One-Man Massacre (14 page)

At sundown Apgar was to set out for the Overlord
spread. He should push his horse every minute of the
way. He would find Gibbons at the ranch with Malcolm
Lord, and excitedly report an invasion of Mulchay's place
from across the river. So much for Apgar.

Riker was to stage the "raid" here. He was to watch
the passage of time carefully
—and one hour after Apgar
started off he was to set fire to the outbuildings, and when
they were ablaze put the torch to the main house.

"Cato," Gibbons said then, keeping his voice unemo
tional, tactical
—"Cato, your work is the blabbermouth.
You still pack those Mex blades in your saddlebag?"

Cato, a lean and hungry-looking man, nodded.

"Then use one you can part with. Wait until the house
is on fire, then drag him out beyond the porch. Leave the
knife sticking in his heart where we can all see it."

Cato nodded again.

"After that all four of you clear out. We'll rendezvous
at the MacKay ranch. Any questions?"

"That's the Ranger, the house, and the old man," Apgar said. "There's one other."

"She's my problem," Gibbons told him. "You and
everybody else forget about her."

He said that with the same assurance he'd said every
thing else, turned away from them before they could
read the troubled indecision in his eyes. For Rosemarie
certainly was his problem, and a mind-torturing one to
solve under this kind of pressure. His coldly practical half
demanded she be left here with Cato, warned him over
and over that she was his damnation. But pride and pas
sion bent him the other way, fed his hungry ego. The woman is yours, their strong voice insisted. A prize of
war. Then, when he wavered again: What are you afraid
of? You do run things. Or do you?

His thoughts had carried him to the back of the house,
where Harley was standing guard over Rosemarie, and
the girl in her turn was making Mulchay as comfortable
as she could.

As soon as she saw him she stood up, almost by reflex
action, and it was the defiance in her, the pure loathing
for him that pushed Gibbons into his decision.

"You and I are leaving," he said to her.

"I'm staying with Angus . . ."

His fingers clamped on her upper arm, painfully, and he swung her around and half-dragged her out the rear
door.

"You're going to learn one thing," Gibbons promised.
"You're going to learn to jump when I tell you to."

He forced her to ride ahead of him along the river,
to a line camp Mulchay and his neighbor Bryan shared
for their common roundup. Rosemarie was ushered into the small, clapboard shack.

"See you tonight," Gibbons said. "By the light of the
silvery moon." He closed the door and bolted it, and
rode for Scotstown, there to instruct Lou Kersh about invoking the martial law, then on to Overlord to set the
scene for the "invasion" of Mulchay's ranch.

FOURTEEN

LAUREN
MacKay
was a round, bustling, blue-eyed man
who always had a great many important affairs to at
tend to
—tomorrow—and what kept him busy today was
avoiding doing those things he had spoken of to Rose
marie yesterday. Each morning he arose with the sun,
ordered his favorite breakfast of flapjacks and boiled beef,
and after the third cup of coffee studiously wrote out a
list of chores that was invariably the same as the list he
threw away the night before. Then he left the house,
looking purposeful, and perhaps his eye would notice that
a board was coming loose in the steps. The loose boar
d
immediately went on the list
—first thing tomorrow—and
he would continue his inspection of the ranch.

And that was the man's real occupation, riding end
lessly over the six hundred acres he owned. It stunned
his imagination, all this grass, filled him with so much
awe of the size of it that he couldn't begin to think
where he should start working it. But he was going to
start
—tomorrow—start perhaps with a loan. That way he
could increase his herd to, say, five hundred head. And
with that much beef he'd have to hire half a dozen
punchers, a wrangler and a full-time Mex cook to help
his niece with her work. In a year, maybe less, he'd be
drawing level with Malcolm Lord—and wouldn't that be something, pestering Lord to buy him out instead of vice
versa? Rosemarie, of course, would have to stop working
in the saloon and learn to live like a girl with the richest ,
uncle in the Big Bend.

He'd get on it tomorrow, first thing, but by now it was
nearly noon, time to head for his favorite spot by the river,
where he had the jug cooling and the cottonwoods made
a
siesta the next best thing to heaven. That's where he
was
when Jack Gibbons was violating the privacy of his
h
ome, and the gunfire that followed startled him awake.

MacKay's first thought, to give the man his due, was
far his niece's safety. But his second was for his own,
p
erhaps only natural for a bachelor of fifty-five, and damn
pro
vidential, and instead of dashing pell-mell toward the
h
o
u
se he went that way circuitously, keeping to the dense
gro
ve of cypress. All he saw, when he finally had the
house
in view, was Gibbons' departing group, Rosemarie
am
ongst them and two figures draped over their saddles.
It never occurred to him to go to the house now, thereby
u
p
set
ting Gibbons' plan to take him in tow. Instead he
took
up pursuit of the men with his niece.

Th
is, too, he did with caution, just keeping their dust
just in v
iew along the primitive road toward Mulchay's
spread.
And when they arrived at Mulchay's, MacKay
took cover in the trees again, biding his time to do he
knew not what.

Then, obligingly, Rosemarie and Gibbons emerged
from the house, and even at this distance MacKay was dismayed to recognize the rough treatment the girl was
receiving. MacKay followed along again, watched her im
prisonment
—and with maddening precaution waited the
better part of twenty minutes before venturing forth to
unbolt the door.

And as he slid the bar back
—in all fairness to MacKay:
the harmless old do-nothing considered it a simple
enough business he was engaged in, rather foolish, in
fact—but should he live among the angels through eter
nity the man would never again be on the receiving end
of such a look as Rosemarie gave him when he opened
that cabin to daylight.

For she had spent every second of those twenty minutes
futilely searching a way out of the gloomy little place.
Twenty minutes is a large slice of life under those con
ditions, when even something as drastic as suicide is
denied a person, and had the door opened four hours after
Gibbons had thrown her in there she could not have felt
so heart-burstingly happy to see whose face it was peering
in and asking, "What you doin' in there, lass? Come on
out."

She couldn't answer, only fly to him, hold onto him as
if she needed the feel of his bewhiskered face against hers,
the touch of his rough shirt beneath her ringers to make
sure this was no dream.

MacKay had no idea what it was all about.

"You better quit that job in Terhune's," he said parent
ally. "I don't approve the company you meet there."

"I will, Uncle Lauren, I will. But Mr. Mulchay's in
trouble. He's bad hurt. We have to help him."

"I've known Angus Mulchay for twenty years. He's
forever in trouble."

"But this time it's awful. They mean to kill him off."

"Who does?"

"Those gunmen Gibbons left behind."

"Gibbons? The fella that's massacreein' the poor Mexi
cans?"

"The same. Come on, Uncle, we've got to help."

MacKay spread his arms. "How?" he asked.

How?
Rosemarie heard the question echo in her mind
and she came back to hard reality, saw her mild-faced
uncle for the lovable but still woefully ineffective man he
was.

"What can we do?" MacKay asked, reading her dismay.

"Ride with me back to our place," the girl said.

"Why?"

"So you'll be safe, and I can borrow your horse."

"And do what?" he asked, suspicious of her tone.
"Nothing foolish, now!"

She shook her head. "Nothing foolish."

"What are you going to do?"

"Climb up there," she told him, looking toward the
m
ountain.

"Climb the Negras? And whatever for?"

Tor a man," she said. "Now let's be off, both of us."

FIFTEEN

W
hat
day did you say this was?" Fargo asked. "Tuesday."

“
Still June?"

"July the second. The year is eighteen fifty-seven."

"Don't have to bite a man's head off. Hell, I know
wh
at year it is."

"Tm not so damn sure."

“
Is that so?"

"Yeah, that's so. And I'm not so damn sure about
a
n
y
thing else."

"And what might that be, Mr. Grouchbag Buchanan?"

"All right, Fargo. I'm a grouchbag and I'm gripin'
—
but, dammit, tell me one thing: Have you ever in your
life mined gold before?"

"You can bet your wasted life I have! Man, I was
cashin' nuggets big as California plums ten years before the big strike
!
"

"Out of a goddam mountain?"

"Well, no. My specialty heretofore was placer minin'.
But when I won this here map in a poker game over to
El Centra . . ." Fargo's voice trailed away guiltily and
he pretended trouble with his full-glowing pipe. The
silence dragged on and Buchanan let him fry in his own
fat. Finally he turned to look at him.

"You mean the map the old Spanish don gave your
granddaddy in seventeen-eighty?" he asked softly. "The
one that'd been in the family vault for so long, but be
cause Grandpa saved the don's daughter from drowning herself in the Conchos he handed over the most fabulous
treasure in all history? That map?"

"That map," Fargo admitted, and when Buchanan
broke into wonderful laughter it was one of the most
relieving sounds the old man had heard in a lifetime of
narrow squeaks.

"Won it in a poker game!" Buchanan was shouting to
the moon overhead. "Won
—it—in—a—poker—game!"

"Well, it's gold-bearing, ain't it?"

"Sure it is. Sure!" He couldn't or wouldn't bottle the
laughter bubbling from his chest. "Gold all the way
down, so far as I know. But Fargo, a man can't beat a
mountain to death!" A fresh wave of laughter took him
and he let himself fall flat on his back. "Won it in a
poker game!" he roared happily.
'

"What's so blinkin' funny about that?"

"The two of us," Buchanan answered him, recovering
himself. "You for risking your good money to win it,
then turning right around and roping me into the deal.
”

"Figure you've been chummed, do you?"