Raw Land (17 page)

“And you'll do what?”

Will flipped his cigarette away. “I'm goin' in for rustlin', to begin with, Milt.”

“Rustlin'?”

“Nine X beef,” Will said grimly. “Case and Pres, as far as I can make out, hate each other. Case doesn't trust him, but now they're partners. Supposin', all of a sudden, that Case starts missin' beef. He'll blame it on me at first, maybe. But then I'll leave enough sign to show him there are three or four of us in on it. All my crew's in jail, so he can't figure out where I'd get the men. Then he'll trace the beef, and I'll leave plenty of hints that it's Pres. He'll accuse Pres of it, and unless I miss my guess they'll fight. That's the first move.” He looked at Milt in the dark. “How does it sound?”

“Huh?” Milt yanked himself up, and then laughed uneasily. “I must be gettin' old, Will. I wasn't payin' attention.”

Will told him again, and Milt agreed it was a good idea. Will added, “I want you to ride to Yellow Jacket tomorrow and write the railroad orderin' enough cars for a hundred and fifty head of cattle to be on the Sevier Creek siding the night of the nineteenth.”

“All right.”

“That's done. Now, has Phipps got a bounty on me yet?”

“A thousand,” Milt said. “And say. There's the damnedest story goin' around Yellow Jacket. They claim that Phipps has arrested Sommers for givin' you the gun to escape with.” Milt laughed and went on. “Imagine that? Charlie Sommers handin' you a gun, so you could bust loose. Phipps must be crazy.”

“He's not crazy,” Will said. “He's right.”

Milt turned his head slowly, peering at Will. “He's—what?”

“Sommers gave me the gun.”

“But—he's a deputy U. S. marshal.”

“But he gave it to me.”

“Why?”

Will said quietly, “He thinks I know where you are, Milt. He don't know, but he's playin' a hunch. He put me a proposition. He said he knew you were crooked, Milt. He said I'd find out some day that you were forked. When I did, he said, he wanted me to come to him and help him get you. If I'd promise, he'd give me a gun to bust loose with.”

There was a long silence and Milt said stiffly, “And what did you say?”

“I told him I would. I took the gun.”

There was a long, long silence, and then Milt said in a voice in which there was an underlying wildness, “That's comin' pretty close to promisin' to sell me out, Will.”

Will was dumb with amazement. When he could speak, he said simply, “You aren't a crook, are you, Milt?”

“No.”

“Then why am I sellin' you out? What have you got to fear?”

Milt said passionately, “But, Will, dammit, you hear stories! You can't help but hear stories about me! And when you hear 'em enough, you might begin to believe 'em.”

“I've heard stories,” Will countered angrily. “Hell, if I believed them, I wouldn't have given you help!”

Milt sighed. “Oh, hell, Will. I didn't mean that. I'm edgy. Hell, no, you don't believe 'em, and you never will. You know me. Let the others talk.” He squeezed Will's arm, and the old careless, brash way was with him again. “Will, I'm edgy, I tell you. And I don't like it when you take that kind of help from a man tryin' to hang me. It—scares me.”

“But—”

“I know. You did right,” Milt said, and added with bitter humor: “Take his help. Sure. You did right. Let him roost in jail, where he belongs, and remember how he tried to bribe my friends.”

“That wasn't a bribe,” Will said quietly. “That was a promise, and I'll keep it, Milt.”

Milt looked at him in the night and then laughed his old reckless laugh. “Good. That'll keep me in line better than advice from my mother.”

Will laughed then and rose to go. He told Milt where he was hiding out, a cave close to one of the springs in the brakes. When Milt wanted him, he was to come to this spring where Will would pick him up.

They shook hands; Will rode off, and Milt watched him go, his face sober and narrow-eyed and touched with a pinching fear. Then he laughed to himself and walked slowly toward the house. He had never realized how implacable a man's honesty could be, as Will's was.

Will broke camp before daylight and had a hard time starting his fire. Everything was wet from the rain of yesterday, including his blankets, and he felt cold and miserable. It had cleared during the night, and he yearned for the warm sunlight that would thaw and dry him out. He had ridden all day yesterday and late into the night in a driving rain that turned the brakes into a greasy mud and set its arroyos churning with a brown weight of water. His horse was red-clay color to his withers, and the legs of Will's Levis were the same color. Beard stubble shadowed his face, and his gray eyes were dismal with discomfort.

Clean sunup, however, changed things. He came to the north edge of the brakes at sunrise, and could look over the rain-clean Sevier Basin for sixty miles to the distant Cecils. This slope before him was like the range immediately around his place—hardscrabble, as poor as a man might find outside of a desert.

And Will was counting on just this poverty of the range to help him in his plans. He took the first trail he came to; it wound out of the clay dunes and soon joined another. Barely an hour later he rode into the yard of a stone-and-adobe shack set among the cheerless dunes.

A man stepped to the door, and Will greeted him, observing him carefully. A child peeked out from behind the man's legs, and the face of the man was work-worn and fearless and friendly. A rose bush struggled out of the clay beside the door, testifying to a woman's presence.

“Light and have some breakfast,” the man invited.

“Thanks, but I'm ridin' through,” Will said. “I'm lookin' for some Circle 5 strays. Haven't seen 'em, have you?”

The man eyed him steadily. “Can't say I have.”

Will knew this wasn't the kind of man he was looking for, and he rode on. But the very look of the man, his quiet defiance, told Will that the kind of men he did want was close here.

Three miles beyond the place a road forked off east and soon started to climb again. Two hours later, Will saw a mean stone shack at the head of a bunch-grass meadow, a single tall cottonwood an eye-hurting emerald-green against the red hills.

Two men watched him ride in, one from the doorway of the place, the other from the corner of one of the shabby outbuildings.

Will reined up in the yard and looked around him, finally eyeing the silent man in the doorway. This was more like it, Will thought; there were no children, no rosebushes here. Cans littered the yard, and the man in the doorway hadn't worn clean clothes in months. He was thirty-odd, dirty, and his eyes bored into Will with the hard suspicion of men who do not welcome callers.

Will said, “Fine day.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm lookin' for a couple of hands to work for me,” Will said.

The man delicately shifted a cud of tobacco to his other cheek and said, “Why come here?”

“I pick my men,” Will said. “I'm lookin' around.”

The other man had come up now, and was leaning against a corner of the house. Will didn't look at him, but he talked loud enough so the man could hear.

The one in the doorway looked long at Will and shook his head. “We got jobs.”

Will nodded agreeably and picked up his reins. “Maybe,” he said slowly, “you could steer me on to a couple of men who know these brakes.”

“Mebbe I could,” the man said, “but mebbe I won't.”

The man at the corner spoke. “You ain't ranchin' out there, mister.”

“Did I say I was?” Will murmured. He pulled his horse around and started walking it out of the yard.

“Wait a minute,” the man in the door called.

Will pulled up and waited patiently as the two men converged on him. The one he'd spoken to first was older, more seasoned-looking than his hungry-looking companion.

“We know them brakes some,” the first speaker said.

“But you got jobs, you said,” Will answered mildly.

“What you aim to pay, and for what kind of work?”

Will didn't answer immediately and then he smiled faintly.

“What you make depends on how good you work. The job? Well, there'll be some cattle drivin'.”

“Where you from?” the second man said. “You ain't from the Sevier.”

“No, I'm from the other side of the brakes,” Will drawled. He saw them look at each other and knew both were thinking of the same thing—that here might be a chance to pick up some money.

The first man said obliquely, “What kind of cattle drivin'?”

“Mostly night drivin',” Will murmured.

“How much?”

“Depends on what you want to draw in a month,” Will murmured.

“Where you aim to drive 'em to?”

“Sevier Creek pens,” Will said.

A pause. “Who you aim to sell 'em to?”

“Stockyards.”

The men looked puzzled. “Why the hell don't you ship out of Yellow Jacket, then?”

“Because I'm goin' to start with about three hundred and wind up shippin' a hundred and fifty.”

“Where are the others goin'?”

“To whoever helps me drive 'em.”

“Wait a minute,” the older man said. “I don't get this. If they're wet cattle, they'll check at the yards, hold 'em, wire the owner, and credit him.”

“They're not wet. The bill of lading is signed by the owner's foreman.”

“You're his foreman?”

“Pres Milo from the Nine X.”

The two men considered this, eyeing him carefully and respectfully. “What's the catch?” the younger man answered.

Will folded his arms and leaned on the horn and said, “There's no catch. I've got my boss by the short hairs. Once it's done, he can't move. But gettin' it done is what's hard. If I drive to Yellow Jacket he can stop me, but if I drive through these brakes, he won't know it. The railroad won't check back with him, because the stuff is shipped to the yards and is his brand, signed for by his foreman. By the time he gets his check from the yards, tallies, and misses three hundred head instead of a hundred and fifty, you can have them vent-branded and out of the way. I admit it, and he can't move.”

“Sure he can't?”

“That's my risk. And where's yours? There ain't any.”

“What's your cut?”

“A third.”

The older man pondered. “We may need another man or two.”

“Pay 'em fifty dollars, if you know any.”

The older man nodded. “What about cars?”

“I wrote for 'em. They'll be on the Sevier Creek siding on the nineteenth—five nights from tonight.”

The younger man looked at his companion. “What's wrong with that?”

“Nothin', except the time. We'd have to start now,” the other said.

“What's stoppin' you?” Will murmured.

The older man grinned. “Nothin'. Light and give us fifteen minutes.”

Chapter Fourteen

F
IGHT FOR
L
IFE

Milt came awake to hear the rain drumming on the roof. He stood in the doorway, watching the gray morning light seep up from the ground like a dreary fog. Last night's talk with Will and the discovery that Pres was double-crossing him had put a wicked edge on his temper.

He ate a cold meal swiftly, then donned his slicker, and splashed out to the corral. He saddled his big chestnut, turned the other horses out to pasture, and headed for town to mail the car order.

All morning the drizzle kept up, slow and implacable. Within an hour it had channeled down inside the collar of his slicker and inside his boots. It was all fuel for his anger, which was cold and wicked now. Pres's double cross was like a sore in his mind. He knew what had happened—Pres, knowing there was no other way but to share the loot with someone who could get the Pitchfork, had thrown in his lot with Case. Pres had brushed him aside without even bothering to tell him so, now that he didn't need him any more. In Pres's mind, Milt had failed to persuade Will, so now he was no longer of any use. And Milt could do nothing about it.

Out on the Nine X range, a cold raw wind drove the rain before it, and Milt hunched over in dismal discomfort. Pres would be in town; if he wasn't, Milt would wait for him. If he didn't come, Milt would go after him. The arroyos were running now, and Milt had to force his horse into the swiftly running water.

In midmorning he came to the arroyo where Will had met Becky. But instead of finding a creek, he was looking at a raging torrent of brown boiling water some thirty yards from bank to bank. And there, barely visible through the pelting rain, was someone in a slicker, back to Milt, huddled under the cottonwood over a smoldering fire. The thunder of the flood drowned out all the noise of his approach.

Milt rode down and looked at the water, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He couldn't cross this; it was too swift and treacherous. He moved down the bank, closer to the cottonwood, and peered incuriously at the figure over the fire, barely visible in the rain. Something about that back, its squat barrel-shape, was familiar. Milt pulled his horse around and headed upstream again, so that he could see the man's horse now hidden by a plum thicket. And then he saw the horse, a big black gelding—Pres Milo's horse.

Without a moment's pause, Milt roweled his horse into the flood. The force of the water immediately swept the horse off its feet. It didn't even try to breast the torrent, but fought to keep its head up above the churning waves. A log slammed into the horse's rump, turning it sideways and sending it under. Frantically, Milt kicked the log off, yanking his horse's head above water. They were like corks, bobbing downstream, now afloat, now hidden by the boiling waves. The banks raced by with a breath-taking speed, and they were soon out of sight or possible earshot of Pres. Once, when the arroyo bent abruptly, Milt thought they were lost. The savage current piled them against the bend, pounding and dragging the tired horse against the clay bank with a violence that caved dirt on them. And then, as unreasonably as it had swept them into the bank, the current swept them out again. And this time, out of pure panic, the gelding spent his last effort in getting to the other shore.