The Tall Men (3 page)

On top of the divide over which the stage road came into Virginia City from the south, they pulled their horses in. While their mounts rested, the minds of their three riders did not.

Clint thought of the $40,000 in terms of blondes and bourbon. Ben thought of it in measures of the trail ahead, how to ride it to put the most of Montana they could between them and Virginia City before daylight, and how to ride it in the futureless months and miles that would follow that bleak northern sunrise. Nathan Stark thought of it along lines of coldblooded calculation—the odds against his chances of getting it back by betting his brains against their guns.

Nathan Stark never gambled, he only took chances. The difference was that between a busted flush and a businessman. He had come out of the east ten years before, an eighteen-year-old farm lad without a penny in his patched jeans. He had built a solid future for himself in that decade and men called him a gambler for it. They called him wrong. He played the percentages, always, and he never bet against the house. And when he played, he did so with the bluest of all chips—
brains.

Nathan Stark had a mind like a steel trap, all honed teeth and coiled springs. When that mind snapped shut on something, it never let it go again. Weeks before, it had closed on the thought of bringing beef
to Montana’s meat-hungry mining camps. And only an hour gone, it had rung instantly shut on the one thing lacking to bring that thought into the hard focus of reality—the lean, trailwise, wolfwary form of Ben Allison.

He had had the gaunt Texan marked the minute he saw him. He knew the breed. Knew, too, a superlative specimen of it when he saw him. Only the necessity of first reaching camp and cacheing the bills he had gotten from Lazarus had kept him from approaching Ben in the Black Nugget. Now the game had gotten beyond the percentages he liked. And beyond the certainty he preferred. But not yet, not quite yet, beyond the limitless, last cunning of the calculated chance. And in the end, even as he pushed his first stack forward, he knew he was risking exactly nothing against $40,000.

“Boys,” he announced, apparently speaking as much to the wind and the snow as to either of them, “we’re all in the same tight together. You figure it out.”

They were his first words since the forty-five-minute climb began. Their unexpectedness pulled Ben around in his saddle.

“I been figgerin’,” he said. “Mebbe the same as you, mebbe different. You’re talkin’.”

Stark nodded. “You’ve got twenty thousand dollars,” he said slowly. “What do you mean to do with it?”

“What the hell you mean?” challenged Clint. “We was told forty thousand.”

“I’m not talking to you,” replied Stark, staring at him, jaw thrust. “I
know
what you’ll do with your twenty thousand.”

Ben grinned as Clint cursed.

This Nathan Stark was nobody’s ninny. It was too bad they had met going opposite sides of the streambed. He would more than do to ride most rivers with. Especially if they were on the rise and over the willows.

“Keep talkin’,” he shrugged. “We got a few minutes while the hosses blow. I alius aim to listen when a man makes sense.”

“First off,” said Stark, “the money’s in big bills, mainly mint-fresh. You’ll have to discount it say forty per cent to get rid of it, and have to ride to the Indian Territory or even to Mexico before you can do that well. That leaves you twelve thousand and you haven’t bought a twist of Burley yet.”

“Otherwise?” suggested Ben soberly.

“Otherwise, you’ll start spending it the way it is and those new hundreds will hang along your backtrail like buzzards over a sick calf.”

“And—?”

“You’ve heard of the Pinkertons?”

Ben had. His short nod conveyed the fact to Stark.

“In my time among the road agents,” continued the Virginia City freighter pointedly, “I’ve had some small use for them now and again.”

“So—?”

“They will be up to you,” said Nathan Stark flatly, “before you’ve gotten shut of the first thousand.”

It was no idle threat.

Ben knew it.

The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the one bunch a man in his business did well not to deal with. Local sheriffs and even U.S. marshals could be bought off, or dodged, and in any event seldom stirred themselves after a man unless he was posted
with a fat enough price. He and Clint were new and not yet known. There wasn’t a single flybill out on them, at least that they’d heard of, let alone a posted reward.

But the Pinkertons were something else again.

They had run the Union Army’s Secret Service during the War between the States. Ben knew more than a little something about that from his fourteen months as a Union prisoner. They were a real,
organized
outfit. Once any customer of theirs put them on a man’s trail, they never quit. Just as clearly as he was sitting there on his bay stud waiting for Ben’s answer, Nathan Stark meant to put them after him and Clint.

“You’re making it tough,” he said at last. “We may have to ’leave you here’ yet.”

“You may rest assured, my friend, that I’m not intending to be ’left.’ I’m not trying to make it tough, but tempting.”

“Run them tracks another turn of the trail,” said Ben.

“You’re a Texan,” nodded Stark. “And a cowman.”

“You’ve been peekin’,” interrupted Clint accusingly.

“So?” said Ben, ignoring his brother.

“So,” said Stark, compounding the fraternal slight, “you know cattle,
and all there is to know about cattle.”

“Go on.”

“What were steers selling at when you left Texas?”

“They wasn’t sellin’.”

“Suppose somebody was buying?”

“Three, four dollars a head. All you want and buyer’s pick and choice. What you gittin’ at, Mr. Stark? You ain’t makin’ sense no more.”

“The hosses are blowed.” Clint was no longer affable nor easy. “We’re movin’.”

He ticked his mare with his Petmakers spurs, jumping her out of her head-down drowse. Ben clucked to his gelding, reined him around. “Let’s go, Mr. Stark.”

“Hold up, both of you!”

Stark jumped it at them, his excitement so real a man couldn’t miss it. Sensing it, Ben checked the black.

“Boys,” Stark swept on, shoving his last stack into the narrow opening of Ben’s hesitation. “I’m making more sense than you’ve ever listened to in your lives. Get this—”

“Make it quick,” snapped Clint. “And simple. Me and my frosted butt are gittin’ quick-sick of both of you.”

“Fortunately, my simple-minded friend,” said Stark acidly, “I can make it short enough to span even your mental gap. In Texas we buy three thousand cows for ten thousand dollars, in Montana we sell them for ninety thousand dollars.”

“I got a even better idee,” drawled Clint, loose grin returning with the thought, “In South Carolina we buy soft coal fer two bits a sack, and sell it to the Eskimos fer two dollars. Leggo my laig, mister, ’fore I jam my boot in yer mouth.”

Ben had not even heard Clint’s curdled reply. His held breath eased out now behind his slow realization of Stark’s historic proposal. “Good Gawd Amighty,” he murmured to the Virginia City man. “You fairly mean to drive a herd from Fort Worth to Virginia City!”

“I
did
mean to.”

“It’s your ’crazy scheme’ we hear about in the Black Nugget. The one you wouldn’t tell nobody.” Ben’s mind was already lost in the one world he
knew and loved. The sagebrush, saddle leather, horse sweat, cow chip world of the Texas longhorn.

“It
was.”
Stark left it short, sensing the excitement he had aroused in the southerner.

“Man,” breathed Ben softly, “it
could be
done!”

“But by Gawd it ain’t goin’ to be!” barked Clint, knowing his older brother and knowing where his mind went the minute anybody wrote “cow” on the blackboard. “Goddamit, now—”

“Ease off,” said Ben, his imagination caught up with a vision too big for Clint’s. “How’d you see it workin’, Mr. Stark?”

Quickly then, voice low, tense words drumming the darkness, Nathan Stark filled in his dream.

He told them of the Gallatin Valley, a stretch of grass bellydeep to the tallest longhorn ever calved. He told them of its cuts and draws and sheltered creek bottoms, and of a secret they held which no white man before him had learned—cattle could winter through on the open range in Montana.

He had suspected it from the beginning, had this past winter turned loose eighty head of worn-out workstock in a gamble against his hunch.

Those yoke-galled bulls had gone into the valley in September, thin and slatribbed and ready to drop. There had been blizzards in December and January, blizzards no stock could go through without stormsheds and hay corrals to hold them out of the wind and free of the snow. Ten days ago, with spring peeking over the Big Horns, he had ridden out to the Gallatin expecting to find a frozen ox every four miles from one end of its watershed to the other. Instead he had found the whole bunch, not a head missing and all grass-fat as open heifers in August, safe in a cross timbered creek draw!

He told them, then, of his planning of how it would work and what he would need. First, money. Lots of it. Then men. Many men. Texas men, who knew cattle and could take them where the devil himself, no matter he had hoofs and horns, wouldn’t dare go. And one man, especially. The man who had already ridden the trail between the Alamo and Alder Gulch. The man who not only knew the way and knew cattle—
but knew men.

The Texas cowboys could handle the herd.

But who would handle the Texas cowboys?

Clearly, there was one man alone who could do that and live to laugh about it.

Another Texan.

Then, quietly, Nathan Stark played his buried ace.

For this last man, this hoped for, all important trailboss, he, Stark, had planned an equal partnership in the Gallatin Valley ranch.
Fifty-fifty on every head that came through to Montana alive, and on every calf that was dropped in the Gallatin from then on until the tally book was closed!

When he had finished, he sat his horse in silence, staring at Ben ahead of the final pause and nod.

“That man, my friend,” he said slowly, “was going to be you.”

Ben did not answer. His thoughts, tunneled up into the whirlwind maw of Nathan Stark’s imagination, were far from Montana. His eyes looked down upon the distant, twinkling lights of Virginia City and saw them not. His face burned to the keening bite of the high country’s winter nightwind and failed to feel its sting. His ear listened to its lonely, freezing cry and heard instead the bawl of the lead steer smelling water from afar. His nostrils tightened
to the shrink of the frost in its bitter breath and smelled in its place only the sweet dust and pungent manure of the southern bedding grounds in spring.

Ben Allison was already in Fort Worth, gathering his men and grading his cattle.

Not so the towering Clint.

The younger brother shouldered his sorrel into Ben’s black.

“I know what you’re thinkin’, bud,” he said evenly. “Count me out. It’s plumb crazy. First off, it cain’t be did. Next off, we’ve nothin’ but this bastard’s word that he won’t turn us in the minute he gits the chance. Last off, the money’s ourn, he ain’t offerin’ us nothin’. Not a damn solitary thing,” he let the words drop like cold water on a flat rock, “savin’ a certain dose of hemp fever served up atop a kicked-out whiskey barrel.”

“That, for sure,” nodded Ben. “Against the long odds of bein’ suthin’ we ain’t had no other chance to be—nor ain’t likely to git no other chance to be.”

“Sech as honest men, I suppose!” rasped Clint sarcastically.

“Sech as honest men,” said Ben simply.

Clint’s snort of angry derision got stuck halfway out. And stayed there as Nathan Stark calmly spread his full hand.

“I am offering you,
each of you,”
he stressed softly, “one third of the chips in a game that could make the biggest raise any man ever played a royal flush to. More money, and
honest
money, than you could whore-up in six lifetimes. Against that,” he concluded deliberately, “you are gambling a few thousand dollars in your pocket, the spending of which, ten-to-one,
will wind you up in some state’s prison for the rest of your useless life.”

The prospect had been purposely put in terms Clint understood. And so well put as to slow even his wild mind. But that mind, once slowed, was still as devious and quick as Ben’s was straight forward and slow. It slashed now, like a wolf, at what appeared the vulnerable hock tendon of Stark’s offer.

“And what’s to keep us,” he sneered, “that is, providin’ we would admire to be honest men like my weakminded partner, here, suggests, from simply usin’ yer money to run our own herd up from Texas?”

“Two things,” said Stark quietly. “Me and the Sioux Nation.”

“Well, now,” drawled Clint, beginning in his perverse way to enjoy the debate, “you don’t bother me none whatsoever. But what’s this here about the Sioux Nation?”

“You’ve got to cross it to get to the Gallatin.”

“So, we cross it.”

“Not quite. The Army’s got it closed to through civilian travel. There’s one trail across it and that’s the Bozeman Road. Nobody gets up the Bozeman without a military permit and troop escort.”

“Fair enough,” shrugged Clint. “We git a military permit and troop escort.”

“Precisely the point, my thickheaded friend.
You
don’t.”

“It’s a deal. We don’t. Where’s that leave you?”

“I
do,”
said Nathan Stark.

“Talk don’t sell no higher in Montana than it does in Texas, Mr. Stark.” It was Ben, plodding back into the conversation. “How do we know you do?”

“You said you would listen to a man as long as he made sense. Listen to this—both ears.

“I’ve been freighting for the Union Army since Fort Sumter. The whole five years of that time from Leavenworth to Virginia City
up the Bozeman.
I can get anything I want cleared beyond Fort Laramie. And two troops of cavalry to see that it stays cleared.”

It was enough of a mouthful to make even Clint chew a minute before he spit it out. While he was chewing, Ben swallowed.