Gunsmoke Justice (7 page)

A
FTER
June Grant had left them, Brad and Olaf followed Arden into the bunkhouse. It was a neat place, but no neater than the average man would want it. There was no sign of a woman’s hand, no frills at the windows, no fancy cloth on the table that sat under the hanging center lamp. Brad had seen that kind of thing on a woman-run ranch; he was glad to find that June Grant had more sense.

The bunks were near the front with an open space at the rear. Near one side wall was the large heating stove flanked by the big table and a half dozen chairs. Brad walked past Arden and sat down; Olaf followed him.

Looking at Arden, Brad tried to reserve his judgment. He was a quick man when it came to making decisions, but now he tried to curb himself. Prepared to like Arden, to work with him in this fight, it bothered Brad to find that he could not feel the same trust in the foreman as June Grant evidently did. It was not anything he could put his finger on — Arden was amiable, smiling, a relaxed man who looked sure of himself. But the doubt was there inside Brad, not a positive distrust or dislike, but simply a lack of feeling. He could not feel drawn to Arden as he had expected.

Now he said probingly, “How strong are we here?”

Arden was standing relaxed with one hip against the edge of a bunk. He made and lighted a cigarette and then snapped the burned match between his fingers. He was no longer smiling.

“As strong as that,” he said, and tossed the match out the open doorway.

Brad waited, letting Arden carry the talk, only speaking to ask a question. The men, Arden said, were of little use. There were Andy Toll and Jake Bannon and Nate Krouse. They were punchers and good enough at their jobs, but good only for those jobs. He had the same opinion of Jim Parker. A man who read too much and was no fighter for this kind of war.

Privately, Brad didn’t agree with that. What he remembered of Parker had given him a different opinion. But it was only opinion, so he didn’t push the matter.

When Arden turned to talking of Quarles, his voice flattened out with hopelessness. As though, Brad thought, he had about decided to give up but wouldn’t say so in words. Quarles was planning to make this his big year, according to Arden, and ruin both the Split S and Parker before an injunction could force him to give up the water. Arden admitted that the Split S would have nowhere near enough hay to feed the stock through the winter. For June Grant that would mean selling all but a handful of beef at a loss. It would mean, too, that she could not meet in full her notes due at the Spokane Falls bank.

Brad shaped up a cigarette and struck a match. Blowing out the flame with a puff of smoke, he said, “What’s Quarles showing in the open?”

“He’s got the water tied up,” Arden said.

Brad brushed the statement aside. “Until you get an injunction, that’s legal,” he said. “You say he’s pushing the Split S. I’ve seen him rough Parker, but that’s a different thing.”

Arden moved reluctantly away from the bunk. “It’s a hard thing to pin down, Jordan.” He shook his head. “Quarles doesn’t push June much in the open.” He took a moment to flip his cigarette onto the packed, bare ground in front of the bunkhouse door, and then turned toward Brad again. “Just one thing,” he added.

“Tell it,” Brad said. He spoke more harshly than he intended. But if a man had something to say, he liked him to say it.

Arden shrugged. “It might not be much.”

And it might be a lot, Brad thought as he listened. Arden explained that at the edge of the timber where it folded into the sage hills June Grant’s father had located a fine-grassed canyon where he fattened his best stock. It was open range and belonged to him only by right of long usage. This spring Biddle and Quarles had moved in seventy or eighty head of their own prime stuff into Pine Canyon, putting the Split S back on the scantier range in the open. June had gone to Quarles with a complaint.

“He told her it was open range,” Arden went on, “and said we were welcome to run his beef out if we could.”

Brad nodded his understanding. It was a challenge June Grant was too weak to accept. In a way Arden was right — it wasn’t too much to argue about. Open range was open range, and in a country as raw as this, the right of usage wouldn’t have too much meaning.

“Even so,” he said aloud, “why hasn’t McFee helped?”

Arden’s laugh was almost ugly. “McFee’s town marshal. There’s no law in the valley outside his town. No law but this.” He slapped his gun.

“If that’s the law,” Brad said, “then we can use it as well as Quarles.”

“We haven’t the strength,” Arden objected. “What are we against Quarles and Biddle?”

“We’re no more than we want to be,” Brad said. This man bothered him even more than he had at first. Signaling to Olaf, he started for the door.

“When you’re ready to do something, let us know,” he told Arden.

Leaving the foreman, Brad and Olaf went up to the house and entered. “Olaf and me will be at his homestead,” Brad told June Grant. “There’s work for us there and, until we can do something here, there’s no call for all the extra feeding we’d mean to you.”

June Grant looked thoughtfully in the direction of her hayfields. “It will have to be soon,” she said slowly. “I can’t hold out much longer.” She paused and added, “I’ll have a man come for you when Dave is ready.”

It was on Brad’s lips to ask why Arden had to wait any longer. But he stopped himself. He knew little of these people. It was not his place to work on June Grant’s faith in her foreman.

He said, instead, “We’ll take a boundary sashay on the way home, then,” and left.

As they rode, he tried to piece together what he had learned so that it would make a coherent pattern. But there was too little to work with as yet. He had seen Quarles’ kind many times. Some were slick men, and some depended on force to get what they wanted. But in every case Brad had never found a solution except to meet force with force. This was the only law certain types of men recognized.

He drew rein now on a high knoll that gave him a sweeping view of the valley. In the distance he could see Sawhorse Falls as a faint cluster of ugliness on the brown face of the flats. He remembered again McFee’s position in all of this, and he wondered at a man who could draw himself into his own tight little world and let that around him shatter into pieces.

Olaf was looking, too. He caught Brad’s eye and nodded understandingly. “It’s a good land,” he said.

“Good land,” Brad agreed. “It could be a good place to live.”

“Yah,” Olaf said. And Brad knew that he would stick, no matter how tough the fighting got.

They reined around and rode on into the hills.

• • •

Arden watched Brad and Olaf ride off and when the first rise to the west had blotted them from sight, then he walked purposefully to the house.

June Grant was in her kitchen, getting ready for the noon meal. Arden beckoned to her, and she stepped to the comparative coolness of the side veranda.

“What made you hire a man like that?” he demanded.

Her eyes widened and a faint flush tinged her cheeks. “I hope to save my hay,” she said briefly, “and my stock.”

“Fight fire with fire,” he murmured. His smile for her was warming, asking for inclusion in her troubles. “You’ve made the decision, then.”

Sometimes Dave took too much for granted, June thought, but she could not help being drawn by him. With her love for Jim Parker, she saw Arden only as a trusted friend. There was always a faint sense of warning when she felt his smile, but she put it down to a natural suspicion of anyone born with such easy charm.

“The decision was to be yours, Dave,” she said. “But if you’d rather not — ”

She left it there, and he looked down at her, smiling crookedly. “Hinting I might be afraid, June?”

“Or not think it wise.”

“I don’t,” he admitted. “Quarles is too strong.”

“He’s not getting any weaker,” she pointed out. “Is there any other way?”

Arden considered this while he took the time to roll a cigarette. He lifted it to his mouth and licked the paper. His eyes met hers. “No,” he said, with complete honesty, “there’s no other way.”

“Then,” she said with quick logic, “I couldn’t do better than to hire a man like Jordan.”

He laughed at her triumphant expression. “Putting it that way, you win.” He touched a match to his cigarette. “Right now I’d better get to town and see to the supplies we ordered.”

“That’s right,” she agreed. He was nearly down the steps when she called to him. “Act quickly, Dave. I think Jordan is a restless kind of man.”

“Quickly, quickly,” he muttered as he went to the corral for his horse. Give him two months and an army of Jordans could not do anything.

Going to the hayfields, he stopped and looked carefully at the plants. Not even two months. Unless there came a rare summer rain heavy enough to soak into the ground, six weeks would see the end of this crop. The sand here was deep and dry. Hay took a lot of moisture to stay alive through a desert summer; it needed even more to grow strong. The first cutting should be nearly ready now, he realized. Last year they had cut hay just at this time. But it had been put off this year, hoping for more growth. Well, they would have to cut, but there would be little more than stubble. There wasn’t hay enough to feed more than a handful of the stock June needed to get through the winter.

He started on again, the hoofs of his horse thudding sullenly across the bridge. Arden looked down at the riverbed and frowned a little. The trickle of water in it wasn’t enough to hold a small fish. And though he realized the necessity of this for his own plans, he had enough love of the soil in his nature to regret it for the moment.

At the turn he looked back, and he could see faintly two dots on the farthest bare bench. Jordan and Hegstrom, he thought, and his frown turned from regret to anger.

In Jordan he saw clearly a potential threat. Until now there had been no man in the valley with the driving strength necessary even to challenge Quarles’ self-assumed leadership. One man might not seem like much, Arden thought, but it was in that very fact that the danger lay. If Quarles were fool enough to push aside the threat of a man like Jordan, Arden knew that Quarles might find himself against a wall before he realized it.

But it wasn’t Quarles Arden worried about too much. Quarles had the power and the strength to handle Jordan if he awoke to his danger soon enough. It was for himself that Arden’s anger turned on Jordan. He sensed in the other man a shrewdness that would force him to move more carefully. Until now, he had had it easy at the Split S; he warned himself to go more carefully.

As he rode along his anger turned to worry, and from it came a plan that took form and shape and strength. It was beautiful in its simplicity. He was Jordan’s boss, wasn’t he? What could be simpler than to give Jordan an order no man could live through? After all, wasn’t Jordan’s purpose to fight openly against Quarles?

Smiling suddenly, Arden hurried his horse. Nothing could be simpler. Nothing could be safer.

“I
LIKE TO GET
the feel of the country,” Brad said to Olaf.

They mounted the last bare bench, following a northwest trail, and the edge of the timber was just beyond them. Nearby, in a meadow, a few head of cattle grazed. They had the Split S brand on them, so he knew he was still on home range. Farther along and below them there was a thin razorback hill with a crest of scrub timber. It looked like a natural dividing line, and when Brad could see beyond it, the idea was confirmed. Cattle now carried Nick Biddle’s odd-looking Sawhorse brand. Along with them were a few head of the Double Q.

Brad pointed out the brands to Olaf, making sure he understood their meaning. He cut due west into the timber and then along a trail that ran slightly south in its general direction. “This is all open range,” he explained, “and if Grant was on it first, he’s got more rights than Biddle.”

He was hunting for Pine Canyon and when he found it, marked as it was by two tall ponderosas standing like sentinels at the narrow mouth, he looked back and judged he was well south of the razorback that separated Biddle from June Grant.

“But rights don’t count,” he told Olaf, and pointed to the Sawhorse beef grazing on the belly-deep grass.

He looked admiringly at the canyon. This was a place to put a man’s best cattle, right enough. There was water from a creek that roiled along one canyon wall, and grass deep and rich enough to keep any cow happy. It was cool in here with the high, partly timbered sides shutting out the sunlight at this hour of the day, but a notch near the end showed him where it would come in warmly in the afternoons.

Biddle and Quarles realized its value, too, that was plain. Off to one side and a short distance in from the mouth was a line shack, set above the high-water mark of the creek. Smoke rose indolently in the still air, indicating the presence of at least one person.

“We go?” Olaf wanted to know, nodding toward the shack.

“It’s not time yet for trouble,” Brad said, reining around. “I got other things to see first.”

He followed a ridge trail that he judged would bring him north to the end of Sawhorse Valley. He rode with caution, since to his right lay Quarles’ graze and Quarles’ men. To the left, he caught a glimpse now and then of the jumbled mass of sage hills and rock canyons that sloped gradually toward the Columbia River. The Sawhorse was an isolated pocket on the edge of the desert, and with the railroad being built not too far away from the south gap, Brad could see its worth.

When he reached the northernmost limits of the ridge trail where a high wall of rock forced him eastward, he could look back and see the whole valley spread out below. The patches of hay meadow were like specks of green on a brown carpet, the road and its branches white threads that had been laid in a neat pattern.

“There’s room for fifty,” he said in a burst of anger. “But one gets rich and forty-nine starve.” He studied it gloomily. “Look at it. Look at the families men could support on that land, Olaf.” He sucked the tang of pine and leaf mold into his nostrils. “Timber and water and flats for grazing and hay to keep cattle fat.”

He reined his horse around, and Olaf followed, contented just to be near despite the roughness of the ride.

Brad found what he was hunting before too long. He had dropped nearly to the valley floor, and now he had to work back up again. He came to the reservoir that accident had created for Quarles. Some water seeped over the jumble of boulders and trees that jammed the entrance to the deep, narrow canyon, but not enough water to do the river below much good, except when Quarles wanted to release it. It was easy to trace the water flow on up now, and Brad followed it to a great swampy meadow. Here two creeks came in, angling from either side, and both flowing strongly. They nearly filled the meadow, he saw, and seeped into the ground out of sight, later to re-form as the Sawhorse River.

It was no different from a hundred other river sources that he had seen, but it was the first one he had found so low in the hills that a man could take advantage of it as Quarles had.

This, he decided, was where Quarles and Biddle had filed their water rights. A channel had been cut across the meadow, catching a large percentage of the water before it went underground, and draining it through a cut in the canyon. Brad could hear the steady roar of a falls, and he followed the marshy ground until he could climb above it and look down on what Quarles had engineered.

The channel led the water from the canyon and over the brink of a drop to another canyon a good hundred feet below. Here it collected, straightening out and running down over rocks and brush, seeping into the earth so that its runoff was slowed until it oozed into the reservoir down below.

“He just stores it and uses it when he wants it,” Brad marveled. “What gets loose is not enough to do anyone else much good down below.”

A territorial or a federal court could stop this without much trouble. But nature had never waited on the slow, ponderous movements of man’s laws. Hay would not stand still in its dying while a court battle was fought. And without hay June Grant would have to sell most of her stock or see them starve through the winter.

These things piled up in Brad’s thoughts, and he had a new respect for Ike Quarles. The man was shrewd and clever, and Brad doubted if he had yet openly broken any law that could touch him. Quarles was a power here, but he wore no gun in McFee’s town. Yet Brad knew McFee alone had no strength to stop Quarles if he chose to exert his force.

It added up to new ideas for Brad and gave him some measure of the man he was to deal with. He rode on, eastward and curving south, mulling it over, seeking a way to turn this knowledge to his own use.

The trail was long and slow, and it was past dinnertime when they came to the first spread on the east slope of the valley. A man came from the rear door of the small, solid house as they stopped. He had a friendly, open face, ruddy from sun and weather. He regarded Olaf and Brad with frank curiosity. Brad recognized him as one of the men who had helped Jim Parker from the One-Shot the day before. He introduced himself as Coe.

“You’re the notorious Jordan,” he said in a pleasant voice. “Light down and eat.”

“Obliged,” Brad said. And for a moment his hopes rose that this man might be of some help.

But once inside the roomy kitchen and introduced to the plump, heat-reddened wife of Coe, those hopes slid quickly back out of sight. There were two children, the oldest a boy of twelve or so; and an old man bent and twisted with years of living on the range. If this was what Coe had, he wouldn’t be a man to chance losing it.

“You run a nice place,” Brad commented when the small talk had died. Though the family was through with their meal, Mrs. Coe found food enough to heap two plates and set them before Brad and Olaf.

“Small,” Coe said, “but the more a man has, the more grief he has.”

Brad nodded agreement. “I see you got a fine stand of hay,” he said. “You don’t depend on the Sawhorse water?”

Coe’s glance was quick and sharp, and the smile was gone from his eyes. “If I did, I’d have no hay,” he said. “No, I was lucky. I got the only dependable creek on the east side, and when Parker snowed us the new hay, I decided to try it.” He waved a hand vaguely southward. “I can run three times the stock my neighbors can.”

“They don’t object?” Brad asked.

Coe’s smile returned, but it was a different one now. “We’re satisfied over here.”

Brad let it drop for the time being, but after he was through eating and a decent time of visiting had passed, he rose and, with Coe and Olaf, returned to the yard.

“Looking for a job?” Coe asked.

“We’re riding for the Split S,” Brad said.

Coe nodded slowly. “There’s no help from this side, friend. We take what we have and thank God on Sundays. We’ll wait it out over here.”

“You think Quarles will stop once he’s got the west side of the valley?” Brad asked quietly.

“No,” Coe said honestly, “a man like that never stops. Not until he’s played out his string. But his way is slow. Parker has already talked of filing suit for the water. It’ll do them no good over there, but hell be hamstrung before he gets a chance at us.”

“Ah,” Brad said, “that’s bad reasoning.” He mounted his palomino and settled in the saddle. He paused to roll his after-dinner cigarette. “He lies near to you now. If they stop him from going south, he’ll come east. If he can’t have all that water, he’ll take what he can get, and this, too. He’s the kind that would take the end of the meat if he couldn’t get the side.”

Coe’s expression showed he had never considered this before. “I’m not big enough,” he said. “It’s a pleasant life we have, and I’ll try to keep it so.”

Brad turned his horse for the road. “Quarles can see your hay from his veranda,” he remarked, and led the way out of the yard.