Dark Canyon (1963) (2 page)

Weaver lifted a hand. "Don't say you ain't thought of it. At first I thought you were playin' a favorite, then I could see you were deliberately keepin' the kid from being identified with us . . . at least so's he'd have an argument."

"What have you got in mind?"

"Let me talk to him."

Two days later they were camped on the Sonora in a little grove of cottonwoods and willows, with a scattering of smoke trees farther up the draw. Weaver was washing a shirt when the kid came down and shucked his own shirt and started washing it. Weaver glanced at the thin brown shoulders. There were three bullet holes in Gaylord Riley's body.

"You've caught some lead," Weaver commented. "When I was a kid. Maybe a year or so before I left Texas. Pa an' me was livin' on a little two-by-four place down on the Brazos. Pa was gimpy in one leg, caught a bullet fightin' Comanches the tim
e
they killed ma. We had ourselves a few cows, and we're makin' out to have more.

"One night some fellers started making a gather of our stock and we fetched up to stop them. They killed pa, and they touched me up some. They figured me for dead.

"I crawled back to the cabin and fixed myself up. I'd this hole here, and one you cant see-in my leg. There was an old Tonkawa lived three, four miles from us, and I got onto a horse and rode over there. When I got well I got pa's old six-gun and went to work.

"That Tonk, he was a tracker, and he located one of those men for me. The cattle had been driven out of the country, but this man was spendin' money he'd no right to have. I hunted him up."

Weaver worked over his shirt, listening. The story was not unfamiliar. How many times had such things happened on the lawless frontier?

"He was riding that buckskin with pa's brand still on it, and I called him for a thief."

Weaver had seen such things, and a time or two had had his own hand in them. He could see it clearly now, as Riley told his simple, unadorned tale. The thief would have reckoned his chances good against a wet-eared boy.

"There were five of them raided us that night. Two of them I could never find, but there'll come a time. My pa," he said, "was never no hand with a gun. He hunted here and there, but he was a man who wished for no trouble, and he wasn't up to a shoot-out with that outfit that robbed him."

"Are you still hunting those others?"

"Seems to me there's a lot else to do in the world. I'm thinking of my own future some, but I have it in mind that a day will come when we will meet up. Then I'll have my say."

Weaver rinsed out his shirt and hung it in th
e
sun to dry. He squatted back on his heels and lit a cigarette. "Riley," he said, "I've been thinking back. You've got around six thousand dollars stashed away in your outfit."

Gaylord Riley said nothing at all, but Weaver was amused to see the way that right hand stayed clear of the water. The kid was careful, and Weaver liked that. He had never liked a cocky youngster. He liked them sure, careful, and honest.

"Jim is pushing forty. Parrish and me are upwards of thirty-six. Kehoe, he's just thirty-two. We have been outlaws a long time and it hasn't got us a thing, but we ain't going to be anything else until we get too old to ride."

Riley said nothing, and he began to wring out his shir
t
"This life gets you nothing. Jim Colburn's s a shrewd and careful man and we've been lucky, but let me tell you-Jim's scared."

"Him? He ain't scared of nothing!"

"Rightly speaking, he isn't scared, but he's scared of the odds. We've been too lucky for too long. All right-we've planned it always, but the thing a man can't figure is the unexpected. You check the time a bank opens and when folks begin to get there. Most people are creatures of habit, so all we have to do is learn those habits. But what about the man who forgets something? He forgot to tell the banker something, or he meant to keep part of the money he deposited. For whatever reason, he goes back. "Or you stand up a stage out on the road. Nobody is supposed to be around. And then comes an army patrol returning from a scout . . . or maybe there's two or three gun-happy men aboard. "The thing you can't figure, kid, is the unexpected, and it always happens. Well, we've been lucky, but Jim is scared now, and so am I."

"What's all this talk lead to?"

"You, Riley. Get out of this business."

Weaver reached around and picked up his saddlebags. He dug out his poke and tossed it to Riley. "There's a thousand there. Take it, with what you've got, and buy some cows."

"You're tryin' to get rid of me?"

"Uh-huh." Weaver rubbed his cigarette in the sand until it was carefully put out. "You ain't cut out for it, kid. You don't like to kill, and that's the way it should be. You've been shooting to scare, and that's the best way. Rob a bank, and nobody gives you too much of an argument but the law; but you kill a man, and that man has friends, and they'll chase you to hell. But some day we'll get in a bind and you'll have to kill."

"I'll do what I have to."

"You've killed men, kid, but you were in the right. You kill riding with us, and it's different. It is different in the eyes of the law and of people, and you'll see it different yourself."

"What will Jim say?"

"He likes you . . . like you're his son. We'll all be pleased, Riley. We sure N
. M
."

"I can't take your money."

"You ain't taking it. Some day I'll be too stove up to ride, and then I'll come to you and you can fix me up in a shack on your place and let me eat some honest beef."

They walked back to the fire. The way the others looked up, Riley knew they had been waiting for the results of the talk.

Colburn tossed a heavy poke to Riley. "Three thousand there, kid. We're all buying M. You start yourself an outfit."

Gaylord Riley looked down at the poke, and then after a moment he looked up. "This here's fine .. . mighty fine. Always wished a place of my own, like pa wanted."

"One thing, Riley," Colburn advised. "Wherever you settle, you file government claim to your water. You file government claim to all the water you can get. You can take it from me that a range is only as big as its water supply, and when a steer walks too far to water he walks off beef."

Riley picked up the poke. "All right, then." When he had saddled up, he stepped into the saddle and looked around at them. "You boys take care," he said, "and you remember-there's always a place with me, no matter where I am."

They listened to the sound of his horse's hoofbeats until they died away and the dust settled and lay still. In the stream the water chuckled and rippled over the rocks and among the roots.

Jim Colburn looked around with sudden distaste. "Come on, let's light a shuck," he said.

"I'll miss that kid," Kehoe commented.

"Only four of us again."

Parrish said nothing, but he turned twice to look back.

Chapter
3

When Gaylord Riley was only sixteen he had camped for two nights near a spring at the head of Fable Canyon. They had been still, cold nights in the fall, with stars hanging so low it seemed a man might knock them down with a stick.

Never had he forgotten those magnificent distances, the mountains and canyons, the tremendous reach of unpeopled land, and now he had returned, as he had known he would.

To some the immensity, the solitude, the vastness of sky and landscape would have been appalling, frightening; but to Gaylord Riley, whose nature was attuned to all this, it offered something to the spirit. Near the head of Fable Canyon, on a bench at the foot of the Sweet Alice Hills, he began the house that would be home. On every side the land fell away, offering an unimpaired view to the north, west, and south. Fifteen miles away as the crow would fly lay the Colorado River, to the north a vast basin of several thousand acres where he planned to run cattle. On the south lay a jumble of canyons, cliffs, and pinnacles that stretched away for a vast distance, to end finally in the Painted Desert.

Long ago this had been an inhabited land, but it was so no longer. Cliff dwellings remained, ruins now, and there were the remains of ancient irrigation. Why the original inhabitants had moved on, no ma
n
could guess, but no others had come to fill the gap they left behind, although of late there were stories that the Navajo were beginning to drift into the southern part of the area.

From the moment Gaylord Riley rode away from the outlaw camp he had been thinking of this place. It was not an area anyone else would be likely to think of. There were ,better grazing lands available, but they were not better for him.

The grazing here was good. There was timber for building, there was an unlimited view, which he liked, good water, and no near neighbors. Moreover, there was a maze of canyons in any direction, so when his friends came to visit they would not need to worry about getting away.

The nearest town was Rimrock, peeled and raw, something over twenty miles to the northeast. The town was scarcely a year old, a dusty avenue shaded by cottonwoods and lined by false-fronted stores. It was a one-doctor, no-lawyer, five-saloon town, with two good water-troughs, a deep well, and excellent home-made whiskey.

Nearby were eight prosperous ranches and a pair of lean mining prospects. Local society consisted of the doctor, the banker, the eight ranchers, the preacher, and the newspaper publisher.

It was a town where the leading saloon, as well as one of the smaller ones, was owned by Martin Hardcastle. He was a very large man with a polished, hard-boned face, slicked-down hair, and a handle-bar mustache. Among the regulars at the Hardcastle saloons were Strat Spooner and Nick Valenti. There were two powers in the town of Rimrock, and in the country around. Martin Hardcastle and Dan Shattuck had been speaking acquaintances, and had often talked together several minutes at a time, either during casual meetings on the street or in Hardcastle's saloon. They did so no longer.

Outwardly there was between them the same reserved amiability as before, but no longer did Shattuck drop into Hardcastle's for his evening drink, or to meet friends. Bit by bit he had withdrawn his trade, transferring it to a saloon across the street. Those who had been inclined to meet Dan Shattuck at Hardcastle's had drifted to the other saloon.

The business was not important to Hardcastle, but Shattuck's attitude was. Hardcastle was sure that Shattuck had not mentioned the reason for his change to any of the others, for their attitudes toward Hardcastle remained the same. Nevertheless, a line had been drawn, sharply and definitely.

Not that the line had not existed before it had. The trouble was that Martin Hardcastle had overstepped it.

That Sunday afternoon had been warm and bright, and Marie Shattuck's niece had been visiting Peg over at Oliver's Boxed 0. Dan Shattuck had been working over his ranch books in the room he called his "office." Pico had been braiding a horsehair bridle on a bench in front of the bunkhouse.

Martin Hardcastle had driven into the yard in a spanking new buckboard with a black body and red wheels. He wore a black broadcloth suit and a starched white shirt. Across the front of his vest was a heavy gold chain supporting an elk's tooth.

Pico watched him get down from the buckboard, and he would not have denied his curiosity.

Dan Shattuck answered the door himself. He was a tall, fine-featured man with a shock of graying hair. He was puzzled, and had no idea of what to expect.

Hardcastle was forty-five years old and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, very little of it fat. He carried himself well, and at times he could be suave and adroit. He was not so now, made abrupt by the very strangeness of what he was about to do. Seated, he put his big hands on his knees. "Dan,"
h
e said abruptly, "I'm a wealthy man. I'm healthy, and I've never been married, but I've decided it's time."

Shattuck had never known Hardcastle except as proprietor of a place where he bought drinks from time to time, or in the meetings natural to two men in a small town. He was even more puzzled when Hardcastle said, "I decided to come to you first."

"Me?"

"Yes, Dan. You see, it's Marie I'm thinkin' of." Had Hardcastle reached over and slapped him across the face, Shattuck would have been less surprised-and much less angry.

Hardcastle ran a saloon, and to men of Dan Shat-tuck's stamp and to many others that placed him beyond the pale. A less-known fact was that Hard-castle was also the proprietor of a business operated by three girls in a house by the river. This fact was known to Shattuck, although Hardcastle believed his tracks were well covered.

Dan Shattuck got to his feet abruptly. "You can stop thinking," he said coldly. "When my niece marries it will not be to a saloonkeeper who also trafficks in women. Now get out of here, and if you ever venture to speak to my niece I'll have you publicly horsewhipped and run out of town." Hardcastle's face had turned red, then white. He started to speak as he reared to his feet. His hands shook, his eyes bulged. Abruptly, he turned and strode from the room, almost stumbling as he went down the steps. He got into his buckboard, whipped it around, and raced toward the road.

Pico put aside his bridle and walked to the house, where Dan Shattuck sat, white-faced and furious. Briefly, he explained to Pico.