A hot desert wind ruffled the brush lightly, swirled the sand, and moaned a little under the eaves of the gray-weathered prospector’s shack. Outside the shack, tethered to a broken down spring wagon sunk halfway to the hubs in sand, were four horses, saddled, still lathered from a workout under the glare of the noonday sun.
From inside the shack there came suddenly the flat, hard retort of a Colt .45. The horses shied a little, but none of them pulled loose.
The cabin door, just rough boards nailed together and swung on a couple of screechy hinges, was yanked open. Out came a square chunk of man with a smoking Colt in his huge fist, and fire flashing in his eye. He had deep-sunken eyes, and bushy eyebrows over them. He looked like a grizzly bent on tearing apart an intruder.
He stalked out into the sun, jabbing his Colt back into a worn, dusty holster, and behind him came two other men. One was tall and awkward, thin as a rail and with a face like a dried prune. The other was short and had little watery pig eyes which he blinked rapidly in the sun. Both men wore six-shooters and worried looks.
The three of them got on their horses.
“We cain’t just go off and leave him,” the rail said. “Supposin’ somebody comes by this way?”
The blocky man’s anger was cooling, like a stove after the fire is out. He looked at the rail. “Don’t you worry none, Pole Turner. Who’s ever going to know who done it? By the time anybody comes ’long, there’ll be nothin’ but dried out bones anyway.”
“But they’ll be lookin’ for us, Boss,” the pig-eyed man complained. “Supposin’ he told somebody he was meetin’ you here? If we buried him, it’d look like he never got here, or left safe and sound.”
“It ain’t worth it,” the chunky boss said shortly. He was impatient. “I ain’t sweatin’ my sweat over a tinhorn riverboat gambler like him.”
“Okay, Boss, but I don’t like it. What’re we going to do about his hoss? Cain’t just leave him here.”
“Why not? He’ll go wild in a bit.”
“We could take him into Killer Ledge and sell him,” Pole Turner suggested, doubtfully.
“And have people remember who it was sold the dead man’s horse?” the pig-eye returned. “Not me.”
“What’s your notion then?” the boss asked.
“I say we lead the horse off a good way, up into the mountains maybe, and turn him loose on some good grass. He won’t wander, and there won’t nobody up there know who he belongs to.”
The boss shook his head. “It’s too risky. It’d be more dangerous than just leavin’ the critter here. Somebody might see us while we were on the way. Anyway, I ain’t sweatin’ my sweat over Pete Dolan. He’s cost me enough time and energy as it is. Come on, boys, we got chores to do over on the east range.”
With that he led off, and the others followed, moving easily with the cantering of their horses. In a few moments they were gone amongst the thorny mesquite and squatty greasewood, leaving their tracks to the low moaning wind.
Sand trickled, dried stalks rattled, a loose board in the shack bumped dully at spaced intervals. The sky was gunmetal hard, the sun a white hot brand burning in a hole it had made up there. For a few moments it appeared the dead man and the horse were alone on the vast desert.
Across the tiny rill of a creek, in an oak thicket, there was a slight rustling, and in a moment a hard-looking man appeared. He stopped on the creek bank, shifted his battered old flop-brim hat, and stood there for a moment with his hands on his hips.
The renegade was a lean, muscle-knotted fellow, wearing a sweat-stained blue shirt faded from endless days in the sun. He wore baggy brown cotton pants of an indeterminate cloth, and ankle-high boots cracked with age and leaking toes. His face was lined and leathery from constant squinting, but his blue eyes were sharp and hard, and right now they were bright with calculation.
He brought up a blunt right forefinger and scratched slowly just below his chin. Then he went across the creek and up over a dune of sand to the cabin door, still ajar. The horse tied to the wagon wheel looked at him and pricked its ears.
The man stepped into the shack and glanced around.
On the dirt floor, in a puddle of blood, there was the body of a man in a seedy, worn-out suit. The renegade looked down thoughtfully into the open eyes, but didn’t recognize the dead man. He squatted and went through the pockets, came up with cigarette makings and little else. He looked more carefully around the shack then, and decided, just as the conversation he’d overheard earlier had indicated, that the dead man hadn’t been living here.
There was a gleam of something in the dirt: turned out to be a gold-cased pocket watch, initialed B.T. in flowing script.
“How about that,” the renegade said.
The renegade spied a shovel somebody had slung into a corner, and he took it outside and hunted up a good spot on high ground but protected by a greasewood thicket from the wind. For an hour or so he worked, the sand and loose soil flying. Then he went and hauled up the body and pushed it over into the hole. He didn’t bother to pause for words or a gaze up to heaven, or any ceremony at all, but just went right to throwing the sandy dirt back in.
It was getting on for the middle of the afternoon by the time he had finished this project. He went and got his own pony from the oak thicket, took a drink from the canteen on the saddle, and then sat down under a bush to rest and consider what came next.
A few minutes later, he got up and unhitched Pete Dolan’s horse from the half-sunken wheel. There were no saddlebags. There was a bedroll, a pretty ratty one. The renegade looked at it thoughtfully a moment, then took it off and shook it out. It smelled sour, but the renegade’s nose was too used to the stench of long-unwashed sweat and stale tobacco and old whiskey stains to even notice. There was nothing to be found inside it.
The renegade rolled it up again, tied it on Dolan’s horse where it had been, and then swung aboard his own dappled pony and set off, leading Dolan’s horse by the reins.
The tracks were gone, almost, and in some places didn’t show at all for long stretches. But the renegade wasn’t worried. He’d seen the brands on the killers’ horses.
~*~
The XBT ranch sprawled over the dry desert wastes west of Killer Ledge, extended south and curled around the bottom end of town until it reached the cow trail northwest to the reservations. The northern and western parts of the XBT were in the foothills of the Calico Mountains, reaching as high as groves of aspen and Douglas fir and hillsides where in the spring gold poppies and desert dandelions bloomed.
The XBT buildings nestled within the protective foothills of Fremont Valley like spring calves in a vale. Along the bottom of the valley bubbled a snake of shining water fresh from the Calicoes. There was a large ranch house, a rambling frame building with a porch that ran all along one side. There was, among other outbuildings, a large bunkhouse; and there were several corrals. Cottonwoods were yonder, fluffing along the stream bed.
It was getting dark by the time Buckshot Justin, riding up the valley, sighted the buildings. There were lamps lit inside some, and things looked solemn and peaceful.
“Not for long,” he said aloud to himself, and chuckled.
Fifteen minutes later he rode into the dooryard and hitched both his horse and Pete Dolan’s to the corral fence near the water trough.
The door opened, and Buckshot Justin, now partway up the front steps, came to an abrupt halt and unconsciously licked dry lips.
The girl silhouetted in the doorway was standing so that the light from inside fell across her white peasant blouse and showed how full it was. The light also let him see a little of the amused pout on her face. She had crow-black hair in a sweeping fall down her back, and she stood with her left hand on her hip, propped against the door jamb on her right shoulder.
From within a voice familiar to Justin bellowed, “Either let ’em in or run ’em off, Maria. The draft’s flickerin’ the lantern.”
The girl called Maria pushed the door wide open and stepped back. Justin climbed the rest of the steps, crossed the porch and went past her, giving her a once-over as he did. She met his gaze frankly and with challenge. He grinned crookedly.
Fire and ice, he registered. It was beginning to look like his luck was changing.
Maria closed the door and led the way through a short hall along which were hung chaps and hats and bandannas. Justin didn’t take off his hat. He didn’t even think of it.
In the huge living room he found the blocky man who had been called Boss. He was wearing reading glasses, which made him look squinty and out of his element. He had papers spread out on the massive table under the hanging lamp. He looked up when Maria and Justin entered.
“Who the devil’re you?” he asked.
Justin looked from Maria, who had slacked into a big bearskin-covered chair in such a way that she was right easy on the eyes, to the walls of the room, on which were hung the heads of bighorn sheep and grizzly bears and a couple of snarling cougars. There was a rack of at least a dozen rifles and shotguns, and a peg to the side held a worn leather gun belt holding a Colt Justin had seen smoking in the man’s hand back at the old prospecting shack at noontime. There was also a huge stonework hearth in which a fire sputtered fitfully at a couple of logs.
“Fine spread you got here,” Justin said, and made himself easy in a second skin-covered chair, an arm’s length from Maria’s.
The blocky rancher puffed at the cigar in the corner of his mouth. “You ain’t said what you’re here for. If you’re huntin’ a job, I got no empty bunks in the bunkhouse.”
“Well, that’s all right,” Justin drawled, and settled down real comfortable in the chair, putting his feet up on the hearth, wiggling his toes in the holes in his boots. “I had in mind to live in the house anyway. More my style.”
“More your style!” The rancher fixed him with an amazed glare.
“That’s right.” Justin went on wiggling his toes. “More fittin’ for a man of means. Now you take them boots—they ain’t fittin’ for a man of means to wear.”
The rancher yanked out his cigar, scattering ash.
“What in the name of the wrong end of hell are you talkin’ about?”
Justin looked at the rancher with amusement. “What’s your name, anyway? I know you, but I ain’t been rightly introduced.”
The rancher just stared. He was too perplexed to even be his usual brusque self, for the moment.
“Well,” Justin said, “I can always just call you bub, or XBT, or wait until I hear somebody call you by your name, but it do seem to me that if we’re goin’ to discuss business, we ought to at least know each other’s handles. Mine’s Buckshot Justin, late of Tombstone, even more late of Tucson, and more late still of Kingville.”
“My father’s name is Bert, Bert Tower,” Maria said, when the rancher was still gape-mouthed. “You know mine—Maria.” She smiled invitingly. The left corner of Justin’s mouth rose in a grin. He tipped his head back so he could look from under his low crumpled hat brim across the big table at Bert Tower.
“Well, Bert,” Justin said, his voice low, calm, and rough-edged, “what say we deal over a drink? I could use something to gargle the dust outa my throat with.”
Bert Tower was back in control of himself again. He pulled off his reading glasses and looked at Justin hard. “Out with your business, Justin, and out with it quick. Or clear off. I got no time to play games.”
“Pete Dolan.”
If Justin had gotten up and swung his fist just under Tower’s nose he could have gotten about the same effect.
“You go to your room, Maria,” Tower said shortly.
Her mouth opened to protest, and her eyes flashed fire at her father. But he was in no mood to be indulgent and cut her off before she could speak. “Go now,” he said.
She got up and went out, Justin watching every sway of her hips with appraising eyes. When she was gone, he looked at Tower and grinned.
“Now what exactly is this all about?” Tower demanded.
“I saw how you wanted to get away from that shack as quick’s you could. So quick you didn’t bother to bury poor dead Pete, or lead off his horse. So after you and your hands left I took care of the body, buried it where it’ll rest easy and where no wolves will dig it up. I fixed it so nobody’d ever think a soul had been around there in twenty years. I even brung his horse along. It’s outside with mine right now. What I figured was, you might not believe me without it. You want a look?”
Tower’s face had flushed a deep purple, and veins stood out on his neck. He placed his two hairy fists and forearms on the table and leaned onto them.
“What do you want, Justin?”
“Why I thought I already made that clear. I’ve took a hankerin’ to lazy around a while. This here is fine country to go fishing and gunnin’ in. Nice lookin’ daughter to keep me company when I want it. What more could I want? Just some poker money now and then, and whiskey money, and a little somethin’ in case I need a new hoss, or saddle, or boots.” He wiggled his toes again, regarding them in his characteristic thoughtful manner. “It ain’t all that much. We’ll just tell folks I’m here on business. It ain’t nobody’s business what business we got. Everything’ll go along nice and quiet.”
Bert Tower stood up, slowly, like he was lifting the Calico mountain range on his shoulders.
“By God,” he said softly. “I ought to skin you alive. But instead I’m goin’ to give you an out—a warnin’. You take your horses and you get lost somewhere over the Calicoes. I don’t care to see your face again. Not a soul around here would take your word over mine. You’re just a renegade who can’t even afford decent boots. But if I ever do see your face again, I’m going to string you to the nearest cottonwood. Got that?”
Justin had been rolling a cigarette. He tucked it in the corner of his mouth and lit it, puffed thoughtfully.
“The thing is, Bert,” he said, flicking the spent stinky at the trash bucket, “I found your gold pocket watch in the cabin next to the body. Right now there’s a lawyer in Killer Ledge who has it locked up in his safe in a sealed envelope. I told him that I’m going to see him regular, every week. If some week I don’t show he’s to send the sheriff looking for me, and open that envelope. He’ll find your watch and all written out how I sat off in the oak thicket and watched Pete Dolan ride up—I was camped down there on the creek, just passin’ through. Then I seen you three arrive, and heard the shot, and saw you leave, and went in and found Pete Dolan with all the life leaked out of him, through a bullet hole. It says how I buried the corpse and took the horse and come out here to live off’n you. And how it means that if somebody’s readin’ the account, it’s because you didn’t take to it and kilt me.”
Justin thrust his chin at Tower, grinning beneath the floppy hat brim, cigarette jutting from the middle of his mouth like a cannon barrel from a turret. He leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees, let his hands hang loose between them.
“How do you think it would look,” he said, the cigarette bouncing, “if I’m dead or missing, and my lawyer is wavin’ that document and the gold watch under a judge’s nose?”
Bert Tower, who had been checking his pockets, presumably for the gold watch, now just glared, mouth shut tight, for the space of a dozen ponderous ticks of the huge grandfather clock in the corner.
Then, slowly, he subsided wearily into his chair.