Feud On The Mesa (13 page)

Jud rolled a smoke and passed the makings to his partner. As though he hadn’t been listening, he said: “Tell us about that town, down yonder.”

“Clearwater? There’s not much to tell. It’s a stage stop. Once, a few years back, there was some talk about the telegraph coming in, but it never did. There are some log holding pens south of town, for when several cow outfits want Tomake the drive eighty miles to rail’s end together. It has a big general store and so forth.” She smiled faintly. “My parents used Tomake the trip by wagon. We’d start early one morning, reach town by afternoon, lie over, and head back the next day. That general store…around Christmas time when my father would read to us from a book he had about Christmas and Santa Claus and the North Pole where all those wonderful things were…well, I’d think of that general store.”

Rufe smiled at her with understanding, but Jud pursued the topic from a quite different angle. In a drawling tone he said: “Clearwater’s got a store, and a tradin’ barn, and all like that…and a jail-house?”

Elisabeth agreed. “Those things, and a retired Army doctor named Bruce Tappan. It’s a cowmen’s town.”

Jud understood. “Pretty wild on Saturday night, eh?”

She did not know about that. “I’ve never been in Clearwater on a Saturday night, Mister Hudson.”

Jud looked at her, slightly startled, then dropped
his head a little and studied the flaky accumulation of ash on his cigarette.

Rufe arose with a rattling sigh. “Sure nice, here like this, but I figure I’d better ride out the brown horse so’s we can get acquainted.” He looked back. “You better trail along in case I need someone to pick me out of the grass.”

Jud arose, and they sauntered down to the corral without a word passing between them. Elisabeth remained back on the porch, gazing after them, chin resting upon crossed arms atop the porch railing. She would have enjoyed going down there with them, and even saddling up and riding out with them, but years ago she had been inhibited against this very thing by perfectly blunt-talking brothers who had left no doubt in her mind at all about there being times when a man did not want a female around, at all.

Maybe this really was not one of those times, but she did not want to find out, so she sat there, watching, and, when the pair of range men left the corral heading northward, side-by-side, Rufe Miller riding the tough brown horse that she knew would give him no trouble, she wondered about them, wondered why, if they were range riders, they were this far south of the Colorado big country ranges, or this far north of the desert cow outfits.

It was entirely possible that they just had no intention of working hard this season. Frequently range men did that, took a summer off and just went poking and exploring around. And yet Rufe had said they had needed work.

She watched them grow small, far out in the sun-light with its barely discernible heat haze, and
remembered the very casual way Jud Hudson had tackled the last three words on his question about Clearwater:
and a jailhouse?
The idea that they might be fugitives did not shock her. Ever since she could remember, she had heard her father speaking about men he’d encountered skulking through the yonder trees.

She had no illusions about outlaws; this was exactly the kind of out-of-the-way country they gravitated toward. Jud maybe, she told herself. He did not smile very readily and he had a look to him that she could not define, but that she felt hid something.

Rufe was different. She suddenly straightened up, frowned, then arose and went briskly down in the direction of the barn to hunt stolen nests in the loft and mangers, and rob them of eggs for a cake.

The heat haze was as faint as gauze but as obvious as the thin drift of blue-bellied clouds stringing out very slowly from the northwest. The weather could change. It was not yet fully summer and the combined natural complexities that locked in a predictable variety of summer weather southward over the New Mexican desert, and farther northward upon the peaks and parks of Colorado, had not completed that equinoctial meld yet. As a matter of fact, they never seemed actually to accomplish this in the vicinity of Cane’s Mesa. When it had ceased to rain out over the desert, for example, and had not yet begun the summer rains in Colorado, it quite often rained on Cane’s Mesa.

Undoubtedly this was what accounted for the thick profusion of stirrup-high grass that grew most of the year. That same eternal thermal conflict overhead was
also responsible for the open winters when no snow fell, although anyone atop the mesa could see it falling just about every other place.

As Jud observed while he and Rufe rode north-ward and Jud studied those incoming thin clouds, a man could get pretty badly fooled, trying to guess the weather upon a plateau like this one, and Rufe, who was not particularly interested in the weather and had been watching the seal-brown horse’s ears, made his pronouncement of satisfaction.

“He’s not the little bay horse, but he’ll do.”

Jud thought so. “Tough and strong and savvy. All you got to do is pay her for him.”

“With what? Anyway, she said she’d
give
him Tome.”

“Why should she do that?” inquired Jud. “It wasn’t
her
gun killed your horse.”

Rufe turned, scowling. “You’re sure argumentative today.”

Jud smiled. “Nope. I was just fixing to weasel you around until you figured out how to pay Miz Lizzie for the brown horse.”

Rufe understood at once. “All right. What’s on your mind?”

“A whole lot of things like cuttin’ her stud horse when they knew he’d take a week to die, and shooting her bull, and running off her other animals, and shooting up her buildings, and…. ”

“Damn it, I know all that stuff, too, Jud, you don’t have to convince me!” exclaimed Rufe. “What’s on your devious little goat-sized mind?”

“Maybe we’d ought to go down and visit that town,” Hudson replied. “They got a jailhouse, which means they got a lawman. Seems Tome, before we
brace Arlen Chase, we’d ought to know what else we might be bucking into.”

Rufe was disappointed. He had thought his part-ner had evolved some plan to hit back at Chase. “That’s a hell of a long ride, down there and back, and it’ll be just as damned uncomfortable going back down as it was getting up here.”

Jud smiled again. “Not the way I figure for us to go. I figure for us to go right through Mister Chase’s cow camp tonight, maybe about one or two o’clock in the morning, cut his picket pins, kerosene his flour, turn out his corral stock, then take on down the trail for town with him bawling bloody murder and runnin’ around in his nightshirt waitin’ for dawn, so’s he can charge down off the mesa on our trail, which we’ll conveniently leave as plain as day with shod horse sign.”

Jud looked down. “You got to shoe that brown horse, Rufe.”

Every man had some chores he preferred to other chores. Rufe preferred almost anything at all to horse-shoeing. He groaned as they turned, heading back for the ranch.

Jud loped along as cheerful as a cherub. He usually became this way when his mind was busy. They had the buildings in sight when Rufe said: “Tell you what, if you’ll shoe this horse, Jud, I’ll…. ”

“Like hell,” chirped Hudson. “Whatever it is, I’m not going to shoe your horse. Besides, you’re a better blacksmith than I am…Rufe, do you smell that?”

They loped almost to the farthest log corral and hauled down to a walk before Rufe, head up, nose wrinkled, gave his answer.

“Cake! By Gawd, Jud, I don’t believe it. Now that
is what I call a female woman. Shoot, brand, bite your head off, and bake cakes.”

They turned into the barn, unrigged, cared for their animals, and went up front to stand in the doorway with late day softening the sunlight around them, catching an even closer, more tantalizing aroma of oven baking.

T
hey were at supper in the main house, scrubbed and shiny and as hungry as a pair of bitch wolves, when Elisabeth asked how Rufe liked the brown horse, and he told her he’d take him, and pay her as soon as he found a cache some-where.

She was pouring Jud’s coffee and looked over Jud’s head to say: “I didn’t
sell
him to you. I
gave
him to you.” She finished pouring, put the pot down, and sat down at her place across from Rufe. “I told you there’s no money for hired hands any more. The brown horse will be part of your pay…or just a gift, Mister Miller, because within another month or two he’ll disappear anyway.”

Jud said nothing. It was an idiosyncrasy of his that Armageddon could occur right outside the cook house window complete with winged, trumpeting hosts, and Jud would not look up or comment until he finished his meal. He did not speak now, when Rufe said: “I’ll consider the horse part wages then, Miz Cane. He’s a using animal. Didn’t even make trouble when I shod him…which I had to do even though I’ve got a bad back, because my partner wouldn’t help.”

He winked at Elisabeth, but Jud ignored them
both. It had been a very, very long while since he had eaten steak with hash-browned potatoes and fresh-made coffee, all of it woman-cooked. One insult was certainly no deterrent.

Elisabeth smiled more, this evening, and it was very becoming to her. Once she even laughed. That was near the end of supper when Jud finally looked up and around, with only his coffee left to be consumed, and said: “Your back never bothered you in your life, Rufe. Ma’am, you mind this feller, he can josh a bird right down off a tree.”

She brought out the cake and put it upon the table. The two men sat contemplating it with genuine appreciation, and Elisabeth, like most young women, made excuses.

“My mother was better with that stove than I’ll ever be. She used to say it had a personality, just like a person, and the best way to get along with it was never to get it too hot, and always keep it clean.” She pointed to a dip in the cake’s top. “Well, I’ve always done exactly as she said, and, look there, the cake started to fall anyway.”

She cut them each a huge piece, ate none herself, and refilled the coffee cups, then sat and watched. Again, Jud did not raise his face as long as there were any crumbs on his plate. He only looked up to protest feebly when Elisabeth cut off another great slice and slid it onto his plate.

She did the same for Rufe, and smiled at him when he said he’d known when they’d first ridden in, yesterday, from the way she’d held that old buffalo rifle, that she was the best cook on Cane’s Mesa.

“The only cook, Mister Miller, except for Abe Smith, Arlen Chase’s
cocinero.”
She sat down,
thought a moment, then added more. “And I don’t drink nearly as much as Abe does.”

Afterward, they went out upon the rambling porch of the main house, and she told them stories of her father, of her mother and brothers. She even told them about the sister who had ridden off and who had never returned, or even written.

This fascinated Jud for some reason. Regardless of how their subsequent talk drifted away, Jud kept bringing it back to the mysterious disappearance of Elisabeth’s older sister.

Even later, when the pair of men went down to the bunkhouse, Jud said: “Why, unless her pa beat her, or some cowboy got her in a family way, would a girl run off from up here?”

Rufe sighed. “What’s so terrible about that? You’ve met kids with peach fuzz for whiskers from here to there, who ran off from somewhere.”

“Boys,” averred Jud. “Boys, and even some men…but she was a girl.”

Rufe went to the door, opened it slightly to look out, examined the sky, the solitary lighted window over at the main house, and sniffed the air before pulling back to say: “I wish to hell she’d turn in.”

That did not trouble Jud in the least. “She won’t hear us if we lead the horses out a mile or so before riding off. Are you ready?”

They went down to the barn, led forth the horses, and methodically saddled up without a word, slung booted carbines under
rosaderos
, buckled throat latches, went up for a final look in the direction of the main house—where there was finally only darkness, indicating that Elisabeth had gone to bed— then they trooped on through and out the back way,
walking as quietly as was necessary, leading their animals.

That veil of obscurity was still up there, across the high heavens. It dulled down the brilliance of the stars, and those lean clouds they had noticed in the afternoon had got reinforcements from up north and were now widening their scope and thickening their depth and height.

Rufe sniffed. “Rain coming, Jud.”

They swung up a mile out, turned eastward, and picked their way, in no hurry at all. They had the full night ahead, and the later it was when they located Chase’s cow camp, the better for their purpose.

But they didn’t reach it.

Jud was rolling a smoke when Rufe’s horse threw up its head, missed a lead, and pointed onward with its little furry ears. Rufe stopped, swung down, and lay a hand lightly upon the horse’s nostrils to pinch off a nicker, if one started.

Jud dropped the cigarette two-thirds fashioned to do the same, but it irritated him, so he hissed a little profanity while they stood, peering out into the gloomy night with its steadily decreasing visibility.

A shod hoof struck rock. They placed the direction of that sound but saw nothing. Rufe leaned close to whisper. “Maybe Chase’s remuda broke out.”

Jud did not reply. He handed Rufe his reins and went ahead like a soundless wraith.

The night was warm, but it was hard Tomake things out, even against the ghostly paleness of the grass, and Rufe had misgivings, even before his partner returned and said: “Hell, it’s three mounted fellers skulking along south of us, heading for the Cane place.” He grabbed his reins and swung away
to mount and turn back. Rufe was already in the saddle before Jud reined over close to lean and whisper again.

“I understood her to say they only shot up the ranch about sunrise and about sunset.”

Rufe was straining to detect the southward, onward sound, and glared without comment. Jud subsided and rode with one hand on the butt of his holstered Colt. He did not need an answer to his comment, any-way. Unless those three riders were strangers, which seemed improbable since they were coming directly from the area where Chase’s cow camp was located, they had to be some of Chase’s men.