“That’s the bunkhouse over there.”
Lance took the hint and departed, leading his horse.
When the man was out of earshot, Fallon said, “You should have investigated him better. I know he’s got that diamond-and-silver thong clasp, but all the same, this territory may get to be a state most anytime and the government would sure want to clean the place up first. He might be a spy.”
“Uh-huh, and if he is, then maybe we can use him. But he might be Windy Green. I’ve heard tell that man was poison. Tell you what you do, Fallon. You spread it around through the outfit that this may not be the man he says he is. That way, they won’t let him get away with anything. But if he is Windy Green, I’m glad to have him. We’ll have a tough fight on our hands sooner or later and every gun’ll count. Meantime, speed up with that trail herd. The buyers’ll be getting impatient up north and we might have to skip out with plenty of cash.”
“Right,” said Fallon, and followed Lance’s course toward the bunkhouse.
During the next few days, Lance had every chance to inspect the Three B ranch, but strangely, none of the punchers or gunslingers seemed to pay any heed to his cautious questions and he finally had to be content with what he could guess.
They were a hard crowd, the Three B. Collected from every corner of that wide-flung range, from the Mississippi to the Golden Gate, they represented the worst of their kind. In another period when men talked first and let the law shoot it out later, these men would have found their way to the captains of crime and would have been content with the gutters.
But something in the bigness of the Southwest, something in the hard, perilous life they led, had given them a brand of courage which, though it might be classed with the proverbial cornered rat’s, was nevertheless a type of valor. They were blustering when they knew they were safe, they were bullying until they were called, they were efficient in a hard-fisted, arrogant way, as long as their leaders were just a little bit harder and tougher than they.
For three days Lance Gordon rode with them, cutting out a trail herd from a dozen different brands, working over Triple Hs and Bar Sevens and Flying Ys into crude Three Bs with the use of wet gunnysacking and running irons. The whole cradle of the valley stunk with the smell of burned hair and wood smoke. The Baron was working fast, getting this herd into shape and away before the word that they were coming preceded them. To the north there was law.
As a matter of cold fact, the Baron and his kind were not too far from their victims. The cattlemen of the wide plains had founded their own herds upon rustled stock from the Mexicans. But with fifty straight-shooting men at his back, the Baron’s might made right, and the range, unable to recruit enough rifles, unwilling to die for a few cattle, did not dare protest too loudly when even the two troops of cavalry were powerless against the Baron.
Lance stumbled over his first obstacle in the person of a man named Bat Summers, a fellow six feet tall and all muscle, even between the ears. Bat Summers habitually wore an antagonistic expression, which went with the notched and well-worn butt of his gun.
On the third morning, still groggy with sleep, Lance built his loop and whisked it into the remuda, aiming for a bay of his string. But the light was bad and the rope, thanks to the cold of that high altitude, was stiff, and perhaps Lance, used to open country and a sixty-five-foot grass rope, could not quite accustom himself to a lariat forty feet long. The loop fell short and dropped neatly about the head of a rearing black.
Lance, disgusted, began to take in. A clap of thunder at his side said, “That’s my hoss!”
“I gotta free my rope, haven’t I?” said Lance.
“I said that’s my hoss,” repeated Bat Summers.
The man was looking for trouble and Lance gave it to him. In a sudden burst of anger, Lance tossed the end of the tight rope, whip fashion, about Bat’s ankles. The black, sensing the looseness, plunged away. The curling rope lashed itself tight and brought Bat’s feet out from under him. He sat down hard in the dust, swearing.
“You did that on purpose!” roared Bat.
“Sure I did,” said Lance, evenly. “Going to do anything about it?”
Bat leaped up and rocked forward on the balls of his feet, palm flat and going down. Murder flickered in his eyes.
Lance stepped back a pace and sprang to one side, drawing swiftly with a queerly loose motion. Bat’s gun belched flame. But before Bat could fire again, Lance had fanned twice.
Bat doubled up with a startled grunt, dropping his gun. Blood began to run between his fingers as he clutched his chest. Eyes staring with disbelief, he crumpled into the dust.
Lance walked away but Fallon was in his path.
“What’s the idea?” said Fallon. “We needed that feller. Cantcha keep your head or what?”
“You lookin’ for trouble, too?” said Lance.
Fallon backed hastily away, flapping his arms. “No . . . no . . .”
Lance went on, undisturbed.
The incident in itself was small enough, but it had its effect by bringing Lance to the Baron’s attention.
The Baron, that evening, sent for the supposed Windy Green.
“Hear you can’t keep your gun in,” said the Baron, leaning back in a chair and stabbing Lance with his sucked-in eyes.
“He asked for it, I gave him the break.”
“Uh-huh, I know. But funny as it seems to you, Windy Green, I need every man I’ve got. And now you’ve made me lose two.”
“Two?” said Lance, sensing the presence of other men on the porch.
“You and Bat Summers. Two.”
“Y’ain’t thinking of anything rash are you?” said Lance.
“Uh-huh. But old Dave Sweeny just carted in a load of chuck and he’s going out again in the morning. He says you bein’ a friend of his, he’ll be glad to take you east a ways, seeing that you don’t stop off around Santos. Know him, don’t you?”
“You never can tell,” said Lance. “But what’s the idea shipping me out? I’m . . .”
“I don’t care anything about that. But this trouble might start other trouble and it’s hard enough to keep gunslingers peaceful.”
Footsteps came from the porch and an old man with a white beard looked hazily into the room.
“Come in, Sweeny,” said the Baron.
“That you, Windy?” said the old man, peering closely at Lance.
Lance froze. He took in the room quickly. Men on the porch, a saddled horse at the side of the house, a lamp burning smokily upon the table and a window behind him.
“Hell, you ain’t Windy Green,” said Sweeny.
The Baron rocked forward in his chair, hand racing toward his shoulder holster. Men moved fast on the porch, coming in.
Lance swept up the lamp and sent it crashing against the table. A wall of flame sprang between him and the Baron.
A man fired through the doorway. Lance dived through the window and lit in a rolling heap. Colts roared behind him.
He snatched at the reins, breaking them with a jerk, and sprang into the saddle. He jabbed his spurs into the mount’s flanks and hanging low over the horn, shot out across the meadow.
Behind him the hut, half lumber and half ’dobe was bursting into great tongues of flame.
“There’s your signal, Tyler,” panted Lance, riding hard.
CHAPTER FOUR
Santos Again
THE Baron’s office might be burning, but that in no way interfered with pursuit. In the dusk a string of riders lashed out of the camp, riding fast to the crack of romals and quirts.
Lance looked back at them and then up at the entrance to the pass. There, he knew, he would find two guards who would know, merely by looking at the uproar, that Lance must be stopped, preferably dead in his tracks.
But there was no other escape from the valley a
nd Lance could hardly turn back. And so he rode straight at the boulders which might momentarily spew death at him.
The Baron’s success, so thought the Baron, depended upon stopping the man who might be a spy. Lance knew that swift bullets already had his name scratched on their blue noses.
The boulders grew bigger and bigger ahead of him. Abruptly two men detached themselves from the rock and leveled their rifles. Involuntarily, Lance checked his horse. The threat of the guns was too plain. Perhaps . . . but it was a wild thought. He couldn’t ride them down. They’d gladly drop him at the first sign of resistance. Perhaps other men had tried to escape this way.
Hoofs rolled closer behind him and the line of racing men began to bunch up for the kill. Once Lance had ridden down a wolf out on the wide prairies. The wolf had looked back at him with hate and fear in its yellow eyes and had finally turned to face an enemy he must have known meant death.
Lance knew now how that wolf had felt and, for a fleeting instant, he was sorry he had killed it.
The tall, cadaverous guard sang out, “Pull in and get down!”
Lance pulled in under the muzzle of the Henry rifle, but he did not get down. The two guards moved closer to him, eyeing him with thin distaste.
“Drop him,” said the man known as Harry.
Lance tried to get at his own gun, but he knew that he couldn’t make it. Harry’s finger was already tight on the trigger.
Suddenly flame and thunder rolled out of the boulders and Lance thought for an instant that Harry had fired. But Harry dropped into the darkness, throwing the rifle away as he went down. The other man, Jim, cried out in surprise and whirled upon the boulders.
Another shot echoed through the valley and Jim pitched down on his face, making no effort at all to save himself.
From the boulders came Tyler’s command, “Ride, you damned fool!”
Lance’s quirt cracked and the Spanish spurs dug deep. Bullets sang about him from the riders who drew close behind. The startled horse reared and then leveled out in swift flight.
As he passed the boulders, Tyler swung out of the darkness, half mounted on the running mustang. As he settled himself into the saddle he took a backward shot at the string of men who poured up the trail.
Side by side, Lance and Tyler raced down the length of the pass.
“That was close,” shouted Lance. “Thanks.”
“I saw your signal,” said Tyler. “And boy, when you make signals, you don’t stint yourself none.”
The running legs of their horses carried them into the spreading blackness of the night. Time after time the darkness behind them was lit by the flash of a revolver. Bullets sang off the blank pass walls and screamed up toward the stars.
They went on, silent now in their determination. Three miles of pass slowly reeled off and they were again in open country, plunging perilously down a mountain slope, tripping and swerving away from abruptly looming obstacles.
And then Tyler pulled in and listened.
“They’ve lost us,” he announced.
“It’s about time. This cayuse is about foundered.”
“What did you learn down there, pardner?”
Lance looked back at the ragged silhouettes of the range. “He’s got fifty men and the place couldn’t be cracked by an army. But he’s sending a trail herd north in a couple days. Twenty men are going with it, I hear.”
“Shore, and that leaves only about thirty for the two of us. Got any ideas?”
“None.”
“Huh, neither have I. But doggoned if they can ship my pore cows out of their home like that. It’s plumb cruel. The Baron figure to make a fast cleaning?”
“That’s what I understand, and there’s nothing to stop him. He’ll have this range stripped in a couple weeks.”
“Won’t do no good to send word north. Cows is cows up there. And won’t do no good to send word to Santos. Anything we say’d be poison to their ears.”
“We ought to do something. You’ve got me weepin’ salt tears about them poor cows of yours.”
“Uh-huh, and I reckon Coyote River’ll run torrents before I ever see them again. And they was such nice cows too. Big, soulful eyes, with lovin’ dispositions. And they liked family life. Never see such affection for one another. And they used to beller plaintively whenever I’d come around. I’ll tell a man, pardner, we’ve got to do something about my pore cows.”
Once they heard hoofbeats far to the right and they dismounted to render themselves more invisible. Lance gripped the sticky butt of his Colt, expecting to shoot it out after all. But the noise died.
“They couldn’t find a mustang in a corral,” said Tyler. “You got any ideas, yet?”
“We might head off the trail herd when it goes out. That’d slow things up considerable.”
“Won’t do no good. It’s things like this that hold up Arizony from becomin’ a state like people want. Look at Nevada, for instance. Been a state for years. Look at Texas. Been twenty-five years since they was admitted to the Union. But Arizony . . .
“Look what’s happened every time they’ve tried. Some wise yahoos go up to Prescott and say they want us to be a state and then put a lot of things in our constitution a goat couldn’t digest. About time somebody did something about it. We ain’t even got good cavalry, not blamin’ Anderson none.
“Time somebody did something when fellers like the Baron come in and walk off with my pore cows. I got half a notion to send Washington a telegram about it.”
“That wouldn’t do any good,” said Lance, practically. “I was in Washington once and all they got is a lot of shorthorns walkin’ around in high hats with big words in their mouths. You got to know somebody to get anything in Washington.”
“Well, I know Sam Thorpe. He was out here for a couple years when they sent that crowd of pilgrims to Prescott to govern us. Never see such a thing. They sent them fellers out bag and baggage, territorial government complete, and you know something? Not one of them gents could stick a bronc. And they rode bouncin’ up and down and tried to tell us that was the style. Said it was park walkin’, or maybe postin’, but that didn’t take me in. I spent my whole life tryin’ to keep daylight from showin’ between me and the saddle, and then when they can’t, they tell us it’s the style. Yah!”
“What about this Sam Thorpe?”
“He was a kind of judge or something, but he wasn’t a bad feller. He wanted to see the territory and so I showed him what I could of it. But hell, we’d only been out a month and we couldn’t see more’n one section and he wouldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it all. Guess it’s so big he got tired lookin’ at it. He came from a shorthorn state named Rhode Island. And Rhode Island, they tell me, has been a state for years and, hell, we’re bigger’n six hundred Rhode Islands.”
“What’s this gent Thorpe now?”
“I dunno. I haven’t heard from him for goin’ on a year. But the last time he said he was something-something to the secretary of war, or maybe it was something else. General or something.”
“Maybe it was an attorney general.”
Hoofs clinked to their left and again they sat up, guns in hand, looking intently through the curtain of night. But soon the sound faded.
“Yep,” said Tyler. “That’s right. Attorney general. But when a man’s an assistant to a secretary, he ain’t much. I borrowed Slim Johnson’s dictionary and looked it up and it said a secretary is a feller that writes letters for somebody else. That don’t make Sam very much, does it.”
“Wouldn’t seem so,” said Lance. “I ain’t got much of an idea about it, but it seems to me that the attorney general has charge of justice.”
“Some kind of a judge, huh?”
“That’s right. Must be a soft job, judgin’ those slick-ears in the East. They never do nothin’.”
>
Tyler spun his Colts idly, thinking hard. “Maybe if I telegraphed Sam Thorpe he might do something about the Baron takin’ all these cows up north. I dunno. You know, we got a railroad into Santos now. That’s how they got word about you so fast. Supposin’ we just mosey down there and send Sam Thorpe a telegram. I always wanted to send one of the blamed things, but I never had nobody to send one to.”
They sat still for an hour but evidently the Baron’s men had tired of the search. Finally they mounted their horses and picked their way down to the Coyote River.
“We won’t let Brant or Anderson see us,” said Tyler. “They don’t seem to appreciate our efforts at civic betterment. They told me they’d hang me if they saw me again and I guess they meant it. Trouble is, I took too much off’n them at poker the other night and they’re itchin’ for my scalp.”
They rode silently after that, threading down the trail which skirted the bases of great, sheer-walled mesas and rock pinnacles which jutted out of the sand to black height against the stars.
Soon they picked up the lights of Santos, but Santos was still three hours’ ride away. As they approached there was no greater brilliance to the yellow sparks. They seemed to be standing still.
A train whistled, a foreign sound to this expanse. Tyler turned to Lance. “Hear that? Who says we ain’t gettin’ fancied up. That’s a real, honest-to-God train.”
The lights in the coaches strung out, moving slowly in the distance. The train whistled again and, after being in sight for two hours, melted into the blue darkness of the west.
At the outskirts of Santos, Lance and Tyler climbed down and tied their horses to a clump of brush.
“This is going to be risky,” said Lance. “Somebody may be hanging around the station.”
“Mebbe,” grunted Tyler.
Spurs tinkling musically on the platform, they went up to the lighted office. They did not stop at the wicket; they pushed open the door and strode into the room.
The operator glanced up at them through his green eyeshade and took a tuck in his black sleeve guards. He moved nervously back when he saw that both Tyler and Lance held drawn guns.