Feud On The Mesa (11 page)

When a pair of horsemen cursed and grunted and scrabbled their way up atop the mesa from the west, and passed through a mile of solid pine and fir forest, clambering around ancient deadfalls nearly as tall as a mounted man and longer than most village roadways, then came to the thinning last fringe of dark trees to catch their first view of the mesa’s huge
rolling to flat grasslands, it was probably like get-ting from this life to the next one, at least for men born and bred to the saddle and to stockmen’s ways.

They just simply reined down and sat there, like struck dumb, bronzed and weathered, faded and hard-eyed carvings, until the one called Jud said: “Now this is what a man spends his life dreaming about, and knows damned well don’t exist.”

The other man smiled, looped his reins so the horse could rest after his recent three-hour odyssey of travail, with scratched shins and seared lungs from the climb, and pointed.

“Smoke, Jud. Early for supper and late for dinner, I’d say.”

Jud studied the distant, very faint tendril rising al-most arrow-straight against the pale, flawless sky and made his guess. “Branding. It’s that time of year again.” Then Jud swung from the waist to look be-hind, but if there had been a troop of cavalry back through the dark forest, or a whole band of feathered war whoops, he couldn’t have seen them because sunlight never reached fully to the forest’s floor, and the trees stood thickly as hair on a dog’s back.

When Jud straightened back around and caught his partner’s sardonic smile, he shrugged. “I don’t want it put on my headboard that they caught Jud Hudson from behind.”

The smiling man turned back to gazing out where that faraway smoke arose. “No one’s any closer be-hind us than the Gila Valley, and that’s a month’s damned hard riding back yonder.” The speaker lifted his reins. “Want to bust right out, like we got a right?”

Jud considered. He was heavy boned but not heavy in build. He probably
would
have been heavy, if he’d
had that chance, and, in fact, throughout all his thirty-five years he’d never had a chance to vegetate.

His partner was finer boned, leaned-down, sinewy as old rawhide and perhaps ten or fifteen pounds lighter, but he looked as weathered, as faded, as though he were about Jud’s age. His name was Rufus Miller, and he was wanted back across a moonscape of desolation, of deadly desert and ghostly nights, for the same crime Jud Hudson was wanted for— stage robbery.

Jud hung fire over the decision on whether to ride forth boldly in plain sight or not. A month of trailing by moonlight and becoming shadows by sunlight had fixed in Jud Hudson a habit of reticence. He gestured. “We could stay among the trees and get most of the way down there.”

Rufe turned to follow after, but, as he rode and studied this huge plateau, it became clear to him that, when they ran out of forest to protect them, they were going to be miles southward of that standing smoke. It also struck him that down south where those trees played out, there had to be a series of damned near perpendicular bluffs, because he could see 100 miles straight outward and downward without a single blessed knoll or ridge to interrupt the view.

Rufus Miller was a calm, pensive man, gray-eyed, capable, range-born and rough-raised. Earlier, like Jud, he had let his spurs down a notch in the towns so that they would make music on the plank walks, and he’d worn his gun in a special holster, twisted slightly away from his hip. But a man gets over those things—if he manages to survive his youth in a country where every other gun-carrying rooster is just as quick Tomake, or accept, challenges.

Rufe had survived and so had Jud, but they’d done some things others who had also survived had not done, like raiding the coach in the Gila Valley But again, if a man can survive his errors and doesn’t repeat them, there’s hope for him.

There was not a worthwhile man alive who hadn’t done his share of wild, senseless things. Unless he
had
done them, he never quite acquired the cross-hatch of invisible scars upon his inner self that, when he finally matured, made him wiser than many, more careful than most, and more understanding than the mill run of folks.

And that lousy stagecoach had turned out not to have one damned mail pouch on it. Nothing, not even a good watch, because the only passengers had been an old man and his little bird-like, frightened wife, and, hell, a man wouldn’t take an old man’s watch right there in front of his wife. Like-wise the driver. He’d had three $10 gold pieces he’d been hoarding to buy his boy a speckled pony for Christmas.

They had ridden away fast, and empty-handed, and from the first high hill they had seen the cowman posse boiling up dust in flinging pursuit. So— becoming outlaws hadn’t proven any more profitable than mustanging had been, or than range riding had been, or than horse-breaking had been, except that outlawing created reverberations, and they hadn’t dared go back west of the Gila country where they’d been range riding, so they kept heading northeast, skirting around the worst of the desert country profanely assuring one another that the whole damned planet couldn’t be that bad. And now, by God, it turned out that the whole damned planet
wasn’t
that bad.

Jud drew rein, stepped to earth, peered steadily out across the golden sun smash, then turned and beckoned for Rufe to join him. “There’s a big old log ranch out there, all by itself. That’s where the smoke’s rising up…out back behind the barn where the corrals are. You see?”

Rufe saw. The air was as clear as crystal glass, so the Cane place looked two miles closer than it was. Even so, those mighty log structures would have been visible from an even greater distance.

“That,” announced Rufe, after thoughtful consideration, “is a pretty big outfit.”

Jud said: “But the fire isn’t. Maybe they only got one or two riders.”

Rufe started back for his horse. “In that case, they sure need a couple more, this being marking season.”

Jud went to his horse more slowly, inhibited by all the days and nights of secrecy and hiding. They understood one another better than brothers. Rufe leaned atop his saddle horn. “Jud, this can’t last for-ever. Anyway, we’re so far off even if those cowmen were still trailing us, their damned clothes’d be out of style by the time they got over this far. And those folks down there probably never even heard of the Gila country.”

Jud wagged his head and climbed back across leather looking worried, but he offered no objection when Rufe struck out past the final tier of huge old shaggy trees into the dazzling sunlight, heading for the log buildings. They had a considerable distance to cover. That clear air did not delude them, although they had been traveling through it this time of year all their lives, going one place or another. In fact, limitless horizons had from boyhood conditioned them
both, and a large army of similar men, to half believe that the traveling was the important thing, that goals, or the arriving at some destination, were for people who had to have goals.

They were two miles closer when Rufe said: “Things have been better for that outfit.” It was finally possible to note the signs of gentle neglect and decay, the patched corral stringers, the weeds flourishing along the back of the huge old barn, the bare places up above where winter wind had carried away fir shakes in patches, letting rainwater drop straight through to the barn’s interior.

Jud stood in his stirrups, hat brim pulled low, and said nothing until he eased down, then he sighed. “One man at the branding fire in the corral, Rufe. This time, we’d have done better to stay in the trees.” He turned slightly, movement far out catching his attention. He raised an arm. “Three riders. Maybe they’ve been hunting more cattle to put into the corrals.”

Rufe looked, saw those three horsemen suddenly haul back to a sliding halt and stare hard down in the direction of Rufe and Jud. “Must not get many strangers up on this mesa,” Rufe said, watching those three distant horsemen, and Jud’s reaction was wary.

“We shouldn’t have left the damned forest.”

The three riders came on, more slowly now, in an easy lope, erect in the saddle with an unmistakable, sharp interest. Jud yanked loose the tie-down on his holstered Colt and leaned to loosen his Winchester in its boot.

Rufe watched, said nothing for a long while, and, when he finally turned in the direction of the log barn and those old log working corrals, he saw a
hatted dark head come up over the topmost corral stringer. He also saw sunshine dully along gray steel.

“Caught between the rockslide and a hard place,” he said quietly. “Look yonder, Jud, at the corral.”

They had little choice, being completely exposed out on the grasslands, but to keep right on slowly riding toward the buildings. Whatever they had stumbled into, they were certainly not going to be able to shoot their way out of, so the alternative had to be talk.

Jud said: “Sure a fine day for sighting down a rifle barrel. That feller in the corral doesn’t have a carbine. He’s got a rifle. If he’s any kind of a shot, he could knock my hat off from right where we are now.”

Rufe, watching the three horsemen, swore quietly. “Damn it all, they’re fanning out. This is like riding into a nest of Apaches.” Rufe kept watching the rid-ers. They fanned out, for a fact, but the closer the pair of strangers got to the buildings, the less those three riders seemed inclined to come closer, and that didn’t make sense to Rufe. If he and Jud had stumbled onto some old mossback’s private domain where trespassers were badly treated, it seemed that his mounted men would cut off all retreat and herd the strangers down that other fellow’s rifle barrel.

Rufe tipped down his hat, rubbed his jaw, and finally said: “Jud, there’s something wrong here. You know what I think?”

“Right now,” replied Jud, alternately squinting at the rifle barrel resting atop a corral stringer and those three distant horsemen, “I’m not interested in what you think, unless it’s got to do with us cutting back and making it to those damned trees before we get shot.”

Rufe was scowling. “I don’t think those horsemen got anything to do with that feller in the corral with the rifle. I think they’re deliberately staying beyond his range.”

Jud leaned a little also to study the range men, and in fact it was at about this time that they hauled to a halt, conferred briefly, then one man stepped down from his saddle, shielded by the other two, so that neither Jud nor Rufe could see what he was doing— until he fired.

Rufe’s stocky little bay horse, a companion of many a hard trail, as honest as the day was long, gave a huge lunge high into the air, folded all four legs, and dropped, stone dead.

Rufe barely had time to kick his feet free before he hit the ground, rolling, the wind half knocked out of him, dimly hearing Jud’s roar of rage as his partner rolled from the saddle dragging out his saddle gun, but those distant riders were already turning tail.

Jud fired three times, elevating his sight each time, and cursing with helplessness because no carbine could reach that far.

From the corral, that rifle roared. It had a sound like a light cannon, and, because its range was much greater, Jud lowered his weapon to watch. But the horsemen were also beyond rifle range.

Jud stood up, looked from the dead horse to his partner, who was sitting there blinking and feeling around for the ground in order to push upright, then Jud turned in the direction of the corral and saw that rifle still trained in the direction of those fleeing horsemen. He shook his head in complete bafflement, stepped over, and lent Rufe a hand.

“You all right?”

Rufe picked up his hat, said nothing, went over and leaned down to put a hand upon the bay horse’s neck, and after a moment, still saying nothing, he straightened up, gazing far out where the racing range men were still in the easterly sun blaze.

S
he was long-legged for a woman, and flat every-where hard work made people flat, but she was also round in all the places Nature made women round. She had thick, absolutely straight, black hair in two braids past her shoulders, very dark blue eyes, and skin the color of new cream. She looked to be maybe twenty or twenty-two, and not even the boots, the faded trousers, the old work shirt, and the streaked old wide-brimmed hat could detract from something else men immediately noticed about Elisabeth Cane. She was beautiful.

But beauty being a relative term, even Tomen who had not see a beautiful woman—
any
kind of a woman at all in over a month—that rifle she held as steadily as stone as they stiffly dismounted from riding on in, both upon Jud’s horse, made her beauty less immediate than the bronzed hand on the gun, with one bent finger curled around the trigger.

Jud was still sulphurous, so he said: “Lady, point that gun some other way.”

She did not move and neither did the long barrel. “Who are you?” she demanded.

Rufe, glancing back where his horse and outfit lay, spoke slowly when he came back around facing her.
“My name is Rufus Miller. His name is Jud Hudson. We were just riding through.”

“Up through that badlands country from the west?” she said, eyeing them skeptically as her father and brothers had always eyed men coming onto Cane’s Mesa from that improbable direction.

“Yeah,” said Rufe, looking steadily at her. “Up through those badlands. Is there another way up here?”

She did not answer that. “What do you want?”

Jud said: “Well, until about fifteen minutes ago, we didn’t want anything, lady, but that was before some son…that was before a feller shot Rufe’s bay horse.”

The gun barrel tipped down a fraction, and the hard blue eyes above it studied both men. “I’ll sell you another horse,” she said. “Sound, well broke, and cheap. Then you had better turn and go back exactly the way you came. There’s an easier way off the mesa, but you’d never make it.”

Jud’s anger never departed quickly. He looked back harshly at the handsome woman. “Is that a fact, ma’am? Why wouldn’t we ever make it?”

“A cowman named Arlen Chase has a camp over there. He has four riders. All five of them…. ”

“Wait a minute,” broke in Rufe. “Is that who those three fellers were…riders for this Arlen Chase?”