IT WAS VERY quiet down in the bottom of the hollow again now that the Rosarita men had ridden into the timber. And, just as when Steele had first approached the house on the track between the overgrown fields, so now as he closed with it from the rear the only sign of life within the dilapidated building was the smoke rising from the chimney.
He thought he could detect an appetizing aroma of frying meat intermingled with the acrid taint of burning wood. And as he rode slowly around the front corner of the barn and reined in his mount at the side of the back yard his mind was filled with the tantalizing image of sharing a home-cooked meal with the easy on the eye Charlotte Begley while they discussed the details of a deal. The woman having commanded her snotty son and her swaggering protector to remain silently in the background while she listened with high interest to how a partnership could work. She and Dale and Fletcher Arness would have to return to the city from whence they had come, of course. And Steele would require first refusal to purchase the property if ever a sale was to be contemplated. For his part, the Virginian would put the land to good use raising blood-stock horseflesh and would see that it was kept in fine order—which included dealing with the trouble caused by the Double-H owner or anybody else.
Of course, such a scheme assumed that the Begleys had no firm plans of their own for their inheritance … And probably assumed a whole lot of other things, Steele allowed with a fleeting grimace as he swung down out of the saddle and eyed the windowless rear wall of the house. It was not in his nature to extend his thought processes so far in advance based upon such unknowns and unpredictables. But, dammit, he had been doing much of late that was uncharacteristic of him. Which had to be a measure, he reflected ruefully, of just how intently he was getting to desire the fulfillment of his ambition.
Hoofbeats of a bunch of horses at the gallop sounded in the distance and for perhaps a full two seconds he had the impression that he heard this only in imagination: and he almost conjured up a picture of a herd of saddleless and unbridled thoroughbreds fired to race across the open range for no other reason than the simple joy of living free on such beautiful land.
But then a woman shouted: ‘Fletcher, riders coming!’
And the quiet smile of pleasure that had begun to spread across Steele’s face was gone in an instant. And a grimace of malcontent was back in the line of his mouth and the coldness of his black eyes. This as he led his horse toward the entrance of the barn where one of the double doors still stood wide open from when the Rosarita men had crowded onto the threshold with their prisoners to listen to Kyle talk them out of a possible lynching. Now, after he and the stallion were inside the barn, Steele dragged the door almost closed again. One of the hinges protested rustily, but the creaking sound would not have carried far against the rising volume of hoofbeats at the gallop. The movement of the door could have been seen though: by the frontrunners of the bunch of men who plunged their mounts out of the trees and through the gateless entrance to start down into the hollow.
Nine or ten men, most of them obscured to a greater or lesser extent by the billowing dust of the gallop. But as they drew closer to the house, so they slowed their pace: and over lessening distance with a less dense cloud of dust to contend with, Steele was able to recognize the curly-haired Buck Ashton as one of the two men at the head of the column. The scar-faced Irwin Wylie was in the bunch, also. And he didn’t doubt that Rex Lowry and Marv Ritter had come calling on the new owners of the place, too. But there was little time to attempt more than a cursory survey of the riders before they dropped down into the hollow low enough to be lost to his sight by the intervening bulk of the house. And for most of the final few seconds when the frontrunners were still in view he concentrated on the man riding to the left of Ashton.
A silver-haired man with a face stained dark brown by the elements, the skin that was stretched over the sparse flesh and prominent bone structure looking to be heavily and deeply lined. Not a young man. Not tall or with a powerful build. But there was something in the way he sat his horse that suggested he was a man who possessed a commanding presence, and Steele guessed this was Lucas Hart himself. He was dressed in much the same style as the younger men—in the working cowpuncher’s garb such as his top hand and the other three had worn yesterday as they sat out the funeral in the Pioneer.
The Virginian went to his horse to slide the Colt Hartford out of the boot, then left the animal to wander at will in the sunlit barn that was redolent with equine smells that did not quite yet mask the more pungent taint of the lotion Doc Bascomb had used to clean the sheriff’s bullet wound. And sweated more heavily as he returned to the cracked open door. Was aware, perhaps only in his imagination, of some old pains starting to hurt a little. He could no longer detect the fragrance of frying meat in with the wood smoke that still rose in a straight column from the chimney at one end of the house.
For a while he listened to the many sounds made by many men reining in their mounts after a lengthy gallop. And he did not concentrate upon trying to hear anything else until there was just an occasional animal snort, human spit and a combination of heavy breathing from out front of the house. Was tensed, in particular, to hear if any Double-H man was coming out back to check on the barn.
‘What the hell do you people want?’ Dale Begley snarled suddenly.
‘Tell you what we don’t want,’ came the answer, and Steele recognized the voice of the blond, good looking Marv Ritter. ‘We don’t want no lip from some sassy kid who ain’t near old enough to have stopped a-suckin’ on his momma’s titty.’
‘Why, you—’
‘Shut up, Dale!’ Arness snapped to cut in on the youngster’s shrill anger.
But it was apparently not sufficient to check his rage at the insult. And there was the sharp crack of an open-handed blow on bare flesh. Dale’s shriek was pitched higher than his voice had been. Then this venting of pain was cut short by his mother as she warned in an ice-cold tone:
‘One day you’ll learn to do as you’re told by those who know best, son.’
There was a pause of a second or so before the owner of the Double-H spread said: ‘My apologies for the uncouthness of my help, Mrs. Begley. I guess most of my men are not too familiar with the genteel ways of city folks like you. But, by the same token, I would have expected folks such as you to open your door to visitors making a neighborly call.’
‘There!’ the woman answered, sounding less cold. And the way she flung open the door so that it slammed violently against the inside wall emphasized the strain she was under to keep control of her anger. ‘And it’s Ms. Begley. Avery and I never married.’
‘That kinda makes the kid a bastard, I guess?’ either the scar-faced Wylie or Rex Lowry taunted.
Then followed a sudden upsurge of sound that caused Steele to tense for the expected climax—as many men drew and cocked their guns. But Lucas Hart barked:
‘Hold it, boys!’ Then he moderated his tone to add: ‘Let’s do our best to keep this polite, uh?’
‘Ms. Begley and I didn’t exactly have the welcome mat put out for us when we tried to call on you last night, sir,’ Fletcher Arness said, and sounded firmly in control of himself.
‘Touché,’ the rancher allowed, and pronounced it impeccably. But then he over-emphasized his southwestern accent as he went on: ‘Like you city folks say. But we folks out here in the sticks, we’re the early to bed, early to rise kind. Except for those that hire on to see a man’s property and belongings are protected.’ As Steele eased the door open a little further, the rusty hinge hardly making itself heard, he recalled what Orville Kyle had said about the newcomers to the Begley place being out when he came back here to rest up in the middle of the night after the Nelson boy shot him.
‘Dale was a stupid fool to go out to the Double-H the way he did at the time he did,’ Arness admitted. ‘But the men who stopped him knew who he was. Just as they knew who we were when we got there before they could do the boy serious harm.’
‘They wouldn’t have—’
There was the crack of another open-handed blow that caused the youngster to cry out again. His mother warned him tautly:
‘You’ve been told to hold your tongue!’
‘The boy sounds like he could have been spoilt in the past, Mrs. … Ms. Begley,’ Hart said conversationally as Steele slid out of the barn doorway and moved between the hog pen and the chicken run, heading for the firmly closed rear door of the house. ‘Reaping the error of your early ways now.’
‘I’d be appreciative if you would get to the point of your visit here, Mr. Hart,’ the woman said as Steele pressed his back to the wall on the hinged side of the door, the Colt Hartford angled diagonally across the front of his body in tight fists.
‘I was about to remark that you are now showing wisdom in the way you chastise your son, Ms. Begley.’ This close to the door, Steele heard muted whispers from inside the house. Visualized the youngster rasping a curse at the rancher and his mother hushing him up with a dire warning. ‘And to say I trust you may be as wise in accepting the offer I intend to make to you.’
‘To buy us out?’ Arness asked.
‘I am given to understand that the late lamented Avery Begley left this property to his wife,’ Hart countered in a dismissive tone.
‘Guess his bastard son maybe has a say in—’ one of the Hart hands started.
‘Listen you bunch of smart aleck know-it-alls!’ Charlotte Begley snarled and Steele heard her heavy footfalls as she stomped out over the threshold at the front of the house. And although she had now abandoned her attempt to remain coldly aloof to the unwelcome visitors she was able to hold her temper on a tight rein.
‘Charlotte!’ Fletcher Arness rasped anxiously.
‘Mother!’ Dale yelled, in greater fear.
She ignored both pleas to hurl her contemptuous admonition at Hart and his men. ‘I was married for more than two years before Dale was born! His father—’
‘Lady, we’re not concerned with none of that,’ Wylie broke in. ‘Right, Mr. Hart?’
‘What’s over and done with is over and done with,’ the rancher said. ‘Whether it happened all those years ago. Or just last night.’
With his mother well beyond arm’s reach out front of the house, Dale felt secure enough from punishment to snarl: ‘I went out there to tell you not to bother trying to scare us off, big shot!’
‘My men told me that, son. And my men don’t lie to me,’ Hart acknowledged evenly. ‘Ms. Begley, Mr. Arness … They also told me you apologized for the boy’s crass behavior in trying to invade my privacy at such an ungodly hour. Then you told my men much the same thing as the boy had said. But in a more civil manner. You are unprepared to entertain any kind of offer for the property you have inherited?’
‘That’s about what happened and what was said,’ Arness allowed and it sounded to Steele as if the man had now stepped outside to be with Charlotte Begley.
‘It was not our intention to put it so bluntly,’ the woman augmented. ‘But since your men were on the point of flogging my son my temper became somewhat frayed.’
‘I was told the boy needed to be restrained.’
‘Damn right I did.’
The woman made a sound of irritated impatience. Then pointed out: ‘You are right, Mr. Hart. It is over and done with. It was a stupid and unseemly disturbance in the middle of the night. But as far as we are concerned, it served a useful purpose. Or should have done. You know we have no intention of selling the Begley ranch to you. Nor, I should perhaps add, to anyone else.’
For a stretched second the Virginian had the notion his return to the place had been seen and Charlotte Begley knew he was close enough to be eavesdropping on the exchange.
‘But apparently it was not made plain enough to you?’ she went on. ‘Or you and your bully boys would not be here now?’
‘I have a great deal of trust in my men when they are doing my bidding, ma’am,’ Hart replied. ‘I have never instructed them to negotiate property purchases on my behalf. I am here now to offer you—’
‘A million dollars—’
‘Do not be ridiculous, Ms. Begley,’ Hart snapped.
‘If you had let me finish,’ the woman snapped back, ‘you would have heard me say a million dollars would not be enough to buy one square foot of this land you killed Avery to get!’
‘Careful, lady,’ Buck Ashton advised icily.
‘That’s all right, my friend,’ the rancher said, but there was a tautness in his tone that suggested it required an effort by him to say this. But Steele was sure he expended a far greater quantity of nervous energy as he reached for the handle of the door, turned it a fraction of an inch at a time and then began to ease it inwards as soon as he felt the tongue had been withdrawn out of the recess. This as Lucas Hart was saying: ‘These people are strangers hereabouts and maybe they’ve heard some unfounded rumors.’ He hardened his tone then, as he went on: ‘But let me tell you, Ms. Begley, Mr. Arness and you, boy—my men don’t lie to me and I lie to no one. I nor anybody working for me killed Avery Begley. I will admit that I made it difficult for him to live here as my neighbor. But it was never my intention he should die.’
Steele had eased the door open wide enough so that he could swing away from the wall in an arcing about-face, so that he was able to peer with one eye through the crack between the door’s edge and the jamb. As he completed the silent move he took a double-handed grip on the uncocked Colt Hartford again: the rifle angled so he could use the muzzle as a ram to thrust the door wide.
‘No matter what you intended, he’s under six feet of earth in the Rosarita cemetery now, Mr. Hart,’ Charlotte Begley accused in a toneless voice. And she could not have directed a greater weight of contemptuous reproach at the rancher had she shrieked the accusation at the top of her voice.
Steele could not see Dale within his restricted field of vision across the spartanly furnished room. But he could hear heavy, frightened breathing from somewhere over to the right. And he guessed the boy was at the window he had shattered with a gunshot earlier. What the Virginian was able to see across a pine table and the top of a chair back was the wide-open front doorway and a section of the yard beyond. Where, some six feet away from the threshold, Charlotte Begley and Fletcher Arness stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the Double-H hands, who remained in their saddles. But the men were no longer in a double-file column. They had moved into a tight-knit group, with the commanding figure of Hart and the curly-haired Ashton beside him still at the center front. Within the confined view through the door frame Steele could see five other men. The scar-faced Wylie who was smoking a cigar: the others unknown to him. If any of these men had drawn a revolver from his holster or a rifle from his boot at the outset of the confrontation, all their guns had since been put up.
‘That cannot be denied,’ Hart responded to the woman’s charge with a slight inclination of his head. Now that he had a closer and clearer view of the man, the Virginian thought the rancher was older than he had seemed at first sight. Perhaps was even a well-preserved seventy. ‘And it takes us into the realms of what has been done and how it cannot be undone. We must concern ourselves with what remains to be achieved. Or wasted.’
‘That sounds like a threat?’ Arness muttered.
‘The lady has said her last word on the subject of what she intends to do with this property?’ Hart countered.
‘I intend to live here,’ Charlotte Begley told him resolutely.
Hart inclined his head again and said evenly as he backed his horse out from the center of the group: ‘I wasted a great deal of time with the previous owner and time is something a man of my advanced years cannot afford to waste. So I do not propose to squander very much more in the pursuit of this particular aspiration of mine.’
‘Is that your last word, or is it a threat, Mr. Hart?’ Arness asked, and stepped protectively in front of the woman.
The rancher checked the backward movement of his mount, and his face that had been hard set now expressed sadness as he answered: ‘To you, mister, my last word is goodbye.’
Irwin Wylie was fast on the draw, but one of the other men hidden to Steele’s narrow-eyed gaze was faster. Unless he already had his gun clear of the holster. Whichever, the out of sight man shot first—as the woman vented a strangled cry of shock and Steele started to thrust open the door with the muzzle of the Colt Hartford.
On the periphery of his vision the Virginian saw Dale swing away from the window, the boy’s expression a match for the emotion that had sounded in his mother’s scream: this as the center of his attention was held by the spurt of gunsmoke with a streak of flame at its tail that exploded with a bullet from the barrel of Wylie’s revolver.
Then Fletcher Arness started to go down, executing a half turn away from the position he had taken as a shield in front of the woman. Both his hands clutched at the area on the left side of his chest from which blood was spurting. There was a less forceful eruption of bright crimson from the hole above his left eye into which the second bullet had tunneled. He was rigidly dead as he began the fall, then collapsed into a limp heap on the sun-bright yard as his muscles gave a final spasm and surrendered their functions.
For a fraction of a second Charlotte Begley and Adam Steele were held in frozen attitudes. She in a state of debilitating horror as she stared down at the dead man. The Virginian locked in a forward-striding action as he gazed at Dale Begley: unable to move as he recognized with a blinding flash of reason that he was a stretched second away from getting himself killed. And killed for no good reason. Killed because he had reacted with reckless instinctiveness to the brutal gunning down of an unarmed man. A man who, if he was anything to him, was his enemy. In terms of him being allied with Charlotte Begley in her determination not to sell her inheritance.
The scar-faced Wylie had cocked his revolver again by then. And exposed his teeth in an eager grin—teeth that were slightly parted so that they gripped without biting off the end of his wispily smoking cigar. Grin, cigar and handgun were all aimed through the front doorway of the house, across the table and chair back and at the unmoving Virginian who was framed on the rear threshold.
Now Steele moved the gloved thumb of his left hand, to pull back the hammer of the Colt Hartford. The sound made by the cocking action of the rifle was masked by the thud of Dale Begley’s footfall as the boy came far enough across the room to reach for the Winchester that Amess had left leaning against the side of the pine table.
‘I’ll kill you, boy!’ the Virginian roared with such power that his voice seemed to fill the tiny house and explode out of the shattered windows and open doorways with a tangible force.
It acted to freeze the youngster while his clawed hands were still several inches short of getting a grip on the leaning Winchester. And in the moments of utter silence that followed the bellowed threat, Steele sensed many more eyes than those of the grinning Wylie and the perplexed Dale Begley fastened upon him.
‘You …?’ the boy croaked.
‘Why?’ his mother managed to vent from her shock-constricted throat.
‘You bast—’ the youngster started, and leaned far enough forward to get a hand on the Winchester.
But Steele plunged into fluid movement, too. Leapt off the threshold rather than took a stride toward the snarling boy. Half turned from the waist and swung the rifle into a fuller turn. So that the muzzle raked away from its aim at Dale Begley. But the side of the rosewood stock made vicious contact with the side of the boy’s head. Knocked him out on his feet and sent him sprawling across the floor like he was a loosely-packed sack of feed.
His mother lunged away from the dead Arness and flung herself down onto her haunches beside him as he came to rest on the threshold of the front door. And Steele was careful to keep the Colt Hartford aimed at the floor as he replied to her query:
‘Things aren’t always how they seem, ma’am.’
‘I can believe what I see with my own eyes!’ she challenged as she sank forward onto her knees and held the blood-leaking head of her son against the slope of her thighs; pushed out one of her hands that was stained red.
‘Don’t they say you sometimes have to be cruel to be kind?’ Steele drawled as he advanced slowly across the room.
‘Hell, we can see you’re all heart,’ Irwin Wylie growled sardonically and then a hollow laugh exploded from between his clenched teeth. Which he ended abruptly to add: ‘You must have one big as Texas, I figure.’
Steel came to a halt at the doorway that was blocked by the unconscious boy and his kneeling mother, swept his cold-eyed gaze over all the mounted men and drawled: ‘For a while there, I reckon I had a head that was about as empty.’