Troublesome Range Part 3

"He's still out?"

"Cold. They carried him across to a room at The Antlers."

Lyans's smile pa.s.sed unnoticed in the darkness. By rights he should have been angry about being dragged out of a hot midweek bath to officiate at the outcome of a brawl. He wasn't. Half an hour ago he had hurried home to give his wife the news of the settlement made at the Middle Arizona ranchers' meeting.

Her relief had been as keen as his, for the past few weeks had been a waking nightmare to both of them, with the threatened violence between the cattle company and the Mesa Grande outfits a constant worry. As deputy sheriff, responsible for law enforcement in this remote corner of the county, Bill Lyans considered himself a lucky man at the way things had turned out. Now he could concentrate on his job at Olson's feed mill, meanwhile dealing with such petty duties as arose, like this trouble between Merrill and young Bonnyman.

"He'll probably hop that late freight," Baker said as they came abreast of the first darkened stores.

Lyans had been thinking of something else. "Who?" he asked, half absently.

"Joe Bonnyman."

"Here's hopin'." Lyans breathed the words prayerfully, knowing Joe Bonnyman's capacity for making trouble. He considered his natural liking for Yace Bonnyman's wild son as something alien in his make-up, like his taste for whiskey, and now conscientiously tried to bridle his regret at not having seen Joe or had a drink with him during his brief return to Lodgepole. He was sure that Baker's hunch on Joe's leaving was correct.

Ed Merrill was lying on the bed of an upstairs room, head and shoulders propped on pillows. Doc Nesbit was offering him a bottle of smelling salts, which he pushed roughly aside as Baker and the lawman entered. Ruth Merrill was there, holding a lamp Nesbit had needed in applying antiseptic to the cuts and bruises on her brother's face. When Lyans stepped in, she returned the lamp to the table and moved quietly into the background, antic.i.p.ating an immediate outburst from Ed.

That outburst didn't come. Ed's look turned sullen at sight of the deputy. He seemed about to say something, then evidently changed his mind.

Seeing that Merrill wasn't going to speak, Lyans queried: "Everything all right, Doc?"

"He needs rest. No bones broken." The medico came up off the bed and began packing his black kit bag.

Lyans looked at Merrill and waited, giving the man a second opportunity to speak. But again Merrill chose to retire behind the sh.e.l.l of his sullenness.

"Goin' to bring charges?" Lyans asked at length.

Merrill shook his head.

The deputy lifted his shoulders in a meager gesture of dismissal. Then, seeing the doctor heading for the door and Baker already gone, he felt that his presence here was unwanted, and said: "I'll walk along with you, Doc."

The steps of the two men had receded down the corridor toward the stair head before Ed said querulously: "A sawbones and the law! Where's the coroner? They act like I'd been murdered." The perfect oval of Ruth Merrill's face took on a smile. "You nearly were," she said, a dry edge to her voice. Abruptly her look changed, robbing her of some of her composure. "What did you say to Joe?"

Ed glowered up at her a moment before answering. "Told him to stay away from you."

She nodded. "And what else?"

"Did there have to be anything else?"

"Yes. If you remember, staying away from me is an old story to Joe. You must have said something else."

Merrill swore softly, adding the weight of a mocking laugh to his words. "Dog-gone it, you're a little flirt! First you wouldn't have anything to do with Joe because he wanted you. Now you've . . ."

The girl's face flamed hotly in anger. All at once she stepped up to the bed, drew back her hand, and slapped her brother hard across his cut and swollen mouth. There was no pity in her as he groaned in pain. She stepped quickly out of the way as his hand s.n.a.t.c.hed out, trying for a hold on her skirt. At the door, turning to give him a last loathing look, she said scathingly: "You're still the same spoiled brat that rubbed burrs in that tame little Shetland's saddle blanket to make him buck. I wish I could hope Joe was staying to finish what he started."

The dark look that came to Ed Merrill's face didn't pa.s.s until minutes after she had closed the door and gone to her room. At this moment, he was a man half insane with rage and shame, rage at his sister's reminder of a bullying childhood, shame at having suffered another defeat at the hands of a lifelong enemy. Never before tonight had he been really afraid of Joe Bonnyman. But now, remembering the ease with which Joe had licked him, the studied viciousness of those last blows driving him back through the window, he was afraid, and that fear fed the flames of his impotent hate.

Although he didn't will it, Ed's mind incessantly brought up pictures of the past, mostly of his relations with Joe Bonnyman. In the next couple of hours that he should have spent asleep, he took a better look at himself than ever before in his life, and what he saw didn't please him. He was plagued by the certainty that he had been in the wrong tonight, shamed at having let a smaller man whip him, and finally his fury was directed at the doctor and Bill Lyans for their offers to be helpful. He couldn't put down the idea that they had been making fun of him, gloating over his helplessness in a smug and mock-serious derision. Well, he wasn't going to give anyone else that chance. As he decided that, he was swinging his legs down off the bed and stepping into his boots.

A spell of dizziness, quickly pa.s.sing, hit Merrill as he stood erect. He looked at his watch and was surprised to find the hour close to 1:00. He went to the window, cupped his hands to his face, and peered out and down along the dark street. There was a light on in the window of a bakery, the semaph.o.r.e at the station winked greenly, and out beyond that, in the distance, the bright myriad of stars dimmed before the darker shadow of a cloud bank.

Ed crossed the room unsteadily to stand with feet spread widely, peering at his reflection in the cracked mirror over the washstand. His right eye was swollen shut; no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't even slit it open. Both it and the left were purpling under deep bruises. The cheek bone below the shut eye was gashed and a livid red. Merrill had refused to let the doctor put sticking plaster over it. His upper body and arms were sore to the touch in a dozen places, and he couldn't close his left hand because of the intolerable ache in a bone of the palm. He knew that his impulse to ride out home tonight, to avoid the looks and questions of friends and acquaintances on the street tomorrow, was a rash one, yet any amount of torture was worth the saving of his injured pride, and, when he walked back soundlessly along the corridor to the back stairs, he knew that he would get out to Brush tonight if it half killed him.

In the alley, Merrill turned left toward the feed barn lot, hoping the stableman had left his horse in a stall. He had taken perhaps thirty steps, and the outline of the big pole corral was coming up out of the darkness, when a sound from a building close at hand abruptly stopped him.

That building he identified as the Acme Land Company's. The sound he couldn't define; it was a m.u.f.fled tapping, sharp yet indistinct, the ring of metal on metal. Then, suddenly, Ed was seeing the big safe that sat behind Fred Vanover's desk in the Acme office, and as suddenly knew that someone was trying to break into that safe.

He stood there uncertainly, ruling out at once the idea of calling help because he was in no shape to be seen. His gun was in a pouch of his saddle, down at the barn, but to find the saddle and get back here might mean he'd be too late. Still hesitating, he peered hard into the thick shadow at the building's rear. Something he saw sent him tiptoeing in toward the door, aware that the sounds inside had ceased.

He was reaching out for the broken handle of a broom that leaned against the wall when the door close beside him grated open. s.n.a.t.c.hing up the rounded three-foot stick, Ed whirled to face the door, and the man who lunged through it. He swung the stick viciously, yet the blow that took his a.s.sailant across the forearm only increased the power behind the gun arcing down at Ed's head. Its sharp heel caught him high on the forehead, and made a pulpy sound as it drove deeply in his skull. His big frame went loose all over, and he melted down into the darkness. A moment later a dull heavy thud rode across the stillness.

The man who had hit Merrill wheeled in through the doorway quickly on the heel of that m.u.f.fled explosion. He choked as the stinging stench of burned nitroglycerin bit into his lungs. Coughing, his eyes filled with tears, he crossed the dust-filled room, kicked aside an overturned swivel chair, and pushed open the sprung door to the safe.

By the brief flare of a match the man located a strong box and two filled money sacks. He was out the alley door and running in toward the hotel's high outline by the time the first shout sounded on the street. Presently he disappeared into the shadow at the rear of the hotel. The faint squeak of a door hinge deep in that shadow was the only sound that betrayed his entrance into the building.

Homeward Bound.

Joe Bonnyman was disappointed and angry. Barely a mile out of Lodgepole, he had left the dry, smelly warmth of the stove-heated caboose to stand on its rear platform, his frame wedged against the wall by a boot braced on the sooted railing. There, tense under the violent lurching of the long line of cars gathering speed under two locomotives for the stiff grade leading to the pa.s.s, he watched the lights of the town recede into the distance. He could no more define his regret at leaving Lodgepole than he could the impulse that had brought him down here from Wyoming after vowing never to lay eyes on his father again.

The twin ribbons of steel unwound beyond the platform's edge into the night. For a time they held Joe's glance fascinated, two bright spots reflecting the gleam of the caboose's warning lanterns glowing rosily. Finally he let his glance stray to either side and out into the country flanking the railroad's line. To the south the flats stretched mile upon mile, dropping ultimately to the desert, he knew. Northward, he could picture the climbing folds of the sage country that would eventually put a man at the edge of the broad mountain-backed mesa on which Anchor and the other big ranches were lost in the vastness of a rich and gra.s.sy land.

Joe tried to put down a small run of excitement as he saw a pinpoint of light shining down from that high country. That light might well be coming from a window of Anchor's sprawling stone house, his home, or it might be the lantern hung outside the bunkhouse door to guide in a late rider, his father, or Blaze. Joe eyed it long and fixedly, hardly aware of the train's labored jerking as it took the long grade into the low tangle of foothills that was an offshoot of those northward peaks backing Anchor.

Now that Joe was alone and could look back sanely upon the night's happenings, his mind gradually built a web of thinking that was logical and dispa.s.sionate. Back there his judgment had been a little warped by the unexpectedness of once more clashing with his father's will. But little of his anger remained when he remembered Yace's look, how much he had visibly aged. He knew his father must feel himself on the downgrade of life. Soon, five years from now, ten at the outside, Yace would be but a sh.e.l.l of the man whose brute strength and iron will had carved a cattle empire from this far frontier. Then, his family gone, the fruits of his life's struggle would seem barren and valueless in his loneliness. Yes, even Yace Bonnyman would one day find his world meaningless.

A slow rebellion built up in Joe as this picture flashed before his mind's eye. He could even feel sympathy for Yace, see him as a pathetic, lost figure whose only solace would come in memories of days long gone. He considered his reasons for leaving-his inability to get on with Yace, his reluctance to face the blame for his original foolhardy act of selling out to Middle Arizona. And he knew now that, wherever he went, whatever he did, the memory of having backed down before these two obstacles would always rankle.

It naturally followed that Joe began considering ways to make amends, supposing for the moment that he stayed on in this country. He could avoid Yace, get a job that would never take him to Anchor; the job Clark had offered was such a one. He could pull in his horns, mind his own business, and maybe one day prove to the others that he wasn't all bad. Blaze had been right; he should take the chip off his shoulder. People would gradually forget, so would Yace, and in the end, when time had glossed over the past, he could one day go back to Anchor.

Suddenly Joe awoke to the fact that his problem was already half solved. In his experience, the actual doing of a thing was, more often than not, less difficult than deciding to do it. Now that he had decided there was no logical reason for not remaining here, the thing to do was act on that decision.

He did, turning at once in through the door into the caboose's now dark interior. The conductor had undoubtedly turned into his bunk for a couple of hours' sleep before the train reached Junction. The brakeman was up in the cupola, at his solitary vigil of watching the top of the long line of freight cars.

Joe lugged saddle and war bag out onto the platform, and then down the steps. He tossed the saddle down the embankment, and then, war bag in hand, swung out with a tight hold on the hand rail. He hung there for a moment, judging the train's speed. When he did let go and jump, he found the shadows deceptive.

Misjudging the depth of his fall, he landed with knees rigid. His weight overbalanced and he fell inward, barely avoiding the iron steps. His war bag was torn from his grasp and his left arm whipped down across the near rail with such force that it set up an ache that traveled to his shoulder. Then, the pain quickly pa.s.sing, he lugged the war bag back to where the saddle lay, and stood peering out across the night-shrouded reach of land close by.

Off there some place, no farther than a mile, he judged, lay Ernie Baker's ranch house. Ernie was good for the loan of a horse.

Joe cached the war bag under a pion close to the embankment, and, slinging the saddle over his shoulder, set off diagonally northwest from the line of the rails. He didn't mind the long walk that lay ahead, for his mind was at ease and a world that had minutes ago seemed gloomy and depressing was now to his liking.

It was less to his liking some forty minutes later, as he threw his saddle on the back of a scrubby big-headed bronco alongside Ernie Baker's corral. His only greeting had been the persistent yapping of a cur dog that had heard his approach and signaled it long and loudly.

The weathered frame house was deserted, and Joe had found the corral gate open. It was only by accident that this pony had been inside the enclosure, licking at a salt block. There was every evidence of Baker's having been away for several days.

As he reined the tough-mouthed horse out across the barn lot, Joe remembered that Baker usually worked for one of the mesa outfits each fall on roundup. Doubtless the man now lay asleep in his blankets close to one of the chuck wagons working the higher hills.

Within 100 yards of the corral, Joe realized that his luck had been bad on the horse. The animal was lamed in the right foreleg. Dismounting, Joe inspected the leg and found a swelling above the hoof. It wasn't sore to the touch, but neither was it sound. Anchor lay a good twenty miles away, and Joe doubted that the animal was good for that distance. But he would use him until he lamed badly.

He rode back and found his war bag. When he had tied it to the cantle and had pointed the pony's head toward the peaks, he was whistling. It was good to be on his way home.

The Horsehair Hatband.

Fred Vanover's face as he looked in upon the lantern-lighted ruin of Acme's office showed as bleak an expression as Lyans or any other of the half dozen men inside had ever seen it wear. The Middle Arizona man had been informed of the main fact on his way down with Roy Keech, the hotel clerk, who had been sent to get him. He knew that the safe had been robbed, and he knew that Ed Merrill lay dead in the alley, the front of his skull crushed in from the blow of a gun b.u.t.t.

He now looked at Lyans and at Clark Dunne, standing alongside the deputy, as he came in the door, and Lyans said courteously: "We didn't touch a thing, Mister Vanover."

The Middle Arizona man nodded briefly and surveyed the room. The safe's flimsy door was buckled outward, torn from its lower nickeled hinge. The roll-top desk had been pushed away by the concussion, three of its slats broken in by a piece of flying metal. The swivel chair lay on its side on the floor. Both lamps had fallen and were broken, ringed by their puddles of coal oil. The big window at the front was now gla.s.sless. Vanover had noticed that someone had swept the walk outside clear.

The extent of the wreckage left Vanover with a helpless, muddled feeling. Because he didn't know Lyans well, his look went to Clark Dunne as he asked: "Any ideas?"

"Not many, Fred," Clark told him. "The safe door was pried open above the lock, and nitroglycerin poured down the slot. Whoever did it broke into the powder shed behind the hardware store and stole what he needed. That safe wasn't any too strong."

"I've been trying to get them to send me a new one," Vanover said ruefully.

"You'll have to tell us what's missin'," Lyans put in, and stepped over to hold his lantern so that its light illuminated the safe's interior.

Vanover knelt in front of the deputy. His brief glance showed him the strongbox and the two money bags missing. He said tonelessly, speaking more to himself than to them: "This is out of my hands now. They'll send their own crew up here to recover the money."

"Was there much?" Clark asked.

Vanover looked back over his shoulder at him. "Close to nine thousand. My instructions were to have it on hand to make a cash payment on any outfit that came up for sale."

Lyans whistled softly, eloquently. "That much?"

Vanover nodded and came erect, his face looking tired and worn. "Have you moved him?" he asked quietly.

"No. He's out there." Lyans led the way to the alley door and, through it, stepped aside and held his lantern extended so that the canvas-covered mound lying close to the door was fully lighted. He motioned to a man standing beyond, and the canvas was pulled back to reveal Ed Merrill's body lying huddled, face down, one arm out of sight. It was as though Merrill had gone to sleep under a light covering, and had hunched his big frame together against the night's bitter chill.

Vanover took a hasty look. "Where was he hit?"

"Stoop down and you can see," Lyans said. "We ain't touched him yet. Wanted you to be here before we did."

The pallor of Vanover's face clearly indicated his reluctance to be a witness to this. Without bothering to inspect the body further, he said: "Go ahead with what you have to do."

Lyans set his lantern on the ground, nodded to the man who had been standing guard, and together they knelt and gently rolled the body on its back. Vanover looked away quickly as the gaping hole in the forehead came into sight. Because he looked away, he didn't know the reason for the deputy's quick intake of breath.

It was Clark Dunne, behind Vanover, who asked: "What is it, Bill?"

"Have a look for yourself."

Only then, when he realized that something unusual was happening, did Vanover force himself to look again. When he did, it was to see a braided band of black-and-white horsehair clenched tightly in Merrill's hand, the hand that had been out of sight beneath his body.

"You're a witness to this, Mister Vanover," Lyans said tonelessly. "He must've grabbed it just as he was. .h.i.t. Who knows where it came from?"

There were seven men crowded around the body now, those who had been in the office plus one or two more who had been waiting out here. One of them spoke up immediately: "I wouldn't swear it was his, but Joe Bonnyman used to own a hatband a lot like that."

"Don't be a fool, Corwine," Clark Dunne said softly, yet explosively. "Joe couldn't have done this . . . wouldn't. He's not the kind to club a man with the b.u.t.t end of a gun. Besides, Blaze and I were with him when he climbed onto that late freight. He's fifty miles from here by now."

"Let's get this straight," Lyans said quickly, eying the man who had identified the hatband. "You're sure about this, Corwine? It's Bonnyman's?"

"Holy mackerel, no, I ain't sure. I said it could be."

"And them two had a sc.r.a.p tonight," Lyans breathed, thinking aloud. Sudden determination showed on his face as he wheeled on the nearest man. "Al, go get Johns out of bed and down to the station to wire the agent at Junction. He's to find out if Bonnyman's on that train. She's due at Junction at two-ten. If Bonnyman ain't on the train, tell Johns to get a report from the conductor on when he got off." He nodded to the man who had been watching the body. "You and Bates carry him on down to Hill's, Ned. The rest of you hang around until I get the report. We may have some ridin' to do before mornin'."

Ned and two others were lifting the body, slung in the canvas, ready to carry it on down the alley to the undertaker's, before anyone spoke.

It was Clark Dunne who said gravely: "I'd go easy on this angle, Bill. Joe isn't a killer. He's on that train, I tell you. If that's Joe's hatband, there's a good reason for its being here."

"Sure, sure," Lyans drawled easily. "Only you don't expect me to just forget about it, do you?"

Jean Vanover had been wakened by the strident knocking on the front door, and was about to answer it when she heard her father cross the living room. A moment later she recognized Roy Keech's excited voice and, standing at the head of the back hallway, caught most of what he said. A strong foreboding took her as he told of the robbery, an intuitive feeling that the suspicions and hatreds eased by tonight's agreement between the ranchers and Middle Arizona might come alive again. But, more immediately important, was the tragedy of Ed Merrill's death.

As Lyans's messenger finished giving Fred Vanover the brief but grisly facts on the killing, Jean called: "Dad, what's being done about Ruth? She's there alone at the hotel, isn't she? Could I go stay with her?"

Keech answered out of the darkness: "That'd sure be a help, ma'am. Far as I know, Lyans ain't thought of any way to tell her yet. She's in room Number Fourteen."

Jean dressed hurriedly, hearing her father and Keech leave before she had quite finished. Out on the street, she gathered her coat tightly about her against the bite of the cold night air. She took the dogleg bend in the street, and, seeing the crowd and the lights at the Land Office close ahead, she purposely avoided going over there by keeping to the opposite walk. She wished she could be with her father now, to help him take this bitter defeat that might undo all the fruits of his long struggle to settle things peaceably with the ranchers. But this other was more important. Ruth Merrill's manner was always proud and distant, not only toward her alone; Jean knew that at such a time as this the girl would be alone and friendless, and the stubborn streak in her wouldn't let her side with others when it came to gloating over Ruth's misery.

The upper hallway of The Antlers was empty and so dark that Jean had a hard time finding the Number 14 on a door far back along it. Her knock remained unanswered for a long interval, so that she had to repeat it, much louder the second time.

Finally Ruth Merrill's voice called sleepily: "Who is it?"

"Jean Vanover, Ruth. May I come in?"

Ruth made some unintelligible response and Jean tried the door. It was locked. She waited as sounds of movement came from inside. Finally lamplight glowed beneath the sill, and a moment later the door opened on Ruth. She was pulling a robe about her, tying its cord. Her silvery blonde hair was mussed, the braids hanging down her back loosened to give her a slightly disheveled look. Typically she smoothed down the robe at her slender waist and reached up to run a high-backed comb through her hair; her two hands came down to rub color into her cheeks, and at once she was her usual beautiful self, calm, a.s.sured, her look a trifle aloof as she said: "Isn't it rather late?"

"Yes, Ruth. But something has happened. It . . ."

"To Ed?" Ruth asked with surprising intuition. She stepped aside and Jean moved past her into the room.

"Yes, to Ed. There's been an accident."

Jean was trying to think of words to add, words that would ease the shock of the message she was bringing, when Ruth breathed softly: "He's dead. I know it. You don't need to tell me."

All Jean could do was give a brief nod of her dark head and watch the change that came over the other girl. Ruth seemed to shrink visibly, to lose her proud bearing as her shoulders sagged lifelessly. Her bright-blue eyes became moist, then tear-filled, and she was no longer quite so beautiful. Jean held out her arms. The other girl, stripped of her cloak of pride, came to her, trying to stifle a sob.