Читать книгу The Enchanted Hill (Western Novel) - Peter B. Kyne - Страница 3

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A zephyr, light as an angel’s breath, bore the incense of yerba santa and sage across the level gray stretches of El Valle de los Ojos Negros; yet from this labor it reserved sufficient strength to turn the fans of a light windmill, the mechanism of which, lacking lubrication, creaked, banshee-like, at each lazy revolution. Grasshoppers, mysteriously impelled to hop, decided instead to fly, and droned lugubriously down wind; the telephone and telegraph wires, strung on poles along the railroad right of way, hummed faintly, like distant harpsichords badly out of tune; in the sycamore trees flanking the thin trickle of water that was the Rio Hondo in time of freshet, two crows cawed sociably; a woodpecker rendered his very best imitation of a riveting machine. Save for this diapason of minor sounds there was silence in San Onofre.

San Onofre was accustomed to silence. It was a flag station in the heart of El Valle de los Ojos Negros, and over it and the cattle corrals and loading chute, the complaining windmill and a five-thousand-gallon water-tank kept guard. It boasted neither station agent nor station loafers; even the trains did not stop there to take on water, for the windmill and tank had been erected by the railroad company to supply water to the transient herds of cattle held in the corrals for car shipment, and for the horses and men who drove the cattle thither. Hence, except on those occasions when the cow-men who ranged in El Valle de los Ojos Negros and the public grazing lands in the forest reserve to the north and northeast drove their beef cattle in for shipment, no human voice competed in San Onofre with the zephyr, the grasshoppers, the crows and the woodpecker.

Alone in San Onofre, Lee Purdy sat on the lip of the loading chute and smoked a cigarette of his own manufacture. Half an hour previous, a westbound freight had picked up the ten carloads of steers he and his men had loaded that day, and the range boss and six men had accompanied the cattle to care for them en route and check up on the weights when the shipment should reach the stockyards in Los Angeles. Stockyards were the most recent innovation in that boom-throbbing metropolis, and it had occurred to Lee Purdy to test the California market with New Mexico range beef rather than the Kansas City or Chicago markets, which had absorbed his brand in the past.

Joaquin José Ramon Oreña y Sanchez, alleged cook, driving two mules hitched to the chuck wagon, had departed for the ranch headquarters immediately after serving the midday meal. To Joaquin, Lincoln Hallowell, the range boss, had entrusted his two best saddle-horses for return to the ranch. They were tethered at the tail-gate of the chuck wagon. The men who had not accompanied the beef shipment had also departed, heading home straight across country and herding before them the small remuda which had accompanied the drive to San Onofre; presently, after resting, smoking and cogitating, Lee Purdy would follow. Meanwhile he sat on the lip of the loading chute, his soul steeped in a gentle melancholy, his muscles relaxed in pleasing lassitude, his mind vaguely alive to the realization that he had prodded three hundred recalcitrant three-year steers up that loading chute and into the cattle cars that day.

He sighed. He was weary. A prodder of steers was he, and prodding steers was work designed by Providence for men strong in the arm and thick in the head; nevertheless, he, Lee Purdy, who was strong of arm but not thick of head, had performed his monotonous task without complaint, with a certain joy even, albeit there had not been any urgent necessity for his accompanying the drive to San Onofre, there to deplete his youthful vitality by prodding unwilling and suspicious Herefords up a loading chute. Link Hallowell, his range boss, could have got on very well without him.

The vague melancholy hereinbefore referred to, however, had its genesis not in rebellion at the character of his labors, but in a very definite realization of their futility. The shipment of steers he had just started westward would not reimburse him for the cost of production. With good fortune he might hope to net sixty-five dollars a head; and only a month previous, in New York, he had partaken of a small steak in a not very well-known restaurant and had paid therefor the sum of one dollar and twenty-five cents. He wondered now how many such steaks a clever butcher might be able to carve from the carcass of a thousand-pound steer.

“I ought to be a middleman,” Lee Purdy told himself. “As a consumer and as a producer of beef I’m headed straight for economic ruin and vegetarianism.”

He rested his tired body against the upright at the head of the loading chute and drowsed pleasurably in the mid-afternoon sunshine. The hum of the telegraph wires, the drone of the grasshoppers, the anesthesia of the clean, pure, aromatic air, lulled him little by little. He would rest awhile before commencing that forty-mile journey back to his ranch. He slept.

He awakened with a terrific start—the spasmodic reaction of one suddenly and violently plucked from the arms of Morpheus. Something had struck, with great force, the four-by-four-inch upright against which his head had been resting; the impact had been disturbingly close to his head. As he jerked upward, his ears registered on his sleep-drugged brain the clear, sharp crack of a high-power rifle; even as the thought came to him that somebody had deliberately used the Purdy head for a target, he lost his balance and fell in a ludicrous heap to the ground under the lip of the loading chute. Thereupon his guardian angel whispered to him to lie perfectly still.

He did. In about thirty seconds a second bullet ripped a hole through the shoulder of his canvas jacket and lost itself somewhere out on the sage. Still Purdy remained motionless, although a sharp, burning sensation on his shoulder informed him that the bullet, in its passage, had barely touched his skin and seared it.

He had but one chance in a million to live and he was taking advantage of that chance. Somebody was striving to kill him from ambush, and if the killer could be induced to believe he had accomplished his purpose, Lee Purdy hoped he might be inclined to ponder the futility of wasting additional ammunition on a corpse.

Lee Purdy knew that no murderer, fully convinced that he has killed his man at, say, four hundred yards, cares to walk that distance to view at close range the still and gory tribute to his skill. Wherefore, Purdy lay as he had fallen from the loading chute—on his left side, with his left arm thrust out under his head and his legs drawn up slightly. And as he lay thus, wondering if the bushwhacker would try a third shot for luck, two crows flew agitatedly over his head, and there was heard no longer their cawing or the rat-tat-tat-tat-tat of the woodpecker in the sycamore trees along the Rio Hondo. The Rio Hondo, a wide boulder-strewn wash perhaps three feet below the level of the surrounding country, paralleled the railroad tracks at a distance of about three hundred yards on the south. Purdy reasoned that the man who had shot at him had doubtless crept down this almost dry wash and hidden among the sycamores, since at the sound of his shooting the crows had abandoned their home-building and flown straight away from there.

There was no more shooting; nevertheless, for five minutes Lee Purdy remained as he had fallen, motionless. Then, quite distinctly, he heard a man say: “Get over there, boy!” Followed the sound of a smart slap.

“He’s come to the conclusion he’s done his job,” Lee Purdy decided. “He’s mounting his horse to ride away; he’s slapping the horse on the flank to make him swing away from some obstacle to his mounting. Well, here goes for the altars of the Purdy family!”

He rose and ran to his automobile across the railroad tracks. Following the fashion of so many cattlemen whose business necessitates their motoring frequently over lonely mountain roads, across sage and mesquite-studded plains and through timber where panther, bear, wolf or coyote, the cow-man’s constant irritant, are frequently met, Lee Purdy carried, strapped to his spare tire in front, a cavalry rifle scabbard in which an army rifle, cut down to a sporting weapon and always loaded, nestled ready to his hand. After obtaining this rifle he dropped prone behind the steel railroad track which, perched on the ties, rose some twelve inches above the level of the ground on which Lee Purdy lay; with care the hundred-and-twenty-pound rail would afford him perfect protection.

He listened. Presently, above the thrum of the telegraph wires, he heard a slight sound that would have passed unnoticed by one whose every nerve was not strained to listen. It was the blow of a steel-shod hoof against a boulder in the wash of the Rio Hondo, and the sound came from east of where the man had spoken.

“He didn’t see me get up,” Lee Purdy exulted. “He was busy picking his way through the wash. But he’ll come up out of the sycamores presently and halt for one last backward look to make certain. A fine sight at five hundred yards ought to fix that scoundrel’s clock.”

He adjusted his sights and decided that luck was with him, in that he would not have to make an allowance for windage, which is inconvenient when doing fast snap shooting. Then he drew the bolt, quietly slid a cartridge into the breech and waited, quite calm in his belief that he could not possibly be deceived in his estimate of human nature. Surely the scoundrel must know that in all that desolate lonely land there was no human being closer than Arguello, sixteen miles east. That knowledge would make him careless—inspire him with confidence.

The head of a roan horse appeared above the low fringe of sage along the northern bank of the Rio Hondo. It rose higher, turning as it rose, and presently horse and rider came into plain view. And even as Lee Purdy had assumed, the rider pulled up his horse, quartering toward San Onofre, and looked back for the thing he had left lying at the foot of the loading chute. He did not see readily that which he sought, so he raised his hand above his eyes to shade them from the westering sun while he looked again. . . .

As he watched the man slide slowly out of the saddle and fall beside his horse, Lee Purdy murmured, “I think I made a bull’s-eye, but I’ll take a leaf out of your book, my sweet Christian friend. It’s a sign of hard luck when one doesn’t make certain that an important job has been perfectly done. As some wise-acre once remarked, ‘Genius is a capacity for taking infinite pains.’ I’ll stroll over and read your brand and earmarks.”

He did, advancing briskly, his rifle at the ready, his glance never faltering from the man who lay so still beside the roan horse, now playfully nuzzling his late rider’s body.

Purdy turned the man over on his back, and the two men gazed into each other’s faces silently and thoughtfully. Then:

“I thought you’d come,” said the wounded man, speaking with difficulty. “You were smart enough to fool me, so I figured if you were able to walk you’d do what I neglected to do—and that’s make certain. Well, give me the mercy shot, as they say south of the Border.”

Lee Purdy relieved the fallen man of a pistol in a shoulder holster under the latter’s left arm. Next he opened the man’s shirt and searched for the wound. He found it high up on the right side, with the point of exit under the right shoulder-blade. It had just missed the spine.

“I will be surprised if it develops that you broke any bones in your fall,” he declared. “The horse stood fast enough and you slid off so slowly I would have fired again if I hadn’t entertained so much respect for your horse. Why should anybody shoot a good honest horse?”

“Thanks. He is a good horse—an Irish hunter crossed with a Hermosillo range pony. Well?”

“I’ve drilled you through the right lung and made an extraordinarily clean job of it. I think you ought to get well. At any rate the chances are about even. Ever study the vagaries of the flight of a rifle bullet?”

“No.”

Lee Purdy squatted on his heels and rolled another cigarette. “At short range—say up to two hundred yards—the bullet, after leaving the muzzle, has a twisty motion imparted to it by the lands, or what you call the rifling in the barrel. This causes the bullet to wobble, describing a tiny orbit as it speeds ahead, and if it reaches its target while this wobble is on, the result is a great jagged wound. At longer ranges, however, after the bullet has settled in its flight, it will, unless it strikes a bone, drill a neat small hole from entrance to exit. At extreme ranges, after the force of the bullet has been spent, it will begin to wobble again; then, if it hits a man, it will tear him up a bit. I dropped you at five hundred yards and if you have any particular desire to live your desire should be granted. You appear to be a tough, stringy sort of person.”

The would-be assassin’s dark, fierce eyes glowed somberly. “Are you playing with me before finishing your job?” he demanded.

“Certainly not. I’m not going to do anything to hasten your death.”

“Why not? I tried my best to kill you.”

“Well, I have never killed a wounded, helpless enemy, and if that experience can be avoided I prefer to avoid it. Of course, I tried my best to kill you five minutes ago, but that was in self-defense. I had to stop you or risk having you do a better job the next time you tried.”

“But,” said the stranger with a curiously frank grin, “you say you are not going to stop me. You appear to want me to live. Why? So I’ll be grateful and tell you who hired me?”

“No. I do not expect you to snitch. If you’ve sold yourself, stay sold. Be an honest killer, if that’s your trade, but don’t be a double-crossing crook.”

This frank expression of a code evoked a chuckle from the wounded man. A slight hemorrhage stifled the chuckle almost instantly. When he could get his breath he said:

“I see. You’re saving me to get hung, eh? Well, there were no witnesses, so how are you going to prove I tried to murder you? You can’t convict a man on uncorroborated testimony. My word is as good as yours.”

“You are an unimaginative ass. I haven’t the slightest interest in you since I failed to wound you mortally. I’m going to bring my automobile over here, tuck you into the tonneau and run you down to the railroad hospital at Arguello. Have you got any money?”

“About two hundred and fifty dollars, Mr. Purdy.”

“Well, then, pay your own hospital bills while it lasts. If it isn’t enough I’ll make up the deficit, and if you’re foolish enough to die I’ll give you Christian burial and write home to your folks a first-class lie regarding your demise, if you care to give me your home address.”

“I don’t understand you, Mr. Purdy. How do you know I won’t try to earn my fee after I get out of hospital?”

Lee Purdy smiled a quiet, prescient little smile. “Well, if you’re dog enough to do that I suppose that’s one of the chances I’ll have to take. Well, don’t die, old settler, until I can get back here with my auto.”

“Take my horse,” said the killer affably.

“Thanks.” Lee Purdy swung into the saddle and galloped back to San Onofre, where he turned the horse into the cattle corral, and drove back in the automobile for his now thoroughly mystified passenger. With considerable difficulty he managed to get the fellow into the tonneau and stretched him out on the rear seat, with his long legs dangling over the side. Then, in low gear, Purdy drove away, breaking trail through the sage to the main road. It was a rough ride at best, and the wounded man was grateful when Purdy halted his car in the shadow of the tiny station at San Onofre.

“Well, what’s the next move?” he demanded of Purdy.

“The California Limited is due in about fifteen minutes. I’m going to flag it and send you, in the baggage car, to Arguello.”

“A limited train will not stop on flag.”

“This one will,” said Lee Purdy confidently. “I’ll straddle the tracks with my auto and pretend I’m stalled.”

“My name’s Bud Shannon,” his chance acquaintance volunteered. “You’re a good fellow and I’m beholden to you.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Purdy said affably, and gave the wounded killer his hand. They stared at each other humorously. Then: “Any time you feel like giving up your present profession and tackling the hard, lonely life of a cow-hand, I’ll give you seventy-five dollars a month, good board and the best lodging in New Mexico. I have a real bunk-house, not a kennel, and any foreman who can’t make his men keep it clean can’t be foreman.”

“Mr. Purdy, I don’t understand you a-tall.”

“I’m not surprised. There are times, Bud, when I have difficulty understanding myself, and this is one of them. Want me to take your horse home with me and keep him until you’re ready to fork him again?”

“By God, I don’t understand you a-tall!” Bud Shannon repeated.

A plume of thin smoke showed over a low hill to the west. “Here comes the Limited,” Purdy announced, and forthwith set his automobile astraddle of the tracks.