Raw Land (6 page)

“And what's that?”

“He'll kill a man who steals a steer of his. He'd kill his mother if she stole one. He'll put up with anything from his crew but stealing. And sooner or later, Will, he's apt to think you're a thief. And then you'll have trouble, real trouble.” Will only nodded, and Chap said in a tired voice, “You're willing to risk that? You still want to go through with it?”

“I do.”

“All right,” Chap said. “I'll sign it over to you, then.”

“Sign it over to me?” Will echoed.

Chap nodded. “I bought the Pitchfork in my name, with my own money. I thought—I hoped—you'd change your mind. If you had, it didn't matter that I'd bought it and was stuck with it. I'm old, Will, and money's nothing. I just don't want you to get a wrong start.”

“I want the place,” Will said. “Sign it over, Chap, because I'm here to stay.”

Chap murmured, “I can remember a fifteen-year-old kid I singled out of a bunch of so-called rustlers brought into the sheriff's office. I can remember thinking he looked pretty stubborn. When I pleaded his case privately with the judge, and the judge asked to see him, he still looked stubborn. The judge said so, when he dismissed charges.” Chap shook his head. “You haven't changed much, Will.”

“No,” Will said.

Chap turned to his desk. “Well, I'll sign it over to you.”

Will rose, ready to go. Chap said, “Oh, I almost forgot, Will. There's a young woman in town staying at the hotel. Her name is Norman. She asked me about you. She wants to talk to you.”

Will scowled. “Norman? I don't know any Norman. What's she like?”

“Young. Pretty in a hard way. She wouldn't state her business. I told her you'd see her.”

Will nodded. They chatted a few minutes longer, and then Will left.

His lean face was grave as he hit the boardwalk and turned down it. He was touched by old Chap's effort to get him to reconsider buying the place, and he was disturbed by what Chap had said of the Murray Broome-Senator Mason fight. Chap was wrong, of course.

Milt was tying a package across the cantle of his saddle when Will came up to the tie rail.

“I'll be with you in a minute,” Will said.

Milt looked at him, saw his scowl, and asked, “Bad news?”

Will laughed. “No. Only damn these people who don't give a man credit for knowin' his own mind.”

“Meanin' what?”

Will said grimly, “Chap Hale was so sure I wouldn't want to buy the place after I looked at it that he bought it in his own name. Now I buy it from him.”

Milt laughed with quiet irony. “Chap's right, Will. It's a damned sand pile. If you can do better, don't buy it.”

“Damned if I won't,” Will growled. “I don't care what kind of graze it is. We're buyin' it because it's lonesome.”

Milt said quietly, “On my account, isn't it, Will?”

Will said briefly, “That's what we're here for, isn't it?” Milt nodded bleakly, and Will said, quick to change the subject, “Go get a drink. I'll pick you up at Mohr's,” and went on toward the hotel.

At the hotel desk he inquired for a Miss Norman and was told to go up to room ten.

Upstairs, at the door of the room next to the last he knocked, and a woman's voice said, “Come in.”

Will stepped inside, yanking off his Stetson. A girl was standing by the bed, a girl he had never seen before. Will caught the faint scent of cigarette smoke in the room, but he couldn't be sure. He immediately thought of Chap's description of her, “Pretty in a hard way,” and he thought that described her. She was dark-haired, and her dress was of a dull-red silk that closely molded her figure. Her brown eyes were watchful and smiling.

“Mr. Danning? I'm Mary Norman.” She smiled and extended her hand, and Will shook hands with her. She offered him a chair by a connecting door into the next room and then sat on the bed facing him. He was more curious than ever about her as he sat down and waited for her to begin.

“I understand you've bought a spread around here.”

“That's right.”

“It's a lovely country,” Mary Norman said, and smiled a little. “A lot better cattle country than where you were, isn't it?”

“Why, yes,” Will said. His gray eyes were searching, and the girl returned his level stare.

“I saw you around the Double Bar O,” she said. “That's how I happened to know of you.”

“I see,” Will said. He didn't remember her.

Mary Norman seemed calm enough, but Will noticed that she was pleating the goods of her skirt with nervous fingers. Suddenly, she said, “Oh, I'm no good at hiding anything, Mr. Danning. I've come to ask you a question.”

Will nodded, still puzzled.

“Have you ever heard Murray Broome speak of me?” she asked quietly.

Will felt a vague uneasiness as he shook his head. “No, ma'am.”

“He and I were—well, good friends,” Mary Norman said.

Will said nothing, and his silence seemed to embarrass the girl. She looked away from him, and her cheeks were slowly coloring, Will saw.

Suddenly, she blurted out, “You know, we were going to be married.”

“I didn't know,” Will said blankly.

The girl stood up and turned her back to him. “I don't know how to say this with you looking at me that way. But Murray and I were more than friends. He—he was going to marry me when all this trouble was over.” She whirled now, and her skirts billowed as she turned. “I—you can guess now why I want to see him,” she said defiantly.

Will didn't speak, only inclined his head. It was a nicely acted mixture of embarrassment and a declaration of love, intended to be a show of maidenly modesty. Only it didn't quite carry; it was too expert, Will thought.

“I can't guess, no,” he said slowly.

“I want to see Murray,” Mary Norman said.

Will said, frowning, “I understand that, yes. But I don't understand why you came to see me. You want me to find him for you?”

“Yes,” the girl said swiftly.

“And where should I look?” There was a faint touch of irony in Will's voice.

“You must know where he is!” the girl cried. “Somebody does, and you were his closest friend!”

Will shook his head and came to his feet. “Sorry, ma'am. But I'm not workin' for Murray Broome any more. I've got a spread of my own. Murray's disappeared, so I've heard.”

“You didn't answer my question,” Mary Norman said stubbornly.

“What was it?”

“Do you know where Murray is?”

Will looked at her levelly, and the lie came easy. “No, I don't.”

The girl didn't believe him; he could see it in her eyes. “Please,” she said. “I won't tell. Do you think I'd sell out the man I'm going to marry? Do you think I ever believed anything they wrote about him?”

Will drawled, “You've got a bum steer somewhere, miss. Why do you think I know where he is?”

“Call it a hunch,” the girl said swiftly. “I know you do. You must.”

Will shook his head. “I wish I could help you. I can't.”

“You won't tell me?”

“I can't,” Will repeated.

There was a long silence. During it, Will heard a muffled movement in the next room. It sounded as if somebody had scuffed a chair in passing. Only a deep silence would have allowed him to hear it. The girl heard it, too, for she said swiftly, “Please, please tell me!”

And then she made the fatal mistake of looking toward the connecting door.

Will knew instantly there was someone in the next room, someone listening to this conversation.

He wheeled and lunged for the door, brushing his chair out of the way. The door opened easily, and he had only the briefest glimpse of a room like the one he had left before something crashed down on his head, and a curtain of blackness wrapped him in oblivion.

Mary Norman ran to the door and stood looking down at Will's broad back as he lay on the floor. Then she raised her eyes to regard the stocky, ruddy-cheeked man against the wall who was just holstering his gun.

“I had to do it. He knows me,” the man said quietly, defensively.

“Well, are you satisfied now?” Mary Norman asked angrily.

“No. Not at all.”

“He said he didn't know where he was!” Mary Norman said hotly.

“Why would he tell you?” the man asked. “He doesn't know you. But you stick around here for a while and give him a chance to see you. If Murray Broome's around, he'll find out you're here. You stick.”

Mary Norman looked at the man and said passionately, “It's wrong! It's a sneaking, cruel thing to do, and you know it!”

The ruddy-cheeked man grunted. “Well, you can always go to jail, sister, if you don't like it.”

“I don't hate it that much,” Mary Norman said bleakly. “What's my next move?”

“I'll hide in your closet. Get some water and douse his face with it. He'll be proddy when he comes to. Tell him you don't know anything about who was in this room. He won't believe you, but tell him. Or,” he suggested dryly, “you can cry. But he looks too tough to fall for that.”

Mary Norman said in a low, passionate voice, “I hope you choke, Charlie Sommers! I hope you die in your sleep tonight!”

Charlie Sommers's plain face broke into a smile. “I won't,” he drawled. “When you get to hatin' yourself too much for tryin' to trap your old sweetheart, just think how jail looks from inside—for a long time.”

He went back into Mary's room, took a hand towel, soaked it in water from the pitcher, and gave it to her. Afterward, saying nothing more, he went back and opened the door to her closet and went inside.

Mary Norman knelt and laid the towel on Will's forehead. She worked over him a full minute before he stirred, opened his eyes, looked about him, and then pushed himself unsteadily to his feet.

“Are—are you all right?” Mary asked. “What happened?”

Will shook his head, and then his sultry gray glance settled on her. “Don't bother,” he murmured.

“But what happened? I only saw—”

“Don't bother, I said,” Will said curtly. “It was a cheap frame-up by a pair of cheap bounty-hunters. But it didn't work, did it?”

Mary Norman started to cry then. Will picked up his Stetson and left.

During his first look at the town Milt Barron made the pleasant discovery that nobody paid any attention to him. Among the scattering of punchers on the street and in the stores, he was inconspicuous. The only hostile glance he received was from a man he thought was one of the Nine X crew. Milt looked at him blankly and didn't speak.

After he met Will at the horses and talked with him, he headed idly for the big saloon across the street. Will's words were still in his mind, and he felt the anger that comes with helplessness. For it wasn't pleasant to see a friend break himself buying a squalid stone shack and a handful of stony acres so that he could hide a friend there. Milt felt a hot loyalty to Will. Some day, of course, he could and would repay Will tenfold for this help, but that didn't comfort him now. He looked at the movement on the street with a kind of childlike hunger, thinking of the loneliness of the spread. He reflected, with a touch of irony, that Will had bought a place to hide him that was so much like prison that there was hardly any difference. An angry restlessness was on him as he shouldered through Hal Mohr's swing doors and tramped up to the bar and ordered a drink.

He gulped it down and poured another, feeling it warm his belly. He leaned both elbows on the bar and hunched his shoulders and stared in the bar mirror, seeing the image of a man he scarcely recognized. This was what hunger did to a man, he thought. Nature intended him to be a thick-bodied, burly man; and he had starved himself into this slim, work-worn-looking puncher in the mirror. His stomach protested at the liquor, and with a sudden recklessness he wondered how much it would protest at several more drinks. He took the bottle and his glass and tramped over to one of the tables where a dirty pack of cards was scattered. There was a desultory game of poker going on at one of the back tables.

He had another drink, shuffled the thick cards, and laid out a game of solitaire.

He was barely into it when he was aware of the bartender calling sharply to someone. He looked up, and standing in front of his table was a small Mexican boy.

“Get out of here, kid,” the fat bartender called.

The boy extended a soiled envelope to Milt, and Milt took it. On it, written in pencil, was the name:
Milt Barron
. Milt gave the boy a coin, and he ran out of the saloon.

Milt looked at the envelope. The drinks he had taken were working now, and he regarded the envelope with dispassionate curiosity. Only a handful of people here knew his name, and of them he couldn't think of one who didn't dislike him. Oh, yes, there was Becky Case. He looked at the writing, and it didn't seem like a woman's hand, but you never could tell. He propped the letter against the bottle and went on playing solitaire. He wanted to open it and read it, but his amusements were small enough these days. To prolong his curiosity was a form of enjoyment.

He played out his game of solitaire, poured himself another drink, and then reached for the letter. He opened it without haste, unfolded it, and read:

There's a drift fence a half mile up the wash from your place. You come there alone tonight, Murray Broome, or I may decide to collect your reward. Remember, I said alone. If you tell Danning about this I'll turn you up tomorrow morning. If you don't come I will too
.

A sudden paralyzing nausea gripped Milt's belly, and when it passed he was dead sober. He folded the note, took a deep breath, and came to his feet, fighting down the urge to run. He went over to the bar, paid for the drinks, and looked at the door. Walking through that door was the hardest thing he would ever have to do. He got a grip on himself then, reasoning that whoever sent the note wouldn't be waiting out there, and wouldn't have the law there. Whoever sent it wanted to talk to him first—for blackmail, probably.