The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume Five Page 12

  A horse’s hoof clicked on stone and I turned with my hands spread. You don’t pull anything fancy when four men are looking down rifles at you.

  “What did you kill him for?” The speaker was a squat, broad-chested man with a square red face and gimlet eyes. He looked tough as a winter in the mountains, and at least two of the riders with him looked fit to side with the devil on a ride through hell.

  “Don’t jump your fences, pardner,” I told him, pretty chilly. “I didn’t shoot this gent. When I rode into the Cup two hombres were standing here, one right over him. They took a shot at me, then lit out, ridin’ up the valley as I came in.”

  “We heard shootin’,” the square-faced man replied. “He’s dead an’ you’re here.”

  My eyes went over them, sizing them up. Nobody needed to burn any brands on this hide for me. Here I was on the dodge from one killing of which I wasn’t guilty, and now I’d run smack-dab into another. Nobody had seen those other riders but me, so what happened now depended a whole lot on just who and what these men were.

  At first glance I could see there was only one man of the four who would give anybody a break. He was a young fellow with brown eyes and dark hair, and a careful look in his eyes. He looked smart and he looked honest, although a man can be fooled on both counts.

  The square-built man who had done the talking seemed to be the big gee. “Who are you, anyway?” he demanded. “What brings you here?”

  Something in the way he asked that question let me get downwind of an idea. I decided to tell this hombre nothing, least of all that I was Wat Bell. “Why, they call me the Papago Kid, and I’m from down Sonora way.

  “As for what brings me here, it was this black horse brought me, and the trail through the pines. A lot of trails have brought me a lot of places, and”—I added this with some meaning—“when I wanted to ride out, nobody stopped me.”

  His eyes sharpened down and his lips thinned out. I could see the old devil coming up in his eyes. This man was not one you could push far. He figured he was some salty, and he had no liking for being called up to the mark by any casual drifter. However, there was a funny little frown came into his eyes when I mentioned my name; and somehow the idea was there, full-size and ready for branding, that he had expected another name. That feeling was so strong in me that it started me thinking about a lot of things.

  Sometimes a man rides trails and reads sign so long that he develops an instinct for things. There was the strong smell of trouble in my nostrils now, and for some reason I knew that I’d made a good bet when I told him I was the Papago Kid. The funny part of it was that if he could find a way to check back down the Sonora trail, he’d find out I hadn’t lied. A man sometimes can have two names that take separate trails, and if I was young Wat Bell in Dimmit County, Texas, I was also the Papago Kid down in Sonora.

  “Lynch,” the young fellow interrupted, “let’s get in out of this rain, and get the body in, too. I liked old Tom Ludlow, and I don’t like his body lying around like this.” Then he added, “We can talk just as well over some coffee, anyway.”

  Lynch hesitated, still not liking me, and itching for gunplay. “All right,” he agreed, and turning to the other riders, a fat-faced man and a tall, stoop-shouldered rider, he added, “you two pick Ludlow’s body up and cart it out to the stable. Cover it with a blanket and then come on in. Better put the horses in, too.” He looked at the tall man. “Don’t leave anything undone, Bill,” he added.

  When I heard the tall man called Bill a faint suspicion stirred in me, but I didn’t look up. When I did, the fat man answered my question for me without any talking from me. “You take his feet, Keys. I’ll get his shoulders.”

  Lynch turned abruptly toward the door of the stone house and I followed with the young fellow behind me. Inside, Lynch got out of his slicker and I got a shock. He was wearing a sheriff ’s badge on his vest.

  “The coffee was your idea, Dolliver,” Lynch suggested. “Want to start it?”

  Dolliver nodded, and I knew he had seen my reaction to that badge and was curious about it. He turned toward the shelves and began taking things down as if he knew the place. In the meantime I was trying to scout my trail and read the sign of this situation I’d run into.

  Hugh Taylor had told me to ride to the Tin Cup and ask for Bill Keys. Yet when I arrived here, there was a dead man on the ground who isn’t Bill Keys but is apparently the owner of the place. Meanwhile, Keys appears to be riding for the sheriff and with what reason I had no idea.

  It was a neat little house, tidy as an old maid’s boudoir, and the smell of coffee that soon filled the room gave it a cozy, homelike feel. The fireplace was big enough, and all the cooking utensils were bright and clean. A blanket over a door curtained off an inner room.

  Lynch dropped astride a chair and began to build a smoke. He had a bullet head covered with tight ringlets and a mustache that drooped in contrast. Slinging my hat on a hook, I hung up my own slicker and dropped into another chair. Lynch saw my two guns and his face chilled a little. Something about me disturbed him, and I decided it was partly the guns—the fact that I was wearing them, not that he feared them.

  “You call yourself the Papago Kid?” Lynch’s question was sharp.

  My eyes held his and I knew Sheriff Lynch and I were not going to be friends. He was distinctly on the prod, but he was digging for something, too. I was beginning to wonder if I didn’t know what it was he wanted. “I’ve been called that,” I said, “and I like the name. You can use it.”

  “Did you get a good look at those two riders who lit out of here? The two you said you saw?”

  “I did see them. No, the look I got wasn’t too good. One of them legged it for his bronc and the other grabbed iron. Naturally, with a man drawing a gun on me, even at that distance, I wasn’t wasting any time looking him over.”

  “How many shots did you hear?”

  “One.”

  Dolliver turned around from the coffee. “I heard three.”

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “One shot apparently killed the old man. Then I rounded into sight and one of these hombres took a shot at me. I shot back.” I hitched my chair back a little. “However, as you no doubt saw, the old man was shot twice. I figure he was wounded someplace away from the ranch, then trailed down by the killers, who finished the job.”

  “What gives you that idea?” Lynch demanded.

  “If you noticed, Sheriff,” I said, “the rain hadn’t washed out the old man’s tracks. Those tracks came from toward the corrals, and even from where I stood I could see the old man had fallen down twice on that little slope, and there were blood spots on his clothes.”

  It was obvious enough that the sheriff had seen nothing of the kind, and he studied me carefully. I was doing some thinking on my own hook. The reason the sheriff hadn’t seen those tracks was because all his attention had been centered on me.

  Dolliver, whose attitude I liked, brought the coffee up to the table and filled our cups. He was a clean-cut youngster and no fool.

  The door opened then and Bill Keys came in with his fat friend. They knocked the rain from their hats and shed their slickers, both of them looking me over while they were doing it. Dolliver filled cups for them and they found chairs and sat down.

  It struck me as faintly curious that Sheriff Lynch was making no effort to trail the men I had mentioned, nor to see if there were tracks to back up my story. I wondered what Dolliver thought of that, and was glad that he was with us. This was new country for me, and I was definitely in a bad spot, and unless the breaks came my way I’d soon have the choice of shooting my way out or I’d find myself looking into my past through the leaves of a cottonwood with the loop end of a rope around my neck.

  “You ever been in this country before?” Lynch demanded.

  “Never. When I left my home in California, I crossed Arizona down close to Yuma and went into Mexico.”

  “How’d you happen to find this place? It ain’t the easiest
valley to find.” He stared at me suspiciously, his eyes trying to pry behind my guileless eyes. I was wearing my most innocent face, carefully saved for just such emergencies.

  “Did you ever cross that desert behind here?” I asked. “The only spot of green a man can see is right here. Naturally, I headed for the pines. Figured there might be people where there was water.”

  That was simple enough even for him, and he mulled over it a little. “You said you came from California? You sound like a Texan to me.”

  “Hell,” I grinned cheerfully, “it’s no wonder! On the last spread I rode for down Mexico way there were eight Texans. My folks spoke Spanish around home,” I lied, “so when I talked English with that Texas outfit, naturally I picked up their lingo.”

  The story was plausible enough, but Lynch didn’t like it. He didn’t get a chance to ask any more questions for a minute, as I beat him to it. “What’s up, Sheriff?” I asked. “Is this a posse? And if it is, why pick on me?”

  Lynch didn’t like that, and he didn’t like me. “Huntin’ a Texas outlaw supposed to be headed this way,” he said, grudgingly, “a murderer named Wat Bell. We got word he was headed west so we’re cuttin’ all the trails.”

  “Bad weather to be riding,” I sympathized, “unless you’re on a red-hot trail. Is this Bell a bad hombre? Will it take four of you?”

  Dolliver’s eyes were shrewd and smiling. “I’m not one of them,” he told me. “I have a little ranch just over the mountain from here, and joined these boys back in the pines when they headed this way. My ranch is the Tumbling T.”

  CHAPTER II

  PUZZLE ON THE TUMBLING T

  Lynch ended his questions and devoted himself to his coffee. From the desultory conversation that followed while Lynch mulled things over, I learned that the dead man, old Tom Ludlow, had owned the Tin Cup, and had no enemies that anybody knew. Win Dolliver was his nearest neighbor, and liked the old man very much, as had his sister, Maggie Dolliver.

  The nearest town was Latigo, where Sheriff Ross Lynch had his office. The fat rider was Gene Bates, but nothing more was said about Wat Bell or what made the sheriff so sure he could find him that he started out on a rainy day. Knowing the uncertainties of travel in the West, and the liking of sheriffs for swivel chairs, I had a hunch that somebody had tipped the sheriff. It was less than reasonable to suppose he would start out with two men in bad weather merely on the chance that the man he sought was coming to Arizona.

  Lynch looked up suddenly. “We’ll be ridin’ on into Latigo,” he said, “and I reckon you’d better come along.”

  “Are you arresting me?”

  His blue eyes turned mean again. He didn’t like me even a little bit. “Not necessarily,” he said, “but we’ll be wantin’ to ask you questions, an’ we’ll be gettin’ answers.”

  “Look, my friend.” I leaned forward just a little, and having my hands on my hips as I did, the move put my gun butts practically in my palms. “I’m not planning to get stuck for something somebody else did. You rode down here and for some reason assumed I was the guilty man. Anyway, you’re all set on taking me in.

  “You made no effort, and I’ll leave it to Dolliver here, to check my story. You’ve sat here while the rain washed or partly washed those tracks away. You made no effort to get after those killers.

  “You claim you’re hunting some killer named Wat Bell, yet when you got here all the ambition seemed to leave you. Mr. Sheriff, I’m not your man. I didn’t kill Tom Ludlow. I never saw him before. I have all the money I need, and a better horse than any of you ride. Ludlow had nothing at all that I could want. The only shot I’ve fired was from my rifle, and Ludlow was shot with a pistol, and that last one was fairly close up.”

  Lynch looked ugly. “I know what I’m doin’!” he stated flatly. “I’ve got my reasons!”

  This looked like a good time to let them in on something. How anxious they were for gunplay, I didn’t know. I did know that I stood a much better chance right here than on the trail. I’d a sudden hunch that might be haywire as could be, but it might be correct. I’d a hunch Lynch had been told Wat Bell was coming right to the Tin Cup. I’d a further hunch that Wat Bell was not supposed to leave this ranch alive, and also that while Lynch now had doubts that I was Wat Bell, he was very apt to gun me down once I was on the road with the three of them.

  “All right!” I said, “you’ve got your reasons! Well, I have mine for not going into Latigo with you! I don’t wear two guns just for fun, and if those two shots had been fired at Ludlow by me he’d never have come back to this ranch. If you want to call my bluff and see whether I savvy guns or not, just buy chips in my game and you’ll see!”

  He was madder right then than a wildcat in a swarm of bees, but he wasn’t very happy about the spot he was in. Ross Lynch was not yellow, not by a jugful, but I knew there were several things about this setup he didn’t like. The presence of Win Dolliver, who I now knew had joined him by accident, was one of them. Another was the fact that I said I was the Papago Kid. That name meant nothing to him. But if, as I now believed, he had been tipped off that Wat Bell was coming to this ranch, then I had confused the issue enough so that he wasn’t sure who I was.

  Also, he was no fool. He had seen those two guns, and the guns had seen use. If we cut our dogs loose in this cabin, somebody was going to get hurt besides me. Nobody knew that better than Lynch.

  Dolliver smoothed things over. He was a smart hombre, that one. “There’s something to what he says, Ross. After all, why should we suspect him? It could just as easily have been me who found Ludlow. I was headed this way when I met you boys.

  “We should have looked for those tracks, too. I’m honest to say that I never thought of it.” He turned to me. “Did you hit the man you shot at?”

  “Burned him, I think. His horse was moving. I held my fire, but it was the best chance I had.” Right then I decided to say nothing about the gun the rider had dropped, but to have a look the first chance I got. That gun might be a clue that would help me ferret out the answer to this deal.

  Lynch was getting ready to say something, and I was sure I wouldn’t like it. Dolliver interrupted. “Look, Ross,” he said quietly, “don’t blame the Kid here for being on the prod. You can’t blame him, riding into a deal like this. He certainly could have no reason to shoot Ludlow. Let him come on over to my place with me. I can use a hand for a few days, and when you want to see him, ride over. That will clear this situation up, and I think Papago will agree to work for me. I’ll pay him top hand’s wages.”

  “That’s good for me,” I agreed. “I’m not hunting trouble. I’ll do all I can to find that killer, and if you want, I’ll try to trail those men for you. I’ve ridden trails before,” I added, and I pointed this one right at Lynch, “and found out right where they ended.”

  Lynch didn’t like it, but no more than any other man did he have a stomach for gunplay in that close quarters. The presence of Win Dolliver was a big help, and allowed him a chance to back out and save face.

  The same questions kept coming into my mind. How had they learned Wat Bell was headed this way? Why had Hugh Taylor told me to ask for Bill Keys on the Tin Cup when it was owned by Ludlow? Who had killed the old man, and why?

  Bill Keys was another puzzle. Taylor had said the man could be trusted, but he didn’t size up right to me. How good a description did he have of me? Or did he have one at all? Hugh might not have known him so well, and could have been mistaken in trusting him. For one, I was doing no talking until I understood the lay of the land.

  Something else had come into my mind that somehow I’d never thought of before. When Hugh Taylor had met me that night and told me of my uncle’s murder, and that I was wanted for it, I had thought of little else. True, I had left town rather suddenly after a quarrel with old Tom Bell, but that he had been murdered on the night I left for Mexico, I’d had no idea until then. Hugh had showed me the reward poster, but had assured me that he didn’t believe me guilt
y. He had investigators working on the crime, and advised me to go away and stay in hiding until he sent for me.

  My mind was full of questions. Had my uncle left a will? And to whom had he left two hundred thousand acres of his ranch? And who had killed him?

  Bill Keys got up and turned toward the door and my eyes dropped to his gun, absently noting that a chip had been broken from the bone handle, and the break looked recent. Sheriff Ross Lynch and Bates followed him out, and then Dolliver and I. When he rode around the corner of the house, Keys was saddling a horse with which to carry the body into town.

  Once around the house, I slid from the saddle and scrambled into the rocks. A hasty look showed me only one thing. The gun was gone!

  Win Dolliver looked at me curiously, but said nothing until we were well along the trail to the Tumbling T. It was just six miles, and Dolliver talked pleasantly and easily of the country, the cattle, and the rain. Ludlow had been running only about six hundred head, while he had four times that many. Keys and Bates, holding a ranch in partnership, ran a few head over west.

  When we were in sight of his own ranch, Win turned. “Did you get a good look at those riders? Enough to know them again?”

  “No,” I admitted, realizing this was the first pointed question he had asked, and wondering what was behind it, “but one of them lost a gun back there. When I looked it was gone.”

  “Maybe you just didn’t find it?”

  “No, I saw where it had been. There was a boot track near it.”

  We didn’t say anything more right then because the door opened and a girl stepped out on the porch and I forgot everything I had been thinking and all that had happened.

  There is no description for a girl like that. It was simply that this was the girl I had been looking for all my life. It wasn’t a matter of eyes nor hair, although hers were beautiful; it was simply that here she was, the girl that was meant for me. She was trimly shaped and neat, and there was quick laughter in her eyes, and there was interest and appraisal, too.