SUDDEN ARRIVED back at the JH on the morning after Cameron’s visit and its aftermath. Stunned by the events which the old homesteader recounted, the puncher listened in silence as Jake told him of Cameron’s thinly veiled threats.
‘Mebbe we ought to send Miss Susan away, at that,’ he said thoughtfully, but that young lady tossed her head spiritedly in dismissal of such a suggestion.
‘This is my home, and no thug with a gun is going to frighten me away,’ she said calmly. ‘Jim, Daddy, I appreciate your concern. But I’m not going. Anyway,’ she added in a lighter voice, ‘who’d look after our invalid?’
Green went into the little bedroom where Philadelphia lay. The fever had paled the youngster’s complexion, and he looked startlingly like the thin-faced tenderfoot who had so nearly been the victim of Jim Dancy’s liquor rage that day in Yavapai.
‘Yu shore got the easy life,’ Sudden told him with a smile. ‘Pretty nurse, good food, an’ no work.’
Philadelphia smiled ruefully. ‘Any time yu wanta change places, Jim, speak up,’ he said. ‘I’d give a couple o’ years’ pay to be able to go out huntin’ for that coyote Cameron.’
‘Yu take yore medicine,’ Sudden told him. ‘Cameron’ll keep. There’s bigger fish fryin’ in these parts. Get yoreself fit: I’ll be needin’ yu.’
‘Yu bet, Jim,’ said the boy, his face glowing.
Susan Harris bustled in and shooed the tall puncher out of the room. ‘No more of that war talk, you two,’ she scolded. ‘Philly, yu’ve got to sleep. Lie down, now.’
‘Hel – heck, I ain’t tired, Miss Sue,’ he complained. ‘I just got through sleepin’ a whole raft o’ hours.’
‘Now don’t you argue with me, Mr. Philadelphia Sloane’ the girl was saying as Green left the room, leaving the boy grinning ruefully after him.
‘Take about six months o’ that to make him sick,’ Green told his employer, who smiled fleetingly.
‘Creates a few problems, though, Jim,’ the older man said. ‘I can’t talk Susie into goin’ into town, an’ while she’s here I’m not keen on goin’ far from the house. Yet someone ought to ride over to tell the others that this Cameron’s skulkin’ around, in case anyone tries to take him on afore they know what they’re gettin’ into.’
‘Yo’re right,’ Green agreed. ‘I’ll skedaddle over to Taylor’s now. I can be there an’ back in about two hours. I’ll eat here, then ride over an’ spread the word to the others.’
Without further ado he saddled up his horse and in a few more minutes was thundering westward towards the Lazy T.
Green had been gone about an hour when the sound of a wagon coming across the open plain brought Harris once more to the door, his hand shading his eyes as he scanned the prairie. He recognized the wagon immediately, and called in to his daughter reassuringly, ‘It’s Reb Johnstone’s wagon – no need for alarm.’
A few minutes later the gangling Virginian was jumping down from the wagon seat, his cheerful Southern drawl bringing a smile to Harris’s face. With him was his neighbor, Stan Newley, smiling nervously as always, and saying little. Harris rapidly described the events of the previous day, and the tall Southerner’s face was dark as he listened.
‘He better not come snoopin’ around man place,’ he said. ‘I ain’t afeared o’ no damyankee gunman an’ that’s whatever.’
‘Yu see him, yu stay away from him, Reb,’ warned Harris. ‘He’s pizen mean an’ he’s fast enough with that gun to kill any of us afore we got rightly started.’
The Virginian’s cheerful visage was serious as he listened to this warning.
‘Mebbe yo’re right at that, Jake,’ he admitted. ‘If’n Ah run into him, mebbe I’ll pussyfoot some. Now: anything I c’n bring yu from Yavapai?’
‘Yo’re goin’ into town?’
‘Got to,’ Newley said. ‘Reb an’ me got some fencin’ to fix. We ordered some o’ them reels o’ fencin’ wire from Kansas City, an’ Lafferty’s has got them down there.’
‘Need some vittles, too,’ Johnstone added. ‘An’ by cracky, I need me a good bottle o’ sourmash. I’m plumb outa drinkin’ likker.’
Harris shook his head. ‘I hate to sound like a Jeremiah, Reb, but yu be sure an’ tread lightly in town, hear? Nice an’ easy, like. Any o’ the Saber boys down there, any sign o’ this Cameron hombre an’ yu just turn aroun’ real quiet an’ head for the Mesquites.’
‘Hell, Jake, yu sound like an ol’ woman,’ complained Johnstone. ‘We ain’t lookin’ for no fight.’
Harris nodded and turned to Newley. ‘Stan, I’m puttin’ it to yu. It’s yore responsibility, yu hear me? Any sign o’ trouble an’ yu git. Okay?’
Newley blinked nervously and nodded, don’t … don’t yu worry, Jake. There’ll be no trouble. We’ll just pick up our stuff an’ …’ As usual, his sentence ended unfinished.
Grumbling to himself about being ‘treated like some half-wit infant’, Reb Johnstone mounted his wagon. When Newley was aboard he swung the team around and cursed them up the trail into the pines at a hair-raising speed.
‘Damn’ fire-eatin’ Rebel,’ muttered Harris, shaking his head.
He stamped back into the house, where Susan, seeing his frown, asked, ‘Do you think that man will be in Yavapai, Daddy?’
‘I shore hope not,’ said her father heavily. ‘I shore as hell hope not.’
When Green reached the Lazy T, he wasted no time in observing the social niceties but told the astonished Taylor about the events of the preceding day. Taylor wasted no more time than his visitor in confirming that he would take his men across to the Harris place immediately.
‘There’s naught here that would interest a manhunter, Jim,’ he said. ‘An’ I’ve the feelin’ that we’ll all have a better chance together. I’ll get my boys to ride over an’ bring Kitson, Newley, an’ Johnstone in to the JH as well. It’ll be interestin’ if our gun-totin’ friend shows his face again.’
Green agreed to this arrangement gratefully; and Taylor agreed to explain to Harris that his rider had one more chore to do which would probably take him another twenty-four hours.
‘Get on with whatever yu want to do, laddie,’ Taylor told him. ‘I’ll tell Jake as soon as I get over there.’
The dour Scot’s unexcited reaction to the bad news from Harris’s place was a welcome tonic to Sudden, for he had been worried that Cameron’s threats had shaken the old homesteader more than he cared to admit. With his friends beside him Jake would stand firm come hell or high water.
Sudden leaned forward and patted the glossy neck of his mount. ‘Night, we got some hard work ahead of us, an’ yo’re goin’ to do most of it.’ The horse nipped playfully at his hand as Sudden extended it, and he pulled the horse’s ear, smiling. ‘G’wan, yu walkin’ gluepot, ’bout time yu worked for yore eats.’ He pointed the black stallion’s nose towards the northwest, where the frowning peaks of the Yavapai mountains towered against the sky.
Three-quarters of an hour later the sound of water echoing in a canyon reached his ears, and, spurring Midnight forward, the puncher came to a flat, open area. Ahead of him, like a giant crack in the earth’s crust, was a canyon. Sudden dismounted and approached the edge. Down below, perhaps sixty or seventy feet, the waters of the Yavapai River boiled whitely over rapids.
‘That’ll be Apache Canyon,’ he told himself. ‘We go north.’
Mounting again, he followed the edge of the canyon northwards, noting that the ground here sloped sharply downwards. Soon the canyon was behind, and the river was a broad, flat stream which raced down from the mountains ahead. Trout leaped like flashes of rainbows out of the water, and once the cowboy caught a glimpse of a big bear lumbering through the brush. Off to the right was a spur of the range of high mountains ahead, lying like the paw of an animal across the foothills. Veering towards them, Sudden could see that the spur was scored by deep ravines on its western side; and he nodded to himself at this confirmation of his own thinking.
‘Some o’ them gullies will be deep enough to be used for pennin’ cattle,’ he soliloquized. ‘My Gawd! but ain’t they purty?’
This exclamation was elicited as the sun, slipping down in the west, touched the rims of the mountains with fire. The spur of hills which were the object of Green’s attention turned bright ochre, brilliant orange, deep red, with dark black streaks where the gullies scored the rock.
‘Purty or not, however, we got to take a gander at ’em a mite closer than this, Night. Let’s get at it.’
Responding to the light touch of his rider’s heels, the black stallion lifted his heels and thundered towards their destination.