Novel 1969 - Conagher (v5.0) Read online

  Conagher swore. He had meant to hit him, but it was evidence of his weakness that he had missed. “You,” he said to Casuse, “you get my horse and saddle up, and don’t try anything foolish.”

  Moving slightly to keep the Mexican under his eyes, he watched him saddle up and carefully tighten the girth.

  Conagher then moved around to pick up the reins with his left hand. His grip on the gun was very weak. Parnell was watching him.

  “Hell,” the outlaw said, “you’re so weak you can scarcely stand.”

  “You want to see how weak? Reach for your gun.”

  “No,” Parnell said practically, “because you’ve got just sand enough left in you to kill me.”

  Conagher turned, reached for the pommel, but never made it. He felt his knees giving way under him, grabbed at a stirrup, and it slipped through his fingers. He hit the ground on his face and lay still.

  For a long moment nobody moved. Pete Casuse stared at Conagher, then looked at Smoke briefly. “There lies a man,” he said, and then he glanced again at Parnell. “What was that town you were tellin’ me about? Was it Milestown?”

  “Up Montana way,” Parnell said, “and I think that’s a good idea.”

  He hesitated a moment, then threw back the blankets, sitting still until he was sure Conagher was not going to move.

  Fascinated but frightened, Curly Scott was staring at the fallen man, and then he looked at Smoke. “Are you going to kill him?”

  “Kill him?” Smoke Parnell turned around sharply. “Kid, you don’t know what you’re sayin’. I may be an outlaw, but I never yet murdered anybody in cold blood, least of all an hombre. And there, as my friend Casuse will agree, is an hombre that is an hombre.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We—me an’ Pete—we’re ridin’ back to the outfit and we’re going to pick up Kris and Tile and we’re heading for Montana. We’re ridin’ north with the spring.”

  “What about me?” Scott protested.

  “You stay with him. When he’s well enough to ride, take him back to Seaborn Tay. He’s worth more to this country than that whole outfit. And while you’re with him, kid, you watch him. If you ever get to be half the man he is, you come back and ride with me if you think you’re still cut out for an outlaw.”

  When they were gone, Curly Scott stirred up the fire and started to drag the unconscious man closer. Then, worried at what he might do if he woke up, he just eased him onto a ground sheet, covered him over with blankets, and sat down to wait for daybreak.

  Several times he turned to look at the sleeping man. He was dirty and unshaven, and his clothes were worn and bloody, but there was something about him, even in sleep, that spoke of what kind of a man he was.

  Conagher stirred restlessly, muttering something about the wind in the grass.

  “Tumbleweed…” he murmured, “rolling like wheels…like wheels…”

  The words made no sense to Scott, but then, when did words spoken in delirium ever make sense?

  Chapter 14

  *

  TWO WEEKS AFTER his return to the ST, Conagher was riding again. He had wanted to go back to work after two days, but Tay would have none of it.

  “You lay up for a while. Get some rest. Thing like that takes more out of a man than he knows.”

  Conagher mended a bridle, fixed the hinges on the corral gate, sank some post holes for a fence around the kitchen garden, and generally kept busy.

  He had lost a lot of blood and he had missed some meals, but such things were all in the day’s work. He had never had it easy, and did not expect to now. Johnny McGivern had stayed on, and they had hired Curly Scott, whose sister had gone on to California without ever seeing him.

  March came to an end and April passed, and the grass was green from the spring rains, the prairies covered with wildflowers. The stock was fat and lazy, and Conagher rode wide, once even stopping by the Ladder Five, but the buildings were deserted and still, and tumbleweeds were piled against the corral after the spring winds.

  Conagher swung the dun horse and walked him over to look at the tumbleweeds. Sure enough, there was something grayish-white on one of them near the bottom. Conagher pulled the tumbleweeds away until he could get at the note.

  It was an old note, and must have been written late in the fall. It could scarcely be read, it was so faded.

  It is very cold, and I am often alone here. How I wish someone would come!

  He read it and re-read it, then tucked it away, folded in a little bundle with the others. There was no accounting for what a lonely person would do; he knew that of his own experience. He was often alone, and like all men who rode alone he often talked to his horse. You got cabin fever after a while when you lived alone, and you just had to talk, and this was a lonely woman somewhere away off up north who needed to talk to somebody.

  He prowled around the Ladder Five for a while. Nobody had been there for quite a while. In fact, they must have pulled out right after that time in the mountains. He had come out of it himself to find only young Scott with him, who had fixed him up some chow and they ate there together until they rode back to the ST.

  As he rode away he turned in the saddle to look back. The Ladder Five was a good layout. Nobody owned it. Parnell and his outlaws had just squatted there, fixed things up enough to get along, and stayed on.

  The ranch lay in a small cove in the rock wall of the mountain, with a few trees behind it and a clump off to one side that would break the wind. The house was solid and there was a good supply of water. The grass was green and the range lay out before it. Taken altogether, it was the sort of place where an honest man could do well by settling.

  Several times during his ride back to the ST headquarters, Conn took out the notes and read them over. They didn’t say much when you came right down to it, but they told of a lonely girl somewhere far off. Likely she didn’t see many folks, stuck out on the plains.

  Conagher rode up to the bunk house and got down and began throwing his duffel together.

  Leggett came from the barn and watched him without comment for a few minutes, and then he said, “You lightin’ a shuck?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The Old Man will be some put out. He sets store by you.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “You better talk to him. He wants to make you foreman. He told me so, and it’s right he should. You saved his outfit for him.”

  “I did my job.”

  “You done more. You done more than anybody could have expected.”

  Conagher straightened up. “Mister, when I hire on for a man, I ride for him. I ride for his outfit. If I don’t like things I quit. I’ve got me a horse and a saddle and there’s a lot of country I ain’t seen, but when a man hires me I figure he hires my savvy and what all I can do.”

  “You run those outlaws clean out of the country.”

  Conagher shook his head. “I’d not say that. I just worried them to where it wasn’t what you’d call comfortable for them. Nobody likes to laze it around more than an outlaw, and you keep him stirred up and he’ll usually move. Well, I sort of stirred them up.”

  When his blankets were rolled and his gear packed he went up to the house and asked the cook for coffee. Seaborn Tay came in and dropped into a chair. “How’s the range look?”

  “Good. There was a good fall of snow and most of it sank right in. No runoff to speak of. I’d say you’d a mighty handsome year ahead.” He sipped his coffee. “Mr. Tay, I want to draw my time.”

  “Now see here, Conagher. You can’t just up and leave a man that way. I need you. I was figurin’ on you for foreman. I’m not as spry as I should be, and like you maybe guessed, I’ve got a bad heart. I’ll give you a hundred a month.”

  “Nope.”

  “Look, where are you going to find that much? You’ve been riskin’ your neck for thirty a month and you deserve to get more. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you a hundred a month and a ten per cent sh
are.”

  “I want to ride north. I got business up there.”

  Tay argued quietly, but Conagher merely sipped his coffee. The cook put a piece of pie before him, and he ate it.

  “Things work out, I may be back. But I’ll be back to lay claim to the Ladder Five. I won’t be workin’ for you, but I’ll be your neighbor.”

  “You got a girl somewhere? You gettin’ married?”

  “I can’t say. I’ve never been married, and don’t figure I’m the sort to stand hitched.”

  Well, when it came to that, he didn’t know. Somehow, when girling time came around he was always too backward, or else he was off riding the range where you couldn’t find a girl. Other men no better off than he was had found some pretty fine women, here and yonder…and some miserable ones, too. It kind of scared a man.

  He was no youngster any more, and it was no time to start building fancies, yet when it came to that, why not?

  Anybody could dream, and it seemed to him that girl who’d been tying those notes to tumbleweeds had been doing a sight of dreaming. So he would just ride north, camp along the way, and kind of look the country over. When he came to a lonely cabin he’d find that girl, all right. He would know her anywhere.

  It puzzled him how she lived, but he decided she was the daughter of some rancher, or maybe of a dirt farmer, or even, perish the thought, a sheepman’s daughter.

  He finished his coffee, pocketed the money Tay gave him without so much as counting it, and went outside. Tay followed him to the door.

  “Damn it, man,” he said, “why do you have to go tomcattin’ off across the country? You could build yourself into a nice place here, and rightly a piece of it is yours.”

  “I’ll be back some spring, follerin’ the wild geese,” Conagher said, and swung into the saddle. He lifted his hand to Leggett and McGivern, alone in the bunk house now that Euston was gone, and he rode away.

  The grasslands looked greener in the distance than they did close up. He guessed it was always that way.

  Chapter 15

  *

  IT WAS A fool thing he was starting out to do. He was going to try to find the girl who was writing those notes. It was foolish to try, because it was about as impossible a task as a man ever set for himself, but it was doubly foolish because what that girl was pining for was a young man, a man younger than Conn Conagher.

  He looked at himself with no illusions. He was a hard-grained man, a man who had lived a hard life, and no great beauty to begin with. He carried scars, inside as well as out, and about all he had left was some years of hard work and a boy’s dream of the girl he would find some day.

  Oh, he had it, all right! Conagher considered himself with sour humor. He was a damn fool who should have outlived all that nonsense years ago. Maybe it was the fault of having read too much of Walter Scott while still not dry behind the ears.

  So here he was, riding north across the plains looking for a will-o’-the-wisp. He checked out every piece of old tumbleweed he saw, but found no messages. He camped at night wherever he could find a good place.

  When a week had gone by without finding a single message, he rode off the plains and headed toward the Plaza. There, in Callahan’s, he met Charlie McCloud.

  “I’ll buy the drinks,” McCloud offered.

  “No, that’s block and tackle whiskey. You take a drink, and then you walk a block and you’ll tackle anything. I’m going to sit with you and have a beer.”

  “From what Smoke Parnell says, you don’t need whiskey. You’ll just tackle anything, any time.”

  “You’ve seen him?”

  “I saw him when he was pullin’ his freight for Montana. He said a decent outlaw couldn’t make a livin’ with you around.”

  “He’s a tough man.”

  McCloud glanced at him. “Didn’t I see you with a blanket roll behind your saddle? Are you drifting again?”

  “I’ve got tumbleweed fever.”

  “You too?”

  “What d’ you mean—me too?”

  “Seems to me half the cowhands in the country are hunting tumbleweeds these days. Somebody found a note tied to one, and that started it.”

  Conagher felt a swell of irritation within him. “Note? What kind of a note?”

  “From some girl up north—at least, she’s probably up north. She’s been writing little notes or poetry or something and tying them to tumbleweeds. Just goes to show what happens when you’re too long alone.”

  “How do you know she’s alone?”

  “The notes sound like it. The cowhands over east of here are makin’ bets on whether she’s short and fat, tall and skinny, a blonde or a brunette.”

  “She’s probably got a husband who’s broader across the shoulders than he is between the eyes,” Conagher said dryly. “They better leave it lay.”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, it’s got them all stirred up. If she keeps it up, all the cow outfits in the country will be shorthanded.”

  Conagher traced circles on the table top with his beer glass. He was annoyed. Couldn’t a man even have a dream by himself? But he should have guessed there would be others who found those notes.

  “How far north have they found them?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. All across the country, I guess. I’ve only talked to them along the stage lines.”

  “A tumbleweed can roll a mighty long way. Hell, that woman may be married and have two kids since she wrote those notes. How you going to tell how old the notes are?”

  Conagher signaled for a refill. “Speakin’ of a woman with two kids,” he said, “how’s that Mrs. Teale gettin’ along?”

  “Had a hard winter, I guess. I haven’t seen or talked to her in three, four weeks. I’ve seen them around when the stage rolls by…they always wave.”

  “Wonder what ever happened to her husband?”

  McCloud shrugged. “He was carrying money. Four hundred in gold, she told me. Now, you know a man can’t just carry money like that unless he’s careful. But there’s a lot could have happened. How many men have you known who rode off and just disappeared?

  “A few years ago,” he went on, “we found an empty stage out on the plains with nobody aboard, the horses feeding along the road, the driver and the two passengers gone. We never did figure out what happened. Maybe they all got out to look at something, or to walk up a steep grade, and something scared the team and they ran off…there’s a lot could have happened. You know about how long a man can last in this country without a horse and without water.”

  In the morning Conagher rode east riding slow, checking the tumbleweeds as he went. They were old tumbleweeds, left over from the previous year, and on the one paper he found, the message had been erased by snow and rain.

  After four days he saw to the north a thin column of smoke rising that he knew was on the Teale place, and he swung his horse and rode in that direction.

  He had gone no more than fifty yards when he saw the trail of at least a dozen riders, going east. The grass was only now springing back into place; they must have gone by within the hour. Off the trail and keeping to low ground, as low as you could find in this almost flat plains country, he went on. Because of the grass, he could find no distinctive prints, but they seemed to be unshod horses.

  “Well, boy,” he said to the horse, “I reckon you better build a fire under your heels. We got some travelin’ to do!”

  He lifted the horse into a gallop, standing in the stirrups from time to time to get a better view of the country. He was close to the Teale place now, and all was quiet there. He could see the boy in the yard cutting wood; he could see him swing the axe, see it fall…and then an instant later he heard the sound.

  He closed in at a hard gallop, swung into the yard and wheeled his horse. “Laban, where’s your ma and sister?”

  “Hi, Mr. Conagher! They went up the draw to pick greens. What’s the matter?”

  “Get in the cabin and stand by for a fight. There are Indians around. I’ll
get the womenfolks!”

  He slicked his Winchester from the scabbard, saw the boy dart for the cabin, and then he went up the draw at a pounding run.

  Evie and Ruthie were coming back, and he wheeled around. “Quick! Get a foot in a stirrup, one on each side! Hurry!”

  “What’s wrong?” Evie asked.

  “’Paches,” he said shortly, and took them back down the draw and wheeled up to the cabin. “Get in, fast,” he said.

  He turned the horse and trotted it to the gate, then swung down, swung the gate open, and led the dun into the shed. He was hurrying toward the cabin when he heard the Indians coming. It was too late to make the cabin, though he saw two gun muzzles showing from loop holes, and knew the Apaches would see them, too.

  They had swung around to the east and approached the cabin walking their horses. He counted eleven, all braves. He had stopped near the door, but out of line with the loop holes.

  One of the warriors he knew by name, at least three of them by sight. Benactiny, often called Benito, was a great warrior, and a fighting man with more than usual wisdom.

  “Hello, Benito,” Conagher said casually. “You boys are pretty far north, aren’t you?”

  “These mountains”—Benactiny swept his hand toward the Mogollons—“were Apache medicine ground. This is our place.”

  “This is a time of change,” Conagher said conversationally. “I heard you were livin’ in the Sierra Madres, in Mexico.”

  “I live there,” the Indian replied sullenly. “Too many white soldier come.”

  “Soldiers never worried Benito,” Conagher said. “Nobody could drive Benactiny and his warriors. Benactiny went because he wished to go. He went to the lonely mountains where there was running water and many trees. He has been happy there.”

  Benactiny’s expression did not change. He was a proud man, as Conagher knew. “You are right,” the Apache said. “Nobody could drive Benactiny, but this is my land, too.”

  “Once it was your land,” Conagher admitted, and then slyly, his expression innocent, he added, “Once it was Mimbres land.”