Mistakes Can Kill You Page 16

  “That depends on you, Ducrow. You can drop your gun and I’ll take you in for a trial. Or you can shoot it out.”

  “Drop my guns?” Ducrow chuckled. “You’d actually take me in, too! You’re too soft, Bastian. You’d never make the boss man old Ben Curry was. He would never even of said yes, or no, he would have seen me and gone to blastin’! You got a sight to learn, youngster. Too bad you ain’t goin’ to live long enough to learn it.”

  Ducrow lifted one hand carelessly and wiped it across the tobacco-stained stubble of his beard. His right hand swept down for his gun even as his left touched his face. His gun came up, spouting flame.

  Mike Bastian palmed his gun and momentarily held it rigid, then he fired.

  Ducrow winced like he had been slugged in the chest, and then he lifted on his tiptoes. His gun came level again.

  “You’re … fast!” he gasped. “Devilish fast!”

  He fired, and then Mike triggered his gun once more. The second shot spun Ducrow around and he fell, face down at the edge of the fire.

  Dru came running, her rifle in her hand, but when she saw Mike still standing, she dropped the rifle and ran to him.

  “Oh, Mike!” she sobbed. “I was so frightened! I thought you were killed!”

  Julie started to rise, then fell headlong into a faint. Dru rushed to her side.

  Mike Bastian absently thumbed shells into his gun and stared down at the fallen man. He had killed a third man. Suddenly, and profoundly, he wished with all his heart he would never have to kill another.

  He holstered his weapon, and gathered up the dead man, carried him away from the fire. He would bury him here, in Peach Meadow Canyon.

  X

  Sunlight lay upon the empty street of the settlement in Toadstool Canyon when Mike Bastian, his rifle crosswise on his saddle, rode slowly into the lower end of the town.

  Beside him, sitting straight in her saddle, rode Dru Ragan. Julie had stayed at the ranch, but Dru flatly refused. Ben Curry was her father, and she was going to him, outlaw camp or not.

  If Dave Lenaker had arrived, Mike thought, he was quiet enough, for there was no sound. No horses stood at the hitchrails, and the door of the saloon stood wide open.

  Something fluttered on the ground and Mike looked at it quickly. It was a torn bit of cloth on a man’s body. The man was a stranger. Dru noticed it, and her face paled.

  His rifle at ready, Mike rode on, eyes shifting from side to side. A man’s wrist lay in sight across a window sill, his pistol on the porch outside. There was blood on the stoop of another house.

  “There’s been a fight,” Mike said, “and a bad one. You’d better get set for the worst.”

  Dru said nothing, but her mouth held firm. At the last building, the mess hall, a man lay dead in a doorway. They rode on, then drew up at the foot of the stone steps and dismounted. Mike shoved his rifle back in the saddle scabbard and loosened his sixguns.

  “Let’s go!” he said.

  The wide veranda was empty and still, but when he stepped into the huge living room, he stopped in amazement, five men sat about a table playing cards.

  Ben Curry’s head came up and he waved at them.

  “Come on in, Mike!” he called. “Who’s that with you? Dru, by all that’s holy!”

  Doc Sawyer, Roundy, Garlin, and Colley were there. Garlin’s head was bandaged, and Colley had one foot stretched out stiff and straight, as did Ben Curry. But all were smiling.

  Dru ran to her father and fell on her knees beside him.

  “Oh, Dad!” she cried. “We were so scared!”

  “What happened here?” Mike demanded. “Don’t sit there grinning! Did Dave Lenaker come?”

  “He sure did, and what do you think?” Doc said. “It was Rigger Molina got him! Rigger got to Weaver and found out Perrin had double-crossed him before he ever pulled the job. He discovered that Perrin had lied about the guards, so he rushed back. When he found out that Ben was crippled, and that Kerb Perrin had run out, he waited for Lenaker himself.

  “He was wonderful, Mike,” Doc continued. “I never saw anything like it! He paced the veranda out there like a bear in a cage, swearing and waiting for Lenaker. Muttered, ‘Leave you in the lurch, will they? I’ll show ’em! Lenaker thinks he can gun you down because you’re gettin’ old, does he? Well, killer I may be, but I can kill him!’ And he did, Mike. They shot it out in the street down there. Dave Lenaker, as slim and tall as you, and that great bear of a Molina.

  “Lenaker beat him to the draw,” Doc went on. “He got two bullets into the Rigger, but Molina wouldn’t go down. He stood there spraddle-legged in the street and shot until both guns were empty. Lenaker kept shooting, and must have hit Molina five times, but when he went down, Rigger walked over to him and spat in his face. ‘That for double-crossers!’ he said. He was magnificent!”

  “They fooled me, Mike,” Roundy said. “I seen trouble a-comin’ an’ figured I’d better get to old Ben. I never figured they’d slip in behind you, like they done. Then the news of Lenaker comin’ got me. I knowed him an’ was afraid of him, so I figured to save Ben Curry I’d get down the road and drygulch him. Never killed a white man in my life, Mike, but I was sure aimin’ to! But he got by me on another trail. After Molina killed Lenaker, his boys and some of them from here started after the gold they’d figured was in this house.”

  “Doc here,” Garlin said, “is some fighter! I didn’t know he had it in him.”

  “Roundy, Doc, Garlin, an’ me,” Colley said, “we sided Ben Curry. It was a swell scrap while it lasted. Garlin got one through his scalp, and I got two bullets in the leg. Aside from that, we came out all right.”

  Briefly, then, Mike explained all that transpired, how he had killed Perrin, and then had trailed Ducrow to Peach Meadow Canyon and the fight there.

  “Where’s the gang?” he demanded now. “All gone?”

  “All the live ones.” Ben Curry nodded grimly. “There’s a few won’t go anywhere. Funny, the only man who ever fooled me was Rigger Molina. I never knew the man was that loyal, yet he stood by me when I was in no shape to fight Lenaker. Took that fight right off my hands. He soaked up lead like a sponge soaks water!”

  Ben Curry looked quickly at Dru. “So you know you’re the daughter of an outlaw? Well, I’m sorry, Dru. I never aimed for you to know. I was gettin’ shut of this business, and planned to settle down on a ranch with your mother and live out the rest of my days plumb peaceful.”

  “Why don’t you?” Dru demanded.

  He looked up at her, his admiring eyes taking in her slim, well-rounded figure. “You reckon she’ll have me?” he asked. “She looked a sight like you when she was younger, Dru.”

  “Of course, she’ll have you! She doesn’t know—or didn’t know until Julie told her. But I think she guessed. I knew. I saw you talking with some men once, and later heard they were outlaws, and then I began hearing about Ben Curry.”

  Curry looked thoughtfully from Dru to Mike.

  “Is there something between you two? Or am I an old fool?”

  Mike flushed, and kept his eyes away from Dru.

  “He’s a fine man, Dru,” Doc Sawyer said. “And well educated, if I do say so—who taught him all he knows.”

  “All he knows!” Roundy stared at Doc with comtempt. “Book learnin’! Where would that gal be but for what I told him? How to read sign, how to foller a trail? Where would she be?”

  Mike took Dru out to the veranda then.

  “I can read sign, all right,” he said, “but I’m no hand at reading the trail to a woman’s heart. You would have to help me, Dru.”

  She laughed softly, and her eyes were bright as she slipped her arm through his. “Why, Mike, you’ve been blazing a trail over and back and up again, ever since I met you in the street at Weaver!”

  Suddenly, she sobered. “Mike, let’s get some cattle and go back to Peach Meadow Canyon. You said you could make a better trail in, and it would be a wonderful place! Just you and I and
—”

  “Sure,” he said, “in Peach Meadow Canyon.”

  Roundy craned his head toward the door, then he chuckled.

  “That youngster,” he said, “he may not know all the trails, but he sure gets where he’s goin’, he sure does!”

  RIDE, YOU TONTO RAIDERS!

  CHAPTER ONE:

  The Seventh Man

  The rain, which had been falling steadily for three days, had turned the trail into a sloppy river of mud. Peering through the slanting downpour, Mathurin Sabre cursed himself for the quixotic notion that impelled him to take this special trail to the home of the man that he had gunned down.

  Nothing good could come of it, he reflected, yet the thought that the young widow and child might need the money he was carrying had started him upon the long ride from El Paso to the Mogollons. Certainly, neither the bartender nor the hangers-on in the saloon could have been entrusted with that money, and nobody was taking that dangerous ride to the Tonto Basin for fun.

  Matt Sabre was no trouble hunter. At various times he had been many things, most of them associated with violence. By birth and inclination he was a Western man, although much of his adult life had been lived far from his native country. He had been a buffalo hunter, a prospector, and for a short time, a two-gun marshal of a tough cattle town. It was his stubborn refusal either to back up or back down that kept him in constant hot water.

  Yet some of his trouble derived from something more than that. It stemmed from a dark and bitter drive toward violence—a drive that lay deep within him. He was aware of this drive, and held it in restraint, but at times it welled up and he went smashing into trouble—a big, rugged, and dangerous man who fought like a Viking gone berserk, except that he fought coldly and shrewdly.

  He was a tall man, heavier than he appeared, and his lean, dark face had a slightly patrician look with high cheekbones and green eyes. His eyes were usually quiet and reserved. He had a natural affinity for horses and weapons. He understood them and they understood him. It had been love of a good horse that brought him to his first act of violence.

  He had been buffalo hunting with his uncle, and had interfered with another hunter who was beating his horse. At sixteen a buffalo hunter was a man and expected to stand as one. Matt Sabre stood his ground and shot it out, killing his first man. Had it rested there, all would have been well, but two of the dead man’s friends had come hunting Sabre. Failing to find him, they had beaten his ailing uncle and stolen the horses. Matt Sabre trailed them to Mobeetie and killed them both in the street, taking his horses home.

  Then he left the country, to prospect in Mexico, fight a revolution in Central America, and join the Foreign Legion in Morocco, from which he deserted after two years. Returning to Texas, he drove a trail herd up to Dodge, then took a job as marshal of a town. Six months later in El Paso he became engaged in an altercation with Billy Curtin, and Curtin called him a liar and went for his gun.

  With that incredible speed that was so much a part of him, Matt drew his gun and fired. Curtin hit the floor. An hour later he was summoned to the dying man’s hotel room.

  Billy Curtin, his dark, tumbled hair against a folded blanket, his face drawn and deathly white, was dying. They told him outside the door that Curtin might live an hour or even two. He could not live longer.

  Tall, straight, and quiet, Sabre walked into the room and stood by the dying man’s bed. Curtin held a packet wrapped in oilskin. “Five thousand dollars,” he whispered. “Take it to my wife—to Jenny, on the Pivotrock, in the Mogollons. She’s in—in—trouble.”

  It was a curious thing, that this dying man should place a trust in the hands of the man who had killed him. Sabre stared down at him, frowning a little.

  “Why me?” he asked. “You trust me with this? And why should I do it?”

  “You—you’re a gentleman. I trust—you help her, will you? I—I was a hot—headed fool. Worried—impatient. It wasn’t your fault.”

  The reckless light was gone from the blue eyes, and the light that remained was fading.

  “I’ll do it, Curtin. You’ve my word—you’ve got the word of Matt Sabre.”

  For an instant then, the blue eyes blazed wide and sharp with knowledge. “You—Sabre?”

  Matt nodded, but the light had faded, and Billy Curtin had bunched his herd.

  It had been a rough and bitter trip, but there was little further to go. West of El Paso there had been a brush with marauding Apaches. In Silver City two strangely familiar riders had followed him into a saloon and started a brawl. Yet Matt was too wise in the ways of thieves to be caught by so obvious a trick and he had slipped away in the darkness after shooting out the light.

  The roan slipped now on the muddy trail, scrambled up, and moved on through the trees. Suddenly, in the rain-darkened dusk there was one light, then another.

  “Yellowjacket,” Matt said, with a sigh of relief. “That means a good bed for us, boy. A good bed and a good feed.”

  Yellowjacket was a jumping-off place. It was a stage station and a saloon, a livery stable and a ramshackle hotel. It was a cluster of ’dobe residences and some false-fronted stores. It bunched its buildings in a corner of Copper Creek.

  It was Galusha Reed’s town, and Reed owned the Yellowjacket Saloon and the Rincon Mine. Sid Trumbull was town marshal, and he ran the place for Reed. Wherever Reed rode, Tony Sikes was close by, and there were some who said that Reed in turn was owned by Prince McCarran who owned the big PM brand in the Tonto Basin country.

  Matt Sabre stabled his horse and turned to the slope-shouldered liveryman. “Give him a bail of corn. Another in the morning.”

  “Corn?” Simpson shook his head. “We’ve no corn.”

  “You have corn for the freighters’ stock, and corn for the stage horses. Give my horse corn.”

  Sabre had a sharp ring of authority in his voice and before he realized it, Simpson was giving the big roan his corn. He thought about it, and stared after Sabre. The tall rider was walking away, a light, long step, easy and free, on the balls of his feet. And he carried two guns, low hung and tied down.

  Simpson stared, then shrugged. “A bad one,” he muttered. “Wish he’d kill Sid Trumbull!”

  Matt Sabre pushed into the door of the Yellowjacket and dropped his saddlebags to the floor. Then he strode to the bar. “What have you got, Man? Anything but rye?”

  “What’s the matter? Ain’t rye good enough for you?” Hobbs was sore himself. No man should work so many hours on feet like his.

  “Have you brandy? Or some Irish whiskey?”

  Hobbs stared. “Mister, where do you think you are? New York?”

  “That’s all right, Hobbs. I like a man who knows what he likes. Give him some of my cognac.”

  Matt Sabre turned and glanced at the speaker. He was a tall man, immaculate in black broadcloth, with blond hair slightly wavy, and a rosy complexion. He might have been thirty or older. He wore a pistol on his left side, high up.

  “Thanks,” Sabre said briefly. “There’s nothing better than cognac on a wet night.”

  “My name is McCarran. I run the PM outfit, east of here. Northeast, to be exact.”

  Sabre nodded. “My name is Sabre, I run no outfit, but I’m looking for one. Where’s the Pivotrock?”

  He was a good poker player, men said. His eyes were fast from using guns, and so he saw the sudden glint and the quick caution in Prince McCarran’s eyes.

  “The Pivotrock? Why, that’s a stream over in the Mogollons. There’s an outfit over there, all right? A one-horse affair. Why do you ask?”

  Sabre cut him off short. “Business with them.”

  “I see. Well, you’ll find it a lonely ride. There’s trouble up that way now, some sort of a cattle war.”

  Matt Sabre tasted his drink. It was good cognac. In fact, it was the best, and he had found none west of New Orleans.

  McCarran, his name was. He knew something, too. Curtin had asked him to help his widow. Was the Pivotrock outfit in
the war? He decided against asking McCarran, and they talked quietly of the rain and of cattle, then of cognac. “You never acquired a taste for cognac in the West. May I ask where?”

  “Paris,” Sabre replied, “Marseilles, Fez, and Marrakesh.”

  “You’ve been around then. Well, that’s not uncommon.” The blond man pointed toward a heavy-shouldered young man who slept with his head on his arms. “See that chap? Calls himself Camp Gordon. He’s a Cambridge man, quotes the classics when he’s drunk—which is over half the time—and is one of the best cowhands in the country when he’s sober.

  “Keys over there, playing the piano, studied in Weimar. He knew Strauss, in Vienna, before he wrote The Blue Danube. There’s all sorts of men in the West, from belted earls and remittance men to vagabond scum from all corners of the world. They are here a few weeks and they talk the lingo like veterans. Some of the biggest ranches in the West are owned by Englishmen.”

  Prince McCarran talked to him a few minutes longer, but he learned nothing. Sabre was not evasive, but somehow he gave out no information about himself or his mission. McCarran walked away very thoughtfully. Later, after Matt Sabre was gone, Sid Trumbull came in.

  “Sabre?” Trumbull shook his head. “Never heard of him. Keys might know. He knows about ever’body. What’s he want on the Pivotrock?”

  Lying on his back in bed, Matt Sabre stared up into the darkness and listened to the rain on the window and on the roof. It rattled hard, skeleton fingers against the glass, and he turned restlessly in his bed, frowning as he recalled that quick, guarded expression in the eyes of Prince McCarran.

  Who was McCarran, and what did he know? Had Curtin’s request that he help his wife been merely the natural request of a dying man, or had he felt that there was a definite need of help? Was something wrong here?

  He went to sleep vowing to deliver the money and ride away. Yet even as his eyes closed the last time, he knew he would not do it if there was trouble.