pete asked himself, did a bum like him raise enough dough to marry a girl like Kate Storm?
Pete was mulling the situation over, eating his heart out like a lovesick pilgrim and trying at the same time to trail some stray cows into some rough unclaimed country to the north-west of Three Creeks. He was, he knew, a few miles north of the range claimed by Mart Storm, the boss’s brother, on which he had started raising a herd when he built a house and settled down with his new wife the year before.
At least he thought he was trailing strays until he became puzzled by the fact that the sign told him that the animals, three in number, had taken a mighty deliberate course. Strays usually grazed their way to greater freedom on an haphazard course enticed onward by ever greener grass. If Pete’s thoughts had not been dwelling bitterly on Kate Storm and the suave sophistication of that damned Riley Brack, he would have noticed sooner that the cows had been driven against their will.
He stopped and gazed at the tracks and it was now that he picked up the sign of a shod horse’s hoofs. One man had driven those cows away from Three Creeks and that meant that man had stolen them. It was enough to bring Pete fully to his senses. He was no great shakes as a tracker, but even he could tell that the animals had not passed that way long before. That meant the thief could be close. He at once made his way onto higher ground to gain a better view of the country.
He climbed for a while, then allowed his horse to blow before he made his way along a ridge that took him about a mile into the west. He knew from the lie of the land that the rustler would have come this way. He continued with his search, thinking, no doubt, that he would come on one man who had stolen three cows. All he had to do was get the drop on the fellow and take him back to Will Storm. He didn’t doubt that the boss would know what to do. Will wasn’t a hanging man, but he would think of something appropriately unpleasant. Pete didn’t know that he was in for the biggest shock of his life.
The first indication he had that he was near fellow-humans was the soft whicker of a horse. He halted and looked around him. Below him, tied to the low branch of a tree, were two horses. One was a tall black, bigger than most animals ridden in this country. It had magnificent lines and Pete paused a moment to admire it. It was the other animal that started the shock. It was a small and neatly-made strawberry roan mare. There was only one such within miles and that belonged to Kate Storm. As Pete could tell the conformation of any horse belonging to his outfit at a considerable distance, he knew that this was Kate’s mare.
Pete’s exclamation was profane, but it expressed his reaction completely—‘Jesus Christ!’
He dismounted hastily and led his horse back into deep cover and tied it. A dozen different thoughts ran through his head and he didn’t much care for any of them. He was a pretty confused waddy. Whichever thought was right, it didn’t matter too much. There was a man down below with Kate Storm. Whether he meant her harm or not didn’t alter the position. He’d stolen three Lazy S cows and his right place was at the wrong end of a gun.
Pete crept down off the ridge, gun in hand, behaving as much like a stalking Indian as he knew how. Either the man and the girl were so engrossed in each other that they wouldn’t have noticed if a thunderbolt had fallen or Pete made a fair chore of creeping up on them. Whichever was true, he gained sight of them without being seen or heard.
They were lying in the shade of a tree and they were—well, they were engrossed. Which is the most delicate way a man can put it.
Pete viewed them in rage and despair. His first thought was to get the Hell out of there and forget, or pretend to forget the whole thing. For a start it was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him. He didn’t know how he could face the girl if he stepped out of cover with a gun in his hand.
When looked at objectively, the behavior of Pete Hasso, erstwhile saddle-bum and neglected foster-child, was exemplary. To keep up the pretence of Kate Storm’s virtue, a commodity which at that period in time was considered to be of great social value to a respectable woman, Pete risked his life.
He let down the hammer gently on his gun, returned the weapon to leather and retreated back the way he had come. He mounted his horse and then headed down the ridge making a deal of noise, certainly enough to warn the lovers of his approach. He made such a racket, swearing at his horse and knocking rocks from his path that he wasn’t surprised to find that the roan mare was no longer tied to the tree and that not even the man was in sight.
The man wasn’t in sight because he was behind Pete.
The first Pete knew of him was when a voice said: ‘H’ist ’em, boy.’
Pete was as aware as any other man that when a man said those words in a certain tone, there was usually a gun to back them. He halted and raised his hands.
The man walked into sight and the two of them looked at each other.
The fellow was about Pete’s own age, tall and rangy, good-looking, confident. It didn’t surprise Pete that a girl like Kate could have fallen for such a fellow, but he promised himself that the next time the girl laid her lovely eyes on the sonova-bitch those looks would not be so good. The fellow held the gun now, but the first chance Pete had, he’d jump him and work him over like a man had never been worked over before. Such an action was a man’s sacred duty.
Pete heard the sound of retreating hoofbeats and he knew that Kate was headed back for the house. Which settled that little problem for the moment.
The man said: ‘You followin’ me?’
Pete said: ‘If you was with them three cows, I’m followin’ you.’
‘I don’t know a thing about three cows,’ the man told him. His eyes were very blue and very cold.
Nobody in his right mind called a man holding a gun a liar, so Pete didn’t. He merely said: ‘If you wasn’t with them three cows then I ain’t followin’ you.’
‘Just the same, mister,’ the man said, ‘I’ll take your gun. Toss it this way.’
Pete lifted his gun from leather, calculated the exact spot where he’d drop it and did so. The man bent forward to pick it up. Pete hit his horse with his spurs. With a squeal of alarm, the animal jumped. Its off foreleg hit the man and sent him sprawling. Pete dove from the saddle. He landed on the man just as he was struggling to get the gun lined up on Pete. From then on it was an untidy scramble of arms, legs, feet, teeth, fists and butting heads. Two men, for a brief while, reverted into two animals fighting for their lives. Pete may have been a cats-paw of life, the wrong end of human society and suffering from a marked sense of social inferiority, but just the same he had physical confidence, he wasn’t afraid of any creature on four or two legs and he was strong. He could also m
ove very fast.
The other fellow was no slouch, but Pete’s horse going into him had knocked the stuffing out of him. He lost his gun when Pete dove into him and the only time he got his hand on it again, Pete stamped down on that hand with the high heel of his cowman’s boot. Which put that hand out of action. When he made a try for Pete’s gun, Pete kicked him in the throat and the fight was over.
Pete, a little short on breath and with one eye closed, picked up both guns, stuffed the other man’s under his belt and held the other ready.
The man writhed around on the ground for a while making choking noises and without arousing one iota of sympathy in Pete’s breast. By the time he had recovered himself enough to sit up, holding his throat and groaning, he didn’t look much like the man Kate Storm had taken a shine to. In fact there wasn’t a woman living who would have given him a passing glance. He looked a mess. His nose had bled and soaked the front of his blue hickory shirt, his hair was disheveled, his mouth was mashed and his eyes looked sick.
Now Pete, in possession of the gun, thought fit to say: ‘You’re a liar. I was followin’ you with them three cows.’
‘If you didn’t have a gun in your hand,’ the man said indistinctly, ‘you wouldn’t have the gall to say that.’
‘I do have the gun,’ Pete said.
‘You own those cows?’
‘No.’
‘Then what’s the fret?’
‘My boss owns ’em.’
‘You’re just a hired man.’ There was derision in the tone.
Battle Fury Page 2
