Lassiter Tough (18 page)

“I don't know what you mean.” Hobart was counting the money with jerky motions of his hands, his face set.

“Somebody could try and rob me on the way back to Box C,” Lassiter said. And when Hobart's head snapped up, he read the truth in the vindictive hazel eyes.

When the money count was ascertained and the coins locked in the safe, the amount was added to the Chandler account. Lassiter made sure of that.
Then he had Hobart write another receipt to show that the money had been credited to Box C.

Only then did he take his leave from the fuming banker. . . .

The minute Lassiter left the bank, Hobart flew out a rear door and hurried across the street to O'Leary's. Plainly agitated, he entered the saloon and called O'Leary away from his bar.

“Has the man left yet?” Hobart demanded in a low voice. “The one taking my note to Sanlee, I mean.”

“Well on his way by now.”

“I want another man,” Hobart said hastily. “Give me a pencil and paper, if you will.”

O'Leary hurried to oblige. Then Hobart sat at an empty deal table and scribbled a hasty note. “Sudden change of plans,” he wrote. “Will explain. H.”

He folded the note, dug a five-dollar gold piece from his pocket and handed it to O'Leary. “Pick a good man.”

O'Leary nodded and signaled a bandy-legged little man with a pock-marked face. He whispered to him, then gave him the folded paper. The five-dollar gold piece brightened the man's eyes.

“Ride like the wind,” Hobart ordered.

As Hobart crossed back for the bank, he cursed the day he had allowed himself to become involved in Brad Sanlee's machinations. Everything had started to go wrong the day Sanlee, in a rage, had gone after his runaway half-sister and inadvertently brought Lassiter onto the scene. . . .

In the yard before the imposing two-story headquarters at Diamond Eight were saddle horses and several rigs of various descriptions. An azure sky was pitted with occasional lumps of white clouds. A breeze carried strong odors from the corral.

The bandy-legged rider, Tuck McReynolds, came pounding into the yard, causing some agitation among the horses tethered there. He thumped up the veranda steps and banged on the front door. From inside the house came a murmur of voices and laughter. They were suddenly stilled. The front door was flung open by a dour older woman.

“What do you want?” Elva Dowd demanded in frosty tones.

McReynolds told her that he had to see Brad Sanlee on a very important matter. The woman looked him over, then said, “Wait.”

She went back into the house.

After the interruption when someone pounded on the door, Sanlee resumed a discussion concerning the railroad. His coarse, reddish hair was slicked down with pomade. He wore a brown suit, freshly ironed, a snowy shirt and string tie. His boots bore a high polish. He was a picture of the successful Texas rancher. The four men he faced were from San Antonio and had come all this way to hear Sanlee expound on his growing cattle empire.

“My poor sister, recently widowed as you know, has asked me to handle her affairs at Box C. So that means more acreage, more cattle added to the pot.” Sanlee smiled around the thin cigar he was smoking and leaned forward in a leather chair. “It wouldn't surprise me at all if Kilhaven doesn't go in with us. After a suitable period of mourning, I expect him to ask for my sister's hand.”

The four men in stiff collars and business suits exchanged glances and looked pleased.

“That leaves only Tate and Rooney on your eastern flank,” said Luther Barnes of the Texas Central Railroad.

“Only a matter of time till they'll be in the fold,” Sanlee assured them.

“Well, if you can guarantee the railroad that much business,” spoke up Hector Landeau of the Great Lakes Bank of Chicago, “it makes sense to swing the tracks south from Tiempo instead of east. . . .”

Sanlee suddenly realized that Mrs. Dowd was at his elbow. He was about to tell her to go away, that he was discussing important business, but she leaned over, whispered in his ear, gestured at the front door and then departed stiffly from the room.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” Sanlee said heavily and started for the door. In the adjoining sitting room, which was his late mother's favorite gathering place, were several women chattering away, wives of the four men and of other guests.

As Sanlee strode for the door, Isobel Hartney stepped from behind some heavy red plush drapes and made as if she had just entered from the veranda by a side glass door.

With her blond head high, she strolled in the direction taken by Sanlee. Each of the four men
straightened up to stare at her voluptuous figure outlined in fashionable silk.

On the veranda, Sanlee was scowling at a slip of paper McReynolds had handed him. Sanlee crumpled the paper and smiled. “It won't make no difference,” he said, slipping back into the speech patterns of the range. “The main thing is that Lassiter bastard. . . .”

He broke off upon realizing Isobel stood nearby, her green eyes flashing fire. “I thought you was with the ladies,” he snapped.

McReynolds scooted down the steps and hurried to his sweated horse. He had ridden hard to bring the note to Sanlee—a note about as important, it seemed, as a handful of dust in a high wind. Sanlee hadn't been a damned bit interested.

“Brad, I heard Lassiter's name mentioned,” Isobel said crisply, stepping to the veranda and closing the door at her back.

“What the hell of it?” Sanlee started to brush past her, but she blocked the door.

“And I distinctly overheard you tell those men that Millie had turned the affairs of Box C over to you, which is a lie and you know it.”

He stepped closer, feeling the nape of his neck tighten as he caught the scent of her perfume and saw the swell of her breasts under silk. “You'll have to learn that business is for men. Women can knit an' take care of the kitchen. . . .”

“I am in a business that I manage very well,” she shot back at him.

“When we're married . . .” He broke off as he saw the corners of her red mouth begin to tighten. “I gotta get back inside. . . .”

Smiling, he took her arm and steered her to the door that he was opening. But she jerked away.

“What you didn't say, Brad, is that when we're married you intend to take over the store?”

“It's a husband's place, not a wife's. I'll put somebody in there to run it.”

She whirled away from him, entered the house and hurried to the stairway.

Sanlee regretted letting it slip about his plans for the store. But it had to come out sooner or later. She'd sulk now, but she'd be over it by the time his guests departed and they could be alone, he assured himself.

It was later when he and the four men were laughing at a joke he had told when he heard a rattle of wheels. From a side window, he saw Isobel heading out, driving a buckboard with a big Diamond Eight branded on its side.

For the rest of the afternoon, the guests at Diamond Eight saw the simmering, volcanic nature of Brad Sanlee. He was polite and would smile with tight lips through his reddish beard, but everyone could tell by the leaden eyes that he was seething.

Buck Rooney decided it was time to pay his respects to the widow Chandler. He hadn't attended Rep's funeral, having been up at Tiempo at the time. In fact, he hadn't even known that the Box C neighbor was dead until he returned home. This time of year there wasn't much to do around his ranch; roundup was over and the cattle had been sold. Now the next big chore was roundup in the fall.

It was an afternoon with a hint of summer's breath that soon would be searing the brush country,
drying up creeks and turning the soil to powder. He thought longingly of upstate New York where there were lakes with cooling breezes.

It had been a gamble coming to Texas because he was soon known contemptuously by local residents as a “blue belly.” Most of them had fought secession. But he had bought a likely ranch, with money left him by his father, from an old man named Gephart and settled down. At first his New York accent brought frowns, but after a few years, neighbors made a place for him. When he took Sandra, daughter of a Galveston merchant, as his wife, his position was assured. But he had lost both wife and unborn child in the first year of marriage. The brasada was hell on women, so it seemed.

There was another reason for his visit to Box C today. He wanted to have a talk with the foreman. Millie Chandler didn't know how fortunate she was to have a man like Lassiter to take over when her husband died so suddenly. In fact, his neighbor Marcus Kilhaven had said just the other day that it wouldn't surprise him if Lassiter and Rep's widow ended up marrying. Kilhaven's long face was sad as he uttered it, as if such a possibility was almost more than he could bear. Rooney smiled at the memory. Those who knew said that the personable Kilhaven had been crushed when Millie Sanlee had married Rep Chandler.

Rooney knew it would be too far for him to ride all the way home that day, so he'd spend the night at the Box C bunkhouse, as was customary.

He was following a trail through the brush that would soon lead him to wheel tracks, the Box C road, when he heard a rattle of gunfire dead ahead. . . .

From time to time after leaving Santos, Lassiter would look over his shoulder to see if he could spot any threatening riders. He was as sure that the Texas sun burned down on the back of his neck as he was that Hobart had gotten word to Sanlee about the money. At the bank, when he had turned the money back in, it had shown on Hobart's face—mostly in his eyes.

Well, he'd soon be home and to hell with any possible threat this day from Sanlee. He urged the team to a faster pace. It was the rattle of the hack wagon wheels and the pounding of hooves from the team that drowned out sounds of approaching horsemen.

But at last, where the road struck a long stretch of sand and the sounds of the wagon and team were diminished, he heard them coming. As sharp as a sudden clap of thunder on a still day was the ominous rush of hoofbeats.

Looking back, he saw them, three riders charging diagonally along a game trail through the brush,
avoiding overhanging mesquite branches. Their hat brims were turned up from pressure of wind against their faces. He recognized them instantly—Doane because of his enormous size, burly Joe Tige and Pinto George with the whitish hair and pale eyes. Each of them bent low in the saddle of speeding mounts.

With his wagon moving at a good clip, Lassiter transferred the reins to his left hand and leaned down to pick up his rifle from the floorboards. Putting the rifle stock between his knees like a vise, he worked the loading lever with his right hand. He was about to fire single-handedly as if it were a pistol when two things happened simultaneously.

The road made a sudden sharp bend. And the whirling right front wheel hit a deep soft spot. Lassiter felt the speeding wagon tilt. With a chill in his gut, he was flung out as if fired from a cannon. For an instant he had an upside-down view of the sky, then of earth. He let his rifle go in midair. Although deep sand broke his fall, he still struck with enough force to daze him and jar breath from his body. Just as he came down he had enough presence of mind to clamp his right hand to his holstered gun. Holding it in place as he rolled, he barely managed to escape the overturning wagon. The wagon tongue was wrenched loose in the spill. He had a distorted view of the team running madly up the road. A great cloud of dust and sand shot into the sky from the tongue they were dragging.

Two of the riders started to fire at him, but Doane bellowed, “I want him
alive!
”

It was Joe Tige who was nearest, mounted on a red roan. Firing at a gallop threw off his aim. It did the same for Pinto George. Geysers of sand stung Lassiter's
cheek. A reminder of an evening when bullets into a dirt floor had temporarily blinded him.

He threw up his forearm to shield his eyes from the sand. Then he rolled aside as the red roan was leaping toward him. He fired, the bullet plowing into the roan's neck and on into Tige's chest. As the roan flashed past, blood pumping from the neck wound, it stumbled and went down head first. Tige was thrown like a bundle of rags.

Momentum had carried Doane and Pinto George some distance beyond the overturned wagon. Now they were reining in. Sand spurted as they turned their horses. Doane had a big knife clamped in his teeth, giving notice of what he intended to do with it. Agleaming .45 was gripped in his oversized hand.

Lassiter sprang for the wagon, which rested on its side, one splintered wheel still turning slowly. He fired twice but Pinto George was reining toward some mesquite. The shot missed. And as he drew a bead on the man for another try, there was a flurry of hoofbeats from the east. Buck Rooney appeared suddenly in the road. Because he was directly behind George and Doane, Lassiter was forced to hold his fire. He yelled at Rooney to get away.

Rooney could not quite comprehend the scene thrust upon him so suddenly. He pulled up and then started a belated try for his holstered revolver. But Doane rammed in the spurs. With a squeal of pain, his big Morgan lunged. It put Doane close enough so that one huge arm swept Rooney out of the saddle and dumped him in the sand. At that moment, Pinto George resumed firing. Bullets crashed through the underside of the wagon where Lassiter had taken refuge. Mingled with waves of dust was a layer of blue-black gunsmoke.

“Rooney . . . duck!” Lassiter shouted at him. He was afraid to fire at Doane and perhaps risk putting a bullet in Rooney. But in the next second or so, Doane was out of the saddle. He landed behind Rooney, who was dazed but sitting up.

“Hold it, George!” Doane yelled, allowing only a wedge of his face to project beyond Rooney's heavy shoulder. “Lassiter, throw down your gun, or I'll kill Rooney. Hear me, I'll
kill him!
”

Rooney cried out in pain as Doane rammed the barrel of his gun into the rancher's ear and twisted it.