Guns Of the Timberlands (1955) (10 page)

"We've got him, Noble. Judge Riley's issuing an injunction that will force Bell to allow free passage over the old stage route until the case can come to trial." He chuckled. "By that time it won't matter. We'll have logged off that piece and have the logs cut into ties."

"That injunction--who will enforce it?"

"A Deputy United States Marshal we'll have appointed."

"You namin' him?"

"Who else?"

Devitt smoked quietly for several minutes, considering the situation. Suddenly a thought occurred to him. "Wheeler, who is Hardy Tibbott?"

Noble Wheeler turned his face to Devitt. He was alert, suddenly anxious. "He's a lawyer. An able man. Knows folks."

"He's in Washington, trying to get a permanent grazing right for Bell."

Noble Wheeler came around sharply in his chair. His heavy face was shadowed with worry. "I should have guessed it! He's liable to trouble us!"

"Chase will handle that end." Devitt had been interested, but he was not worried.

Wheeler muttered and fumed, and Devitt stared down at the back of his hands, wishing he had an hour alone in this office. There might be some clue as to what the banker planned. He dared not even hint at the subject, for Wheeler was shrewd. Whatever it was he had in mind, he would do no talking.

It was time for some action now. When the marshal was appointed he would ride to Emigrant Gap and Bell would be forced to give right-of-way through to Deep Creek. It had shaped up like a battle, and that move would end it.

Or would it? Irritably, Jud Devitt realized that it was no certainty. Clay Bell was a man who could plan as well as fight. There was, too, a noticeable lack of eagerness among some of the men. The Bell who had attacked them at The Notch had put the fear of God into them.

He glanced out of the bank window and saw a man standing in the door of the Homestake Saloon. He was a tall man, lean-bodied and tough, with black hair that looked like a skull cap on his head. This was Stag Harvey.

It might come to that. Devitt had seen the other one, too. Jack Kilburn was a short, thick-set man with a round, plump face. He looked like anything but a killer. Yet they waited as if they knew their time was coming.

Queer places a man's ambition got him to. He had never liked western towns . . . the hotels and polish of the East, that was more like it. Even San Francisco or New Orleans, but not these ramshackle towns on the edge of nowhere at all.

Here he sat in this musty, unaired bank office, looking across the street at a man who killed for hire. He dropped his hands to his knees. Time to be moving.

"Tibbott can be a trouble," Wheeler said suddenly, "but it's Garry who worries me."

Devitt was not sure he had heard correctly. "Garry? The wounded man?"

"If that cowboy dies the B-Bar will come off Deep Creek huntin' scalps."

"Nonsense!" Devitt got to his feet. This sort of talk irritated him. There had been more of it before this, when men got together around town. He had listened to some of them talk. "There aren't enough of them to make trouble even if they dared."

Wheeler sat back in his chair. It creaked heavily. He prodded in his vest pockets for something, looked around the desk . . . then found it. A match.

He picked up his pipe and began to stoke it slowly.

"Montana Brown, Rush Jackson, Bill Coffin, Shorty Jones, and Hank Rooney? That's an army."

Despite his impatience at the talk, and his total disbelief that anything would come of it, Devitt found the thought nagging at his mind. So much so that when he met Colleen for dinner, he brought up the subject. "You've been to see this Garry fellow. How is he?"

Colleen wore a blue gown this evening, and the color brought out the deep blue of her eyes. She lifted her eyes and looked across the table at him, a strange, searching, measuring glance.

"He is better," she admitted, "if you can call a man better who is permanently scarred and has lost one eye."

"He won't die then?" Some of his relief was in his tone.

Colleen lifted her cup. This evening, for the first time, she was less than proud of Jud Devitt. She was beginning to see him in a new light. Her father's friends in Philadelphia and Washington had spoken of him as a go-getter, a man who got things done. She was beginning to understand how he got them done.

"He will be all right if he doesn't get pneumonia. Dr. McClean says that with his bad lung he wouldn't have a chance. It's nothing short of a miracle that he has lived this long."

Devitt sensed her disapproval and turned the conversation.

Judge Riley shared some of his daughter's feelings. He looked at his food with distaste. He had accepted what amounted to orders from Devitt, and had gone along because Devitt usually had a strong case. Now he was less sure. Jud Devitt was an ambitious man, and if he had ever possessed any feelings for the men around him, those feelings had been swallowed by his ambition and confidence in his own innate rightness.

Of late, during their casual conversations, Devitt had talked at length, and Judge Riley was a good listener. With more and more disquiet he had heard Devitt express his feelings. Many of their friends would have agreed that Devitt was right. This was a growing country, an expanding country, and a man had to grow with it. If in the process he knocked over a few smaller men--well, competition was the law of growth.

Or was it? Judge Riley remembered that the Colonies had a bad time of it until they started working together. It was no different with men. There was a place for competition, but a bigger place for cooperation.

Judge Riley was a tall man, lean and quiet. His features and expression were those of the student rather than the man of action. He knew law, and adhered closely to the letter of the law, but since he had come west, here with these people of wider, more liberal view, he was beginning to feel what one of his old teachers had long ago told him. That no matter what the letter of the law said, it was of purely general application. It was the judge and his sense of justice that gave law its meaning. There were differences. All cases were not black or white--there were many shades of gray.

Two days before, buying a cigar in Kesterson's, the storekeeper had said, briefly, "Good man, Bell. Hard-working, sincere. Country needs men like that."

Kesterson gestured widely. "Most of these are drifters. When he came here nearly all of them were. Clay Bell came in here, scouted Deep Creek, put down his roots."

Judge Riley had considered that. Kesterson was a man he understood. He was like his own solid New England-Pennsylvania ancestors.

Devitt, he was beginning to feel, was a man who considered the law a tool to be used, rather than a means to justice that should be treated with respect. That night in his room the judge turned idly the pages of his Blackstone. Men had not arrived at these principles quickly. Within the covers of this book, and of all books that dealt with the laws of men, within those covers there was a little of Hammurabi, a little of Moses, memories of Greek and Roman, of the Magna Carta, and of the first Colonists--each had contributed something. The law was a maze of many turnings, justice was the one true path through that maze . . ..

On the upper veranda of the hotel he looked off toward the mountains. Was Bell awake at this hour? Of what did he think? Did he think of justice and the rights of man? A faint wind stirred the sage and brought its scent to the judge. What must this country have been like when Bell first came? For that matter, when Sam Tinker first settled here?

Chapter
10

In the ranch house at Emigrant Gap, Clay Bell was sitting beside his table staring at his accounts. He hated book work, and particularly when his books gave him no comfort, as tonight. To ride herd, to judge beef, to know grass land and range country--those were what he knew best.

And tonight it was worse. His shoulder itched and burned. It was healing, growing rapidly better. The rough life might not be conducive to comfort but it did build strength, and he was coming out of it rapidly. But behind and beyond the figures that stared up at him from the cheap tablet on the table, there was a shadowy figure. He had been shot at by a man who wanted to kill him.

That man could not have been Jud Devitt. He was positive, perhaps unreasonably so, of that. Devitt might try to kill him. He might even hire him killed, but it would not be by ambush. Devitt would be sure to be accused of such a killing--and Devitt, for all his ruthlessness, was not that sort of a fighter.

The fact remained that he had been shot at. By whom?

On the porch of the Tinker House sat a man who might have given him an idea, and that man was fat Sam Tinker, who whiled away his hours smoking on the porch. Smoking and observing life. Little could happen in the town that Sam did not know, and he understood more than anyone suspected.

Usually, people believe their motives and emotions are known to themselves alone, yet few things remain concealed from an intelligent observer with time to see, to consider, and to speculate. Sam Tinker, from the porch before the hotel which he owned, missed very little.

The bartender at the Tinker House was having trouble with his wife. The burly young blacksmith was flirting with Simpson's oldest daughter. Sam Tinker observed these simple things and many more, watching the town named for him, with the kindly tolerance of a grandfather.

He had watched Clay Bell ride from town after his visit to the railroad station. He had seen Bell visit the bank, earlier. Bell, Tinker decided, was in trouble. He had gone to the station after seeing Wheeler, and that meant that the banker had refused to loan him more money. There would be no other reason for him to ship cattle at this season. Sam Tinker had talked with Bell, he knew his plans, knew he wanted to build a herd instead of selling, knew that most of his stock was young.

Clay had ridden from town, and not long afterward Noble Wheeler had left the bank by the rear door, had mounted his gray horse and gone away into the desert. Tinker had been watching Wheeler long enough to know that the banker disliked riding. He never rode for pleasure. He particularly disliked riding in the desert at midday. Come to think of it, Tinker recalled, Wheeler never did anything for pleasure. Unless you called making money a pleasure.

One more item had been apparent to Tinker. Wheeler had carried a rifle when he rode out of town. That rifle had not been taken from the bank. It must, therefore, have been kept in the barn. And that barn was no place to leave a valuable rifle with so many strangers in town; and Noble Wheeler, who valued a dollar no more than his eyesight, was not likely to leave a rifle in such a place.

Suppose, then, it had only been taken to the barn on the previous night and hidden there? And if so, why?

A few days later the grapevine brought added information to the grist of Sam Tinker's mill.

Clay Bell had been wounded when he charged the lumberjack camp in The Notch. Sam Tinker had listened to their excited talk, and all agreed that Bell had used his gun with his left hand. That his right side was bloody and he looked haggard.

Sam Tinker said nothing of these things, but sat quietly, listening, watching, and thinking. Jim Narrows came walking up the street to dinner. Jim's wife was gone to Denver and he was eating out these days.

"Howdy, Jim!" Tinker spat a stream of tobacco juice at an unoffending ant. "What's new?"

"Nothin' much." Narrows took his pipe from his mouth. He stood there, enjoying the coolness after the heat of the day. Then, low-voiced, he said, "Sam, what's got into Wheeler?"

"Wheeler? What's wrong?"

"He sent a wire down state tryin' to get that old killin' case against Monty Brown reopened." Narrows took his pipe from his mouth and stared into the bowl, then knocked it out against the edge of the porch. "A body would think Bell was havin' trouble enough without his own folks openin' up on him."

"Clay shippin' cows . . ."

"No cars--orders come down from main office. No cars for Bell."

"Devitt?"

"Prob'ly."

Sam Tinker turned the matter over in his mind. Bell owed Wheeler money. If Devitt logged off Bell's best range, Bell could never pay that money. It scarcely made sense that Wheeler would cut his own throat that way.

"Now I wonder?" he said aloud. Then added, "You know, Jim, we folks here in town, we should oughta stick together. This here Devitt--tryin' to ride roughshod over ever'body."

He rolled his quid in his jaws and spat again. It was too dark to see if he had nailed the ant again.

"Jim, you see any of the B-Bar outfit, you tell 'em to see me. That means Bell himself, too."

Jim Narrows put his pipe in his shirt pocket. "Never liked Noble Wheeler, anyway."

Sam Tinker did not follow Narrows into the dining room, although he customarily ate at this time. Instead, he sat in the darkness listening to the familiar evening sounds of the town. The lumberjacks were off the street now. They were a morose lot, not like the jacks he had known in his earlier days in Michigan, in the Saginaw country. Nor like the old days in Tinkersville when sixteen thousand belted men had been marching down to Hell the hard way.

It had been young and lusty then, with Indians in the hills and every man packing a gun and a chip on his shoulder. That was when there had been a big strike back in the hills and Cave Creek was alive. The old Tinker House had worked three shifts a day, nine bartenders to the shift, never closing its doors.