Death Rides the Night (10 page)

Jake Munort was still alive when Jose, the Mexican boy, came panting up from his shack a few minutes later. The rancher had strength to lift his head and gasp out, “Ezra! He shot me. Mus' be some mistake. I don' reckon …” His voice faded to nothingness and he died.

Jose had noted the time when he heard the shot and jumped out of bed. It was easy to figure about what time Ethan Page had reached home from town, and the condition of his partially unclothed body indicated that he had been murdered before he had time to get into bed. That set the time of his death a little more than half an hour before Jake was killed, just about time for a rider to gallop between the two ranches, and Jake's dying statement coupled with Ethan Junior's description of his parents' murderer made things look pretty black for Ezra the next day when people found out about Ezra's jail-break and began putting two and two together.

9

“For the last time, Ma, why won't you think it over?” George Kincaid's young voice rasped out angrily at his mother bent over a dishpan in the kitchen. He leaned in the doorway with a black felt hat pulled low over his thin face, twisted in a discontented scowl. George Kincaid was nineteen and he hated the ranch in Powder Valley. Ever since his father had died three years previously he had tried to urge his mother to sell the ranch and let him go to Denver where he vaguely planned to enter some sort of business.

Mrs. Dora Kincaid shook her gray head placidly. She was a stout, middle-aged woman with a cheerful, unlined face. “Robert Kincaid would turn over in his grave if I was to put a mortgage on this ranch,” she told her son. “I mind his last words, spoken when he knew he was passing on. ‘Dora,' he said, ‘promise me one thing, Dora, that you'll keep the ranch going for George to take over when him and Amanda get married. I'll die happy knowing it'll be waiting for him to settle down on and raise his young-uns like we raised him.' Them were your father's very words, George, and I remember them like it was yesterday.”

“But Manda and I don't want to settle down here on the ranch and raise a family, Ma. She wants to go to Denver just like I do. I don't know whether she'll even have me if I stick around here in Powder Valley.”

“She'll have you if she loves you,” Mrs. Kincaid told her son serenely. “If she don't love you you'll be better off finding it out right now 'stead of later on.”

“But why are you so stubborn about it, Ma? A thousand dollars is all I need to get started in Denver. Mr. Harlow will loan us three thousand, and you can keep the rest of it and keep right on living here if you want to. If you won't sell it, that is. And I think you're crazy not to. Why, you could travel all over the world and live in luxury on the eight thousand he'd pay us outright for the place.”

Dora Kincaid shook her head and kept on washing the supper dishes. “I don't want to have any truck with your Mr. Harlow. He's a slick one, son. You mark my words, he's up to no good for this Valley.”

“That's all you know about it. He's the best thing that ever happened to us. Why, things are already different since he started in loaning money to help folks fix up their ranches. How do you think he made all
his
money, Ma? By sitting back and letting the world go by? No sir. He's up and coming. He's waking the Valley up.”

“It did all right for a good many years before he came along. Your pa and I were happy enough here. And you were too until you went off to school and got a lot of silly city ideas in your head. You'd best get rid of them and start in helping me to run this place the way your father did.”

“I'm going to see Mr. Harlow in town tonight,” George told her sulkily. “There's some sort of meeting at the courthouse and he wants me to come. I told him I'd make one more try to make you see sense, and he said he was just about through holding his offer open and if we don't want the money there's others here in the Valley that do.”

“Little credit to them,” said his mother tartly. “You tell Mr. Harlow I said for him to go on and do anything he wants to with his money because we don't want to borrow it and the Lazy K isn't for sale either. Not for ten times eight thousand dollars.”

“You're just a stick-in-the-mud,” George groaned. “I don't know what Manda's going to say when I tell her.”

“She'll come around,” Mrs. Kincaid assured him. “After you're married you'll be glad you've got a home to bring her to.”

“She just won't do it, Mr. Harlow,” said George Kincaid an hour later in Dutch Springs. “I've talked till I'm blue in the face without getting anywhere.”

“That's too bad … for you.” Eustis Harlow shrugged his heavy shoulders. “As I told you, I can't hold my offer open forever. I'll take my money where it's wanted.” He turned away abruptly to go toward a group of men loitering on the courthouse lawn, and George Kincaid stared after him miserably. There went his last chance to get away from Powder Valley to the city where he could be a gentleman. A furious sense of frustration took hold of him. He didn't see why his mother had to be so stubborn about it. It wouldn't hurt anybody to borrow a little money. What was so terrible about putting a mortgage on the ranch? Lots of other people did it and the world didn't come to an end.

His shoulders slumped wretchedly and he felt very sorry for himself. He went over to one of the kegs of beer and stayed there until the men filed inside the courthouse to open the meeting that resulted in Pat Stevens' resignation as sheriff of Powder Valley.

He went in behind the others and slumped down on a bench in the last row, and paid little attention to what went on. He left when the others did, and silently followed a group of them to the Gold Eagle where he drank numerous glasses of whisky on top of the free beer he'd poured down before the meeting. He witnessed Pat's capitulation to Harlow and Tripo, and the subsequent jailing of big, one-eyed Ezra.

He stayed on in the Gold Eagle, slumped laxly against the bar with his hat pulled low over his sullen eyes while he grew angrier and angrier at his mother and her refusal to help him get away to the city.

After midnight the bartender refused to sell him any more whisky because of his youth and because he had had enough, but George was too miserable to care and he stayed on at the saloon until the new sheriff's 'two deputies came into the saloon cursing luridly about Ezra's escape from jail.

George stumbled out and mounted his horse to ride home soon after that. He was sober enough to stay in the saddle with a loose rein and let his horse pick his own way home, but he was drunk enough to feel utterly and completely sorry for himself. He was dozing in the saddle in a wretched state of self-pity when he reached the Lazy K ranch some time after midnight.

A couple of hundred yards from the dark ranch house the road led through a wire gate that was always kept closed. George roused himself enough at that point to note with some curiosity that the gate was now open.

He knew he had closed it when he rode out to Dutch Springs earlier in the evening. None of the other Lazy K hands had followed him to town and he didn't understand why it was open.

He checked his horse subconsciously as he rode through the gate, instinctively meaning to get down and close it behind him.

Just as he started to swing his right leg back over the saddle he heard the loud clear crash of a .45 up ahead at the dark ranch house where his mother was sleeping.

His horse tensed and pricked his ears forward. George remained as though petrified, half out of the saddle, his weight resting on his left foot in the stirrup, hands tightly on the pommel, while he stared ahead through the night and tried to think what the sound could have been other than a gun-shot. For he knew it couldn't be a gun-shot. He knew his mother was up there in the house alone, and she had a deadly fear of guns.

Then he heard the loud drumming of a horse's galloping hooves rapidly drawing toward him.

He slid back into the saddle and gripped the reins and stared through the night with blurred eyes.

A horseman emerged from the darkness and thundered toward him. George's horse pranced nervously and the boy tightened the reins.

The galloping figure dashed past him and through the open gate and continued on away from the ranch with undiminished speed.

George caught only a fleeting glimpse of the rider in the faint moonlight, but that single glimpse was enough. He saw a bulky figure and red whiskers and a single eye that glared at him menacingly as it sped past. He saw enough to swear it was Ezra who had killed his mother after he rode on up to the house and found her body lying in her blood-soaked bed.

When his testimony was added to that of Ethan Junior and of Jose it was quite enough to convince the strongest doubters that Ezra was the victim of a homicidal mania that had taken four lives in the span of a few hours.

10

Pat Stevens hesitated briefly after walking out from Sally to his saddled horse. The gray had been ridden to Dutch Springs and back, and Pat decided it might be a good idea to change him for a fresher horse. He didn't know how far he'd be riding, nor how fast. His plans were vague but he knew he likely wouldn't be back to the Lazy Mare before matters were definitely settled with Eustis Harlow.

Instead of mounting the gray, he picked up the trailing reins and led him out to the corral. He pulled saddle and sweaty blanket off and dumped them on the ground, unbarred the gate and swung it open, then slipped the bridle off the gray's head. The horse snorted gleefully and trotted toward the other saddle horses bunched in one corner of the pen watching the man curiously.

Pat stepped back and unhooked his coiled lariat from its leather thong over the saddlehorn, then entered the corral and closed the gate behind him. He shook out a small loop as he walked toward the horses in the corral corner, let it trail along the ground behind him while he held the rest of the coiled rope in his left hand.

The horses tossed their heads and scattered at Pat's approach. They milled around and then began to circle warily around him as he stopped in the center of the corral. They pretended to be very wild and quite frightened, tossing their heads and snorting as they circled the corral at a gallop, but it was only a game they played each time a man entered the corral with a rope in his hand. As soon as a loop tightened about the neck of any one of them, that horse would instantly quiet down and become docile.

Pat pivoted slowly, studying the circling horses in the moonlight with narrowed eyes while he waited for a short-coupled dun to separate from the others so he'd be a fair target for Pat's throw.

The dun was wily. He had been roped out of the corral hundreds of times and he knew all the tricks of the game. He pressed close on the heels of the horses in front of him, managing all the time to keep another horse's rump between his head and the man in the center of the corral.

Pat had a vast amount of patience and he knew the tricks of the game also. He kept turning, always with the small loop spread out behind him ready for an instant throw and with his eyes glued on the dun.

After a dozen circles around the corral the horses began to tire of the fun. They slowed to a lope, and then some of them began to trot. Pat gave a sudden shout and made a feint toward the horse in front of the dun. He jumped forward, and for an instant the dun's head was clear. Pat's loop sailed out and settled over his neck. The dun stopped instantly and mournfully began to walk toward his captor. The other horses abandoned their game and gathered in one corner to pensively watch Pat lead the dun out and saddle him.

The dun bowed up in the middle and took a few springy jumps on stiff legs when Pat mounted. But Pat wasn't in a mood for further play, and he tightened the reins and roweled the horse lightly. The dun instantly relaxed and broke into a trot. Pat reined him down toward the bunkhouse. There wasn't any light in the house where the Lazy Mare hands slept, but Pat thought Pete and the others might have returned from town and gone to bed before he came back.

He pulled up outside the door and called, “Pete,” lightly. He waited a moment but got no response. His features tightened and he turned to ride away from the ranch alone. He had a sort of plan that would be easier accomplished with some help, but he would have to go it alone. He knew there was no telling when the boys would be back. And they might refuse to ride with him if he waited. They all liked Ezra and were probably pretty disgusted with their boss after what he had done in town.

Pat let the fresh dun out into an easy lope and headed due south across the range. His ranch stretched a dozen miles to the south from headquarters, with one corner of it touching the Spangler ranch that Ezra had bought recently. From that corner it was another two miles to the closest boundary fence of the VX.

It was well past midnight: somewhere around about one-thirty, Pat figured, after squinting up at the moon and stars. There was no particular trail leading in the direction he was headed, and Pat guided the dun straight toward the Lazy Mare corner by instinct.

Pat used up an hour covering that first twelve miles, holding his mount down to a steady pace that left plenty of strength in reserve for the riding that would be required after the Lazy Mare boundary was reached. When he was less than a mile from the corner, Pat slowed to a dog-trot while he searched through the velvety moonlight for signs of Lazy Mare cattle ahead.

There was a little coulee near the corner that was rich in grass, and he thought he might find a bunch bedded down there. As he neared the coulee he decided he had better drive a few of those along to the fence-line and not take a chance on finding others closer. It would slow him up a little, but it would save time in the end if there weren't any others closer and he had to ride back to the coulee.

His hunch was right. There were ten or twelve two-year-old heifers sleeping in the lush grass, and they lifted their heads and stared at him in mild surprise when he checked his horse in front of them. They were well-fed and tame, and he had some difficulty rousing them and cutting out half a dozen to drive toward the fence corner.