by T. T. Flynn
Jim Rapburn had thoughtful eyes and sensitive features still untanned by the Southwestern sun. “I was watching your face when you fired,” Rapburn said slowly. “You meant it.” His smile was forced. “I saw Gid Markham killed just then.”
“Not Markham,” Travis said, and the tension caught him again as he thought of the target that had been in his mind. He changed the subject, eyeing the young lawyer critically. “You look well and prosperous.”
Rapburn’s flush was self-conscious as he glanced down at his new gray suit. “Does something for a man to have money in his pocket and dress like he’s successful.”
Cynically Travis said: “Does more to other people when they know he’s successful. They like him. They come running to please him.”
“Like I jump to please you,” said Rapburn wryly.
“Jim, I wasn’t suggesting anything like that.” Travis could be warmly convincing. He left his horse there with reins on the ground, and they fell into slow step together.
Rapburn’s glance went about the wide, busy ranch yard. “This looks like a fort making ready for a campaign. Supplies stacking up, men coming and going. Wagons in and out.”
“Something like that,” Travis said. He handed over a cigar and bit the end off another. They were good cigars, the best of the Bonanza stock in Soledad.
Rapburn sniffed the tobacco appreciatively. Travis got his smoke going and absently broke the match at right angles. They were both, he suspected, thinking of the same thing—of how Jim Rapburn, the young lawyer out from the East for his health, had sat in Socorro, the county seat of this vast Socorro county, pockets empty, suits threadbare, until Travis had come to him with a handsome retainer. Rapburn might even be aware that he had been selected because he was new in the territory, without old allegiances, and needed money desperately enough to serve a well-paying client with all effort.
“The surveyors,” Rapburn said slowly, “are back in Socorro. Everything is about ready.” He seemed troubled. “As your lawyer, I must ask if it’s wise to expand Kilgore’s ranch as planned.”
“Matt’s decision,” said Travis calmly. “I’m only backing him.”
It was a fiction that even Matt believed, and Rapburn’s comment was sincere. “A son couldn’t be doing more for Kilgore.”
“I feel almost like a son,” Travis said, and, in a way, he did feel so, he mused, as they strolled past workmen enlarging the bunkhouse.
On the north side of the yard, Matt’s booming voice was audible. Rapburn’s glance that way was still troubled. “Does Kilgore realize the trouble he’ll have with Gideon Markham?” Rapburn asked uncomfortably. “Markham isn’t a weakling.”
Travis spoke with scorn as they walked on beyond the last corrals. “Markham is no worry.” The worry was the stranger who had bluffed his way out of the South Bay Bank with a pipe stem. Tightly cautious, he said: “You’re my lawyer, not Kilgore’s lawyer. I own cattle here. My money is in this ranch. How quickly could I sell everything for cash?”
“You couldn’t.”
“You might say then I’m trapped in all this now.”
“In a way,” Rapburn agreed.
“Means staying with it,” Travis said. And, with the bald choice on him again, his long-boned, rugged face hardened. “Ever have big plans, big dreams, Jim?”
Young Rapburn’s smile was wry. “More than my share. There’s been so much to dream about that I haven’t got.”
“I came here to sell my cattle,” Travis said, “and I found a chance at the future which few men will ever have.” In spite of the sweating strain that would not leave now, enthusiasm sharpened Travis’s words. “The railroad is going to cross the territory toward California. Cattle can be shipped out. Settlers will come. More mines will open. Towns will grow. The man who makes friends now, and digs in and spreads out, will have a chance for wealth beyond anything this territory has ever known.” Travis looked at the gray ash lengthening on his cigar and added coolly: “And men who work with him will grow big, too.”
Under his breath Jim Rapburn said: “Is that why Kilgore is ready to fight even the Markhams to expand now?”
“The Markhams,” said Travis impatiently, “don’t count. Old Amos Markham was in the Army with Matt. After they got out, Amos married a Mexican girl from one of the old native families. He was kingpin, and he started to spread over everything in sight. When Matt Kilgore married and started to ranch in this same country, Amos tried to crowd him out. Even raised his son, Gid Markham, to fight Matt. Gid Markham almost had Matt on his knees when I came here.”
“I’ve heard so,” Rapburn murmured.
“Amos Markham,” said Travis scornfully, “ran the country around here like an old-time hacienda, everyone on it peons of his. Gid Markham wants it to stay that way. He can’t see what’s ahead. If he makes trouble, he’ll be pushed aside.” Travis drew on his cigar and said evenly: “Matt might not live to see it all happen. But this ranch will and his daughter will.”
Full understanding came keenly into Rapburn’s glance. “I’d forgotten Miss Kilgore,” Rapburn said, smiling faintly. He drew a slow breath. “If you follow through with this, you’ll end up one of the biggest men in the territory . . . or a dead man.”
“My money is in it. I can’t get out now if I want to. And I don’t intend to lose or get killed,” Travis said with hardening calmness.
XII
When Clay Mara came awake in the little outside room at Dr. Halvord’s house, mote-spangled sunlight through the open window made him stare unbelievingly. He felt sharp and alive and ravenously hungry as he crossed the cold, hard mud floor on bare feet and opened the door. By the sun, it was long after seven in the morning. In rumpled, sand-filled clothes, he’d slept nearly twenty hours. In the distance across the low roofs of town the mountains lifted, purple-shadowed under the cloudless sky. Yesterday those mountains had mocked his exhausted, grimly stubborn will to reach the fellow who was calling himself Roger Travis.
Clay thought of the man in detached anticipation as he walked around the doctor’s quiet adobe house and turned toward the plaza. Yesterday the town had been a tired blur. Now he saw that they built mostly of adobe here, and the town sprawled away from the sunny plaza without much pattern. Sunroofs extended over the plaza walks. Native New Mexicans, dark-skinned for the most part and leisurely, were numerous. Ledfesser’s seemed to be the largest store. Clay bought what he needed there, and crossed the plaza again past a tangle of Indians just arrived—bucks, squaws, children standing by scraggly ponies. The long, gay-colored skirts of the squaws marked them as friendly Navajos.
Barbershop—Baths. Clay walked in, and in a back room he soaked luxuriously in a tin tub, lathering the desert out of his hair, digging grit out of ears and eye corners. Clay sang from sheer animal vigor and knowledge that the long trail ended here. He scoured the towel furiously over glowing skin and cording muscles, opened the bundle from Ledfesser’s, and pulled on new clothes, keeping only the sweat-stained leather money belt and comfortable old boots.
Men were loitering in the barbershop. While lather foamed over his beard bristles, Clay asked casually if Roger Travis were in town. Travis was not. But the question started them talking of Travis. Of the money the man had. Of the way he was helping Matt Kilgore. Friendly talk. They liked Travis; they respected the fellow.
Clay speculated on what they’d say if he told them he was really Roger Travis. They’d jeer, he knew. The Kilgores had accepted Travis and were backing him. In this remote part of New Mexico, with little law, Travis could kill an armed stranger and with his money and new friends, get away with it. And, at the first suspicion, Travis would. Clay had no doubt of it now.
The barber’s mirror showed a new man, hair trimmed, dark face cleanly smooth. The new wool pants, canvas jacket, gray cotton shirt, and fresh red kerchief felt luxurious as Clay walked from the barbershop to the sign he had already marked. Ah Wing—Eats.
Ah Wing was back in his kitchen clattering pans as Clay
sat at a scrubbed pine table. The plump waitress grew wide-eyed, fascinated as she brought coffee, hot biscuits, steak, eggs, fried potatoes, more coffee, more steak. “More coffee, ma’am . . .”
The waitress asked: “When’d you eat last, mister?” Clay grinned over the bite of steak on his fork. “Long time ago.”
“If you ever et before, there wouldn’t be that much room,” she said with conviction.
Clay asked directions and walked to a feed corral, and there was no sorrel horse waiting for him. He tried the Star Livery and Feed, east of the plaza corner, a long, low adobe barn with a runway through the center. In one of the stalls, a young Mexican hostler in waist overalls and red-checked shirt was wiping a horse with a sack. Teeth flashed at Clay’s question. “You want horse the lady left?” They walked back to the corral behind the barn. “The black one, señor.”
Clay rested elbows on a corral bar and eyed the black gelding across the corral. Not a cull. Short-coupled like the sorrel, with a look of soundness and bottom. Over a shoulder, in Spanish, Clay asked: “Miss Kilgore brought that black one in? For Clay Mara?”
And back in Spanish, cheerfully: “In the office is the paper of sale. He is one good horse, no? ¡Sala’o!”
Clay said inquiringly: “¿Sala’o?”
“Salty . . . salado,” explained the boy. Slender and good-natured, he had dark eyes that glinted with amusement. “We say sala’o.”
Clay dropped back into English. “Let’s see that bill of sale,” he said drily.
He was rueful when the boy left him. He should have guessed that the Spanish he had learned in old Mexico and on south would be different. Like New Orleans talking to Boston. And Travis, too, would probably know the difference by now. Best not admit knowing Spanish from now on. The boy returned with a brown unsealed envelope. Silently Clay read the enclosure.
I hereby sell and transfer to Clay Mara for value received all rights and ownership in the black gelding branded MK on neck, right side.
—Patricia Kilgore
The slanting pen strokes were impersonal, explaining nothing. The bill of sale was as coolly antagonistic, in a way, as Patricia Kilgore herself had been yesterday. She was close to Travis. She was at odds with Gid Markham. The missing sorrel had been taken from the men at Red Rocks. Clay put the paper back into the envelope.
“Where can I find Missus Strance who owns the newspaper?” he inquired.
“West,” the boy said. “Across plaza. Is little house. Flowers, sand pile in front.”
“How about renting a saddle and gun boot?”
Clay took the rope from the boy and went into the corral and brought the black out. Preoccupied, trying to fit bits of this mystery together, he stepped into the saddle.
Sala’o—salty. The exploding jump and spin almost threw him. The boy started to laugh. The grin Clay tried to give back was shaken off his face as he barely managed to get the plunging brute’s head up and turned into the barn.
Thankful he’d hauled cinches tight, Clay rode the bucking, twisting black through the long shadowy runway of the barn. Only in the wide street outside did he get the hard mouth under control. The young hostler had run through the barn after him and was still laughing.
“¡Sala’o! ” Clay called wryly, and swung the black toward the plaza, across it, and on.
He found the sand pile, and the black gelding went falsely hipshot and placid when Clay stepped off. With a jaundiced look, Clay warned: “Don’t count on it next time.”
It was a neat little house with tan-colored earthen walls washed by infrequent rains into graceful, grooved patterns. Lush green of an irrigated garden was visible behind the house, with a row of teepee-like poles covered with climbing bean vines. And, to the right of the narrow front portal, under the reaching green branches of a cottonwood tree, a doll was kneeling in a board-enclosed sand pile. The doll’s grubby hand waved as Clay opened the gate in the low picket fence and walked to her. A small, distressed lower lip was protruding.
Helplessly the doll said: “Wolf’s nose felled off.”
A tin basin held muddy water. She had been molding a damp sand image. Its nose had indeed fallen off. A tiny Chihuahua dog almost the color of the sand stood in one corner of the box and watched Clay with alert, pricked ears.
“Is that Wolf, ma’am?” Clay inquired with caution.
“He won’t bite,” said the doll reassuringly.
“Had me worried,” Clay said with relief. He pushed back his hat and considered the problem. “Did you squeeze the sand tight?”
The doll’s scrubbed, healthy little face was freckled and smeared with mud. Red hair was parted into two braids, each with a small bow of green ribbon. “I squoze,” she said forlornly, “but it felled off.”
“More water in the sand might help,” Clay suggested. He stepped into the sand pile and dropped to a knee.
The doll leaned close, watching his hands work. Her dress and her apron were neatly ironed. Her question was hopeful. “Are you my daddy?”
“No, ma’am.”
“He wented away,” the doll said. “What’s your name?”
“Clay Mara. What’s yours?”
“Lucinda.”
“That,” said Clay admiringly, “is a pretty name.” Carefully he pinched a new nose to an aggressive point.
“Gid Markham,” the doll confided, “says Lucinda means sugar an’ spice. He rides me on his horse.”
“Ride your mother, too?” Clay asked, working on an ear.
The doll chortled. “Mommy’s a big girl.”
An amused voice spoke on the house portal: “Do you children need a larger sand pile?”
Clay dipped hands into the basin and stood up, catching off his hat. “I used to be better at snowmen, ma’am.”
Widow Strance’s fresh cotton print dress was as plain today as yesterday, and her bright red hair was caught smoothly back. She was smiling without recognition as she walked to the sand pile, until he said: “I’m Clay Mara, ma’am.”
Her eyes widened and grew guarded. Her comment was impersonal with amused irony. “Do you usually start the day playing in a sand pile, Mister Mara?”
The doll said: “I like him, Mommy. Do you like him?”
Clay smiled at Widow Strance’s expression. “Don’t answer, ma’am. I didn’t stop here to be praised.”
She flushed, and for a moment looked like an older copy of the doll, close to having her warm lower lip protrude in distressed uncertainty. Smiling, Clay pulled pipe and tobacco from his coat pocket. “I came to ask about my sorrel horse. Where is he?”
Widow Strance’s smooth face recovered composure. “José Sanchez brought your horse in. Ask at the feed corrals or the livery barn.” She watched Clay thumb tobacco into the straight-stemmed pipe. Her mouth parted slightly.
Calmly Clay said: “This black gelding was left at the Star Livery for me. Miss Kilgore left him, and a bill of sale for him. But I had a sorrel horse. I want him.”
“Of course. And light your pipe, if you wish, Mister Mara.”
Clay did so, and reminded her: “You were the one who said that the sorrel would be brought into town.”
“I thought he would be.”
For a remembering moment, Clay looked at her shoulder where his grimy, unshaven face had sagged while he had slept, exhausted, in her buggy yesterday. She had been understanding about it, as a young widow could be. Now she seemed on guard against him, with speculation in her hazel eyes.
“Those two Mexicans work for Miss Kilgore?” Clay said.
“Yes.” In something like fascination, Mrs. Strance was watching the straight-stemmed pipe in his hand.
“That doesn’t explain why a black horse arrived instead of the sorrel,” Clay said coolly.
He was thinking of the way Widow Strance’s pliant young figure had tensed against him in the buggy yesterday when he had mentioned Gid Markham. And of what her small daughter had revealed about Markham. Mrs. Strance seemed to read the turn of his thoughts.
“Many things seem to need explaining,” she said, watching him. “Gid Markham rode in at once and talked to you, and left town immediately. Then Gid gathered men and rode off on some urgent matter. But strangely, Mister Mara, no one in town seems to know about it.”
“Markham’s business isn’t mine,” said Clay indifferently. “But if you’re his friend, don’t talk about what he’s doing until you see him.”
Her slight frown considered him. “What Gid is doing doesn’t concern you?”
“No.”
She was perplexed. “Why is Gid being secretive?”
“You seem to know all that happens,” Clay reminded with his own irony. “Why don’t you know more about my sorrel?”
“Why should the sorrel be so important?”
“Because, ma’am, someone seems to think he is important,” Clay said. His smile came again. “I’ve never played in a sand pile with a sweeter young lady.”
The doll’s grubby hand waved as Clay turned to leave. He waved back. Mrs. Strance stood by her daughter and watched him short-rein the black gelding, slam into the saddle watchfully, and hold the edgy black brute with a hard bit. Only then did she lift her voice.
“Mister Mara . . . when were you in California last?”
Clay’s teeth clamped on the pipe stem. He halted the black’s half wheel, reined back, and took the pipe from his mouth. “I don’t remember saying I was ever in California, ma’am.”
“Not yesterday?” Mrs. Strance countered. “In the buggy, when you were almost asleep?”
Clay stared at her with a kind of shock. Had he blabbered and mumbled, unawares, in that exhausted soddenness that had blanked out on her soft shoulder?
Her smile came, provocative, with an edge of mockery. Of a sudden, pretty as she was despite her plain dress and severely pinned hair, she took on threat and danger. The smile Clay forced was an effort. “A man can say anything in his sleep, ma’am.”
She persisted. “You have been in California, haven’t you? In San Francisco?”
