The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 3 Page 4

  A dead man sprawled over the windowsill above the barn. A soft wind stirred his sandy hair. That would be Stanton. Pardo was holstering his gun. There was no sign of Stryker or Feeley.

  “You all right, boss?” Pardo asked.

  “All right. How about you?”

  Tony Costa was getting to his feet. “Caught one in the shoulder,” he said. “It’s not bad.”

  Heads were appearing in doors and windows, but nobody showed any desire to come outside. Then a door slammed down the street, and Carol was running to them.

  “Are you hurt?” She caught his arm. “Were you shot?”

  He slid an arm around her as she came up to him, and it was so natural that neither of them noticed. “Better get that shoulder fixed up, Costa.” He glanced down at Carol. “Where did they have you?”

  “Strykes and Feeley were holding me in a house across the street. When Feeley saw you were not alone he wanted Harry Strykes to leave. Feeley looked out the door and Pat Flood saw him.”

  “Flood?”

  “He followed you in, knowing there’d be trouble. He came in behind them and had me take their guns. He was just going out to help you when the shooting started.”

  “Carol,” he hesitated. “I’ve got a confession to make. I am not Michael Latch.”

  “Oh? Is that all? I’ve known that all the time. You see, I was Michael Latch’s wife.”

  “His what?”

  “Before I married him I was Carol Arden James. He was the only one who ever called me Arden. During the time we were coming west I was quite ill, so I stayed in the wagon and Clark never saw me at all.

  “He convinced Michael there was a wagon train going by way of Santa Fe that would take us through sooner, and if we could catch them it would help. It was all a lie to get us away from the rest of the wagons, but Michael listened, as the train we were with was going only as far as Laramie.

  “After we were on the trail, Clark left us to locate the wagon train, as he said. Randy Kenner and Mike decided to camp, and I went over the hill to a small pool to bathe. When I was dressing I heard shooting, and believing it was Indians, I crept to the top of a hill so I could see our wagon.

  “It was all over. Clark had ridden up with two men and opened fire at once. They’d had no warning, no chance.

  “Randy was not dead when I saw them. One of the men kicked a gun out of his hand—he was already wounded—and shot him again. There was nothing I could do, so I simply hid.”

  “But how did you get here?”

  “When they left I did not go back to the wagon. I simply couldn’t, and I was afraid they might return. So I started walking back to the wagon train we had left. I hadn’t gone far when I found Old Nellie, our saddle mare. She knew me and came right up to me, so I rode her back to the wagon train. I came from Laramie by stage.”

  “Then you knew all the time that I was faking?”

  “Yes, but when you stopped Walt I whispered to Costa not to say anything.”

  “He knew as well?”

  “Yes. I’d showed him my marriage license, which I always carried with me, along with a little money.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? I was having a battle with my conscience, trying to decide what was right, always knowing I’d have to explain sooner or later.”

  “You were doing much better with the ranch than Michael could have. Michael and I grew up together and were much more like brother and sister than husband and wife. When he heard from his uncle George, we were married, and we liked each other.”

  Suddenly it dawned on Jed that they were standing in the middle of the street and he had his arm around Carol. Hastily he withdrew it.

  “Why didn’t you just claim the estate as Michael’s wife?”

  “Costa was afraid Seever would kill me. We had not decided what to do when you appeared.”

  “What about these guns?”

  “My father made them. He was a gunsmith and he had made guns for Uncle George. These were a present to Mike when he started west.”

  His eyes avoided hers. “Carol, I’ll get my gear and move on. The ranch is yours, and with Seever gone you will be all right.”

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  He thought his ears deceived him. “You—what?”

  “Don’t go, Jed. Stay with us. I can’t manage the ranch alone, and Costa has been happy since you’ve been here. We need you, Jed. I—I need you.”

  “Well,” he spoke hesitantly, “there are things to be done and cattle to be sold, and that quarter section near Willow Springs could be irrigated.”

  Pardo, watching, glanced at Flood. “I think he’s going to stay, Pat.”

  “Sure,” Flood said. “Ships an’ women, they all need a handy man around the place!”

  Carol caught Jed’s sleeve. “Then you’ll stay?”

  He smiled. “What would Costa do without me?”

  Four-Card Draw

  When a man drew four cards he could expect something like this to happen. Ben Taylor had probably been right when he told him his luck had run out. Despite that, he had a place of his own, and come what may, he was going to keep it.

  Nor was there any fault to find with the place. From the moment Allen Ring rode his claybank into the valley he knew he was coming home. This was it; this was the place. Here he would stop. He’d been tumbleweeding all over the West now for ten years, and it was time he stopped if he ever did, and this looked like his fence corner.

  Even the cabin looked good, although Taylor told him the place had been empty for three years. It looked solid and fit, and while the grass was waist high all over the valley and up around the house, he could see trails through it, some of them made by unshod ponies, which meant wild horses, and some by deer. Then there were the tracks of a single shod horse, always the same one.

  Those tracks always led right up to the door, and they stopped there, yet he could see that somebody with mighty small feet had been walking up to peer into the windows. Why would a person want to look into a window more than once? The window of an empty cabin? He had gone up and looked in himself, and all he saw was a dusty, dark interior with a ray of light from the opposite window, a table, a couple of chairs, and a fine old fireplace that had been built by skilled hands.

  “You never built that fireplace, Ben Taylor,” Ring had muttered, “you who never could handle anything but a running iron or a deck of cards. You never built anything in your life as fine and useful as that.”

  The cabin sat on a low ledge of grass backed up against the towering cliff of red rock, and the spring was not more than fifty feet away, a stream that came out of the rock and trickled pleasantly into a small basin before spilling out and winding thoughtfully down the valley to join a larger stream, a quarter of a mile away.

  There were some tall spruces around the cabin, and a couple of sycamores and a cottonwood near the spring. Some gooseberry bushes, too, and a couple of apple trees. The trees had been pruned.

  “And you never did that, either, Ben Taylor!” Allen Ring said soberly. “I wish I knew more about this place.”

  Time had fled like a scared antelope, and with the scythe he found in the pole barn he cut off the tall grass around the house, patched up the holes in the cabin where the packrats had got in, and even thinned out the bushes—it had been several years since they had been touched—and repaired the pole barn.

  The day he picked to clean out the spring was the day Gail Truman rode up to the house. He had been putting the finishing touches on a chair bottom he was making when he heard a horse’s hoof strike stone, and he straightened up to see the girl sitting on the red pony. She was staring openmouthed at the stacked hay from the grass he had cut and the washed windows of the house. He saw her swing down and run up to the window, and dropping his tools he strolled up.

  “Huntin’ somebody, ma’am?”

  She wheeled and stared at him, her wide blue eyes accusing. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “What do you mean by movi
ng in like this?”

  He smiled, but he was puzzled, too. Ben Taylor had said nothing about a girl, especially a girl like this. “Why, I own the place!” he said. “I’m fixin’ it up so’s I can live here.”

  “You own it?” Her voice was incredulous, agonized. “You couldn’t own it! You couldn’t. The man who owns this place is gone, and he would never sell it! Never!”

  “He didn’t exactly sell it, ma’am,” Ring said gently. “He lost it to me in a poker game. That was down Texas way.”

  She was horrified. “In a poker game? Whit Bayly in a poker game? I don’t believe it!”

  “The man I won it from was called Ben Taylor, ma’am.” Ring took the deed from his pocket and opened it. “Come to think of it, Ben did say that if anybody asked about Whit Bayly to say that he died down in the Guadalupes—of lead poisoning.”

  “Whit Bayly is dead?” The girl looked stunned. “You’re sure? Oh!”

  Her face went white and still and something in it seemed to die. She turned with a little gesture of despair and stared out across the valley, and his eyes followed hers. It was strange, Allen Ring told himself, that it was the first time he had looked just that way, and he stood there, caught up by something nameless, some haunting sense of the familiar.

  Before him lay the tall grass of the valley, turning slightly now with the brown of autumn, and to his right a dark stand of spruce, standing stiffly, like soldiers on parade, and beyond them the swell of the hill, and farther to the right the hill rolled up and stopped, and beyond lay a wider valley fading away into the vast purple and mauve of distance and here and there spotted with the golden candles of cottonwoods, their leaves bright yellow with nearing cold.

  There was no word for this; it was a picture, yet a picture of which a man could only dream and never reproduce.

  “It—it’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he said.

  She turned on him, and for the first time she seemed really to look at him, a tall young man with a shock of rust-brown hair and somber gray eyes, having about him the look of a rider and the look of a lonely man.

  “Yes, it is beautiful. Oh, I’ve come here so many times to see it, the cabin, too. I think this is the most lovely place I have ever seen. I used to dream about—” She stopped, suddenly confused. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t talk so.”

  She looked at him soberly. “I’d better go. I guess this is yours now.”

  He hesitated. “Ma’am,” he said sincerely, “the place is mine, and sure enough, I love it. I wouldn’t swap this place for anything. But that view, that belongs to no man. It belongs to whoever looks at it with eyes to see it, so you come anytime you like, and look all you please.”

  Ring grinned. “Fact is,” he said, “I’m aimin’ to fix the place up inside, an’ I’m sure no hand at such things. Maybe you could sort of help me. I’d like it kind of homey-like.” He flushed. “You see, I sort of lived in bunkhouses all my life an’ never had no such place.”

  She smiled with a quick understanding and sympathy. “Of course! I’d love to, only”—her face sobered—“you won’t be able to stay here. You haven’t seen Ross Bilton yet, have you?”

  “Who’s he?” Ring asked curiously. He nodded toward the horsemen he saw approaching. “Is this the one?”

  She turned quickly and nodded. “Be careful! He’s the town marshal. The men with him are Ben Hagen and Stan Brule.”

  Brule he remembered—but would Brule remember him?

  “By the way, my name is Allen Ring,” he said, low voiced.

  “I’m Gail Truman. My father owns the Tall T brand.”

  Bilton was a big man with a white hat. Ring decided he didn’t like him and that the feeling was going to be mutual. Brule he knew, so the stocky man was Ben Hagen. Brule had changed but little, some thinner, maybe, but his hatchet face as lean and poisonous as always.

  “How are you, Gail?” Bilton said briefly. “Is this a friend of yours?”

  Allen Ring liked to get his cards on the table. “Yes, a friend of hers, but also the owner of the place.”

  “You own Red Rock?” Bilton was incredulous. “That will be very hard to prove, my friend. Also, this place is under the custody of the law.”

  “Whose law?” Ring wanted to know. He was aware that Brule was watching him, wary but uncertain as yet.

  “Mine. I’m the town marshal. There was a murder committed here, and until that murder is solved and the killer brought to justice this place will not be touched. You have already seen fit to make changes, but perhaps the court will be lenient.”

  “You’re the town marshal?” Allen Ring shoved his hat back on his head and reached for his tobacco. “That’s mighty interestin’. Howsoever, let me remind you that you’re out of town right now.”

  “That makes no difference!” Bilton’s voice was sharp. Ring could see that he was not accustomed to being told off, that his orders were usually obeyed. “You will get off this place before nightfall!”

  “It makes a sight of difference to me,” Allen replied calmly. “I bought this place by stakin’ everything I had against it in a poker game. I drew four cards to win, a nine to match one I had and three aces. It was a fool play that paid off. I registered the deed. She’s mine legal. I know of no law that allows a place to be kept idle because there was a murder committed on it. If after three years it hasn’t been solved, I suggest the town get a new marshal.”

  Ross Bilton was angry, but he kept himself under control. “I’ve warned you, and you’ve been told to leave. If you do not leave, I’ll use my authority to move you.”

  Ring smiled. “Now listen, Bilton! You might pull that stuff on some folks that don’t like trouble! You might bluff somebody into believin’ you had the authority to do this. You don’t bluff me, an’ I simply don’t scare—do I, Brule?”

  He turned on Brule so sharply that the man stiffened in his saddle, his hand poised as though to grab for a gun. The breed’s face stiffened with irritation, and then recognition came to him. “Allen Ring!” he said. “You again!”

  “That’s right, Brule. Only this time I’m not takin’ cattle through the Indian Nation. Not pushin’ them by that ratty bunch of rustlers an’ high-binders you rode with.” Ring turned his eyes toward Bilton. “You’re the law? An’ you ride with him? Why, the man’s wanted in ever’ county in Texas for everythin’ from murder to horse thievin’.”

  Ross Bilton stared at Ring for a long minute. “You’ve been warned,” he said.

  “An’ I’m stayin’,” Ring replied sharply. “And keep your coyotes away if you come again. I don’t like ’em!”

  Brule’s fingers spread and his lips stiffened with cold fury. Ring watched him calmly. “You know better than that, Brule. Wait until my back is turned. If you reach for a gun I’ll blow you out of your saddle.”

  Stan Brule slowly relaxed his hand, and then, wordless, he turned to follow Bilton and Hagen, who had watched with hard eyes.

  Gail Truman was looking at him curiously. “Why, Brule was afraid of you!” she exclaimed. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “Nobody, ma’am,” he said simply. “I’m no gunfighter, just an hombre who ain’t got brains enough to scare proper. Brule knows it. He knows he might beat me, but he knows I’d kill him. He was there when I killed a friend of his, Blaze Garden.”

  “But—but then you must be a gunman. Blaze Garden was a killer! I’ve heard Dad and the boys talk about him!”

  “No, I’m no gunman. Blaze beat me to the draw. In fact, he got off his first shot before my gun cleared the holster, only he shot too quick and missed. His second and third shots hit me while I was walkin’ into him. The third shot wasn’t so bad because I was holdin’ my fire and gettin’ close. He got scared an’ stepped back, and the fourth shot was too high. Then I shot and I was close up to him then. One was enough. One is always enough if you place it right.”

  He gestured at the place. “What’s this all about? Mind tellin’ me?”

  “It’s very simp
le, really. Nothing out here is very involved when you come to that. It seems that there’s something out here that brings men to using guns much faster than in other places, and one thing stems from another.

  “Whit Bayly owned this place. He was a fixing man, always tinkering and fixing things up. He was a tall, handsome man whom all the girls loved—”

  “You, too?” he asked quizzically.

  She flushed. “Yes, I guess so, only I’m only eighteen now, and that was three, almost four years ago. I wasn’t very pretty or very noticeable and much too young.

  “Sam Hazlitt was one of the richest men in the country around here, and Whit had a run-in with him over a horse. There had been a lot of stealing going on around, and Hazlitt traced some stock of his to this ranch, or so he claimed. Anyway, he accused Bayly of it, and Whit told him not to talk foolish. Furthermore, he told Hazlitt to stay off of his ranch. Well, folks were divided over who was in the right, but Whit had a lot of friends and Hazlitt had four brothers, clannish as all get-out.

  “Not long after, some riders from Buck Hazlitt’s ranch came by that way and saw a body lying in the yard, right over near the spring. When they came down to have a look, thinking Whit was hurt, they found Sam Hazlitt, and he’d been shot dead—in the back.

  “They headed right for town, hunting Whit, and they found him. He denied it, and they were goin’ to hang him, had a rope around his neck, and then I—I—well, I swore he wasn’t anywhere near his ranch all day.”

  “It wasn’t true?” Ring asked keenly, his eyes searching the girl’s face. She avoided his eyes, flushing even more.

  “Not—not exactly. But I knew he wasn’t guilty! I just knew he wouldn’t shoot a man in the back! I told them he was over to our place, talking with me, and he hadn’t time to get back there and kill Sam.

  “Folks didn’t like it much. Some of them still believed he killed Sam, and some didn’t like it because despite the way I said it, they figured he was sparking a girl too young for him. I always said it wasn’t that. As a matter of fact, I did see Whit over our way, but the rest of it was lies. Anyway, after a few weeks Whit up and left the country.”