Riders From Long Pines (24 page)

“It's not fair, but it's the rules of the game,” Sam said. “I know the rules. I've got to play by them.”

“But . . . ?” Maria said, as if expecting more on the matter.

“But nothing,” Sam said with a tired smile. “If I get Stanton Parks, and I keep him and Grissin from killing these drovers . . .” He let his words trail.

“Saving innocent lives is no small matter,” Maria offered quietly.

“I know,” said the ranger. “I didn't mean to sound like it is. If these cowhands get out of this with their skin still on, I'm satisfied. I'll get Parks. Grissin won't get away with his crimes forever. He'll slip up somewhere along the way. Maybe I'll be there when he does.” As he spoke he once again took out the money band from his shirt pocket and toyed with it restlessly, as if something about it was still unsettled in his mind.

“You say all these things,” Maria offered, “and yet you still search for an answer in this scrap of broken paper.”

“I know,” Sam said, closing his fist around the broken money band. “Sometimes it's the smallest piece of evidence that bags the biggest thief.” He opened his fist and stared at the money band again. “Davin Grissin knows that as well as I do. He's no ignorant horseback thief. He's gone far beyond that.” He fell silent for a moment, studying the scrap of paper closely. “Every time I look at this, something tells me it's the evidence that will bring him down. I just haven't figured out how. . . .”

Maria didn't reply; she knew a response was expected. Instead she drank her coffee in silence. He would work it out, she told herself, he always did. Yet when she lay down in her bedroll moments later, the ranger still sat in the glow of the small fire, staring at the scrap of paper, the big cur asleep on the ground at his side.

The next morning, the ranger and Sergeant Tom Haines were already up. Sam had boiled fresh coffee and started warming jerked elk meat and cooking a pan of biscuits before she'd awakened. The dog sat watching intently, his nostrils piqued at the scent of warm food.

After a hot breakfast, the three set out while the sun still lay in a thin purple mantle on the horizon. By midmorning they had picked up the drovers' trail and followed it into a canyon that grew more narrow, rocky and tree-studded as they went. When they had veered off the trail in order to follow the hoofprints, Sam stopped suddenly and held up a hand. Ahead of them the dog had also stopped. He looked back at the ranger and Maria as if seeking their permission to continue on.

But the ranger gave him no such permission. Instead, he and Maria stepped down from their saddles and led their horses forward quietly. Touching the dog on its head as a form of reward, Sam ventured to the edge of a steep cliff overlooking a wide stream and a clearing below. On the far side of the stream stood a cabin, half of its roof missing and collapsed. Behind the cabin stood a barn constructed of pine logs and rocks from the streambed.

Beside the ranger, the dog watched quietly as a young drover walked from the barn back to the cabin. Through the half-open roof, Sam watched another drover stoke logs in the open stone hearth. As Maria slipped in beside him and looked down, Sam said, “Looks like we got here before anybody else. Now let's see if we can ease down there quiet-like and manage to do some good.” He gestured a nod toward a narrow path that wended down steeply and came out at the edge of the braiding stream. . . .

Inside the cabin, Harper walked over to where Jock Brewer stood pouring a cup of coffee from a battered tin pot they'd rummaged out of the debris left after a storm had destroyed the roof. A few feet away, Mackenzie sat tending his wound, having first changed the bandage on Thorpe's side.

“The horses are grained and watered,” said Harper. “But they could stand some grazing in the sweet grass we passed alongside the water on our way in.”

“Maybe later,” said Brewer, pitching another short log into the open hearth. “Mac wants one of us to go stand lookout from atop the hill, make sure nobody rides in off the main trail without us knowing about it.”

“I'll go,” Harper said.

“Hold up, Tadpole,” said Mackenzie, rising, directing his attention toward the stream and the hillside beyond the cabin walls. “I heard something out there.”

“You must have awfully good ears,” said Harper.

But almost before he'd finished his words, the four turned toward the sound of the ranger calling out, “Hello the cabin.” The drovers' hands went instinctively to their guns.

“Hello the cabin,” Sam called out again. “This is Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack. Don't shoot, I'm here to talk to you.”

Before the drovers responded, they spread out along the thick cabin wall and took positions. Mackenzie looked back and forth, made sure each man had well covered himself, then called out, “We haven't had much luck talking to the law, Ranger Burrack. Why should we think talking to you is going to be any different?”

“I know about the money. I think I know how you come upon it,” Sam yelled back.

Mackenzie looked at the faces of the other three as if for approval. “We're listening.”

“I know you didn't rob the stage,” Sam said. “I'm after the last of the men who did rob it. His name is Stanton ‘Buckshot' Parks, but he is carrying a badge and impersonating a sheriff. He's trailing the four of you. Things are not going to get any better until you're rid of him.”

Mackenzie ran things through his mind. “Do you know a sheriff by the name of Fred Mandrin, Ranger?”

“Not anymore, I don't, he's dead,” said the ranger. “Buckshot Parks killed him. He left blame for Mandrin's killing on you four. Mandrin was a former deputy who stole a sheriff's badge. That's the badge Parks is using to impersonate a sheriff.”

Mackenzie let out a breath.

Sam paused for a moment, then called out, “How do you like our conversation so far?”

Mackenzie looked from one drover to the next. “Who's out there with you, Ranger?”

“Just me, my partner Maria and a dog that belonged to the colonel, who was on the stage you found.”

“The colonel's dog?” Mackenzie said. He stepped out and saw the dog on the other side of the stream. “I saw him lying beside the wrecked stage. I thought he was dead.”

“He nearly was,” said Sam. “But he pulled through it. Do you want to invite us in, or do you want to come out here and talk to us?”

“What if we don't want to talk to you?” Mackenzie asked.

“I know you didn't break any laws,” Sam said. “You just happened to be in a bad place at the wrong time. If you won't talk to me, I'll have to back away and leave you alone. But if I were you I wouldn't do that. I'm the only lawman involved here. Everybody else is out to nail your hides to the wall.”

“Let them try,” Mackenzie said, “we know how to look out for one another.”

“I know you do,” said Sam, “I've seen that. But the fact is, I could use some help taking down Stanton Parks and Davin Grissin. I was hoping I could count on you fellows.”

A tense silence passed as Sam turned around and looked at Maria and the dog. The two stood waiting on the other side of the stream. Finally Mackenzie said, “All right, Ranger. We're coming out. We've all heard good things about you. Don't let us down.”

Sam and Maria stood back and waited. The dog circled slowly and dropped out of sight on the rocky hillside.

 

When the four drovers stood facing the ranger out in front of the cabin, Mackenzie held two stacks of the stolen money in his left hand. Pitching them one at a time to the ranger, he said, “Just so you know, we never had any notion of keeping this money, even though Davin Grissin owes us all wages.”

Sam caught the two stacks and looked at them, seeing the same kind of money bands he had in his pocket. “I understand,” he said. “Is the rest of it close by?”

“It's inside,” said Mackenzie, nodding toward the cabin. “We carried it separately for a while to make it easier to handle, but it's now back in the same bag we found it in.”

“Good thinking,” said Sam, inspecting the two stacks of money as he spoke. He looked up at Mackenzie and said quietly, “I'll be taking the money for safekeeping from here.”

“I say good riddance to it,” said Mackenzie. “You're welcome to every dollar. It's all there, except for a few dollars we kept for supplies and such. I've writ down how much and what we bought.”

Harper cut in and asked, “How do we know we can trust him with this much money?”

But Mackenzie silenced him with a stare. “You'll have to excuse Tadpole, Ranger,” he said. “We've seen our share of distrust since we found that stage wreck.”

“I understand,” said Sam. He looked at Harper and asked, “Tadpole, is it?”

“Yes, sir, to my pals,” said Harper, courteous but not overly friendly.

“I hope you'll excuse our rudeness, Ranger,” said Mackenzie. “We haven't been on our best manners of late. This is Jock Brewer, Holly Thorpe and Tadpole Harper”—he emphasized
Tadpole
—“who you just met.”

Sam nodded, looking from one face to next. “Pleased,” he said. “This is Maria, my—”

Before he could finish speaking, a bullet reached down from high atop the rocky hillside, hit Harper in his chest and slammed him back against the front of the cabin. “Get down!” Mackenzie shouted at the others. He made a dive for Harper, grabbed him and dragged him inside the cabin as another bullet thumped into the dirt at the ranger's feet.

“I'm taking my money!” Parks shouted from a cliff above the hillside.

Jock Brewer had jumped for cover, but upon hearing the rifle shots and Parks' voice, he made a run for a better position, his rifle in hand. But the next shot from high up the hillside grazed across his thigh and sent him sprawling into a loose stack of firewood. As he struggled to right himself, the ranger rose from behind a low stack of firewood and fired shot after shot toward the sound of Parks' rifle.

Sam knew his pistol was too far out of range, but it gave Brewer some protection until he had hurriedly crawled behind the loose wood and taken cover. “Maria, are you all right?” Sam called out.

“I'm all right,” Maria replied from behind a three-foot-tall rock alongside the stream. “But Sergeant Tom Haines is gone!”

With no time to consider the dog, Sam watched as Thorpe looped Brewer's arm across his shoulder, ran from cover and ducked inside the open doorway. As soon as the two were safely indoors, Sam raced across the open yard and dived in behind the rock where Maria sat hunkered down. A bullet kicked up dirt right behind him. Grabbing his shoulder, Maria said, “Sam, are you hit? Are you all right?”

“I'm good,” Sam said. “I never expected Parks to get here so soon. Him and Grissin finished up their fight awfully quick.”

“Money has a way of making men like Parks and Grissin do the impossible,” Maria commented.

Sam didn't reply. He looked upward, past the spot where they had left their horses hidden in the trees and brush on the hillside. “I've got to get up there and stop him.”

“I can offer you no cover with this,” Maria said, nodding at the shotgun in her hands.

“I know,” said Sam. “He's too far away for anything but a long-range rifle to do us any good. We're going to make a run for the hillside. Once you get to the horses, I want you to wait there for me. Grissin and his men could be showing up any time now, if there's anything left of them.”

“I have a feeling there are plenty of them left,” said Maria. She gazed up along the hillside of broken rock and trees and brush. “I am ready when you are,” she said quietly.

Inside the cabin, kneeling over Harper, Mackenzie hurriedly opened his shirt. But beneath the fierce bullet hole in the center of the shirt, the young trail boss saw no blood, no gaping wound. Pulling the shirt open wider, he stared at the red welt left from the bullet striking one of the stacks of money Harper had stuck inside his shirt.

“Don't—don't be mad at me, Mac,” Harper said, still struggling to regain his breath. “I know I let you down.”

The lopsided bullet fell out of the stack of money and landed on the dirt floor. Mackenzie picked it up and looked at it. “Dang it, Tadpole,” he said in exasperation. “I don't know if I should be cussing you for not doing what you was told, or just glad you did what you did and it kept you alive.”

Thorpe and Brewer saw what had happened. They'd circled around Harper, both of them looking relieved even as another shot from high up the hillside thumped against the front of the cabin. Seeing the young drover was all right, Brewer tightened a bandanna around his own leg wound and said, “You can't be mad at him. He's just a worthless tadpole. I told you he'd never 'mount to nothing.”

Harper said, “Believe it or not, I was keeping this money for all of us. In case things didn't go our way, I'd pull it out and say, ‘Look, pards, we've still come out all right.' ”

“Yeah? When was you going to say that,” said Thorpe, a hand pressed to his healing side wound, “right after they tightened the rope around our necks and got ready to pull the lever?”

Seeing their teasing attitude toward him, Harper coughed and caught his breath and said with a devilish grin, “Better late than never, I say.”

As another shot exploded, Mackenzie flinched and said in reflection, “I expect if I had it to do over again, maybe we would have just lit out to old Mex. At least we'd all had something to show for it.” He felt the pain in his own throbbing shoulder. He looked at Thorpe's wounded side, Brewer tightening a bandanna around his leg and at the large welt on Harper's chest. He realized how close the young man had come to getting killed, and how he would have been killed had he followed Mackenzie's orders.