A CLOCK WITH a tinkling chime began to sound the hour of high noon as Adam Steele rode past the rough-hewn timber marker that was seared with branding irons to proclaim:
ROSARITA
Pop. Growing Fast
It was an old and weather-ravaged sign that marked the western limits of what the Virginian thought might be one of the earliest Anglo settlements in the Territory of Arizona. For as it basked in the hot and bright sun of a summer’s day it had the look of a long-established community. And, as far as he could tell from gazing down the street that ran arrow-straight for the best part of a mile, it looked like no new buildings had been put up in many years. As he kept his big black stallion moving at the same easy walk off the open trail and onto the street, he was not prepared to reach any conclusions about the derelict state of some of the widely spaced buildings that flanked the broad street.
For a moment or so he reflected upon the undeniable truth that it had been a long time since Rosarita had grown at any rate at all: then, with no great urgency, applied his mind to the search for a reason why the single street was empty of people. Not that it was important for him to know why this should be, since the quartet of horses hitched to the rail outside the Pioneer Saloon and Cafe showed him the town was not entirely abandoned. And the sixth sense for lurking menace that had saved his hide so many times before caused no stir of apprehension on this occasion as he angled his mount toward the saloon on the south side of the street’s western extremity. It was simply that it was better for him to keep his mind occupied with inconsequentials than to let it be blank and so prey to wishes that were likely to be unfulfilled and hopes probably destined to be dashed.
Closer to the saloon he was able to hear the rising and falling tones of men’s voices, engaged in desultory talk within the sun-shaded interior of the single-story, timber-built, stoop-fronted place. The clock with the chime that was pleasant to the ear had by then ceased to make its unobtrusive sound from in back of the open window of a frame shack immediately opposite the Pioneer. And for a few seconds the only sound to compete with the voices in the uncomfortable rather than unbearable heat of the new-born afternoon was the lethargic clop of the stallion’s hooves as they were set down amid lazily-eddying dust on the hard-packed surface of the street. Until a bell began to toll. Just as Steele reined in his mount and made to swing down from the saddle.
The sound was not startlingly loud, for by the time he heard the first strike it had traveled the entire length of the street. And it should not have been unexpected, for it could well have been another clock starting to sound the midday hour. But as Steele checked his dismount for a moment and peered at the distant church tower, he was sure he knew why the street was deserted. And he completed his easy swing down from the saddle to the ground against the measured tolling of the bell that sounded at the cadence of the death knell.
He did not count the number of the mournful notes that were struck, and coincidentally the final clang reverberated through the still air just as Steele slid the Colt Hartford rifle out of the boot: this after he had hitched his horse to the rail at one end of the line of animals that looked to be working cow ponies. Then, as he moved around the rear ends of the horses and sloped the revolver action rifle to his left shoulder, organ music began to drift down the street from the church. He was up the two steps, in the shade of the stoop roof, when many voices were raised in the singing of an appropriately maudlin hymn.
‘Stranger, this don’t look like your kinda town,’ a man growled sourly as Steele pushed between the batwings that creaked on dry hinges.
Steele came to an easy halt on the threshold of the place and eyed the interior and its occupants with cool indifference—like he had never expected to find here what he was seeking and was totally unimpressed with what he had found. While he made his impassive survey, he drawled in a voice that suggested he had ridden directly from Virginia to Arizona Territory: ‘No town is, feller.’
It was one of the two men behind the bar counter that ran across the rear wall of the saloon who had spoken the less than welcoming greeting: a short, fat, balding man of fifty or so who was attired like he should have been at the funeral service in an ill-fitting suit, a white shirt and a dark necktie.
‘Hell, Pa, ain’t no point in you takin’ out your bad feelin’s on a stranger who ain’t done you no wrong! And who’s fixin’ to put some money into the cash drawer, I figure?’
Steele now saw that the son of the ill-humored man was not much more than a boy: sixteen years old, he guessed. At six feet he was a head taller than his father. Much less heavily fleshed, like his frame was growing faster than the rest of his body could handle. He had blond hair and a pale complexion marred by angry patches of fresh acne and the pits of old attacks. If his father had ever been handsome it no longer showed on his fleshy and world-wearied face, but the boy had the kind of bone structure that suggested he would be a head turner among the ladies once he was out of adolescence. He was dressed in patched dungarees and a heavily stained shirt, and a Stetson was held between his shoulder blades by the leather thong looped around his neck.
‘The price of a square meal,’ Steele answered to the implied question.
‘Beef and beans. Chili it up if you want.’
‘Beef and beans will be fine, son. Coffee before and after?’
Irritation that was a match for that which seemed a permanent fixture on the father’s face paid a brief visit to the youngster’s features. But he was eager to be of service again as he swung around to go through an open doorway in back of the bar counter, and called over his shoulder: ‘I’ll get right to it.’
‘You wanna keep my son thinkin’ you’re a big man, stranger, don’t go callin’ him son no more,’ the funereal-garbed man growled, and directed some of his rancor toward the four men who were obviously the riders off the horses out front of the Pioneer. ‘Nor boy, nor kid, nor young’un nor nothin’ else along them lines.’ He sucked some saliva up from his throat and spat it expertly out of a corner of his mouth; hit a metal target on his side of the bar counter without shifting his contemptuous gaze from the quartet of cowpunchers who sat at a table midway between the entrance and the rear of the place.
It was one of six tables in the Pioneer, each of them with four attendant chairs. All the other tables looked to have been unused since opening time—were stained but clean of debris and stood on areas of floor spread with undisturbed sawdust. Playing cards were heaped on the center of the occupied table, but the game had been over long enough for all the stake money to be put away. Each of the cowpunchers had a beer glass in front of him, three of them empty except for heeltaps of foam. The fourth glass had some ash in it, from the cigar of the man who had drunk from it. The cigar smoke was sweetly fragrant but was not strong enough to effectively mask the stale odor of sweat that permeated the atmosphere of the Pioneer.
While he moved to the table in the far corner of the saloon, Steele was aware of the fact that his own clothing gave off the rancid smells of a long ride through several hot days. But if he was ever less than indifferent to how he smelled or looked after riding a long trail, it was never in such surroundings or amid such company as this. In different circumstances he might be concerned about causing offense: sometimes.
‘Don’t pay no mind to Dunc, mister,’ the cigar-smoking cowpuncher said evenly as Steele sat down: selecting the chair which put his back to the corner and gave him a clear view of the two doors, two windows and everyone in the place. ‘He does a lot of barkin’, but he ain’t never been known to bite.’
‘Not like you, I guess?’ the man opposite the cigar smoker queried. He had his back to Steele and did not turn to look at the newcomer.
‘Buck means you,’ another man at the crowded table said, and glanced at the Virginian with scant interest.
‘On account,’ the fourth man said, as he rasped a fingernail over the stubble on his left cheek, ‘that a guy who totes around a fancy rifle like you … well, he ain’t just your run-of-the-mill dude down on his luck like you might appear to be.’
‘If you didn’t tote the rifle,’ Buck added.
‘And if you didn’t take the safest seat in the house,’ the cigar smoker pointed out.
An out-of-luck dude was precisely what Adam Steele appeared to be—and had in fact been for a long time. Lately though, appearance was deceptive. In his early forties, he mostly looked older because of his hair that had prematurely turned from auburn to gray many years ago. His lean face was time-ravaged and element-burnished, and only in a certain level of light at a particular angle did his features hint at the brand of nondescript handsomeness that had been their stamp during the early, privileged years when he had played to the hilt his part as the over-indulged son of one of the wealthiest plantation owners in Virginia. Since those days, violently ended by the grueling Civil War, his coal-black eyes had witnessed far more than one man’s share of the darker side of human influence on the world: and his compactly built frame had been honed to toughness while his emotions were being squeezed dry.
During the early years of the violent peace that drove him out of the East and into the West after the war was finished, he had sought to cling to whatever he could of what once had been—in the doomed hope that he might one day re-establish some semblance of the lifestyle he had considered by right to be his. But today he was as much wiser as he was older, and the cut and condition of his clothes could no longer be taken at face value in terms of the kind of man he was.
He wore a gray Stetson with a black, tooled leather band. A blue-black city style suit. Spurless riding boots and buckskin gloves were solid black. Beneath the suit jacket was a cream-colored vest, and he also wore a white shirt with a gray silken kerchief in the vee of the open neck. The entire outfit, with the exception of the skintight gloves, had been stylish when it was new: but every item of his clothing was now old and worn and scuffed. And served a purpose that no longer had anything to do with what a man of good taste—and his tailor—might have in mind when such an outfit was purchased. Mostly his clothes were worn to keep him warm when it was cold, protect him from the heat of the sun on days like today and keep him from being arrested as a pervert in towns such as this. Except for the gloves which he wore out of habit; and the kerchief which sometimes became a weapon.
‘See Pa,’ the youngster said as he assumed a patronizing manner in the doorway behind the bar. ‘It’s like ma always said about folks. You didn’t oughta try to judge a book by its cover. Just ’cause he looks like a citified guy from how he’s dressed don’t mean he has—’
‘You take care not to burn no more skillets, Pierce!’ his father broke in with a recriminatory scowl at the boy. This after the singing of the dirge in the church down the street had come to an abrupt end and the sizzling of hot fat could be clearly heard from the kitchen in back of where the youngster stood.
Pierce’s acned face glowed red with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, but he bit back on the first retort that came to his mind. And managed to achieve a tone of ice-cold derision as he countered: ‘If I do we can always buy a new skillet. But if a person ain’t got what it takes to see no further than the end of his nose where certain kinds of men are concerned, well … he’s likely to make the kinda mistake that ain’t so easy to get over. On account of he could wind up dead.’ He swept his suddenly hard-glinting green eyes from his father to Steele to ask: ‘Right, mister?’ But before the Virginian had time to offer a response, the boy directed his demanding gaze to the other occupied table as he rapped out: ‘Ain’t I right, Mr. Ashton? Mr. Lowry? Mr. Ritter? Mr. Wylie?’
Only the cigar smoker deigned to glance at the youngster. ‘To die by mistake must surely be a bad way to go, Pierce,’ he granted, then took a final draw against the cigar before he dropped it into his foam-damp glass where it hissed out in a pall of smoke and steam.
‘Over in Texas,’ Buck put in, ‘when I was trailbossin’ a drive of three thousand head of Bar-Seven critters, we had a cook who just couldn’t get anythin’ right. Grub he served up was always either near to raw or burned to cinders. On account of he didn’t pay enough attention to what he was hired on to do. Always daydreamin’ about what else he could be doin’.’ He suddenly guffawed and changed his tone, looked at the men he was addressing as he concluded: ‘Weren’t you on that Bar-Seven drive, Rex? No, it was you, Marv. How did we kill that lousy cook? Did we drag him, hang him or just plain shoot his ass off?’
There was some more laughter, and Marv indulged in a bout of thigh slapping as he retorted: ‘There was a cook we had on the Lucky Lady spread over to Fort Worth way! He couldn’t boil water to make coffee, seemed like! What we did, we filled this real big pot with water and we wedged him into it and we boiled his ass but good!’
‘He die from that, Marv?’
‘No, Rex, but I guess you could say he came to a painful end!’
Pierce needed again to battle hard against the threat of anger born of humiliation as he listened to the banter. But he chose not to take issue with these men who he admired, even though they were making pointed fun of him. Instead, he snapped his head around to glower at his father. But before he could give snarling voice to his fury, his father warned icily:
‘Keep in mind your mother’s wish.’
It was enough to defuse his rage in an instant. And he was simply despondent as he swung around to return to the kitchen, from out of which wafted an appetizing aroma of frying meat.
‘Can I get you somethin’ to drink?’ the man behind the bar counter asked of Steele, his antagonism toward the world in general now reduced to resignation.
‘Just coffee,’ Steele answered as the cowpunchers lowered their voices to a conversational level—continued to talk of the cattle business, unconcerned now with anything or anybody outside of what they were discussing. Or so it seemed: until the bell in the church tower at the far end of the street began to sound the death knell again. This as Marv Ritter began to deal out a solitaire hand of cards, Wylie made to bite the end off another cigar and the saloonkeeper looked ready to emerge from his state of apathy and snap a barbed comment at Steele.
Buck Ashton rose to his feet and broke off what he was saying to change the subject. ‘Figure they’re about to put him in the hole now, boys. That’s the part of the whole funeral service that really gets to me.’
Rex Lowry got up from the table and so did Ritter and Wylie after the cards were neatly stacked and the cigar was returned to the pack. This as the man behind the bar counter eased his necktie loose and unfastened his shirt collar.
‘See you, Dunc,’ Wylie said with a lazy gesture of his hand toward the saloonkeeper.
‘Hey, Pierce!’ Marv Ritter called. ‘Takes a man to go along with bein’ kidded!’
‘And you did all right!’ Rex Lowry added.
‘Like, always, Mr. Nelson, we’re much obliged for your hospitality,’ Ashton said evenly, his mannered attitude emphasized by the good-humored grins worn by the others. Then, with a nod toward Steele, he predicted: ‘Food’ll be good and there’ll be plenty of it, mister. You have a nice stay in Rosarita.’
He led the way toward the batwinged entrance of the Pioneer: and now they were upright and on the move the Virginian was able to confirm his first impressions of the four men. All of them about thirty years old, all close to six feet tall and all solidly built. Ritter was a handsome, blond-haired man of the type that Pierce Nelson would probably become in later years. Rex Lowry had the darkest hair and complexion. Wylie was dark-haired, too. The elements had colored his skin, but fists that had reshaped his nose so that it pointed off center to the right had also hit hard enough above his right eye and along his left jawline to leave areas of livid scar tissue. Ashton had eyes like shiny gray pebbles and a mouth that was not shaped for easy smiling. His hair was tightly curled, even where it grew in long sideburns that reached down to the ends of his jawbones.
Just as the mounts hitched to the rail outside were quite obviously cow ponies because of the way they looked and how they were tacked out, so were these men cowpunchers. This seen in everything about them from their battered Stetsons to their work spurs, from the knots in their kerchiefs to the style of their belt buckles, from their bulging arm muscles to their bow legs. And the Colts nestled in the hip holsters of three of the men had heavily dented butt bases. The exception was Ashton, whose handgun looked to be in perfect condition from a great deal of careful attention. It had never been used as a makeshift hammer.
‘Something you can do for me, Mr. Nelson,’ Steele asked after he had completed his unobtrusive survey of the four men who were on their way out of the place.
‘That won’t mean a red cent in the cash drawer, I bet?’ Dunc Nelson growled.
On the point of pushing out through the batwings, the man with the well-preserved handgun abruptly halted, and this caused the three behind him to come to an unexpected stop. ‘Hey there, is that any way to behave toward a stranger in town?’ Ashton rebuked the saloonkeeper. ‘Pierce was right about how you shouldn’t bawl out everybody just because you’re—’
‘What d’you wanna know?’ Nelson snapped, and the glower directed toward the men at the doorway still had plenty of power behind it when he switched his gaze to the Virginian.
‘Where I can find Avery Begley.’
Nelson’s anger became confusion that immediately was mixed with some fear and suspicion. This as the four cowpunchers all caught their breath and stiffened with tension. The silence seemed to have a palpable presence that warped time after the final note of the death knell had sounded in the hot, still air of the Arizona afternoon. For there were no longer any noises of any kind from out back in the kitchen.
‘Why d’you want to find him, dude?’ Wylie said, tenderly fingering the scar tissue on his jawline.
‘Between him and me, feller,’ Steele replied.
Ashton nodded and said as he pushed between the batwings: ‘He’s down at the other end of the street, mister.’
‘Grateful to you,’ the Virginian replied as Wylie and Lowry went out of the Pioneer and Pierce Nelson showed at the doorway behind the bar counter, carrying a tray.
Marv Ritter held back to augment with the trace of a soured smile: ‘Way down at the end of the street, if you get my drift. Like almost a mile one way. And six feet the other.’
Steele nodded: ‘It’s his funeral, I reckon?’
‘You got it,’ the good-looking blond cowpuncher confirmed. And the mirthless smile was transformed into something approaching a threatening grimace before he went out to where the horses were snorting and scraping at the ground as they eagerly anticipated heading for the open range after the irksome wait at the saloon hitching rail.
‘Stranger, you just seen a bunch of sure-fire murderers walkin’ free in what used to be a fine and decent town,’ Dunc Nelson growled, keeping his voice low as he shrugged out of his suit jacket.
‘You better stop from talkin’ that way, Pa,’ his son warned, but also pitched his voice so that the men getting mounted out front of the place could not hear him. This as he brought the tray laden with a steaming plate and cup to Steele’s table. And his father followed him out from behind the bar counter, tying a leather waist apron around his middle as he headed for the debris-littered table vacated by the cowpunchers. ‘Mr. Begley died from natural causes.’
‘Grateful to you,’ Steele told the youngster as the food was placed before him and the riders spurred their mounts to an immediate gallop, east along the single street of Rosarita.
As the dust of the sudden start began to drift in under the batwings and Dunc Nelson started to gather up the empty beer glasses, Pierce felt it necessary to emphasize the point to the Virginian.
‘Doc Bascomb signed the certificate, legal and bindin’ and Sherriff Kyle went right along with what it says. Heart attack was what Mr. Begley died from.’
‘In a manner of speakin’, I can’t disagree with that, stranger,’ the elder Nelson allowed bitterly as he set the dirty glasses on top of the bar counter. Then he scowled into infinity as he rasped: ‘Seein’ as how them sons of bitches work for Lucas Hart.’
The youngster eyed Steele anxiously, seeking a reaction to what his father had implied. But when the seated man merely took off his hat and gloves and set these on the seat of a chair against which his rifle leaned, Pierce let out his pent-up breath through teeth exposed in a grin of relief. Then, with what came close to a sneering glance at his father, he asked of the Virginian:
‘So you ain’t hereabouts to take a hand in no local disagreements, mister?’
Steele speared a piece of meat with his fork, pushed it into his mouth and replied as he chewed with relish: ‘Right now there’s only one kind of beef that interests me.’