Death Rides the Night (9 page)

“Aren't we, Ethan?”

“Nope.” He pulled off one boot and it thudded against the wall across the small room. “I'm sorry, hon, but we'll just keep on bein' poor and getting along like we have been.”

“That's all right,” she told him gently. “I don't mind, Ethan.”

“I wanted it mostly for you,” he blurted out. “I wanted you to have things other women have. And I wanted to make more money … so you could keep on having nice things.”

“I know.” Her voice comforted him. “It doesn't matter. I've got the children … and you. And we're young and healthy.”

He pulled off his other boot and stood up in his bare feet. He turned and his dark eyes brooded down at her. “You don't know how plumb wonderful you are, Nancy.” His voice was unsteady. “I've been dreadin' having to come home and tell you. Don't you think I don't know how you've scrimped an' done without.”

“It doesn't matter. Money isn't everything.” To her own surprise, Nancy smiled and her voice was tender and strong. “What happened to make you change your mind?”

“That meeting tonight.” Ethan's young face flushed dark with anger. “Know what they did? Voted Pat Stevens out as sheriff of Powder Valley and turned his star over to Eustis Harlow's foreman. Fellow named Tripo. A two-gunned rattlesnake from Texas.”

“They voted Pat out?” Nancy echoed incredulously. “Who did that?”

“Fellows at the meeting. It was a put-up job,” Ethan went on harshly. “Harlow worked it. He claims Pat hasn't done anything to stop cattle rustling off his ranch an' said we needed a new sheriff working for a salary. Offered to pay half it himself if we'd kick Pat out.”

“You
didn't vote against Pat Stevens?” Nancy protested in a horrified voice.

“Didn't come to a showdown. Pat walked in while the talk was goin' on, and he resigned. Pulled off his badge an' gave it to Harlow. But I had my orders on how to vote before the meeting,” he went on harshly. “Mr. Harlow called me off to the side an' told me he expected me to go along with him if I wanted that loan.”

Nancy was aghast. “What did you tell him?”

“Right then I didn't tell him yes or no,” Ethan admitted. “Plumb flabbergasted me, sort of, and I still didn't know what was up. Then I saw he had the meeting packed with men he
has
loaned money to. Morrel and Simpson, old man Tucker, Jimmie Peters. The whole gang he's been soft soaping along. There they were, scared of him an' ready to jump if he cracked the whip. Each one of them with all their hired hands ready to vote the way Harlow said. I tell you it made me sick to my belly, Nancy. I saw that's where
I'd
be if I took that loan from him.”

“What happened? Tell me all about it.”

“Soon as he got Tripo in for sheriff he accused one-eyed Ezra of stealing his cattle. You know, Ezra's taken over the old Spangler ranch just east of the VX. So Tripo arrested Ezra and put him in jail.”

“But everybody knows Ezra wouldn't steal,” wailed Nancy. “He may not be the smartest man in the Valley, but he's
good.
And he's certainly as honest as the day is long.”

“Shore he is. That's what makes my blood boil. The way I see it, Harlow wants to get hold of the Spangler ranch to spread out his place. If he can keep Ezra in jail he'll have a chance to buy it in, maybe.”

“But that's dishonest,” protested Nancy. “That's downright crooked, Ethan.”

“That's when I decided we didn't want to be beholden to a man like that. If I went ahead and borrowed from him on a mortgage I'd have to be like the rest and knuckle down when he said to. So I told him it was off and told him I wanted that mortgage back that he's had drawn up.”

“Did you get it back?”

“Not tonight. He said it was at the ranch. But I haven't signed it yet so it don't matter.” Ethan Page turned away from her and began to unbuckle his levis.

“I'm glad you did, Ethan.” Nancy spoke with spirit. “I'm proud you told him off. Why, Pat Stevens and Sam and Ezra
made
this Valley. You know that. They've risked their lives for us a dozen times. Of course we have to stand behind them.”

“That's the way I figured it. Even if we do have to go slow the next few years.” Ethan was pulling off his undershirt and his voice was muffled.

He didn't hear the small sound just outside the bedroom window; the undershirt over his head prevented him seeing the blued muzzle of a .45 resting on the window ledge pointing at him.

Nancy heard the sound, and she turned her head in that direction the very instant that the muzzle erupted flame and lead. Her scream blended with the roar of exploding gunpowder.

She saw her husband stagger forward and go to the floor, and she started up in time to receive a second slug in her heart. She sank back with a little moan and didn't answer Ethan Junior's terrified cry of childish fright from the other room.

She lay very still and the padding of bare feet into the room was the only sound now in the midnight silence enveloping the small ranch house.

Six-year-old Ethan Page Junior stopped in the doorway and looked solemnly at the figure of his father huddled on the floor, and blinked at the spreading stain of crimson on the pine floor. He lifted his befuddled eyes and saw a terrifying apparition outside the open bedroom window. It was a man with red whiskers and a terribly scarred face. A one-eyed man who leered at the bewildered little boy for a moment before he disappeared in the darkness.

That's all little Ethan Page could tell about the murder of his parents the next day after their bodies were discovered by a passing rider. And his younger sister slept right on through the shooting, so she couldn't add anything at all to Ethan Junior's terrified tale.

8

Jake Munort was a crabbed old man who lived alone on a small place across the valley from the Pages. His ranch wasn't much. He had only six sections under fence and he ran less than a hundred head of cattle on it. It was rich ranchland, and with proper supervision would have supported more than twice that many cows, but old man Munort was too lazy and too cantankerous to bother about trying to keep his ranch up. He was all alone in the world and it provided for his simple needs and he wasn't interested in anything else. He had a Mexican lad who worked for him and lived in a little shack down the creek from his house, and together the two of them managed to keep the ranch going.

Above all else, Jake Munort resisted change and modernization. He resented all the modern improvements that his neighbors went in for, and loudly bewailed the passing of the good old days when there weren't any fences to bother a man and the accepted way of building up a herd was to spread a wide loop and work fast with a hot running iron. The new-fangled ranching methods were ruining the country, he complained, and the breed of men and cows was growing softer as each year went by.

Jake laughed at Eustis Harlow when he first came to him with a proposal to lend him money to fix the ranch up and put in new stock. The ranch suited Jake as it was, and his gaunt and stringy whitefaces were the same as he'd been raising all his life and were plenty good enough for him.

He felt the same way about selling his ranch, even for a sum of money easily more than twice what it was worth. He had lived on those six sections all his life, by golly, and he planned to die on them. He was comfortable in his little two-room log house, and he reckoned he wouldn't be comfortable anywhere else in the world. He'd be durned if he wanted to go traveling around the country on trains and such, and where would he go if he sold out his place.

Harlow argued with the old man in vain, raising his price to almost double his original offer, but Jake Munort remained adamant.

“Nosiree,” he exploded finally, “I ain't sellin an that's final.” He slammed a gnarled fist into his leathery palm and glared at the Texan. “You must be crazy tuh want to buy it nohow. Anybody in the Valley'll tell you my place ain't wuth a damn.”

“I'm not crazy,” Harlow assured him with a thin smile. “Your six sections join up against Simpson's place and I'm loaning him money to make improvements and expand. You're standing in the way of development, Mr. Munort.”

The old man snorted loudly. “Leroy Simpson allus wuz a danged fool. I reckon yo're lookin' tuh foreclose him an' then add my six sections onto his place. I'll be dead fust, I kin tell you that.”

“All right,” said Harlow equably. “I'm not in any hurry. I guess I can wait that long.”

“I'm mighty tough,” Munort told him seriously. “Good fer a lot of years yet, I reckon.”

Eustis Harlow said, “Maybe,” and left it like that.

Jake Munort was old and crabbed and set in his ways, but he was far from being a fool. He kept his mouth shut and his ears open and observed how Harlow was lending large sums of money to various ranchers throughout the Valley at ridiculously low interest rates, and how the recipients were spending the money foolishly on things they didn't need, and he began to realize Harlow's plan to gain control of the entire Valley.

He didn't say anything about it to anyone. No one would have listened to him, and he didn't care what they did anyway. But he made his own private plans to circumvent Harlow.

With no living relatives to leave his ranch to, he knew it would be thrown on the open market in the event of his death, and he shrewdly suspected that Harlow had investigated and knew this also.

It was right after Ezra bought the Spangler place right out from under Harlow's nose that Munort got his great idea. He knew Ezra and liked him, and he thought Ezra was too sensible to borrow money from the Texan or buckle down to him. So he made a trip to Pueblo by the stage one day, and consulted a lawyer in that city. He had the lawyer draw up an iron-bound will leaving his property to Ezra in the event of his death, and then he returned to Powder Valley slyly elated at the way he'd fixed things so Harlow couldn't touch his six sections even after he died.

He didn't tell anyone in the Valley what he had done, but settled back down on his ranch to keep on living just as he had before.

One of the delights of Jake Munort's old age was the chokecherry wine he made each summer. There was a thick growth of the bushes along the creek running through his place, and every summer he gathered bushels of the red berries when they were ripe and hanging in thick clusters from the bushes.

He had four wooden barrels in which he made his wine by a process of his own. He filled each barrel half-full of the ripe berries, throwing in twigs and leaves indiscriminately, and then put in enough creek water to cover the berries. A week later he stripped naked and washed himself in the creek, then crawled inside each barrel and “tromped out the juice” as he called this process. After that he threw a fifty-pound sack of sugar in each barrel and filled it to the brim with water. He let them stand open until they quit working, then drew the clear crimson liquid off into kegs which he set away for the winter. It was very potable, and strong enough so a man could get on a pretty fair drunk with two tin cups of it. Jake Munort always drank a cup before dinner and then polished off two more before going to bed.

He liked to sit by himself in the darkness before a flickering fire of dry mesquite roots in the fireplace and doze through the long evenings while he sipped his wine and got just drunk enough to stagger off to bed and to sleep, for he didn't sleep well in these later years and without his two tin cups of chokecherry wine he was likely to lie awake and toss around until dawn.

It was midnight and Jake Munort was well along toward finishing his second cup of wine when he heard a horse ridden up into the yard just outside his cabin. The old man was dozing along in a torpid state of relaxation. He wondered if the rider would be Simpson on his way back from some meeting in Dutch Springs. Simpson had stopped by on his way in earlier to urge Jake to ride in with him, but the old rancher refused. He wasn't interested in meetings, and he particularly wasn't interested when Simpson told him it was something cooked up by Eustis Harlow.

“I'll set right here in front of the fireplace an' take it easy,” Jake had told Simpson. “I reckon you feel like you gotta ride in 'cause Harlow says so, but me I don't jump through a hoop fer no man.”

Simpson had flushed and angrily declared that he wasn't jumping through a hoop at Harlow's bidding either, that he was simply attending the meeting because he believed it was a citizen's duty to take an interest in community affairs, but old Jake just grunted sardonically and poured himself out a tin cup of wine and settled back to enjoy another long evening in his own way.

Now he cupped a hand behind his ear and listened to the sound of footsteps approaching the house. Didn't sound like Simpson's walk, he thought. His senses were dulled by wine but he could tell pretty good that it wasn't his closest neighbor. This man was taking heavy, solid steps, while Simpson sort of dragged along. Must be a stranger stepping by, Jake thought, for he hadn't any friends who would come to see him after midnight.

He leaned forward and picked up a charred stick to stir the smoldering fire into bright flames, then turned in his rawhide armchair to look at the man stepping inside his open door.

The leaping flames showed a bulky figure with a red-whiskered face and a disfiguring scar down one side of it. He appeared to have only one eye and it was fixed malignantly on the old rancher.

Though his vision was blurred by drunkenness, Jake knew the man in the doorway must be Ezra. He called, “Come on in, Ezra,” impatiently, and then he saw the gun in the newcomer's hand.

The muzzle swept up in a steady arc and covered him. Jake stared at it in disbelief and lifted one hand as though to ward off the inexplicable danger.

The six-gun thundered and a bullet crashed into Jake Munort's chest. He collapsed in his rawhide chair with a groan, and the bulky figure disappeared from the doorway. A moment later there was the sound of galloping hooves, and they swiftly receded into the night.