Gunsmoke Masquerade

by Peter Dawson

  “That can’t be! There isn’t a way in over the peaks from the north.”

  “Buchwalter thought the same, until tonight. But there is a way.”

  “How?”

  “It’ll keep,” he told her. “You’re coming along to see the whole thing.”

  “I am not!” she said hotly.

  “But you are, ma’am. We’re in too good a spot to have you spoil it. Your father’s sent me back to keep an eye on Fencerail.”

  “I’m with Fencerail, too. Why do I have to go with you?”

  “Any girl who will sell out her father is just as liable to sell us out. I’m keeping an eye on you until we’ve finished this thing.”

  There was a quiet scorn to his words that stung Cathy worse than the lash of a whip could have. Suddenly she felt shame, a hot tide of emotion that was strong with self-loathing as she realized what this man must think of her. The next instant her pride came back. “Why shouldn’t I be on Fencerail’s side? You are, yet you blame me for believing in the same things you do.”

  Streak nodded. “I do. If my father thought otherwise, I’d stick with him.”

  “You wouldn’t if he had killed the man you were to marry, if he’d sent you away for a whole year to keep you from seeing that man.”

  “It’s not my job to judge,” Streak said patiently. “The only thing I’ve got to be sure of is that you don’t spoil our chances. So you’ll come along with me and stay until we’re safe. Am I going to have to put a rope on you?”

  “No,” she said lifelessly, “I’ll do as you say.” There was no fight left in her and her pride was touched deeply. It somehow mattered that this man had a shabby opinion of her.

  He silently motioned her on, and she put the mare up the trail ahead of him.

  About two miles farther on they came to a belt of timber flanking the trail on either side. As they rode into the shadow of the trees, out of the moonlight, he came up even with her and announced: “We’ll pull off here a minute and keep our ears open.”

  With the mare half a dozen paces from the trail, deep in the trees, Cathy stopped, knowing he had called this halt to make sure no one had followed her away from the ranch. He came in alongside and for a brief interval there was no sound but the breathing of their ponies and once the creak of a latigo as he shifted his weight in the saddle.

  All at once she could stand the silence no longer and said: “Kincaid, you’re a hard judge.”

  “People call me Streak,” was his reply. “As for the other, it doesn’t matter.”

  “But it does. I want you to see my side of this . . . this . . .”

  The abrupt lifting of his hand checked her words. She listened.

  What she heard was the distant muffled sound of a horse trotting fast up the trail.

  Chapter Eleven

  Fred Kelso had played his hunches tonight and so far they were panning out. He didn’t know where they were leading him, for certain things he had seen puzzled him exceedingly. But he was on the way to discovering something. That he knew definitely and without reservation. Because he was a man who tried to see what lay behind the obvious, his curiosity had brought him far tonight. And now he thanked his luck that he hadn’t ridden straight in on the Crescent B, but had waited down there by the corrals instead.

  The sheriff had followed Kincaid in to the layout. While waiting there, he had seen Cathy Bishop saddle her mare. Now he was following both Cathy and Kincaid away from the layout, wondering where they were going, sensing that he had stumbled onto something important.

  Back there in Ledge, he had been one of the first to climb the hill toward the jail after the guns sounded. He had known instantly on hearing the shooting that Kincaid was being broken out of jail. Who could be responsible for the break Kelso had had no way of knowing until he saw Johnson’s riderless paint horse trotting off into the darkness around the shoulder of the hill. The paint was easily recognizable. Kelso remembered when the Crescent B man had bought him.

  It took something like an hour for the lawman to finish with his explanations and listen to the various conjectures made by his friends on who was responsible for Kincaid’s daring escape. Then, knowing that Frank Bishop’s crew had been involved in the fight at the jail, suspecting that Fencerail had, also, he turned in for what he hoped would he a good night’s sleep. But he was too troubled to rest. Frank Bishop had always been his friend. To think that Frank would take the law into his own hands at a time like this sobered Fred Kelso more than anything had to the seriousness of this feud. The longer he held his eyes shut, trying to force sleep, the more wide awake he became. Finally he struck a match and looked at his watch to see that it was past midnight. It was then that he had his idea, and that idea was backed by an ingrained stubbornness and a righteous anger. Frank Bishop couldn’t get away with this!

  He pulled on pants, shirt, and boots and, getting his cane, hobbled down the sleeping street to the feed barn. He saddled his roan and rode the alley to the upper end of town, heading out the east trail. Kelso didn’t know that a rider was ahead of him until he smelled the dust kicked up by the other’s pony. Tonight it was his business to be curious about late riders. He cut off the trail and rode hard in a fast circle, approaching the trail again a good four miles beyond the point he had left it. A ten-minute wait brought results. He stood behind a thicket of laurel close to the trail, and presently the moonlight showed him Kincaid mounted on a Fencerail gray riding past. He could have drawn his gun and taken the outlaw easily. Instead, he let Kincaid get well ahead and then followed. For he didn’t understand two things: first, the fact that Kincaid was forking a Fencerail pony; second, his heading for the east slope.

  Reconsidering the wisdom of trying to follow Kincaid, who he suspected might be doubly wary on his mysterious mission, Kelso played his hunch and again left the trail, this time riding point for the high-timbered hill that backed Bishop’s headquarters. He knew the country well, knew that the trail swung a good bit south to serve Bishop’s nearest neighbor. So when he tied the roan up in the timber above Crescent B’s cook shack and hobbled down the slope with his cane, heading for the big corral, he judged he was in time to witness Kincaid’s arrival—if the man was coming here.

  Sure enough, Kincaid appeared a few minutes later. Only he took the bridge and rode up the knoll to the house instead of swinging off to the corral. That was proof to Kelso that the outlaw was here to see Frank Bishop. The lawman cursed his luck and wondered what the next move was. With this evidence of Bishop having once violated the law tonight, he knew he would be running a chance in going to the house himself to accuse the rancher of the jail break. Bishop could easily hold him here until he accomplished whatever purpose he’d had in recruiting Kincaid.

  The lawman was stumped. First, there was that Fencerail horse Kincaid had been riding. Next, Kelso had all the evidence he needed that Bishop was a lawbreaker. But he was powerless to use it. Typically he loaded his pipe, shielded the match as he got it going, and sat down to think the matter through.

  He was sitting there, the pleasing aroma of the tobacco tainting the clean cold air about him, when he saw someone furtively approaching the corral. It didn’t take him long to recognize Cathy, nor to read her intentions. He didn’t wait any longer but headed for his horse, hurrying for fear of losing her.

  Cutting down out of the timber to the forking of the trails at the end of Crescent B’s pasture lane, Kelso had to trust his nose to tell him the direction the girl had taken. He rode the town trail for nearly a quarter mile before making sure she hadn’t gone that way. There was no dust in the air. He quickly recovered the lost distance and headed up the pass trail. Within two hundred yards the smell of dust told him she was ahead. So as Fred Kelso rode in on the timber that flanked the trail some three miles east of Bishop’s layout, he was feeling a certain grim satisfaction in having ferreted out much information in his long night ride. He had proved that Frank Bishop had aided in the escape of a wanted man; this hurt more than he da
red admit, for until now Kelso had considered Bishop a close friend and absolutely honest. He had halfway uncovered an intrigue that involved Kincaid in a double-cross of some obscure nature, for the outlaw had been riding a Fencerail pony. He had seen Cathy Bishop setting out on some furtive errand that he didn’t doubt was involved in her hatred of her father. All this was adding up to something. What it was he had no way of knowing. But before many more hours had passed he would know a good deal more than he did.

  A shape moving toward him out of the trees to his left snapped the thread of Kelso’s thinking and flooded him with acute wariness. He had lifted his boots to rowel the roan when Streak rode into full sight. He vaguely made out the gun in Streak’s hand and let his boots settle gently to the horse’s flanks, spurs clear. For the moment he thought of reaching for his gun. An instant later he knew he didn’t have a chance. He tightened the pressure on the reins. It was that simple. No word had been spoken; there had been nothing beyond Streak’s sudden appearance, Kelso’s careful calculation of his chances, his dismissing them, and his sudden halt.

  “Now that’s a help,” Streak drawled. “I was thinking you’d need some persuading, Sheriff.” He rocked his gun back over his right shoulder. “Get over here, Kelso. You’ve got company.”

  The roan had taken only three paces off the trail before Kelso saw Cathy Bishop. The shock of his surprise made him breathe his favorite expletive: “I’m damned!”

  “So am I,” Streak said behind him. “I thought she’d make a getaway while I was after you.”

  “I thought of it,” Cathy said quietly. “But I’ve decided to go along and see how you’re doing it.”

  “Doin’ what?” Kelso asked, more puzzled than angry.

  “Fencerail’s making their drive into the valley in the morning,” Cathy told him dryly. “Kincaid has been kind enough to arrange for me to be there to see them do it. He’s evidently going to invite you, too, Fred.”

  Kelso’s head came around. “That’s about it,” Streak told him. Then, before the sheriff quite knew it had happened, Streak’s hand came out and lifted his Colt from holster.

  Kelso’s anger mounted belatedly at feeling the weight of his weapon lifted from his thigh. “Say, what is this?” he demanded, swinging around fully on Streak.

  “Just what she says. We’re going on up to watch the woollies come in.”

  “Not me, brother!”

  “Fred,” Cathy put in before Streak could speak, “there are a lot of things I don’t understand in this. Some you don’t, too. Why not go with him and see for ourselves what’s happening?”

  “Confound it, Cathy, he’s a wanted man! And I’m a sheriff, in case you don’t remember.”

  “And in case you don’t remember, Fred, there isn’t much we can do about it.”

  Kelso glared at Streak a moment. At length, he shrugged. “Where to?” he said.

  Streak’s answer was smoothly drawled: “Fencerail’s sheep camp, Sheriff. You’d better lead the way. I’m not sure where it is.”

  * * * * *

  An hour before dawn, three men started climbing the needle rock in the cañon high up in the Arrowheads. Bill Paight was one; with him were Slim Uhler, one of the Fencerail men who had helped him at the jail break, and Fred Sturgis, owner of the Cloverleaf, a small outfit on the valley’s west slope. They had brought along ropes, a canteen of water, and a three-foot crowbar.

  By the time it was fully light, they were nearly halfway up the spired rock, resting. Paight’s shirt clung to his shoulders wetly, even though the air was cold. Ten feet below, Slim and Sturgis sat on a ledge; they were breathing hard and Slim’s gaunt face was dirty and streaked with sweat.

  “You could’ve found a better man than me for this, Bill,” he complained.

  Paight answered a sparse—“Yeah, I could.”—and continued his inspection of what lay below.

  They had picked themselves a job, or, rather, this Streak Mathiot had picked one for them. Down there, so straight down that Paight could have spit in the water, the knife-edged peninsula beyond the base of the needle rock halved the foaming stream into its separate channels. Upstream for nearly twenty rods the right bank of the creek gave out onto a wide-climbing stretch of talus. Part of that stretch the stream would fill when the right channel was blocked. But there would be room to spare, Paight saw, room enough for the sheep to move down that bank.

  Paight’s chief worry about this job was the danger of falling rock loosening the foundations of the unclimbable spire towering overhead, of ton upon ton of rock falling to crush him and his men. Streak had said it would be dangerous work and so it looked from here. But Paight gave only scant thought to the risk involved, so intent was he upon making sure of this, the weakest link to the plan Streak and Buchwalter had laid last night at the camp below. About twenty feet above him was a broad shoulder piled with loose rock, the actual base of the high needle rock itself. It was from there that Paight had decided to work. Now, impatient to begin the job, he called down—“Shake a leg, you two!”—and began the rest of the climb.

  Another twenty minutes saw them heaving over the first big boulder, a slab of granite two feet thick. They levered it over the edge with the crowbar and stood watching as it whirled downward. It hit a projecting corner with a boom! like the blast of giant powder, and struck in midstream of the right channel, geysering water to a height of twenty feet.

  Paight said—“Not bad.”—and they went to work on the next.

  For two hours the cañon echoed with the sharp explosions of falling rock, and below the right branch of the creek became littered with boulders whitening the racing water. One huge rock slab loosed a small avalanche low on the base, dumping it into the stream. Following that, the water foamed through a narrower channel only half its former width.

  They heard the bawling of the sheep soon afterward and, looking along the upper cañon, saw the leaders of the band come into sight around a higher bend.

  “We’re late,” Paight said, and tackled the base of the biggest boulder with the crowbar.

  When it went over the edge and boom-ed down into the creek, they felt their footing tremble. But now Paight was working too feverishly to notice. Boulder after boulder toppled from the high shoulder, gathering smaller rocks in its plunge toward the creek.

  Finally Slim said dryly: “You want to fill up the whole cut, Bill?”

  Paight’s breathing was coming in huge sobbing gasps; his shirt was torn and his face streaming sweat. He stepped over, and, as he looked down, a broad grin came to his face. “That’ll do it,” he said, and sat down to build a smoke.

  Down there the right channel of the stream was blocked so tightly that only a bare trickle flowed along it. And the sheep were already climbing over the uncertain footing of the makeshift dam, heading down the comparatively dry streambed that would lead them to the west slope of the downward valley. The roar of the falls in the west channel had gained in volume. As far upcañon as a man could see the right bank was a flowing river of sheep.

  “I’m so dog-gone tired I couldn’t get back down if I had to,” Slim declared.

  “You don’t have to, not now.” Paight’s look was serene, almost gloating. “We can sit right here and let things take care of themselves. Gents, we’ve licked Frank Bishop. From now on it’s us that’ll call the turn, not him.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The saddle of the pass through the eastward hills was graying with the strengthening dawn when Frank Bishop, leading twenty-three east-slope riders, called a halt a mile above Elbow Lake. While his men closed in about him, Bishop let his glance run around the vast reach of the Association’s hill lease. It was a sight to warm the heart of any cattleman, a five-by-three-mile span of lush grass country with the dog-leg mirror of Elbow Lake marking its downward limit. Bunches of grazing cattle dotted the gentle incline. There was a chill and a freshness in the air, and the tall grass was silvered with dew. This was something to fight for, Bishop was telling himself, not only
this isolated spot but the whole valley. It didn’t matter who owned the land, how much or how little, just so long as it remained the cattleman’s paradise it was.

  Bishop’s glance singled out Jensen, his closest neighbor, and he said soberly: “Ed, it isn’t too late to pull out of this.”

  “Hell with that, Frank,” Jensen’s deep voice grated. “We don’t let ’em in.

  “Then we split up here. We have the whole saddle to cover. Better work in pairs. When we sight Fencerail, one man’s to ride out and give warning. If they don’t turn back, the other’s to open up. Not to kill, but to warn ’em back. That’ll call in the rest. And”—Bishop paused, making sure of their close attention—“pull your sights off Kincaid. He tipped us off on this.”

  “For how much, Frank?” asked one of the men, somewhat querulously.

  “He didn’t get a dollar for it,” was Bishop’s prompt answer. “I don’t know why not, but he didn’t. The only thing he had to say was that he can’t abide the stink of sheep in a cattle country.”

  There was a murmur of approval at this last. Shortly they went on, fanning out in parts so that by the time they reached the timber below the saddle they had covered better than the width of the pass.

  * * * * *

  Two miles up from that meadow margin of the trees, Tom Buchwalter rode alongside Streak, their horses at an easy walk. Trailing out behind came the sheep, long, thick, twisting lines of them, flowing in and through the trees. An occasional herder could be seen now and then. Streak and Buchwalter rode idly, the former still wondering at the turn of circumstance that had made him a sheepman for the first and, he hoped, the only time in his life. Last night, at the camp with Buchwalter and Paight, he’d hesitated only briefly in choosing the side he should be on in this war. But now there was a small doubt insistently nagging him. His call on Frank Bishop had given him that. Bishop hadn’t been the man of yesterday, the aloof and proud owner of a big brand. Something had happened to him since the ambush on the street. Last night he had been mild-mannered, almost humble.