Fiddlefoot (21 page)

“What's so damn funny, Frank? You drunk?”

“No. You wouldn't understand.” He lay there, smiling in the darkness, then he came up on one elbow. “John, send a man tomorrow to bring back your horses. You're in business again.”

There was a long silence, then John moved across the room. He came over to the bed, and struck a match, holding it over his head. Frank blinked against its sudden light. John was standing there in his baggy underwear, his sparse hair awry, his toes curling away from the cold floorboards. But his round face was deadly serious.

“That's nothing to joke about,” he said slowly.

“I'm not joking. Send him.”

“What about Rhino?”

Frank rolled over on his back and looked up at the ceiling. “He'll be in jail tomorrow. So will Nunnally.” He hesitated a moment. “So will I. Now get to bed, will you?”

Chapter 18

When Buck Hannan stepped out of the Colorado House after a solid breakfast, there were only a couple of loafers in the barrel chairs on the veranda. Buck said, “Beautiful mornin', boys,” and walked out into the bright sunlight on the edge of the boardwalk. The air was heavy with the rich smell of sun on soaked earth. He sniffed it appreciatively before he fired up a thick cigar, and then he contemplated the road. One wagon had been out already and left twin gashes in the muddy street. The pools of water had shrunk, but Buck knew the mud was soft, and he swore crossly. Somebody ought to plank these crossings so a man could go more than a block and still be dryshod, he thought.

Resignedly, he stepped into the mud and hurriedly negotiated the cross-street. It was just a matter of time, anyway, before his boots were muddy. He had to ride out to Dutra's on business about Rob's death this morning, and there'd still be mud aplenty. At the thought of how little he knew of Rob's killer, how little he had done or could do about it, he scowled.

He spoke affably to the few passers-by he met, and was soon at the cinder path at the edge of town. When he came to Hulst's horse lot, he looked at the great pool of water under the gate and swore again.

Skirting it widely and coming around from the other side, he managed to achieve the office steps and loading platform without getting his boots soaked, and he was pleased and in a good humor again.

He poked his head in the office, and saw Tess Falette and Shinner just opening the safe. Buck said, “Mornin', Tess.”

She said good morning and smiled sweetly at him, and he said from the door, “Tell me, honest-to-God, Tess, did you really fill in that last straight?”

“You wouldn't pay to find out,” Tess reminded him.

“I'm curious. Tell me.”

“Get a warrant.”

Buck grinned and went on down the loading platform. There was a beautiful girl, he thought, and he winced a little when he remembered last night. He should have stuck to his usual game of playing the percentages, but playing with a woman it was different. You had to play hunch poker with them out of self-defense—or at least he'd thought so until last night.

He went back toward the stables, and a hostler said, “Mornin', Sheriff.”

“Mornin',” Buck said. “Get my horse for me, will you? Big Black.”

“Sure, I know him.” The man went off to the stable and Buck loitered along behind him. He hauled up in the sun outside the stable, and let its warmth soak into him. The hostler came to the stable door in a moment and shouted, “Bud, where's the sheriff's horse?”

Someone across the lot yelled, “He's in there.”

Then a wrangle started, and a couple of men drifted across to the stable. Buck smoked contentedly. He paid no attention as the three men came out, glancing obliquely at him, and went over toward the corrals. Presently, however, he became impatient. He walked to the corner of a corral and looked down the drive. He saw a half-dozen men gathered in a group talking, and among them was his hostler.

As he started for them, he saw them look at him, and then they spread out, waiting for him.

“Find him?” Buck asked pleasantly of his hostler.

“He ain't there,” the man blurted out. “He ain't anywhere on the lot.”

Buck snorted. “Look again.”

They scattered. In five minutes they were back again. The sheriff's horse wasn't here.

“Go get Nunnally,” Buck said, in disgust. Nunnally wasn't there, they said. Neither was Rhino. Buck felt his temper rising a little, and he looked carefully at them and said, “Which one of you wanted to show off to your girl? In the rain, too. Who rode him?”

“He was in that corral at nine last night,” a man said, pointing to the stable corral. “I forked him some hay.”

A faint apprehension came to Hannan then. The man who had just spoken said to his companion, “You drove 'em to water this mornin', Hodge. Was he there?”

“Now I remember, no,” the man said emphatically.

Buck, trailed by every hostler on the lot now, walked over to the stable and looked inside. He felt foolish after he got there; the horse wouldn't materialize out of thin air. He dropped his cigar now and said: “You mean, somebody could steal a horse out of here? Don't you lock the stables? Isn't there a night watchman around?”

The crew looked at each other and shifted their feet uneasily. “Somebody's always sleepin' in the barn,” someone volunteered.

Buck felt his neck getting hot. He had hold of the other end of the stick, now. There was nobody to report a stolen horse to except himself. And the fact that his, the sheriff's, horse was stolen, was outrageous. Nobody stole a sheriff's horse; it was tantamount to committing suicide, and the whole world knew it. He couldn't conceive of anybody with the idiocy—or the gall—to do it, yet the horse was gone. Taken out of a public lot.

He said now, “A couple of you go out on the road, and shove everything that comes by off it. Keep it clear for tracks.”

He tramped out of the stable and halted. If anybody was laughing at him, daring him to make something of this, he'd take the dare, and damn quick.
You're gettin' redheaded
, he told himself. He took a deep breath and looked at the rear gate of the lot near-by, thinking closely now. There was one thing important to know, and that was whether the horse had been taken while it was raining, or after the rain had stopped.

The drive through the rear gate was trampled heavily. Outside the fence, Buck turned downriver, but he gave that up immediately. Nothing but a pair of dogs had been along here since the rain, the dirt showed.

He turned upriver, and immediately, once he was clear of the tracks of the horses who were driven down to water this morning, he saw the tracks of a horse. There were boot tracks, too, clear, and they had been made since the rain. He followed them over to a tree, where there were the tracks of another horse. Simple enough: the thief had simply led the black to his waiting horse, mounted, and led the black off.

The hostlers watched him in silence. Buck found a clear set of tracks where the trees hadn't dripped water on them, and knelt, examining the tracks. A glance told him it was his black. The left hind foot toed in, and the frog of its shoe was distinctive. The tracks were about five hours old, he judged. He rose and eyed the tracks as they continued upriver, plain in the clean-washed clay of the wagon road. A slow and solid wrath stirred again in him.

He said to the men, “Saddle me a horse, a good stayer, and be quick about it.”

When the horse was brought him, he mounted and set out parallel to the tracks. At the cross-street by McGarrity's freight yard, they turned and Buck turned with them. They crossed the main street, and then were mingled with the tracks of other horses, but the traffic had been light so far this morning and Buck had no trouble following them to the base of the hill.

Reining up here, he considered. Putting aside his own personal feelings, the insult to him, what was the best thing to do? Anybody fool enough to steal a sheriff's horse was fool enough to wait in the brush and shoot the sheriff when he came after the horse. Then, too, with a five-hour start, the thief might be headed out of the country, which meant long riding. If the thief took to the trails, there were ways to block him. Everything pointed, Hannan decided, to the necessity for several men. He accepted this reluctantly, with a wry foreknowledge of the grins it would bring.

Accordingly, he rode back to the main street. He was undecided about the best place to raise some deputies, but he'd start with the Pleasant Hour.

A scattering of horses at the tie-rail told him there were riders here. He didn't much like the idea of depending on men who opened saloons in the morning, but there was no choice. As he dismounted, he looked over the brands of the horses and saw several Saber brands. That was different. The old Saber crew had been replaced by Rhino's men and this was only a loafing place for them until another job turned up. They weren't saloon bums.

He went inside and tramped back through the room, sizing up the scattering of men here. He saw old Cass Hardesty sitting at the idle monte table, his stubby pipe fuming; Cass was wearing a pair of iron-rimmed glasses, studying a crumpled week-old paper. He looked as if he'd read it five times already.

Buck went up to him and said, “Want to catch a horse thief, Cass, on deputy's pay?”

“If it'll get me out of here,” Cass said.

“Any of your old bunch around?”

“Johnny Samuels, Pete Hargis, Joe Rich.”

“Round 'em up,” Buck said briefly.

Ten minutes later, Hannan, with his four deputies, was at the base of the hill examining the tracks.

“Whose horse?” Cass said.

“Mine.”

Cass smiled faintly under his mustache. “There's a hero.”

The traveling, once they were on top of the hill, was good. The tracks were absurdly easy to follow; there had been no pretense made at covering them. They clung to the Wells Canyon road on the way to the pass for some miles, and then struck off on a side trail traveling east, when the tracks turned off. They stopped here to blow their horses.

“He'll get some hard goin' over there,” Johnny Samuels observed looking toward the east.

Single file, they took to the trail, Hannan ahead. He soon saw that the rider ahead knew his way around the country. He kept working east, choosing the right trails, crossing Horn Creek into the Saber range. Once, they saw where he had stopped and shifted saddles to Hannan's horse. Buck dismounted here and looked at the tracks, crumbling the side of them with his finger to test the consistency of the mud.

“We're close,” he said.

Later, at a fork in the trails, they saw where two riders, coming from the south, joined up with the lone rider. The three of them kept east.

Buck moved more cautiously now, dropping three of his men back so they would not all walk into an ambush. Presently, Buck came out on a timbered ridge, and he reined in so abruptly that Cass's horse, following, bumped his. Cass pulled up alongside and Buck pointed.

The ridge broke for a little park, and Cass first saw Hannan's big black horse picketed out in the grass of the clearing. There were three other horses with it. Off to the right in the shade of the fringing timber, Cass could make out the shape of three men lounging around a small fire.

Buck turned back and he and Cass waited for the others to come up. When they were all assembled, Buck gave them a description of the park, and told them his plan. Dismounted, the four of them would work around through the timber until they were on every side of the camp. After twenty minutes had passed, he would ride down the trail into the camp. A single man wouldn't alarm them. If trouble broke, Cass was to stampede their horses, and then they would have the rustlers.

Alone now, Buck felt a grim pleasure. There were several things that didn't seem quite right about this, though, the main one being that the thief hadn't even attempted to cover his tracks and he could have easily. Another was that the three of them were heading into the high country around the peaks to the east, where they could be easily cornered.

When the twenty minutes were past, Buck mounted, and rode on up to the ridge and took the trail down it. Once on the flats, he saw one of the men at the fire rise, and Buck's hand fell to his gun. He rode stolidly on, in not much of a hurry, and when he got closer he pulled his gun and held it at his side.

When he recognized the man standing, he let out a soft expletive, and pushed his horse on into the camp and reined up.

It was Frank Chess standing there. Sitting around the fire were the McGarrity brothers.

Buck said, “Was it you, Frank?”

Frank nodded, and at sight of Frank's face, handsome, tired, but with a veiled friendliness in it, Buck's wrath rose like a brush fire.

“Damn you, Chess, you
want
to hang, don't you?”

Chapter 19

Jonas McGarrity said dryly, “Get it off your chest, Buck, and then listen to him.”

Others were drifting into camp now, Frank saw. He counted four of them, all old Saber hands, among them Cass. None of them spoke to him. Cass, when he saw him, took the pipe out of his mouth long enough to spit contemptuously. Joe Rich's grin was full of malice, and he didn't blame him. Johnny Samuels looked at him as if he had thought all along that a horse thief's end was long overdue.

But it was Hannan who was really angry. Frank waited to see if Buck would take Jonas's advice. Hannan, however, didn't speak for a moment, and then he looked at the McGarritys and said in a hard voice, “I can understand Frank. But you two.”

Frank said mildly, “Have any trouble following me, Buck?”

“No, you bungled that, like the rest of it.”

“Maybe on purpose. Maybe he wanted you to follow him,” Jonas McGarrity suggested.

“Why?” Hannan snarled.

Frank asked, “Buck, if I'd stopped you on the street last night and told you Rhino Hulst had a hundred stolen horses cached back in the hills, what would you have done?”