Ride the Man Down (20 page)

He opened his office around seven-thirty, took care of whatever business the town and county chose to bring to him, and then waited, while out in the hills Bide Marriner and Sam Danfelser drove their men and horses to exhaustion trying to find a man they would kill on sight.

This morning Kneen picked up his mail at the post office and brought it back to the courthouse and was leafing through the new
Stockman's Gazette
when Lowell Priest and Red Courteen came into his office. Kneen threw the
Gazette
on the desk and bid them good morning.

Priest answered him with bare civility. Red Courteen put his shoulder against the wall and watched.

“Kneen,” Priest said truculently, “I was robbed last night.”

“A holdup?” Kneen inquired mildly.

“No. My store. It was broken into sometime in the night.”

Kneen gestured toward a chair and said, “Sit down and tell me about it. What's gone?”

“Powder,” Priest said curtly.

Kneen tried to suppress a smile, but he was not quite successful. The irritability in Priest's thin, precise face deepened, and he said sharply, “What's funny about that, Kneen?”

“Nothing,” Kneen drawled. “I just figured whoever took it couldn't hide it forever.”

“There's a sledge and pipe gone too.”

“All right.”

Priest said sharply, “Aren't you going to have a look?”

“They're gone, aren't they?” Kneen drawled. “Somebody pried off that dollar padlock on your lean-to and helped themselves. Isn't that it?”

Priest just glared at him, and Kneen went on in the same mild, prodding voice, “I told you ten times, Priest, to move that powder or else store it where fire couldn't get at it. Each time you told me you were moving it next week. Maybe”—his voice was dry, thrusting—“some of your neighbors who didn't want their stores blown to hell moved it for you.”

Color crept into Priest's sallow face, and he was silent. Red Courteen moved away from the wall and said mildly, “Maybe you did it yourself, Joe.”

Kneen looked at Courteen for a long, speculative moment and then spat elaborately.

Red's tough face darkened with anger, and he came over to stand beside Priest. Kneen looked at the storekeeper and said with calculated insolence, “What's he doing here? A witness?”

“No. He—”

“Then get out of here. Red,” Kneen said with a deceptive mildness, coming out of his chair.

“Wait, Kneen!” Priest said sharply.

Kneen looked at him questioningly, and there was fight in his pale eyes. Priest said, “We're—uh—business partners. He has a right to be here.”

Kneen said blankly, “In the store?”

“We're running cattle together,” Priest said uncomfortably. When Kneen kept staring at him Priest said, “I bought out Garretson's share of that herd, and Red's running them for me.”

“Where?”

Priest hesitated. “Just east of Garretson's.”

Which was a mealymouthed way of saying Hatchet, Kneen knew, and he looked from one to the other, and then he said in a tired voice as if to himself, “Oh, the hell with it.” He shouldered past them to the door and stood by it.

“Now get out, you pair of jackals! Get out!” The last words came in a shout.

Priest did not hesitate; he scuttled past him. Red walked with a stiff furious dignity, and Kneen slammed the door viciously on him.

He stood there a moment, so mad he was almost sick, and then he came back to his chair and sank into it. He knew what he should have done. He should have given them just one day to get off Hatchet. But there was Red's crew to deal with, and there was himself. In disgrace, unable to command help, all he could do was what the lowliest Indian Ridge rancher could do—wait the outcome of the hunt in the hills.

I've got to wait
, he thought; he tried to make a refrain of it in his mind, but it was drowned in a torrent of inward bitter cursing.

Chapter 19

Will wakened at sunset and raised on his elbows, looking about him. For a long minute he flagged his sleep-drugged mind toward a memory of this place, which was a thick tangle of scrub oak by a stream in the lower slopes of the Indigos. He rose now, quietly as he could, and saw his horse grazing upstream, barely discernible in the fading light.

Rolling his blankets up, he moved toward the stream and knelt by it. The shock of the cold water brought him to wakefulness, and he drank, afterward looking about him again. This place looked like all the others where he had snatched a few hours of daylight sleep and rested his horse. It had taken an effort of will to remember the days, but he was certain that tomorrow morning was the one he had named to Celia.

He drank again, feeling the cold water smother his hunger a little, and then rose and headed for his horse. These last days had fined down his face, which was blurred now by a thick black beard stubble. His leg muscles were iron-hard with saddle-stiffness as he walked, for, except when he stole these occasional hours of deep, exhausted sleep, he had not been out of the saddle.

He pulled up the picket rope, afterward stroking the coat of his black gelding and regarding him critically in the dusk. He was gaunted up, too, but there were no sores yet. Will slapped his rump and then took down his saddle blanket, which he had hung on a branch to dry in the afternoon sun.

Working the bumps out of it so that it would not gall, he rubbed it between his hands to take out the stiffness and afterward saddled up. By deep dusk he was riding again, this time out onto the flats toward the east, beyond Hatchet, to a rendezvous. He found he was not thinking of that, however; his mind kept returning to something he had seen yesterday. That was the day one of Garretson's hands had shot at him. He'd been riding down a trail to the north, half sleeping in his saddle, his mind drowsing and unawares, when his horse shied. He had been pitched from the saddle just as a gun went off some fifty feet in front of him. The man had come running toward him out of the brush, gun in hand, and Will had shot at him and hit him. Afterward he had carried the man down close to one of Garretson's line shacks on the flats because he had asked it.

Will had propped him against a tree, feeling only a pity for the man. He had looked around him and said, “You sure Harve will hear my shots?”

“Courteen will,” the man had whispered. “Him and his crew are running cattle over there. They'll hear you.”

Will had shot into the air and left him. But the knowledge that Priest and Courteen had kept their cattle on Hatchet grass both puzzled and disturbed him. If Lottie had given her father Will's message, then Priest was either a fool or a brave man. And Will wanted to find out which—after tomorrow.

He rode steadily through the night now, his hunger becoming more and more insistent. The last of his grub had vanished yesterday, and there would be no more until morning.

He passed early in the night behind Hatchet to the south and sometime in the night came close to the seep where the skeleton of Bide's chuck wagon still lay.

It was just breaking false dawn when he slanted into the shallow valley above Russian Springs and was hailed quietly from the timber.

He rode into the edge of it and saw first the team and spring wagon, and then Jim Young looked up in the darkness, Mel beside him.

Will said, “Got any cooked grub between yon?” and laughed at himself; the sudden sound of his own voice almost startled him as he dismounted.

Jim Young rummaged in the spring wagon and came back with three cold biscuits and a chunk of fried meat. Will wolfed them down, their salty taste more welcome than cake to his palate.

Mel Young said, “They crowdin' you, Will?”

“Some,” Will said through a mouthful of biscuit.

“They brought that hand of Garretson's in last night,” Mel said dryly.

Jim Young's shape materialized beside him. “Your grub's on your saddle, Will. Here's the shells. Rifle's in your scabbard.”

Will took the shells and reached for his tobacco and then checked himself. False dawn was breaking and time was short.

“How long do you figure it will take?” Will asked, then.

Mel said, “This is new for us, Will. We can't rightly tell.”

“Do a job, that's all,” Will said. “Take the time you need.” He paused. “How's Ike?”

“Good. He wanted to come with us.”

Will smiled into the darkness. “And Miss Evarts?”

“She ain't so good at waitin', Will,” Jim Young said, and Will had a fleeting picture of Celia, restless and impatient, but not despairing.

“She saw Kneen, did she?”

“That's right,” Jim Young said.

Then everything was ready to go, and yet Will still lingered. These were the first friendly voices he had heard since Celia had left him at Cavanaugh's, and he found himself hungry for talk. Yet he had to leave.

The Youngs followed him over to his fresh horse Jim had saddled, and Will stepped in the saddle. He said then, “Reckon you two could meet me on the old logging road tonight around that black shale?”

At their murmur of assent Will lifted the reins and repeated:

“Take your time and do a job. Give me ten minutes.”

He vanished into the timber now, keeping east, and in a few minutes could see the edge of it. He dismounted, loosened the saddle, and tied his horse back deep in the timber. Then, taking his gun and the boxes of shells, he went over to the edge of the timber.

Straining his eyes now, he waited, and presently the shape of Bide's shack and the shed and corrals below came into focus. He was less than seventy-five yards from the buildings. Leisurely, now, he chose the spot which would afford him the best vantage point, picked his tree, broke open the boxes of shells, and then, everything ready, reached in his pocket for his tobacco.

He had rolled and lighted his smoke when the sound came. It was the steady, regular sound of a sledge hitting metal and came from the direction of the Springs upvalley. For perhaps five minutes he heard it, regular as the ticking of a clock, and then he saw the shack door open and a man step out into the yard, peering up the valley.

Will carefully put down his cigarette, raised his carbine, levered in a shell, and fired.

Even in the half-light he could see the spurt of dust kicked up at the very feet of the man. Without looking the man dived back into the shack. Will put two shots into the shack door and then bellied down beside the tree. He put his sights, which he was beginning to see better, now, on the small window at the end of the shack and then pulled off and fired. The smack of the slug in the logs came on the heel of the report of his gun. He waited a moment, giving them time to heed his warning, and then he put two shots through the window. He moved his sights and put another shot into the door and then pushed fresh shells into his gun, watching.

The faint murmur of voices down there in the shack came to him. Suddenly there was a shot, and Will heard the thud of the bullet in the tree above him. He smiled a little and moved deeper behind the tree trunk, and then put two more shots through the window. He heard a loud, bitter cursing inside the shack now and speculated on the reason for it.

It was daylight now, and the steady sound of sledging up the valley had never left off.

Will settled himself comfortably and watched. Presently a rifle barrel poked out of the shack's broken window, and quickly he put a shot at it and it withdrew. Again he put a pair of shots into the door and then, out of some whim, raised his sights to the stovepipe. It took four shots to bring it down; it bent, broke, rolled down the sod roof, and boomed twice as it bit the ground and rolled to a stop.

Again he loaded his carbine, and this time he put the gun aside, waiting.

Nothing moved down there. Nobody offered to come out.

The sun was fully up now, and still the sledging went on up the valley.

Will settled down to wait, and he wondered if the men in the shack understood what was taking place over at the Springs. If Russ Schultz was there, he might, but Will doubted if the others would.

For more than three hours Will kept his vigil, sending an occasional shot into the door or the window, and all the time the sledging up the valley kept up.

Presently it ceased, and there was a long silence.

Then a soft, ground-shaking thud came to him, so quiet he could feel it more than he could hear it.

A few seconds afterward the door of the shack slammed open and a man lunged out. Will's carbine lifted to his shoulder, and then over his sights he saw who the man was. It was Sam Danfelser, and he was running heavily toward the shed by the corral, oblivious to Will up in the timber.

Will's rifle slacked off his shoulder and he called sharply, “Turn around, Sam.”

Sam Danfelser might not have heard him for the attention he paid him. Will looked beyond Sam and saw a man standing in the doorway, watching this. Cursing softly, Will put a slug in the doorjamb inches from the man's head, and the man dodged back and slammed the door.

Will looked down at Sam now. He had made the safety of the shed. The high, vertical cedar poles of the corral hid from Will what was going on in there, and he watched, a faint excitement in him. He could keep Sam a prisoner in there just as effectively as in the shack, but he wanted to know what Sam was going to do. The sledging had hot been resumed up the valley.

Will watched, and then Sam's voice, thick with angry arrogance, lifted into the morning.

“Will, I'm riding out of here!”

Will heard the corral gate dragging and then the sound of a horse running. And then Sam, leaning over the neck of his running horse, came into view from behind the shed, headed for the Springs.

For a moment Will could only stare, more amazed than angry. Sam Danfelser knew he wouldn't be shot in cold blood by Will, and he was taking his own savage, arrogant advantage of it. Will's gun whipped to his shoulder, and he waited a moment, fighting down his anger. Then he held his breath and fired.