Читать книгу Dark Valley - Jackson Gregory - Страница 3

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Twice within forty-eight hours the lone rider, coming up like a whirlwind for dust and speed from somewhere in the farther southwest, had been asked his name—and this was in a country and at a time when it was far from customary to put personal questions to a stranger.

The first occasion had been at the little cow town of Agua Verde. He had tarried there over night. After stabling his horses—he rode into town on a glorious red-bay stallion, the most superb piece of horse flesh Agua Verde had ever seen, and was followed by two led relief horses, likewise high-headed, savage-eyed and clean of line—he ate hungrily at the lunch counter, then repaired to the Green Water saloon. Within twenty minutes he had joined four men playing stud-poker. Within another twenty minutes he had proved himself the hardest player of the lot, and all played hard and fast, with an outer though perhaps deceptive semblance of recklessness. The men with whom he played called one another familiarly Al and Smoky and Gaucho and Temlock. The time came when one of them, quite friendly about it, asked:

“An’ you, Stranger, what’ll we call you?”

The stranger stared at him with a pair of intensely black eyes which were not in the least friendly. He employed the long fingers of a brown muscular hand to sharpen the already needle-pointed ends of a small mustache that was as black as his eyes, and took so long in answering that it began to seem that he wasn’t going to answer at all. But finally he said, in an even, low-toned voice which had spoken only when necessary tonight and never above that hushed monotone:

“You can call me Willie, if that’ll help any, or even Sitting Bull, or, say, Robinson Crusoe, and you won’t even have to smile.”

He used gold pieces for counters—fives, tens and twenties—and appeared to have an ample stock; an hour or so after midnight when the game broke up he went off to bed with considerably more gold than he had sat in with. He was out of town and away, none knew where, long before day had brought any other in Agua Verde awake.

The next night late he rode into the mountain town of Fiddler’s Gulch. At the “hotel,” so proclaimed in the drunken-looking, malformed letters on a split board over the door, he was handed a pencil and a dirty sheet of paper and requested to register.

The way the stranger looked down along his nose at the hotel keeper was like sighting along a rifle barrel. When he demanded curtly, “What the hell?” it was with reason. This was worse than asking a man casually what his name was. Here you were required to set it down in black and white, and it might be used against you.

“Sheriff’s orders,” he was told by a disgusted landlord. “Ol’ Dan Westcott’s a-gittin’ an ol’ man’s notions, I reckon. Every hotel in Rincon County’s got orders straight from him, an’ if you know Dan, or ever heard about him, you’ll likely know he’s apt to raise seven kinds o’ hell with any man that don’t do things his way. Me, I tell him things is comin’ to a purty pass. It’s onreasonable in the firs’ place; it puts a hotel man to a lot of extry trouble; it’s aimin’ at a free American’s con-sti-toot-ion-al rights, an’, hell, Stranger, mos’ folks can’t write anyhow. You can, I’d say?”

The stranger, though he accepted pencil and paper in a way which smacked of reluctance, stood scowling at the two a long while as though hesitating to commit himself in any way; a man might have looked like that if he couldn’t remember his name or didn’t know how to spell it. Finally he muttered something under his breath and wrote in a hurrying scrawl that it would take a better man than his host to read:

“Bolt Haveril. From Texas.”

In his room he lay down with his boots on, smoked and stared frowningly at the cracked ceiling for a couple of hours. He removed his boots only to make his way noiselessly downstairs. No one saw or heard him go.

Later he was seen and talked with by a couple of cowboys on the southern slopes on the Big Bear Mountains when he hailed them to ask a question. It appeared he had ridden out of country familiar to him; he wanted to know how to get to Dark Valley.

They looked him over from the peaked crown of his hat to the spurs on his boot heels; they took full stock of the gallant red-bay stallion he rode, the two scarcely less splendid horses he led, the gun he wore low at his side and the carbine across his saddle, and they told him what he wanted to know. He was still a good fifty-sixty mile from Dark Valley, and he’d think it a lot longer before he got there, as the going got tougher all the way; it was up yonder where the mountain tops were mistily purple against the sky. And the younger of the two cowboys added:

“They don’t welcome strangers much in the Valley. Me, if I was you, unless I was a friend of Duke Morgan’s, I’d pick me somewhere else to go.”

The man who had signed himself Bolt Haveril from Texas, nodded and rode on. The two cowboys continued on their way but now and then turned to look back until he was over the ridge; in Fiddler’s Gulch they reported him to Sheriff Dan Westcott. Old Dan asked his questions so shrewdly that by the time they were answered he had a pretty fair daguerreotype of the lone rider. He scratched a leathery jaw, tugged at a snow-white walrus mustache, spat at a horn toad scurrying to cover as though it had read the look in his eye, and admitted complacently:

“I’m sort of glad he’s put most of Rincon County behind him, and I’m sort of damn gladder I didn’t happen to meet up with him. Pleasant sort of a cuss, wasn’t he?”

“Friendly as a rattlesnake,” said the younger cowhand. Then, eager with youth, he asked, “He was the feller all right that you was lookin’ for—that Mex gent they called Don Diablo. Wasn’t he, Dan?”

“Reckon,” said Dan, while the older cowboy regarded him curiously, thinking that the sheriff might be aging after all, as some said, seeing how he inclined to garrulousness today. “Reckon,” repeated Dan. “Passed this way yestiddy; stayed here over night ’nd crept out with nobody telling him adiós. Signed himself Bolt Haveril, from Texas. Well, at that he might of signed himself Jeff Davis.”

“Now what?” demanded the young cowboy. “Seems like he’s headed for Dark Valley, an’ the lower end of Dark Valley’s in Rincon County, ain’t it, Dan? Goin’ after him?”

“Reckon,” said Dan Westcott, and looked sly. He was sly, a seasoned old fox, as all who had cause to know him agreed. “But, being it’s late now, I won’t start until sun up. Likewise I’m oiling up my old bear rifle tonight, being as it’s the longest-range shooting iron in the county, so’s when me and this hombre meet up it’ll be with plenty room between us. And now, as the feller says, seems like I’ve paid you back in full for all the information I’ve extracted out’n you, and in case there’s any more knowledge you’re craving, you know the way to Dark Valley.”

“No more cravin’, Dan,” grinned the young cowboy. “From what I hear, Dark Valley’s easy enough to find, but it’s something sort of diff’rent findin’ your way out ag’in! S’long, Dan. An’ while you’re oilin’ up your ol’ bear gun, better brighten up your sights a speck.”

“Reckon,” said Dan. “S’ long.”