Читать книгу Riders of the Night - Eugene Cunningham - Страница 3

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Yatesville was lit by three flickering, discouraged oil lamps. Where the yellowish glimmer of these was not, the county seat was pitchy dark. For there was no moon and the hour was three of the spring morning. There was no life anywhere on the streets. Even the gambling-houses had closed more than an hour before. Faraday, the lank marshal, had shambled home. Straggling cowboys found sleeping-quarters in rooming-house or livery corral.

The main street was merely an inky tunnel where the oil lamps did not palely dapple it. It was silent, too. But faintly from the west there sounded a muffled, deliberate pounding; horses’ hoofs, thudding upon the soft dust of the county road beyond the limits of the town. The dull noise came nearer, but seemed scarcely louder—as if, the closer to Yatesville those riders came, the more cautiously they rode.

Five minutes passed. Ten minutes. Then, abruptly as a lantern-show’s beginning, against the weathered gray of the adobe buildings which lined both sides of the main street there was silhouetted a cavalcade of perhaps a dozen horsemen, looming gigantic where the street-lamps flung their shadows.

There was occasional faint creaking of saddle leather, the low blowing of a horse, the tiny jingling of spur or bit chain. Coming farther upstreet at deliberate walk, the horses’ hoofs fell almost silently upon the dust.

On they came, these riders. Past the First Chance Saloon; on to and by the Congress Saloon. They reached Judge Amblet’s long general merchandise store, but made no halt there. Other stores, saloons, gambling-halls were also left on one hand or the other. Now, the square, two-story ’dobe that was the courthouse of Yates County loomed ahead. Beyond it was a livery corral with a wide gateway. The twin gateposts were connected and braced at the tops by a great section of cottonwood log.

Past the courthouse the riders came, with that same deliberate, steady fall of hoofs. In a solid body they approached the livery corral adjoining. One shadow separated itself from the mass—a rider moving up ahead, like a scout, into the gateway of the corral. He reined in his mount and sat moveless for a long minute. At last, he lifted his arm.

Slowly, the other riders halted in mid-street moved again. They came forward to the gate; halted again. From the mass of them a small group split off and joined the single rider in the gateway.

There was a period of near-silent business there beneath the cross-bar of the gate. Small sounds—creakings, the rasping of rope upon leather or rough bark, an odd panting—there were, but none of the cowboys sleeping back in the corral’s stalls were awakened. Three or four minutes passed. Then a grim voice:

‘All right!’ it grunted.

Through the darkness, as softly, sinisterly, as it had come, the party rode back along the main street. At the First Chance Saloon that same grim voice barked, once again:

‘Yo!’

The thud of the hoofs quickened, chains jingled, leather squeaked. The party moved at a long, hard trot; vanished.

The hours of darkness dragged on. Presently, in the eastern sky over the far crest of the rugged Crazy Horse Range showed the faintest flush of rose and pearl. It deepened, widened, until every raw color of the spectrum writhed up and out, as if stroked flashingly upon the gray sky by gigantic, invisible brush. Then over Crazy Horse Peak itself peeped the rim of a disk that looked like molten brass. Light came to all the Crazy Horse country.

In Yatesville, men stirred from houses or corrals or wherever they had spent the night. They came out into the daylight to begin the day’s business. From one end of the main street and the other, storekeepers and freighters and other early birds appeared. And in the cool light of early morning, swaying a little in the gentle dawn breeze, two strange, limp things dangled like bundles of rags from the cross-bar of the gate of the livery corral beyond the courthouse.

Men were drawn there as by a magnet. They clustered about the gateway. They gaped open-mouthed, some of them. Others—like Rufe Redden, the storekeeper who had first seen them—stared broodingly from under down-drawn brows, their mouths sullenly tight, their brown faces immobile.

For to all of those who came to look, the two strangled men hanging from lariat-ends there at the gatebeam were well known; very well known indeed over all the Crazy Horse Range.

Upon the breast of each man a paper was pinned to the shirt. It was not necessary to move up more closely than one fancied approaching a dead man, in order to read the legend upon those improvised placards. The wording was alike on each and printed in the same strong, steady hand:

Citizens! Be Aware!

Do not touch these scarecrows before nine today.

Someone pulled himself away from the grisly fascination of the spectacle for long enough to go after gangling Faraday, the city marshal.

Faraday came shambling up, snapping a suspender over bony shoulder, blinking sleepily, muttering. But at sight of the bodies he lost his drowsiness. He stood there under them like a man transfixed. One long hand remained motionless, gripping a suspender. His loose mouth moved buzzingly. He was reading the placards’ curt warning slowly and painfully, for Faraday was much more the professional peace officer than the scholar—and plenty in Yatesville said that he was not much of a peace officer.

‘ “One,” ’ he finished, reading the signature of the legends. ‘One... Why—why, hell! The One-Gang done this-yere...’

He moved up closer and stared into the faces of the dead men, small head coming forward on buzzard-like neck, little eyes squinting painfully, as if he expected to find in those contorted features something that a policeman should know.

‘Pedro Garcia—an’ Shorty Willets from the Y ... Yes, sir! Pedro Garcia, an’ Shorty Willets! What d’y’know about that! I ain’t seen Shorty for—it’s more’n a week. But Pedro, I run into him just yesterday. He says he sold out that li’l’ place o’ his on Brushy Crick. He was headin’ for New Mexico, last night, he says. To see that rich brother o’ his at Las Cruces. But he never went... One-Gang got him...’

He stopped short. His small black eyes were very round as he stared from one to the other of the figures. He did not need to voice his thought; hardly a spectator there but had been impressed by the same oddity of this business, the coupling together here of that shady character, Pedro Garcia, who had last worked as vaquero on Lance Gregg’s Wallop-8, with little old Shorty Willets, as good a cowhand as the Crazy Horse country knew, and lately foreman of the big Y outfit.

Absently, it seemed, Faraday’s long hand went up, reaching toward Shorty Willets. It was brushing the stiff, sweat-warped leg of Shorty’s old overalls when, from the men watching, there came a dry voice:

‘My goodness! Yuh ain’t forgittin’ what the sign says, Faraday?’

The marshal jerked back his hand as from a red-hot stove. He recoiled from the bodies. Then his sallow, lantern-jawed face was flooded with angry blood. He whirled upon the grizzled, bandy-legged little cowboy who had so contemptuously drawled the question.

‘I reckon I can do whutever I’m a mind to, Turkey Adkins!’

‘Shore yuh can! An’ she shore ain’t a dam’ thing to me!’ Turkey Adkins nodded. ‘I’m jist tryin’ to git this straight in my mind, that’s all. I was jist a-augurin’ whether yuh was callin’ the One-Gang’s bluff or—jist forgittin’ it. Now, go right ahead! If yuh cut ’em down, now, yuh’re a brave man. For yuh’re tellin’ the One-Gang they can’t bluff yuh none; tellin’ ’em to go to hell! Go right ahead!’

Tight grins ran around the watchers. For it was as Turkey had said. Perhaps there was no danger whatever in ignoring the brazen warning of the gang which was daily becoming more notorious for its rustling and robbing and killing across the country; and even more notorious—and impressive!—for the calm insolence and the daring displayed in everything it did. But—these two exhibits alone were enough to make thoughtful even so thoughtless a man as Faraday the marshal.

‘Well—I’m marshal, I reckon!’ Faraday blustered at last. ‘Nobody can interfere with me when I’m a-carryin’ out my duties. Nobody better try it, neither. So——’

Up went his hand again. He touched the saddle-warped leg of Shorty Willets’s overalls. Defiantly, then, he looked around the ring of quiet faces. Then he got out of a pocket a big jack-knife and opened its largest blade.

‘Come on, somebody! Hold ’em up while I cut them lass-ropes!’ he ordered. Then, after a moment of utter silence and movelessness: ‘Come on! Y’ expect me to do ever’thing!’

Still nobody moved. Turkey Adkins rolled his cigarette from one corner of his wide, thin-lipped mouth to the other, spat expertly through his teeth, and regarded the marshal with one squinting gray eye closed against upwreathing smoke.

‘Ol’ cow die—mouth o’ the branch.

’Tain’t goin’ rain no mo’!

Them buzzards held a public dance.

’Tain’t goin’ rain no mo’!’

Thus Mr. Turkey Adkins, singing absently and very softly—precisely as if he had not heard a word of the marshal’s invitation to flout the One-Gang.

‘By Gemini! I’ll do it all by myself, then!’ Faraday snarled loudly.

He jumped up to the top of a ’dobe wall that flanked the gate. He scrambled up a gatepost until he was sitting astraddle of the cross-bar. Then he inched along until he came to where Pedro Garcia’s lariat was turned about the cottonwood log. He took the jack-knife from between his teeth.

Turkey Adkins turned from watching him, to stare across the street. On the opposite side from the corral gateway there were no buildings. Most of Yatesville—that part which fronted upon the main street—lay west of the courthouse. There was little or none at this end behind the main street. So Turkey, standing at the corral gate, looked straight out into the open greasewood and mesquite flats beyond Yatesville—straight out to a little rise in the land perhaps an eighth of a mile away.

He nodded to himself. Since he commanded a clear view of that brush-crowned rise, it seemed natural to believe that anyone upon it commanded equally clear view of the gateway. He turned back, to stare squintingly up at the marshal. But Faraday seemed to have no thought of such scientific and geographic details as these noticed by Turkey Adkins.

He was leaning forward, now. The jack-knife was in his long, lean hand. The edge of the blade had touched the turn of the lariat when, from somewhere over toward that little rise, a flat and vicious report sounded. Something struck the right-hand gatepost of the corral. Shreds of bark and a little puff of smokelike dust went flying. Again that flat, faraway whang! It was a miss. But the third shot of this continuous string slapped the cross-bar immediately under the seat of the marshal’s pants. He came off the cross-bar with a wild howl; came as a kingfisher dives from a limb, head-first and careless of how he landed. He looked spidery as he fell in the dust, all thrashing long arms and legs. He howled steadily as he rolled over and over toward cover.

The men about the gateway had achieved the effect of merely fading from the scene. Mostly, they had jumped the wall of the corral and were sheltered now behind its thick ’dobe bricks. But Turkey Adkins was not one uselessly to expend so much effort. He had slipped sideways along the wall the precise distance necessary to be protected from a shot across that cleared space—and not an inch farther. Now, he squatted and watched with one bright, calm gray eye, the other closed as usual under the spiral of smoke from his cigarette.

He studied the marshal’s frantic rolling until it ended, and, on hands and feet, Faraday galloped up beside him. He said nothing as the marshal jerked himself gaspingly erect and glared wildly toward the source of the lead.

‘Git that dam’ bushwhacker!’ Faraday yelled wildly. ‘Make doll-rags out o’ him!’

‘Who? Me?’Turkey inquired. ‘My motter is that grand ol’ hailin’ cry they use up in Arkansaw: Let ever’ gent kill his own snakes! Nahsir! He wasn’t doin’ no shootin’ at me, fella! He was dustin’ the south end o’ yo’ breeches. So you go git him, yo’self. I ain’t got a bit o’ use for no part o’ that fella. He shoots a lot too en-tire-ly where he’s a-aimin’, for me!’

Faraday, being now sheltered, raced across the street to the corner of that building which bounded the gap across which the hidden rifleman had fired. He had his Colt in his hand. He reached blindly around the building’s corner with it and emptied it in the general direction of the rise. Turkey, loafing across after him, sing-songed the spots:

‘One—Miss! Two—Miss! Three—Double the Last! Four—Five—Miss! Miss! Yuh’re certainly proud o’ that hawglaig, now ain’t yuh? Tell yuh what, Faraday! Yuh ought to ram two bullets down each ca’tridge an’ try to shoot twicet as fur! Or do yuh figger he’s got a weak heart an’ yo’ noise’ll skeer him to death?’

The marshal ignored Turkey’s remarks. He reloaded his pistol and when he turned back across the street he swaggered. But the effect was spoiled when a pebble, flung by Turkey, kicked up dust at his heels. He jumped forward and sideways with a howl like that which had marked his coming off the cross-bar. Turkey, his brown face somber, lip curling, followed him.

‘It’s too bad I never had a long gun!’ Faraday was telling the reassembled group at the gate. ‘I’d have got that hairpin!’

‘Knowed a man name’ Mister Brown.

’Tain’t goin’ rain no mo’.

Wore his hat on upside down.

’Tain’t goin’ rain no mo’!’

Faraday glared at the singer. Turkey regarded him speculatively for a bit. Then:

‘Well!’ he drawled, stretching. ‘Reckon I’ll ramble down an’ hunt me up a bite to gnaw on. I’ll be back, Faraday. Don’t yuh worry about me not comin’. Around nine, I’ll sa’nter back. To watch yuh cut them pore devils down, yuh know.’

‘Y’re mighty brave!’ Faraday sneered. ‘S’posin’ y’ cut ’em down y’self? Yah! Don’t like the notion, huh?’

Turkey blew the cigarette-stub from a pursed under-lip and shook his head.

‘I’m skeered to!’ he said. ‘If a big, brave man, with a great big pistol, like—like you, Faraday, if he’s skeered, I’m runnin’ like hell. I’ll be back at nine, sharp, though!’