by Peter Dawson
As Ordway finished shaving him, Clark became quite genial. If the barber noticed the difference in his manner, he gave no sign of it. It was with an effort that Clark kept from laughing outright when Ordway told him of the sensation created in Lodgepole by the appearance of Reibel, Whitey, and Pecos.
“There’ll be hell to pay if they fence in that water,” the barber predicted.
Out on the street a few minutes later, Clark wondered how to take advantage of this newest development of Saygar’s hiding the fact that Joe was already dead. It would be hard for him to get up to the basin and see either Saygar or his men, for Lyans was gathering everyone available in the search for Vanover’s daughter. This afternoon close to fifty men had set out for the high country in what Lyans himself admitted was a pretty feeble effort.
“Trouble is,” Lyans had said, “we don’t have anything to go on except that note she left her father. Who do you reckon the man could have been that came after her, Clark?”
Clark hadn’t been able to make even a guess. Engrossed as he was with his one problem, he hadn’t given the circumstance of Jean Vanover’s disappearance much consideration. Now he did, seeing in it that same mysterious quality he had first associated with the disappearance of Joe’s body.
He was sauntering up the walk toward the hotel, having decided to use this extra hour before he was due at the jail over a leisurely supper. His stride broke and he halted abruptly. For a full minute he stood at the edge of the walk, deep in thought. From a hard concentration, his face eased into a smile. Presently, when he went on to the hotel, he was whistling softly.
Before he went in to the four-table dining room to eat, he climbed the stairs to his room. There he tore the back from an envelope and, sitting at the washstand, spent several minutes laboriously printing out a message on the segment of raggedly torn paper. Finished with that, he blew out the lamp and went to the window; he touched a match to the remainder of the torn envelope. When the match burned down to his fingers, he dropped it out into the alley.
He spent some forty minutes over a steak supper, topping it off with a piece of pie and three cups of black coffee. During this interval, several men came up and spoke to him. Most of them were men joining the posse tonight. One, Sam Thrall, wore a bandage on his head.
As Thrall approached the table, his face was set in a heavy scowl. Clark, seeing that scowl and knowing the reason for it—the Brush crewman this afternoon had told him about Joe’s theft of Thrall’s horse—schooled his expression to one of concern.
“Tough luck about your horse, Sam,” he told the Emporium owner.
“To the devil with the horse,” Thrall said. His hand went to his bandaged head. “This’s what Bonnyman’s goin’ to answer for.”
“Hurt, does it?”
“Plenty. I’ve already spoken for a seat in the jury box when they try that jasper.”
“Think they’ll bring him in?” asked Clark.
“They will,” Thrall said flatly. “Even with you and Blaze tryin’ to hide him.”
Clark looked at the store owner levelly a moment. “What makes you think Blaze and I are hiding him?”
“You’re his friends, ain’t you? And wasn’t Blaze in here this afternoon lookin’ for you?”
“Was he?”
“He was.” Thrall shook a finger at Clark. “Watch your step, Dunne.” He glared at Clark and, turning, went out of the dining room.
Clark lingered over his last cup of coffee, considering the inference to Thrall’s remarks. He decided finally that nothing in what the man had said could influence the thing he had set out to do. He was sorry he hadn’t been able to see Blaze this afternoon. The redhead might have had something important to tell him. What that could be, beyond the fact that Blaze had possibly been up to Hoelseker’s cabin this morning and found it deserted, Clark didn’t know.
Paying for his meal, Clark left the hotel, crossing the street to the Emporium. He went to the back end of the store, stopping at the counter alongside the wire cage with the window placarded Post Office. Behind the counter a clerk in thick-lensed spectacles sat on a stool.
“‘Evenin’, Brad,” Clark said. “Any mail for me?”
“Ought to be. You ain’t been in for a couple days.” The clerk stared near-sightedly at Clark, left his stool, and stepped behind the wicket, turning his back as he reached into the rack of pigeonholed compartments making up the far side of the cage. A similar rack occupied the side of the cage nearest Clark.
Glancing quickly behind him and up toward the store’s front, Clark made sure that no one was watching him. While the clerk’s back was still turned, he took the torn piece of envelope from his pocket, reached around the end of the cage, and thrust it in the pigeonhole numbered 4. That compartment, he knew, was for Acme’s mail.
By the time the near-sighted clerk faced around, Clark was leaning idly on the counter, well out of reach of the cage.
“You made a good haul tonight,” Brad said, handing a thick packet of letters across.
Clark thanked him and left the store.
A good half hour later, Sam Thrall burst in through the door of Lyans’s jail office. He was out of breath and red in the face. Half a dozen men, Clark among them, were there with the deputy. Thrall tried to speak, couldn’t get his breath, and instead tossed a scrap of paper onto the desk before Lyans.
“What’s ailin’ you, Sam?” the lawman asked, picking up the paper.
“Read it!” Thrall managed to gasp.
Lyans looked at the paper and straightened suddenly in his chair, his face losing color. He glanced quickly up at the store owner, asking tonelessly: “Where’d you find this?”
“Acme’s mailbox.”
“Who found it?”
“Brad.” Thrall wiped his perspiring face. “Vanover got his mail right after the train come in at noon. So the box should’ve been empty. Brad always takes a pretty careful look at things before he closes up the cage. He found this just now as he was lockin’ up for the night.”
“What is it, Bill?” one of the others asked.
Lyans handed the scrap of paper to the speaker, not saying anything.
They all gathered about the man. Clark, looking over his shoulder, read his own crudely penciled message:
Vanover:
Have Lyans call off his dogs, or you don’t get the girl back.
Bonnyman
For the interval it would have taken a man to draw in a slow breath and as slowly exhale, no one spoke. Then Clark gave a toneless laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Lyans growled.
“Nothing. Only Joe Bonnyman didn’t write that.”
“Yeah? How come you’re so sure?”
Clark hesitated, as though lost for an explanation. At length he said lamely: “It just isn’t like Joe. He’d never lay a finger on a woman. He . . .”
“He clubbed Merrill to death!” Sam Thrall cut in. “He meant to do the same to me! Why the hell wouldn’t he do this?”
The man to whom Lyans had given the note looked at Clark, and there was open hostility in his eyes. “Sam’s right, Dunne. Joe and me used to get on pretty well, and up to now I ain’t been sure about him. Right now I am. If it ever comes to hangin’, I’ll take the job of springin’ the trap out from under him!”
An angry murmur of agreement came from the others. Then, seeing Clark properly silenced, their attention came back to Lyans.
The deputy knew it was being left to him to make a decision. From the deadly serious expression on his face, it was obvious that he was weighing all the possibilities. Finally he stood up, reaching around to take his shell belt and holstered gun from the back of the chair. As he cinched the weapon to his waist, he said: “We’ll go see Vanover. But we’ll do it on the quiet, just in case Bonnyman’s here in town watchin’ us. Split up when you go out and let on like you’re goin’ home. Half an hour from now meet a mile out the trail.” His glance rested briefly on Clark. “You needn’t come along, Clark.”
Rustlers Work at Night
That late afternoon saw Charley Staples’s main Singletree shipping herd, along with 150 head of Anchor steers, bunched far and near the mesa’s edge in the triangle formed by the confluence of the Troublesome and the Porcupine. Sherman, the Anchor straw boss, took a look at the swollen waters of the two creeks, at the white water, racing into the mouth of Rainbow Gorge close ahead, and opined: “I’ll let the seat o’ my pants take root right here before I try a-crossin’ through that water, Charley.”
An hour ago Staples had come up with the herd to see what luck his crew was having. He had already made his decision, which coincided with the Anchor man’s. But, because he was an owner, he pretended to give the matter more careful deliberation, especially in view of the fact that tomorrow a thirty-car freight was due on the siding ten miles west of Lodgepole to take his first beef shipment.
He glanced off south to the head of the gorge. Rainbow was little better than a mile long, but even with the Troublesome at its lowest, the waters foamed along the steeply dropping and rocky bed of the gorge with a swiftness neither man nor animal could stand against. From a certain angle at the foot of the rim, where the deep notch emptied out onto the flats 400 feet below, a man could most always see a rainbow thrown up by the water spray along about sunset.
Noticing where Staples was looking, Sherman said: “Wonder what that’d do to a critter that got swept into it?”
“Ground beef and bone meal,” was Staples’s sparse but eloquent answer. He turned in the saddle and looked out across the mesa, along the line of the Troublesome.
Again the Anchor man read his mind. “There ain’t even footin’ for a horse, Charley. I know. I tried it and didn’t think I’d get out alive. Horse is still bloated with all the water he swallowed.”
Staples nodded, reining around and speaking to his men as he went away: “You boys are due for some sleep. There’s plenty of grass and water here, and these critters won’t drift overnight. If I was you, I’d get back to the layout.”
Which advice his men and Sherman acted upon at once. By nightfall, Singletree’s cook was back in his shack at headquarters and serving up a meal for nine men.
From a high point in the timber above the mesa, Mike Saygar observed all this across a distance of some three miles. He saw the dark smear of the herd drift into the wedge of land between the two creeks, saw it pause there, and then, along about dusk, spread out and away from the creeks. Before the light completely failed him, he spotted a chuck wagon going in along the trail leading to Staples’s spread, two miles to the east. and nestling close in to the hills, out of sight.
An hour later, Saygar drifted in on the fire before the lean-to close to a pine-topped knoll along the Troublesome at almost the exact center of Aspen Basin. He could see no one around the fire, so, as he approached, he called: “All right, you rannies! It’s me.” Whitey and Pecos, and, finally, Chuck Reibel drifted in out of the shadows. Pecos hunkered down by the fire and pulled a Dutch oven out of the coals with a forked stick, putting a half-gallon coffee pot in its place.
“Come and get it,” he drawled, tilting the lid from the oven.
Mike Saygar liked to eat. Tonight, as usual, he relished the meal Pecos had prepared, an onion-and-tomato-flavored beef stew. Along with this there was pan bread and coffee. As he wolfed down his heaping plateful of the stew, the rustler chief listened idly to the talk of his men that was concerned chiefly with the minor sensation they had created in town this morning in taking out their homestead papers.
Saygar rarely spoke when he ate. But once, when Whitey turned to him and queried—“What’s all this addin’ up to, boss?”—he took pains to answer carefully: “A nice stake for us, if we work it right. What we’re doin’ tonight ought to split the ranchers and the cattle company again. Each outfit’ll think we’re workin’ for the other. If they don’t start usin’ their guns after this, we’ll give ’em even a better reason for it.”
Whitey’s look was still skeptical. Presently he drawled: “The thing that’s itchin’ me is Dunne. What’s he gettin’ out of it?”
“Don’t be nosy, feller,” Saygar said quietly.
Whitey’s look turned sullen, but he was through with his questions. After that they ate in silence.
When Pecos returned from the creek after sand-washing their tin cups and plates, Saygar said without preliminary: “Let’s go.”
Ten minutes later they headed away from the camp, going down-basin, Saygar leading them well into the edge of the creek. The horses made work of it, with the insecure footing of the flooded stream’s rocky bank. But Saygar kept to the stream all the way to the lower edge of the basin, a good half hour’s going, where they came upon a ridge that marked the beginning of a rocky and treeless tangle of hills falling gradually toward the mesa.
Saygar rode with even more care now, making long detours to avoid crossing the occasional areas of topsoil. They left the roar of the Troublesome far behind, until it became but a faint murmur almost inaudible over the clatter of their ponies’ hoofs on bare rock.
The night’s chill was settling down and this slow going made Reibel, who had foolishly worn only shirt and vest, hunch his shoulders for added warmth. Overhead, the dusting of myriad stars in a cloudless sky gave them enough light to see plainly where they were going. The faint breeze carried with it the clean-washed smell of pine and juniper that flanked this narrow strip of barrens. Once their horses spooked as a startled steer crashed away through a nearby tangle of scrub oak in the bed of a wash. Saygar stopped as they neared the lower margin of the rocky breaks, better than two hours out of camp.
“Can we hit that Diamond trail without leavin’ this rock, Pecos?” he asked.
Pecos thought a moment. “Try it off to the left,” he said then.
Saygar turned east and presently, without leaving the rock, they came to the line of a trail and took it, not caring that now they were leaving sign, for this trail was used fairly heavily.
Twenty minutes more of steady going brought them to within sight of Diamond’s bunkhouse lights. Those lights of Middle Arizona’s headquarters were less than half a mile away as the four men rounded a spur of the hills backing the mesa. At that point Saygar swung sharply off the trail and southwest across the lush grass flat of the mesa. He rode neither fast nor slow, but at an alternate walk and trot. Close to an hour of this riding brought the sound of the Troublesome close again.
Finally Pecos pulled up abreast of Mike. “This ought to be about right, boss,” he drawled.
They halted. Saygar squinted, trying to pick out details of what lay ahead. At length he said: “Whitey and Reibel will work off to the right. You stay left, Pecos. When you come on ’em, push easy until they begin jammin’ up. I’ll give you half an hour. When I shoot, you do the same. The rest ought to take care of itself.”
“You want ’em all pushed in, Mike?” Reibel asked.
“No. There’s too many. Dunne said not to bother if even half of ’em broke away. One thing more. We’re goin’ back the way we came, across that rock. You’re to hit that Diamond trail and ride it a ways before you head for the basin. Go ahead now. And make it good.”
They separated, drifting away to be swallowed by the night. Saygar sat his horse, motionless for many minutes. Then, lifting his reins, he put the animal straight south at a slow walk. Shortly he came upon a bunch of grazing steers, and reined over toward the bunch. They lifted their heads, wheeled, and lumbered away at his approach. He saw more cattle. Patiently he reined from side to side, pushing them on after the others. Soon those gathering bunches made a broken black line close to the outward limit of his vision. Saygar rode in on them obliquely, pushing first against one segment, then another, until he had them moving slowly in the direction of the distant angry mutter that was the pounding of tons of water down the mouth of Rainbow Gorge.
When they started breaking out of line, loping back the way he had come, Saygar drew his .45, lifted it above his head, and se
nt one shot, then another, racketing into the confusion of sound. As the explosions cut loose, the nearest steers plunged away from it, into the massed animals ahead. From off to Saygar’s left came other muted gunshots. Then Reibel and Whitey opened up far away to his right. The bawling of the cattle was drowned by a growing hoof thunder. Fear-crazed animals reared and plunged, pawing the backs of those blocking their way. A few turned and ran back away from the main body of the herd. Saygar let them go. Time and again he shot into the air. When his gun was empty, he reloaded, taking his time, sensing the relentless forward surging of the herd now.
Up along the creek bank, the inky, fast-swirling waters formed a barrier the closest animals shunned with greater fear than that which had made them run from the sudden press of animals closing in on them. But the press of those gun-shy steers farthest behind pushed them relentlessly on, to the edge of the water, into it, then on until they lost a foothold.
Rank after rank of animals plunged into the creek, lost footing, and tried to swim to the far bank close at hand. A few made it. But the powerful rush of the current caught the rest, swept them relentlessly on toward the roaring rapids that marked the Troublesome’s precipitous plunge into the depths of the gorge. The bawling of the lost animals was drowned in that roar as they were swallowed by the curving high crests of the mounded waves racing across the jagged humps of huge boulders.
Saygar felt the forward motion of the herd slow. In another moment it stopped and he emptied his gun over the heads of the nearest steers. The sounds seemed to drive them completely mad, for they suddenly turned on him. He wheeled his pony around barely in time, driving home his spurs. His horse ran for his life, urged on in stark fear at the thunder of hoofs on all sides. A plunging steer came close to knocking the horse from his feet. Saygar lost a stirrup and thought he was going to be thrown. Then, miraculously, the horse pounded into the open and away and he was safe.
