From the ridgetop came a single shot.
Benton looked back. Two or three horses were milling around up there.
Don’t want to push us too close, thought Benton, exultantly, after what happened back on the other side of the ridge.
At the bottom of the slope, he was only a few yards behind Jingo Charley. Looking back, he saw the Anchor riders, plunging down the slope.
Got their nerve back, he told himself.
The canyon walls closed in around them, dark and foreboding. Boulders choked the tiny trickle of water that meandered down the stream bed. Brush grew thick against the banks.
Ahead of him Jingo Charley was dismounting, slapping the pony’s rump with his hat. Startled, the horse charged up the stream bed.
Jingo yelled at him. “Get off. We can hole up and hold them off.”
Benton jumped from his horse and the black went tearing after Jingo’s mount.
“You take that side,” Jingo yelled at him. “I’ll take this.”
“But you’re hit,” Benton told him. “Are you…”
“Fit as a fiddle,” Jingo told him. “Bullet went through my arm slick as a whistle. Nothing to it.”
Below them, down near the canyon’s mouth, came the clatter of hoofs on stones, the excited yell of riders.
Turning, Benton plunged into the brush, clambered up the talus slope beneath the grim wall of the canyon.
Behind a boulder he squatted down, gun held across his knee. Below him the canyon spread out like a detailed map.
Looking at it, he grinned. With him here and Charley over on the other side, not even a rabbit could stir down there that they couldn’t see. And with the canyon walls rearing straight above them, no one could get at them from any other direction. Anything or anyone that came into that canyon were dead meat to their guns.
The sun slanted down the canyon’s narrow notch and squatting by the boulder, Benton felt the warmth of it against his shoulders.
It made him think of other times. Of the tensed hush when a Yankee column was trotting down the road straight into a gun trap. Of the moments when he crouched beneath a ridge, waiting the word that would send him…and others…charging up the hill into the mouths of flaming guns.
This was it again, but in a different way. This was home without the peace that he had dreamed about in the nights of bivouac.
Far below a horse’s hoof clicked restlessly from a bush somewhere nearby, a rasping sound that filled the afternoon.
Something went wrong, Benton told himself. Some of them must have seen Ellen riding back to warn us and they set a new trap for us. Or it may have been the same trap all along. Maybe they meant for old man Madox and Ellen to see them…
But that was too complicated, he knew. He shook his head. It would have been simpler for them just to have waited at the Fork.
The minutes slipped along and the sun slid across the sky.
Benton fidgeted behind his boulder. There was no sign of the riders, no sound to betray their presence.
“Jingo,” he called softly.
“Yes, kid, what do you want?”
“I’m coming over.”
“O.K. Take it easy.”
Cautiously, Benton slid down the hillside. At the trickle of water in the streambed, he wet his handkerchief, clawed his way up the opposite bank.
“Jingo?”
“Right over here. What you got?”
“Going to fix up that arm of yours,” said Benton.
He slipped into the bushes beside the old man, rolled up his sleeve, baring the bloody arm. A bullet had ripped through a muscle. Not a bad wound, Benton declared.
Jingo chuckled. “Got them stopped, kid. They set a trap for us and now we got one set for them. And they ain’t having none of it.”
“What about our horses?”
“Blind canyon,” said Jingo. “Can’t get out less they grow wings.”
Swiftly, efficiently, Benton washed and bound the arm. It was not the first wound he had tied up and taken care of in the last few years.
“We better be getting out of here,” he said.
Jingo hissed softly. “Something moving down there.” He pointed with a finger and Benton saw the slight waving of a bush, just a bit more than the wind would stir it.
They waited. Another bush stirred. A stick crunched.
“It’s Indian Joe,” Jingo whispered. “Figuring to sneak up on us. Only one in the whole bunch that could of got this far.”
Squinting his eyes, Benton could make out the dark face of a crawling man on the opposite bank…a dark, evil face that almost blended with the foliage…almost, not quite.
“Flip you for him,” said Jingo softly.
Benton shook his head. “I got mine today. You go ahead and take him.”
Suddenly he felt calm, calm and sure. Back at the old business again. Back at the job of the last four years. Back at the work of killing.
Slowly Jingo raised his gun, the hammer snicked back with a soft metallic sound.
Then the gun roared, deafening in the bush-shrouded canyon, the sound caught up and buffeted about, flung back and forth by the towering walls of stone.
“Got him!” yelled Jingo. “Got him…no, by Lord, just nicked him.”
The bushes had come to life.
Jingo’s gun blasted smoke and flame again.
“Look at him go!” yelled Jingo. “Look at that feller leg it!”
Whipping bushes advancing swiftly down the bank marked Indian Joe’s going.
“Damn it,” said Jingo, ruefully, “I must be getting old. Should of let you have him.”
The silence came again, silence broken only by a tiny wind that moaned now and then high up the cliff, broken by the shrilling of an insect in the sun-drenched land.
They waited, hunched in the bushes, studying the canyon banks. No bush moved. Nothing happened. The sun sank lower and the shadows lengthened.
“Guess they must of give up,” Jingo decided.
“I’ll scout down the canyon,” said Benton. “You catch up the horses.”
Moving cautiously, Benton set out down the canyon, eyes studying every angle of the terrain before advancing.
But there was no sign of the Anchor riders, no sign or sound.
At the mouth of the canyon he found the hoof-trampled spot where they had milled their horses and leading out from it were tracks, heading back into the hills.
Something white fluttered in the wind and he strode toward it.
It was a piece of paper, wedged in the cleft of a stick that had been left between two rocks.
Angrily, Benton jerked the paper loose, read the pencil scrawled message:
Benton, we let you off this time. You got 24 hours to git out. After that we shoot you on sight.
IV
Benton’s father was out in the yard, chopping wood, when they rode in. At the sight of them, he slapped the axe into the chopping block, left it sticking there, hobbled toward the gate to meet them. Benton saw there was worry on his face.
“I come back again,” said Jingo.
“Glad to have you,” Benton’s father said.
To Benton, he said: “There’s someone in the house to see you, son.”
“You go ahead,” Jingo told the younger man. “I’ll put up the horses.”
Benton vaulted off the black.
“How’s mother?”
“Some better,” said his father. “She’s sleeping now.”
The sun was slanting through the windows of the living room, making bars of golden light across the worn carpeting.
In the dusk of one corner, a woman rose from a chair, moved out into the slash of sunlight.
“Jennie!” said Benton. “Jennie…”
“I heard that you were back,” she told him.
>
He stood unmoving, staring at her, at the golden halo that the sunlight flung around her head, at the straightness of her, and wished that her face were not in the shadow.
“You came for something?” he asked and hated himself for it. It was not the way, he knew, to talk to a woman that he had intended to marry. Not the sharp, hard way to speak to a woman whose memory he had carried through four long and bloody years.
“I came to ask you to take care of yourself…to stay out of trouble.”
“Trouble?” he asked. “What do you mean, trouble?”
She flushed angrily. “You know what I mean, Ned. Trouble with the Anchor. Why don’t you leave, there’s nothing for you here.”
“Nothing but the land that was stolen from me.”
“You’ll be killed. You can’t fight them, all alone.”
“Did Bill Watson send you here to ask me this?”
Her voice rose until it was almost shrill. “You know he didn’t, Ned. You know I wouldn’t do a thing like that. He doesn’t even know I’m here.”
He gave a short, hard laugh.
“You’re a bitter man,” she told him.
“I have a right to be,” he said.
She moved toward him, two hesitant steps, then stopped.
“Ned,” she said softly. “Ned.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t wait.”
“You thought that I was dead,” Benton said, heavily. “There was no use of waiting then.”
“Bill was the one who told me,” she said. “He was the one that started the story. Said he heard it from a man who had been with you.”
“So you married him,” said Benton. “He told you I was dead and then he married you.”
She flared at Benton. “I hate him. Do you hear? I hate him. He’s a beast…a dirty, drunken beast.”
For a moment Benton saw this very room as he remembered it. A shining place with a warm glow to it. A shining room and a laughing girl. But the room was dingy now, dingy with the shafts of sunlight only adding to its dreariness.
A room with a laughing ghost. And the ghost, he knew, didn’t square with the woman who stood before him.
The room was cold and empty…like his heart and brain. Nothing matters, he thought, watching her. Nothing matters now. A cause broken on a bloody battlefield that stretched across four years, a dream shattered by a woman who wouldn’t wait, land that one had thought of as a home stolen by those who stayed at home while he went out to fight.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I’m sorry that I said anything about it.”
“You won’t make trouble then? You will leave?”
A dull rage shook him for a moment and then flickered out, leaving dull gray ash that was bitter on his tongue.
“You shouldn’t have come here at all,” he said.
Standing without moving, he heard her walk toward the door. For a moment she stopped and he thought she was going to speak, but she didn’t. She stood there for a few long seconds and then moved on.
The door creaked open and his father’s voice was speaking.
“Leaving so soon, Jennie?”
“Yes, it’s getting late. They will wonder where I’ve been.”
“Jingo will get your horse for you.”
“No thanks. I can get him myself. He’s in the stall next to the door.”
The door closed and his father’s heavy feet tramped along the porch. Voices sounded for a moment and then he came back in again. Benton walked out into the hall.
“Jingo tells me he got hit in the arm,” his father said.
Benton nodded. “Ran into some trouble. The Anchor gang jumped us at the Forks.”
The old man stood silent for a moment. “Your mother’s feeling lots better today,” he finally said. “Happy about you being back. If anything happened now, Ned, I think that it would kill her.”
“I’ll be careful,” Benton promised.
Out in the kitchen he could hear Jingo rattling pans and poking up the fire.
He tiptoed to the door of his mother’s room and looked in. She was asleep, with a smile upon her face. Quietly he tiptoed back again, out to the kitchen.
“Slow down a bit,” he said to Jingo. “Mother is asleep.”
Jingo looked at him quizzically. “What you aiming to do, kid?”
“That herd the Anchor’s gathering,” said Benton, quietly. “We can’t let them start. Some of them are our cattle they’re figuring to drive north.”
“Ain’t no trick at all to spook a cow,” Jingo told him.
Benton’s father spoke quietly from the doorway. “Some of the others would help.”
“Might need some help,” Jingo admitted. “Probably quite a crowd of Anchor hombres out watching them cows.”
“Madox and his boy would give us a hand,” said Benton’s father. “And the two Lee brothers over at the Quarter Circle D.”
“You’re going, too?” asked Jingo.
The elder Benton nodded. “I’ll get Mrs. Madox to come over and stay with Ma.”
He looked at his son. “Sound all right to you, Ned?”
“You’ll have plenty without me,” said Benton. “I’m going to ride over and have a talk with Old Dan Watson.”
Benton sat his horse on the windy ridge top, staring down at the chuck wagon fire a mile or so away. Vague, ghostly forms were moving about it and at times he caught the snatch of bellowed words, carried by the wind, mauled by the whipping breeze until they made no sense, but were only sounds of human voice.
Out beyond the fire a dark lake was massed on the prairie…a dark lake that was the trail herd gathered for the north. Occasionally Benton heard the click of horns, a subdued moo, but that was all. The herd had settled for the night, was being watched, no doubt, by circling riders.
In the east the sky was lighting, signaling the moon that was about to rise. Starlight glittered in the sky and the wind talked with silken voices in the grass.
Benton whirled his black, headed south.
Half an hour later the Anchor ranch buildings came in sight.
The bunk house, he saw, was dark, but lights blazed in the front room of the big ranch house.
Benton pulled the black to a walk, went in slowly, half prepared for the challenge or the bullet that might come out of the dark.
The plopping of the horse’s hoofs against the earth sounded loud in Benton’s ears, but there was no stir around the buildings, no signs of life at all except the lighted windows.
One horse was tied at the hitching post and before he dismounted, Benton sat there for a moment, watching and listening. The sound of voices came through the window that opened on the porch. But that was all.
He tied his horse, walked softly up the porch steps, crossed to the door.
Then, with knuckles lifted to knock, the sound of a voice stopped him. A loud, arrogant voice that boomed through the window. A voice that he had heard that day.
“…He’s on the prod, Dan. We can’t have him stirring up a fuss. I’d never agreed to the deal if I hadn’t thought you’d take care of things.”
Benton froze. The voice of Coleman Gray, the banker, coming from the window!
Old Dan Watson’s growl came: “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of Ned Benton…and any of the others that start raising hell.”
Slowly, Benton let his hand drop to his side, shuffled softly from the door, pressed his body tight against the house.
“You got me into this,” Gray whined. “You were the ones that figured it all out.”
“You were damn quick to jump at it,” growled Dan Watson’s voice, “when you figured there wasn’t any chance of being caught. But now that young Benton’s come back, you got cold feet.”
“But you said he wouldn’t come back,” Gray yelled. “You said
you’d see to it that he never did.”
Quick steps sounded on the porch and Benton whirled, but he was too slow. A hard finger of metal jammed into his back and a mocking voice spoke.
“Damned if it ain’t the hero, come back from the war.”
Benton choked with rage.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Your old friend,” said the voice back of him. “Snake McAfee.”
“Look, Snake. I was just coming over to see Dan.”
“Just a friendly visit,” snarled Snake. “Damn funny way to go about it, listening at a window.”
He jabbed the gun into Benton’s back. “In you go. The boss will want to see you.”
Urged by the gun, Benton turned toward the door. Snake McAfee yelled and the door swung open. Bill Watson stood on the threshold, wonder on his face at the sight of Benton.
“Good evening, Bill,” said Benton.
Behind him McAfee jabbed with the gun and growled. “Get on in, damn you.”
Bill Watson stood to one side, triumph flaming across his face. His lips parted in a flabby, oily smile.
Benton stepped across the threshold, on into the living room. McAfee, gun still in his hand, slid along the wall, stood with his back against it.
Old Dan Watson sat stolid, red face turning purple, strong, pudgy hands gripping the arms of the rocking chair in which he rested. The banker’s jaw dropped, then snapped shut again, like a steel trap closing. Behind his back, Benton heard young Watson snickering.
“Found him listening just outside the window,” Snake McAfee told the room.
“What did you hear?” Old Dan Watson asked and his words were slow and ponderous, as if he had all the time in the world to deal with this situation and would not be hurried.
Benton flicked a look at Gray and saw the man was sweating, literally sweating in terror.
“No use of talking about what I heard,” said Benton. “Let’s talk about what we’re going to do.”
“Sensible,” Watson grunted and rocked a lick or two in the rocking chair.
“The two of you fixed it up between you to rob your neighbors,” said Benton, bluntly.