Death Rides the Night (2 page)

“Can I, Mom?” Dock asked.

“Can you what, Son?”

“Ride in to the meetin' with Ezra?”

“What meeting is he talking about, Pat?”

“I don't know. How about you, Pete?” Pat called out to the last of the departing cowboys. “Do you know anything about a meeting in town tonight?”

Pete was on his way through the door. He paused long enough to shake his head and mutter some sort of denial, then went on out toward the bunkhouse.

Sally looked at Pat in consternation with her pretty blond head tilted sideways while a spot of color glowed in each cheek. “What's gotten into all of them tonight, Pat? They all act as though they're afraid to talk to you.”

“Or ashamed,” Pat said harshly.

“And Ezra! When he doesn't want to eat peach pie there must be something terribly wrong with him. Why, you might think we had scarlet fever or something.”

Pat's lean bronzed face was set in lines of harsh questioning. He shook his head and said, “I don't know, Sally. Looks to me like something's up.” He frowned down the table toward Dock. “This meeting you're talking about, Son. Where did you hear about it?”

“Gee, I dunno. Some of the fellers were talkin'.”

“What sort of meeting is it?”

“Whole county, I reckon. Gee, I thought ever'body was goin'.”

“Tonight?”

“Yeh. Sure. I betcha Ezra an' Pete an' them are goin'. Can I ride in with 'em, Mom?”

Sally said, “Wait a minute, Dock.” She tightened her lips and looked at her husband. “You're still the sheriff, aren't you?”

“Far's I know.” Pat grinned, but without humor. “Not much sheriffin' to do lately.”

“Isn't it queer you haven't been notified of the meeting?” Sally pursued. “They wouldn't have one without you, would they?”

Pat's face was grim. It frightened Sally suddenly. Most of the time she could forget those old gun-fighting days when that sort of look on Pat's face caused her heart to jump into her throat because she knew it meant he was ready to buckle on his guns and go out to meet death on even terms. He hadn't worn that look much during these later years, but it still had the power to bring Sally's heart up into her throat.

She leaned across the table and put her hand over his. “I'm sure everything's all right.” But her tone betrayed her. It said, instead, that she knew everything decidedly
wasn't
all right. It changed to a pleading note, “Don't get upset, Pat. Someone must have forgotten to notify you.”

Pat Stevens looked past her toward the open door. He didn't appear to feel her hand on his nor to notice the note of pleading in her voice. He said curtly, “I reckon I'll find out what it means.” He got up and stalked out the front door. She sat very still at the table and listened to the hard crunch of his bootheels fade away to silence as he strode toward the corral.

“Gee whiz,” Dock said in a low tone of awe. “Dad looked awful mad, didn't he, Mom? I'd sure hate to go up against him when he looked like that.”

To Dock's utter astonishment his mother put her face down in her hands on the table and began to cry. Great racking sobs shook her slender shoulders. Dock's eyes became big and round and he stared at her for a moment in consternation, then he got up and went to her and put his thin arm about her shoulders and his young face down against her hair and whispered, “Gee whiz, Mom. Don't do that. You know there won't nothin' happen to dad. Why I bet he could whip the whole of Powder Valley single-handed if he was a mind to.”

Sally's sobbing subsided gradually. She lifted a tear-wet face to press it against her son's cheek, and in her heart was a surge of thanksgiving that he was not yet old enough to go out into the world of men to fight his battles and frighten another woman as Pat so often frightened her.

2

It was still early enough in the spring for the night air to be cool. In this portion of southern Colorado east of the Rockies, the altitude of Powder Valley was high enough so that a tinge of winter cold carried on well into early summer, and the air was so thin and sweet that a man dragged great quantities of it deep into his lungs and it tasted like no other air on earth.

There was no other place on earth like Powder Valley. Pat Stevens was conscious of this inward realization as he stepped outside the ranchhouse, just as he was always conscious of it with the soft coolness of the night air about him and the clean blue of the star-sprinkled sky overhead.

It wasn't that Pat thought about it. It was a part of him; this deep love of Powder Valley. It was everything in the world that was important to him. Life had been meaningless until he came to Powder Valley and took root there. He knew from the beginning it was going to be like that with him and the Valley. As soon as he met Sally, he knew. It was different then. The Valley was a challenge to him. A rendezvous of outlaws, one of the frontiers of lawlessness, it was a harsh rugged land that defied the men who sought to tame it.

Pat Stevens had taken a large part in the transformation of Powder Valley from a damned and evil place to the quiet community of prosperous ranchers who now called it home. He settled there when the going was tough, and he'd fought for the Valley with his guns and the raw courage of desperation, and it had become a part of him as he was a part of the Valley. He and the Valley together had earned this peace; they had settled down to enjoy it together these later years. Pat was only in his early forties, but sometimes he had a feeling that he was an old man. The past was so turbulent, so full of things a man wanted to forget, that it sometimes seemed to him he had lived out his full span of years rather than a mere half of it.

When he felt like that it was good to sense the tranquillity of the even flow of life here in the Valley now as contrasted with those hard and dangerous years that had gone before. It was something you could taste in the air, could feel deep inside of you when you stood alone in the night with only the stars overhead.

That's why Pat Stevens was so disturbed as he went down toward the saddle shed and corrals to catch Ezra before he rode off to town. In Ezra's peculiar actions at the supper table, Pat sensed a threat to the peace and tranquillity of the Valley and those who loved it. He had an uneasy feeling that Mr. Eustis Harlow was somehow behind that threat.

It was something he couldn't put his finger on, and he didn't want to believe it, but the conclusion was unavoidable. He knew, now, it was something he had feared ever since Harlow had moved into the Valley from Texas six months previously. He had tried to feel differently, but from the beginning he had sensed a subtle antagonism toward the wealthy Texan who had come to the Valley with the announced intention of setting up one of the biggest and finest spreads between Montana and the Pecos River.

Harlow started by purchasing the VX ranch along the southern slope of the Valley for a good price, though he made it quite clear from the beginning that he planned to vastly extend the original boundaries of the VX before he was through. He was perfectly frank about his intentions. He had a great deal of money and was willing to pay for adjoining territory. He had only contempt for the small holdings of the ranchers in Powder Valley who were content to go along year after year with a comfortable living. He had grandiose ideas of establishing a huge cattle empire in southern Colorado which would eventually swallow up all the modest holdings in the Valley.

Well, Pat Stevens didn't blame the man for being ambitious. Eustis Harlow was quite open and honest about it. He didn't try to acquire land covertly nor by underhanded means. He laid his cash tin the line in the open market and was able to overbid anyone who was presumptuous enough to bid against him.

He was also very free with his money in the matter of making loans, and therein Pat Stevens and a few of the more intelligent ranchers saw Harlow's real danger toward the Valley. He talked loudly of improved methods and a better breed of beef stock, and he was quite willing to loan any of the ranchers money to make such improvements, taking a mortgage on their ranches, of course, as security for the loans.

With such money offered so freely, many of the ranchers had borrowed from him to buy fripperies and things they didn't really need, planning vaguely to repay the money from increased receipts, and Pat feared they wouldn't be able to meet their obligations when they came due. He felt that Harlow hoped it would work out that way, that it was the essence of his plan to eventually obtain control of the entire Valley, but you couldn't openly accuse the man of that. There wasn't anything dishonest about it. If people wanted to be fools and borrow more than they could pay back, you couldn't blame the lender for being businesslike and foreclosing on the mortgages to protect his investment.

Actually, nothing like this had happened yet. Eustis Harlow had been established in the Valley only six months, and he was well liked by most of his neighbors. But since his coming there had been a gradual spread of dissatisfaction among the small ranchers. Up to the time of his coming they had been well pleased with things as they were. They hadn't, in short, known they were missing anything. They were content to go along with their small holdings and the moderate prosperity they had known for years. He had opened their eyes to undreamed of possibilities and joggled their suppressed ambitions. Each man began to dream of getting hold of more land and expanding, and they began to look contemptuously at the few like Pat Stevens who refused to borrow money from Harlow and were content to go along as they had for many years.

These were the thoughts that raced through Pat's mind as he went toward the corrals. He wasn't really conscious of them. He knew only a deep fear that the security of his beloved Valley was somehow threatened, and he couldn't rid himself of the feeling that Mr. Eustis Harlow was at the bottom of it.

He had sort of looked for an explosion last month when he helped Ezra get hold of the Spangler ranch, a twenty-section spread lying directly east of Harlow's present holdings. He knew that Harlow coveted those twenty sections, and when Ezra bought the ranch out from under the Texan's nose for less than Harlow would have paid, Pat expected him to be angry about it.

But Harlow wasn't the sort to cry over spilt milk. He laughingly told Pat so one day soon after the deal was finished when they happened to meet in the main street of Dutch Springs. He laughed boomingly and shook his head at the sheriff, and said, “I hear you and Ezra put one over on me in buying the Spangler ranch.”

“How come?” asked Pat. “Spangler wanted to sell out an' Ezra met his price.”

“With the help of a slight loan from you, eh Stevens?”

Pat shrugged. “Ezra an' me have been friends a long time, Harlow.”

“You put over a smart deal,” the Texan acknowledged. “Tell Ezra any time he gets a notion to sell out he can make a nice profit by coming to me.”

Pat said he would tell Ezra. Well, that's all that had been said. Reviewing the incident later, Pat didn't know exactly why Harlow's attitude in the matter irritated him. He tried to be honest about it. He had to admit his irritation probably came from the fact that Harlow had been so damned decent about being outslickered. He would have liked it better if Harlow had been angry and threatened him. He was just too smooth, Pat decided. He had a way of disarming you and not leaving you anything to strike back at.

Ezra was leading a big-boned blazed-face sorrel out of the corral to the saddle shed when Pat got there. He led the sorrel past Pat and said, “Hi,” without turning his one eye in Pat's direction. He took a bridle down from a nail and busied himself fitting the curb bit in the horse's mouth, just as though he didn't know Pat had come down to have a talk with him.

Pat lit a cigarette and spun the match away into the velvety darkness. “Ridin' in to town, huh?”

“Yep. Thought I would.”

“The other boys going?”

“I dunno.” Ezra threw a saddle blanket over the sorrel's back.

Pat took a deep drag on his cigarette. He asked, “What's it all about, Ezra?”

“All what?”

“The meeting in town. The one you're goin' to.”

“Who said I wuz goin' to a meetin'?”

“Come off it,” Pat said half angrily. “Something's eatin' on you, Ezra. What is it?”

Ezra tossed a heavy saddle over the sorrel. He ducked his head to reach under the animal's belly and get hold of the center-fire girth swinging on the other side. He pushed the end of the latigo strap through the iron loop and pulled the girth tight. “You listenin' to what Dock says?” he scoffed at last.

Pat sighed. “You never could keep a secret from me, Ezra. Right now it's fightin' to come out. It'll turn sour in yore belly if you don't tell me 'fore you ride off.”

Ezra buckled the latigo strap carefully. “What'd you say if I tole you you'd mebbe be better off not askin' so damn many questions?” He tried to sound angry at Pat, but managed only to sound mournful.

“I'd say I'm ridin' in with you to get my own answers. Wait a minute till I throw a saddle on the gray.” Pat turned toward the corral, picking a short coiled catchrope off a hook on the wall.

“Wait a minute,” Ezra growled gruffly.

Pat stopped and waited.

“Cain't you take my word fer it there ain't no cause tuh git riled up?”

Pat said, “Not when you don't hardly taste yore son-of-a-gun an' don't wait for a piece of peach pie.”

Ezra sighed loudly and mournfully. “I was scairt you wouldn't. Aw right, there
is
a meetin' tuhnight, Pat. In the main room of the courthouse.”

Pat remained silent. He waited for Ezra to go on.

“I reckoned I'd sorta ride in tuh see what happened,” Ezra went on weakly.

“Who passed out the invites to the meetin'?”