Fiddlefoot (19 page)

Now half Rhino's bunch started hazing the new horses north over the hogback. The horses went reluctantly, for they were almost beat, and now Frank knew why Hugh had been in such a hurry to finish the corral. He had expected these horses, who were being hidden out in the canyon back there.

Frank watched the rest of the crew mount now, while one man ran to the corral and opened the gate. Rhino's horses were hazed out now, and roughly divided into two groups. One group was chased up the trail the other horses had just come down. The other bunch was driven back and forth across the meadow, and each time they were turned around they moved closer to the hogback.

Frank stared at this in bafflement. Once this bunch was close to the hogback, they were turned and driven clear across the meadow and onto a trail leading over to Horn Creek. They were gone only a few minutes, when they were driven back. Now the back-and-forth process was resumed again. The horses were driven ceaselessly, always bunched. Frank's glance shifted to the three riders who had come in with the last bunch; they were squatted around the fire, resting.

The horses caught his attention again. They had been driven over to the head of the trail now, where they were made to mill round and round.

Frank watched this with growing bafflement. Suddenly, it came to him with the weight of utter conviction.
They're covering the tracks of the bunch that came over the peaks
.

It made sense. Half the bunch sent up the trail would blot out the tracks on the trail. This bunch here, having been driven back and forth in the meadow and down every trail that led onto it, had left a thousand confusing tracks of their own and covered every track of the last bunch. In an hour the rain would leach out the sharp edges of all these tracks, making identification of any single horse impossible. Anyone trailing these horses over the mountains would come to the meadow and find thousands of blurred horse tracks going in all directions, and Rhino's band of a hundred horses would be innocently grazing here.

He settled back on his heels now, and slowly robbed a hand across his face. He had the answer to a lot of things now. Rhino, his partner, was dealing in stolen horses. With Saber's vast range, he could hide the stolen stuff until they were vent-branded or their brands altered and healed. The set-up was foolproof. Nobody ever questioned a Saber-branded horse, and any number of horses could be brought in over the back door of the peaks.

He saw how carefully Rhino had planned and executed this, so sure of himself that these horses had been stolen and scheduled to arrive here weeks before Frank knew he was after Saber. No wonder Rhino had suggested the fishing trip, and no wonder the old Saber crew was promptly moved out. No wonder—

“Getting an eyeful, Pretty Boy?”

The voice was wry and gibing, coming from behind him. Even as he turned his head, still squatting in the brush, he knew who had spoken.

Albie Beecham stood there in the slow rain, gun in hand and cocked. He had taken off his slicker so its noise would not give him away, and he had come up within a dozen feet of Frank before he spoke.

Frank came carefully erect and turned, his hands at his sides. He was caught cold, and he saw the bitter exultation in Albie's vicious face.

“It took all day, but I made it,” Albie said thinly.

Frank didn't comment.

“So now you know,” Albie jeered, “and now you're dead.”

A cold swift fear touched Frank then. Was he going to shoot him, now?
Not without Nunnally's word
, Frank thought. But the promise was there, naked and cold, so plain the crew already knew it. Once he discovered Rhino's business, he was dead. They'd used him and now they were through with him. His discovery here, coupled with what he had seen today, would earn him a bullet in the back.

He had been cold before; now he was sweating. He beat his mind for some way out of this, watching Albie with a narrow attention. If he moved, Albie would shoot. Even if Albie missed him, this would bring the crew from the meadow here in a minute's time. And then it came to him and he didn't like it, but he knew he was going to do it.

He smiled with an easy confidence and put out his hand. “Give it to me, Albie. It's no use.”

Albie's gun steadied on him.

Frank took a step toward him, a slow step, his hand still extended, and now he raised his other hand slowly to push his hat off his forehead. He looked beyond Albie and called sharply, “Jonas, get closer—and be quiet. The meadow's full of them.”

Albie had the hint. He acted promptly, wisely, because he was almost sure—but only almost—that Frank was bluffing, and that there was nobody behind him. He raised his gun shoulder high and fired a shot for help. That was the most Frank had hoped for.

He wrenched off his hat and threw it at Albie's head, hoping to distract his aim, and lunged for the slight puncher. Albie's shot bellowed almost in his face, but it was too late and Frank was on him. His head butted Albie's chest and his long arms were around him.

Albie, cursing wildly, went down, and Frank fell atop him and clamped onto his gun. They wrestled silently, viciously for seconds in the muddy leaves, Frank holding Albie's gun in an iron grip as they rolled over and over. It took Frank a few experimental seconds to discover that, once Albie was pinned on his back, his own extra weight could pin him down. Albie's arm was wrapped around Frank's neck, and he hugged Frank with a wild and stubborn tenacity. With a cold and wicked haste upon him now, Frank read Albie's motives. Albie wanted to hold him until help from the meadow got here, and it was surely on the way.

Smothering Albie with his weight now, Frank clawed at his slicker with his right hand, trying to open it and get his gun. The stout buckles held, and he moved his hand to the pocket and ripped it savagely. His face was mashed against Albie's chest, and now Albie, reading Frank's intent, tightened his hold and rolled Frank over on one side, pinning his free hand under his body. This was too slow, Frank knew, and a wild desperation came to him. He must break, and soon.

He opened his mouth now and sank his teeth savagely into Albie's shoulder. Albie howled, and his hug loosened. He heaved over on his other side with a violence that rolled Frank off him and tore his grip from the wet gun in Albie's right hand.

But Albie's very violence wrenched the gun from his own hand too. It fell and skidded in the mud beyond Frank's head. Frank rolled over, his legs driving in the mud to bring him to his feet, but Albie was already lunging for the gun, and Frank knew they must repeat their struggle. He ignored Albie's gun and, kneeling now, he ripped at the inside of his slicker pocket with a violence that almost tore out his nails. The oilskin gave, and now his hand drove down for the gun in the waistband of his denims, just as Albie stumbled and fell on the muddy gun and picked it up.

Frank saw him swing it in a tight arc toward him, struggling with his muddy hand to pull back the slippery hammer. His thumb slipped, and now Frank's gun came up. Albie had his left hand flat, streaking for the hammer to palm it back, when Frank shot. Albie, kneeling too, was knocked over as if some invisible hand had swept him to the ground, and his left hand, still traveling its course, slapped into the hammer and the gun went off in the air.

Frank was aware of several things now as he rose. There was a pounding of horses at full run in the meadow. He was still screened from the meadow by the aspens, and he knew he had not been seen. If he could get out of here now—but no, there was Albie.
But maybe Albie's dead
, he thought.

Swiftly, then, Frank searched for and found his hat, looked briefly around the scuffed leaves and mud for anything he had dropped, and then ran for Albie.

Albie, drenched and muddy, lay on his face. His shot, Frank saw, had caught Albie in the chest, and he was dead already. Frank plunged past him now into the timber, and as he ran he heard a horse crashing through the brush behind him, and a man yelled, “Where are you?”

Frank lay face down, listening, his heart pumping wildly. The rider moved on then, calling in the deepening dusk to his companions. Frank rose and ran, and when he came to the trail he turned down it. A horse shied away from him in this wet, twilight gloom, and he knew it was Albie's mount. He ran on a few yards, and came to his own horse.

Mounting, he heard behind him a shout, and then three quick shots in succession. They had discovered Albie. Frank pulled his horse around and roweled him down the trail. Behind him now, he could hear other horses coming down the trail at a dead run.

He yanked his pony off the trail then, turning him into the close timber. Lying flat on his pony's neck, he gave him his head, and rode blindly for several minutes, branches clawing at him as he rode under them. Reining up then in a stand of dripping pine, he turned to listen. He could hear nothing, and he knew it was too dark now for them to track any more.

He was free, and he speculated on what that meant. Nobody had seen him, so nobody would know who killed Albie. The persistent rain would make identification of his tracks or his horse's tracks, hopeless. When last seen by any of Rhino's crew, he was miles back in the crescent meadow on his way to town. He could bluff this through, claiming innocence of any knowledge of Albie's death. If he ran now, everything was lost—Carrie, Saber, his whole future.

And then he saw the flaw.
Hugh will check on the time I got to town, and I'll have five hours to account for
. He thought of that with a narrow pessimism, reading his defeat in it.

And then the answer came to him, and he turned it over slowly and carefully in his mind. Normally, leaving Hugh when he did, he would have reached town at six. Rhino would be gone, the lot closed, with perhaps someone, probably Tess, working in the office.

Then it was up to Tess. If he could find Tess tonight, get her to write in her own handwriting the items Hugh had given him for Rhino, go to the office and leave this list on Rhino's desk tonight, so that it would be there first thing in the morning, the plan would work. Provided, of course, that he could get to town without being seen, so that Tess would say he had come in just as she was closing last night.

He put his horse into motion now, and rode on in the darkness, and he was remembering Tess's words of Saturday night. Shrewdly, he knew she would not have spoken those words unless she liked him. Yes, he could count on Tess.

He rode now with a purpose.

Chapter 17

Hannan leaned back to light his cigar, and over the match flame he saw Doc Breathit's ruddy face grinning. There was a friendly malice in Doc's eyes, and he said now, with derision, “She gave it to you. She folded so you wouldn't cry.”

“I was ready to,” Hannan agreed. He looked across the table at Tess's big stack of chips, then raised his glance to her and grinned. She smiled back, but it was a warning smile.

Newhouse, to his left, riffled the cards impatiently. “Take off that star and see what she does to you, Buck. You're afraid to.”

“That's the way he get votes,” Isaac Maas said gently from around his big calabash pipe. He scratched his thick black hair and said: “Simple. You lose enough pots to people and they feel grateful enough to vote for you. What they think of your brains, I won't go into.”

Tess winked at Hannan, and he laughed. She liked these people and she liked these evenings of poker in Mr. Newhouse's living room on the hotel's ground floor. There was seldom a courteous word spoken, and the poker was expert and cutthroat.

Mr. Newhouse was shuffling the cards expertly when a knock came on the corridor door.

Doc Breathit hit the table with the flat of his hand. “I knew it Mrs. Jeffries baby.”

“Come in,” Newhouse called.

The night clerk opened the door and stuck his head inside. “Somebody to see Miss Falette.”

Isaac Maas looked at her. “So we bring sex into this.”

Tess laughed and rose, as Breathit remarked dryly, “It's a woman's privilege to quit while she's ahead.”

Tess made a face at him and walked out the door, closing it behind her.

Frank Chess was leaning against the wall. He shoved away from it, his slicker dripping water, and she could see that the rain had soaked his curly hair. His face was grim and unsmiling, lean and somehow haunted and beaten-looking.

“I've got to talk to you, Tess,” Frank said. “Somewhere alone.”

Tess said, “Come on,” and walked past him up the corridor into the lobby. A half-dozen loafers were killing a rainy night in the lobby chairs, and Tess went on through to the empty dining room.

A wall lamp still burned in its bracket under a small table. Tess pulled a chair out and sat down, and Frank sat down across from her. He laid his soaking hat on the floor, and pulled his slicker open; his movements were swift and impatient, Tess noticed.

“Tess, have you got a key to the office at the lot?” Frank asked. When Tess nodded, Frank said quietly, “I'm in trouble; I need help, Tess.”

She said nothing. Frank leaned forward and went on in a sober, quiet voice, “When did Rhino leave the lot tonight?”

“About five. He was headed for Saber. Didn't you see him?”

“No. I didn't come on the road. Who locked up, and when?”

“I did—a little after six.”

“Were you alone?”

Tess nodded.

A wry grin came to Frank's face and went swiftly. He looked at her a silent, speculative moment, then said: “I was supposed to tell Rhino something at—no, I've got to prove I was in town at six tonight, Tess. I wasn't.” He paused, and Tess said nothing, watching him, feeling a curious distaste for this.

“I was sent in to tell Rhino some things. If you could write out those things, I'll take your key and put the list on Rhino's desk tonight. Tomorrow, he'll ask about it, and you can tell him I came in at six, you wrote the message and left it on his desk.”