Authors: Luke Short
“I thought that was Texas beef that took out my camp,” Jim said with grim humor.
Lufton almost smiled. “It was. That’s the part of the stuff Pindalest rejected. He not only rejected my beef, but he trumped up a whisky-peddling charge against me so he could kick me and my beef off the reservation grass.”
Jim pondered this, and still it didn’t satisfy him. “That don’t explain about the loose riders.”
“No, not in itself. But, you see, I haven’t got any grass to move to except what I used to claim down
in the Basin. I’ve got a brand down there, the Blockhouse. It was there before Sun Dust, before there was a white in this country.”
Lufton was talking slowly with a kind of relish that held a bitter humor for him.
“Five years ago,” he went on, “I started to contract beef for the agency, buying my herds in Dodge and Abilene. I’d turn them over to the agent, and they’d winter on reservation grass. I couldn’t use my grass, except for a scattering of horses, so I didn’t pay much attention to the homesteaders that drifted in.”
“Ah,” Jim said. This, too, ran to a pattern, an old and dismal story.
Lufton nodded grimly. “That’s it. Now that I’m kicked off the reservation I need my water and grass; it’s taken. I’m moving back.”
“They’ll fight?”
Lufton rose, a faint smile moving his mustache. “I reckon they will. They say they will now that they’ve been told they ought to.”
Jim was puzzled, and his face showed it. Lufton made an impatient gesture. “Just a jackleg hard case that come in this summer. He’s organized them to fight me. Name’s Riling, which”—he smiled wryly—“is what he’s doing to me.”
Jim didn’t speak, not trusting himself. For a panicked moment he wondered if his name had given him away, and then the moment was gone. For so many months his name and Tate Riling’s were linked in men’s minds, as they soon would be again, that he thought all men knew.
He said calmly, “About the loose riders.”
“He’s bringing gunmen in.”
This was what Lufton was getting at. Jim could tell it from the way the crew looked at him, from the way Lufton waited, from what had gone on before.
Jim’s cigarette was dead. He tossed it into the fire and then said equably, “Nobody can blame you for being careful.”
“You don’t get it,” Lufton said.
Jim looked squarely at him. “Get what?”
“This: It’s work for Blockhouse, for me, or ride on out of the country. That’s your choice, Garry.”
“And what if I don’t?”
“I’ll give you time to get a shave and drink and night’s sleep in Sun Dust, and then you better drift.”
Jim’s glance shuttled from Lufton to his men. In their faces was the same iron challenge. If they could prevent it no man would stay in this country unless he was a Blockhouse man.
Lufton said mildly, “Sleep on it, Garry,” and left him.
Morning brought a cold sunrise, but no rain. After a hasty breakfast the crew rode off. Bart, Jim’s companion of last night, left to pick up his yesterday’s gather and shove it down to the herds that would move into the Basin. The crew didn’t talk much, and Lufton didn’t give any orders. The men seemed to know their job and want to finish it quickly, so they could face the real job.
Jim borrowed a rope, caught his horses and led them back to the camp. He fashioned a hackamore for the saddle horse, and when he was finished he came over to where Lufton was saddling up.
“Much obliged,” he said.
Lufton nodded. “Working for me, Garry?”
“I don’t reckon. I’ll ride on through.”
“It’s your choice,” Lufton said. “I take it you’re heading for Sun Dust?” When Jim said he was, Lufton went on, “Mind leaving a note at my place with the women-folks? It’s on your way.”
“I’ll leave the rope too,” Jim said.
Lufton went over to the fire, tore the label off one of the cook’s cans and wrote a note on the back. He handed it to Jim, gave him directions, said, “Good luck,” and watched Jim ride off, leaving his pack horse. There was an expression of grim and sardonic humor in his eyes as he watched.
It was an October mountain morning, and Jim had found his camp of last night, salvaged what he could of his outfit and was below the Blockhouse camp before the chill was really out of the air.
By midmorning he’d tied his sheepskin behind his saddle and when, around noon, he slanted down into the dry canyons that let onto the Massacre River the sun was hot on his shoulder blades.
He picked up a wagon road on the flats between the river and the canyon mouth, and before it had taken him to the river he had a long look at the yellow-stippled rolling reaches of Massacre Basin to the east. Unless his directions were faulty, the patch of green far across the river and to the south against the white-hooded limestone outcrop was the Blockhouse, Lufton’s spread. The river was the east boundary of the reservation. According to Lufton, the left-hand one of the forks in the road across the river would take him the five miles across the Basin and to the rim below which, on the Basin floor, was Sun Dust.
At the river Jim’s pack horse was already drinking. He rode out into the river, shallow and wide
here at the ford and fringed with the willows of the dry country, and let his horse drink.
He stretched in the saddle, feeling the welcome sweat that replaced the chill of last night. And now he faced the decision he had been postponing all morning. He was carrying a note from John Lufton to his ranch, and it might well be that this note held information valuable to Tate Riling. He would read it, and if it contained orders that affected Lufton’s plans he wouldn’t deliver it. Otherwise he would, since it would insure the day of grace in Sun Dust Lufton had promised him.
His hand rose to his shirt pocket and then paused. A faint stirring of shame halted him, the memory of eating a man’s grub, of sleeping in his camp, of violating a trust, of all the shabby dishonesties of these past years. And then his hand moved on to his pocket.
The hard, unechoing crack of a rifle exploded the stillness, and a geyser of water leaped up beside his horse.
Jim sat motionless, hand half raised, his glance searching the thicket of willows for the telltale wisp of smoke.
He located the place in the willows from which the shot issued, but he didn’t move. His horse stood alertly, and the sound of its slobbered water alone broke the stillness.
Jim called out, “Put it up. I’m ridin’ through.”
The second shot at his horse’s feet sent water in his face. His pack horse turned and sedately retreated.
A slow anger narrowed Jim’s attention. Whichever faction was stopping him, Blockhouse or nester, he had a passport if he could only speak.
“Come out and talk!” he called.
The third shot followed on the heels of his call. It flicked his Stetson, hit the rocks behind him and whined off in ricochet. Plain sense made Jim yank his horse around and rowel it toward the bank from which he had come. The horse lifted sheets of water in its flight, while Jim yanked his carbine out of its scabbard. As the horse hit the shore and lurched up the bank Jim rolled out of the saddle, staggered and landed sprawling on an upjutting of shore boulders. His horse stopped immediately, missing the weight in the saddle.
Levering a shell into his carbine, Jim laid a sight on the far trees opposite and then fired. He shot six times, fast, laying them two feet apart and at the same level. Whoever it was across there had chosen a fool’s shelter, for he was screened only by trees. The rocks were above and behind him up the slope.
When his hammer clicked on empty Jim reloaded, his glance searching the shore. He heard a snort over there and again he raised his carbine. This time he widened his aim, searching patiently along the shore.
At his fifth shot he saw a horse break out from the trees and lunge up the far slope. On its far side the rider was holding onto the horn, running bent over, shielded from sight by the frightened horse.
Jim didn’t wait to see more. He vaulted on his horse and put him into the river at a lope. By the time he had lost sight of the lone horse and runner over the ridge he was in the shelter of the screening shore willows and coldly angry.
He reined in and turned his horse upstream at a slow walk, listening. Presently from downstream the shooting began again—at what, Jim didn’t know, since it wasn’t at him.
He hugged the willows for a quarter mile, then put his horse into them. He rode through the thicket, reined up and peered out. The rocky lift of the ridge screened him from sight. He ground-haltered his horse, patted his coat pocket to make sure he had shells, took his carbine and then moved downstream again in the willows. Presently he crawled up on the ridge and dropped on its far side.
The shooting, stubborn and senseless, continued. Jim worked his way over the broken ground toward it until he was very close. It seemed over the next low ridge. Pulling off his Stetson, he bellied down on the loose gravel and carefully edged up to the hump and peered over.
There on the near side of the slope toward the river the rifleman was bellied down, methodically putting shots across the river. Jim looked closely and then swore softly under his breath.
The rifleman was a woman.
Her hair was the giveaway; it lay with the sheen of wheat down to her shoulders, where it was caught by her Stetson, which had been lost in her retreat and now hung down her back from the chin strap. Otherwise, at this distance she could have been mistaken for a man with her worn levis, flannel shirt and man’s coat.
Jim’s gaze narrowed and his eyes grew oddly hard. She was shooting methodically at something—at him, she thought—as if this were sport. His gaze shuttled to her horse ground-haltered behind her, and he saw the Blockhouse brand on the left hip. One of Lufton’s womenfolk playing at being a man.
Slow wrath stirred within him as he watched her. She’d kill a man, and gladly, it seemed. Shoot first,
ask questions afterward. It didn’t matter to her if she killed a man; it wasn’t worth the trouble, apparently, to find out if the man she was killing was friend, enemy or U.S. marshal.
He glanced down at his Stetson. There was a notch bitten out of the rim, fraying the felt, where her bullet had touched. His mind was suddenly made up, the result of a stubborn conviction he did not even put into words to himself.
He crawled up to the ridge and laid out his cartridges on the ground beside him. The girl was still shooting as fast as she could lever the shells into her gun.
Jim calculated the distance to her, his eyes hard and cold and wicked, and then drew his bead. He held his breath and made it careful and fired.
The heel flew off her boot as if expelled by a spring. The girl whirled to a sitting position, and Jim shot again. The dirt beside her leaped in a little geyser of dust. He shot again, and on the other side of her, closer yet, leaped another spurt of gravel. She came to her feet in panic, and Jim laid a shot at her feet. She started to run for her horse now, stumbled, missing her heel, and fell sprawling. Jim laid a shot not six inches from her head that plowed dirt into her face and hair.
When she rose this time she had given up the idea of reaching her horse. She turned and ran for the rocks she had been hiding behind, and Jim laid three shots behind her close enough to hurry her. When she disappeared over the ridge and down the slope to the river he moved with her and put a last shot beside her as she made the willows.
He came erect and slipped down the ridge to her
horse. Swinging into the saddle, he rode over the ridge and picked up the trail he had come afoot. At his own horse he dismounted and found that his hands were shaking, his knees oddly unsteady. The backwash of a tension he hadn’t understood had its way with him for a minute as he slowly realized what he had done. What if he had hit her? In that momentary anger he had forgotten that she was a girl and remembered only that she deserved a rough scare. And scare her he had, heedless and unthinking, in the same way he would scare a man in a reckless and savage brawl.
Standing there in the willows, he had a rare, blinding moment of self-judgment that comes to a willful man, and it turned him sick with loathing of himself. When it was gone and pride had come back he knew he wasn’t going to try to remedy what he’d done. It was finished, gone, like all the other mistakes.
Soberly he mounted and headed away from the river, leading the Blockhouse horse. He had no intention of riding back to pick up his pack horse and run the risk of meeting the girl.
Swinging south and east, he was soon in a rolling, open, grama-grass country; hummocks of sage broke its rich golden monotony. To the east, running southeasterly, was a low rim with more of the broken grasslands running off into mountains that were barely visible in the blued distance. Autumn haze touched the land, and off below the rim he could see the square sear patch of a homesteader’s planting. When he reached the road he turned the Blockhouse horse loose and kept south, and presently the bright yellow flag of the autumn cottonwoods pointed out the Blockhouse.
It lay, when he at last saw it, at the heel of a low thrust of limestone that spilled in a five-mile tongue from the rim to the east. A stream, following the edge of the limestone, now took off for the distant Massacre, rearing this thick stand of cottonwoods at the parting. They were old and thin leaved and a gaudy yellow now.
The house itself, a one-story, flat-roofed stone affair with a long, deep veranda, squatted under the big trees. Off closer to both creek and the shelter of the limestone there were clustered the barns and corrals and sheds that made up the working ranch. It had the rich, worn look of something used and old, and as Jim rode into it he understood why Lufton supposed this country was rightfully his. No raw nester shacks could ever lay the claim to this land that this place could.
He rode past the house, judged a second stone building midway between house and barn to be the bunkhouse and headed toward it.
A girl’s voice at his back called, “Don’t go over there, please.”
Jim reined up and turned in his saddle. The girl was standing on the edge of the veranda, leaning against a pillar. Dutifully Jim swung his horse around and rode up to her, touching his hat as he pulled up.