Glory Riders Page 6

  The bunkhouse door opened and Sparkman stepped into the light. “What’s the matter?” he asked. “What goes on?”

  Sandifer called softly, and Sparkman grunted and came down off the steps. “Jim? You here? There’s the devil to pay up at the house, man. I don’t know what came off up there, but there was a shootin’! When we tried to go up, Mont was on the steps with a shotgun to drive us back.”

  “Take care of this hombre. I’ll find out what’s wrong fast enough. Where’s Grimes an’ Rep?”

  “Rep Dean rode over to the line cabin on Cabin Creek to round up some boys in case of trouble. Grimes is inside.”

  “Then take Dunn an’ keep your eyes open. I may need help. If I yell, come loaded for bear and hunting hair.”

  Jim Sandifer turned swiftly and started for the house. He walked rapidly, circling as he went toward the little-used front door, opened only on company occasions. That door, he knew, opened into a large, old-fashioned parlor that was rarely used. It was a show place, stiff and uncomfortable, and mostly gilt and plush. The front door was usually locked, but he remembered that he had occasion to help move some furniture not long before and the door had been left unlocked. There was every chance that it still was, for the room was so little used as to be almost forgotten.

  Easing up on the verandah, he tiptoed across to the door and gently turned the knob. The door opened inward, and he stepped swiftly through and closed it behind him. All was dark and silent, but there was light under the intervening door and a sound of movement. With the thick carpet muffling his footfalls, he worked his way across the room to the door.

  “How’s the old man?” Martin was asking.

  His mother replied. “He’s all right. He’ll live.”

  Martin swore. “If that girl hadn’t bumped me, I’d have killed him and we’d be better off. We could easy enough fix things so that Sandifer would get blamed for it.”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” Rose Martin intervened. “You’re always in such a fret. The girl’s here, an’ we can use her to help. As long as we have her, the old man will listen, and, while he’s hurt, she’ll do as she’s told.”

  Martin muttered under his breath. “If we’d started by killing Sandifer like I wanted, all would be well,” he said irritably. “What he said about the Katrishen trouble startin’ with our comin’ got the old man to thinkin’. Then I figure Bowen was sorry he fired his foreman.”

  “No matter.” Rose Martin was brusque. “We’ve got this place, and we can handle the Katrishens ourselves. There’s plenty of time now Sandifer’s gone.”

  Steps sounded. “Lee, the old man’s comin’ out of it. He wants his daughter.”

  “Tell him to go climb a tree,” Martin replied stiffly. “You watch him.”

  “Where’s Art?” Klee protested. “I don’t like it, Lee. He’s been gone too long. Somethin’s up.”

  “Aw, forget it. Quit cryin’. You do more yelpin’ than a mangy coyote.”

  Sandifer stood very still, thinking. There was no sound of Elaine, so she must be a prisoner in her room. Turning, he tiptoed across the room toward the far side. A door there, beyond the old piano, opened into Elaine’s room. Carefully he tried the knob. It held.

  At that very instant a door opened abruptly, and he saw light under the door before him. He heard a startled gasp from Elaine and Lee Martin’s voice, taunting, familiar.

  “What’s the matter? Scared?” Martin laughed. “I just came in to see if you was all right. If you’d kept that pretty mouth of yours shut, your dad would still be all right. You tellin’ him Sandifer was correct about the Katrishens an’ that he shouldn’t’ve fired him …”

  “He shouldn’t have,” the girl said quietly. “If he was here now, he’d kill you. Get out of my room.”

  “Maybe I ain’t ready to go,” he taunted. “An’ from now on I’m goin to come an’ go as I like.”

  His steps advanced into the room, and Jim tightened his grip on the knob. He remembered that lock, and it was not set very securely. Suddenly an idea came to him. Turning, he picked up an old glass lamp, large and ornate. Balancing it momentarily in his hand, he drew it back and hurled it with a long overhand swing through the window.

  Glass crashed on the verandah, and the lamp hit, went down a step, and stayed there. Inside the girl’s room, there was a startled exclamation, and he heard running footsteps from both the girl’s room and the old man’s. Somebody yelled: “What’s that? What happened?” And he hurled his shoulder against the door.

  As he had expected, the flimsy lock carried away and he was catapulted through the door into Elaine’s bedroom. Catching himself, he wheeled like a cat and sprang for the door that opened into the living room beyond. He reached it just as Mont jerked the curtain back, but, not wanting to endanger the girl, he swung hard with his fist instead of drawing his gun.

  The blow came out of a clear sky to smash Mont on the jaw, and he staggered back into the room. Jim Sandifer sprang through, legs spread, hands wide.

  “You, Martin,” he said sharply. “Draw!”

  Lee Martin was a killer, but no gunman. White to the lips, his eyes deadly, he sprang behind his mother and grabbed for the shotgun.

  “Shoot, Jim!” Elaine cried. “Shoot!”

  He could not. Rose Martin stood between him and his target, and Martin had the shotgun now and was swinging it. Jim lunged, shoving the table over, and the lamp shattered in a crash. He fired, and then fired again. Flame stabbed the darkness at him, and he fell back against the wall, switching his gun. Fire laced the darkness into a stabbing crimson crossfire, and the room thundered with sound, and then died to stillness that was the stillness of death itself.

  No sound remained, only the acrid smell of gunpowder mingled with the smell of coal oil and the faint, sickish-sweet smell of blood. His guns ready, Jim crouched in the darkness, alert for movement. Somebody groaned, and then sighed deeply, and a spur grated on the floor. From the next room, Gray Bowen called weakly: “Daughter? Daughter, what’s happened? What’s wrong?”

  There was no movement yet, but the darkness grew more familiar. Jim’s eyes became more accustomed to it. He could see no one standing. Yet it was Elaine who broke the stillness.

  “Jim? Jim, are you all right? Oh, Jim … are you safe?” Maybe they were waiting for this.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “Light your lamp, will you?”

  Deliberately he moved, and there was no sound within the room, only outside, a running of feet on the hard-packed earth. Then a door slammed open, and Sparkman stood there, gun in hand.

  “It’s all right, I think,” Sandifer said. “We shot it out.”

  Elaine entered the room with a light and caught herself with a gasp at the sight before her. Jim reached for the lamp.

  “Go to your father,” he said swiftly. “We’ll take care of this.”

  Sparkman looked around, and was followed into the room by Grimes. “Good grief,” he gasped. “They are all dead. All of them.”

  “The woman, too?” Sandifer’s face paled. “I hope I didn’t …”

  “You didn’t,” Grimes said. “She was shot in the back by her own son. Shootin’ in the dark, blind an’ gun crazy.”

  “Maybe it’s better,” Sparkman said. “She was an old hellion.”

  Klee Mont had caught his right at the end of his eyebrow, and a second shot along the ribs. Sandifer walked away from him and stood over Lee Martin. His face twisted in a sneer, the dead man lay sprawled on the floor, literally shot to doll rags.

  “You didn’t miss many,” Sparkman said grimly.

  “I didn’t figure to,” Jim said. “I’ll see the old man, and then give you a hand.”

  “Forget it.” Grimes looked up, his eyes faintly humorous. “You stay in there. An’ don’t spend all your time with the old man. We need a new set-up on this here spread, an’ with a new son-in-law who’s a first-rate cattleman, Gray could set back an’ relax.”

  Sandifer sto
pped with his hand on the curtain. “Maybe you got something there,” he said thoughtfully. “Maybe you have.”

  “You can take my word for it,” Elaine said, stepping into the door beside Jim. “He has. He surely has.”

  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, that 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 had 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 pack rats 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, open-mouthed, 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.

  “Hunting 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 moving 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 fixing 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 Guadaloupes … 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, but 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 loveliest 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 any time you like, and look all you please.” Ring grinned. “Fact is,” he said, “I’m aiming to fix the place up inside, and 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 and 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 this 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 he 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 interesting. 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 staking 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 all this time 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 believing you had the authority to do this. You don’t bluff me, and 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 half-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 taking cattle through the Indian Nation. Not pushing them by that ratty bunch of rustlers and highbinders you rode with.” Ring turned his eyes toward Bilton. “You’re the law? And you ride with him? Why, the man’s wanted in every county in Texas for everything from murder to horse thieving.”

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

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