Читать книгу Mesquite Jenkins - Clarence E. Mulford - Страница 4

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The rider slowed and stopped as he topped the little rise, and looked through close-lidded eyes along the desert track, following it as it meandered over the straighter, more direct openings through sage, cactus, and greasewood, at times wavering and thinning in the quivering iridescence of heat waves streaming up from the hot desert floor.

There was no movement, no life save of himself and his horse, for this was the midday hour, and the desert dwellers sought sanctuary of warrens and the shade of sage and chaparral. The desert was hushed, deserted, concealing a teeming and tumultuous life as vicious as it was swift and short-lived. A distant range of burned brown mountains was indistinct in the heat haze, seemingly close at hand; but he knew better.

This was the trail he had been looking for, the main track between Franklin and Desert Wells. His short cut, taken with the calm assurance of the desert bred, had saved him a full day of riding—nearly forty miles. There was nothing unusual about this scene, one way or another. It was an accustomed environment, revisited after a year or more of absence. The heat, hovering between one hundred twenty and one hundred thirty at this hour of the day, was nothing to become uneasy about; he sensed it without any particular thought, accepted it tacitly. The glare of the sun was stopped by the brim of his big sombrero, but the reflected light, pouring up almost like a material thing from the desert floor, caused his lids partly to close. He rode on, letting his horse pick its way, set its own pace. A man on a holiday, with a year's wages in his pockets, had no need to hasten when haste was foolish. He had a destination, but also he had all the time he wanted in which to reach it, and the destination was not so important that it could not be changed if he felt like it. For weeks he had been riding south from a far Northern range, angling and pausing, riding slowly and riding rapidly, as his humour and the circumstances directed. He still had many miles to cover, in as many hours, days, or weeks as he chose.

The last year had made a tremendous difference in his life; in fact, the change had begun a year or two earlier, but this had been more of a probationary period, so tactfully imposed and directed that he had hardly been conscious of it. A mere youth, his careless steps had wandered down the easy slope that leads to crime and outlawry; but, through the influence of others, he had climbed the slope again before his digression had become really serious.

He smiled as he let his memory bring back that second year on the Montana range; as he thought, man by man, of that close-woven outfit, where daily precept had taken the place of preaching; of the courage, loyalty, and clean thinking which had taken on a dignity, in his slowly opening eyes, that was very much worth while. He had learned by close personal contact, through days and nights, that honesty, truthfulness, justice, clean thoughts, consideration for others—that these things are not namby-pamby; that they are not signs and measures of weakness, not sickish, not things for which apologies should be made. He had learned that such attributes are coloured by the individuals who practise them; that the great factor is the nature of the man himself. He had known the opposite attributes, had associated with those who practised them almost as a profession; they had been a hard crowd; but he chuckled as he thought of that hardness: hard as they were, they would have broken, crumpled, had they came in contact with that Northern outfit; hard as glass, they were, but soft to a diamond. Why, there was one man in that Northern outfit who would have cut them down as a scythe cuts grass.

A whirling dust devil caught his attention, and he idly watched its mad, erratic course across the desert sands, glad when he saw it break and sift down to earth. He glanced about him carelessly, and then his horse snorted and stopped. It was trembling, its delicate nostrils playing nervously. A movement caught his searching gaze. Something dirty-coloured had moved past an opening in the sage.

Instinctively his knees pressed against the saddle skirts and sent the nervous horse moving from the trail at a tangent. His hand rose and fell, the spurting smoke spreading along the ground, the crashing roar lost in the immensities of flat space. Heavy bodies rose from the sand, winging ponderously aloft, reluctant to leave. He rode past the dead vulture, and then stopped quickly as he caught sight of the vulture's magnet.

Face down on the sands was the body of a man, its neck showing a single slash where a vulture's beak had ripped. This meant that the man had only just died, for otherwise he would have been torn to ribbons by now; but how long he had lain there helpless was conjecture, how long he had watched those restless scavengers waiting for him to breathe his last could not be known.

The rider, tossing the reins over the horse's head, went ahead on foot the few remaining steps, his questioning eyes on the inert shape, searching, appraising, studying.

The earth has its messages for such as he, and he moved along a twisting track, which easily might have been overlooked by you or me. To the uninitiated too often the word "desert" brings up great reaches of sand, soft, deep, ridged, and patterned by winds, where footprints lose identity in the unstable, sliding grains. Such prints would be larger than the feet which made them, their rims squashed outward from under the falling tread, and from those outer rims the inner surface sloped downward to the centre. Here the desert was hot, hard soil, covered with an armour of pebbles, slivered rock, and occasionally dusted lightly with rounded grains of sand, except where it was piled in windrows. The heels of a puncher's boots might have scratched it, but it seemed impervious to signs of progress on hands and knees. To the stranger's eyes the marks were plain: small crescents cut here and there by curved and digging fingers; an almost imperceptible line where the toe of a boot had dragged; the unvarnished side of a larger pebble facing upward, and the hole whence it had been scratched.

The stranger noticed that the tracks described a curve, and he pushed on wonderingly. The curve was constant, and seemed to have been purposefully made, since there was not an aimless twist or bend in it. Reaching the trail he found a wealth of signs: hoof prints made by iron shoes, marks of a fall, shown by the ground and a broken sage; red-brown spots which had been hurriedly sucked of moisture by the parched earth; and now the hoof prints which he had idly noticed as he had ridden along the main trail told him an interesting fact. The unfortunate man had been riding in the same direction as his own; he had noticed that the bullet which had brought death had gone in the back, under the left shoulder: therefore, the man who had fired the shot had been behind both the stranger, as he now stood, and the victim. This was something that could wait. The dead man came first.

The stranger went back along the tragic tracks and stopped again beside the body. Yes, the bullet had been fired from behind; but to make certain of this he gently turned the body over. Opening the blue shirt, one glance told him that his conjecture had been correct. This, then, was murder: cold, cowardly. He studied the elderly bronzed face; the grizzled beard with its stain of brown around the lips; the pale blue eyes; the sombrero, coat, and everything else to be seen. The gun lying on the ground had not been fired. It was a revolver not very common in that place and time: a Smith and Wesson reissue of 1877, shooting the .44 Russian cartridge, and a gun of exceptional accuracy so far as regular issue weapons were concerned; but this weapon had been used and abused so much that the rifling in the end of the barrel had been worn almost smooth.

Why had this unknown man steadily curved to the right as he crawled and dragged himself away from the trail? Why had he left the trail, where help might be more reasonably expected than out here, a hundred yards into desolation? The stranger nodded in a satisfied way, went to his horse, and rode forward on a continuation of that pitiful trail, seeking visual proof of what he already knew to be the true explanation. It was not long before he found it; another gathering of greedy vultures, this time around a startlingly mottled piebald range horse, dead on its side. Its tracks curved back to the main trail parallel with those made by the man, but with a much greater radius. It had been killed by a shot through the head.

It was plain now, the reason for the dead man's curving trail: he had crawled doggedly toward his loose horse, which had kept ahead of him on a greater circle. The stranger could see this terrible scene: the moving piebald, the crawling man slowly bleeding to death; the blazing sun, the desert silence, a murderer grimly waiting; a murderer who did not have the decency to finish his victim out of hand, but who took an indirect though no less certain method. The death of the horse spelled death for its owner.

The stranger followed his own track back to the body and thence to the main trail, which he crossed before he began his circle. After a few minutes of riding he cut and followed another set of horse tracks. This set had followed the trail, but distant from it two hundred yards. Then, behind a clump of greasewood, where the alkali was thick and scabby, he stopped and read a book which was plain to his eyes.

The killer had dismounted here, picketed his horse in a little gully, walked to this clump of greasewood, and sat down, cross-legged, like a Turk or a cowboy. Half a dozen cigarette stubs told that no small interval had been passed here. Hand and leg prints, on the right side, showed how he had arisen, presumably with the rifle in his left hand. The left foot, plain in the yielding surface, was ahead and to the left of a deep knee print. So he, a right-handed man, had knelt and fired. The empty shell lay a little more to the right. The stranger pocketed it before he followed the boot prints around the clump and back again. Going out, they were those of a running man, the sharp heels driven deep on the turn; coming back, they were walking steps, leading straight toward the picketed horse. These walking steps were carefully measured, in terms of his own stride, by the stranger. Mounting again, he followed the tracks of the murderer's horse to the main trail, and across it, at a point three hundred yards from the place where the victim had been dropped. They stopped and swung sharply back to the main trail and along it out of sight.

The stranger stopped, too, and looked studiously from this point to the place where the dead piebald lay. The shot had been an amazing one for such a distance with such a gun. No man but an expert rifle shot could have made it; and with a .45-70 repeating rifle it was almost beyond belief. No, not quite beyond belief: Red Connors, up there in Montana, could have done as well, and then repeated it to prove it was not an accident; but when one unconsciously linked the marksmanship of an unknown man with that of Red Connors it was a compliment, indeed. This killer was a wonderful shot, with rifle, at least.

He looked down hopefully. Yes, there it lay, its brassy surface glinting in the sun. He swung down gracefully, picked it up, and then struck straight for the dead man. The vultures had drawn close again, and one was so desperate and vicious as to show a sign of fight. One shot cured it and drove the others off. In a few minutes the stranger rode on again, carrying a burden as heavy as himself, face down across the saddle blanket, tied snugly against the cantle. No more did he ride carelessly, apathetically; for the killer might be holed up somewhere, ready to object to such close interest in his affairs. The stranger smiled grimly and hoped that the first shot would miss; after that, if it did, he would endeavour to give an exhibition of Ute trailing and Red Connors's rifle work. It was a combination bordering upon perfection.

It was mid-afternoon when the stranger rounded a rocky hummock at the far end of a narrow trail through the ridge and saw the town of Desert Wells sprawled before him on the low bench; and he also saw that this farther side of the ridge was nowhere near as desertlike as the other. A turn in the trail had brought him face to face with a good cattle country, and here he felt even more at home than he had back on the desert wastes. The trail joined a narrow road which skirted the ridge, and it was not long before he entered the town itself. Stopping at the first building, its faded sign proclaiming it to be Parsons's Saloon, he dismounted and went inside.

Parsons himself was behind the bar.

"Where's th' sheriff or th' coroner?" asked the stranger, now hearing excited voices in the street outside.

Parsons looked at the speaker, his face grimly curious.

"Pe-culiar combination," he observed, and he had used his eyes so well by this time that nothing about the stranger, on the surface, was undiscovered.

"There come both of 'em," he said, bobbing his head toward the door.

The stranger turned slowly and saw two men push through the crowd now milling about the front door. They were commonplace, these officials, of medium stature, with bronzed and wrinkled faces, and the hair of both had been well bleached by the sun. The eyes of the first were a pale blue; of the other, a slate-gray. Both wore scrawny moustaches, and the age of neither could be easily approximated.

"That yourn?" asked the first, whose five-pointed badge bore his title in capital letters.

"Where'd you find him?" asked the second curiously.

The stranger removed his hat and wiped his forehead with a dusty sleeve.

"It ain't mine," he said to the sheriff. "Three hours back on th' Franklin trail," he said to the coroner.

"Why didn't you let him lay an' bring th' news to me, instead?" asked the sheriff coldly, and his companion emphatically nodded.

"I had to kill two vultures out of a score to keep him from bein' eaten while I looked around. Nothin' else has been touched, an' there's plenty of evidence left."

"What kind of evidence?" asked the sheriff.

"Signs—lots of 'em. Here's one bit," and the stranger handed over an empty shell.

"H'm! .45-70," muttered the sheriff, rolling it in his fingers, his gaze on the dented fulminating cap.

"Just scratch some kind of a mark on th' side of this, stranger, so it can be identified," requested the sheriff, returning the shell. He watched the stranger's knife point scratch a double X, and then he took the shell and put it in his pocket. He turned to the coroner.

"Reckon we better take him over to Murphy's," he said. "We oughta be able to hold th' inquest to-night. He won't keep well in this heat, an' Murphy can't embalm worth a cuss."

He spoke to the stranger again.

"Reckon you better come along an' git yore hoss. You've got to take us back there, anyhow."

The stranger nodded and obeyed the sheriff's gesture, lining up at the bar with the two officials. He was last on the line, and gave his order after his two companions had made known their wishes.

"Sarsapariller," he said.

The two officials looked their frank disbelief, and the man behind the bar leaned forward quickly.

"Sarsapar——" said the latter, not completing the word. His lips curved unpleasantly. "Wall, now, damned if I got any. Nor milk, neither."

"I know better than to ask for milk on a cow ranch," said the stranger. "What you got aside from likker?"

"Hell, I got a lemon," answered Parsons, not as free with his facial contortions, and keeping the inflection of his voice within safe limits. He was now beginning to discover things that his first gleanings had failed to find. The stranger had been regarding him with a cold, level gaze, and something came to the bartender with great clarity and suddenness.

"You squeeze it, then, in water," said the stranger, and thereupon aided in keeping the silence intact.

The drinks disposed of, three rounds of them, the stranger shoved his two cigars into a pocket and followed the officers out to the horse.

In silence they went to Murphy's, the local undertaker, who would have reached for his gun had anyone called him a mortician, and who could not embalm worth a cuss. Evidently he was a much better hardware merchant, as suggested by the stock on his shelves and his evident prosperity. A trip, slowly and in step, to Murphy's back room marked one duty done, and the three emerged in customary and becoming silence and gravity.

Someone following the crowd had brought up two horses and turned them over to the officers. In a moment the three men were riding along the bench road leading toward the desert trail to Franklin.

"Seein' as how you got there first," said the sheriff as they drew away from the town and whatever itching ears it might contain, "you might tell us about it." His glance had rested on the rifle in the stranger's saddle scabbard.

"Mine's a .45-70," said the stranger coldly. "Take it out an' look at it, if you want."

"Shucks," grunted the sheriff. "Be lots of time for that later. Did you find him on th' trail?"

The stranger told his story briefly, but not quite all of it. He was nettled and perfectly willing to let his companions do some of their own work themselves. At the conclusion of the recital the coroner turned his head.

"He couldn't 'a' been dead very long, th' way them vultures acted. You must 'a' been right close to there when he died."

"Mebby; he was plumb limp, if that means anythin' to you."

"It means somethin', that an' them vultures," said the coroner.

The sheriff pulled at his moustache.

"See anybody?"

"No."

"H'm. If the hombre that did this killin' was ahead of you on th' trail he could 'a' been seen, out there, for quite a ways. Must 'a' beat you to town, huh?"

"He started back th' way he come," replied the stranger, "toward Franklin. An' if he didn't want to be seen, he couldn't 'a' been seen for quite a ways, out there."

"Seems you took a lot of interest in this here murder, if it was one," suggested the coroner professionally.

"Seems as though I did, but what of it? Shouldn't I oughta?" asked the stranger in mild surprise. "Citizen's duty, I take it."

"Kinda pert, ain't you?" demanded the coroner, slightly huffed.

"Don't reckon so, but I never did have th' tail-waggin' habit."

There was no reply to this, and another silent interval ensued.

Both officers stole occasional glances at their companion, supplementing and checking up on the franker scrutiny they had enjoyed back in Parsons's Saloon: What they saw might have disturbed less worthy souls. A calm, unemotional, and very cold face, with thin lips and a pair of eyes that had a trick of becoming frosty. The pair of Colts on the stranger's thighs were tied down for an unhampered draw. Most men found it sufficient to carry but one; but there were some who had attained professional dexterity who made it a point to carry two. This was unwise if the dexterity was insufficient, for two guns bespoke the professional, and there were certain ambitious souls upon whom this conceit acted as an irritant. Some of them regarded the two-gun affectation much as small boys regard a chip on the shoulder.

"Did you notice anythin' special?" asked the sheriff, his hounding instincts arousing themselves to a fresh effort. "Any perticular signs?"

The stranger was canny when dealing with strangers, and he still smarted under that look at his scabbarded rifle; still, it had been perfectly natural in a peace officer.

"Quite some cayuse tracks," he answered. "I kept off of 'em th' best I could. All I wanted to know was two things: First, if there was any life in that feller to be saved; second, if th' shooter was hangin' round within gunshot of me." He let his eyes rest calmly on the coroner's face. "If I'd had any sense I'd 'a' come on my way an' let him lay there an' forgot all about it."

"H'm," said the coroner unpleasantly.

"H'm," echoed the sheriff, not at all unpleasantly. "Glad you didn't. His wife will want to know. Kinda uncertain when a man don't come back an' nobody knows why."

"You know him?" asked the stranger.

"Yep. Name's Tobe Ricketts, owner of th' Lazy S, over east of town. Tobe warn't none too well liked. He was havin' some kinda trouble with his men. Don't know what his widder will do now, with one thing an' another like it is."

"One of th' first settlers, Tobe was; an' sorta had th' idear that th' hull range belonged to him," supplemented the coroner, thawing a little, perhaps because of the desert's heat. He spoke without bias or warmth, but he caught the sheriff's warning glance and felt hastily for tobacco and papers.

Mile after mile rolled behind them and then the stranger drew rein and pointed ahead on the trail.

"There's where I started," he said. "You want me to come along?"

The answering grunts were affirmative, and they rode first to where the body had lain, the stranger explaining its position and pointing out his own tracks. Then he fell in behind and let his companions lead the way. They did not back-track, either through poor eyesight, or because they did not believe it necessary, but rode on to where they were told they would find the horse. Vultures arose from it as they drew near, but were soon allowed to return and continue their feast.

"Lazy S piebald that he mostly rode," said the sheriff. "Where's th' tracks of th' feller that did th' shootin'?"

They stopped again at the alkali depression and looked around for a few minutes. The tracks of the off caulk of the near front shoe of the killer's horse did not show, although the other caulks were plain enough in the crust. The stranger said nothing, showed only casual interest; but his eyes missed nothing that his keen and thorough training told him was worth studying. He idly pulled a stem of salt grass, withered and sere, and gently chewed one end of it; and when the officers turned their backs to bend down over a boot print, he swiftly measured a print near his hand, broke off the stem, and put it in his pocket.

"Where'd you find th' ca'tridge?" suddenly asked the sheriff, without turning his head.

"Right back there, where he knelt."

"H'm. Shot Tobe in th' back. Let's foller his sign an' see where he got back on th' main trail, where he shot th' hoss."

It did not take them long to reach the spot, and one glance was all the sheriff wanted. He took the shell out of his pocket and idly turned it over and over and end for end.

"Reloaded ca'tridge," he grunted. "Well, there's aplenty of them in this country, though th' primer may tell us somethin' when we get a chance to force it out. Don't know as there's any difference in th' various makes, but that can wait. Th' calibre ain't very talkative, neither; I know a dozen men that use th' same ca'tridge. H'm."

The stranger smiled coldly, drew his Winchester from the scabbard, and offered it for inspection.

"What you doin' now?" asked the sheriff in mild surprise.

"You seemed to be curious about this gun," explained its owner, "back there on th' trail. You better look it over before I get rid of it."

"Shucks," grunted the sheriff, with a show of amiability. "I don't have to look at that. I looked at th' tracks of yore hoss in town an' at yore boot tracks out here. I ain't as dumb, mebby, as some folks reckon; but, notwithstandin' th' fact that I find yore tracks out here just like I oughta find 'em if you didn't do th' shootin', an' just to please you, I'll take th' gun. Hand her over."

The sheriff handed his friend the empty shell, took the rifle, pushed down the lever to see that the gun was loaded, and then fired into the ground. He caught the shell as it came out of the barrel, examined it swiftly, held it out against the one in the coroner's hand, and smiled.

"Look at th' prints of th' firin' pins," he said. "Yourn is deeper, sharper, smaller, an' plumb centre; th' killer's is shallow, blunt, a mite bigger, an' a mite to one side. His rifle's purty well wore, while yourn is like new." He tossed it from him before the stranger could check the movement, and then chuckled at the instant retrieving of it.

The stranger did not try to justify his action, but he did not intend to have that shell lying about on the scene of the murder.

"Well, let's go back an' hold th' inquest," suggested the coroner.

"Reckon we might as well," acquiesced the sheriff. "I know th' verdict right now."

"Murder by some person unknown," said the coroner, and wheeled about to return to Desert Wells. Four hours later he was proved to be a prophet, for that was the verdict of his jury. There was one thing about this inquest which was striking and illuminating to the stranger. This jury was very easily satisfied with three sworn statements: the finding of the body, the course of the bullet, and the position of the supposed murderer. Not a single bit of detail as to other proof was demanded. The sheriff's professional secrets were not revealed, which must have been very gratifying to that officer.