by Jonas Ward
“Seems like,” Billy said as they moved out of the Spread Eagle yard without a backward glance. “Too much peace for his own damn good. Who do you figure this scudder was that pulled the kid out this mornin’?”
“Mr. Handy-Andy himself,” Pecos said. “And no tenderfoot with a rifle, neither. I was kind of wonderin’ all along if the kid had drilled Lafe Hupp all that clean and sent Hamp Jones a-scurryin’.”
“Busted Hamp’s arm, how about that?” Billy said, repeating the tale brought back from town.
“And stopped Jules Sweger’s clock cold,” Pecos said. “I guess that didn’t bring no tears to your blue eyes.”
“That slippery, sidewinding sonofabitch,” Billy Rowe said. “Not hardly.” Billy was recalling a moonless night two years ago, another range war, and the man Sweger shooting from behind, in the dark, giving Billy six weeks of painful recovery and a back scarred from shoulder to spine with buckshot wounds. “Not hardly,” he said again, wishing friend Sweger a merry roasting in Hell.
“Must be fair capable, that one,” Pecos said of the stranger.
“Yeh. Too bad he showed up after the ball was over.”
“Over and done with,” his friend agreed. “Say, you know something, Billy-boy? We picked a right hot day to start for California.”
• • •
BUCHANAN WAS NOTICING the heat, too. Especially at the times when the trail left the cooling shelter or the pines and exposed him and his animal to a merciless sun in a coudless sky. Noticing, also, that there was getting to be less and less shelter and more and more naked sun. Then the timber gave out altogether and he came to the rim of a wide, baked-looking expanse that stretched for God-knew-how-many miles of uncomfortable riding.
He knows but I don’t, the big man thought judiciously. And since we don’t have no special appointment on the other side of this desert why not cross it when the sun loses its punch? The motion was seconded and carried, Buchanan pulled back beneath the pines, pegged out the horse and settled down for a sensible siesta. Minutes later he was sleeping peacefully—and half an hour after that awake. Awake and staring into the unwavering barrel of Biggie Tragg’s .45. Beyond Tragg’s shoulder, and also with his gun inhospitably drawn, was a smirking Saul Ruppert. Draped over that one’s shoulder was Buchanan’s own gunbelt.
“What’s cooking, boys?” Buchanan asked them.
“Your goose,” Tragg said and Ruppert chuckled.
“Make him set up and beg,” Ruppert suggested then.
“Sure,” Tragg said. “Get on your knees, ranny.”
“Go to hell,” Buchanan told him. Tragg’s hammer clicked sharply as he cocked it. Seconds of taut silence passed away into eternity as the two men stared into each other’s eyes.
“Go on and shoot the bastard,” Ruppert’s voice urged then. Still Tragg held off, began moving his crooked trigger finger back and forth, tauntingly, and watched for the slightest change in Buchanan’s ice-calm composure.
“Let him have it, Biggie,” Ruppert said again, impatiently. “What the hell you waitin’ on?”
“It’s an act!” Tragg snarled into Buchanan’s face, his voice ragged, charged with irritation. The gunman, in truth, had just seen himself with the situation reversed—and hadn’t liked what he saw. “It’s a gahdamned act!” he raged again and brought the gunbarrel slashing down across Buchanan’s face. “Beg, you sonofabitch!” Tragg shouted. “Beg for your worthless, friggin’ life!”
Buchanan wiped the blood from his mouth, eyed the excited man almost with detachment. He said nothing, and for the good reason that he could think of nothing to say that was going to affect the outcome one way or the other.
“Come on, Biggie,” Saul Ruppert said. “Put him back to sleep.”
“Sleep,” Tragg said, pouncing on the word as if it had ignited a bright idea. “Sure,” he repeated, “sleep. He ducked in here out of the sun for a nice cool sleep.”
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Ruppert asked.
“I ain’t gettin’ hunk, that’s what’s the matter,” Tragg blurted, revealing what was secretly bothering him. He wanted more satisfaction out of this encounter than Buchanan was giving him. He wanted to see fear. Leering wickedly, Tragg took a short backward step, spoke in a goading, sneering tone.
“Stand up, bo, and peel off that shirt,” he said. Buchanan, thinking that he was reading the man’s intentions, climbed slowly to his feet, stripped himself naked to the waist. Studying that awesomely muscled torso seemed to deepen Tragg’s resolve. Saul Ruppert, for his part, was frankly impressed.
“I thought I got hit by somethin’ special,” he said. “Now I know.”
“Walk,” Tragg said abruptly, motioning with the cocked gun. Buchanan moved in that direction, toward the bright sunlight beyond the timberline.
“Where we goin’ now?” Ruppert asked.
“To put him to sleep like you said, Saul,” Tragg told him.
“Why don’t you kill him right here?” Ruppert asked and Tragg laughed.
“Me? I ain’t gonna kill him at all.”
“Then what the hell did Malvaise send us after him for?”
Tragg laughed again. “To teach him a lesson about Big M,” he said. “And when we tell Bart that the ranny is pegged out here in the sun, Saul, you see if he don’t slip the two of us a little bonus. Just see if he don’t!”
“Pegged out?” Ruppert echoed. “Won’t that kill him, too?”
“You bet it will,” Tragg said. “But slow and hard. Less, of course, he gets lucky and a scorp bites him. Or some bad-tempered ole daddy rattler comes along.”
“Seems some simpler to just plug him and be done,” Ruppert said.
“That’s your only fault, Saul,” Tragg told him. “You don’t think big like me and Bart Malvaise. Wait’ll you see the bossman slap us on the back when he hears. I mean, boy, in just twenty-four hours this big drifter is gonna be a skeleton picked clean. Now won’t that be a warning to anybody else not to mess with the Big M?”
“Warn me, right enough,” Ruppert agreed. “And he’ll hand us a little bonus, you reckon?”
“Twenty-five, maybe fifty bucks,” Tragg assured him.
And Buchanan, listening to this byplay, had to agree that Tragg was probably right. Malvaise, from what little he’d seen of him, was just the type who’d shell out a little incentive for creative thinking.
“Ain’t this far enough, Biggie?” Ruppert asked. They had moved a good hundred feet out into the blazing sun.
“Little bit more,” Tragg said. “We want our boy to get the full benefit when it rises tomorrow mornin’. If he’s still alive, that is,” he laughed, “and not pure loco. Oh, Bart’s gonna love this stunt, Saul. This’ll be the makin’ of we two. All right, ranny, stop where you’re at and get flat on your back.”
Buchanan, bareheaded and squinting from the fierce glare, turned around to face both men.
“I’d as lief you shot me, Tragg,” he said very simply.
“Yeh, hanh? You maybe don’t hanker much for my idea?”
“Not much,” Buchanan admitted. “We’re white men, you and me. Not Apaches.”
“All right, white man—get down on your knees and beg me to put a bullet atween your eyes!”
Buchanan looked at him, seemed to be considering it. All at once he lunged at the other man, caught Tragg at the belt with his shoulder, locked his arms around his legs and brought him down. Ruppert, slow-witted but powerful as an ox, came at Buchanan from behind, hammered brutally at Buchanan’s skull with the butt of his .45. Tragg, swearing violently, drove his thick knee into Buchanan’s groin, kept driving it with the fury of a madman. Buchanan, beginning not to feel so good, managed to roll over on his back and launched a kick that knocked Ruppert back. Biggie Tragg crashed his gunbarrel flush on the bridge of Buchanan’s nose, with all his strength, and bright lights exploded, the sun and sky began to spin. He didn’t even know that Tragg hit him another for good measure, that Ruppert, sore at being kick
ed, got in some more licks of his own. Didn’t know and was beyond caring.
He cared a while later, though, when he came back to consciousness with a pile-driving pain inside his head, opened his eyes dazedly and immediately shut them tight against the relentless sun. Then, still very groggy, not at all sure where he was or what had happened, he tried instinctively to bring his forearm across his face to ward off the damnable light. But the arm couldn’t move because the wrist was fastened tight to the hard ground. And the other, and both legs. With rope and three-foot long pegs he was spread-eagled here on the desert floor. All he could do was swing his aching head from side to side, breathe the still, hot air into his lungs.
Thirst, incredible thirst. That was the second discomfort once his mind made a compromise of sorts with the skull-pounding and the general situation. He ran his tongue around his lips and got about as much comfort as he would have from a dried, salty jerky. Nor was he perspiring in this moistureless hell. One hundred and thirty degrees where he was staked-out, and with each passing minute the ordeal was becoming more and more exquisite. He could even feel his tightly shut eyelids becoming burned, his earlobes, the thin skin that stretched tight over his ribs.
Pain, thirst, agony—and the other thing that Biggie Tragg had guessed might happen. A breaking down of the spirit. A humbling before the awful and inexorable power of nature—a power that was so especially cruel because there was nothing a man could fasten his mind to fight against, nothing he could match his miserable human little will to. Here he lay on a tiny patch of earth called Pasco County, Arizona Territory, that was slowly, slowly turning beneath that great ball of fire in the center of the sky. Three thousand miles to the east that same sun was setting. Three thousand more and it was the cool, cool black of night. Buchanan thought about some fellow man in New York gazing at the beautiful sunset. He thought about some fellow man in Scotland, maybe some relative, fast asleep atop a feather bed. And that’s what Biggie Tragg hoped he might get to thinking about once his mind broke its own discipline and began wandering.
A shadow passed briefly across his face, just for an instant, but so sensitive was every nerve in his body to any lessening of the heat that he was aware of it immediately. Then another shadow, a blocking out of the glare that seemed to linger for a second or more. And another, even longer. Very cautiously Buchanan opened his eyes, opened them to the merest slits, and when he saw what caused the shadows he wished that he’d kept his lids closed. Three turkey buzzards were wheeling slowly overhead, huge meat-eaters with seven-foot wingspread, circling closer and closer to the ground to investigate the hearty meal in store, carefully scouting what kind of opposition the helplessly pinned-down prey could put up. Then, correctly gauging the human’s plight from his lack of movement, and being omnivorously hungry for rarely found manflesh, they all three landed nearby and began to close in on foot.
Buchanan knew these ugly black vultures well. He’d not only hunted them as a kid in the Big Bend but had to contend with them as rivals when hunting wolves and mountain cats. He knew their mean tempers, their voracity, and the strength in those hooked beaks that could rip away a quarter pound of meat in one vicious swipe.
He watched them come nearer—fifteen feet, ten, five. Their beady, malevolent little eyes were fixed on him hungrily. Buchanan filled his lungs with air and suddenly rent the air with the wild, piercing Texas yell made famous in the “big battle down in Buena Vista. Mexican soldiers had fled in terror then. Now three startled buzzards took to the air, one passing so close to Buchanan’s body that its sharp talons raked his chest.
Just a stall for time, and Buchanan knew it. A brief reprieve while the birds circled overhead again, made another reconnoiter of the situation on the ground. Buchanan kept tabs on his deadly enemies at intervals, opening his eyes briefly every thirty seconds to check their nearness. And with each passing half-minute they dipped closer and closer, would soon decide on a second landing. He was sure he could drive them off another time, maybe a third, but after that the birds would know that the man’s sole defense against them was sound.
Then came a bloodcurdling sound that made Buchanan’s body stiffen on pure reflex. The angry, staccato rattle of a diamondback. The snake, a full eight feet long, had been slumbering in its cool burrow underground. Now it had come out to investigate all this activity so close to home. To investigate and punish any and all trespassers.
The scent of the human had alarmed the snake’s senses. It had vibrated its rattles as a warning to the interloper to clear out of its private domain. For a full minute now it waited, gave the intruder every opportunity to avoid combat. But when the human thing didn’t get up and move away the diamondback took it as a challenge to its prior rights here. Another fearsome rattle sounded, this one more intense, furious. The killer-snake slithered forward toward Buchanan’s rigid body and all the man could do was wait.
It hurts for a little while, he remembered hearing once. There’s a kind of a burning while the poison from the fangs gets into your bloodstream. But you don’t linger on too long, and in truth he would rather have it this way than be eaten alive piecemeal by the vultures.
As Biggie Tragg had said, if he was lucky a snake would come along and end it fast….
Chapter Four
WHEN WORD WAS BROUGHT to Bart Malvaise in the Silver Queen that Matt Patton wanted to meet with him in Banker Aylwood’s office, the Big M owner could hardly believe his ears.
“You think the old man’s throwing his hand in?” Sam Judd asked.
“Throwing what hand in?” Malvaise laughed. “A busted straight? A four-card flush?” He tossed off the rest of the whisky in his glass, very deliberately poured another. “This is table stakes,” he said boastfully to the fawning yes-men around him, “and I’ve been holding aces full even before the draw.”
“You going over to the bank to parley with him?” Judd asked.
“Maybe, maybe not, Sam,” came the arrogant-sounding answer. “Sort of hate to spoil the fun I had planned for Spread Eagle.”
“How’s that, Bart?”
“I’ve got the boys all primed for a ride tonight. A little house warming,” he added slyly, “with Matt Patton’s house getting the warming.”
There was dutiful laughter around the table at the boss’ wit, murmurs of appreciation. Malvaise looked all around him, took it big.
“Looks like the old man got wind of your party, Bart,” a needle-nosed lawyer named Sharpe said.
“So what difference is it going to make to him?” Malvaise demanded gruffly. “It ain’t going to affect Matt Patton one way or another whether his place is so many burnt ashes or I turn it into a cribhouse for my friends. He won’t be around these parts no matter what.”
“A cribhouse?” a hanger-on named Tully echoed happily. “Say, that’s just what we need around Pasco.”
“Why not?” Malvaise said. “What’s good for Phoenix is good for us. And I met a little French gal in ‘Frisco last year who’s willing and eager to come down here and stock it with the prettiest bunch of whores you ever saw.”
“You almost sound serious, Bart,” Sam Judd told him.
“Sure I’m serious,” Malvaise said. “Turn Patton’s main house into a fancy bordello, build me a gambling casino where the corral is now. Put this place on the map, make it another New Orleans.”
“Won’t that be somethin’!” Tully said excitedly. “The swells’ll be comin’ from clear back to Chicago! Let’s go down to Bart’s place, they’ll all say.”
Malvaise smiled, took a throatful of liquor and swallowed it. “That’s another thing, boys,” he said then, his voice seeming to savor the sound of the words it spoke. “You think there’d be any objections to changing a few names around here?”
“Names?” the lawyer asked. “What names?”
“Well, Pasco, for instance. Just because old Colonel Pasco happened to come through here fifty years ago and survey the land don’t seem reason enough to have the whole county named af
ter him. It don’t to me, at any rate. How about you, Sam?”
“Never gave it much thought, Bart,” the sheriff said. “What would you change it to?”
“I’d say Malvaise County would be more appropriate,” the dark man said blandly, running his eye over the surprised faces. “Colonel Pasco just made boundary lines for the government,” he added. “He didn’t take over the running of things.”
“Malvaise County,” Sharpe said. “Got a ring to it.”
“And Indian Rocks,” Malvaise went on. “That’s no name for a city that’s the county seat. A great big thriving city like I’m going to make of it.”
“You got a name for it?” Judd asked.
“Bartsville,” Malvaise answered. “I was thinking of Barts-town, but that don’t seem to have much bigness to it. Do you think?”
“Bartsville,” Sharpe said. “Got a ring to it. Bartsville, county seat and leading metropolis of Malvaise County, Arizona.”
“That’ll let ’em know right off who’s in charge,” Tully chimed in. “When you fixin’ to set up the cribhouse?”
“The Crystal Palace? Oh, right soon now. Couple of months, maybe.”
“Man, oh, man,” Tully drooled. “The Crystal Palace. Fancy gals.”
“And right in Matt Patton’s parlor,” another one said. “You going to tell him about the changes you’re making, Bart?”
“I ain’t telling that old man but one thing,” Malvaise said, “and that’s to get up and get out.”
“When you figure on goin’ over to see him at the bank?” Sam Judd asked with some concern. Judd liked his new job as peace officer in the county, he saw it as his life’s work, and the more trouble that could be settled without resort to violence the less trouble for him. Not that he minded covering up for the transgressions of Bart Malvaise and Big M during these times. He just didn’t want to make himself too obviously Malvaise’s man.
