Sudden--Troubleshooter (A Sudden Western) #5 (8 page)

‘Rub him down, feed him,
an’ put him in the corral,’
the Saber man
was telling someone. ‘An’ Jack Mado’s geldin’, too.’

‘Okay, Jim,’ said the man
to whom Dancy was speaking. In a moment the foreman came out of the
stable, hitched at his gun belt, and crossed the open yard towards
the big house.

A quick glance about him revealed no one
else in the vicinity, and Green covered the few yards remaining
between him and the building at a flat run. Almost soundlessly he
skirted the wall, coming to the open door which led into the
corral. He lay flat on the ground, and took a quick look around the
doorway. It was an old trick; a man looking at the opening would
not expect a head at floor level. Green was taking a calculated
risk that the man inside would not be looking at the door. Nor was
he; the tall, thin horse-tender was busily rubbing down a sorrel
standing in one of the stalls.

Rising noiselessly to his
feet, Green moved like a shadow inside the stable and was behind
the man in three swift steps. Almost instinctively the man felt
Green’s presence and half turned.

‘Wha—’ he began, when the
barrel of Green’s forty-five caught him solidly behind the ear, and
he fell like a sack of wheat into Green’s waiting arms. The cowboy
dragged the man into a vacant stall and then, crooning to soothe
the slightly startled sorrel, he examined the horse. He noted the
sweat marks dried on the sleek flanks, and lifted the
hoofs.

‘Ain’t no pine needles,’ he
said, disappointment in his voice, ‘but plenty o’ sand around the
fetlocks. Now the question is: who’s yore rider, ol’
hoss?’

He spent a few more moments
examining the saddle which was straddling the stall partition.
There was nothing in the saddlebags to yield a clue as to its
owner. The only other horse in the stable was a gelding which, from
the conversation he had overheard, Green knew to belong to the man
called Jack Mado. A rapid inspection of this animal revealed no
sign of pine needles or sand, nor had the horse been hard used.
‘Not yu, beauty,’ Green murmured. ‘Whoever owns that sorrel is our
man.’ He thought for a moment; then, nodding, he produced a Barlow
knife from his pocket and spent another minute
in the stall with the sorrel. With a grim smile of
satisfaction he pocketed the knife.

‘I’ll shore know yu when I
see yu again, hoss,’ he told the animal. ‘Yu don’t look like yu go
in any
remuda
to
me.’

By this the JH man was referring to the
prevalent practice of keeping a pool of horses on a ranch for the
riders to draw from daily in their work. These animals were
normally half-wild, hardly-broken animals. The sorrel, on the other
hand, was a good horse with some breeding in him.

‘Next time I see yu I hope
yore owner’s ridin’ yu,’ Green told the animal, patting its velvety
muzzle. The horse whickered softly as the cowboy edged back to the
door and, after a quick glance about, once more crossed the
dangerous open space to the mouth of the gully he had
descended.

A few minutes later he was above the crest
of the hill and loping towards his rendezvous with
Philadelphia.

LAFE GUNNISON
sat in silence in the sprawling, untidy
living-room of the Saber ranch house. Opposite him, a petulant look
on his face, his son was haranguing him.

‘You know damned well that
those nesters are stealing our cattle,’ Randy was saying. ‘This
nonsense about someone trying to kill Susan Harris is just some
kind of trick to make us look bad. They can tell the Marshal that
they even rode across here to try to reason with you. That you told
them all sorts of things you never said. Think of all the kinds of
lies those conniving rogues can concoct!’

The elder Gunnison remained silent. The
advent of the coolly imperturbable Green had been surprisingly
upsetting; the man did not have the outward appearance of a liar,
although Gunnison had met plenty of men who had the most honest and
open of faces, but were black-hearted villains who would have
killed their own mothers for a dollar bill. He felt restive; the
cowboy had probed into some area of his mind, disturbed a feeling
which he had pushed out of his thoughts, and set it to plaguing
him. He could not put it into words; but it was there. Meanwhile,
Randy Gunnison was still talking.

‘Your old-time notions of
fair play are out of date, Father,’ he told the old man. ‘These
people aren’t going to be impressed or affected by notions like
that. They’re out to grab our range if they can. It’s up to us to
stop them.’

The old man looked up at
his son with tired eyes. ‘How come yo’re so all-fired anxious about
Saber all of a sudden?’ he wanted to know. ‘I ain’t seen yu
spendin’ yore time tryin’ to find out how the place is run. I
figgered yu was more interested in runnin’ up a bill at Tyler’s, or
whatever yu do with yore time.’

His son chose to ignore this familiar attack
upon himself. It was an old bone of contention between them and he
did not want to become side-tracked by it now.

‘Never mind that now,’ he
told his father. ‘You just remember what I say. If you give those
homesteaders an inch they’ll take more than a mile – they’ll steal
the Saber from right under your nose! Why you’ve never taken the
men up there and cleaned them out I’ll never
understand.’

‘Is that what they teach
you in them fancy Eastern schools I sent yu to?’ growled Lafe
Gunnison. ‘Right is might?’

‘No, Father,’ Randy
replied. ‘They don’t teach it, but you learn it just the same. All
those boys in that school had parents who could buy and sell Saber
fifty times a day for a year and never notice they’d spent money.
They didn’t stick to the letter of the law, believe me. When the
law got in their way they changed the law.’

‘Damned if I don’t think
that sendin’ yu there was the worst thing I ever done. Ever since
yu come back here, yu been spoutin’ about money bein’ the only
thing in the world worth havin’.’

‘Not money, my dear
father,’ sneered Randy. ‘Power! Money
is
power! You don’t seem to realize
that. You could brush those damned thieves in the Mesquites
off
you like a man swatting flies, and
nobody would say a word and you know it.’

‘Mebbe that’s why I ain’t
done it, boy.’ said Gunnison heavily. ‘Another thing about power is
the way yu use it.’

‘Well, things would be very
different if I were running the Saber, I’ll tell you that!’ his son
told him.

The old man turned, a flash
of anger brightening his eyes for an instant. ‘Yu ain’t runnin’
Saber yet,’ he growled. ‘Until yu are, yu stick to yore theories
an’ I’ll stick to mine.’

Randolph Gunnison crossed
the room and opened the door to leave. As he did, he turned,
shaking his head. ‘I’ll never understand you,’ he said, without
trying to hide the contempt in his voice. He slammed the door and
Gunnison heard him stamping out on to the porch and calling one of
the men to fetch his horse.

Gunnison shook his grey
head. ‘Cuts both ways, boy,’ he said sadly. His thoughts turned
back in their previous path, and he reviewed again what the
dark-haired cowboy, Green, had said. Someone had tried to kill
Susan Harris; but for what reason? He was sure that there must be
an explanation behind it. Some hunter, maybe, frightening the girl?
That still didn’t explain the shot which had so nearly killed the
boy. That boy! In that one fleeting moment the boy had borne such
an amazing resemblance to … he shook his head. The whole thing was
impossible! It was some cool plot to discredit the Saber, to make
the homesteaders appear like the injured party. He snorted. Injured
party, hah! Damned nesters. The story was the same wherever they
took up land. The big spreads would begin to lose beef. Nothing
serious: one or two head, he thought. Nesters always reckoned that
killing a beef for food wasn’t theft. Crumbs from the rich man’s
table. Then they’d graduate to two, three head. You didn’t
complain: it wasn’t worth it. Coyotes and wolves pulled down as
many every month. But nesters were always greedy. Because you’ve
deliberately chosen to overlook the loss of a couple of head, they
start to think about stealing to sell instead of stealing to eat.
Botching brands, hazing ten, twenty head down to some dusty town
where no questions were asked, some
anonymous buyer who’d throw them into a bunch which some
drover would take up north in a trail herd to the Reservation. The
Injuns weren’t particular whose beef they ate; and the Army asked
no questions so long as the price was right. Finally, the nesters
discovered that it was easier to steal than work their land, and
then you had a full-time rustling problem on your hands. He slapped
his thigh. ‘Dammit!’ he growled to himself. He’d liked the look of
Jacob Harris when he’d first met the man. It had gone against the
grain when he’d discovered that Harris had filed on land up in the
Mesquites, land he’d always thought of as Saber land until he’d
learned at the land office that he didn’t even have title to the
land on which his own home stood. Harris and his neighbors had
become a kind of symbol of the fact that his own easy-going
good-natured way had become out of date. His cronies in Tucson had
sympathized: everyone knew nesters were plain no damned good. Maybe
Randy was right; maybe he ought to get the men together and clean
them out of the Mesquites once and for all. It had to be one of
them. Maybe even the shooting at Harris’s girl had been done by one
of them. He shook his head. If only a man could go up there and
talk to them. But no self-respecting cattleman could countenance
that. Saber was in the right. ‘I was here first,’ he told himself.
‘Damme if I go to Harris an’ apologize for it!’

He stoked an old briar pipe and sat for a
long time, smoking in the silent room. There had to be something he
could do. Finally, moving like a very tired man, he came to a
decision and, crossing the room, he sat down at his battered old
roll-topped desk. He sat there for a long moment, then pulled out a
pen and some paper. Slowly, chewing the pen between words, he began
to compose a letter.

THE MAN
rode into Yavapai from the south at about noon. He was not a
big man by frontier standards; perhaps five feet seven or eight,
but there was strength in the supple frame. The man rode a bay
stallion with an ornate Mexican saddle, decorated with silver that
gleamed in the golden sunlight. Although his clothes were dusty
they were evidently of good material; he did not look like a man
who had ridden from Tucson within the last two days, but he had.
The man on horseback entered Yavapai from the south, noting the
location of the buildings in the town, a faint sneer playing about
his lips.

In truth, Yavapai was
nothing to look at. It was typical of any hundred other
southwestern settlements of that time; a wide strip of
wheel-rutted, hoof-pounded dust comprising its only street, flanked
on either side by jagged rows of crude buildings, some of adobe,
squat and unattractive, the two-foot-thick walls robbing them of
any grace. One or two of the edifices along the street were of
timber, warped and bleached by the blazing Arizona sun. A few, like
the bank and Tyler’s saloon, had glass windows with blinds which
could be drawn to give at least an air of coolness in the midday
heat. Along the street on both sides ran a boardwalk for
pedestrians; it was broken here and there, and unrepaired. A few of
the larger buildings boasted hitching-rails, and an attempt had
been made to sweep the ever-present tin cans and bottles into piles
of trash which would be collected if the town ever became
civic-minded enough to care. On this inspection the stranger
thought it unlikely. Yavapai appeared to have been thrown down from
above haphazardly into the middle of the narrow end of the valley
watered by the river from which the town took its name. Yavapai had
no beauty, no charm. It had begun as a crossroads and a saloon. The
store, the bank,
the land
office, Mrs. Robinson’s restaurant had all come
later and existed only to serve the cattlemen from the surrounding
area: Saber on the north, and two large spreads which
lay some forty miles to the south, halfway along
the road to Tucson.

The stranger spotted the
bleached sign on the false front of Tyler’s saloon and guided his
stallion towards it. Dismounting, he hitched the animal to the rail
outside and, mounting the boarded sidewalk, pushed his way through
the batwing doors into the gloomy coolness of the saloon. His step
was light and wary, and his right hand rarely swung more than three
or four inches away from the tied-down holster at his side. The
holster was an unusual one; unlike most it was a one-piece
construction, an expensive gun rig in which the holster and belt
had been cut entirely from the same piece of leather. The belt was,
like the man’s saddle, studded with silver. The holster was
hand-stitched and reinforced, with a deep cutaway section carefully
shaped to expose the maximum amount of butt, trigger guard, and
trigger for an exceptionally fast and easy draw.

The stranger’s wary gait
and his ornate gun belt could hardly have escaped the notice of the
few solitaire-and-whisky cases who were in the saloon this early in
the day. These few stared in speculation as the man approached the
bar. He favored them with a fleeting, narrow-eyed glance and then
ignored them. Tyler came bustling along to serve the newcomer. His
bonhomie fell away like autumn leaves as he looked into the cold
green eyes.