Blood on the Moon (7 page)

“I won’t ask you to risk your father’s life,” Tate said stubbornly. “You’d hate me for that. But I’m asking you to help. I need you.”

Carol nodded, misery threaded through the happiness she felt at his words.

Tate said bluntly, “Then ride back and find out where the herd he crossed is being held. Ask him where. When he tells you, pretend you’re worried. Then confess to him; tell him you circled back and watched us this morning, and we lined out to find his cattle, like we meant to drive them back.”

Carol was following his words with close attention. “And did you?”

“No. But he’ll fear a raid and draw the reservation crew over to help him.”

“But I don’t understand,” Carol said slowly.

“That’ll leave his other two herds under light guard. We’ll stampede them from hell to breakfast, and he’ll have to call every available man back to round them up again. That’s when we’ll drive the Basin herd back across the Massacre.”

Carol considered this slowly, with a kind of breathless attention. She could see no fighting here, no threat to her father’s safety. And when she couldn’t she felt a vast and rising relief.

“I can do that, Tate! It won’t harm him.”

Tate rose, and she rose with him, and he folded
her to him. He kissed her then, and he had his moment of doubt again. She was beautiful and she was his and she was desirable. She put a spell on a man that was a drug and made him want to forget everything but her. But that distant coolness in his mind, a kind of gray-andiron knowledge that he wanted more than this, checked him, and he moved her gently away from him.

“I’ll want to see you soon, Carol.”

“Shall I come to the rock tomorrow?”

“There, or if I’m not there come to my place. Good-by, darling.”

She watched him ride out, and she was utterly and completely happy.

After skirting the dunes they dropped down into the Basin level, and inside of an hour Jim Garry knew enough about the two men with him. He knew about Joe Shotten when they jumped a band of antelope. They didn’t see the antelope, but the dust funneling up beyond the low ridge to the south and the faint rataplan of quick hoofs were the giveaway.

Joe Shotten touched spurs to his horse and galloped toward the ridge. He was riding a bay with four white stockings, and it was a pleasant sight to watch the horse run. Shotten had drawn his rifle from its scabbard on the way over. On the back of the ridge he slipped from his saddle, bellied down and presently fired. He shot once and came back, smiling a little.

“Can still do it,” he bragged with pleasure.

He was a plain hard case, Jim thought. His hands were rope calloused, and he chewed tobacco with a patient violence. It bulged the left cheek of his concave face and seemed to draw his small eyes even closer together by widening his face. He stank of horse sweat, and its sweet, acrid smell, mixed with the even sweeter smell of the chew, clung to him like a sickening aura. A man of average height, he had narrow slanting shoulders that set his big head in bold and ugly dominance.

They crossed the ridge, and far ahead on the amber
flats Jim saw the downed antelope blending almost imperceptibly with the grass. It was three hundred yards, he calculated, and he knew that Joe Shotten knew he was calculating it and he said nothing.

Tom Riordan didn’t even look up. A decade of hard living had frozen his slanted face into a vicious indifference. He had a cough that he was constantly trying to smother. It started softly, like low gears meshing, and he seemed to be shaken with silent laughter. At these times he would put his bright feverish glance on anyone watching, and there was a murderous dare in them. Two circles of color stained his cheekbones above the stubble of his beard, helping the illusion of doll-like delicacy that was in his slight frame and thin hands. It was when they pulled up at the antelope that Jim learned about Tom Riordan, the consumptive.

Shotten had killed a doe. It lay formless and deflated, the long grace gone from its legs, its eyes smeared with death.

Joe said placidly, “It was a hard shot,” and contemplated it with quiet pride for a moment and touched his horse with his spurs.

Riordan said in a soft voice, “Take a quarter, Joe.”

Shotten looked at him and laughed. “Hell, we’re headed for town.”

Riordan said with deceptive gentleness, “God damn a man that leaves game to rot! You’ll eat some of it. Get down!”

He had braced Shotten as easily and gently as a woman talks, but it was deadly. Jim stayed silent, watching Joe Shotten weigh his chances and immediately refuse the fight.

“I like a tongue,” Joe muttered. “Why not?”

He dismounted and cut out the tongue, and Riordan seemed satisfied. Shotten put it in his pocket and mounted, and in a few moments he was whistling, the incident forgotten.

Jim had his hour of bleak disgust after that. In Tate Riling’s eyes the only difference between Jim and these two was the price he was paying for each. Jim understood that and the reason for it. These two were unstable as the weather. At another time a sudden flare-up like this would bring gunplay that might leave them both dead. Tate Riling needed them, but he needed judgment, too, and it was Jim’s job to have it, to keep these two apart and think for them. He was like Riordan—only with brains. It was a new picture of himself, and Jim pondered it with a gray and bitter distaste. Amy Lufton had not been very wide of the mark; she had named him truly—a gun hand.

They came afterward to a dry lake bed where a half-dozen seeps still held the grass green. Beside one of these, off to the south a half mile, was a log shack. Its grounds were barren of trees, and it stood stark and sun-baked in the noon heat.

Shotten said, “I’m thirsty,” and pointed his horse toward the shack.

“Whose place?” Riordan asked.

“That big one—Titterton.”

They rode across the yard to the well frame by the seep and dismounted. Shotten had his drink and then stood aside, hands on hips, regarding the shack. It presented a windowless wall of logs at the back. The plank door was closed. Beside it, hanging over a bench, a tin washbasin glistened brightly in the sun.

Shotten viewed it with rising interest and then pulled his gun. He shot without aiming, and the basin boomed and leaped off its nail and clattered to the ground.

“Chase it,” Riordan challenged, and he was smiling.

Shotten emptied his gun. By the time he had finished he had chased the basin around the corner of the house. Riordan nodded mild approval and lifted his gun from its holster.

“Let’s leave a card,” he said.

“What kind?”

“Blockhouse, right on the door.”

He raised his gun and shot five times. Four of his shots made a square; the fifth was above the square. “There’s the top half and the ridgepole,” he said softly. He looked obliquely at Jim to see if he was watching.

Shotten had reloaded by now. He lifted his gun and now he shot four times in swift succession. Below the big square and joined to it was a smaller square. The Blockhouse, as Lufton branded it, was outlined. Shotten now looked at Jim. “It needs a door, don’t it?” It was both invitation and challenge.

“You mean like this,” Riordan drawled. Again he fired four times, rapidly and seemingly without looking. His four slugs picked out a small rectangle in the lower square against the base line. He had outlined the door. At this distance it was shooting, and he knew it and Shotten knew it, and they both regarded Jim, sly elation in their faces. They were feeling him out, impressing him, and behind all lay the implied threat of their expertness.

Jim walked beyond them, so he was clear of the
horses, and lazily, almost indolently, pulled his gun. The interval between the gun leaving the holster and the shot was imperceptible.

“There’s the latch,” Jim murmured. To the right center of the smaller rectangle that was the door was the mark of Jim’s slug.

It was the kind of cheap bravura these two understood, and Jim watched their faces. Riordan regarded the door thoughtfully, looked curiously at Jim and walked toward his horse, indifferent again. Shotten was more transparent. His mouth opened slightly as he studied the door and then it clamped shut. He spat, said, “Sure, sure,” approvingly, and went over to his horse, not looking at Jim.

The ride into town brought no further comment from the two. They rode into Sun Dust in midafternoon and went straight to the Basin House.

Jim tramped downstreet and ate alone and afterward returned to the hotel porch. He dragged a chair to the rail and slacked into it, putting his feet on the rail. As he watched the sleepy street his face settled into moroseness. Presently he lifted a cigar from his pocket and fired up. He stayed with it for a dozen drags, and then it went sour for him and he tossed it away. Across the street, in front of a saloon, Riordan and Shotten lounged idly.

Jim felt the gray depression settle on him, and he hunkered down in his chair, a long, restless man with defeat in his gray eyes. It was the old pattern again, this long waiting for trouble out of which he would profit. For what? A few hours at the tables and the old driving restlessness that pushed him into trouble again. He watched Riordan across the street, back to the wall, hot eyes raking every
passer-by, every interplay of movement, interpreting them only as they affected his ultimate survival. That was himself in a few years, when the edge of his conscience had blunted even more. A hired gun hand, who balked at nothing that would pay for his whisky and his taste in horses or women and his pride. A man with no roots, who could know the lifetime of a town and its people in a few hours and reject its ways and theirs. A man with no stomach for anything except trouble.

He knew now that he would have to leave here, but his mind did not answer the question of when it would be. “That will come, too,” he thought bitterly; “I’ll be having a drink and see myself in the bar mirror, and then I’ll walk out and get on my horse and ride out, sick of myself and what I am, but with a little hope for what I’ll meet over the next hill.”

He was thinking this when he saw the buckboard stop in front of the hotel and John Lufton step down from it and come toward him.

John Lufton rode into Blockhouse with one of his crew around noon. Amy saw him and ran for the horse corral. The three men left to guard the place were already there when Amy reached him.

Her father was dismounted, beating the gray dust from his clothes when Amy came up. Even his mustache was gray. He looked up at Amy and grinned swiftly.

“Dad, what’s happened?”

“Nothing. We’ve got cattle in Massacre Basin again.”

Amy waited impatiently while he inquired of Ted about things at the ranch, and then he joined her. He
took her elbow lightly and squeezed it and said, “I could eat.”

Amy knew she wouldn’t hear much about it until after he was fed, but she was happy. John Lufton wouldn’t admit it, but this had been riding him for the last month, had been riding them all.

While he washed in the kitchen Amy put the meal on the table. There was little talk between them, and it had always been like that. With Carol and her father it was different. In Amy’s place, Carol would have learned all there was to know before she left the corral. With Amy, there was a man’s patience, a knowledge that news would keep until a man’s hunger was worn off, a kind of thoughtfulness. She demanded little, and because of it John Lufton was apt to give her more consideration than he did Carol.

When the first edge of his hunger was gone Lufton began to talk. He told of moving the cattle across the river this morning. It was unexciting; they were primed for trouble and it didn’t come.

“And I know why,” Lufton chuckled. “Did a loose rider drift in here yesterday with a note to you?”

“Garry? Yes.”

“I pegged him for one of Riling’s gun hands,” Lufton said dryly. “I think I’m right. I think he read the note, like I hoped he would, told Riling, and Riling was waiting at Ripple Ford this morning.”

“I know he was,” Amy said. She told her father about the morning ride. He listened attentively, eyes alert and curious. She didn’t tell him about Garry shooting at her at the river; she was afraid of what he would do.

“So he’s joined Riling,” Lufton murmured. He went on eating then, but his mind worked carefully.
He saw here the excuse for which he had been hunting, the excuse to take the fight to Riling and take it hard. Garry had been warned; he’d been given a choice of joining Blockhouse or riding on through, and he had done neither. Lufton arrived at his decision with a somber reluctance. He didn’t have any gun hands and he was asking his men to go up against some. But it was root hog or die, even for them, and it had to be done. It had better be done by himself, he thought.

“Another thing,” he said to Amy. “I don’t want you girls to ride out alone. That’s orders.”

“All right, Dad. Carol’s out now, you know.”

Lufton nodded and pushed his plate away, drew out his pipe and packed it thoughtfully. Amy watched the absent-minded, expert way his hands went at it. It was one of those small male rites that, if seen a thousand times, still hold a curiosity for a woman. Her father was still troubled, she knew; she could read it in his saturnine face.

Lufton grimaced. “What’s this damned country comin’ to? And the men that’ll run it.” He looked darkly at Amy. “There’s that Garry. I can’t shake him from my mind. A nice-seeming man, but snarly.” He clamped his teeth on his pipe and drew smoke deep into his lungs. “In my day there were two kinds of bad men. One was a dirty, tough, drunken killer. You knew it, and he knew it and he bragged it. Then there was the river-boat gambler—pretty as a snake and just as deadly. Point is, you knew them. Nowdays a man acts and looks like a thirty-a-month puncher, but he’s just as apt to brace you and shoot your ears off as not. It was simpler then. I liked it better.”

“You think Garry is a killer?” Amy asked. She
didn’t know why, but it seemed very important to know this. She did know why too. It was because she, like her father, would have been misled at another time by Garry’s looks, just as she’d been misled by Riling’s. Jim Garry, in looks, was like the men she danced with at the schoolhouse, the men she grew up with.

“I think he will be soon,” Lufton said meagerly. “Only he won’t get the chance.”

The sound of a horse coming into the yard made him turn his head to listen. The horse stopped, and soon the door opened and Carol stepped inside. Lufton smiled at her, thinking she was the prettiest thing he’d ever seen, and she came over and kissed him.

Amy got up to get Carol’s food, and she listened to Carol asking her father how things had gone. He told her, and she asked where they had pushed the cattle. They were scattering them in the scrub piñon and cedar hills to the west of Avery’s patch, Lufton said.

“Avery? He was with Riling, wasn’t he, Amy?” When Amy nodded Carol said, “You know, I went back and watched them this morning after I’d left Amy.”

Lufton was disapproving but amused. “To see what they’d do? And what did they?”

“They were heading south toward Avery’s,” Carol said. “I wonder why?”

“They didn’t split up?”

“They sent a man upriver and another down, and then they headed south. But before the two men left Riling called them back, and they gave him their rifles.”

Amy brought Carol her dinner, and they talked about the ride. Carol talked on nervously, speaking to Amy now. She said that the scrub-oak thickets up by the Chimney Breaks, where she pretended to have ridden that morning after she left Amy, were one mass of red foliage. Improving on that, she said the slope looked like a forest fire from a distance. While she talked John Lufton was looking out the window, his eyes musing, speculative. Carol wished she knew what he was thinking.

Presently he rose. “I’m going into town. I’ll take the buckboard, so there’s room for you girls.”

“I’ll go, Dad,” Amy said.

Carol demurred, and Amy went into her room and changed from levis to a dress. It was a ceremony that she had retained from childhood, out of some dim loyalty to her mother’s custom. She remembered how her mother used to corral them, make them wash their ears, rebraid their hair and put on dresses before they went into Sun Dust.