Troublesome Range

by Peter Dawson

  “He’d likely shoot you,” had been Blaze’s caustic comment when he found where Yace was going.

  “Joe didn’t kill Ed. John knows that,” Yace had said briefly.

  He and Blaze had ridden west from Anchor on the Brush trail. They hadn’t talked with Merrill. Coming in on the layout, they’d spotted the doctor’s buggy under the lean-to shed alongside the barn and another by the main hitch rail at the house. As they rode up to the house, Fred and Jean Vanover had come out the door with Ruth Merrill.

  Her father, Ruth had told them quietly, had had a stroke on learning of Ed’s death. The doctor wouldn’t say how bad it was, but Ruth was afraid it was quite serious. Blaze and Yace had expressed their sympathy and offered their help. The girl thanked them. She wanted to know what the posse had accomplished in the hunt for Joe and seemed glad when Yace said stoutly: “Nothin’, ma’am. And they won’t.”

  Vanover and his daughter had driven out the lane with the two Anchor men. At the forks in the trail below Brush’s big pasture, Vanover had pulled in to say: “Bonnyman, what about this talk I hear?”

  “What talk?” Yace’s tone had been curt.

  “That I had my own men break open that safe.”

  “Whoever claims that is a fool.” Yace had been emphatic. “What’s more to the point is that Harper might have been riled about losin’ his job, riled enough to collect what he figures you owe him.”

  Vanover had showed a steady check on his temper. He had said merely: “I’m looking into that matter, Bonnyman. Good day.” The rain had seemed to push Yace down into a deeper mood of depression. He had retired behind a wall of testy silence ever since Lyans’s departure this morning. Consequently Blaze had been glad to give the excuse that he was going back up Porcupine to spend the night with the crew. Yace had accepted his explanation without comment.

  It was now plain to Blaze that more lay behind the Acme robbery than any of them had supposed this morning. It had erased the last remnant of good feeling bred by last night’s meeting. The old suspicions had come to life once more. Even Fred Vanover couldn’t be sure that his own men hadn’t betrayed him. Vanover had made a mistake in disclosing his uncertainty. He was the wrong man for his job, always had been. The cattle company needed a man with Vanover’s brains and Harper’s cold mercilessness. Vanover was too soft, too reasonable. Blaze felt sorry for the man as he saw what might be coming. He liked Vanover.

  He now shrugged away these unwelcome thoughts and touched the gelding lightly with spurs, sending the animal on at a faster trot. Ahead, the broad sweep of the basin was a dusk-bordered sodden gray reach of melting snow. Close to his left the creek roared an ominously strengthening note. Until now, Blaze hadn’t given much thought to what tomorrow would bring. At this moment, he did; there would be maybe a week’s delay in driving down to the railroad and in shipping. To an outfit as big as Anchor, which hired ten extra men for roundup, that week’s delay represented a sizable expense. And, as always, Blaze accepted this unlooked-for trouble as a personal one, so conscientiously did he take his job. The storm was bad enough. This matter of Joe’s trouble made it . . .

  The gelding’s sudden sideward shying cut in rudely on Blaze’s thoughts. He said—“Whoa, you jughead!”—glancing toward the creek to see what had frightened the animal.

  An instant later he was vaulting from the saddle, dropping reins and running over to the sprawled figure he had already recognized. Transfixed by horror he knelt beside Joe, peering down at the crimson stain on the snow around his friend’s head. Then, gently, he lifted Joe’s upper body. The head sagged back loosely at what Blaze first thought was an inhuman angle.

  “Joe! Joe, boy! Answer me!” he cried hoarsely.

  His hand went to Joe’s chest, and his panic subsided as he felt the even beat of the heart. His eyes moistened as relief and thankfulness hit him.

  Calmly, methodically Blaze made the next few minutes count for all they were worth. He took off his poncho and put it under Joe. He unlaced his blanket from the saddle and wrapped it around the unconscious man. For the moment, he could do nothing about the wound, which was an ugly deep bullet crease high along the side of Joe’s head.

  As Blaze worked, he looked up from time to time, his glance sweeping the slowly narrowing circle of plainly visible ground nearby. Finally he left Joe and, mounting again, rode toward the timber. The position in which he had found Joe gave him no hint of where the bushwhacker had hidden. But before the light was completely gone, he intended to try and find the killer’s sign, knowing that the rain would have obliterated it long before morning.

  And now, as Blaze began what appeared to be his almost hopeless search, his earlier doubt was gone. The fact that Joe had been shot and left here, apparently dead, to be discovered by the first stray rider who happened along was proof that someone had a reason for not bringing Joe in himself. What that reason was, Blaze had no way of knowing. But there was a reason, and it might tie in with Ed Merrill’s murder. That small possibility did more to bolster Blaze’s belief in Joe’s innocence than anything that had happened today.

  Riding into the timber, Blaze began circling, knowing that the trees offered the best protection to a man wanting to shoot from cover. He crossed the creek and noted that the water had risen from its normal fetlock depth to his gelding’s knees. Beyond the stream he angled back along an open stretch, skirting it. Farther on, he climbed along a low rising spur of ground. Beyond that, in a shallow draw, he came across horse sign.

  The light was now so feeble that Blaze had to lean down in the saddle to get the details of that sign. The horse had worn light shoes and, from all appearances, had been a fairly big animal. Blaze turned toward the basin, following the sign. He found the spot where the horse had been tied and its rider gone on afoot. But out here, where the force of the rain wasn’t broken by the trees, the sign was already badly washed. There was nothing but the badly melted outline of boot prints to go by. They might have been made by a man wearing a size seven boot or by one wearing a twelve.

  The boot tracks led to a boulder. It was behind the boulder, under its back vertical face, that Blaze found the still clear print of a rifle’s butt plate. He knelt and examined it closely, even striking a match and cupping it in his hand against the rain, to see clearly every detail. The mark was coarsely etched in cross lines, a Winchester. That was discouraging, for probably 100 men in Lodgepole alone owned Winchesters.

  Then, almost when he was ready to drop his match, Blaze saw a raised line angling over the cross-hatching. It ran obliquely across the plate, from a point midway on it almost to the heel. It was obviously a scar put on the butt plate made by rough handling; perhaps a deep branch scratch, or the mark left by the rifle’s owner dropping the gun’s stock carelessly onto a sharp edge of rock.

  When he straightened and climbed onto his gelding again, Blaze knew that he would be able to recognize the killer by his rifle, if he could ever get a look at the gun. And from now on he’d inspect every Winchester he came across.

  Back with Joe again, he faced a knotty problem. Where could he take the wounded man? Anchor was out, for Yace wasn’t to be trusted; besides, the posse was making the ranch house its headquarters for tonight at least. Joe would need care, more care than Blaze himself could give him. A doctor’s care would be best. Doc Nesbit was at Brush. But, reasoned Blaze, Nesbit would be as anxious as the next man to turn Joe in as a suspected murderer. So he couldn’t go to Nesbit.

  Ruth Merrill! The instant Blaze thought of her, he was sure he had found the right person to help him. The next, he wasn’t. Hadn’t Ruth kept stalling Joe five years ago when Joe openly admitted she was the girl of his choice? Why, Blaze asked himself, would Ruth now go out of her way to protect a man she didn’t love? He had never liked Ruth much; her ways were too high and mighty to suit him, and her treatment of Joe had done little to increase his respect for her. In fact, Blaze still looked on Ruth Merrill as one of the primary causes of Joe’s having sold out to Middle Ar
izona before he left home.

  He thought of Jean Vanover and at once discarded her as a possibility. She, like the others, wouldn’t hesitate to give away Joe’s whereabouts to the law at her first opportunity. Also, to bring Jean up here would mean telling Vanover about Joe. And that would seal Joe’s fate as surely as though the bushwhacker’s bullet hadn’t missed its mark.

  As total darkness settled over the basin, Blaze knew that he would have to do this on his own. He tried to think of a place to take Joe, and abruptly knew where it would be. Two miles from here, up a narrow box cañon, was a cave where he and Joe and Clark had once smoked out a mountain lion their dogs had cornered.

  Blaze had a hard time lifting Joe and getting the gelding to stand while he roped his friend across the animal’s withers. But in the end he managed, and left the creek, striking eastward. The rain came harder now, no longer a misty vapor, but a pelting downpour. Blaze began to worry about Joe’s catching cold, even though he had bundled his friend tightly in the poncho. He wondered how long Joe would remain unconscious. He wondered what he could do about feeding him. He wondered, all at once, if Joe would die.

  From then on Blaze hurried, as though his friend’s life depended on how soon he could find the cave and get a fire going. He found the brush-choked mouth of the box cañon and rode its narrow bed for better than half a mile before he was sure he had passed the cave. He turned back, his impatience blending with his worry to set up a strong and futile anger in him. He went almost as far as the mouth of the cañon without seeing the cave, and knew he had again missed it. Then, stubbornly, he got down and led the gelding, stumbling through the scrub oak along the east wall. He was ready to give up. He started thinking he had come up the wrong cañon.

  Then he saw the tall, jagged finger of a high rock outcrop, and suddenly knew where he was. Fifty yards up the cañon he found the cave entrance. It was hidden by a tangle of a hack-berry thicket he hadn’t remembered. Leaving the gelding, Blaze crawled into the low opening on hands and knees, lighting a match to inspect what lay beyond. The long low tunnel was some fifteen feet deep, broadening out and shoulder-high at its rear wall. It was dry and warm in here.

  He scraped the floor clear of twigs and branches left by some small animal that had once made the cave its home, then went down for Joe. He fell once on his way back to the cave and had a moment’s bad fright when Joe’s limp body rolled off his shoulder and into the mud. Hardly had his panic subsided than he was in the cave and hearing Joe’s breathing now as a throttled, choked gasping. That awful sound lasted even after he had stretched Joe out at full length on the blanket.

  Helplessness and near desperation were strong in Blaze now. He sat alongside Joe with the conviction that his friend was dying, that the strangled breathing sounding so ominously out of the darkness was a prelude to the end. The pitch blackness made it seem as though this cave was a tomb. As though he had found a way of helping Joe, Blaze went out into the night again and stumbled around until he had gathered a big arm load of wood, mostly dead branches broken from windfalls and the bottoms of the stunted cedars higher up along the near wall. He found some pitch pine, too, with which to kindle the damp wood.

  The fire helped. Now that he could see, Blaze made his first close inspection of Joe. It was with a start that he saw the bandanna around the unconscious man’s neck knotted hard and drawn so tightly that the neck muscles bulged. He loosened the knot and pulled the bandanna free. And at once Joe’s breathing became easier, quite normal. Somehow, in that fall Blaze had taken when he was lugging Joe up here, the bandanna had been drawn so tightly that it had constricted the unconscious man’s breathing.

  Blaze sat back on his heels, keen relief striking through him. He might have killed Joe back there. Tragedy had nearly struck Joe a second time, proof to Blaze now that he wasn’t capable, alone, of looking after his friend. No matter how often he told himself that Joe’s color was good, that his friend would presently regain consciousness, he couldn’t put down the urgency of the belief that he should go for help. Supposing Joe should die because he didn’t get that help? Supposing his death should be caused by some simple thing like that tightly drawn bandanna that another person could readily see and correct?

  Blaze knew finally that he was going to get help. Once again he tried to think of a person he could trust. There wasn’t one but Clark Dunne. And Clark would be little more help than he himself in a situation like this. In the end, Blaze settled on Jean Vanover as the likeliest possibility. He went out and gathered more firewood. As he wrapped his poncho around Joe, took a last look, and finally stepped out into the rainy night, he thought he knew a way to get Jean Vanover up here without anyone knowing where he had brought her.?

  Night Ride

  At Diamond Ranch, headquarters for Middle Arizona, Fred Vanover and his daughter were sitting before the fire that blazed on the hearth of the big stone fireplace. Vanover had been restless and distracted since supper, and now he said abruptly: “I can’t wait any longer, Jean. I have to know.”

  “What, Dad?” His daughter’s head tilted up from the book she was reading. She was sitting on the couch, her legs curled under her.

  “About Harper. Yace Bonnyman was right. It could have been Harper that looted the safe and killed Merrill.”

  “But, Dad, he isn’t . . .”

  “He’s entirely capable of it,” Vanover anticipated what she was going to say. “Harper’s been an enigma ever since they sent him down here to me. Last night, when I told him he and his men were through, it was as though I had remarked on the weather. He’s the coolest proposition I’ve ever come across.”

  “But to rob the man he’s been working for, to kill that way? I can’t believe it.”

  “What has he had out of this beyond wages?” her father asked, reasoning aloud more than putting a question to be answered. “His kind are never in a thing for wages alone. It’s an admitted policy of the company to reward their hired gunfighters with something besides pay. Take their Phillipsburg operation ten years ago. Dooley came out of it with a ranch of his own. He was nothing but a hired gun boss for the company when he went down there.” Vanover rose from the chair and went out of the room, to reappear a few minutes later, pulling on a poncho. He had his Stetson. “Don’t wait up for me,” he said. “I’m going up to the camp.”

  “Be careful, Dad,” Jean said, and walked with him to the door, kissing him before he went out. She knew that nothing she could do or say would keep her father from riding up to the chuck wagon tonight to see Harper and have it out with him. This was part of her father’s job. The only reassurances she had against the gun boss resorting to violence was that her father never carried a gun, and that several of the roundup crew had little use for Harper and would side with her father if it came to a showdown.

  She stayed at the door until he rode from the yard, then went back to the couch and picked up her book again. But now she stared sightlessly at the page, her thoughts too insistent to be turned aside. The rain drummed gently on the roof, reminding her as it had this afternoon that the fifty men on the hunt for Joe Bonnyman must be having a miserable time of it.

  As had happened several times since early morning, Jean’s thoughts turned to the tall, pleasant man who had come to Ruth Merrill’s hotel room in that dawn hour. She wondered again why she hadn’t called out for someone to stop him after he had struck down Roy Keech. But now an answer came to her. She didn’t really believe that Joe Bonnyman was guilty. She hadn’t believed it this morning as she stood at the head of the hotel stairs and listened to his mocking words. It didn’t do any good to reason that she had found him attractive and was giving in to a little wishful thinking. It went deeper than that, to an instinct she couldn’t deny, one that seldom was wrong. That instinct told her that Joe Bonnyman wasn’t capable of having committed the crime for which he was being hunted. The brutality of striking down an unarmed man with the butt of a gun wasn’t in his make-up, or she was no judge of a man.

 
; She had told Ruth of Joe’s visit, and Ruth had bitterly resented the fact that she hadn’t been wakened. She hadn’t even bothered to thank Jean for staying with her through the night. She’d had two opportunities, once before Jean left the hotel, another when Jean and her father had gone over to Brush to offer their help this afternoon on learning of John Merrill’s collapse. Both times Ruth had assumed that proud cloak of cool aloofness so irritating to most people who didn’t know her well. But instead of taking offense, Jean had felt sympathy for the girl. She wished now that she had wakened Ruth and let her talk with Joe for she saw even more clearly than she had last night, when Ruth so blandly admitted it, that the girl’s feeling for Joe Bonnyman was sincere. So, in her generous way, Jean Vanover blamed herself rather than Ruth for the coolness of feeling that lay between them. She would have given anything to be able to relive those few minutes with Joe in the hotel’s upper hallway, so as to make good what she now saw as a grave error.

  She was thinking this when she heard a rider coming in across the yard toward the house. Her first thought was that it was her father returning, then she knew it couldn’t be, for he hadn’t been gone long. She had a disquieting moment of realizing she was practically alone, until she remembered that Harley, the cook, was close enough to be wakened if she called. His room was beyond the kitchen, which adjoined this main living room. So when the solid clump of boots crossed the porch and the knock sounded at the door, she answered it unhesitatingly.

  It was the Anchor foreman who stood in the light of the lamp shining through the door when she opened it, a sodden, drawn-faced, poncholess Blaze Coyle, who wrung from her a quick: “Blaze! You’re soaking! Get over by the fire!”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” he drawled, and took off his hat as he came in, revealing his sorrel hair matted wetly to his head. He crossed the room and stood with his back to the fireplace, puddles forming quickly around his boots as he said: “Sorry to butt in on you this time o’ night.” His glance roved the room and came back to the girl. “Your father around?”