“We’ll make a dry camp here. No fire. If they come up after us, they’ll have to use that trail—and from here I can hold them off for a week, all by myself, if I have to. We’ll hear a rider coming from half a mile away, down in those rocks.”
“I don’t reckon I’ll hear a thing,” Cleve said. “I could sleep for a month.”
“You get five hours. Then we move on.”
“You bastard,” Cleve said, and added, “I suppose I’ve got to thank you. You saved my life.”
Six growled at him. Cleve sat down slowly and watched through half-shut, weary eyes while Six unsaddled his horse, spread the blanket on the ground, and took his saddle bags forward to hunt out tinned food. They ate without talk; afterward Six said, “You’ve caused me a hell of a lot of trouble, Cleve. Do you think you’re worth it?”
“Don’t ask me. I didn’t want any of this. If you’d asked my advice back in Spanish Flat, I’d have told you to go back to bed and pull the covers up over your head.”
Six gave him a swig from the canteen and then reached out for Cleve’s left hand. Cleve grunted with pain. Six pulled his arm out to the side and opened the empty half of the handcuffs with his key; he handcuffed Cleve to the base of the trunk of a small piñon. “That wouldn’t hold you if you were up to par, but you’re weak enough. And if I hear you make a noise, I’ll swat you with a gun barrel. Understand me?”
“I ain’t going anyplace,” Cleve said. “My goddam hand hurts.”
“It’ll hurt just as much if it’s untied,” Six said. “Lie back and get some sleep.” His voice was gentler than it might have been. He walked over to the horse, saw to its hobbles, and then settled down in the shadow of a juniper clump. Cleve watched him for a while, but it was impossible to tell whether Six was awake. Finally Cleve’s eyes slid shut and he fell asleep.
Eight
Ma Marriner bellowed like a cavalry sergeant, “Well?”
Clem Sandee, who had just galloped in to join the main force, shook his head. He took off his battered hat and scraped his sleeve across his brow. “Hard to tell in the dark, ma’am. I’d be a lot surer if we’s to wait for sunup.”
“Sunup,” Ma roared, “and Six could have my son sixty miles away.”
Ma Marriner’s foreman was a muscular middle-aged ex-bronc buster with a face made dour by a disillusioning familiarity with life’s iniquities. His name was Bill Parker, and now he put his horse forward into the crowd, and said in a calm way, “Ma, I reckon Sandee’s right. Ain’t no sense in us battin’ around blind all night. We might end up farther away from them than we are now.”
In the darkness, Ma’s thick face was unreadable, but her bullhorn voice was unmistakable. “God damn it, Bill, I don’t aim to—”
“Yes’m,” Bill Parker said. “I know that. Ain’t none of us any less anxious to catch up to them than you are.”
“That’s a lie, Bill Parker.”
“No, ma’am. But anyhow suppose we camp someplace around here, and send out Sandee and Vidoza and one or two other good trackers. That way the whole crew won’t be tramplin’ down any tracks there might be to find. One of the trackers finds Six’s trail, he can report back here. I reckon it’ll save us time in the long run.”
“All right,” Ma growled, in a tone only slightly less deafening. “But get their rumps moving, Bill. On the run.”
“Yes’m.” Mindful of the widow’s grief, which was much deeper than her raucous surface might indicate, Bill Parker drew a handful of men aside and gave them their instructions in a calm, low voice. A few words drifted back into the silent crowd of horsemen: “Fan out and loop back and forth. Don’t miss no ground. They’ve got to be someplace north of this line—find out where.”
Ma shouted, “The rest of you get down and give them horses a rest. Loosen up the cinches but leave ’em saddled. I don’t want no time wasted when we pick up that bastard’s trail. Don’t make no fires; I don’t want Six to know we’re anyplace around here.”
Someone grumbled, “Then maybe you ought to keep your goddam voice down.”
Ma’s head swiveled. “Who said that?”
There was no reply. Leather squeaked as men dismounted and loosened their cinches. Ma Marriner’s roar rolled over them. “I find the man said that, I’ll lash the hide off his back.” It drew no response. She added, “You’re a bunch of worthless no-good saddle tramps, the lot of ya, but by God if you ever want to use my ranch for your stolen cows again, you’ll find that man Six and run him into the ground for me.”
Bill Parker came away from his chosen knot of scouts. “Don’t worry, Ma,” he said quietly. “We’ll find them.”
The scouts rode away, their horses clip-clopping on the hardpan. Men settled down, on their haunches and on their backs, saddle-sore and grumpy. They numbered more than thirty, even after the departure of the scouts, and most of them felt this was none of their fight. They didn’t work for Ma Marriner. One man complained sullenly, in a voice too low to reach Ma, “Hell, it’s like a boardin’ house tellin’ a lodger to pay the mortgage. Ain’t our lookout, her no-good son went and got hisself arrested. And I didn’t owe old Buel nothing. I’m all paid up.”
“Me too.”
A third voice said guardedly, “Simmer down. You want her to hear you? She wasn’t just whistlin’ Dixie when she said she’d tear the hide off Jed Wilson’s back.” A moment later the rider added, “Besides, we’d be right between hell and a right hard place if she went and closed off the Matador to us. Ain’t no place near as good for our business operations.”
The first man replied, “She’s a fat old woman. Only takes one bullet.”
“You kill a woman and see where it gets you, Nate. You think Six is in trouble right now, just wait and see what happens to a man shoots a woman in this part of the country.”
“That ain’t a woman, that’s a buffalo with a foghorn attached.”
Several voices laughed low. “No, you mind me, we got to do what the old woman wants. Ain’t no way out of it. Hell, I’d be just as happy as the rest of you to be drunked up in some cantina right now, other side of the line. But we’ll get down there soon enough and get that herd sold. Meantime it ain’t goin’ no place.”
“Besides,” someone put in, “I always did want to kill me a marshal.”
Ma Marriner grunted like a bear when she got off her horse. She left it standing there, leaving it to Bill Parker to loosen the cinch and take care of the horse; she turned, looking around, and found a slim shape walking toward her.
Ma said, “Wanda, wipe that look off your face. You look like you been suckin’ on lemon.”
“I don’t want any part of this,” the girl said. “I told you that.”
“Just the same, you’ll come and you’ll watch and you’ll see what happens to a man that does dirt to a Marriner. It’s something you’ve got to know, girl.”
Wanda had her arms folded under her breasts, as if she felt cold; and she said in a determined voice, “I’m not a Marriner.”
“You took the family name when your pa died.”
“That doesn’t make me a Marriner. I’ve got no Marriner blood in me, Ma. I don’t want anybody going out with a gun if somebody does me wrong.”
Ma shook her stubby finger at the girl. “You made yourself a Marriner when you took the name, girl, and they ain’t no backin’ away from it now. I always told you you hadn’t half the guts of a scared cottontail rabbit. It’s time you grew a backbone of your own.”
Wanda said, “I don’t think it takes much backbone for forty gunmen to chase after one man.”
“Yeah,” Ma snarled at the top of her lungs. “And what about your brother Cleve? What about him? You don’t even want to see him set free?”
Wanda said in a small voice, “I don’t want to argue with you, Ma. It never does any good.”
“Then just shut your goddam mouth and be ready to ride when I tell you.”
It was impossible to tell whether the girl was blushing, but she could hardly h
elp knowing that every man in camp had heard Ma’s voice.
Time stretched while Wes Marriner studied the Matador night camp—horses standing saddled, men lying around or milling about restively. The rind of moon showed them up well enough for a head count; he made out thirty-two figures. With the five who had ridden away a few minutes ago, that added up to thirty-seven. The force was just about as big as Chavis and Riley had expected.
Decided, Wes Marriner backed out of the brush clump which hid him and walked down into the hollow where he had tethered his horse. He climbed aboard, circled back to the coach road, and cantered forward boldly, making no attempt to be secretive. Skulk around, he thought, and they’re likely to shoot first and ask my name afterward.
It was with a certain measure of relief that he had watched Matador settle down. If even for a few hours while trackers sought Six’s trail, it still meant Six was gaining just that much more lead-time on them.
But there was no evidence that Six was out of the woods yet. There was still great danger, or at least its possibility. And Wes Marriner had committed himself. He couldn’t turn back now.
Clouds were working up, trying to obscure the stars, but they were wispy, too thin to black the desert out. The horses ground-hitched in a bunch heard Wes Marriner’s approach; they began to mill, and a few whickered restlessly. Wes Marriner took the last bend in the road at an easy trot and presented himself boldly, in silhouette on horseback with both hands at shoulder-height.
A murmur of warning ran through the camp; one man’s tall, muscular shape stood up and came forward warily. Moonlight glistened on gun barrels here and there. The muscular man’s voice laid a flat challenge against Wes Marriner: “Keep it like that, friend.”
“This the Matador camp?” Wes Marriner asked mildly.
“Who wants to know?”
“They told me down south I might find you-all up around here.”
The muscular man said, “Strike a match and let’s have a look at you.”
Wes Marriner reached, without any sudden motions, into his shirt pocket, extracted a match, popped it alight on his thumbnail, and squinted past the flare of light.
A strange, heavy voice roared like an express train: “Put out that goddam match!”
“Sorry, ma’am,” said the muscular man. “We need to know who’s comin’ up behind us, here.”
“Then tell him to get off his horse and walk in here where we can all see. For God’s sake, Bill Parker, do I need to draw you a blueprint?”
Wes Marriner stepped out of the saddle and walked away from his horse, leaving it to stand ground-hitched, as it had been trained to do. His small, wiry shape advanced into camp; and Bill Parker said, “For a man with short legs you sure take long chances, whoever you are.”
Several men rose and stood flat in the night shadows. Emerging from their posts, they collected before Wes Marriner, silent and curious and ready to kill. Bill Parker’s breathing came hard. A thin whisper of feeling went through Wes Marriner—My kin, all right—and he stopped twenty feet in front of them. “Where’s Ma Marriner?”
“I’ll ask it just one more time,” Bill Parker replied. “Who are you, friend?”
“Don’t get trigger happy,” Wes Marriner advised. “I’m Wes Marriner.”
Ma roared, “Who?”
“Your nephew from up north aways,” Wes Marriner said, trying not to gag on the confession. There was nothing he wanted less than Ma Marriner for a relative. There was only one saving grace: she wasn’t his blood kin. He was old Buel’s blood, not hers.
The woman waddled forward, squinting at him with her face poked out ahead. She wasted no time with mundane greetings. She yelled, “How do I know? I never seen you before.”
Wes Marriner glanced at Bill Parker, and then reached inside his shirt. He drew out a folded paper. The folds began to come apart when he opened it; the paper was old and brittle. He held it out to her. The woman snatched it out of his hand and bent her nose over the paper, trying to make it out in the moonlight. “Wanted flyer,” she said. “Looks like your face, all right. What of it?”
“Read the name.”
“Can’t read,” the old woman snapped, and added quickly, “’cause the light’s too bad. Bill Parker, can you read?”
“No, ma’am. Sorry.”
A slim, tiny-waisted girl appeared, drawing all Wes Marriner’s fascinated attention. “I’ll read it,” she said, in a liquid mellow voice that made him swallow. Even darkness couldn’t hide the grace with which she walked forward. She gave him a brief glance, without friendliness, and glanced at the paper in her mother’s fist.
“It says his name’s Wes Marriner,” the girl said. “It’s dated 1874.”
“Seven years ago,” the old woman said. “Your face ain’t changed much but you got black hair in the picture. Wanda, what’s it say he’s wanted for?”
“Murdering a peace officer in Montana,” the girl said, with a bitter small voice.
Wes Marriner said, “He was a cheap hired gun who’d weaseled himself a tax-collector’s badge. He was no more a peace officer than I am. They dropped the charges a while back. I’m not wanted in Montana anymore.”
“Badge-toters are all cheap hired guns,” Ma said, in a voice somewhere between a shriek and a thunderclap. “Anybody who’s killed hisself a badge-toter is welcome around here, ’specially if his name’s Marriner. You just in time, nephew. You know what we’re here for?”
“I heard something about it, back in town.”
“That goddam town,” Ma roared. “Filled you full of lies, I’ll bet. I reckon they didn’t tell you their badge-toter shot your uncle Buel dead in the back out of a dark alley, did they?”
“They do tell it a little differently,” Wes Marriner admitted. “They claim Uncle Buel drew first, on the marshal.”
“Lyin’ dogs,” Ma growled.
But Wes Marriner was watching the girl, Wanda, and he saw her pretty head nod, as if in agreement with what he had said. He found a great mystery here: what was this supple, willowy young girl doing in the midst of Ma Marriner’s pack of cutthroats?
Ma’s voice was roaring at him like a storm at sea: “… if we have to tear down every God damned mountain range between here and California. I aim to empty this whole gun full into him!” Ma was shaking her enormous revolver overhead. Wes Marriner glanced at it. It was an old Dragoon model Colt .44, the big 1848 model that must have weighed four or five pounds. Somewhere along the line a frontier gunsmith apparently had done a crude, but workable, job of converting the weapon to fire modern cartridges. It was a huge horse pistol, but it fit in Ma’s great paw the way a derringer fitted most ladies’ hands.
Wes Marriner watched the girl turn slowly and walk away into the darkness, as if the weight of the world pressed down upon her dainty shoulders. Right away, just the sight of her made him want to comfort her and get her away from this strong-smelling pack of curly wolves.
Ma said, “You got a gun, nephew. You come here after us, so I guess you aim to throw in with us. Maybe you want to use that gun on another badge-toter, huh? But you listen to me, nephew—I want that badge-toter Six for my own self. If you shoot him, you make good and goddam sure you don’t kill him. I want that left to me. Understand me? All of you, that goes for all of you. You people listenin’ to me?” Her voice had climbed to a new peak of driving high decibels.
Bill Parker said calmly, “We heard you, Ma,” and Wes Marriner sized up the muscular man as one of the few riders present with a head on his shoulders. Bill Parker was dour and bleak of appearance, but he seemed a sensible man. He was oddly out of place, mismatched with the rest of the scramblers in the pack.
Ma told Wes Marriner, “We’re just waitin’ here for my trackers to pick up Six’s trail. You be ready to hit your saddle any minute, hear?” And she tramped away.
That’s quite a welcome, Wes Marriner thought. He said to Bill Parker, “You the foreman here?”
“Foreman of the Matador crew, which is eight
of us includin’ the five men out scouting trail. The rest of these”—Parker made a contemptuous gesture and lowered his voice—“they’re border-jumpers, come along because Ma threatened to close the Matador to them if they didn’t help run Six down. I don’t figure to count on them in a pinch. Advise you don’t either. But then there ain’t too much of a pinch we can get into. There’s only one man out there.”
“I thought somebody said back in town he’s got a Marriner with him.”
“That’d be your cousin Cleve. Yeah. Make sure you don’t shoot him, all right?”
“Mmm,” Wes Marriner murmured in assent; his mind was on other things by that time. For one thing, he knew he had to learn the identities of the eight regular Matador hands on the crew. Only three were in camp now, Parker and two others. If things came to a head, Marriner might be able to count on scaring off the border-jumpers, but he knew the Marriner clan well enough to know that Ma’s own crew would be likely to stick by her no matter how the odds might change.
But that thought, important as it should have been, got crowded into the back of Wes Marriner’s mind; what he said to Bill Parker was, “That girl, Wanda. What’s she doing here?”
Instead of answering, Bill Parker looked both ways and said, “Walk off a little piece here with me,” and turned on his heel, walking without hurry out past the edge of the improvised camp ground. When he had reached a spot a good distance away from the nearest prying ears, he stopped and waited for Wes Marriner to come up.
Bill Parker hunkered down on his haunches, yanked up a blade of straw from the dry earth, and poked it into his mouth. As he chewed on the grass it waggled in his mouth, and he said to Marriner, “Most things kind of ride off my back, you know? But I kind of don’t like what the old woman’s doing there. I guess we all got a soft spot for Wanda. Maybe that’s sayin’ some, since I ain’t had many soft spots in me in my life.”
“Who is she?”
“Well, old Ma’d like to make out like Wanda’s her own daughter, but it ain’t so. Wanda’s father was a stove-up bronc buster, came to work for Matador when she was maybe two, three years old. Cholera took her father a year or two later—him and four or five other hands on the place. Your uncle and Ma, they was too mean to get took sick. They took in the little girl and Ma made her take the Marriner name. I been on the outfit a long time and I can’t say as I’ve done much to feel good about in my time, but one thing I’ve made it a point to do, and that’s keep an eye out for that girl. Between me and old Buel and Ma, there ain’t a man ever laid a hand on her.”
Marshal Jeremy Six #5 Page 8
