Flint Read online

  There was a back door to the livery stable also, and to this he made his way.

  His feet made no sound here for the old corral was soft with dust, hay, old manure, and straw. Near the wall of the building he paused, listening again.

  Far off, back in the trees near Doc McGinnis’ house, the mockingbird was still singing, but the distant sound seemed only to emphasize the stillness. In his mind he traced the steps he must take to where the red stallion waited, and it was almost halfway along toward the front door of the big barn.

  The door near which he stood was as wide as that in front for the passage of hayracks and other large wagons, but it was in complete darkness. Flint waited a minute longer and then stepped inside the barn.

  His feet made a soft rustle in spilled hay. He stood near the wall, waiting for a reaction, and there was none.

  He could hear horses munching grain, and occasionally one stamped or blew. Otherwise the stillness was complete. There was the smell of fresh hay, of manure, and of leather. Living with danger had sharpened his senses, and he was uneasy without having justification for it.

  He took two careful steps, then another. He was probably being a fool. There was no one here, and perhaps nobody wanted to kill him now. Yet Port Baldwin was still in town, and Lottie was here … and he had no reason to trust Lottie.

  He took several quick, careful steps, then stopped. Suddenly, from within a few feet he heard a deep sigh.

  Something brushed lightly at his shoulder and putting his hand up he touched a bit. It was removed from its bridle and hanging from a nail, and felt rusted and old. With careful fingers, to make no sound, he eased the bit from the nail, and judging the location from which the sigh had come, he drew back his hand and threw it waist high and hard, for he thought the man was sitting down.

  The bit thudded against something and a voice demanded, “You tryin’ to be funny? What the hell is the idea?”

  “Shut up, will you?” said a second voice.

  “Well, stop throwin’ things! This ain’t no time for horsing around.”

  There was a moment of silence and then the second voice said, “I didn’t throw anything.”

  The silence was deeper.

  Now they would be worried. They would be listening intently, staring all around. Crouching, careful to make no sound, Flint felt through the layers of hay and straw on the ground and got a handful of sand.

  If he threw sand at the man he had struck with the bit, he might get it in the man’s eyes. If his eyes were averted and some sand struck him, he would quickly look around. It was simple as that.

  Flint swung his hand wide, allowing some of the sand to escape between his thumb and forefinger. There was a sharply drawn breath and he threw the rest. He heard a gasp, and the rustle of clothing and he stepped around the stall.

  One hand dropped swiftly, feeling for the target, and when his hand touched the crouching man’s shoulder, the gun barrel followed. He struck with a thud, and the man grunted and fell against the stall. Flint caught him by the collar and struck him again.

  Then heaving the man erect, he shoved him, with all the strength he had, toward the stall from which he had heard the other voice.

  “Sax! What the — ?”

  Saxon lay sprawled in the center of the barn, dimly visible in the light from the big front door. Strett whispered hoarsely, but Saxon lay still. Strett had heard a rustling of clothes, a faint rattle, a thud. Had Saxon been kicked?

  He waited an instant, then emerged from the stall and crouched beside Saxon. “Sax … what’s the matter? You hurt?”

  In the silence, Strett heard the click of a cocked pistol and froze, his heart pounding heavily. He was crouched down, his coat over the butt of his pistol. Swiftly he gauged his chances and decided he did not like them.

  “You pick up your partner,” Flint said, “and walk out of the door. Walk slow and keep both hands on him. I don’t want to kill you, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t mind. You make your own choice.”

  Strett got to his feet, slung Saxon over his shoulder, and started out.

  Flint stepped quickly into the stallion’s stall and spoke softly to him. Watching across the stallion’s back, Flint adjusted the girth and slipped on the bridle, then he led the stallion out and stepped into the saddle.

  Strett had stopped just outside the door. Flint rode up behind him and, leaning down, took his pistol from its holster, then took the gun from Saxon.

  “Walk up the street,” he said, “and keep going. Head for California.”

  “California!” Strett protested. “Can’t we get our horses? Look — !”

  “After I am gone, you can get your horses if you feel lucky. But if I were you, I’d get into the saddle and ride. From what I hear that’s a coming country out there, and neither of you boys have any future here.

  “My name is Flint, and when I see either of you again, I’m going to start shooting … no matter where it is. And you have had all the warning you are going to get.”

  He watched Strett staggering up the street under his burden, and then he rode away.

  The near mountains loomed black, a cool wind blew from the pines on the high slopes. He turned south, forded the trickle of the San Jose, and took the trail to the hideout.

  In his darkened room at the Grand Hotel, Porter Baldwin at last snubbed out his cigar. So they had failed him. Flint was still alive.

  Baldwin pulled off his shirt and pants, rolled into bed in his long underwear, and lay staring up at the ceiling. He could not hold his cattle on that Nugent grass forever. Already it was overgrazed and would start losing weight, yet to sell now meant a loss and the added risk of losing the cost of shipping to the Eastern market.

  Somewhere down the hall a door closed softly. Baldwin listened. No footsteps passed his door, but after a moment he heard a sound from the head of the back stairs, and a faint creak of a boot on a step.

  Somebody was going down the back stairs! Somebody who left the hotel after midnight. Who used the back stairs? Possibly many people, but he knew of only one. Buckdun. Lottie’s room was down the hall, and Lottie was anxious for Flint to die. Baldwin turned on his side and stared at the window, and was like that when he went to sleep.

  Miles away to the south, at the Hole-in-the-Wall, Nancy Kerrigan was not asleep. She had been lying awake for some time when she got up and threw wood on the fire and seated herself, wrapped in a heavy coat, on a log near the flames.

  Jim was dying. He was dying somewhere, and he was alone. So many things began to shape to a pattern now. Staring into the flames, she saw his face there. She poked at the fire, remembering Lottie Kettleman. She was cold, but she was lovely, and it was obvious she knew how to please men.

  If Jim was dying, and Lottie hated him, why was she here?

  Money …

  Did Jim have money? Of course. He was James T. Kettleman, numbered among the richest men in the country, along with Vanderbilt, Gould, Fisk, and young Harriman. Of course he had money. If he died, then Lottie would have it all, so why was she here? There were so many puzzles … his connection with Flint, if there was one. Yet a wire from him had been enough to destroy the land empire that Baldwin had been about to build.

  All that was unimportant. The important thing was that Jim was out in the hills somewhere, dying. She remembered him lying in the guest room at the ranch, his face horribly bruised from the beating, and she remembered the way he had ridden from here, practically driven from the Hole-in-the-Wall after he had done so much.

  She heard a light step and looked up to see Pete Gaddis coming to the fire.

  “Something wrong, ma’am?”

  “I was thinking about Jim Flint.”

  Pete Gaddis hunkered down near the fire. “I was a damn’ fool. All I could think of was that he had come hunting me, after all these years.”

  Nancy told Pete of her talk with Lottie. She told him about the cancer, and she told him about Lottie.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I sure
ly am.”

  She stayed by the fire alone. There was a restlessness in her that denied sleep, and there was anger in her, too, anger that a woman such as Lottie Kettleman had married Jim.

  She had no right to him … none at all.

  But she did. She was married to him, and no matter what happened to Jim, she would still be married to him.

  Nancy Kerrigan got to her feet and looked off at the faint lightening of the sky in the east. No matter … if Jim Flint was going to die he would die among those who cared for him. And she was going back to the Kaybar headquarters and build again, and if Porter Baldwin wanted trouble, he would get it.

  And if Lottie Kettleman wanted Jim Flint, she would have to fight for him.

  Chapter 17

  THE MALPAIS, that dreaded death trap of lava, lay still and hot under the afternoon sun, and upon its vast and rugged expanse, nothing moved. From the edge of the mesa, Buckdun studied the malpais with careful eyes.

  Three days had passed since the fight in the Divide Saloon at Alamitos, a fight that ended disastrously for the Baldwin riders. Three days since the night he had talked to Lottie Kettleman.

  In those three days Buckdun, a cautious and relentless man-hunter, had been tracking the man he was to kill.

  As he had previously told Baldwin, a man with no fixed habitation or habit is most difficult to kill, for the simple reason there is no place where one may lie in wait.

  Flint came from nowhere and vanished into nowhere.

  Yet he had to have a hideout, and the two horses with which he had been seen had to be kept somewhere. Moreover, the red stallion wore no brand, which indicated it had been a wild horse. And such a horse had been seen on no range, for no cowhand was apt to forget such a fine stallion.

  Seated upon the mesa, hidden among the trees and rocks, Buckdun assembled what information he had.

  Flint had appeared at Horse Springs. His gun battle with the Baldwin riders had taken place on North Plain while riding north. He had come to Alamitos several days later from the south.

  He had been involved in the fighting at the attack on the Kaybar, and had been seen riding to that ranch ahead of the attackers and coming from the south. He had visited the telegraph station at McCartys. Most of his visits to Alamitos had brought him to town from the south or east.

  That indicated a hideout somewhere south or east of Alamitos and north of Horse Springs.

  The implication was obvious. Flint’s hideout must have been somewhere in the malpais or around Ceboletta Mesa. Nonetheless, Buckdun had drifted south and west. He had checked the old Indian ruins near Post Office Flat and Old Redondo Canyon. He had ridden along both sides of the Zuni Range.

  He checked the tracks left by the red stallion. The shoes were new and distinctive. He found no such tracks anywhere west of the Kaybar. He picked up a trail several days old south of Kaybar and backtrailed it to North Plain, where it faded out. His time was not wasted, for he had learned a little. He picked up a fragment of trail headed south toward Horse Springs, a very old trail, mostly blown out by wind.

  He narrowed his wide circle, and soon had decided the hideout had to be north of the southernmost point of the main flow of the lava.

  He found a few tracks between the rim of Ceboletta Mesa and the lava beds, and they were fresh tracks. Some went north, some south.

  Yet it was only now, seated on the rim of the mesa, studying the malpais, that he remembered the man who had disappeared from the train the night before his own arrival in Alamitos.

  Of course. Kettleman — Flint. And Flint must have left the train during the long climb up the grade, and come westward across the mesa, which meant there was a horse waiting for him.

  One of Nugent’s riders — Buckdun was a good listener, and he listened to all saloon conversations — had talked of the meeting with the stranger. And it had been west of the railroad. Flint had to be somewhere in this area. Buckdun knew that lava flows had their islands of enclosed grass, their pits and their peaks, their springs and streams. Leaving the train as he had, and dropping from sight so quickly, implied that Flint had proceeded to a destination already known to him.

  The story that Jim Flint was actually the kid from The Crossing was too good to keep, and scarcely a person in or around Alamitos but knew of it.

  Buckdun was not disturbed. Such a shooting as occurred at The Crossing, and the berserk shooting of Baldwin riders in the saloons of Alamitos following Flint’s beating implied a man who lost his head or might become reckless. And the reckless ones are soon the dead ones.

  Buckdun, for example, had not a reckless bone in his body. He had refused any previous offer to kill Flint until approached by Lottie Kettleman.

  He had never known anyone like her. She was so slender, so dainty, yet so completely a woman. She was breathtakingly lovely, and she knew so well how to talk to a man. She had won him over even before she casually suggested that, as he was going to do it anyway, he might as well go to Baldwin and say he had changed his mind. “After all,” she had said, “we … I mean you … can use three thousand dollars.”

  There had been several of those hints. Buckdun believed he had been promised a great deal when actually he had been promised nothing. He had made no advances for the simple reason that he would not have dared. She was unlike any other woman, something very special, and Flint had made her life miserable.

  Buckdun, like many of his kind, was sentimental about things other than his job. The fact that she implied a killing was necessary did not shock him. Lottie had persuaded him … or allowed him to persuade himself, and she had done it without giving anything of herself more than the aura of her presence, her lingering glances, occasional blushes, and the scent of her perfume.

  Buckdun was accustomed to dealing with the roughest men, with horses and with guns. His few contacts with women had been on a pay-as-you-leave basis, and Lottie Kettleman was a woman from another world.

  Like many a lesser man he was conquered by sex. The thought that he should also get the money from Baldwin struck him as eminently practical, and he was amazed that such a pretty little head could think of such a thing.

  And now he was here, doing what he did best, stalking a man for the kill.

  Flint returned to the hideout and remained there. He slept a lot, drank much beef broth, and cultivated his small garden. He spent a lot of time with his horses, and he broke another of them to ride with no more trouble than had been given him by the red stallion.

  Doc McGinnis had told him that rest, freedom from worry, and simple food were the best things for him.

  He had always liked reading, and now he had the chance. Usually he took his books to the inner pasture and read, with the horses for company. The weather had grown warmer although the nights were still cool.

  On the morning of the fourth day after the shooting in the Divide Saloon he was about to venture out upon the malpais when sunlight winked in his eyes. Turning his head he caught another wink of light from the rim of the mesa. Somebody was up there, probably with field glasses.

  He remained absolutely still, knowing that only movement is easily seen, and at such a distance nothing else would reveal his presence.

  After several minutes he lowered himself a foot or two then, after a brief wait, dropped back into the basin. It might be that reflected light was not from a field glass, or if so the observer need not be looking for him. But that was not the way to play it. He would assume the worst.

  Returning to his seat on the rock he eliminated all from his mind but the problem at hand. If he was being stalked it was because somebody wanted him dead, not an unexpected conclusion in the light of recent events.

  The strongest man is he who stands alone. Flint knew he need expect no help from anyone, but then he had never expected help.

  From expecting death he had come to want life, and during these past months he had come to a new appreciation of all that was about him, the vast breadth of the Western sky, the warmth of the sun, drifting clo
uds, the gracefulness of a moving horse.

  The strong, fine feel of a gun butt in the hand, the smell of leather, the odor of sage on a hot, still day, the twittering of birds, the crunch of sand under the boots, the cold, wonderful feeling of water in the throat after a long thirst, the way a woman moves when she knows an interesting man is watching, the flight of an eagle against the sky, and storm clouds on a summer day … these were things he remembered, he felt, things that he had never appreciated until he thought they would soon be taken from him.

  Life, he decided, was never a question of accumulating material things, nor in the struggle for reputation, but in the widening and deepening of perception, increasing the sensitivity of the faculties, of an awareness of the world in which one lives.

  Living with this new feeling he had for the first time learned to listen. Disturbed by no people he had become aware of the smallest sound upon the lava beds. The falling of a seed pod, the rustling of a pack rat, the rustle of wind in the grass, the creak of expanding or contracting timbers subjected to heat or cold, all these he knew and his mind separated them from any unfamiliar sound.

  Living with awareness had enriched his life, but it had also prepared him for the ordeal that lay before him. His eyes learned to know each natural movement, to place each shadow. If he wished to live he must live with a constant awareness of danger.

  They would send Buckdun to kill him.

  He must remain near the horses, for their perceptions were quicker than his, and their reactions could be a warning.

  He began his arrangements at once. At a point well within the entrance passage he rigged a simple deadfall trap with a large slab of rock balanced to fall. With a thin strap of rawhide about a foot above the ground and well hidden in grass and brush, he prepared his trip and trigger.

  Then he sat down in the warm sun and built a bow and an arrow, and this he rigged with the arrow directed down the passage, chest high above the ground. Due to the angle he was able to conceal the bow near one wall. Yet such traps had small chance of success against men like Buckdun, and he might decide to come across the lava itself. Making several trips, after it grew dark, he carried gravel from the stream bed and prepared a wide, apparently accidental belt of it on the sides where the hideout bowl could be approached. Anyone crossing that gravel must make a sound that could be heard below.