Читать книгу Dark Valley - Jackson Gregory - Страница 4

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Bolt Haveril rode hard all that day, changing his saddle several times with a mind to saving his horses, sparing the bright red stallion especially, but seeming to have no thought to spare himself. From every rise he turned to look back, his eyes narrowed, hard, watchful; he was suspicious too of the wild country which he was penetrating so deeply. Most of all his vigilance had to do with the rugged uplands straight ahead, the lofty blue spires which cast their shadows down into the somber confines of Dark Valley.

One would have said that here passed a man who rode full tilt into some great hazard, who knew it and yet only pressed on the harder for his knowledge. Down yonder, sweeping upward from the gently sloping country on this nether side of Fiddler’s Gulch, he had given the impression of a man in rapid flight from something following on behind, dogging him—Sheriff Dan Westcott, perhaps, or in any case the law which he represented. That impression at no time ceased to emanate from his carriage, for he never gave over those searching backward glances, but something else and new was added. It was as though he was not only driven but pulled; as though the impatient haste which marked his flight was a twin with that other haste which made him seem eager to hurl himself along into some bright danger.

It was only dusk in the mountains when he came to the high plateau, knife-edged in steep cliffs on one side, which marked the southwestern rim of Dark Valley. And all at once and for the first time his haste gave place to an idling sort of leisureliness. He stopped and threw down his bed-roll near a creek which, a hundred paces from where he elected to camp, spilled itself down in a feathery cascade some hundreds of feet into the valley below. He rubbed down each of his three horses and seemed to enjoy the task; he watered them, watched one after another roll luxuriously, gave each a handful of oats, staked them out to graze and then proceeded unhurriedly about his own affair of creature comfort.

He made his fire close to the brook. With no breeze blowing, with the air as still as unstable air can ever be, his smoke stood up like a gray tenuous column against the slowly purpling sky; it could be seen for miles. He placed an iron skillet on three convenient stones; he carved thick slices of bacon and set them frying; he dug out of his kit a black iron pot which would hold twice as much as your two cupped hands, and made coffee in it. And between whiles he found time to roll a cigarette and squat on his high heels and sing to himself. He sang like a man crooning a lullaby. You would have thought him at peace. It was all about a little white dove with tender red feet that flew in at his window—first the window of his house, then the window of his heart, for the little white dove came from Her. “La palomita de mi Morena!”

The inflection which he gave the Spanish words was pure Mexican. A stranger would have found it hard to decide whether he was Mexican or American. His speech down there in Agua Verde and again with the cowboys on the flank of the mountain sounded like that of an American from Texas. His mustache was of an order popular below the border; when he touched up the ends, as he seemed to have a fondness for doing, now and then he revealed in its entirety a small new moon of a scar, knife-made.

Having dined as languorously easeful on the bank of the stream as an ancient Roman on his cushioned couch, he constructed a slender cigarillo of some rich, black tobacco penciled into a thin white paper, and slouched over to the cliff edge to look down into the valley. Just then he was as Mexican as Santa Ana.

Dark Valley was well named. It was a deep-cleft place which saw a deal more of shadow than of sun, a somehow ominous and sinister long, crooked and in spots dankly depressing gorge, cliff-bound. From where Señor Bolt Haveril stood one could see but the lower, narrower end of it at all distinctly, so did its writhings about rocky promontory and abutment conceal its other portions. A riotous small torrent of a river, obscured mostly by overhanging alder and aspen and mountain red willow, crookedly traced the crooked valley’s entire length, to slip away unseen through a dark ravine; it had entered the upper valley, also unseen from here, by spilling down in wild, ever windblown cascades from a higher pass. Here and there the valley was so narrow that two men could have called back and forth to each other from the tops of the cliff walls, but there were also widenings affording pasture lands and even richly fertile small meadows, high in grass and field flowers and, where infrequently cultivated, in garden crops.

Bolt Haveril stood some few brooding moments, his tall black sombrero swung from a finger by its chin strap, the evening breeze ruffling his black hair, his cigarette dangling and his eyes as somber as the dark valley so far below him. He gave a hitch to his belt, sagging with its low-slung gun, turned his back on all this and returned to his camp site. He pulled off his boots, put down a piece of grimy canvas, spread a gray blanket on that, used his saddle for a pillow, rolled himself into his coverings like a cigarette, pulled his hat low over his eyes and lay still.

In the dawn he awoke and stretched and lay regarding the pale apple-green of a stretch of sky through the pines; he watched it turn to green-gold, then to the gayer, brighter hues of full sunup. Presently into the clean morning sky stood the high column of his campfire smoke, frankly unhidden like last night’s. Breakfast unhurriedly done, he took up his carbine and, before saddling, turned back on foot the way he had come yesterday.

And now again he moved guardedly, like a man sensing danger all about him. Some three or four hundred yards along the return trail was a nest of big boulders through which he had ridden last night. Stooping his tall form and running swiftly across the open space intervening, he came to a stop behind the rocky barrier and peered forth down trail as though not only suspicious of pursuit but inclined to be confident of it. Keeping his rangy body pretty well concealed, though the high crown of his sombrero and the nose of his rifle did briefly show themselves over the top of a boulder, he prepared to wait, as patient as a cat that has already smelled its mouse.

The mouse in this case, however, was a fox—a long-legged, two-legged, gray old Rincon County fox known across a pretty wide sweep of territory as Sheriff Dan Westcott. He showed up, advancing cautiously and on foot himself, quite like Señor Bolt Haveril in that, on the farther rim of an opening in the Bear Mountain timber like the one across which Bolt Haveril had so recently advanced, and he too came to a halt behind the convenient barricade offered by a fallen pine. That he had seen the smoke of Bolt Haveril’s fire was unquestioned; Dan Westcott was far too vigilant, far too shrewd-eyed to have missed it.

The two men spied each other at almost the same instant. The sheriff, with his long-range rifle raised threateningly, shouted a shrill command:

“Hi there, you! I got the drop on you! Come out peaceable or I’ll blow your damn’ head off!”

“Que quiere usted, Señor?” the other called back to him. “W’at you say? Who you want?”

“You, damn you, that’s who I want! A feller that they call Don Diablo, down beyond Laredo.”

The man in the big sombrero behind the rocks laughed at that.

“Me, I’m Bolt Haveril, from Texas,” he called back. “American, not Mex. You got the wrong man, pardner.”

“Like hell, I have!” shouted old Dan. “You’re Don Diablo, real name Juan Morada, all right, and you’re coming along with me——”

The carbine, as steady as the rock itself on which it rested, made answer for its owner and cut the sheriff’s words short off. It was a neat piece of shooting, all things considered, for the early light was tricky among the pines and there were splotches of sun quivering among shadows which seemed to breathe like live things; though the bullet left Dan Westcott unscathed it carried his hat off his head with a hole drilled through the crown.

A yell burst from the old sheriff as he leaped to better cover:

“You danged long-eared jackass! You come damn’ near nailing me that shot, don’t you know it? Now—now jus’ suppose you take this!”

Thereafter no words were squandered. Dan Westcott cut loose with a string of bullets which screamed as close to the man behind the rocks as any man could listen to with the least pleasure. There had been a flash of white teeth, a broad and even good-humored sort of grin with a touch of sheer diablerie about it when Bolt Haveril had shot off the sheriff’s hat; there was no more grinning as Dan’s flying lead came so uncomfortably close. For ten minutes the two alternately held their fire, to peer out guardedly, and blazed away. At the end of that time, with a good dozen shots fired on each side, the duel came to an abrupt end.

Neither man made any attempt to assure himself that any of his many bullets had done the work for which bullets are made. Old Dan Westcott said to himself smugly, “Well, that job’s done,” and on all fours crept back among the pines, getting to his feet only when safely away, hastening back to his horse and riding again southward. He didn’t so much as turn to look over his shoulder.

The other man emulated Dan Westcott. He went to his horses, saddled and made his pack, mounted and rode north toward the upper end of Dark Valley. He went slowly, frequently abandoning the dim trail to ride circuitously through the trees and buck brush, and was again the man of yesterday in that he was forever peering into shadowy places, glancing back over his shoulder, keeping a hard brown hand close to the grip of a belt gun. Always he kept Dark Valley at one side, a sheer-dizzy drop below; at times he rode close to the cliff tops, at other times, seeking the more solitary and more devious way, he was as far as half a mile from it. When he had traveled a little more than half way between points marking the valley’s lower and upper ends, he gave over looking behind him; he said curtly to the red stallion:

“Well Daybreak, we ought to be out of Rincon County by now and getting into Juarez County. Happens every county has got its own sheriff; it’s Dave Heffinger up this way. They say he favors a sawed-off shotgun loaded to the muzzle with buckshot.”

He rode so slowly that the stallion Daybreak, super-charged with fierce energy, was in a lather from chafing restiveness; he champed his restraining bit and, save for the firm hand on his reins, would have jerked his head around many the time to snap with bared teeth at his master’s leg. The other horses, the smoky roan and the sorrel, were also fretful from restraint, wetter with perspiration than if they had had their morning run. But the rider fought the three of them down to slow progress and gave every appearance of treating Juarez County and its lawful overlord, Dave Heffinger, with respect equal to that he had observed toward Rincon County and Dan Westcott.

He came abreast of High Gap, the main pass leading down into the somber deeps of Dark Valley, and to the first fence he had seen. Here, too, he came of a sudden on a road that was less a road than a winding clear-way through the pines, gouged with two wheel ruts. He gave no evidence of any intention to turn into this road, down toward the padlocked gate vaguely glimpsed through a screen of laurels, but was pushing on toward a brushy mountain flank above when a shout rang out, commanding him:

“Get your hands up, Don Diablo! I’ve got you covered with both barrels! If you start filling your hand I’ll blow you clean to hell!”

Instead of filling his hand or doing the other thing, namely lifting both hands, empty, Bolt Haveril promptly elected a third line of action. As he dropped his carbine he pitched headlong out of the saddle, and the hidden shotgun roared—both barrels together making a reverberating thunder in the rocky defiles of the mountains. Yet it remained that a second time that morning Bolt Haveril went unscathed. He struck the ground rolling and was still rolling when he brought up against the padlocked gate under the laurels. As if of its own volition an old walnut-gripped forty-five had got into his hand; he saw a puff of white smoke drifting lazily away and started shooting.

And then an odd thing happened, the sort of thing which folk, for lack of a better name, term a coincidence. He caught a glimpse of a man’s hat—a new pearl-gray Stetson this time—and, though the man who wore it got safe away that day without a bullet through his head, still the hat of Dave Heffinger, sheriff of Juarez County, was ruined. And a second time a sheriff let out a yell, this one throaty with rage.

The man crouching at the gate permitted himself a grin, one that twitched a pointed black mustache in such fashion that the small new moon of a scar flashed into full instead of semi-eclipsed evidence. But the grin vanished as swiftly as it had flashed into being. Close behind him, not three swinging paces away on the other side of the gate, was a third man, and he spoke now in a measured, deep-toned and peculiarly surly voice:

“Well, Stranger? What’s the trouble?”

Bolt Haveril didn’t turn. His eyes were still concerned with the patch of buck brush and the scattered rocks over which the white puff of smoke had drifted. But he answered.

“Trouble?” he shot back, and sounded no less surly. “Look at my horses! Stampeded, the three of ’em! And you, whoever the hell you are, if you think I like walking, you’re crazy!”

The newcomer into his scheme of things snorted. Just then came another shout from the man lying hidden in the buck brush.

“Throw your gun, you down there by the gate, and come along with both hands high, or you’re a dead rooster. Me, I’m the law up here, and I c’n see you and——”

Bolt Haveril lifted his gun, but the man behind him said commandingly, “Hold it!” and then raised his voice to call out, “That you, Heffinger?”

“You’re damn right it’s me!” Heffinger shouted back at him. “And you, Morgan, keep out of this. Which Morgan are you, anyhow? Duke?”

“No. I’m not Duke Morgan——”

“Budge Morgan, then! Anyhow——”

“You listen to me, Dave Heffinger!” roared the unseen Budge Morgan. “You’re getting too damn’ close to Dark Valley and you better know it! Ain’t you got it through your head yet that the end of your prowling territory’s more’n a mile off from this line fence?”

There was a silence. Then the sheriff said angrily:

“One of these days, Budge Morgan, I’ll have me your hide, along with some more Morgan hides, nailed to my barn door!”

“You’d never last long enough to see my hide dry out in a summer sun, Dave,” retorted Budge Morgan. He in his turn grew silent a moment; then he called out to ask: “Who is this hombre anyhow? What do you want him for?”

“Hell!” shouted Heffinger. “He’s that dirty greaser that thinks he’s king down on the border, Don Diablo, that’s who!”

The gun in the wanted man’s hand cut loose with a string of bullets.

“You’re a liar, Heffinger,” he yelled as he fired. “Me, I’m Bolt Haveril, from Texas.”

A hand reached through the gate and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Leather your gun and keep your mouth shut,” said Budge Morgan. “Me, I’ll step out and have a word with this damfool sheriff. He’s off his stamping grounds and he’d better know it.”