War Party (Ss) (1982) (15 page)

He turned on his heels and started for the corral. Then he stopped on a sudden hunch and looked back. "Say," he said, "are you any relation to Edwin Macomber, of Denver?"

Price was startled. He turned around. "Why, I'm his brother? Why do you ask?"

Wells looked at him for a moment, and then he began to smile. Suddenly, he felt better.

He walked on to the corral.

Price McComber hesitated, staring after him, then he shrugged. Judson beside him, he walked to the wall. It was all nonsense, of course. This wall was completely out of the way, and no earthly excuse would warrant its blasting. He felt better, despite the smile on Wells' face, because this had proved his theory again, that most such unexplained items were the result of the impractical whims of impractical men.

He wanted the appearance of fairness, so he would at least look at the wall, but this was just another of the little details that proved how right he was in his theory.

The dead Indian was not explained, but that could wait. He would ask about that when Price Macomber glanced across the wall and. his face turned green. He backed away, retching violently. When he straightened, he dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief and stared at Judson, eyes bright with horror. There were three dead Indians beyond the wall. Each of them had been hit several times with jagged, ricocheting bullets.

Macomber stumbled a little as he hurried back toward the stage. This was an awful place! He must get out of here. Jim was on the box, holding the lines and waiting.

Molly was talking to Wells, showing him something.

Price Macomber got hurriedly into the stage and sat down beside his niece. As they started to roll away, Judson waved to Wells. Macomber did not look back.

When they had gone a little way, he stiffened his face. "Send him that powder, Judson.

The wall is an obstruction."

A thought occurred to him, and he turned to his niece. "What were you showing him?

What did he say to you?"

She looked around. "I meant to tell you. He said he thought he knew my father and mother, so I showed him that picture of us. This one "

Judson glanced at the picture as she handed it to her uncle, and could scarcely repress a smile. It was a picture of a prim-faced man who might have been Price Macomber himself. He wore spectacles and stood beside a very fat woman with two chins and a round, moonlike face. A face that once might have been quite pretty. Price Macomber nodded. His brother Ed, a solid, substantial man. He handed the picture back. "What did he say when he saw the picture?" She frowned, her eyes puzzled. "Why, he didn't say anything! He just stood there and laughed and laughed!"

His loaded rifle beside the door, the man called Wells began to sweep up the empty shells. "The ranch will look pretty good after this," he said aloud, "but after all, there are worse things than Apaches!"

*

Men to Match the Hills.

Cap Moffit was a careful man. That he was forty-two years old and still alive proved that beyond a doubt, for Cap Moffit was a professional killer.

He had learned the lesson of care from his first professional killing. In that case-and he had been fifteen years younger-Cap had picked a fight with his victim and shot him down and been nearly lynched as a result.

From that day on, Cap Moffit planned every killing as painstakingly as a great general might plan a battle. And he no longer made mistakes, knowing he need make but one.

Over the years he had developed a technique, a carefully worked out pattern of operation.

He rode into the country over back trails, located the man he was to kill, and then spied upon him from cover until all his habits were known. Then, and only then, did Cap Moffit move in for the kill.

He always waited until his man was alone. He always caught him without cover in case the first shot was not a kill. He waited until his man was on the ground, so that a startled horse could not carry off a wounded man, or deliver the body too soon among friends. And also because it made that first shot more certain.

He never approached the body after a man fell, always went immediately away. And so far he had never failed.

Slightly below medium height, he was of Blender build, and his face was narrow and quiet, with pale blue eyes and a tight, thin-lipped mouth. He invariably wore a narrow-brimmed gray hat, scuffed and solid, a gray vest over a blue cotton shirt, and faded jeans outside of boots with rundown heels. His gray coat was usually tied over his bedroll behind his saddle.

Cap Moffit lay comfortably on his stomach in a slight depression in the partial shade of the pines that crested Elk Ridge. Below him, in the long, green valley, was the T U Ranch, and living alone on that ranch was the man he was to kill. He was a man unknown to Moffit, although Cap knew his name was Jim Bostwick.

"Don't figure him for an easy one," his employer had warned. "The man's no gunfighter, but he gives me the impression that he's been around. He's tough, and he won't scare at all. We tried that."

The advice bored Cap. It mattered not at all who or what Jim Bostwick was. He would have no chance to show himself as wise or tough. Once the situation was known, Cap Moffit would kill him, and that would be that. Of this, Cap Moffit had been sure.

Now, after five days of watching the ranch, he was no longer so positive. Men, he had discovered, were creatures of habit. All the little practices of living sooner or later fell into a pattern, and once that pattern was known, it was comparatively easy to find a point at which a man was usually motionless and within range.

For the first three days Jim Bostwick had come from the house at five-thirty in the morning and fed his horse a bait of oats and corn. He curried the horse while it finished the grain. Not many men took the time to care for a horse so thoroughly.

That completed, he brought a wooden bucket from the house and, walking to the spring which was forty steps from the door, he filled the bucket and returned. Only then did he prepare breakfast.

By the second day Cap Moffit had decided that if the practice continued, the place for the killing was at the corral while Bostwick was currying the horse. The pole corral offered no cover, the man was practically motionless, and there was good cover for Moffit within forty yards. If the first shot failed there was time to empty the gun before Bostwick could reach shelter. And Cap Moffit had never missed once since he had entered his present profession. He did not dare miss.

Moreover, the spot he had selected for himself offered easy access and retreat over low ground, so he could not be seen reaching his objective. On the third day the pattern was repeated, and Cap Moffit decided if it held true one more day he would act.

He had taken every care to conceal his own presence. His camp was six miles away and carefully hidden. He never used the same vantage point on two successive days.

He kept his fieldglasses shaded so their glass would not reflect light.

Yet, despite all his care, he had given himself away, and now the hunter was also the hunted.

On the morning of the fourth day, Jim Bostwick came from the house before Cap Moffit was settled into shooting position. Instead of going to the corral, he went around the house and disappeared from sight behind it. Puzzled by the sudden change Cap waited, sure the frame of habit would prove too strong and that the man would return to his usual ways. Suddenly, his eyes caught a movement at the corral and he was startled to see the horse eating from a bucket. Now, what the hell!

Jim Bostwick was nowhere in sight.

Then suddenly he appeared, coming from the spring with a bucket of fresh water. At the corner of the cabin he stopped and shaded his eyes, looking up the trail. Was he expecting visitors?

Bostwick disappeared within the house, and smoke began to climb from the chimney.

Cap Moffit lit a cigarette and tried to puzzle it out. If Bostwick followed his usual pattern now he would devote more than an hour to eating and cleaning up afterward.

But why had he gone around the house? How had he reached the corral without being seen? And the spring? Could he possibly be aware that he was being watched?

Moffit dismissed that possibility. No chance of it, none at all. He had given no indication of his presence.

Nevertheless, men do not change a habit pattern lightly, and something had changed that of Bostwick, at least for a few minutes. And why had he looked so carefully up the trail? Was he expecting someone?

No matter. Moffit would kill Bostwick, and he would not wait much longer. Just to see if anyone did come.

Moffit was rubbing out his first cigarette of the day when his eye caught a flicker of movement. A big man, even bigger than Bostwick, was standing on the edge of the brush. He carried a rifle, and he moved toward the house. The fellow wore a buckskin shirt, had massive chest and shoulders, and walked with a curious, sidelong limp.

At the door he suddenly ducked inside. Faintly, Moffit heard a rumble of voices, but he was too far away to hear anything that was said.

He scowled irritably. Who was the man in the buckskin shirt? What did he want?

Had he but known it, there was only one man in the cabin. That man was Bostwick himself.

Stripping off the bucks
k
in shirt, he removed the other shirts and padding he had worn under it and threw the worn-out hat to a hook.

He was a big, tough man, to whom life had given much in trouble and hard work. He had come here to hold down this ranch for a friend until that friend could get back to make his own fight for it, a friend whose wife was fighting for her life now, and for the life of their child.

Jim Bostwick knew Charley Gore wanted this ranch and that he would stop at nothing to get it. They had tried to scare him first, but that hadn't worked. Gore had tried to ride him into a fight in town, when Gore was surrounded by his boys, and Bostwick had refused it. Knowing the game as he did, and knowing Gore, Bostwick had known this would not be the end of it.

Naturally wary, he had returned to the ranch, and days had gone by quietly. Yet he remained alert. And then one morning as he had started for the corral, he had caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eyes. He had not stopped nor turned his head, but when he was currying the horse he got a chance to study the rim of Elk Ridge without seeming to.

What he had seen was simple enough. A bird had started to light in a tree, then had flown up and away. Something was in that tree or was moving on the ground under it.

It could have been any one of many things.

Cap Moffit was a student of men and their habits. In the case of Jim Bostwick he had studied well, but not well enough. In the first place he had not guessed that Bostwick had a habit of suspicion, and that he also had a habit of liking to walk in the dark.

It was simply that he liked the cool of night, the stars, the stillness of it. He had walked at night after supper ever since he was a boy. And so it was that the night after the bird had flown up Jim Bostwick, wearing moccasins for comfort, took a walk. Only that night he went further afield.

He had been walking west of the ranch when he smelled dust. There was no mistaking it He paused, listening, and heard the faint sound of hoofbeats dwindling away into distance.

At the point where he now stood was the junction between two little-used trails, and the hoofbeats had sounded heading south down the Snow Creek trail. But where could the rider have come from? The only place, other than the ranch, would be high on Elk Ridge itself.

Puzzled, Jim Bostwick made his way back to the ranch. If this rider had been on Elk Ridge that morning, and had caused that bird to fly up, he must have spent the day there. What was he doing there? Obviously he had been watching the ranch. Yet, Bostwick thought, he could have been mistaken about the bird. A snake or a mountain lion might have caused it to fly up. But he doubted it.

The following morning, an hour before day, he was not in the cabin. He was lying among the rocks above Snow Creek trail, several miles from the ranch, his horse hidden well back in the brush. He did not see the rider, for the man kept off the trail in the daylight, but he heard him. Heard him cough, heard his horse's hoofs strike stone, and knew from the sound that the rider had gone up through the trees to Elk Ridge.

When rider was safely out of the way, Jim Bostwick went out and studied the tracks.

He then returned to the horse he had been riding and started back for the ranch, but he circled wide until he could ride down into the arroyo that skirted the north side of the ranch. This arroyo was narrow and invisible from the top of the ridge.

In a grassy spot near the ranch house, he turned the horse into a small corral. It was where torn Utterback kept his extra riding stock. , Then he crept back to the ranch house and went about his chores in the usual way, careful to indicate no interest in the ridge. He was also careful not to stand still where he would long be visible.

Inside the house, he prepared breakfast and considered the situation carefully. Obviously he was being watched. There was no point in watching him unless somebody meant to kill him. If the killer was that careful, he was obviously a dangerous man, and not to be taken lightly.