Desert of the Damned (7 page)

Reifel dragged him back and fell across him, gasping. It took him a long while to muster enough strength to get up again. Three feet away Bugler, standing on dropped reins, looked into the west with his ears pricked forward.

Alarm stirred in Reifel and he got onto his knees. With hands that were all but unmanageable he fumbled with his empty pistol, reloading it with cartridges from the deputy’s belt — even thrusting a few extras into the loops of his own. Then he staggered erect and lurched over to the horse.

The stirrup seemed a terrible long way from the ground. He thought he’d never make it and, when he finally got a boot into it, the worn-out muscles of his arm wouldn’t pull him into the saddle. But he got there, someway. And someway he stayed in it.

• • •

It was the girl who saw him first.

She was standing straight and rigid in the open doorway arguing with the rared-back man in the wire-patched rocker that was fifty miles away across the dilapidated porch.

The fellow in the rocker wasn’t paying much attention. He looked a lot more interested in the bottle he was holding, hoisting it aloft from time to time and smacking his lips when he lowered it. He had a sunken-cheeked face swathed in a month’s growth of whiskers and his shape was so ganted you had to look twice to make sure he was there.

But he was there all right. When the girl saw Reifel — when she cried out and pointed — the weasel-eyed old reprobate came out of that rocker like he worked on a spring. He never spilled one drop from that goddam bottle, but he wasn’t no more than onto his feet before his other hand was thumbing back the hammer of a pistol.

“What the hell do
you
want?”

Reifel’s throat was too dry to get any words out. Even with both hands choking the apple it was all he could do just to stick in the saddle. A hundred miles of riding without food in four days, and half the time fighting fever, had finally brought him to the end of his string.

The girl cried, “He’s hurt!” and made as though to start forward, but the old man waved her back with the bottle.

“You keep outa this, damn it — I know what I’m doin'. Another Devil Iron dodge! By God, I’ll show them bastards — ”

The last thing Reifel saw was the bore of that gun getting ready to take his picture.

G
ERT
K
AVANAUGH’S
mouth pinched in at the corners as she put down the pen on the burn-scarred counter and jerked up her glance to meet the sober regard of the Orient’s proprietor.

So much of her eighteen years had been lived among men that she was sometimes surprised to find she hadn’t turned into one. She dressed like a man and was reacting like one when she said with a trace of defiant acerbity: “It’s still a free country — or have you closed this dump up?”

Joe Clinton’s shrewd eyes passed sadly over her face and he rolled the chewed match stick across his uneven teeth. He didn’t tell her bitterly he might as well close it up nor did he offer directly to discuss her assertion. He said instead, “What’s the use? You been to see him before. You reckon he’s likely to do any more now than last time?”

All of her most vivid memories, and many of those long since grown dim, were irrevocably entangled with the faces of cow hands, gun fighters, gamblers and saddle bums — observable milestones in the disintegration of all that was admirable in the man who had sired her.

The Boxed Y of the Kavanaughs had been carved from the virgin wilderness when this whole rock-girded basin had been traditional hunting ground for Geronimo’s Apaches. It had controlled the best water, the finest grass and winter browse protected by the tumbled bluffs of the Galiuros — a wild and rugged cowman’s dream held together by the exercise of one man’s will and the blazing guns of forty hard-riding punchers.

But these were recollections of the long ago, those fat years of her birth in a land of plenty. This valley wasn’t that kind of land any more. It would still support a considerable variety of life but overgrazing and exploitation of timber had created much aridity and dried up many of the turbulent streams, and the rains didn’t fall in the way of former years. Ranching was done on a more conservative scale and most of the land was fenced these days with more and more wire going under the Devil Iron.

It had not been so much a kind of natural evolution as the death of Gert’s mother which had heralded the passing of Boxed Y influence. From that night Rod Kavanaugh had been a changed man. No one ever referred to him as Rod any more; he was called “Sug” these days after an anecdote of Lamtrill’s. Reckless spending and drunken hours of carousal had emptied his purse and cut into his holdings. Imagined affronts and unwarranted accusations had driven away his friends and reduced his crew to the handful of misfits whose allegiance was renewed each month at fifty dollars and could not be relied upon for longer than it took them to pack this largess into Dry Bottom’s bars. You might still hear tales of his one-time skill with a .45 pistol but few men gave these credence and “Crazy as Sug Kavanaugh” had come to be a saying which slid easy off the tongue. As easy, Gert thought bitterly, as Lamtrill last spring shoving north from Willcox had preempted forty sections of Boxed Y’s best graze.

“You reckon,” Joe repeated, “he’s likely to do any more now than he done for you the last time?”

“At least I can — ”

“Look,” Clinton sighed. “When you going to get it through your head these sugar coated fables about the triumph of right an’ virtue is just so much hogwash figured to keep the rank an’ file from gettin’ too hard to manage? You ought to know by now there ain’t no justice. Seeb Dawson’s nothing but a slinkin’ cur — ”

“He took an oath — ”

“They all take oaths. A carpetbagger without an oath is ‘bout as much use as a cup without a handle. And what if he did? You can’t expect the dog to bite the hand that feeds him — ”

“The taxpayers feed him.” Gert looked stubborn and belligerent. “They vote his salary and pay it, too. They’ve got a right to expect a little action for — ”

“They’ve got a right,” Joe jeered. “Now you’re quotin’ the storybooks again. The only right they’ve got is to foot the bills. There’s just two things turns the wheels in this county — privilege and penalty. Seeb Dawson wouldn’t even unbutton his pants without Nate Lamtrill — ”

“Then I’ll go over Seeb’s head. I’ll go to the commissioners.”

“That’ll be real practical,” declared Clinton dryly. “Case you don’t know it, the Board of County Supervisors is composed of three men.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “There’s young Jules Acktine who’s studyin’ law with the County Prosecutor — one of Lamtrill’s ‘petrified creatures'; Abe Krantz, whose Kollossal Mercantile owes Lamtrill’s bank every nickel it can take in for the next several years; and Honest Nate himself.”

Clinton wrinkled up his face with a wry kind of smile. “Ain’t none of them boys goin’ to prosecute himself — even for you.”

Gert Kavanaugh’s eyes revealed a smoldering fury. “There must be
some
way,” she said, “and if there is I’ve got to find it. I’ve
got
to,” she repeated with an edge to her tone.

There was something very close to desperation in her face.

Clinton looked thoughtful. “What is it you want with Seeb Dawson this time?”

“The Devil Iron’s fenced our southeast thirty.”

Clinton’s brows went up. They climbed all the way to the edge of his hatbrim. “Your Bear Flats range?”

“Including the lake.”

Clinton shook his head. “I always told your Dad he made a big mistake in not buildin’ his ranch house at the edge of that water.” He put the flat of a hand on the counter, drumming softly, and his glance turned inward as he considered the import of what she had told him.

“What’s Sug goin’ to do?”

She studied his face and she was obviously deeply thinking about it and, just as obviously, without much hope. “I expect,” she finally said with no inflection of bitterness, “he’ll do about what he did when Lamtrill stole those forty sections.”

The Orient’s proprietor, less charitable, put his judgment more succinctly. “Pickle himself in forty rod an’ try to forget he ever had that water — ”

“The cows won’t forget it.”

“No.”

“And I’ll not, either.”

Joe Clinton asked angrily, “What’s the matter with all them high-priced hands he’s been — ”

“They’re not working for us now.”

“You mean he finally woke up and fired ’em?”

Something disturbed her breathing and she said a little stiffly, “We ran out of ready cash and — ”

“So you haven’t any crew at all. Lamtrill’s goin’ to love that. You better stay in town, girl. I’ll give Honest Nate about two more months. After that there won’t be any Boxed Y for you to worry about. He’ll have the whole damn place under wire.”

She looked up at him with angry eyes. “You’re forgetting something, aren’t you?”

“What’s that?”

“Me,” Gert said with a man’s directness. “I’ve still got a stake in this and I’m not throwing my hand in.”

She meant it, too.

Clinton told her testily, “You keep out of this, girl. Fightin’ off range hogs ain’t no kind of job for a woman — ”

“If Dad’ll go through with a deal I’ve fixed up we can lease that ten around the Oak Ridge line camp and that will give us enough ready cash — ”

“To buy more likker an’ drifters for him?”

“I’m to have the handling of this money myself — ”

“And what’ll you get? A couple thousand, mebbe? You can’t buy Lamtrill off with that.”

“I hadn’t considered buying him off.”

“If you lease Oak Ridge,” Clinton pointed out, “and don’t have that Bear Flats water to fall back on, you won’t have enough graze left to feed your own cattle. Look the facts in the face — ”

“I’m looking them in the face,” Gert threw back at him; and Clinton’s eyes turned a deal more thoughtful when he paused to reflect on how this girl had been raised. She’d been dealing with facts almost all of her life and had seldom had chance to indulge in those pleasures which most girls knew. Thud of hoofs and the bawling of cattle punctuated occasionally by somebody’s sixgun was about all the music she ever had heard. Things ground into a child’s mind that way had a habit of sticking and were bound to cast long shadows before them, inexorably shaping the pattern of whatever events the times were rushing her into.

This girl had practically lived in a saddle ever since she’d been big enough to climb on a horse; and Joe was honest enough with himself to acknowledge that, save for her, Boxed Y would have gone up the spout a long while ago. Making ends meet, though, was one thing. Pitting her will against a man intent on taking over every square inch of ground between the San Pedro and the Pinelenos was a task no girl should be setting her hand to. Joe could see nothing ahead of Gert Kavanaugh but heartbreak.

“I know how you feel,” he told her at last. “I know what that ranch means to you, Gert, but I know Nate Lamtrill for one of the biggest damn skunks that ever stood on two legs. He’s too big now for any man in this basin to get in the way of. You know how many outfits he’s gobbled — Spur and Three Cross an’ Brad an’ Compass. And I happen to know that yesterday forenoon Ben Crispin signed papers that’ll give him the Circle C south of town. There’s a lot better things in life for a girl — ”

“You’re wastin’ breath, Joe. I’m not going to let these crooks tear up Boxed Y.”

Clinton eyed her uneasily. “What can you do? How you figurin’ to stop ’em?”

“I’m going to give Seeb Dawson one more chance. He didn’t do anything to stop that rustling but if he refuses or fails to move Lamtrill’s crew off that Bear Flats water I’ll see how he likes a dose of his own medicine.”

“You mean you’d go to throwin’ lead?”

“That’s right.”

Dismay bulked large in the look Clinton gave her. “But God’s off ox, girl, you haven’t any crew! You can’t tear down his fence without no backin’ or stand out there with a smokin’ six — ”

“What makes you think I won’t have any backing?”

“Why this country would jump through a hoop if Nate said to. These outfits round here are so damned scared of Lamtrill — ”

“Right now they are, sure. They’re like you, plumb whipped before they ever lift a hand. But maybe I can change that. If I can set them an example that will give them enough hope to get their backs up — ”

“You’re out of your head, girl! That fellow’s a wolf. He wouldn’t worry no more about a chit of a girl than he would about worms in his biscuits.”

“He’ll savvy hot lead.” Gert smiled at him grimly. “If Dawson doesn’t get him off our water I’m going to use that lease money to hire a bunch of warriors — ”

“Gunfighters!” With widening eyes Clinton staggered back. “You don’t know what you’re saying — ”

“I think I do.” She spoke quietly, as a man might — a man who had been around and knew what the score was. “A warrior crew working out of Boxed Y could make Nate Lamtrill an awful pile of misery. For every outfit he’s jumped we could crack two of his; the way he’s spread out he can’t watch everything. For every steer his crowd have rustled we could short his count by twenty. Every lousy trick he’s pulled in this country can be thrown right back in his teeth with interest.”

For a second Clinton’s eyes showed a leaping brightness but its flame swiftly faded. “Not a chance,” he said. “It sounds good but you couldn’t make it work. To get anywhere at all you’d have to find yourself a gun boss guys like that would follow — ”

“I’ve got one. Myself. I can hold that bunch in line.”

She was serious, too — dead serious.

The Orient’s proprietor rasped grizzled jowls. “You figure,” he demanded incredulously, “that you — one girl with a gun in her fist — can bust up the power of Nate Lamtrill’s bank?”

“We’ll find out,” Gert said, and Joe Clinton snorted.

“Even granted such a stunt had any chance to succeed, what gun throwin’ bravo with any thimbleful of sense would be crazy enough — ”

“To go up against Lamtrill?”

“To risk backin’ a busted outfit run by a girl an’ a drunk old fool nobody’s got any use for against the kind of crew Devil Iron’ll be throwin’ at you. It won’t wash, Gert. You won’t more than get started — ”

“There are plenty of owlhooters back in the hills who would welcome the chance to get their hooks in — ”

“You wouldn’t get no farther with that cut-an'-run kind than Sug got with his fifty-dollar drifters. This is a wolf’s game — ”

“I intend to hire wolves.” Gert smiled at him bleakly. “Men like Kid Badger, Sam Hackberry, Flash Dringo — ”

“God almighty!” Joe Clinton stared at her, white and shaken. “You can’t do that! You would better turn wild Indians loose than bring that kind into Sunset Valley….”

His words trailed off. In the stretched-thin silence he seemed to be hearing the muffled hoofbeats of night riders. Whatever he saw it was a frightening picture. But it was too fantastic. He took a deep breath and shook his head, relaxing. “You couldn’t do it, Gert. You couldn’t get men like that — ”

“I can and will,". Gert said grimly. “We’ll cut his herds, we’ll fire his buildings, we’ll bust his bank wide open. And when his credit fails, when what’s left of his crews start digging for the tules and he’s just one man left alone with a pistol — ”

“You’ve gone out of your mind …” Clinton whispered.

“But I’ll do it,” Gert nodded. “If Dawson doesn’t get Devil Iron off my water I’ll do it if this whole damned range goes up in smoke.”