SEETHING, CHRIS RAMMED downstairs and tramped down the street to the livery stable. Glancing up, his eyes chanced on the newly painted sign that flapped on chain hinges: Seven Springs Livery Barn, Ansel Fuller, Prop.
Well, at least it would be good to see one old friend. He wondered if Anse had changed much in six years. Anse Fuller had been a pioneer Concho rider, one of the top hands old Rafe had brought with him from Texas thirty years ago. The old cowboy had half-raised young Chris, had taught him how to break a wild horse, how to handle a rope, how to shoot; and old Anse had been practically the only one who’d root for Chris in his constant battles with his older brother, Boyd. Chris remembered once suffering a terrible beating from Boyd’s fists and running, not to his father, but to old Anse’s shack, where Anse and his Mohave Indian wife had comforted him and dressed his bruises while Anse’s infant daughter, Johanna, had played around their feet.
But Anse was not in the livery stable. Except for half a dozen horses, the place was deserted. Disappointed, Chris walked back through the stable, picking up a bridle on his way.
His eye fell on a rangy long-legged palomino. He had always been partial to flashy horses. Unmindful of the dust and sweat, he stripped off his suit coat and went into the stall to bridle the palomino and back it out into the stable aisle.
He found a polished Texas-rig saddle and cinched it up around the palomino’s girth; he put on his coat again and led the horse forward toward the street. On the way, he stopped by the front door, wrote a brief note, and pinned it to the door where Anse couldn’t miss it.
Anse: I’m making off with your palomino and the best saddle in the place. Give me a day or two to bring them back before you send the law after me. I’ll see you soon, you old buzzard.
Chris McLean
He grinned recklessly and led the palomino outside. It’s white-gold mane shone in the sun like white gold. He used his arms as guides to adjust the stirrup length, gathered the reins, and mounted with a smooth, easy swing.
The palomino was skittish; evidently, it had not been ridden for some days. It wheeled around, plunged up and down, and made an effort to pitch him off.
When the horse found that its rider was not to be dislodged so easily, it set to work bucking in earnest.
Chris’ hat flew off, and he found he had his hands full. The horse was spirited and strong and knew every trick there was. It went up in the air and came down on all-fours, straight-legged, jarring him all the way up his spine; it swapped ends with the speed of a bullet, almost spilling him off to the side; it reared and plunged. Chris’ head spun; he found himself wheeling and rocking and smashing down into the saddle with bone crushing force. A red film rose before his eyes. He felt air between himself and the saddle, and then he was knocked down into it again. He swerved, jerked, swung like a pendulum; but his knees kept their locked hold, and he maintained his seat. Through it all, he slashed a wide grin across his face and uttered a high whoop.
The palomino suddenly settled, gathered its legs, and made a plunging dash directly toward the stable wall. Chris was sure it intended to scrape him off against the wall. He hauled the reins hard to the left and pulled the horse aside just in time.
Defeated, the horse stopped and stood motionless, breathing in long gusts. Its barrel heaved, its eyes rolled, and it looked around at him balefully.
“Bravo,” said a voice; looking around, Chris saw Ford Cooke coming forward. Cooke paused to pick up Chris’ hat, dusted it off, and handed it up to him.
“Good work,” Cooke said. “I see you haven’t lost your touch. That palomino’s only half-broke. Anse just bought him from a horse-hunter last week.”
“He’s broke now,” Chris said with a grin. His vision was not yet altogether clear, nor his nerves steady, but he showed none of that.
“You’re a good rider. You always were. Listen, Chris, be careful when you go out there, hey?”
“I will,” Chris said.
“And one more thing. If you get back to town tonight I mean, if you decide not to stay over on Concho—come on over to my house, and we’ll whip up a bachelor supper.”
“Sure,” Chris said. “Thanks, Ford.”
“Hasta luego, amigo.”
Chris jammed his hat down on his head, took a good grip on the saddle with his knees, and spurred the palomino gently. It moved away with docile obeisance. At the edge of town, he lifted it to a canter and headed north across the undulating hills toward the Concho.
He was angry with a red wrath. His brother Boyd had done a good job of turning old Rafe against him and making the Concho too small to hold both of them. Now, to top it all, Boyd had stolen Vera. It didn’t matter that Chris hadn’t seen or written to her in six years. He would have understood it, he told himself, if she had got tired of waiting and married somebody else—anybody else but Boyd.
He wondered if she was still as beautiful, as voluptuous, as she had been. He remembered what Ford Cooke had observed: six years was a long time.
The coach road took him between long, undulating fields of rich, yellow grass, belly-high on a steer. The bright golden grass rippled before the wind like waves on the sea—ribbons of reflected brilliance stretching across the hills. Half an hour out of town, he came in sight of the Rafter-C mailbox. He intended to ride by the place, but by the time he arrived at the mailbox, a bald-headed, hatless rider had appeared on the ranch road and was approaching him, waving. Chris stopped and waited. The rider, as he drew closer, became recognizable as Mark Cavanagh, who owned the Rafter-C.
Cavanagh reined in a few feet away. He did not offer to shake hands; his voice was cool: “I heard you were in town.”
“Word travels fast.”
“One of my boys was in town overnight. He saw you come in this morning. Said you were hoofing it.”
“Somebody shot my horse down.”
Cavanagh’s eyebrows lifted. “Somewhere around here?”
“Down past Kohlmeier’s, far end of the valley.”
“What was it all about?”
“I wish I knew,” Chris admitted.
“I guess you’re headed out to the Concho now—is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“You heard about Boyd and Vera?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I heard.”
“Don’t look so sour, boy. You’ve got no kick coming. If this was a few months ago, I’d kick your teeth down your throat before I’d talk to you. She pined her heart out for you altogether too many years.”
“Who, Vera? I don’t believe it. She’s not the pining kind.”
Cavanagh flushed and thrust his chin forward. “You think I don’t know my own daughter? Hell, I’ve still half a mind to drag you off that fancy horse and knock you around a little. You wasted a lot of that girl’s time, boy, and neither one of us has forgot it.”
“Mark, you always were one to talk big. I always figured you talked a bigger brand of toughness than you owned.” Cavanagh’s flesh colored deeper. He said nothing; he only glared at Chris. Chris said, “You and your daughter are cut from the same stripe, I reckon. I notice she didn’t let me know she figured to marry Boyd. She just went ahead with it, behind my back.”
Cavanagh leaned forward in the saddle and spoke through clenched teeth. “Now you listen to me, bucko boy. You’ve got no room to complain about a thing. For all we knew down here, you could have been married and had six kids by now. Nobody knew where you were—how could she write to you? She never got so much as a note from you in six years. What the hell do you think you’ve got a right to expect?”
“Aagh,” Chris said in disgust. “I haven’t got time to fiddle with you, Cavanagh.” He lifted his reins.
Cavanagh’s petulant voice followed him down the road: “I hope your brother throws you off the place by the seat of the pants. It’s no more’n you’ve asked for!”
Chris didn’t bother to turn around; his only answer was a cocky grin, which Cavanagh couldn’t see. But the grin soon passed from his face and he was left with a troubled, brooding expression. He seemed to have ridden into a land that was overcast by the shadow of threatening intrigues. There were a great many mysteries to which he had no answers.
The lettering on the big ranch gate was still the same: a big image of the circular Concho brand, and beneath it the words, Rafe McLean and Sons, Proprietors. Old Rafe sure enough had cast a shadow; and now, like a great oak that had died, he still stood above the land.
It was a long ride from the main gate up to the ranch house—almost an hour at the palomino’s mile-eating gait; and for twenty-five miles, Concho land extended onward in the same direction, all the way up to the foothills of the Piedras. The house looked the same, except that the trees around it had perhaps grown a little. It was a big house, like the spirit of the bantam Texan who had built it. Tall, galleried, majestic with its Georgian pillars, it commanded the plateau from its hilltop height. Below, it was surrounded by a litter of big outbuildings: two bunkhouses, a cook-shack, several barns, the smithy shed, two windmills with their water tanks, a maze of wood fenced corrals, some of them containing breed stock, sick cattle, motherless calves, and part of the vast remuda of horses, several hundred strong, that the Concho boasted.
It all looked in good order—whitewashed, clean, workmanlike. Slovenliness had never been tolerated on the Concho, and at least that much had not changed with the change of ownership—a change which, Chris reminded himself, had not been completed yet.
He rode up past a quarter-mile of corrals into the big yard. The steady clang-clang of a hammer sounded from the smithy, and a plume of smoke rose from the bellows fire. There was little activity around the yard, but that was to be expected; the forty men of the crew would be out doing their work on the range, this time of day. The middle-high sun burned down with shoulder slapping heat, making him uncomfortable in his broadcloth suit.
A tall figure ranged up from the wagon barn: Clete Sims. Chris said, “Howdy, segundo.”
“Not segundo. Foreman.”
“All right, then,” Chris drawled, noticing the absence of friendly greeting. “What happened to Jonesy?”
“Bought his own outfit, over by Aztec.”
“Well, good for him.”
The foreman’s eyes narrowed down. “Ain’t that Anse’s palomino?”
“That’s right.”
“And you gentled him down, huh?” A slight smile crossed Sims’ features. “I reckon you ain’t lost your touch with horses, at least.”
Chris appreciated the slight warming of friendliness; there seemed to be little enough of it in this part of the world.
Chris stepped down and handed the reins to the foreman. “Take him down in the shade, will you?”
“Sure thing,” Sims said. He looked up toward the house and seemed about to speak.
“It’s all right, Clete,” Chris said. “I heard.”
“About her?”
“That, too.”
“All right. Take it easy, Chris—it’s been a long while. They going to have to get used to you all over again.”
“They’ll manage,” Chris said dryly.
“Yeah. Well, it won’t help to go in there with a chip on your shoulder.”
“I’ve got a whole tree on my shoulder, Clete, and it’s starting to feel heavy.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that,” the foreman said, and led the palomino away.
Standing alone in the dust of the big, sloping yard, Chris looked uphill toward the house and realized how much it was like the plantation manors he had seen along the Mississippi. Only the setting was different.
The old man, he had to admit to himself, had done a cracker jack job. There wasn’t a ranch for hundreds of miles that could touch this place for competence or dignity.
He was halfway up to the house when a woman’s figure came out on the porch, one arm lifted to shade her eyes as she looked downslope toward him. He saw her stiffen. Then, lifting her skirts, she came down the porch steps, took a few quick steps toward him, and stopped hesitantly. “Chris? Chris?”
“Yeah,” he said, and went up to meet her. The silver in the eyes shone with a wicked intensity; the lines of his mouth took on a cruel shape. “You look fine, Vera.”
“Chris—”
“You don’t have to say a thing,” he said, tight-lipped.
She hadn’t changed. She still had the soft, pale skin he had loved. He could remember caressing her cheeks so vividly that his fingertips tingled with the memory of it. Her face was shield-shaped; her eyes tilted Orientally and squinted in the sunlight, brightly blue just the same; her hair was honey-blonde and done up in a high chignon. She looked, as she had always looked, ready for an aristocrat’s drawing room. But she had an hourglass waist; her breasts were full and high; she was a graceful woman, and there were warm passions in her. Remembering all that, he spoke thinly:
“I saw your daddy down the road.”
“Did you?” Her voice had just the right musical lift; her smile was one of exact courtesy, no more.
“He didn’t seem too glad to see me,” Chris said.
“Why, Chris, you know—”
“Neither do you,” he said, cutting her off sharply.
“That’s not fair, Chris. It was such a shock seeing you—I declare, I haven’t really pulled myself together. Let me see now, how long has it been, Chris?”
Containing himself with an effort, he said, “Almost six years.”
“Has it really been that long?”
“I’ll wait for you forever,” he murmured.
Her eyes widened and then, suddenly, her face turned cold. “How dare you throw my words back at me, Chris.”
“Forever,” he gritted.
“Forever is a long time, Chris. A girl gets a little weary of rocking chairs.”
“You knew I’d come back.”
“I knew no such thing!”
“Then why did you tell me you’d be waiting for me?”
“People say a lot of things in the moonlight, Chris.”
His tone softened. “Don’t fool with me, Vera. It was more than moonbeams talking. You can’t tell me you didn’t mean what you promised.”
“Maybe I did.”
“Well, then?”
“Chris, just what is it you want?”
He was about to speak when a bull-bellow roared at him from the house door:
“Get away from her, you bum!”
Chris wheeled, and saw the burly giant figure coming across the porch with determined long strides: his brother Boyd.