Savage Range (3 page)

“Get up,” he said.

“I've had enough,” Will-John mumbled. He pushed himself to his elbow, and then Jim lifted him to his feet again. He hit him twice and then caught him before he fell, and with a savage, rolling heave he threw him into the tie rail. It splintered and broke with a flat crack, and Will-John caromed into an onlooker. They both went down. The onlooker got up quickly, swearing, but Will-John lay there on his side on the wet sidewalk, face pillowed on his arm.

Jim raised his glance to scan the crowd, who eyed him silently.

“I don't like this town,” he drawled quietly. “Anybody object to that?”

There was a faint stirring among the onlookers, and then they broke up. Jim stood there in the muddy road until they had either gone into the saloon or down the walk. He saw Cope then. Cope was standing on the step of his saloon, leaning lightly on his crutch. He looked down at Jim and then at Will-John and then said musingly, “You ain't the first man that thought that, Wade, but you're the first that said it,” and went inside.

Something stirred behind Jim, and he turned. A woman had come out of the shadow across the street and was bent over the kid. She rolled him over and was feeling gingerly along his ribs.

“Where does he live?” Jim asked.

“I can do it,” the woman said, not looking up.

Jim said, “Let me.” Gently he pushed her aside and picked the soaked kid up in his arms. His body was slack, limp as thread.

They faced each other now in the rain, and Jim saw that this was a girl. Her slim, rather hungry-looking face was twisted into a sardonic smile, and as her glance touched Jim's face for a moment it was hostile, bitter. Then she gestured lazily down the street.

“I've done it enough,” she said quietly and turned. “Come along, then.”

She kept ahead of him. They passed down the side of the hotel, in front of a blacksmith shop where two men were shoeing a span of mules, and turned in on the other side of it.

It was a mean shack of logs set back from the road and abutting the frame blacksmith shop. The room he entered was low-ceilinged, clean, jammed with rickety furniture.

The girl indicated a sofa, whose plush was worn and blackened, and Jim said, “He's pretty wet. You better put a blanket over the sofa.”

“Do you think it could look any worse?” the girl asked in a dead voice. “Put him down.”

Jim did, asking, “Your brother?”

“Yes,” she said wearily, indifferently. She disappeared through a door that was hung with an army blanket. Jim heard her pouring water into a basin, and presently she appeared with it and a towel and set to work on the kid. Beneath the hard and alert bitterness that shaped her face she was pretty. Her wet dress was of sun-faded blue calico. It was plain, clinging wetly to her and showing the slim full-breasted figure that somehow did not seem mature.

Jim's knuckles were smarting from mud ground into a cut, and he wrapped them in a handkerchief, watching her deft ministrations.

“What does he hold against you?” Jim asked suddenly.

The question startled her. When her face turned up to him, its reserve had dropped. “Will-John Cruver?”

“If that's his name, yes.”

Her face veiled over, walling out his curiosity and any kindness he might have intended. Her glance dropped. “He wants me to live with him,” she said quietly. She went on with her work, and then added, “He has a way of making people do what he wants. You'll find that out, maybe.”

“I'll never see him again,” Jim answered. “That's my hope.”

“You're the new Excelsior foreman, aren't you?” she countered dryly. In explanation, she said, “He'll call the turn for Excelsior and he'll call it for you, too.”

It was a plain statement, as if there was no room for doubt in her mind. Jim shifted his sogged boots, faintly irritated. Then Will-John Cruver must be one of the men whom Max Bonsell was trying to run off.

“You like the idea, maybe,” Jim suggested meagerly.

Her head rose again, and there was a brash defiance in her eyes. “Yes. I don't like Will-John Cruver, but he's not a company man.”

She turned back to her work. This time she felt the kid's ribs and then looked at the dirty bump on his temple again, where Cruver had clouted him.

Jim said thinly, “You need a dozen good meals and a new dress, maybe. Good night, miss.”

He wheeled and went out into the rain, stooping low for the door. He heard her run after him, and he stopped and turned, regarding her as she stood framed in the doorway.

“I haven't forgotten all my manners,” she said quietly. “Thank you for helping him.”

“He's welcome,” he said, and turned to go. He heard her walking after him, and he stopped again, and she came alongside him. The wet darkness seemed to lower the barrier of her hostility; she was so close to him that he could smell the warmth of her, and it made him impatient to be gone.

“Maybe you're right,” she said in a low voice. “A dozen good meals and a new dress would make a difference.” Her face tilted up to his. “There's only one way for a girl to live better than an army mule in this place, and I won't do that. But sometimes it's hard.” She hesitated. “You're a kind man, I think. Maybe you understood my sharpness.”

Jim stood motionless, trying to see her face. He reached for his cold pipe and put it in his mouth. “Your brother,” he said. “Is he any good?”

“Not much. He's never had a chance to be.”

“Has he ever worked cattle?”

“Yes. But his jobs never lasted.”

“I'll need riders,” Jim said in a matter-of-fact voice. “If he's any good, I'll pay him forty a month. Ten of that I'll send to you.”

“I don't take charity!” she said sharply.

“That's the way it's got to be,” Jim said brusquely and turned away.

He heard her quiet, resigned, “Thank you,” and she went into the house.

Max Bonsell was waiting under the awning in front of the saloon. He tendered Jim his soaking hat and then drawled, “You sure get acquainted easy, Jim.”

“Who was the kid?”

“Ben Beauchamp.”

“And his sister? What's her name?”

“She's Tom Beauchamp's girl, Lily. He has the blacksmith shop.”

They tramped silently down the walk, and then Jim said, “This Will-John Cruver, he claims to make pretty big tracks around here, eh?”

“About the biggest,” Bonsell said dryly. “He heads that bunch of squatters.”

Jim said nothing. They cut down the side of the plaza toward the stable. Jim said suddenly, “I wonder.”

“What?”

“I had a sort of tangle with another
hombre
earlier in the evenin'. I wonder if he—”

“He was one of your own men,” Bonsell said dryly, and let it go at that.

Chapter Three:
MAN WITH A REPUTATION

His name, Jim found out the following day, was Mel MaCumber, and he was a fair sample of the Excelsior crew. After breakfast, served in the log cookshack, Jim went back to the house for a dry pipe in his war bag, reflecting on the strangeness of this outfit.

The crew had been quartered in two rooms of one of the biggest houses Jim had ever seen. The main part was adobe, two stories high with a white-railinged gallery around all four sides. The wings, two of them, were of square-hewn logs, and these had formerly held the ranch office, a kitchen, a gun room, and storerooms. Mighty cottonwoods raised an arch over the house and shaded it, but it was a magnificent old ghost of a house, nothing more. The deep-set windows were paneless, and every third spoke was missing from the gallery railing. Here and there a door sagged off its hinges, and rank buffalo grass grew right up to the house foundation of field stone. The old place was dying, and the Excelsior, under Max Bonsell, had done little to revive it.

The two rooms of the lower story—where the Ulibarris had entertained Governors General of Mexico, bishops, and perfumed grandees from Castille visiting the colonies—now echoed to the rough jests of a ranch crew, for this was the bunkhouse. East, sloping toward the swift creek, were the outbuildings, the cookshack, wagon sheds, barns, the blacksmith shop, and the corrals. Beyond them was a vast stretch of rolling country of wooded buttes and mesas, where the dark green of big piñon and cedar shaded into the lighter green of greasewood.

Jim found his pipe and came back to the door where he packed and lighted it, his glance on the crew clustered in front of the bunkhouse.

He had worked on enough spreads to know a fighting crew when he saw one, and a faint feeling of disgust welled up within him at sight of this one. Often enough such a crew was necessary, but he hated the idea of heading one. They were riffraff, composed partly of men on the dodge, out-and-out killers, and partly of men who would soon be on the dodge. They didn't like him, and he didn't like them, but there was never going to be any doubt in his mind as to who gave orders to the fifteen of them.

Having Bonsell's orders of last night in mind, Jim tramped down to the cookshack. They were gathered there, waiting for him, and fell silent at his approach. MaCumber, slight and with an unhealthy pallor to his face, stood off a little way, eying Jim with shrewd, unblinking black eyes that distilled the poison for his glance.

“Ball,” Jim said.

“Yeah?” This was an older man, grim-jawed and suspicious and quiet as death. Jim hoped his age had given him a little judgment.

“I'm givin' you the instructions, Ball. Miles, you and Pardee listen, because they're yours, too.” His level eyes sought out the other two, and they nodded. “There's three spreads east of Mimbres Canyon. That's your territory, Ball. Miles, yours is west to the line and south as far as Wagon Butte. Pardee, yours is the rest of the lease. I want you three to ride to every spread in your territory. Tell them they've got till Sunday to get a man to me saying they're going to move. This is Tuesday. If they haven't a a man in here Sunday by midnight, we'll move against them. That's the warning and say it that way.” He paused. “Also, you'll ride unarmed.”

There was a moment's pause, and then someone said, “What the hell for?”

“Because you're told to,” Jim answered quickly. “Any objections?”

“I ain't been without an iron since I was sixteen,” Miles said surlily. “Send someone else.”

“You'll ride out of here without a gun, or you'll ride out of here for good,” Jim said. “What'll it be, Miles?”

Miles's glance slid over to Max Bonsell, who was smoking quietly a few paces away on the cookshack porch.

“How about it, Max?” Miles said.

“He's givin' you orders, I'm not,” Max said quietly.

Miles looked back at Jim. “All right. Only what's the idea?”

“My idea of you, Miles,” Jim murmured, “is that you can't talk without a gun to back you up. Well, you'd better start learnin'. As long as we're in the right here—and any court of law would bear us out—we'll go about this like white men, not Apaches. Those people deserve a warnin' and time to discuss it. Whatever they decide to do after that is on their own heads.”

He paused, watching them.

“Another thing,” he said slowly, his temper prodding him. “I haven't said this to Max Bonsell, but I'll say it to him now, in front of the whole crew. You take orders from me. There's no appeal to Bonsell. As far as you're concerned, there's one boss around here, and that's me.” He looked over at Max. “That right?”

“That's right,” Bonsell said.

Jim turned away. “As far as I'm concerned, the rest of you can light a shuck for town. Be back here by midnight Sunday, ready to ride.”

They moved off toward the horse corral, and Jim walked over to Max.

“That's a prize collection of hardcases, Max. You must have cut sign on every outlaw hide-out between here and Pecos.”

Max only grinned.

“I want a map of this lease,” Jim announced. “Can you draw me one, locatin' the spreads?”

Max could. They went inside the cookshack, and Bonsell sat down with pencil and paper. He was thus engaged when MaCumber appeared at the door.

“Gent to see you, Wade,” he said.

“Who is it?”

“Sheriff.”

Jim went out, Bonsell following, in time to see a man dismount from a claybank gelding and tie his reins to the grindstone in front of the cookshack.

Sheriff Link Haynes might have been fifty but he looked seventy. He had a narrow, suspicious face that was ravaged by dyspepsia and shaped by distrust. Of medium height, his comfortably sized paunch stemming from a flat chest seemed to pull him forward on his toes. His clothes were neat, clean, almost foppish, and the boots he wore on tiny feet were hand-tooled and beautiful.

“You Jim Wade?” he asked brusquely. You had a feeling he tried to make his voice deep and impressive, but he only succeeded in making it irritatingly harsh.

Jim nodded.

“I'm Sheriff Link Haynes.” He made no move to extend his hand, so Jim only nodded coldly. He had a feeling he wasn't going to like this man. “Word's about in San Jon that when you blow in somethin' is goin' to happen.”

Again Jim nodded.

“Well, it ain't,” the sheriff announced flatly.

Jim's mouth started to turn up at the corners, and then a change came over his face. It became perfectly sober, respectful, but there were small dancing lights in his eyes.

“I wish I'd known that,” Jim drawled, his voice rueful.

“What?”

“That a man like you was sheriff,” Jim said. “They told me there was a rat-eaten old fool for sheriff here. Somebody lied to me.”

“Who told you that?” the sheriff demanded hotly.

“A lady.”

“A lady? Couldn't of been. Know her name?”

“Why, I thought she said it was Mrs. Link Haynes,” Jim murmured. “Maybe I'm wrong.”