A gauze of tan dust hung over the meadow. Chavis limped over to the juniper and tried to find a handhold to lean against. Trying to conceal the fact that he was breathing hard, he stood frowning, earnestly rubbing the back of his neck with stubborn determination.
Paradise was inspecting the tie down that held the palomino on its short picket. He came away shaking his head. “Ease up, Tracy. You’ll break your neck at this rate.”
The palomino had pitched Chavis off more times than Chavis cared to count. He said, “My gut aches.”
“Sure. Usually does when you get knocked off a bucking horse every ten minutes by the clock.”
Paradise had a sleepy-eyed smile. The merciless orange sun beat down, baking Chavis’ scratched bruised body: he wore no shirt. Under the discolored skin his gnarled stomach muscles rippled. He sat down slowly, face full of dejection. “To hell with that goddam horse.”
Paradise said slyly, “That’s sure a pretty horse, Tracy. A real Sunday horse.”
“Aagh,” Chavis said in disgust. “There are some horses that just can’t be ridden, and this is one of them.”
“Don’t get your feathers ruffled, partner. You’ll ride him, I expect.”
“When he’s ready? I haven’t got that much time, John.” Chavis made a face. The palomino stood tall and golden in the sunlight. Chavis struggled to his feet. When he took a step forward, the horse’s eyes rolled and flashed; its hoofs shifted. Chavis gave Paradise an unhappy look and walked up to the horse. When he put his hand on it, he could feel it quiver. He said, “Take it easy, feller. Hold him down, John.”
The palomino’s ears lay back. Paradise yanked the horse’s head down and got a good grip on the palomino’s left ear with his teeth. His left hand was gripped at the slipknot of the rope that held the horse down. With his teeth clamped on the horse’s ear, Paradise could only grunt. The horse trembled. Chavis fitted his left boot into the stirrup and tested his weight in it. The palomino stood like a watch-spring ready to explode.
Chavis gathered the reins, reached for the saddle horn and took it in a grip an ape could not have pried loose. The pulse throbbed in his head. He felt weak in his legs; he could hardly pull himself up onto the saddle. Twelve hundred pounds of blasting powder, he thought.
“All right. Turn him loose.”
Paradise opened his mouth, spat, and stepped back.
Well, Chavis thought, here we go again.
The palomino stood bolt still.
It didn’t move a muscle.
Chavis’ stirruped feet were wrapped tight around the stallion’s barrel. His left hand held the reins and his right hand was locked on the horn. No fancy rodeo riding this time. Both hands where they were needed. From the bridle, Chavis’ long rope hung down, purposefully tied in loops and knots: if the palomino threw its rider, it wouldn’t be able to run very far without getting all tangled up in the trailing rope, tripping itself and coming to a halt. At least that much of their arrangements seemed to be working: the palomino had thrown him off at least half a dozen times this morning, but it had never gotten away from them.
“Well,” said Chavis. “What do you know.”
“Ride him, cowboy,” Paradise said, amused.
The horse stood motionless. Chavis said boldly, “I’ll bet you don’t think I can ride him.” Bravado swelled his chest and he grinned. “You’ll just have to see it to believe it.”
“I wouldn’t buy a ticket,” said Paradise.
“Has this damned horse got a wooden head?”
“We’ll see,” Paradise said. Gravely he removed his hat—and quickly waved it under the palomino’s nose.
The palomino jumped straight up in the air.
It came down on its legs, all four of them stiff.
Chavis’ stomach floated around and then the drop drove his backbone up against his skull.
He heard Paradise laughing at him. It was open, wild laughter, born of the roughhousing land of humor that was bred into Westerners. Even a gunfighter owned his share of it.
The horse went mad. It whistled, whip cracked savagely around, fishtailed and corkscrewed. It whipped him up, smashed him down in bone-shattering jolts, sprang forward and whipped back with malevolent cruelty.
Mauled, unbalanced, wheeling through the sky, Chavis saw a red curtain rise across his vision. His ears roared. The horse plunged stiff-legged again, wheeled away to the side, twisted, trying to get out from under the galling weight astride it.
Chavis’ neck snapped wickedly. He felt the sour taste of blood on his tongue. His eyes dimmed with a red haze. The palomino lashed its body into tortuous swirls: it reached around and snapped at him with its teeth, and swung its head away with a mouthful of stirrup leather. It came down and jarred Chavis’ spine; it turned away in a curling rush; heaved back on itself; racked him out of his faint precarious balance.
His teeth cracked together. His belly churned; he went blind with crimson bells, whipped to lather, lonely, beaten ....
He kept his steel grip with his knees, more by instinct than design. He had the salt taste of blood in his mouth; he could feel it in his nose, on his lips and chin. He could not see at all.
There was, lightly, the sensation of sinking into layers of misty cushions. There was no telling how long it lasted: but it ended abruptly, when the ground reached up and smashed into him savagely.
Vaguely he heard Paradise’s worried voice. “You should have cut loose, Tracy. You had no business hanging on as long as you did. Like to busted your head wide open. Look, partner, you can’t break a horse like that all at once. You’ve got to wear him down. Tracy? What the hell—can you hear me?”
Chavis struggled to find his voice. When it came, it sounded like a croak from someone else’s throat. “I can hear you.”
Paradise made a relieved grunt. “You’re the stubbornest bronc rider I ever saw.”
Chavis said, “He’s weakening.” He opened his eyes. His vision swam around for a while before he was able to bring Paradise into focus. “He’s starting to weaken, John. I could feel it. He’s starting to give up.”
The horse was tied down again, across the meadow. Paradise must have done that. Chavis’ body cried out when he moved. In agony, he got one foot under him and then the other, and pulled himself to his feet with the aid of a scrub tree. He stood there with one arm braced against the tree for support, shaking his head, squinting his eyes shut.
Paradise said, “Dizzy?”
It was frightening: for a moment there, Chavis had seen a black veil rise in front of his eyes. For a moment, he had been blind. But it passed, and he was able to straighten up and stand erect. “I’ll be all right,” he said. He started to walk toward the palomino. “I’ve just about got him licked, John,” and fainted, falling limp on the ground, completely unconscious.
Jeremy Six ordinarily made his first rounds of the day in the late afternoon, to take the town’s pulse and get the feel of things. It was part of his job to be to recognized trouble spots before they became trouble-spots.
He entered the Drover’s Rest this afternoon at precisely five-forty-five by his vest-pocket snap-lid timepiece. The place was virtually empty: Six was alone in the room with Hal Craycroft, who was tending bar.
And that was highly unusual. In an early-to-bed, early-to-rise community like Spanish Flat, it was the habit of most of the citizens to drop around to the saloon for an evening drink before heading home to supper and bed. Ordinarily the Drover’s Rest ought to have a respectable crowd at the bar by this time of day.
Six showed his surprise with a polite lift of his eyebrows. Hal Craycroft supplied an explanation:
“You won’t be finding anybody in the saloons right now, Jeremy. Surprised you didn’t hear. The whole town’s gathered down in back of Zimmerman’s place to watch the horses work out.”
“Horses? What horses?”
“Well, Ben Chandler’s for one. Ben brought down that big blaze-faced black stud from his ranch this morning. His foreman’s been giving the stud a little work-out down on the flats behind Zimmerman’s corrals. But that ain’t all. Hell, you mean you really ain’t heard? Where you been all day?”
“Out of town,” Six said, not elaborating. In fact, he had spent the whole day on a wild-goose chase. At four-thirty this morning, Dominguez had roused Six from sleep with the news that Ike and Malachi Lockhart were saddling their horses. Six had gone over to the stables and watched from across the street. When Ike and Malachi had ridden out of town, Six had got his horse and followed them. He had only returned to town half an hour ago. What had happened was enough to raise his hackles with anger. Two hours up into the Yellows, Ike and Malachi had dismounted at Stinking Creek, broken out fishing poles and sat down on the creek bank to fish. It was obvious they knew someone was watching them; it was equally obvious that they were not in any hurry, and had no intention of moving from the spot until they were sure they were alone.
Six had retreated down the mountains, worked his way back up the canyon on foot, and lain in hiding for three hours, watching the Lockharts fish. They hadn’t caught anything. Then, abruptly, at three o’clock they had sprinted to their horses and lashed the horses to a dead run, galloping away up into the mountains. It had left Six flat-footed, a quarter of a mile away from his own horse.
Disgruntled and disgusted, he had returned to town.
But there was no point in telling all that to Craycroft. And so, all Six said was, “Out of town,” in answer to Craycroft’s question.
“Well, then,” said Craycroft, “that explains it. You missed the big excitement.”
Six stiffened. “Excitement?”
Craycroft laughed. “Easy, Jeremy. Man, you’re touchy today ain’t you?”
“What excitement, Hal?”
“Nothing to get the law riled up. It’s just that we all had this horse race figured to be a sure thing. Now it begins to look like Ben Chandler’s black stud has got some competition.”
Six said, “Chavis?”
It was Craycroft’s turn to look surprised. “What do you mean? No, hell no. I ain’t seen Tracy Chavis in weeks, have you? No, it ain’t Chavis. It’s a big fat dandified dude that’s doused himself in bath oil and toilet water. Smells like a goddam distillery and goes by the name of Harry Rose.”
Six put his elbow patiently on the bar. “I may have missed something along the line. Am I supposed to see a connection between any of this and the Fourth of July horse race?”
“I’m getting to it. Hold your horses.” Craycroft frowned self-righteously; he was a story-teller whose yarn had been interrupted. He straightened his vest, cleared his throat, and resumed:
“Anyhow, as I was saying, this Harry Rose individual comes into town this afternoon with a whole goddam entourage or retinue or whatever you call it. Namely a butler and a bodyguard and a half-pint New York horse-jockey by the name of Jay Macquarie.”
“A jockey?”
“And a horse the like of which you ain’t never seen, Jeremy. A great big long-legged—”
“Hal,” Six said, “I think maybe I’d better see for myself.” He clapped his hat on his head and tramped out of the saloon.
The crowd was lined up four-deep at Zimmerman’s back fence, watching the horses. There were only two horses trotting around the pasture, but the two of them seemed to be more than enough to hold the crowd’s attention. One of them was Ben Chandler’s black stallion. Six didn’t have any trouble recognizing it. At one time or another during the past two years, Chandler had won every race-meet in the Territory with the amazingly nimble-footed black. Chandler always rode his own horses in races. He was a chunky little man, solid-muscled but small.
The other horse, with its rider, was far down at the opposite end of the pasture. When Six arrived, it was difficult to get too good a look at it. It seemed to be a large horse, sorrel in color—so much so that it was almost a bright crimson in the sunlight.
When its rider turned the sorrel toward the crowd and trotted it forward, Six frowned. He had seen that kind of gait before, and that kind of riding. The rider didn’t sit the saddle and sway with the horse’s gait, the way a cowboy would; this rider posted: he bobbed up and down in the stirrups, in time to the trotting footfalls of the horse. And the smart clop-clop of the horse’s hoofs told Six something else. This was no ordinary range horse. This was a horse bred for racing.
The sorrel made a half-turn and rose to a canter. Six watched the diminutive rider, the little pancake English style saddle (by a conservative estimate, it weighed about one-third as much as the lightest of Western stock saddles), the skeleton stirrups and separated pairs of reins and bobbed tail of the horse. It was almost a scene right out of a foxhunting lithograph, except that the little rider wasn’t wearing the colors. He wore, instead, a gray-blue denim shirt and broadcloth trousers. Nothing unusual in that. What was unusual was the size of the rider. What had Craycroft said his name was? Jay Macquarie, that was it. Jay Macquarie, jockey. Macquarie probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds, soaking wet.
Six’s mouth was drawn into a strict, spare line when he pushed his way through the crowd and ducked through Zimmerman’s fence.
He was headed toward the three men who stood obliviously on the grass, a little way into the pasture from the fence. All of them wore Eastern-style clothes, and it was evident from Craycroft’s description which one of them had to be Harry Rose. He was twice the size of anybody else in sight; he wore a blossom in his lapel; his hair was wet-down, his mustache waxed, his stovepipe hat raked to one side, and his pudgy fingers festooned with jewelry. His hair and mustache were a dirty sand color; his eyes were pouched behind fat bulging cheeks, but what was visible of them was startling: Harry Rose had keen, shrewd eyes that were nothing like the soft body that contained them. They were hard as gems.
Two men were fixed to Harry Rose. One of them, in shirtsleeves and suspenders, carried a pair of freshly shined boots. The boots were too big to fit him; they must be Rose’s boots. That one, then, was the butler.
The other one was about Six’s height. He wore a bowler hat and a gray striped suit. He had fists like hams; his chest was twice the girth of Six’s, and Six was far from being thin-chested.
Approaching the improbable trio of men, Six allowed his face to settle into an expression of patient resignation. He walked right up to them and said, “Afternoon, gentlemen.”
The big-chested one in the bowler hat swung around and sneered. “Yeah? What’s it to you?”
“Mind your manners, feller,” Six murmured. “I want to talk to Rose, here. Not you.”
“Mr. Rose, bucko.”
Six sighed. Nowadays it seemed that everybody wanted to be called mister. It was a courtesy he refused to extend to such people as Ike Lockhart, but in this case he decided not to quibble. “Mr. Rose, then.”
Rose’s fat face stirred. He said to the bowler-hatted man, “Ask this person what he wants, Mr. Clete.”
“Yes, sir,” said the man in the bowler hat. He turned to Six. “Yeah. What do you want?”
Six’s lips turned a little white. He took a single pace toward Harry Rose. “Talk to me, not to him.”
Harry Rose lifted a fat hand and brushed an imaginary speck of lint off his sleeve. He glanced briefly at Clete, whereupon Clete expanded his enormous chest and grinned; shifted into a boxer’s crouch and aimed a blow at Six’s jaw.
It was a blow that would have knocked Six’s head off, if it had landed. But Jeremy Six was an experienced hand at rough-and-tumble. This particular afternoon he had had a trying day and was particularly inclined to indulge Mr. Clete’s obvious desire for a definitive test of fighting strength. In no mood for it, Six simply stepped aside from Mr. Clete’s battering-ram of a fist, let Mr. Clete spin past him, and swung up his revolver in time to catch Mr. Clete across the back of the neck as Mr. Clete was going by.
Mr. Clete dropped plumb, as if he had been pole axed. Six put away his gun with a sardonic look at the butler, who evaded his glance.
Harry Rose looked directly at Six for the first time. “Neatly done. Very neatly done, sir.”
“That’s an improvement. Now at least you’re talking to me. Do I have to knock someone out every time I want your attention, Mr. Rose?”
“I hardly think that will be necessary.” A brief grin touched Rose’s heavy lips. “I take it you have something to say to me?”
Six was watching Mr. Clete roll over on his back and rub his neck. Clete groaned and rolled back and forth in pain. His employer ignored him altogether.
Six said, “I’m the marshal of this town. Chief of Police to you.”
It made Rose look him up and down. The fleshy face lifted an inch. “How quaint,” he murmured.
Deliberately assuming a cultivated accent, Six spoke with no trace of his ordinary drawl: “Indeed, Mr. Rose. I apprehend that you’ve come to us from a place which has conferred upon you the unjustifiable conclusion that you are superior to us. In fact, sir, it is no conclusion at all, but rather a surmise, and an inaccurate one at that.”
Dropping the pose, Six said, “And where did you come from, anyway?”
Rose was slightly taken aback—astonished enough to have to gather himself together before he answered. “Most recently from Mexico, I’m sad to admit. We’ve just done the circuit of race meetings in Chihuahua and Sonora. It came to our attention that you good people were preparing to hold a horse race on Independence Day, and so my associates and I decided to make a slight detour in order to enter your contest.”
Mr. Clete got to his feet and stood swaying, holding his head, glaring balefully at Six.
“Before that,” Rose explained, “we came from Kentucky, where the Red Beauty you see there was raised. Originally, of course, I hail from New York City.”
“The biggest hick town in the world,” Six remarked. He saw Rose’s cheeks darken with a scowl; it made Six smile grimly. “You’ll find we’re not fools here, Mr. Rose. We’ve all seen, or at least heard of, Kentucky racing horses before. But this isn’t a gentleman’s kind of race we run out here, and it won’t be run on a smooth flat track. It’s a cross-country race, Mr. Rose. Six miles of up-and-down country. Creeks to straddle and fences to jump, hairpin turns to make, hills to climb up and climb down. These cowponies are used to that kind of running. They’ve done it all their lives. I wouldn’t count too much on that Kentucky horseflesh keeping up, Mr. Rose.”
“Just let me worry about that, Marshal.”
“I felt it my duty to give you fair warning,” Six said. “What you do from here on is your own business. But let me ask you this. What do you expect to gain? There won’t be enough of a purse in this race to make it worthwhile for all of you to have come this far.”
“I intend to do a sizable amount of side-betting,” Rose said.
“Do you think you can find enough of that kind of money in this valley?”
“That’s a chance I’ll have to take,” Rose said, with a synthetic smile. “And now, Marshal, you must excuse us. We must attend to our steed.”
Six watched the three of them walk across the field toward the pacing sorrel. Mr. Clete was still massaging the back of his neck. Once he turned around and glared at Six.
Six shook his head and turned back toward the fence. Hal Craycroft was just coming down from the back of Zimmerman’s barn. Craycroft met him at the fence. “What did I tell you?”
“It’s a pretty horse, all right. But a track-bred race horse can’t jump Ransome’s picket fence or slide down the backside of Ocotillo Hill any better than a plow horse. I’d be inclined to favor Chandler’s black.”
“From the looks of that sorrel, I’d say it’ll be anybody’s race. Maybe he can’t jump as clean, but with the legs and chest on that animal I’d give him a good chance to beat Chandler’s black on the straightaways.”
Six said, “Well, Hal, as to that, I guess we’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?” He turned, pushed through the crowd, and went up toward town, frowning darkly. Too many complications were pressing in on him. Chavis’ long absence, the presence of Seth Lockhart in his jail and the leering obsequiousness with which Seth’s brother and father roamed the town, the sudden arrival of the fat horse-owner from New York, the approach of summer heat—all these things added together to make a mixture that didn’t seem particularly healthy.
In a depressed frame of mind, Six reached town and walked down the street toward his office. The street was empty—everybody was down at the pasture, having a look at the horses. Well, the Fourth of July was still ten days away. What complicated the problem was the fact that the circuit judge had been forced to make a change in his schedule, and wouldn’t be able to make Spanish Flat until next week. That left the John Paradise hearing hanging fire, and it left Seth Lockhart in jail, until the first of the month. Six wished both were out of the way. He would be glad to get rid of Paradise—even though he hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the gunfighter in weeks, he knew Paradise was still around the valley, and the man meant nothing but trouble. As for Seth Lockhart, that whole plan had backfired when Ike and Malachi had refused to rise to the bait. They hadn’t made a move. Just sat around town and grinned.
Six didn’t like any of it.
And what he learned in the next fifteen minutes didn’t make him any happier at all.
He was passing the front of the Wells Fargo office, intending to go right on by the place and continue up to his office, when Bob Tell came out the door and stopped him. Bob Tell was the Wells Fargo manager.
“See you a minute, Jeremy?”
“Sure,” Six said, without enthusiasm. He retraced his steps as far as the office door, and went inside with Tell.
Tell was a bald young man with nervous hands that kept fooling with his pipe. He packed it, lit it, smoked it, let it go out so he could light it again, and generally fidgeted continuously. If he wasn’t actually nervous himself, he managed to make everybody else nervous.
Tell said, “Sit down.”
“I’m kind of late on my rounds,” Six said. “Is it something important?”
“Afraid it is.” Tell went around behind his desk, shuffled through a mass of papers and finally extracted one. He set it down on the desk and fooled with his pipe while he studied the document and spoke without lifting his eyes.
“You probably know that Wells Fargo has taken over the contract for the transport and delivery of Army payrolls.”
“What about it?”
“Ordinarily,” Tell said, lighting his pipe, “the regimental payrolls for the Sixth Cavalry and the Tenth Cavalry are cleared through the El Paso office by the twenty-fourth of the month, so that they can be delivered to the various army posts around the Territory by the last day of the month. But this month, with all the Independence Day inspections and celebrations coming up, the War Department got a little behind on its schedules. So what happens is this.”
Tell took the pipe out of his mouth and started to turn it around in his fists, as if it were a gun, a pencil, a knife, and finally a pointer. “The Army boys aren’t going to get their payroll on time this month. But Wells Fargo has agreed to expedite delivery as much as possible. That means we won’t be going through the usual channels of distribution out of El Paso. Here, a minute—look at the map and you’ll see what I’m getting at.”
Arizona was still part of the Military Department of New Mexico. The map on the wall behind Tell’s desk included both Territories. The stem of Tell’s restlessly moving pipe ticked off places as he named them.
“Fort Defiance. Fort Apache. Fort Lowell. Fort Huachuca. Fort Yuma. Fort Bowie. Fort Grant. Fort Whipple. Fort Union. And so on and so forth. You’ve got to distribute a payroll to all of them, in such a way that everybody gets paid as near the same time as anybody else. Obviously the best way to do it is to set up a central distribution point right in the dead-center of the area, and as soon as the payroll arrives, you divide it up and dispatch it to the forts. Do you follow me?”
This, Six thought, is just all I need. He didn’t say it, though. What he said was, “I follow you all the way up to the point where Spanish Flat is dead-center in the area you want to cover.”
“Exactly.”
“In other words, we are going to play host to the Army payroll for the entire Southwest territory?”
“Exactly,” Bob Tell said again, lighting his pipe.
Six said, “All right, since you obviously want me to ask. How big is the payroll?”
“Not too big, this time around. Most of the forts are under strength.”
“How big, Bob?”
Tell said, almost apologetically, “Sixty-five thousand dollars.” He added quickly, “In gold, that weighs about three hundred troy pounds. The Army always pays off in gold.”
“And how long,” Six said determinedly, “do we have to sit on it?”
“Well, it’ll get here maybe on the first of the month, maybe on the second. Either way, the Army’s going to have all its personnel tied up in maneuvers and celebrations and parades and the like for the Fourth. So they won’t be able to send dispatch riders to pick up the payroll until the next day. That is, they’ll leave their home bases on the fifth—some of them may not get here until the sixth. But in general I’d say were going to have the payroll on our hands for four days, give or take a day.”
“Wonderful,” Six intoned gloomily.
“It’s not all that bad, Jeremy. Nobody knows about it except the company, and the Army, and now you and me.”
“Just half the population to the south and west of Santa Fe.”
“Oh, come on.” Tell laughed nervously. “You and I are the only men in Spanish Flat who know about it. And it’ll stay that way, believe me. The stagecoach that drops the payroll off here will keep right on going to Yuma and San Diego. I’ll have it locked up in the safe right here in the office. Nobody will have to know a thing about it until it’s been here and gone on its merry way.
“Well,” said Six, “we’ll do what we can, Bob.” He gave the man a smile that was not altogether wholehearted, and went out. The sun was going down. The crowd was coming back into town from Zimmerman’s pasture, and he saw Ben Chandler leading his big black stallion into the livery stable down the street.
He thought about the impending payroll, and he thought bleakly, again, That is all I blame well need.