Raw Land (5 page)

“Maybe.”

Case said curiously, “In the last three years, Pres, I've asked you a hundred times what you want of that damned hardscrabble spread. You won't tell me. Will you tell me now?”

“You,” Pres said gently, “go to hell, Angus.”

Case went out without another word. Pres, grinning, slacked into the chair and rammed his hands deep in his pockets. He stared musingly at the stuffed pigeonholes of the desk, and his forehead was puckered in a frown.

Presently, he rose and went outside and tramped over to the barn. At the door in one corner of it, he paused, listened, knocked, and then went in.

“Tomás!”

“
Sí
, Señor Pres,” a soft voice answered.

“Where the hell is your lamp here?”

“She's not there, señor,” Tomás answered. “Because I sleep in the barn, I have no lamp, so you say.”

Pres remembered. He'd forbidden this Mexican stable hand to smoke or have a lamp in his quarters here in the barn. Consequently, the poor devil retired at sunset each night rather than sit up in the dark.

Pres stumbled across the room toward the cot in the corner. “You awake?”

“
Sí
. For two hours, maybe.”

“Listen. Have we still got that Star 88 pony the boys picked up a couple of days ago?”

“
Sí
.”

“Then listen. Tomorrow morning saddle up that pony, and you and me are goin' to ride over to the Pitchfork. This Danning and his crew will be out, I reckon. He's got a Mexican cook over there. I want you to toll that cook out of the shack, understand?”

“But how?”

“All you spicks like horses,” Pres said sneeringly. “Take him out and show him this Star 88 pony. He won't know you're from Nine X. Try and sell him the pony.”

“Why do I do that, señor?”

“So I can search the place, you damned dumb greaser!” Pres said.

“
Sí
, señor,” Tomás said. There was nothing in the man's tone to indicate his hatred of this man who detested Mexicans so much that he made them sleep in the barn. But Pres knew the hatred was there. He went out, kicking over a chair and cursing on his way out.

By midmorning next day Pres and Tomás had worked their way carefully to the top of one of the red hills hard to the east of Will Danning's Pitchfork, and from there Pres looked the place over. He regarded the small horse pasture, which held only one horse, and the corral, which was empty, and then the house, where smoke was rising from the cookshack wing. His hunch was right. Will Danning, on his second day home, would have ridden out to locate his cattle and boundaries and get a look at the place he had left ten years ago. Pres cursed when he thought of it. This was a sorry excuse for a ranch, yet he wanted it more than anything he knew.

He said to Tomás without turning, “
Vamos!
” and heard the Mexican scramble down to his horse ground-haltered in the wash.

Presently Tomás rode in from the east and pulled up in the yard and yelled, puncher-fashion, “Hello—the house!”

The cookshack door opened, and Pablo, Will's cook, stepped out. Tomás pulled his horse over. As compatriots will do in a strange country, Tomás and Pablo shook hands, and Tomás dismounted. Pres watched impatiently. If he remembered rightly, there was a ceremony for them to go through—cigarettes to be lighted, some courteous, leisurely talk, and then the hunting of shade in which to squat and resume their palaver.

It all worked out that way. In a few minutes, Tomás gestured to the horse trough. Pablo followed, and they wound up in the shade of the barn.

Pres grunted with satisfaction and started his circle of the house behind the shelter of the clay hills. When he was on the north side of the house, he tied the horse he had been leading, climbed the hill, then cautiously descended the other slope. It levelled off directly in back of the house. Pres approached the west corner, listened, heard nothing; he made sure the barn hid the two Mexicans, then stepped around the corner and into the open door of the bunkhouse wing.

Once inside he paused, looking around at the double tier of bunks and the heavy table in the middle of the room. Now that he was here he felt a little foolish. In his mind last night there had been room for only anger and a single idea—he had to get Will Danning off this place by any means he could. The most obvious way, by violence, had failed, and the next most obvious way was legal eviction. For that, of course, he'd been prepared. Ever since he'd heard Chap Hale had bought the place, he'd been watching the county records in town for the recording of the deed. It had not been recorded, which meant that either Will or Chap had the deed. And last night he wondered if a search of the house would turn up the deed. If he could steal it, then it would give him the time it took Will to get another deed in which to plan some way of getting the place. But this bunkhouse didn't look as if it held any deed.

Nevertheless, he was going to look. Half the bunks were unoccupied; the rest held blankets and clothes. Hanging from the post of each occupied bunk was the war bag of its occupant. Since Pres didn't know which was which, he set about looking through all. He would dump the contents of the war bags on the floor, look through them for any papers, and then put the stuff back.

He had gone through two of them and found only old letters and pictures from magazines and catalogs, beside a change of clothes. On the third bunk, he found a newer war bag, shook it out, and knelt over its contents.

This war bag reflected a different type of owner, and he thought he had Will Danning's. For instance, there was a good pair of gloves; there was a magazine he'd never heard the name of before, and there was also a can of a good and different tobacco. Besides what was in a deerskin sack.

Pres opened the sack. There was a thick silver watch, a cameo pin and a small painted miniature of a woman, framed in glass. There were no papers.

In disgust, Pres threw the stuff to the floor. The miniature hit the boards, and its glass shattered with a small tinkle. It came open, also, and Pres picked it up angrily. Maybe the absence of the glass wouldn't be noticed if he cleaned up the shards of it. He tried to shut the back of it, and it stuck; he turned it over to get a better grip. Curiosity prompted him, then, to look inside. There was another miniature there, of a man with mutton-chop whiskers. Engraved on the inside of the back was this message:
To Murray, from Mother and Dad, on his fifteenth birthday
.

Pres read it, scowled, and closed the lid, but the message set his mind ticking. Murray. There was no Murray in this outfit, unless Milt Barron had lied to him that first day. Maybe Pinky was really named Murray.

And then it came to Pres in a flash. Murray—Murray Broome! That was the man Will Danning worked for, and who had a reward of five thousand on his head for the murder of a senator!

Pres stared at the miniature, his mind working swiftly. Then his glance traveled to a shirt lying on the floor. This was the shirt Milt Barron had been wearing yesterday. This wasn't Will Danning's war bag; it was Milt Barron's!

Pres stared again at the miniature, a thousand things running through his mind. Yellow Jacket, to a man, was wondering why Will Danning wanted the Pitchfork. Here was the answer—to hide Murray Broome!

But which man of them was Murray Broome? Pres didn't have to wonder more than a few seconds, and then his mind settled unerringly on Milt Barron. Something about him, his look, his speech, his clothes, told a man he wasn't an ordinary puncher. Yes, it was Milt Barron.

For one long minute Pres stared at the object in his hand, his swollen face creasing into a smile. He wasn't thinking of the five thousand dollars reward; it was too late to use that money for the only thing he wanted. But better than money, better than anything he could have invented, was the knowledge he held.

It was the pry he needed. At long last he saw a way to get Will Danning's place.

Chapter Four

B
LACKMAIL

It was late morning when Will and Milt rode into Yellow Jacket. It looked like any cow town drowsing in the hot summer sun—one main street, dusty and wide, a cross street bisecting it. The buildings were all frame, with their false fronts scaling paint under the blistering sun and winds of the bench. On one of the four corners, Will noticed, was a new bank, across from it Dunn's General Store. Hal Mohr's big saloon was in the middle of the block where Dunn's used to be, and down-street a few doors and across the way was the sheriff's office and jail, converted from Mohr's old saloon. Across from the new saloon and in the middle of the block the hotel still stood at its same dark location. The only trees in town grew on the back streets where the homes were. The whole town seemed to point to the station at the head of the street, and it was dominated by the long tangle of dirty stock pens next to it. Yellow Jacket was a cow town, living for cattle and dominated by cattle.

Cow ponies were tied in clusters at the rails, and an occasional team and buckboard or spring wagon added variety.

Will and Milt pulled in at the tie rail a couple of doors down from the hotel.

Will said, “Want to meet Chap?”

Milt shook his head. “I met him once, a long time ago. And he looked like he had a memory. No, I'll look around.”

Will said briefly, “You got to face it some time. Go ahead.”

He watched Milt tramp across the dusty street, whistling carelessly, and he was troubled. This furtive hiding, the bleak spread, the barren red-clay badlands, and the long hours of riding were galling Milt, he knew—Will even made himself think of Murray as Milt now.

The night of the shooting, months ago, when Will had taken a horse out to him where he was waiting in the old stage station east of Mesilla, they had settled this. Milt had told him briefly about the fight, how he was crowded into going for his gun, and how he had killed old Senator Mason. Milt had been bitter and discouraged that night, and had seen himself as the victim of a cheap political frame-up. It was then he had asked Will to hide him for a year until the next elections. Then, Milt was confident, a reform party would be elected, his reward would be lifted, and he could come out of hiding. It was all politics, he had insisted, and he was being savagely persecuted for his crusades to clean up the Territory. And Will, who was a loyal friend, knowing nothing of politics and caring less, had remembered old Harkins's place, lonely and remote and unfriendly. He had made his decision that night, and he had never questioned the rightness of it. Milt was his friend.

Five years before, when Milt's father had given him the ranch and the newspaper, Milt had hired him, a lonely, broke puncher riding the grub line. During those five years and countless week-ends, they had come to know each other on pack and hunting and fishing trips. And Milt, because he knew a man with cow savvy when he saw him, had promoted Will to foreman of his Double Bar O. It had been a strange and deep friendship of a volatile, brilliant, and educated young man with a taciturn, hard-to-know young puncher. It was a friendship that few suspected, for they were both careful to guard it as something private.

But a friendship it was. Will had proven that when he had taken his savings to buy this place where Milt was to hide. Will had accepted Milt completely as his friend, and he saw nothing strange in running a constant risk, of spending all his money and a year of his life in helping Milt. Milt was his friend; it was as simple as that.

He turned away, his face sober. Before it was over, Milt would be a lot sicker of hiding, a lot more impatient, and inclined to carelessness. Then the real trouble would begin. This was only the beginning.

Three doors down from the hotel, Will swung into the entrance of a covered stairway that lifted to Chap Hale's office.

He found Chap in a musty room lined on three sides with law books and smelling of good cigars and dust. Will was shocked to see Chap in daylight. Ten years had done a lot to him. He was frail as old china, and his skin was almost transparent. His white hair was thin, and his eyes had lost some of their sparkle.

He shook hands with Will without getting up, and waved Will to a chair.

“How does it look?” he asked, leaning back in his chair.

“Just like I thought it would,” Will murmured.

“Worth a life's savings?”

Will nodded. He smiled a little, the skin around his eyes wrinkling with some inner amusement.

Chap said, “Funny, your liking that place, after Broome's Double Bar O.”

“That was a big ranch. It cost a hundred thousand and grazed eight thousand head of beef. This is—well, it's a poor man's start, Chap.”

Chap said, “I read about this Broome business in the papers.” He looked out the window. “Young Murray Broome must have been a thorough-going scoundrel.”

Will said nothing, and presently Chap looked at him. “You don't say anything.”

“He was a good boss,” Will said quietly. “Outside of that I don't know or care what he was, I reckon.”

“He libeled Senator Mason, and when Mason won the suit he killed him. What do you think of that?”

Will shifted impatiently in his seat. “I don't think about it, Chap. I don't care about it.” He had himself under control and he knew it. But he was sorry and a little angry to hear Chap say what he was saying.

“Well, no matter,” Chap said, sighing. He looked keenly at Will. “You're finished with him, I hope.”

“I'm a rancher,” Will said flatly.

Chap grinned then. “You'll need to be, out there. You're determined to stick it out?”

Will nodded.

“With Case a poor neighbor to you and suspicious?”

Will nodded and said slowly, “What about Case, Chap? You're his friend, you say.”

Chap nodded. “Angus is a good man. But he's suspicious. He remembers Harkins and the rustling. And he's crazy on one subject, like all of us.”