The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour: Vol 3 Part 21

He waited, his hands down, smiling at the other man. "Come on," the watchman bl.u.s.tered, "I don't want no trouble!"

"Then go on back to your shack and keep your mouth shut. If you don't tell Kelman, he'll never know I was here. Then you won't get in trouble at all."

The watchman was disturbed. A second look told him that although this man might not be as tall as he, he was a solid ma.s.s of bone and muscle. Moving him wouldn't be easy. Staring into those bleak eyes made him doubt the advisability of trying the pistol in his holster.

A rattle of hoofs on the trail decided the man. "Get out of here, quick!" he said. "If Kelman found you here, he'd have my scalp!"

In three fast steps, Gunthorp was in among the pinons. He glanced back to see three hors.e.m.e.n riding up to the mine. The man in the lead was Joe, but Kelman himself was not among them.

When he reached his horse, he mounted and cut back across the mountain. There was no regular trail, but he wove in and out among the trees until he could see into a narrow canyon beyond. When he was in position, he stopped his horse and studied this new area with thoughtful eyes. This canyon was green, deeply green, thick with cottonwoods and tamarisk and a small stream flowing along the bottom. At one point the stream disappeared into a wide area of marshy sand and reeds.

Gunthorp glanced at the sun, and seeing there was yet time, turned his horse down the trail and rode down through to the cottonwoods. The small river flowed out of the rock, described a wide half circle through a meadow, and then vanished into the sand on the same side from which it emerged. It was no more than four or five feet across, but the water was clear and cold and ran swiftly.

As his horse drank, Gunthorp turned in his saddle and surveyed the valley. Mining operations had begun here, too. Across from him he could see the mouth of a drift and the pile of waste outside it. The tunnel mouth was low down against the valley floor. Gunthorp turned his horse and started for town, his face serious.

RED b.u.t.tE'S RESIDENTIAL SECTION was composed of some forty or fifty buildings, built haphazardly down the slope from the mesa. Beyond the buildings and corrals, the land sloped away for two miles and disappeared under the unsightly waters of an alkali lake.

Gunthorp tied his horse at the hitching rail and stepped up on the boardwalk, heading for the office of judge Jim McClees.

At that moment, the door of the restaurant thrust open and Kelman stepped out, accompanied by an uncommonly pretty girl. They saw him at the same instant. "That's the man!" Kelman pointed at him with a stiff arm. "That's him.,, "

The girl walked right up to Gunthorp, her heels clicking on the walk. "Where is my brother?" she demanded, her eyes sparking. "I want you to take me to him at once. And you must return the papers you took from him. She was young, and very pretty, and he liked the determined set of her chin.

"Miss Stevens," he said quietly, "your brother is safe, and no thanks due to Mr Kelman. If there are any papers, he alone knows where they are."

"Look here!" Kelman thrust himself forward. "Madge Stevens has returned to settle her father's estate, and to do that, she must have those papers. Your little scheme has failed, so you can bring the boy in and turn the papers over to me."

Gunthorp glanced at the girl. "Is that what you want?"

"It is." Her chin lifted. "You have no right to interfere in this matter, none at all. Mr. Kelman was doing all that could be done."

Gunthorp smiled. "No doubt. But is he doing what is best for your interests and the boy's, or his own?"

"That doesn't matter," she flared."It certainly is none of your business."

"No doubt Kelman has made you an offer for the land your father owned? Was he going to take all that wasteland off your hands as a favor?"

From the puzzled look in her eyes, he knew that he was right. "What did he offer you for it?"

"That's neither here nor there." Kelman's anger was growing. "All you have to do is take us to the boy."

Gunthorp ignored Kelman. "Miss Stevens," he said, "I don't know what he has offered you for the land, but whatever it is, I'll double it."

Her eyes widened. "For that worthless land? Why, that's absurd! That would be ten dollars an acre for-"

"Ten?" Gunthorp's eyes brightened. "Miss Stevens, I'll give you more. If you say ten dollars, he must have offered you only five. I'll give you twenty dollars an acre and a twenty percent share in any profit I make."

"But I don't understand," she protested.

"The man's trying to pull the wool over your eyes," Kelman interrupted. His tone was desperate, and anger was growing in him. "Anyway, it doesn't matter now. You've sold the land to me for five dollars an acre, and you've been paid for it."

He turned back to Gunthorp. "See, my friend? You are too late. Now will you turn the boy over to us and get out of here?"

Gunthorp stood flat-footed, shaken by the statement the girl did not deny. If she had sold the land ...

Suddenly, he smiled. "Miss Stevens," he asked politely, "I know it is always wrong to ask a woman's age, but how old are you?"

"Why, I'm eighteen, almost nineteen, but how does that matter?"

Kelman's face changed. "You mean you're not of age?"

Gunthorp looked up at him. "It really wouldn't matter, Kelman," he said softly. "You see, Lane is an heir, too, and she would have no right to sign away his rights. Miss Stevens has no right to dispose of the property without the authority of his legal guardian."

"But she's his older sister," Kelman protested furiously. "She's his guardian."

"Not unless the court appoints her so, and as she's underage, that isn't likely. I suggest we talk with judge McClees."

Madge Stevens stared from one to the other, frightened and confused. In each of the three letters that had come to her from Kelman, he had a.s.sured her of his friendship for her father and herself, and had offered to dispose of the land her father had, he suggested, foolishly bought. Now this man whom Kelman had said was forcibly holding her brother was suddenly making everything seem very different.

Kelman noticed the indecision in her face. "Come over here," he said to Gunthorp. "I want to talk to you!"

Gunthorp followed him to one side, his calm eyes on Kelman's excited face. "Listen," Kelman protested when they were out of hearing. "Let's not fight over this! That land is worth a fortune! You know that as well as I do! Let's make a deal on this! If you insist, we can cut the girl in, but there's no reason why we should! You and I can handle this by ourselves! To blazes with that girl and her kid brother."

Gunthorp smiled. "Kelman," he said loudly, "I've heard a lot about you. You have already labeled yourself as a liar and a skunk, but now you hit a new low. Asking me to cheat youngsters is about as bad as a man can get!"

"You double-d.a.m.ned-!" Kelman's hand dropped to his gun.

Gunthorp's left fist whipped up, crashing into the pit of Kelman's stomach, and then a bone-shattering wallop to the chin. Stricken, the big man toppled back off the boardwalk and fell into the street. For an instant, he lay stunned, and then he grabbed again for his pistol.

Gunthorp tried to reach him at the same instant, but Kelman had fallen a step or two away. Kelman's gun whipped up, flame stabbed from the muzzle, and Gunthorp felt his hat lift from his head. Then Kelman's gun roared again and something struck Gunthorp solidly. His mouth widened, then closed as his body twisted under the bullet's impact.

Suddenly, things grew hazy and Gunthorp started to turn around, but seemed to trip. Hands grabbed him and eased him to the boardwalk. A man in a wide white hat with a mustache and goatee was bending over him.

"Judge-" His voice had no more focus than his eyes, and he had to fight to arrange the words properly. "Judge, you ... care for this girl. Brother ... her brother's in a cave at my place."

FOUR DAYS LATER Gunthorp was lying on the bed in the spare bedroom of Judge McClees's home. The door opened and Madge Stevens came in, with Lane beside her. Her eyes widened at the sight of him lying there.

"You-you're better now?"

"Sure. Doc says I'll be up and around before long. I guess I'll carry a couple of slugs, though."

"I'm so sorry ... that I ever doubted you. Judge McClees arrested Mr. Kelman, you know. They took him away yesterday."

"That's good." He was still very weak.

"About the land?" she said. "Men have been out to look at the mine. They say it's worthless, and the land is worse."

Gunthorp smiled. "Don't you believe them. Your father knew what he was up to. That isn't a mine at all. It's a tunnel to bring water from a canyon back there. There is a great volume of water, easily enough to irrigate five hundred acres of good hay land, and the level of the land your father bought is below that of the canyon, so irrigation for growing hay will be simple."

"But hay? Is it valuable?"

"Well," he said with a grin, "last year it sold for sixty dollars a ton, and fairly good meadow land will run a ton to the acre. This land you've got, irrigated, will do a whole lot better than many mines."

"The judge said that given all that has happened he should appoint a legal guardian for my brother and me until I turn twenty-one. He thought that it should be you."

"Well, one way or another, I guess I already got started a couple of days ago," Gunthorp said.

"But Lane and I thought it should be more of a partnership. If you'll help us finish Father's tunnel, we'll split whatever we make on the hay three ways."

"With an offer as good as that there is no chance I could turn it down ... I always was a sucker for kids in trouble."

"Kids!" She arched one eyebrow. "I hope you are only talking about Lane."

They turned and left the room, but not before she had paused to fluff his pillow and pull up the covers.

"I wonder," Gunthorp mused, "what I've gotten myself into now...

JACKSON OF HORNTOWN.

Horntown belonged to the desert. Whatever claim man had once had upon it had yielded to the sun, the wind and the blown sand. A double row of false-fronted buildings faced a dusty street into which the bunchgra.s.s and sage-brush ventured. It had become a byway for an occasional rabbit or coyote, or the rattlers that had taken refuge in the foundations of The Waterhole, a saloon in which water had rarely been served. A solitary burro wandered like a gray ghost among the weather-beaten, abandoned buildings. To the east and west, craggy ridges of ugly red rock exposed their jagged crests to the sky. To the north, the narrow valley tapered away to a mere gully down which a dim trail led the unwary to that sink of desolation that was Horntown. To the south the valley widened into the Black Rock Desert.

There were few trees and less water. Had there been a watcher in the ghastly emptiness of the lifeless ridges he might have seen a lone horseman riding up the trail from the desert. He rode a long-legged buckskin, which shambled wearily through the sagebrush, and even the sight of the ghost town failed to awaken any spark in either man or horse. The watcher, had there been one, could have determined from the way the man rode that he was riding to a known destination. All the way across the waterless waste he had ridden as to a goal, and that in itself meant something.

For Horntown was a forgotten place, slowly giving itself back to the desert from which it had come. It had lived wildly, desperately, and it had died hard in a red-laced flurry of gunshots md powder smoke. The bodies of those who fell had been left where they had fallen, and the survivors had simply gone away and no one among them had looked back. Horntown was finished, and they knew it well.

Yet the sun-browned man with the b.l.o.o.d.y bandage on his head had kept his trail to Horntown; through all that broken country he had deviated by no more than a few feet from the direction he had chosen. The red-rimmed gray eyes that occasionally stared back over the trail behind held no hint of mercy or kindness. They were the eyes of a man who had looked at life over a gun barrel, a man who had lived the hard, lawless way, and expected to die as he had lived.

It was fitting that he rode to Horntown, for the place had bred many such men. It had begun over a hundred years earlier, when a west-bound gold-seeker decided he had gone far enough. It died its first death two years later because the founder owned a horse, and a pa.s.sing stranger needed a horse. Jack Horn died with a gun in his hand.

Seven months later a Mexican named Montez moved into the abandoned buildings and opened a saloon. He combined selling bad whiskey with robbing casual travellers until he chose the wrong man and died on his door-step.

It was after that the first Jackson came to town. Enoch Jackson was from Tennessee. Tall, leather-tough, and rawboned, he stopped in Horntown with his six sons, and the heyday of the town came into being. It is a curious thing that no matter how spa.r.s.e the vegetation or how remote the place, how difficult the problem of materials, a man who wants a drink will make one. The Jacksons had always had whiskey, and they had always made their own. They drank their own product, but drank it sparingly.

Once set up in Horntown they drank even more sparingly for, of course, they alone knew the ingredients. No one ever guessed and few asked what the whiskey was made from, but it fed fire into the veins of a hardy brood who turned the country into a whirl-wind of evil with their gunfighting, rustling, and hold-ups. For fifty years the small town that was Horntown.was ruled by Enoch and his powerful son Matt Ben Jackson.

A roving gunman, sore and hunting trouble, sent Enoch to his final pay-off with a bullet in his skull, and then died with Matt Ben's bullet just two hours later. He died where Matt Ben caught up uith him, right where the valley of Horntown opened into the Black Rock Desert. After that Matt Hen ruled; the show at Horntown with his hrother, FireHat Jackson, as his lieutenant.

Several months later Sheriff Star Redman rode to Horntown with a posse of thirty men. They never reached their destination, but when the survivors rode home there were four empty saddles, and five others carried Jackson lead, to be removed later. Redman was not of a yielding nature and he had been elected to do a job. He returned, and on the fourth attempt the final b.l.o.o.d.y battle was fought. Star Hedman had sworn he'd bring an end to Horntown or never return.

There were twenty-six men in that last posse, and only seven of them returned unscathed. Several were buried in Horntown, and two died on the way back. Behind them only one man remained alive, Matt Ben himself. Forty, tough, and fatally wounded, he watched the last of the attackers ride away. Then, like a cornered rattler, he crawled back to The Waterhole and poured himself a drink.

A month later a wandering prospector found him dead on the floor, his gun in his hand. Matt Ben had amputated his own foot and shot himself when apparently dying of blood poisoning.

Searching the town, the prospector, who knew Horntown well, found the bodies of all the Horntown bunch but one. That one was FireHat. Or rather all but two, for with FireHat had vanished Matt Ben the Youiiger.

"They'll come back," Sheriff Star Redman said bitterly, yet half in admiration. "He's a Horntown Jackson, and he'll he back. What I don't understand is why he ran away in the first place."

"Them Jacksons are feuders, Sheriff," the prospector reminded. "When FireHat left he took young Matt Ben with him, and he was only six and too young to fight."

"Maybe so." Redman admitted. "It could be he wanted to save him for seed."

FireHat Jackson died alone, ten years later, down in Sonora. The word drifted back to Webb City, sixty miles south of Horntown. Star Redman took the news with a strange light in his eyes. "Sonora, eh' How did he die'?"

"Rurales surrounded him. He took eight of them along for company."

Redman spat. "You just know it! Them Jacksons never die alone. If one of 'em has a gun he'll take somebody along!"

"Well," somebody whispered, "that ends the Horntown bunch. Now we can rest easy."

"Don't be too sure," Redman warned. "Matt Ben the Younger is somewhere around."

"But he wasn't one of the old bunch, Sheriff. He was too young to have it matter much. He won't even remember Horntown."

Star Hedman shifted his tobacco in his jaws, chewed, then spat. "He was a Horntown Jackson!" He spat again. "You'll see. He'll be back."

"Sometimes, Star," the old storekeeper commented, "I think you almost wish he'd come back."

Redman had started toward the door, and now he turned. "He was one of the old breed. I'd rather he rode for the law, but say what you like about them Horntown Jacksons, they were men!"

The lone horseman slowed the yellow horse to a shambling trot, then to a walk. The buildings of Horntown were just ahead. He slid the winchester from its boot. With his rifle across the saddle in front of him, he rode slowly up the one street of Horntown. There were no more than twenty buildings still standing. The nearest was a trav, wind-battered house, and beyond were several shacks and corrals. Then the great, rambling old structure with its faded sign: The Waterhole.

The rider of the yellow horse with the black tail and mane rode up the empty street. Here and there tumbleweeds had lodged. Sand had drifted like drifts of snow, doors hung on sagging hinges, creaking dismally in the wind. At one side of The Waterhole the run-off from the roof had worn a deep gully.

A spot of white at the corner of a building caught his eyes. It was a human skull, white and bleached. Grimly, he studied it.

"More than likely he was one of my uncles," he said aloud. He swung down in front of The Waterhole and tied the buckskin to the old hitching rail. His boots had a hollow, lonesome sound on the boardwalk. He opened the door and walked in. Dust and cobwebs hung over everything. The chairs and tables remained much as they must have been when the fight ended. A few poker chips were scattered about, an empty bottle stood on a table, another on the bar beside a tipped-over shot-gla.s.s.

Propped against the bar was a skeleton, rifle beside it, gun-belt still hanging to the lank white bones. One foot was missing. Slowly the man uncovered his head.

"Well, Pa, you died hard, but you died game." Outside he went to where the spring was, the reason why old Jack Horn had stopped in the first place. Crystal-clear water still ran from the rocks and trickled into a natural basin, then trickled off down through the rocks and into the wash, where it lost itself in a small cl.u.s.ter of cottonwoods and willows. He filled his canteen first, as any sensible man would, then he drank, and, removing the b.l.o.o.d.y bandage, carefully bathed his head where a bullet had cut a furrow. Then, still more carefully, he washed his hair.

He led the buckskin to water, then picketed him on a small patch of gra.s.s he remembered from the days when he had played there as a youngster. Inside the saloon he found dishes, washed them, and, working at the fireplace, prepared a rough meal. He was digging a grave for his father's bones when he heard a faint sound, then another. His gun slid easily into his hand and he waited, listening to the slow steps, shambling, hesitant. Then a long gray head appeared around the corner.

Matt Ben holstered his gun, then he climbed out of the grave and held out his hand to the burro. "Hi, Zeke! Come here!" At the sound of the familiar name the burro's head lifted, and the scent of this man apparently touched a chord of memory, but still he hesitated. Matt Ben called again and again, and slowly the old burro walked toward him. "It's all right, Zeke. It's just a Jackson, come home at last. I'm glad you waited."

Three days later Pierce Bowman walked into the sheriff's office in Webb City. "Wire for you, Star. Looks like you were right. Matt Ben's on his way home."

"He's already here," Redman commented dryly. "Tim Beagin came by there day before yesterday. Saw smoke in The Waterhole's chimney.

"I didn't plan to bother him. Seems sort of natural, havin' a Jackson out there, but this here wire changes matters. I got to go get him."

"You takin' a posse?"

"No. Just me. If he's a Jackson we'd never get nigh him. Them Jacksons always could smell a posse ten mile off."

"What do they want him for?"

"Sheriff over at Carson tried to take him and he wouldn't go, said he was just ridin' through. The sheriff made a mistake then. He reached for his gun, and Matt Ben put him out of commission."