Mistakes Can Kill You Read online

  She was risking her life, making her death or capture inevitable, to save him!

  Suddenly a breath of air was against his cheek and he hunched himself higher, his head reaching the top of the cliff. Another shot rang out and howled off the edge of the rock beside him. Then his hands were on the edge, and he rolled over on solid ground, trembling in every limb.

  A moment only, for there was no time to waste. He got to his feet, staggering, and stared around. He was on the very top of the mountain and Tucker lay far away to the south. He seated himself and got his boots on, then slipped the thongs from his guns. Walking swiftly as his still trembling muscles would allow, he started south.

  There was a creek, he remembered, that flowed down into the flatlands from somewhere near here, an intermittent stream, but with a canyon that offered an easy outlet to the plain below. Studying the terrain, he saw a break in the rocky plateau that might be it, and started down the steep mountainside through the cedar, toward that break.

  A horse was what he needed most. With a good horse under him he might make it. He had a good lead, for they must come around the mountain, a good ten miles by the quickest trail. That ten miles might get him to town before they could catch him, to town and to the lawyer who would make the bid for them, even if Eaton had him in jail by that time. Suddenly, remembering how Lisa had run out into the open, risking her life to protect him, he realized he would willingly give his own to save her.

  He stopped, mopping his face with a handkerchief. The canyon broke away before him and he dropped into it, sliding and climbing to the bottom. When he reached the bottom he started off toward the flat country at a swinging stride. A half hour later, his shirt dark with sweat, the canyon suddenly spread wide into the flat country. Dust hung in the air, and he slowed down, hearing voices.

  “Give ’em a blow.” It was a man’s voice speaking. “Hear any more shootin’?”

  “Not me.” The second voice was thin and nasal. “Reckon it was my ears mistakin’ themselves.”

  “Let’s go, Eaton.” another voice said. “It’s too hot here. I’m pinin’ for some o’ that good XY well water!”

  Gatlin pushed his way forward. “Hold it, Sheriff! You huntin’ me?”

  Sheriff Eaton was a tall, gray-haired man with a handlebar mustache and keen blue eyes. “If you’re Gatlin, an’ from the looks of yuh, yuh must be, I sure am! How come you’re so all fired anxious to get caught?”

  Gatlin explained swiftly. “That girl’s back there, an’ they got her!” he finished. “Sheriff, I’d be mighty pleased if yuh’d send a few men after her, or go yourself an’ let the rest of them go to Tucker with me.”

  Eaton studied him. “What you want in Tucker?”

  “To bid that ranch in for Lisa Cochrane!” he said flatly. “Sheriff, that girl saved my bacon back there, an’ I’m a grateful man! You get me to town to get that money in Lawyer Ashton’s hands, an’ I’ll go to jail!”

  Eaten rolled his chaw in his lean jaws. “Dave Butler come over the Cut-Off with me, seen this ranch, then, an’ nothin’ would have it but that he come back here to settle. I reckon I know what he wanted.” He turned. “Doc, you’ll git none of that XY water today! Take this man to Ashton, then put him in jail! An’ make her fast!”

  Doc was a lean, saturnine man with a lantern jaw and cold eyes. He glanced at Gatlin, then nodded, “If yuh say so, Sheriff. I sure was hopin’ for some o’ that good XY water, though. Come on, podner.”

  They wheeled their horses and started for Tucker, Doc turning from the trail to cross the desert through a thick tangle of cedar and sage brush. “Mite quicker thisaway. Ain’t nobody ever rides it, an’ she’s some rough.”

  It was high noon and the sun was blazing. Doc led off, casting only an occasional glance back at Gatlin. Jim was puzzled, for the man made no show of guarding him. Was he deliberately offering him the chance to make a break? It looked it, but Jim wasn’t having any. His one idea was to get to Tucker, see Ashton, and get his money down. They rode on, pushing through the dancing heat waves, no breeze stirring the air, and the sun turning the bowl into a baking oven.

  Doc slowed the place a little. “Hosses won’t stand it,” he commented, then glanced at Gatlin. “I reckon you’re honest. Yuh had a chance for a break an’ didn’t take it.” He grinned wryly. “Not that yuh’d have got fur. This here ol’ rifle o’ mine sure shoots where I aim it at.”

  “I’ve nothin’ to run from,” Gatlin replied. “What I’ve said was true. My bein’ in Tucker was strictly accidental.”

  The next half mile they rode side by side, entering now into a devil’s playground of boulders and arroyos. Doc’s hand went out and Jim drew up. Buzzards roosted in a tree not far off the trail, a half dozen of the great birds. “Somethin’ dead,” Doc said. “Let’s have a look.”

  Two hundred yards farther and they drew up. What had been a dappled gray horse lay in a saucerlike depression among the cedars. Buzzards lifted from it, flapping their great wings. Doc’s eyes glinted and he spat. “Jim Walker’s mare,” he said, “an’ his saddle.”

  They pushed on, circling the dead horse. Gatlin pointed. “Look,” he said, “he wasn’t killed. He was crawlin’ away.”

  “Yeah,” Doc was grim, “but not fur. Look at the blood he was losin’.”

  They got down from their horses, their faces grave. Both men knew what they’d find, and neither man was happy. Doc slid his rifle from the scabbard. “Jim Walker was by way o’ bein’ a friend o’ mine,” he said. “I take his goin’ right hard.”

  The trail was easy. Twice the wounded man had obviously lain still for a long time. They found torn cloth where he had ripped up his shirt to bandage a wound. They walked on until they saw the gray rocks and the foot of the low bluff. It was a cul-de-sac.

  “Wait a minute,” Gatlin said. “Look at this.” He indicated the tracks of a man who had walked up the trail. He had stopped here, and there was blood on the sage, spattered blood. The faces of the men hardened, for the deeper impression of one foot, the way the step was taken and the spattered blood told but one thing. The killer had walked up and kicked the wounded man!

  They had little farther to go. The wounded man had nerve, and nothing had stopped him. He was backed up under a clump of brush that grew from the side of the bluff, and he lay on his face. That was an indication to these men that Walker had been conscious for some time, that he had sought a place where the buzzards couldn’t get at him.

  Doc turned, and his gray white eyes were icy. “Step your boot beside that track,” he said, his rifle partly lifted.

  Jim Gatlin stared back at the man and felt something cold and empty inside him. At that moment, familiar with danger as he was, he was glad he wasn’t the killer. He stepped over to the tracks and made a print beside them. His boot was almost an inch shorter and of a different type.

  “Didn’t figger so,” Doc said. “But I aimed to make sure.”

  “On the wall there,” Gatlin said. “He scratched somethin’.”

  Both men bent over. It was plain, scratched with an edge of whitish rock on the slate of a small slab, Cary done … and no more.

  Doc straightened. “He kin wait a few hours more. Let’s git to town.”

  Tucker’s street was more crowded than usual when they rode up to Ashton’s office and swung down. Jim Gatlin pulled open the door and stepped in. The tall, gray-haired man behind the desk looked up. “You’re Ashton?” Gatlin demanded.

  At the answering nod, he opened his shirt and unbuckled his money belt. “There’s ten thousand there. Bid in the XY for Cochrane an’ Gatlin.”

  Ashton’s eyes sparkled with sudden satisfaction. “You’re her partner?” he asked. “You’re putting up the money? It’s a fine thing you’re doing, man.”

  “I’m a partner only in name. My gun backs the brand, that’s all. She may need a gun behind her for a little while, an’ I’ve got it.”

  He turned to Doc, but the man was gone. Briefly, Gatlin explained
what they had found, and added, “Wing Cary’s headed for town now.”

  “Headed for town?” Ashton’s head jerked around. “He’s here. Came in about twenty minutes ago!”

  Jim Gatlin spun on his heel and strode from the office. On the street, pulling his hat brim low against the glare, he stared left, then right. There were men on the street, but they were drifting inside now. There was no sign of the man called Doc or of Cary.

  Gatlin’s heels were sharp and hard on the boardwalk. He moved swiftly, his hands swinging alongside his guns. His hard brown face was cool and his lips were tight. At the Barrelhouse, he paused, put up his left hand and stepped in. All faces turned toward him, hut none was that of Cary. “Seen Wing Cary?” he demanded. “He murdered Jim Walker.”

  Nobody replied, and then an oldish man turned his head and jerked it down the street. “He’s gettin’ his hair cut, right next to the livery barn. Waitin’ fur the auction to start up.”

  Gatlin stepped back through the door. A dark figure, hunched near the blacksmith shop, jerked back from sight. Jim hesitated, alert to danger, then quickly pushed on.

  The red-and-white barber pole marked the frame building. Jim opened the door and stepped in. A sleeping man snored with his mouth open, his back to the street wall. The bald barber looked up, swallowed and stepped back.

  Wing Cary sat in the chair, his hair half trimmed, the white cloth draped around him. The opening door and sudden silence made him look up. “You, is it?” he said.

  “It’s me. We found Jim Walker. He marked your name, Cary, as his killer.”

  Cary’s lips tightened and suddenly a gun bellowed and something slammed Jim Gatlin in the shoulder and spun him like a top, smashing him sidewise into the door. That first shot saved him from the second. Wing Cary had held a gun in his lap and fired through the white cloth. There was sneering triumph in his eyes, and as though time stood still Jim Gatlin saw the smoldering of the black-rimmed circles of the holes in the cloth.

  He never remembered firing, but suddenly Cary’s body jerked sharply, and Jim felt the gun buck in his hand. He fired again then, and Wing’s face twisted and his gun went into the floor, narrowly missing his own foot.

  Wing started to get up, and Gatlin fired the third time, the shot nicking Wing’s ear and smashing a shaving cup, spattering lather. The barber was on his knees in one corner, holding a chair in front of him. The sleeping man had dived through the window, glass and all.

  Men came running, and Jim leaned back against the door. One of the men was Doc, and he saw Sheriff Eaton, and then Lisa tore them aside and ran to him. “Oh, you’re hurt! You’ve been shot! You’ve … !”

  His feet gave away slowly and he slid down the door to the floor. Wing Cary still sat in the barber shop, his hair half clipped.

  Doc stepped in and glanced at him, then at the barber. “Yuh can’t charge him fur it, Tony. Yuh never finished!”

  THE NESTER AND THE PIUTE

  He was ridin’ loose in the saddle when we first saw him, and he was wearing a gun, which was some unusual for the Springs, these days. Out on the range where a man might have a run-in with a locoed steer or maybe a rattler, most of the boys carried guns, but around town Sheriff Todd had sort of set up a rulin’ against it.

  It was the second time I’d seen him, but he looked some different this mornin’, and it took me a minute or two to decide what it was made the difference, and then I decided it was partly the gun and partly that look in his eyes.

  He reined in that yellow horse in front of Green’s and hooked one long leg around the saddlehorn.

  “Howdy.”

  “Howdy.” Hatcher was the only one who answered, only the rest of us sort of looked up at him. He dug in his shirt pocket for the makin’s and started to build a smoke.

  Nobody said anything, just sort of waitin’ to see what was on his mind. He had an old carbine in a saddle scabbard, and the scabbard wasn’t under his leg, but with the muzzle pointed down and the stock close to his hand. A man ridin’ thataway ain’t rightly figurin’ on usin’ a rope on no stock. That rifle would be in the way, but if he was figurin’ on needin’ a rifle right quick, it would be a plumb handy way to carry it.

  When he had his smoke built he lit it with his left hand, and I got a good glimpse of his eyes, kind of cold and gray, and them lookin’ us over.

  Nobody here was friendly to him, yet nobody was unfriendly, neither. All of us had been around the Springs for years, all but him. He was the nester from Squaw Rock, an’ nesters aren’t right popular around cow range. However, the times was a changin’ an’ we all knowed it, so it wasn’t like it might have been a few years before, when the country was new.

  “Seen a tall-like hombre on a black horse?”

  He asked the question like maybe it was a formality that he wanted to get over with, and not like he expected an answer.

  “What sort of man?”

  It was Hatcher who had started the talkin’, as if he was ridin’ point for the rest of us.

  “Maybe two hundred pounds, sort of limp in his right leg, maybe. Rides him a black horse, long-gaited crittur, and he wears two guns, hangin’ low.”

  “Where’d you see him?”

  “Ain’t never seed him. I seen his sign.”

  Yanell, who lived over nigh to Squaw Rock himself looked up from under his hat brim, and spat into the dust. What he was thinkin’ we was all thinkin’. If this nester read sign that well, and trailed the Piute clean from Squaw Rock, he was no pilgrim.

  That description fitted the Piute like a glove, and nobody amongst us had any love for the Piute. He’d been livin’ in the hills over toward White Hills for the last six years, ever since he come back to the country after his trouble. The Piute had done a bit of horse stealin’ and rustlin’ from time to time and we all knowed it, but none of us were right anxious to trail him down.

  Not that we were afraid. Only, none of us had ever caught him in the act, so we just left it up to Sheriff Todd, who wanted it that way. This here nester seemed to have some ideas of his own.

  “No,” Hatcher said, “I ain’t seen nobody like that. Not lately.”

  The nester—his name was Bin Morley—nodded like he’d expected nothin’ else. “Reckon I’ll ride along,” he said. “Be seein’ you!”

  He swung his leg back over the saddle and kicked his toe into a stirrup. The yellow horse started to walk like it was a signal for something, and we sat there watchin’ him fade out down toward the cottonwoods at the end of town.

  Hatcher bit off a hunk of chewing and rolled it in his jaws. “If he meets up with the Piute,” he said, “he’s askin’ for trouble.”

  Yanell spit into the dust. “Reckon he’ll handle it,” he said drily. “Somethin’ tells me the Piute rustled cows off the wrong hombre.”

  “Wonder what Sheriff Todd’ll say?” Hatcher wanted to know.

  “This here Morley, now,” Yanell said, “he sort of looks like a man who could do his own lawin’. He’s one of them hombres what ain’t felt the civilizin’ influences of Sheriff Todd’s star, nor he ain’t likely to!”

  The nester’s yellow horse ambled casually out over the trail toward White Hills. From time to time Bin Morley paused to study the trail, but from here it was much easier. He knew the look of the big black’s track now, and from what was said later, I reckon the Piute wasn’t really expectin’ no trouble. Me, I was plumb curious. My Pappy always did tell me my bump of curiosity was too big for my britches, but after a few minutes I got up off the porch and walked around to where my steeldust was standin’ three-legged in the dust. I throwed a leg over him and trailed out after the nester.

  Maybe I’d been listenin’ too much to the old-timers around tellin’ of cattle drives and Injun fightin’. You listen to the stories a mite and you get to honin’ to see some of them fracases yourself.

  Now I knowed the Piute. Actually, he was only part Piute, and the rest was some brand of white, but whatever it was, the combination had resulted in
pure D poison. That was one reason everybody was plenty willin’ to accept Sheriff Todd’s orders to leave law enforcement to him. I will say, he done a good job. He done a good job until it come to the Piute.

  It was understandable about the Piute. That Injun left no more trail than a snake goin’ over a flat rock, and no matter how much we suspected, nobody could ever get any evidence on him. Sheriff Todd had been on his trail a dozen times, but each time he lost it. I knew what Yanell was thinkin’ just as well as if it was me. Anybody who could trail the Piute plumb from Squaw Creek wasn’t likely to holler calf rope for any Injun rustler without smokin’ things up a mite.

  Me, I was just curious enough and ornery enough to want to see what would happen when this nester cornered the Piute.

  He was a big, sullen brute, the Piute was. Rumor had it he’d killed a half dozen men, and certainly there was several that started out huntin’ him that never showed up until somebody found ’em dead, but there’d never been evidence to prove a thing. He could sling a gun, and when we had the turkey shoot around about Thanksgiving, he used to fetch his guns down, and nine times out of ten, he got himself a turkey—and he used a six-gun. You take a man that moves around over the hills like a ghost, Injun footin’ it over the rocks an’ through the brush, and who shoots like that, and you get an idea why nobody was just too worried about gettin’ him in a corner.

  Six miles out I got a glimpse of the nester. The yellow horse was amblin’ along, takin’ it easy in a sort of loose-jointed trot that didn’t look like much but seemed to eat up the country right fast.

  The day wore on and I kept to the brush, not knowing how Morley would take it if he knew I was trailin’ him. Then all of a sudden I saw him swing the yellow horse off the trail and drop to the ground. He was there for a minute, and ridin’ closer, I could see he was bendin’ over the body of a man. Then he swung back into the saddle and moseyed off down the trail.

  When he went over the next rise I turned my horse down the hill. Even before I rode up, I knew who the dead man was. I could see his horse lying in the cactus off to one side, and only one man in that country rode a bay with a white splash on the shoulder. It was Sheriff Todd.