Law Of the Desert Born (Ss) (1984) (20 page)

"Nothin' much t' tell. I found him ventin' a brand, an' he went for a gun. He was too slow."

"You'll have to understand, Magoon," Rowsey said sharply, "that gunplay is a thing of the past out here. There's goin' t' be an investigation. You have witnesses?"

"Uh-huh." Magoon was mildly surprised but not alarmed. "Barker an' Galway were comin' up behind me an' saw the whole play."

Rowsey's eyes narrowed. "Galway, is it? His evidence won't be good in this county. He's been mixed up in too many shootin' scrapes himself."

The door opened then, and Paul Hartman came in. "Oh, hello, Magoon. Just the man I was looking for. Miss Jarvis wishes to see you."

Stretch walked outside into the sunlight. Kelly Jarvis, a vision in red hair and dark green riding habit, was sitting a sorrel horse at the door. Hartman and Sheriff Rowsey followed him out.

"You wanted t' see me, ma'am?" He looked sadly up into her violet eyes. They were cold now.

"Yes, I did. I understand you were hired by Dean Barker to find who was rustling on my ranch. Also, that you killed my foreman. I don't want hired killers on my property. You're fired."

"Fired?" Magoon's long, melancholy face did not change. "I was hired by Barker, ma'am. I reckon I'll let him fire me."

"Barker," Kelly Jarvis said crisply, "has already been fired!"

Magoon looked up at her; then he pushed his battered hat back on his head. "I reckon," he said sadly, "that's all the reward a feller can expect after givin' the best years o' his life t' that ranch like Barker done. I reckon that's all anybody can expect from a girl who was named for a mule!"

Kelly's face turned crimson with embarrassment. "Who told you that?" she flared angrily.

Paul Hartman stepped up abruptly. "That's enough out of you!" he said sharply. "Get going!" He put a hand on Stretch Magoon's shoulder and shoved.

It was an unfortunate thing. Even an unhappy thing. Paul Hartman was a widely experienced young man, not unacquainted with the rough and seamy side of life. Yet when his shoulder blades hit the dust of the street a good six feet off the boardwalk, he was jarred from head to heel, jarred as he had never been before.

"Here!" Rowsey interrupted sharply. "Y' can't--"

Chicken Livers, the town loafer was smiling. "The dude put his hand on him," he said dryly. "He shouldn't a done it."

Hartman got up, brushing off his clothes. Then, quietly, he removed his coat. "I'm going to teach you something!" he snapped, his eyes blazing. "It's about time some of you hicks learned how to talk to a gentleman!"

Hartman had boxed a good deal, but they had been polite boxing matches, between friends. Stretch Magoon had learned his fighting by extensive application, and while a good deal of boxing skill was included, none of it had been politely learned. The left jab that made a bloody puffball of Paul Hartman's lips wasn't in the least polite, and the right uppercut that lifted into Hartman's solar plexus and picked his feet clear of the boardwalk was crude, to say the least. Even a little vulgar.

Sheriff Ben Rowsey was unaccustomed to Western ways. He had been appointed by a board of which Hartman was the chairman and the directing voice. He was, however, something of a fighting man. himself. He helped pick Hartman up from the street and dust him
off. Aloud, he voiced his sadness at the unfortunate affair. Mentally, he acknowledged it had been months, years even, since he had seen two nicer punches. For the first time, and without adequate reason, he began to wonder about Paul Hartman.

Kelly Jarvis was an angry young lady. Her red hair and Irish ancestry, and perhaps something of the nature that had caused her father to name her for his favorite mule, helped to make her angry.

It took her something over an hour to find that she was much less angry at Stretch Magoon for knocking Hartman into the middle of the street than she was at Hartman for allowing himself to be disposed of so thoroughly. Heroes live by doing, and Paul Hartman had not done.

"The way I figger it," Stretch was saying to Galway, "is this Paul Hartman has been talking to her. She ain't been here long, an' he is the hombre that knows it all. So she listens."

"But what's the idea?" Galway asked. "What's his ante?"

"That," Magoon admitted, "is the point. Maybe he is just a smart lad tryin' take over a pretty filly, an' maybe there's something more behind it. I aim t' see.

He was not the only one who was doing some thinking. Kelly was sitting at lunch, and for the first time since coming West, she was using her own pretty red head. New to the West, she had let Paul Hartman advise her. Now she was wondering. After all, Dean Barker had worked for her _since her father had died when she was but fourteen. His reports, poorly written, but always legible, had been coming with regularity, and somehow, she recalled, the ranch had always shown a profit. Now, on the strength of a new friend's advice, she had discharged him, and had discharged the man Barker hired to investigate the rustling of her cattle. It was true Stretch Magoon had killed her foreman. Hartman had told her Magoon was a professional idller.

But was he? She recalled then that her father had once killed two men trying to rustle his cattle. Another thing came up to irritate her: How had Magoon known that her father had named her for a mule?

It was irritating that he did know. It was also puzzling.

After lunch, Kelly Jarvis mounted her horse and took to the hills. The green riding habit and hat were left behind in the room at Tinker House. She wore a pair of jeans, boots, a boy's shirt, and a hat. And for the first time since she was fourteen, when her father had let her ride alone, she was carrying a pistol.

It had be61 seven years since she had been West, but she found as she rode that her knowledge had not been lost. She had grown up on the back of a cow pony, and she could use a rope and could ride as well as many a cowhand
.

She rode into the breaks that divided her range from that of the new Sombrero outfit. Once, dismounting at a spring to get a drink, she drew a Lazy S in the mud with a stick, then performed the two simple movements essential to change it to a Sombrero. She had to admit that Stretch Magoon had a point. If Lucky Weidman was honest, as,Hartman maintained, it was mighty funny he had chosen the Sombrero for a brand.

Red Posner, Weidman's right-hand man, had a face like a horned toad and a disposition like a burro with the colic. He left thinking to his betters, collected his money, drank it up, then rustled more cattle to get more money to buy more whisky. He was very busy venting a brand on a Lazy S steer when Kelly Jarvis rode down into the clearing.

They saw each other at the same instant, but Red, having a guilty conscience, had the quickest reaction. He hauled iron and threw down on the girl. In a matter of minutes she was on her back in the dust, roped and hogtied with Red's piggin' strings.

When he had her, he paused. There she was, roped and tied. But what now? What to do with her? That h
e
had a lot of ideas on the subject went without saying, but Red Posner had learned that doing things without Lucky Weidman's say-so was very apt to lead to trouble. He tied the girl in her saddle and rode back to the shack on the dry wash.

From Lucky Weidman's viewpoint, it could not have been worse. Had Red Posner come to him and told him he had the girl, he Would have instantly framed a rescue and rushed her back to town, to become the hero of the hour-even if he had to shoot Red. Which, as he considered it, was not a bad idea anyway.

Red, however, being simple even if crooked, had ridden right up to Lucky and started telling what
. H
ad happened. There was no question but what the girl knew they were working together. There was no chance to saddle this on Magoon. Moreover, this was something Hartman could never fix. Rustling cows was one thing; capturing and holding a girl was another.

While Lucky puzzled over the situation, Stretch Magoon was thinking.

Long and lean and unhappy looking, Stretch had a memory as long as his stretch of limb. As an itinerant range detective and law officer, he had a mind filled with odds and ends of lore, and with a veritable mass of data on wanted men and stolen goods. He was thinking as he whittled, and he sat beside Chicken, asking frequent questions and fitting it into the jigsaw of information in his mind.

Chicken Livers had a little mining claim. From time to time he washed out a bit of color. It kept him in food and liquor and free of the awful entangling bonds of labor. Chicken was a philosopher, a dreamer, a man who observed his fellow men with painstaking care. He was no moralist. He was no gossip. He observed and he remembered.

If Livers had observed a murder, he might have been interested in the method and the motive. He would never have dreamed of reporting it. It was a world i
n
which people did strange things. If murder was one of them, it was no business of his.

On this day, however, drawn by the companion whittling of the long-legged range detective and the fact that someone was actually interested in him, Chicken Livers was giving forth.

He remembered, for instance, the very day Paul Hartman had come to town. "Alone, was he?" No. Not alone, but the other man had left him on the outskirts. "Plenty of money?" Uh-huh, plenty. All in twenty-dollar bills. Spankin' new ones, too. "Any friends?" Not right away. Talked with Sam Tinker. Then one day got in a confab with Lucky Weidman, sort of by accident. Only maybe it was not an accident. Weidman had stood around a good deal, like he was waiting.

"Could Weidman have been the man he left on 'the edge o' town?" Could be. Big feller. 'Bout the size o' Weidman.

After a while Magoon got up and sauntered down to the Longhorn, where Sheriff Ben Rowsey was having a drink. Magoon bought one, then looked at Ben. "I take it," Magoon said, "that you're an honest man?"

"I aim t' be!" Rowsey said.

"I take it that if'n you knew a man was a crook, you'd lay hand on him, no matter who, he was?"

"That's right!" Rowsey was sincere. "If it was my own brother!"

"Then," Magoon said, "suppose y' wire El Paso for a description o' the teller an' two gunmen who robbed the bank at Forsyth last May; then check up a little." With that, Stretch Magoon walked out to his horse and swung aboard. Sheriff Ben stood there with his drink, puckering his brows over it, then tossed it off, straightened up, and walked down to the stage station where they'd just put in one of these telegraph Outfits. The grulla was a trail-liking mustang, and he took to the hills. Magoon had no love for towns and he liked to get out and go. He skirted
the plain near the Lazy S
h
eadquarters and the high slopes E with eyes like a 1 riding in the hil from the dying I work
. T
hen turned into the hills, keeping to mong the cedar and studying terrain awk's. So it was that after an hour of s he noted the thin wisp of smoke re where Red Posner had done hi
s
In twenty minutes he was on the scene, puzzling over the second set of tracks. Finally, he found, in the welter of dust and tracks, a partly trampled-out boot print made by a small boot.

There were some marks of ropes on the ground. A tight coil had been turned three times around something. That mark, too, had been partly erased, not by intention, but just by the hoofprints of horses. Then one horse had gone off, and from the way the other followed, always the same distance and never farther behind, it was a led horse.

When two horsemen came into a clearing from opposite directions and go out like that, one of the riders is dead, hurt, or a prisoner.

Stretch Magoon started down the trail made by those tracks. He had a fair idea where they had gone, and about how long before. He followed them because he was afraid they might stop before they reached the Sombrero ranch house. He was pretty certain who the first rider was, and that small boot print could only mean that the prisoner was Kelly Jarvis.

Lucky Weidman was mad. He was mad clear through, but he was also worried. Until now his tracks had been well covered, or fairly well covered, with Hartman'i help. The disappearance of the girl would set the country on its ears.

He cursed Posner for branding cattle when he should have remained quiet, forgetting that he had told him to go ahead. He cursed Hartman for not keeping the gir
l
in town, cursed Posner for not killing her on the spot, and cursed Stretch Magoon most of all.

Tinny Curt-is was going around with a bandage around his neck under his ear, and a bandage on his hand. The wound had been slight, but the missing earlobe was painful in more ways than one. In the West, a man shot through the ear was branded a coward. He was everybody's dog. Curtis realized that he was cursed for life, and was trembling with fury and aching to kill somebody anybody.

Posner sat on the steps, his face heavy with sullen rage. Lucky had given him a cursing, and he didn't like it.

Kelly Jarvis was inside, a bundle of girl dropped on a dirty bed that smelled of Weidman's huge bulk. Bitterly, she regretted ever knowing Paul Hartman or discharging Magoon.

Out in front, on the hard-packed dirt, the three men stared at each other, hating themselves and everybody else.

There was, of course, just one thing to do. Take the girl up into the mountains, drop her into a deserted mine shaft, and then act innocent. And that wasn't going to be simple.