Collection 1986 - The Trail To Crazy Man (v5.0) (28 page)

T
OM FOX, A lean, hard-bitten Bar M man, was staring at me. Coolly, he took a rope from his pommel. “What we waitin’ for, men?” he asked bitterly. “There’s our man.”

Turning, I said, “Fox, from what I hear you’re a good man and a good hand. Don’t jump to any hasty conclusions. I didn’t kill Rud Maclaren and had no reason to. We made peace talk last night an’ parted in good spirits.”

Fox looked up at Canaval. “That right?”

Canaval hesitated, his expression unchanging. Then he spoke clearly. “It is—but Rud Maclaren changed his mind afterward!”

“Changed his mind?” That I couldn’t believe, yet at the expression in Canaval’s eyes, I knew he was speaking the truth. “Even so,” I added, “how could I be expected to know that? When I left, all was friendly.”

“You couldn’t know it,” Canaval agreed, “unless he got out of bed an’ came to tell you. He might have done that, and I can think of no other reason for him to come here. He came to tell you—an’ you killed him when he started away.”

The hands growled and Fox shook out a loop. It was Olga who stopped them. “No! Wait until the others arrive. If he killed my father, I want him to die! But wait until the others come!”

Reluctantly, Fox drew in his rope and coiled it. Sweat broke out on my forehead. I could fight, and I would if it came to that, but these men only believed they were doing the right thing. They had no idea that I was innocent. My mouth was dry and my hands felt cold. I tried to catch Olga’s eye but she ignored me. Canaval seemed to be studying about something, but he did not speak a word.

The first one to arrive was Key Chapin, and behind him a dozen other men. He looked at me, a quick, worried glance, and then looked at Canaval. Without waiting for questions, the foreman quietly repeated what had happened, telling of the entire evening, facts that could not until then have been known to the men.

“There’s one thing,” I said suddenly, “that I want to call to your attention.”

They looked at me, but there was not a friendly eye in the lot of them. Looking around the circle of their faces, I felt a cold sinking in my stomach, and a feeling came over me. Matt Sabre, I was telling myself, this is the end. You’ve come to it at last, and you’ll hang for another man’s crime.

N
OT ONE FRIENDLY face—and Mulvaney had not returned with the Bar M riders. There was no sign of Jolly Benaras.

“Chapin,” I asked, “will you turn Maclaren over?”

The request puzzled him, and they looked from me to the covered body and then to Chapin. He swung down and walked across to the dead man. I heard Olga’s breath catch, and then Chapin rolled Maclaren on his back.

He straightened up then, still puzzled. The others looked blankly at me.

“The reason you are so quick to accuse me is that he is here, on my ranch. Well, he was not killed here.
There’s no blood on the ground!
”

Startled, they all looked. Before any comment could be made, I continued. “One of the wounds bled badly, and the front of his shirt is dark with blood. The sand would be too, if he’d been killed here. What I am saying is that he was killed elsewhere and then carried here!”

“But why?” Chapin protested.

Canaval said, “You mean to throw guilt onto you?”

“I sure do mean that! Also, that shot I heard fired was shot into him after he was dead!”

Fox shook his head, and sneered. “How could you figure that?”

“A dead man does not bleed. Look at him! All the blood came from one wound!”

Suddenly we heard more horsemen, and Mulvaney returned with his guns and the Benaras boys. Not one, but all of them.

Coolly, they moved up to the edge of the circle.

“We’d be beholden,” the older Benaras said loudly, “if you’d all move back. We’re friends to Sabre, an’ we don’t believe he done it. Now give him air an’ listen.”

They hesitated, not liking it. But their common sense told them that if trouble started now it would be a bloody mess. Carefully, the nearest riders eased back. Whether Olga was listening, I had no idea. Yet it was she whom I wanted most to convince.

“There are other men with axes to grind beside the Pinders and I,” I said. “What had I to fear from Rud? Already I had shown I could take care of myself against all of them. Face to face, I was twice the man Rud was.”

“You talk yourself up mighty well,” Fox said.

“You had your chance in the canyon,” I said brutally, “and when I say I can hold this ranch, you know I’m not lying.”

Horses came up the trail, and the first faces I recognized were Bodie Miller and the redhead I’d whipped at the Two Bar. Bodie pushed his horse into the circle when he saw me. The devil was riding Bodie again, and I could see from Canaval’s face that he knew it.

Right at the moment, Bodie was remembering how I had dared him to gamble at point-blank range. “You, is it?” he said. “I’ll kill you one day.”

“Keep out of this, Bodie!” Canaval ordered sharply.

M
ILLER’S DISLIKE WAS naked in his eyes. “Rud’s dead now,” he said. “Maybe you won’t be the boss anymore. Maybe she’ll want a
younger
man for boss!”

The import of his words was like a blow across the face. Suddenly I wanted to kill him, suddenly I was going to. Canaval’s voice was a cool breath of air through my fevered brain. “That will be for Miss Olga to decide.” He turned to her. “Do you wish me to continue as foreman?”

“Naturally!” Her voice was cold and even, and in that moment I was proud of her. “And your first job will be to fire Bodie Miller!”

Miller’s face went white with fury, and his lips bared back from his teeth. Before he could speak, I interfered. “Don’t say it, Bodie! Don’t say it!” I stepped forward to face him across Maclaren’s body.

The malignancy of his expression was unbelievable. “You an’ me are goin’ to meet,” he said, staring at me.

“When you’re ready, Bodie.” Deliberately, not wanting the fight here, now, I turned my back on him.

Chapin and Canaval joined me while the men loaded the body into a buckboard. “We don’t think you’re guilty, Sabre. Have you any ideas?”

“Only that I believe he was killed elsewhere and carried here to cast blame on me. I don’t believe it was Pinder. He would never shoot Maclaren in the back.”

“You think Park did it?” Canaval demanded.

“Peace between myself and Maclaren would be the last thing he’d want,” I said.

Bob Benaras was waiting for me. “You can use Jonathan an’ Jolly,” he said. “I ain’t got work enough to keep ’em out of mischief.”

He was not fooling me in the least. “Thanks. I can use them to spell Mulvaney on lookout, and there’s plenty of work to do.”

F
OR TWO WEEKS we worked hard, and the inquest of Rud Maclaren turned up nothing new. There had been no will, so the ranch went to Olga. Yet nothing was settled. Some people believed I had killed Maclaren, most of them did not know, but the country was quiet.

Of Bodie Miller we heard much. He killed a man at Hattan’s in a saloon quarrel, shot him before he could get his hand on a gun. Bodie and Red were riding with a lot of riffraff from Hite. The Bar M was missing cattle, and Bodie laughed when he heard it. He pistol-whipped a man in Silver Reef and wounded a man while driving off the posse that came after him.

I worried more about Morgan Park. I had to discover just what his plan was. My only chance was to follow Park every hour of the day and night. I must know where he went, what he was doing, with whom he was talking. One night I waited on a hill above Hattan’s watching the house where he lived when in town.

When he came out of the house I could feel the hack-les rising on the back of my neck. There was something about him that would always stir me to fury, and it did now. Stifling it, I watched him go to Mother O’Hara’s, watched him mount up and ride out of town on the Bar M road. Yet scarcely a dozen miles from town he drew up and scanned his back trail. Safely under cover, I watched him. Apparently satisfied with what he did not see, he turned right along the ridge, keeping under cover. He now took a course that led him into the wildest and most remote corner of the Bar M, that neck of land north of my own and extending far west. His trail led him out upon Dark Canyon Plateau. Knowing little of this area, I closed the distance between us until I saw him making camp.

B
EFORE DAYLIGHT, HE was moving again. The sun rose and the day became hot, with a film of heat haze obscuring all the horizons. He seemed headed toward the northwest where the long line of the Sweet Alice Hills ended the visible world. This country was a maze of canyons. To the south it fell away in an almost sheer precipice for hundreds of feet to the bottom of Dark Canyon. There were trails off the plateau, but I knew none of them.

The view was breathtaking, overlooking miles of columned and whorled sandstone, towering escarpments, minarets, and upended ledges. This had once been inhabited country, for there were ruins of cliff dwellings about, and Indian writings.

The trail divided at the east end of the plateau, and the flat rock gave no indication of which fork Park had taken. It looked as though I had lost him. Taking a chance, I went down a steep slide into Poison Canyon and worked back in the direction he must have taken, but the only tracks were of rodents and one of a bighorn sheep. Hearing a sound of singing, I dismounted. Rifle in hand, I worked my way through the rocks and brush.

“No use to shave,” the man at the fire said. “We’re stuck here. No chance to get to Hattan’s now.”

“Yeah?” The shaver scoffed. “You see that big feller? Him an’ Slade are talking medicine. We’ll move out soon. I don’t want to get caught with no beard when I go to town.”

“Who’ll care how you look? An’ maybe the fewer who know how you look, the better.”

“After this show busts open,” the shaver replied, “it ain’t goin’ to matter who knows me! We’ll have that town sewed up tighter than a drum!”

“Maybe.” The cook straightened and rubbed his back. “Again, maybe not. I wish it was rustlin’ cows. Takin’ towns can be mighty mean.”

“It ain’t the town, just a couple of ranches. Only three, four men on the Two Bar, an’ about the same on the Bar M. Slade will have the toughest job done afore we start.”