Flint Read online

  The room was large, square, and neat. The bed was a huge, old-fashioned fourposter, and there was a dresser and a mirror. The floor was almost painfully clean, polished, and there were several rag rugs. He started to move and felt a twinge of pain in his side that left him gasping. His body felt stiff and when he ran his fingers down his side he found he was taped tightly from armpits to hips.

  On a chair back hung his gun belt with a Smith & Wesson in its holster. The other gun lay atop his freshly washed and neatly pressed jeans. His coat hung over the back of the chair also, and in the pocket were the letters.

  For several minutes he lay still, luxuriating in the clean sheets. After a while he closed his eyes and slept. When he opened them again he lay looking at his coat and wondering whether the letters were worth the pain of getting them.

  He heard footsteps. The door opened and Nancy came in, looking bright and pretty in a cotton dress of blue and white, carrying herself like a young queen.

  “You should see yourself,” she said cheerfully. “You’re a sight.”

  “If I look like I feel,” Flint said, “I can believe it.”

  “You’re luckier than you have any right to be. The doctor doesn’t think there are any broken bones, but he is worried about you. He is afraid you may have internal injuries.”

  Flint shot her a sharp glance. “Did he give me a thorough check?”

  “There wasn’t time. He intends to do that when he comes back.”

  Like hell he will, Flint told himself. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said. “If Baldwin finds I’m here, you’ll be in trouble.”

  She held the door for a Mexican girl, who brought in a tray of food.

  One hand was bandaged, and he decided it must have been the hand that was stamped on. The other hand was bruised and somewhat swollen. When he sat up to eat he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, but there was little he recognized.

  There was a great welt above one eye and his nose was swollen to almost twice its normal size. His lip and cheek were puffed out in a knot as big as his fist, and there was a cut on his chin. There was a bandage on his skull, and his eyes were scarcely more than slits, but he had expected worse.

  “We brought your mare in,” Nancy said. “She’s out in the stable eating corn like she had forgotten how it tasted.” She straightened the bedcovers. “And don’t worry about us. If Port Baldwin had not moved in on Tom Nugent he would be here now. We’re expecting him.”

  When she had gone, Flint lay back on the bed. His head was throbbing and he felt very tired.

  He had come to New Mexico wanting no trouble. He had wanted no trouble at Horse Springs, and wanted none on North Plain, but long ago he had discovered that one has to make a stand. If a man starts to run, there is nothing to do but keep running. And if a man must die, he could at least die proud of his manhood. It was better to live one day as a lion, than a dozen years as a sheep.

  Rolling to his elbow, he got the letters from his pocket. One was from the Baltimore attorney, forwarding papers that indicated his plans in some respects were complete, and some investments had been concluded. The other letter was the final report from the detectives.

  Port Baldwin had been the man who arranged for Lottie and her father to secure the services of the gambler who tried to kill him.

  And her father had been associated in some of Baldwin’s financial schemes.

  With difficulty he brought his mind to consideration of the problem. Long ago he had heard of an old Chinese saying to the effect that any man who could concentrate for as much as three minutes on any given problem could rule the world. The thought had remained in his mind, and he had cultivated the ability to apply all his intelligence to any given situation. To close out everything from his mind but the one idea to be considered had taken long practice, but much of his success had been due to that ability to concentrate, to formulate the problem, to bring to it all the information and knowledge he had, and to reach a decision. Only now he was too tired, his head throbbed too much, and he wanted only to rest

  However, and he realized it with surprise, for the first time he was thinking of doing something for someone else.

  True, Baldwin had ordered him beaten, but in a measure he had paid him for that. What he wanted to do had no concern with his own feelings. He wanted to help Nancy Kerrigan.

  He closed his eyes against the ache in his head, but her image remained with him. How different it might have been had he met such a girl instead of Lottie! But would it? For he was dying now, bit by bit, day by day.

  Yet time remained, and he had always loved a good fight. He would help Nancy, he would whip Baldwin, and he would go out with that, at least, completed.

  For a man who had fought all his life, it would be best to go out fighting. Too often men were concerned merely with living, even if they must crawl to survive. He would fight Port Baldwin, he would beat him. Nancy would have her ranch, she would…

  At some point he went to sleep.

  Chapter 7

  WHEN HE awoke it was dark. He could hear the stirrings and the sound of dishes that meant suppertime. Flint sat up and put his feet to the floor.

  When Nancy came in he was strapping on his gun belt.

  “You’re being very foolish,” she said severely. “You need rest.”

  “I’ll get all the rest I need soon enough.” He paused, looking at her in the half-light. “Right now I’m hungry. Anyway,” he added brusquely, “I’m not a man who could ever lie abed when there are things to be done.”

  He tucked the other pistol into his waistband and donned his coat, following Nancy into the main room. She had lovely shoulders, and when she turned to look at him, it was with a quick, direct gaze.

  The ranch house was spacious and comfortable. There were books in some shelves across the room, and he went to look at them. Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, Washington Irving, Shakespeare, Hume’s History of England.

  He was not surprised by the quality of the authors, for he had read the journals of the trappers who came West, and he had known many Western men, and knew of the books they read. They could carry few so they carried the best.

  Nancy returned to his side. “You are interested in books?” she asked.

  “As you’ve noticed, Miss Kerrigan, I am a lonely man, and such men are inclined to read. Luckily, one of my teachers got me started on Plutarch and Montaigne.”

  “You’re a puzzling man. You give the impression of being educated, and yet —”

  “My reactions yesterday disturbed you, is that it? Why do people so readily assume that a man of education cannot also be a man of violence — when violence is called for?”

  “Christopher Marlowe was put under bond to keep him from beating up the constable on his way home, and Socrates was a soldier as well as a good wrestler. Remember how he threw Alcibiades, who was interrupting his conversations? Threw him and held him down, and Alcibiades was noted for his strength.”

  “And Ben Jonson. He once met in single combat in the open field between the assembled armies the best fighter in the French forces, and defeated him.”

  “Believe me, the list is a long one, and many men of education have on occasion been men of violence. An educated man demands his right to information, for example. Take it from him or censor it and he is apt to become violent.”

  “Are you a Western man, Mr. Flint?”

  “I suppose. All Western men are from somewhere else, when it comes to that. At the stage station in Alamitos I heard German, Swedish, and Irish accents in just a few minutes, but I suppose being a Western man is a matter of psychology. The mere fact that a man chooses to come West indicates a difference of temperament or attitude, and then there’s bound to be changes due to the landscape and the conditions. I suppose the basic difference is that men want to survive, to mate, and to have security … and out here the other considerations are out-weighed by the necessity to survive.”

  “Mr. Flint —?”
r />   “Call me Jim. I am used to it.”

  “All right — Jim. When you found Ed, was he able to talk? He was on a business trip for the ranch, and we don’t know whether he was shot when he was going out or coming back.”

  “He was worried. He muttered something about Santa Fe, and about someone called Gladys, that was all. No, he was never conscious while he was with me.”

  She led the way to the long table, and he seated her. “Thank you,” she said. “That is a courtesy I do not often encounter.”

  The hands came in slowly and sat down, stealing glances at Flint.

  “Would you like to tell me about it?” he asked. “I know you are in trouble. Maybe I can help.”

  “Porter Baldwin is going to need a lot of land for forty thousand head of cattle,” Nancy said. “It’s as simple as that.”

  He needed to ask no more questions. Few pioneer ranchmen had ever filed on their land. Indeed, when many of them settled in the West there was no legal way to file and nobody to dispute their claims but wild Indians. Later, the courts and the congressmen of settled states were inclined to dismiss all the ranchers might have done and open their grazing land to settlement. Such action was not, naturally, appreciated by the cattlemen.

  In some cases ranchers had purchased land from Indians, but the government rarely accepted such purchases as legal. Flint was completely aware of all these factors, and knew what the usual steps were.

  “Have you had your hands file claims for you?”

  She looked up quickly, and he was aware of the sudden attention from down the table.

  “Isn’t that illegal?” Nancy asked quietly. “But to reply to your question: yes. We have no choice, and if any of the men wish to keep their claims, they may. If not, we will buy their rights from them. It is either that or lose the ranch my father and uncle worked so hard to build.”

  “There may be other alternatives,” Flint replied. “Are you running cattle on railroad land?”

  “No, we are not. Tom Nugent does, and some of the others. Of course, Port Baldwin is. But we never have used any of that graze that we know of, as we hold our cattle farther south.”

  Long after dinner they sat on the wide veranda and listened to Johnny Otero singing near the bunkhouse.

  Flint led Nancy to talking of the ranch, and learned the whole story of her efforts to improve it. He was surprised by her appreciation of the grazing problem, and what she had done about it. One of her hands had been a German who remained at the ranch an entire summer making repairs in the house, building cabinets and furniture. He had told her about grazing methods in Germany and Switzerland, and from him she learned the use of spreader dams, dams built to spread the runoff from hillsides instead of letting it trickle away. Wells had been dug, seeps cleaned out, herds trimmed to avoid overgrazing.

  “My father was a great believer in children being given responsibility, Jim. He gave me things to do as early as I can remember. And he used to talk to me about the ranch, and explain everything he did, and why he did it.”

  “You know how children are. They are always curious and they want to know something about everything. I don’t remember a single question of mine that he left unanswered. Sometimes when I would ask him something he thought was intelligent he would give me a gift or take me somewhere that I wanted to go.”

  “He never gave me anything really big that I didn’t earn. Sometimes I had to do very little to earn whatever he gave, but it was usually something. Why, before I knew the ABCs I could name every cattle brand in this part of the state, and I could recognize all the plants that poison stock such as loco weed and larkspur.”

  Long after he lay in bed he thought of her and the long talk on the darkening porch. He could not remember ever talking so long to any one person, not even Flint.

  He was very stiff, and no matter how he turned there was a sore spot. For three days he loafed about the ranch, and during all that time he was aware that Pete Gaddis, Johnny Otero, or a hulking brute of a man with a good-natured face, Julius Bent, was always around.

  He learned that Baldwin had tried to get a warrant for his arrest but the local judge refused. “I saw what happened,” the judge rasped, “and as far as I am concerned it was justified. It was self-defense.”

  “He wasn’t defending himself,” Baldwin replied angrily, “he was attacking!”

  “Attack can be the best defense,” Judge Hatfield replied grimly. “You had attacked him without provocation, and he had every reason to believe you would attack him again. I am only sorry he stopped shooting when he did.”

  Baldwin had stalked angrily from the office, and Hatfield had chuckled and returned to his work.

  Baldwin was worried, and he did not know why. Shrewd as he was, he often trusted to purely animal instincts, attacking whenever weakness was evident, biding his time when faced with strength, and trusting to a sharp instinct for danger to save him from going too far.

  He felt that warning of danger now and it worried him all the more because he was not sure where the danger lay. As he carefully sifted the events of the day through his mind there was one comment that remained. Flint had asked him whether it was cattle he was interested in — or land.

  Was that a guess? Or did Flint know something?

  The latter was unlikely, yet it did not pay to overlook possibilities. The swiftness of Flint’s action both at Horse Springs and on North Plain had shocked Baldwin’s men. They were wary of Flint now, and there was an old story being revived — something about another Flint who had been a notorious killer.

  Baldwin decided there was something here he did not understand. He was aware that some of his riders believed Flint was insane, especially after he shot up Alamitos.

  Baldwin chewed his black cigar thoughtfully, sitting on the edge of his hotel bed in his shirt sleeves. Thus far things had gone according to plan. Flynn was not dead, but his death was not essential, merely that he be out of action. Kaybar was no longer a serious obstacle, and he had taken steps to eliminate Tom Nugent.

  Nugent’s swift action against the nesters had alienated the feelings of a lot of people at Alamitos. It would stand against him in Socorro or Santa Fe, if it ever came to that. Nugent would have few friends, anyway, for he was a hot-tempered, arrogant man who made enemies. Several of his hands had quit, already.

  Port Baldwin had come up the hard way. It had been his experience that victory paid off, and losers got exactly nowhere. The government was inclined to a hands-off policy, and a man could get away with as much as he was big enough to handle. Port Baldwin was, he reflected, pretty big.

  He had made his money through speculation, intimidation, and conniving, getting in quick and getting out with a profit. The future of the country did not interest him. He thought only of himself and what he could get out of it now.

  He had speculated in railroads, town-site developments, in mines and shipping, but the railroad land situation, and the state in which government land stood appealed to his instinct for a fast deal.

  Word from Washington was that a change was due in the land laws, and Baldwin foresaw enormous profits for those in possession. But he decided there was a profit to be made without awaiting the legislative action.

  He knew it was almost impossible for the railroad to dispose of their land. They had been given the odd-numbered sections along both sides of the railroad right of way, but the cattlemen, accustomed to free range, grazed government and railroad land with equal disregard for ownership, and under the existing laws it was impossible to prevent such trespass.

  Where railroad land had been sold the contracts usually stipulated that if the purchaser failed to make payments on schedule all profits from the land in question would revert to the railroad, after default in payment. If payments continued to be defaulted for three months, the land purchase price became due and the company was free to foreclose.

  Thousands of land-hungry men were coming West, most of them with a little money to invest, and few of them knowi
ng anything about the land itself. Little of the land in which Baldwin planned to deal could be farmed. It was grazing land, thin-soiled and of value for little else, and to make money from grazing land, thousands of acres were necessary.

  Once he had driven the Kaybar and Nugent from their holdings, Baldwin meant to sell the land to dry farmers, using the same contract the railroad used. He had also secured from the railroad tentative approval of a plan to sell their land, and it was this fact he planned to use in advertising land for sale. Most of the buyers would be, he knew, innocent of the procedures of land purchase, and most of them would believe he was selling only railroad land. Others would believe he was selling off the big ranches to which he had obtained title. Few would go to the extent of a title search, and for those few he had methods of persuasion. If they talked too much they would find themselves on a train going East, in an empty box-car, badly beaten up.

  Few would be able to keep up payments on the land they bought, and the land would revert to him. Whenever possible he meant to assure himself of a reasonable title, but Baldwin knew few of the buyers could afford extensive litigation.

  Once he had sold the land, he would sell off his cattle and go East, retaining title only to that land on which payment had been defaulted. Quite coolly he planned to sell land to which he had no title at all, knowing that if the matter went to the courts, he would no longer be within their jurisdiction.

  It was a swindle, and he regarded it as nothing else, but a swindle it might take years to unravel, and there were always ways of getting such cases delayed or thrown out of court.

  Baldwin knew that few of the ranchers in the area had title to the land they grazed, and he had thought of ways to make that fact work for him. Rolling his black cigar in his jaws, Baldwin contemplated the future with satisfaction. He had lost a good bit of money, but this deal would give him more capital, and it would also give him a good deal of collateral.

  Flynn was out of it. Nugent soon would be. That Kerrigan girl would cause him no trouble. Pete Gaddis he had estimated and dismissed. Undoubtedly a tough man in a fight, he was no businessman and no leader.