Читать книгу Powder Smoke on Wandering River - Jackson Gregory - Страница 5

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Young Jeff thought as he rode through the pines of the old Emigrant Trail, and thought with a tinge of bitterness, “Still Jeff might have opened up a bit more today, might have let me know what was in his mind.” He was forced to compare, as he had done many a time, his own father’s attitude with that of Red Shirt Bill. Today Still Jeff had maintained his habitual silence whereas Bill Morgan had been, as usual, generous with his remarks. “Dammit—” thought Young Jeff, and then began to laugh softly.

For after all, what had Red Shirt said to him? In fewer words Still Jeff had said the same thing: “Better go slow.” And as for any constructive remark, there had been but one. Old Charlie’s dogs would be homeless now, said Still Jeff, and he would give them a home!

“I guess,” he decided, “there wasn’t anything to say.”

Go slow, young man, was the sum total of any advice given him. Well, even that would have been just as well unsaid; he chuckled again; he’d bet a man that already Still Jeff regretted having been so garrulous!

By the time he had climbed up out of Deer Valley and had topped the ridge from which he could look down into Long Valley the sun was sinking beyond the black timbered hills ahead of him. He paused a moment, not only to blow his horse but to look, as he always did, with clouded eyes into the fertile valley which Bart Warbuck had made his own. There it extended north and south a good twenty miles, five or six miles wide in places, three or four in others, some seventy thousand acres than which there were none better in all the breadth of the land—all Bart Warbuck’s. There were herds of cattle, there were horses which it was Warbuck’s boast were finer stock than Young Jeff Cody’s, there were, farther north, thousands of sheep. All Bart Warbuck’s. And what Warbuck had done here he was by way of doing in Deer Valley.

“Give me another five years.” Warbuck was saying of late, being a windy man and rating himself high and unconquerable, “and I’ll own five hundred thousand acres and control another million. I’m going on like a steam roller, and anybody in front had better get out or be prepared to be rolled flat.”

Already in Deer Valley, north of Halcyon, he had acquired the Trent Ranch, the Deer Track and the Box Car Cross. He had gone gunning for them long before the shrewdest of the local men guessed what he had in mind; already wealthy, he went out of his way to be a hail fellow well met. For a time in these twin valleys Bart Warbuck’s name was synonymous with generosity. He loaned money right and left, and you’d have thought that he didn’t much care whether it was ever coming back to him. “Shucks,” said Warbuck. But he took mortgages. Later, men came to know him for what he was: shrewd, long-sighted, hard and as crooked as a stake-and-rider fence.

He began to overtower all other men in this part of the state. His ambition, stalking out into the clear at last, was a sort of Frankenstein colossus. He built him a house that was like a castle; on a craggy knoll it dominated the valley and could be seen for miles. He built dams and went in for irrigating; he got water rights one way and another, stealing them when he could. He entrenched himself behind all available legal bulwarks; he went out to build up political influence just as he was building up his mountain kingdom; a frequent guest was Senator Belknap who, it was pretty generally conceded, was going to be governor. Warbuck was going to make him governor and then Governor Belknap would remember and return favors.

From where Young Jeff sat brooding he could see the Warbuck “castle”—Warbuck was born and raised in a shack like a cowshed—that partook of the salient features of a castle on the Rhine, a Spanish hacienda and the newest, flashiest hotel in Albuquerque, the sort of thing that a man like Bart Warbuck would dream into being. Jeff thought of a sudden, “Wonder what Arlene is like nowadays?” He hadn’t seen her for three years; she was away at school or traveling or visiting friends with names and influence most of that time; odd, he realized, that he should think of her. He didn’t think of Miriam at all—but then most folks didn’t, unless they came to know the little vixen so well that she stuck in the memory like a cocklebur.

“Let’s go, Ranger,” he said, but checked the sorrel before it had more than started down into Long Valley. For Young Jeff’s eyes, forsaking the seven miles distant Warbuck home had been arrested by certain scurrying figures down on the floor of the valley only a mile or so away. There was hot haste for you, and for an instant he wondered what it was all about. The next second, though not understanding everything, he grasped the essence of the thing: It was flight and pursuit with one rider streaking out on a dead run across the valley and six or seven horsemen racing after him.

The sun was low, yet the light reflected from the green valley was still clear. It glanced off rifle barrels straight into Young Jeff’s wondering eyes. It even showed details which in a region of less clarity would have been blurred by the intervening distance. The man who sped on ahead rode a horse which you’d never forget, once seen; a horse which a mile away remained recognizable, a palomino splashed from fetlock to crest like a camouflaged vessel. The horse was unmistakably Dandy, and belonged to Bud King—and no one but Bud King ever rode it. Young Jeff knew. Bud ran a ranch next door, so to speak, to Jeff’s. And Bud, like Jeff would have been tempted to cut off his right hand before offering its grip to Bart Warbuck. And if anything else was certain it was that the crowd of men pursuing him were Warbuck men. Jeff’s hand just naturally dropped to the butt of his rifle in its boot on his saddle.

“Get into it, Ranger!” he grunted, and shot down hill.

He did not get another glimpse of the chase, so did the timber thicken around him, until he too was down on the valley’s floor. Then he saw that the game was still unplayed out; Bud King still rode hell-for-leather, still kept his lead, and the others still hammered along after him, seeming neither to gain nor to lose ground.

“Good man, Bud! They can’t overhaul that palomino—” A rifle ball however can travel considerably faster than a man on a horse. Several shots rang out together; someone must have given the command for that. The palomino ran wildly, lunged, went down on its knees and rolled over. Its rider went out of the saddle like a stone from a sling. Jeff couldn’t make out whether he got up or not. The Warbuck men broke his view, speeding on again, and besides there was a big white oak whose branches, newly decorated with tender, tiny greening leaves, veiled what went on.

He went down into a swale, came up a gentle rise and was horror-stricken at what he saw. The horsemen were all down now, a tight compact mass of them, only one of their number holding back with the horses. A rope had been thrown over a horizontal limb of the oak—a man was hanging there, kicking with agonized heels against empty air. That was Bud King in his grotesque death dance. And Bud King grew suddenly still as one of the Warbuck men, perhaps seeing the possibility of an interruption, emptied a six shooter into the tortured body. As the last shot died away the men broke and ran back to their mounts and went up into their saddles.

Young Jeff yelled at them and pulled his rifle out and rode on his spurs to come to the tree from which a dead body now, hung swaying ever so gently in diminishing arcs. The seven men who were again in their saddles turned and watched him come on. He rode straight on through them to come first of all to Bud King; one glance was all he needed to make sure of what he knew already. He turned then, white-lipped, his eyes filled with his fury, to look-at them. He knew four out of the seven.

He needed to know only one, Jim Ogden, Bart Warbuck’s foreman, general ranch manager and right hand man. The others, Nick Balff, Andy Coppler and Injun Long Knife, did not at the moment matter.

“So it’s open murder at last, is it, Ogden?” he said, his voice as brittle as breaking glass.

Ogden, a tall man, as tall as Young Jeff and some twenty pounds heavier, a peculiarly handsome devil as fair as Jeff was dark, with profuse yellowish curls and a small yellow mustache and long lashes like a girl’s—a man of about Jeff’s age which is to say around twenty-five, no more—smiled.

“Hello, Jeff,” he said genially, little crinkles showing in the hard flesh at the corners of his gray-blue eyes. “How’s tricks?”

A man snickered; that was Andy Coppler, as lean as a snake, with eyes like a snake’s, as hard a hand as took Warbuck wages, which is saying a pretty good deal, and a far flung reputation for cruelty and treachery. The others kept poker faces, all but one, a young fellow scarcely above eighteen or so, whose pinched face had taken on a sick greenish hue, whose eyes were staring out of his head, whose throat kept working.

“This is something you’ll have to answer for, you know, Ogden,” said Jeff.

“I’ll answer for anything I do,” said Ogden. He eased himself sideways in the saddle and began making a cigarette. “There’s nothing you can do about this, is there?” He licked the edge of his cigarette paper.

“Bud’s already dead,” said Jeff. He shoved his rifle back into its scabbard. His eyes went roving, coming to rest on Andy Coppler’s long, thin face. “It was you that shot him, wasn’t it, Coppler?”

“To hell with who shot him,” said Jim Ogden curtly. “He had it coming and he got it. Murder? Hell, no. Execution. A good job and well done, hurried though it was.”

“Execution?” Jeff didn’t speak the word; he said it with lifted brows, exactly as Still Jeff would have done.

“This guy Bud King was a rat,” said Jim Ogden, and spat. “He butchered a man this morning that he called a friend. Sneaked up behind old Charlie Carter and shot him in the back of the head. Three of these boys here chanced along in time to see it happen. He got off on the jump and they trailed him all day. It’s just now that we overhauled him. Maybe some folks would just have invited him to a vacation in jail where he could play checkers and eat and sleep. That’s not our style here in Long Valley.” He spat again. “Come ahead, boys; let’s go.”

“Hold it, Ogden,” said Jeff, and more even than before there was a brittle edge to his voice. “In the first place you’re a damned liar when you say Bud King ever shot anybody in the back. On top of that, there’s likely to be questions asked about this execution of yours. I know you and Coppler, and Long Knife and Balff. Who are these other men?”

“All Warbuck hands,” said Ogden carelessly. “All available when anybody drops in to see them. They’re Frank Bruce, Tod Jones and Pocopoco Malaga. They’re not going to run away. Anyone that wants to see them can find them out here any time. All right, boys? We’re through here.” He looked at Young Jeff narrowly, then began to laugh softly. “There’s nothing you can do about it, Jeff,” he said tauntingly. “It’s an old custom of the country, you know, to string up a murderer as soon as he’s caught, and to hell with jail, court, judge and jury. Now, we’ve got to fade. Me, I’m in a hurry. There’s a dance on tonight over at Pioneer, and I’ve got to eat supper and shave first. See you later.”

They whirled and sped off. Young Jeff Cody stared after them in the grip of the bitterest rage he had ever known. Then for the moment he wiped them out of his mind. He looked at Bud King’s body hanging there, turning ever so slowly at the end of a rope, a length of filthy hemp from the Warbuck outfit. A merciful shadow, creeping outward from the western hills, began softening the horrible expression stamped on the newly dead face. Young Jeff’s lips moved but he did not speak aloud. He sat uncertain a moment then rode on heading toward the sunset, toward the wild cow town of Pioneer City.

* * * *

“I left him hanging there,” said Jeff. “There was nothing else to do; my horse wouldn’t stand for carrying him and—Better hanging there than down on the ground where—”

Sheriff Dan Hasbrook was a grizzled old timer of a vintage almost equal to that of Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill Morgan, with intense black eyes which men swore on occasion he could use to drill holes through an oak plank. He was thick, heavy, round-shouldered and walked with a dragging limp, having been shot in the left thigh, and carried one shoulder two inches higher than the other, having been shot in the upper body. He had a walrus mustache, ink-black, a dead ringer for Still Jeff’s save in the matter of hue, a profoundly deep bass voice, hands as big as hams and a heart some sizes bigger. When it is said of Dan Hasbrook that he had been sheriff for seventeen years and was still alive and still held the respect of men like Still Jeff and Red Shirt Bill and Young Jeff, perhaps enough is said.

Hasbrook downed his drink which he had held poised for the end of the story. Young Jeff kept his eyes down; anywhere but on Dan Hasbrook’s leathern, weather-battered face. That was because Bud King, dead so damnably, had left a mother and two sisters. The mother was Sadie King, of Antelope Valley, a lovely, fragile, well beloved little woman not yet quite fifty—and she was the reason why Dan Hasbrook had never married. Dan, had he been another type, might have hated her children; as it was he had loved Bud King like a son.

“What’s that, Jeff? What’d you say?” asked the sheriff all of a sudden. “Oh, yes. Sure. That was right. I’ll send a couple of the boys out right away.” He cleared his throat, reached again for the bottle, then shoved it away. “Jeff,” he said, “Jeff—” He let it hang there. He saw that Jeff was building a cigarette and nodded approvingly. His strong, thick fingers began deftly following suit. He swallowed again; his throat seemed to bother him.

“Somebody’s got to ride up and tell Sadie King,” he said. “Me, I can’t get away. I’ll have to send somebody.”

“Ogden won’t try to lie out of this, Dan. It’s open and shut. Going to drag him in?”

“Hell, no,” said Hasbrook without hesitation. “He knows that. You know it too, Jeff. Those seven will stick together, they’ll swear that Bud bushwhacked old Charlie, that some of them saw him do it and chased him twenty-thirty miles to hang him for it.” He shook his graying head, then pulled his hat hard down over his bushy brows. “No jury in this country would blame ’em for that. There are too many Warbuck men, too much Warbuck influence and money. Leave ’em alone, Jeff.”

“Yes,” said Jeff. “Sure, Dan. It’s no use. But—”

“Sure,” said Hasbrook. “Sure.” His jaw squared; until he spoke further it was like a jaw that had been poured in concrete and had set, hard. “It won’t be long now, Jeff. I’ll nose around a little. It won’t be long. Meantime, Kid, watch how you walk. Ogden’s going the limit. Watch out. Savvy?”

“Heap savvy,” said Jeff.

They were in the Silver Bar saloon. It was early but the place was filled; that was because it was dance night and the half dozen narrow, crooked streets of Pioneer City were crowded. Men and girls and whole families came from miles in all directions to make a night of it at the Pioneer Dance Hall, an octagonal monstrosity built up around as slick a pine floor as these mountains boasted. A dance electrified the community; men who never went near the dance hall swooped into town to revel, to flood through the saloons and dark alleys, to drink and carouse generally and play poker and faro and seven-up; to get drunk before dawn and make the night echo with a clamor of tramping boots, jingling spurs, throaty voices and rather oftener than not, pistol shots. If not caught in a brawl which ended in a quarrel crowned with flying bottles and gun play, anyhow they could shoot the lights out or play bad man to some gawking tenderfoot. Already the orchestra was tuning up; you could hear the fiddles scraping.

Men, even those who’d not go near the dancing or at most would only stand outside looking in, were attired for the occasion, in full evening dress so to speak. They had shaves, some in cabins and bunk houses, some at Tony’s barber shop; their hair was sleeked down, wet and shiny; their boots polished or anyhow dusted off. The mode that year in and around Pioneer City called for deep purples and orange and various shades of green, and these hues flaunted at the Silver Bar and at Slim Branigan’s Place, in shirts and neckerchiefs. Forty dollar Stetsons were no rarity up and down town.

Naturally there were more Warbuck men in town than any other outfit contributed. Half a dozen of them, young hellions who rode the seventy thousand acres of Long Valley, came surging and jostling into the Silver Bar as Dan Hasbrook and Young Jeff were moving to go out. Loudest mouthed of the sextette was a young hell-bender from down Texas way, a gangling, close-eyed, cold-blooded killer who in a few weeks had established himself and his dubious reputation hereabouts, one Rick Voorhees. He wore his guns loose and low in their fawn-colored holsters; he had a girl’s pink garters on his arms as sleeve holders and his shirt was a lighter pink and he carried a yellowish leather jacket flung over his shoulder; the enormous handkerchief loosely knotted about his throat was as green as grass. He fancied himself, did Rick Voorhees, and so did many rattle-brained girls.

“Hear the news, boys?” he sang out loudly as he and his coterie came lounging up to the bar. “All hell’s on the rampage. Charlie Carter’s dead, shot from behind, and Bud King was the skunk that gored him and a bunch of our boys run Bud to earth and he’s hangin’ by the nail, out in Long Valley—and if anybody don’t like the way the Warbuck boys kill snakes out on their own stampin’ grounds, well he’s invited by me to say so.”

There was sudden, profound silence, then a scraping of chairs, a shoving aside of small round tables, the creaking of new boots and, abruptly unleashed, a murmur of voices which gradually swelled up into a heavy rumble. Men who knew Bud King and Charlie Carter had their questions to ask; men who liked them, and most save for Warbuck men did, grew hard-eyed and many of them flushed of face as their gorge rose.

The swing doors were shoved back again and several men came in. All were Warbuck hands; no doubt Rick Voorhees knew they were coming. He shoved his hat back, caught his thumbs in his sagging belt and looked the room over.

The sheriff and Young Jeff looked at each other out of the corners of their eyes.

“Going my way, Jeff?” asked Hasbrook. “I’d like a talk with you. It’s sort of windy in here.”

Rick Voorhees jostled him, shoving out a vicious elbow.

“Mean me, Hasbrook?” he said insolently.

Hasbrook doubled one of those monster fists of his and struck neatly and powerfully for the chin. Rick Voorhees went down like a man shot through the brain. Where he lay he went stone cold, lucky that his neck was not broken.

“He spoke his piece, correct to the line,” said Young Jeff as the two friends strode off, down along the wooden sidewalk. “All hell’s on the rampage now for sure.”

“Sure,” growled Hasbrook. “Sure.”