“Good idea. Then where will I meet you?”
“At the sheriffâs, I imagine.”
“You're going to report the ambush?”
“I might. Won't know till I size up the man,” Jessica said, “and get a feel as to which side of the ambush he'd have been fighting on.”
They parted, and Jessica strode along the boardwalk to the sheriff's office. Even before opening the door, she could hear an angry voice shouting inside. Entering, she faced a fat, fiftyish man sitting tilted in a swivel chair, and the back of a younger man standing with his fists clenched on top of the littered desk between them.
“Haul your ass out and put a stop to it, Quince!” the younger man was yelling. “My crew's threatening to quit, and after that raid the night âfore last, when Rasmussen got shot dead and three others got winged, I can't rightly blame 'em if they skedaddled. Just like all my goddamned rustled cows you can't find went and skedaddled.”
“Easy, Daryl, a lady's present,” the fat man growled, seeing Jessica and straightening in his chair. “Yes, maâam?”
“Are you Sheriff Oakes?”
“Deputy Sheriff, yes,” the fat man answered, preening one end of the graying mustache that drooped around his pudgy mouth and jowls. A tobacco dribble stained his vest next to his tarnished star. “Something I can do for you, maâam?”
“Maybe the same thing you can do for him,” Jessica answered, indicating the other man with a glancing nod.
She judged the man, who'd now turned toward her, to be about thirty, six foot one or two, maybe two hundred pounds, with a hardness that didn't come from riding a brass rail. Tousled hair the shade of dressed harness leather, brushed long under a wide-brimmed, flat-crowned Kansas hat. Big beak of a nose and an anvil for a chin. Magnetic eyes that appraised her squarely. His frayed range clothes were sweaty and dirty, and the Remington .44-40 stuck in his belt was a relic with cracked grips, but this was no saddle tramp; he was a man used to giving orders and having them obeyed. She liked him immediately.
Regarding Deputy Oakes again, she continued, “You can track down and arrest these rustlers and killers hereabouts, that's what you can do. But I gather you haven't been much good at it.”
Stung, the deputy frowned, puffing his cheeks. “Can't say I place you, maâam. Forgive me if I ask just who you are, and if you've got any special interest in our local problems.”
“I most certainly have,” Jessica retorted archly. “My name's Starbuck, Miss Jessica Starbuck, and I've got a considerable interest in the Flying W.” Which, in a manner of speaking, was true enough.
She left it at that, deciding not to mention the ambush. Even if Deputy Oakes acted on it, she figured he wouldn't be able to do or prove much; Ryker was too clever not to have removed his dead gunmen and cleaned up any other evidence that might incriminate him. And the deputy didn't look like the sort who'd bust a gut investigating; he looked like he'd been in that swivel chair a mighty long time, and was tired of hearing about trouble.
Jessica's name seemed to spark recognition in the other man, but if Deputy Oakes realized who she was, he didn't show it.
“Poor widder Waldemar, a shame, a shame,” the deputy murmured, then eyed Jessica glumly. “I'm not surprised she's sold to an outsider, it's a terrible lot for her to try running all by her lonesome. But like I was about to tell Mr. Melville here, I've been worn to a frazzle chasing one blind lead after another.”
“Well, if you won't do more'n you have,” Melville snapped, “then I reckon us ranchers will have to protect ourselves.”
Oakes leaned back again, shifting uncomfortably. “It's not that I wonât, Daryl, it's that all I've got is me and my night man. Sure's I ride out to your spread, the coyotes are hitting the Double Diamond. I ride there, and they strike Leach's Lazy L.”
“As Miss Starbuck said, Quince, track them down.”
“Don't think I haven't tried. But once off the flatlands, we lose them up in the rock canyons. Can't even get a line on where the cattle's being sold, either, no sign of any of your herds showing up anywhere in the territory. It's just like the mountains opened up and swallowed them whole, and I tell you, it's got me buffaloed.”
“Well, I guess that means me and the others will have to form a vigilante committee,” Melville said, glaring as he leaned over the desk again. “I know it's illegal, but we're fed up with losing our men and cattle.”
Deputy Oakes brooded, as if considering the ultimatum. “Daryl,” he finally said, “I'll ask you not to go off half cocked. Let me wire my boss in Laramie to send some more deputies. I'll scatter them around, and we're sure to get a lead on where the rustlers are rat-holed. You tell that to the others, will you?”
“I'll try,” Melville replied. “They might not listen.”
“Make them listen. Letting your crews run around with itchy trigger fingers can only lead to worse trouble, not less. I mean this for your own good. I'd really regret having to arrest you or any of your men for taking the law into your own hands.”
“All right, Quince, I'll string along with you awhile longer.” Straightening, Melville started for the door. He paused, hand on the knob, to add, “But things have to change around here, and fast.”
“They will, Daryl,” Deputy Oakes replied with an earnest heartiness. “You've got my word. You can count on it.”
Melville nodded and opened the door, then hesitated again to look at Jessica. “Coming, Miss Starbuck?”
It was less a question than a command, and normally such a tone would have provoked Jessica. But she had no more to say to Deputy Oakes, and plenty to ask Daryl Melville. Besides, she was interested in knowing why he'd raised his eyebrows when he heard her name. So, with a parting smile to the deputy, she went out the door that Melville was holding open for her.
Before she could utter a word, Melville started angling across the street, his long swift strides hard for her to follow.
“Where are you going so fast?” she asked.
“To get my father,” he said, slowing so she could catch up. His onyx eyes were flashing more irately than ever. “He's over in the Thundermug, half swacked by now. The damn dog-bleeding crooks.”
“Who?”
“Halford and Kendrick, bartender and gambler, the owners of the dive. If one doesn't rob you, the other one will. Say, by any chance would you be related to the Starbucks in Texas?”
“Yes. Why?”
“I'm one of the ranchers in the Circle Star co-op.”
“Oh? Which one?”
“Spraddled M. M for Melville.” Reaching the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street, he stopped and smiled at Jessica. “Daryl Melville. And my father, Tobias, of course; he started it after driving cattle up from Texas back in the early seventies.”
“You sound proud of it.”
“Dirt-proud, mostly, but it's home,” he responded wryly, and gestured down the street, where the trail continued west to Garrett. “There's a fork in the road a fair piece from here, that goes to five spreads back in the slopes, including ours and the Flying W. There ain't none of us but hasn't fought everything Mother Nature has to throw, and we were winning until this thieving and murdering came along. Hate to say it, but you rode into a range that's raring to explode.”
“I've done that before,” Jessica said quietly.
“I admire your spunk,” he said, starting up the boardwalk again, “but it's too bad you didn't know this before buying out Mrs. Waldemar.”
“I haven't. My only interest is to protect the investment Starbuck has in her herd. In all your herds, if possible. But are you ranchers truly serious about forming a vigilante committee?”
Melville gave a laugh, short and bitter. “I was pure bluffing. The big ranchers don't need to, they've got their own guards. And the smaller ranchers are afraid that to fight back would goad the rustlers into wiping them out, man, woman, and child. So all they're willing to do is stand pat like sheep, doing nothing âcept bleat and leak in their pants, if you'll pardon the expression, Miss Starbuck.”
“Jessie.”
“All right, but only if you call me Daryl. And don't get me wrong, but I can't see how you hope to help the lady, Jessie.”
“First, by riding out there this afternoon for a talk.”
“Won't make it before dark, I'm afraid, and the Flying W isn't much set up for overnight guests. Or are you already expected?”
“Not especially, no. I'd better wait till tomorrow morning.”
“Well, you can leave word with her crew that you're coming,” he said caustically, thumbing toward a knot of horses tied in front of the saloon. “Crews are like mavericks, they have to be taught who's boss and be ridden on short rein. Otherwise they run wild.”
Melville moved through the batwings without holding them open for Jessie; it never dawned on him that a rowdy saloon would be a place she'd visit. She followed anyway, her curiosity piqued by his comment about the Flying W crew, and stood unobtrusively along the wall by the entrance. The Thundermug was aptly named, she thought.
Melville was brushing between the mostly empty tables, thrusting toward the card tables and chuckaluck layout clustered near the rear. It was far too early for much action in the saloon, not even any drink-caging bar girls around yet, and what patrons there were seemed more interested in boozing than gambling. Only a small group of players and kibitzers were gathered at a single smoke-obscured card table, and from what Jessica could see of it, there didn't appear to be any high-stakes excitement going on.
The drinkers were mainly in two separate clumps at the shiny mahogany bar that stretched along one wall. The nearer men were sullenly quiet, a ferret-eyed watchfulness on their lanky, stubbled faces, a challenging bravado to their display of bristling weapons. The other bunch were nondescript cowpunchers, wearing pistols out of habit, the tools of their trade the rope and ring and branding iron. It was from them that Jessica heard the dull roar of talking and laughing, the clink of glasses and bottles.
Behind the bar, two white-aproned tenders were busily pouring. Brackets and chandeliers reflected in the polished backbar mirrors, and gleamed against the huge portrait of a buxom reclining nude. Seated on a high stool next to the nude, presiding over it all, was a frog of a fellow with slicked-down balding hair and a handlebar mustache, a nugget chain looped across a flowered vest, a torpedo cigar clenched in his gold-capped teeth.
He, Jessie surmised, would be Halford, one of the owners. And the boys happily lapping up his rotgut would be Mrs. Waldemar's crew. Melville was rightâthey were going to have to learn some loyalty and earn their keep. Before Jessica or anyone else would have a prayer to saving the Flying W, those men would have to be out there riding, and riding with everything they had. And the more Jessica looked at them and considered their failings, the more incensed she became.
Finally, beyond endurance, Jessie strode up to the crew. “Drink hearty,” she snapped in a cold, cutting voice. “Because this'll be the last drink you'll have on the Flying W payroll.”
Startled heads turned. A hush fell over the bar.
Then one of the men chuckled cynically. “Aw, hell, it's only a female.” He was a bowlegged, weatherbeaten man with a nut-shaped head of narrow, sly features; he was older than the others, who were rawboned youths with devil-may-care in their eyes. “Don't pay her no mind, boys, you know how women go on the prod.”
Jessica eyed him sharply. “You must be the foreman.”
“Uh-huh. Nealon's the name, but you can call me Lloyd.”
“I call you a bum.”
“What?” He reared back, glowering. “Just who dâyou think you are, comin' in here where you don't belong, pesterin' and insultin' us?”
“I'm Starbuck,” she said flatly. “By contract, I own the beef you're not herding. Mrs. Waldemar wrote that she had problems, and now I can sure understand why, with a slob like you rodding a pack of lazy, elbow-bending drunks.”
The others were staring dumbfounded, but Nealon was growing crimson, champing at the bit. “Okay, sweets, enough of your gag.”
“It's no gag. And if you think it is, Nealon, you're dumber than you're acting already.” She stepped closer, surveying the crew, her hands in fists on her hips. “Now open your ears, because I'm going to say this only once. I've come a long way to help the Flying W, and I don't have the time or patience to fool around. I'm going to be out there early tomorrow morning, and any of you who aren't up and out working, and working hard, will be fired.”
A babbling broke out among the crewâall except for Nealon, who was now the one to stare gawking, silent and stupified.
Before they could collect their wits, Jessie pivoted to stalk away. And two things happened, almost simultaneously. Ki walked through the batwings and, seeing her, started across. And from the card table rose an infuriated bellow: “You skunk, Kendrick, I oughta break every bone in your body with my bare hands!”
“Lay a finger on me and I'll kill you!” a second voice shouted almost as loudly. “I run a friendly, honest game here, and your old man sat in of his own free will. Now get him and get out!”
Jessie and Ki, along with most everybody at the bar, headed toward the back, joining the watchers around the table. Cards and chips were scattered all over. Two players were seated with their eyes wide, mouths shut, hands flat on the green feltâthe best position to hold when a game was in dispute. A third player was a bull-bodied, whiskery brute who was obviously enjoying the ruckus and was feeling immune, lounging back in his chair with a contemptuous smirk pasted on his brutal, scarred face.