Blood on the Moon (5 page)

They went out into Sun Dust’s main street and into the Bella Union. The nester crew was loafing idly, waiting for Riling. Jim understood then how completely Riling had done his job. He’d won their loyalty enough to be undisputed leader.

Riling put the valise on the bar and said to the bartender, “Lock that up in the safe, Barney.”

The bartender took it, and Riling turned to go back to the men.

“Wait a minute,” Barney said. He reached down under the bar and brought up a rock, around which was tied a note. He handed it to Tate.

“Someone fired that through the back window during the ruckus,” he said.

Jim had a sudden memory of Carol Lufton riding past him and flinging something through the saloon’s rear window. He watched Tate unfold the note and read it and saw the slow smile that came over his face.

Riling went back to the table and said, “Saddle up, boys. I know where Lufton’s crossing tonight.”

Milo Sweet came over and said, “How do you know?”

Tate grinned good-naturedly and handed him the note. “I know the writing. Saddle up.”

Jim knew then the reason for Tate’s confidence in his eventual success. Carol Lufton was willing to betray her father to him.

Amy Lufton Rose before daybreak, threw a wrap around her and padded in bare feet out to the kitchen to light the lamp and make a fire in the big range. There was a chill in the air, and when she looked out the kitchen window toward the mountains she could see golden sunlight touching the very tops of the distant Braves. It was a melancholy sunrise, as all fall ones are, with their promise of winter coming. When the wood began to snap in the range it was more cheerful, and Amy put on a kettle of water.

Afterward she started back down the long corridor toward her room. Passing the door of Carol’s room, she debated whether or not to waken her now. This day would tell them if Blockhouse could force its way across the Massacre in the face of the fighting nesters. Already it was decided, for they had made their drive in the night at Ripple Ford up by the Chimney Rocks. That’s all Amy knew, learning it through her father’s brief note to them yesterday, and she was tense and excited.

She’d slept little the night before, so that she had heard Carol come in late. She stood irresolute for a moment outside the door, slim in her worn wrap, her arms folded across her breasts. Her attitude was solemn, her face grave, pensive, faintly excited. It was a slim face, serene for the moment, and her full, wide mouth was almost smiling in mockery. Carol
always hated to get up early, yet today was a day she must.

Amy opened the door and stepped into the dark room and walked slowly toward the bed where Carol was sleeping. Amy put a hand on Carol’s shoulder, and Carol roused, shook it off and buried her head deeper in the blankets.

“Roll out, Red,” Amy said mockingly. That name usually roused Carol fighting.

Carol opened her eyes and closed them again and said, “My lord, it’s the middle of the night. Go away.”

“But we’re riding.”

“I’m not,” Carol said.

Amy sat down on the bed and said, “Remember what day it is?”

Carol lazily opened her eyes to regard Amy thoughtfully. “No.”

“Dad either crossed the Massacre last night or didn’t. Don’t you want to know which?”

Carol sat up in bed with an abruptness that made Amy smile. “I’d forgotten!”

“Then hurry.”

Amy left her dressing and went back to her own room. It was small, simply furnished, with a kind of happy-go-lucky and not-too-neat carelessness about it. She dressed in yesterday’s levis and shirt, ran a comb through her thick light hair without looking into the mirror and went back to the kitchen.

When Carol came out, sleepy eyed and dressed in a divided skirt and corduroy jacket, breakfast was ready.

Carol tasted her coffee and then looked at her sister. “Over your sulk, baby?”

“I feel fine,” Amy said.

“But you can’t forget it.”

Amy countered with a show of spirit. “Could you, if you’d been shot at?”

Carol didn’t answer her question but said slowly, “I wonder who he was?”

“Somebody riding through,” Amy said bitterly. “He wouldn’t have dared to do it if he were staying around here.”

Carol put down her cup and laughed. “You didn’t like him, baby? He stood up to you as if you were pointing a potato masher at him.”

Two spots of color showed at Amy’s cheekbones. Carol, watching her, felt a sudden rush of love for her, mingled with a feeling of self-pity. She called Amy “baby” with a kind of mocking irony that wasn’t explained by the two years’ difference in their ages. It was because Amy was so impetuous and wild and untamed, like a young and unbroken horse. Amy was twenty-four and yet she hardly understood the obligations of womanhood, had never known what it was to love a man or to suffer because of him. In her motherless childhood she had been more boy than girl, and in her womanhood she was still like that, Carol thought. Her generosities were magnificent; her angers were rages, her manner as simple and direct as a man’s. Men adored her and loved her, and Amy neither welcomed it nor understood it. Carol, with that dark intuitive knowledge of a desirable woman wise in the ways of love and men, knew there was heartbreak ahead for Amy. It made her feel old and exasperated.

“Darling, if you shoot at some men they’ll shoot at you,” she said simply. “Guns aren’t playthings—not in these times.”

“It’s not that,” Amy said angrily. “It was—well, the humiliation, I guess.”

“Then don’t be such a perfect spitfire,” Carol said crossly. “Come on and finish your breakfast.”

Amy said, “In a minute,” rose, went to the door and whistled shrilly through her teeth. A halloo at a far corral answered her, and Amy shouted, “Saddle up two, Ted!”

Carol winced, yet there was something so natural in Amy’s act that it was laughable. Amy finished her coffee standing, seized her Stetson from the peg behind the door and went out.

Carol cleared the few dishes off the table. Her hand was unsteady, and she paused by the table and shut her eyes, fighting for control of herself. Now that she was alone, bit by bit the appalling knowledge of what she had done last night came to her. Last night she had made her choice. The Bible said for a woman to cleave to her man, and Tate was her man—or would be, when this mess was over. She had betrayed her father, but for what reason? So that she and Tate, once they were married, could be secure in the knowledge that their little piece of range and their few cattle would support them. It wasn’t as if her father would miss it, for Carol believed him wealthy. Last night, then, Carol had made her choice. She would go with Tate.

She blew out the lamp and went out. At the corrals Ted Elser, holding the reins of two saddled horses, was talking with Amy. When Carol approached he yanked off his Stetson and said, “Mornin’, Miss Carol.”

Carol gave him a careless greeting. Elser was a man close to thirty, a lean, inarticulate man whom
few of the Blockhouse crew knew well. He’d drifted into Massacre Basin a year ago, and Cap Willis signed him on. He knew more about horses than anybody at Blockhouse, and both Cap and Lufton had come to depend on him. He had a pleasant, almost homely face with deep, friendly brown eyes, and he was always soft spoken. He was unutterably and deeply in love with Carol. He said, “I picked Monte for you, Miss Carol.”

“But he’s got such a hard gait, Ted.”

“He’s got speed,” Ted said.

The way he said it made Carol turn her cool green eyes on him. “I’m not out for a gallop.”

“You’re likely to need speed,” Ted said doggedly.

Carol looked at Amy, who was grinning, and then at Ted. “What do you mean by that, Ted?”

“I wish you wouldn’t go, Miss Carol,” Ted blurted. His thin browned face was flushed dark, but his eyes were beseeching.

“Why not?”

“Startin’ this mornin’, there’s goin’ to be trouble in the Basin,” Ted said grimly. “If any stray rider will shoot at Miss Amy, I reckon Tate Riling would like to get a shot at you too. And I can’t ride out with you because I’ve got to stick here.”

Carol’s cheeks turned darker, and she said angrily, “What absolute nonsense! Turn Monte out and get me a horse I can ride! And I can do without advice from you too, Ted!”

“Yes’m,” Ted said docilely.

He led Carol’s horse back into the corral, and Carol waited, furious and unable to say anything. These stupid, stupid cow hands. A man who would fight for his rights against them was both a criminal
and a killer of women, according to their thinking. She noticed Amy watching her, brown eyes quizzical and intent.

“You’d think I was six years old,” Carol said resentfully.

“He’s in love with you,” Amy said simply.

“I know he is. That doesn’t excuse his insolence, though.” Carol said it matter-of-factly, with an absence of emotion that puzzled Amy.

Ted returned with a big bay horse, and Amy and Carol mounted and rode off. Ripple Ford lay to the north, a hard three hours’ ride. Somewhere on the way, Amy hoped, they would meet a Blockhouse rider who would give them news of the crossing. Ted Elser, she thought, was right. Trouble would break today. For a month now Blockhouse riders had kept out of Sun Dust except for urgent business. There had been wild talk, and trouble had been averted only by her father’s iron insistence that his men give no provocation. The nesters, led by Tate Riling, had given their warning, however. No more Blockhouse cattle in Massacre Basin. And Agent Pindalest had given his orders too: no Blockhouse cattle on the reservation after the first of November, or the army would impound them. This was the twenty-second, and last night her father had moved. Massacre Basin was fifty miles long. Blockhouse riders had been patrolling the river on the reservation side, just as the nesters had been patrolling it on the Basin side. Somewhere along those fifty miles, at Ripple Ford, her father’s note said, Blockhouse would break through into the Basin. After they succeeded the nesters would fight. Blockhouse would fight back.

They were riding now into broken land that lifted to the Chimney Breaks. The chill of morning had worn off, and Amy was beginning to be worried. The first thing Blockhouse would do after they made the crossing would be to scatter the cattle and send riders ahead. They were close to the ford now, yet there was no sign of Blockhouse cattle or riders. Had her father changed his mind?

Amy glanced at Carol and caught her at an unguarded moment. Carol was worried and, beyond that, frightened. Faced now with the consequences of her smuggled message to Tate, she was afraid. Of course there had been a fight, Carol thought, a fight in which her father might have been hurt. She glanced at Amy and saw her watching her.

“Where are they?” Carol asked.

“Let’s ride on to the ford.”

They were in the clay dunes now that were on a slope toward the Massacre that was so gentle they could see nothing beyond except more dunes and the distant mountains. Amy watched for tracks as they wound in and out among the dunes, and she saw none. That meant Blockhouse had not crossed here.

Presently, two miles beyond, the dunes broke away, and in the V of the break she could see the flats by the river. There were no cattle there.

And then Amy saw the tracks coming out of a gut to the north and heading toward the V. She pulled up her horse and studied them. Horsemen, and many of them. As she lifted her gaze to Carol’s face she saw a look of quiet panic there.

Amy pulled her horse around and put him into a
trot. She saw a sudden and imperceptible movement on the north hummock of the V, and it puzzled her. She lifted her pony into a lope.

The trail wound through the last of the dunes and took off across the flats. Amy, however, swerved sharply around to the north of the dune, Carol behind her.

A hundred feet away, against the last dune, were a dozen men, all dismounted, their horses bunched behind them.

Amy hauled up sharply and let Carol pull up beside her. There was Tate Riling, still hunkered down on his haunches and half turned to them, an amused expression on his big face, as if he had been interrupted in the middle of an explanation. Amy knew the others, too, the whole crew of nesters and small cattlemen banded to fight her father.

And then she saw Jim Garry. He was standing aloof from the others behind Big Nels, who was also squatting. His face was taciturn and unsmiling and calmly watchful.

Amy walked her horse closer, and Riling rose to his feet. “Looking for someone, Miss Lufton?”

Amy didn’t answer immediately. She was looking at Jim Garry, her first bafflement giving way to a slow understanding. She said to him, “So you’re one of them?”

Garry didn’t say anything, just looked at her. Now it came to Amy with a sudden rush of certainty—the knowledge of why these men should be here at a place where her father had planned to attempt the secret crossing of the Massacre.

She swung out of the saddle and came up to Tate
Riling. Carol, behind her, dismounted, too, remaining by her horse.

Amy said, “Get out of the way, Riling. I want to talk to your new gunman.”

Tate looked quizzically at Jim and stepped aside. Big Nels drifted away, leaving Amy facing Jim. He had been fiddling idly with the reins of his horse, his feet planted wide, Stetson shoved back off his forehead. His hands stopped moving now; otherwise he didn’t move.

There was malicious triumph in Amy’s brown eyes now as she regarded him. “I guess Dad wasn’t so wrong about you after all, was he, Garry?”

“Wrong?”

“I haven’t talked to him; I don’t have to. He had you spotted for one of Riling’s saddle-tramp gunmen the moment he saw you.”

Riling laughed softly, and Amy wheeled to face him. Her smile was wicked. “It’s funny, isn’t it, Riling?—but not to you. Right now Dad’s across the Massacre, while you wait here with your crew to throw him back.”

“Is that why we’re here?” Tate drawled in mock innocence.

“Isn’t it? Simply because Dad was smart enough to give Garry a note to us that Garry was sure to read. That note told us Dad was crossing at Ripple Ford. He knew this saddle tramp would tell you and decoy you over here.”

She looked around at the uneasy men, and her gaze settled on Anse Barden. He’d been in Blockhouse when she was a little girl, and they’d been friends ever since. There was something in Anse’s
rugged face that belied dishonesty, and it hurt Amy to see him and his boy here. She said jeeringly, “And how do you like it now, Anse? Why, you aren’t even being led by a smart crook.”

Anse shifted his feet, and then his glance fell away. Sweet was looking hotly at Riling, and Amy saw him.

“How do you like it, Milo?” she taunted.

Sweet said thinly, “This is only the first move, Miss Amy.”

Riling, meanwhile, had turned his head and was studying Carol. His face was unreadable to anyone watching, and yet Carol knew what he was thinking, and her eyes were pleading. She had idly been drawing circles in the dust with the toe of her boot. Now she looked down at her feet and up at him and down again. Riling was briefly puzzled, and then he nodded imperceptibly.

But Amy wasn’t finished. The irony of the situation was broad enough to be obvious to them all, and she used it unmercifully. She picked out one of the strange punchers, a tough, slant-faced man named Riordan, and said with a maddening politeness, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you around here. Are you fighting for your own graze too?”