Chapter Three: SOUNDINGS

By the time Johnny and Hank were in sight of the Bar 33, Johnny was pretty familiar with the details of Pick’s death. What Hank, in deference to Nora, had omitted in the original version, was that Pick’s body was unrecognizable. What the thousand-foot drop onto rocks below hadn’t done, the buzzards had. Before Hank left for town he heard Hoke Carmody, who had found the body, refuse a buck-board and call for a pack horse and a gunny sack.

“Did Carmody get a look at the tracks?”

“He said they was in sand, and drifted bad. You can ask him when you see him.”

The Bar 33 lay south of Cosmos some eight miles. It was a big brand, managed by Major Fitz, and included six other ranches reaching down into New Mexico. It had pre-empted the Santa Rita bench, a thirty-mile stretch of grama grass lying eight hundred feet above the desert at the base of the Calicoes. The torrential spring rains of ages past had cleaned the mountains long since of topsoil, leaving them naked rock, while the original foothills had filled in with mountain drift until they were now the vast, rolling three-sided Santa Rita mesa of the bench. In the process, the bench had kept its own plentiful water, and had soaked up the streams from the Calicoes, until the land to the west was parched and arid, while from her height she remained aloof and green and proud. To the west was semidesert, dropping into desert relieved only by the far blue-misted line of the Nation range. South, indifferent grazing-land fought for brief life on the flanks of the Calicoes. Far, far south, the rock let up, and the mountains were crowned with trees and grass. To the north, skipping the deep, sheltering pocket where Cosmos sprawled between a jumble of buttes, the rocks were less hostile, and it was here that ranchers, making the best of a mediocre deal from nature, fought drought, rains, and rustlers, and sometimes prospered. Hard to the east lay the Calicoes, colorful, savage desert of climbing, snarling rock, defiant of man and God, mute watchmen of puny fortunes, the bare cone of Monarch peak its liege lord.

Climbing up to the bench, Johnny’s black horse, Soot by name, had smelled green, growing grass. Now, as they swung through the pasture gate, he quickened his pace. Home was where they took the saddle off, but Bar 33 had been the home of his colthood, and these three barns looked just as white and spacious, the corrals as trim and break-proof, and the long, rambling, one-story frame house as cool and white under the interlaced cottonwoods, as ever.

Major Fitz was much smaller than the two punchers who joined him at the bunkhouse door and walked over to greet Johnny. Cavalry regulations would have frowned on his dress—half-boots with a three-inch stockinged gap to his tight army trousers; a hunting-coat of duck over a cotton singlet; and an oversize Stetson—but they would have commended his straight carriage, his bowed legs, his sharp, wind-reddened face, and his air of authority. His voice and his restlessness combined to give the effect of a terrier, but his heart was that of a St. Bernard, Sheriff Blue used to say, and none knew it as well as Johnny.

“He’s in the wagon shed, Johnny,” the major said harshly, “but you won’t want to see him. What a day to live. And what a man he was. And how rotten I feel, how humble before him. Get down.” He shook hands with Johnny, and Johnny felt his hand tremble.

“Now what do you want? Dinner? After a while, men? I’ll give you every hand on the place. I’ve got two out where we found the body, but it’s no use, Johnny. The tracks are gone. I’ve got my best man up on the rim, but it’s rock, and he won’t find a thing unless the killer was a fool. Carmody?” He turned to one of the men beside him, a squat man with a blank, oversize face. “Here, Hoke Carmody, meet Johnny Hendry.” He turned to Johnny again, before he could shake hands with the man. “I went out with him to get the body. Nothing. Not a damned thing to work on. Buzzards had almost finished their work. Coyote tracks, buzzard tracks—and man tracks. You could tell that by the deep dent in the sand. He’d been robbed.”

“That’s what Hank said.” Johnny looked at Hoke Carmody. “How’d you come on it?”

“I’d packed some salt out to the rim water hole yesterday. Saw tracks and spent the day cleanin’ up strays. I had to camp there last night, and got an early start this mornin’. When I kicked up about a dozen buzzards just off the trails, I took a pasear out of curiosity. There he was. I never touched the body, but studied the ground a long while. There’d been a man there, but there was no clear tracks to muss up, so I searched him. I brought back what I’d found along with this jacket. The major knowed it right off, and come back with me.”

“Good man,” the major said, nodding.

“I want to thank you for what you’ve done,” Johnny said.

Johnny and Major Fitz went into the wagon shed, and came out in less than a minute. Johnny’s face was a little pale as they started off to the house. He told the major what he and the sheriff had pieced together about the murder, and the major agreed.

Once in the long, low-ceilinged living-room, the major quieted a little. Back to the cold fireplace, he looked out the window a long time. Johnny idly watched his lean, sharp face and wondered what he was about to propose.

Suddenly, he turned to Johnny. “This has got to stop, youngster. I thought it before Pick died. I know it now. A vigilante committee won’t bring Pick back, but it ought to clean out the cause of his death.”

“You won’t need it,” Johnny told him, and he announced his decision to run for sheriff.

“It’s no good, son. You’d make a rotten sheriff,” the major said bluntly. “You’re too easygoing. Does the army cure disease? Partly, but it removes the cause, too.”

“I’ll run on a law-and-order platform,” Johnny continued. The major listened with interest to Johnny’s account of his talk with Blue. “If I can get you behind me, and about a dozen of these cattlemen who’ve been rustled into debt, I’ll swing it. You’ll pull a dozen votes through your hands, and they’ll pull two dozen more through their friends. It’ll work that way with all the straight ranchers. I’ll pull some of the mine vote, too—the management—but the miners will likely swing to Blue because he’s let them do whatever they felt like. I’ll get the town, because they want some peace, and if Blue don’t liquor up the Mexicans, I’ll win them. They’re tired of bein’ rawhided by every drunk in town.”

“And Blue will get the riffraff,” the major said, “and don’t forget that’s considerable. When the word gets out, they’ll know that once you’re in they’re out. It’ll be a fight.”

Johnny shifted in his seat and leaned foreward a little. “All right. I’ve learned somethin’ from Blue. Will you back me?”

“You know I will,” the major said promptly. “I believe you’ve been burned, Johnny. Not that I thought you didn’t do what you could under Blue. But you went at it wrong. Clean up the county and I’m behind you. What’s more, my word carries some weight. I’ll make it.”

Johnny stood up. “Good. I want one thing more now.”

The major looked at him quizzically.

“I’m not right always—maybe not half the time,” Johnny said stubbornly, “but if I get in office I want to be nearly right. I want to know the names of the men you’d like warned out of this county.”

The major was about to voice surprised protest, but Johnny held up his hand.

“I know. It could breed a dozen gun fights if it ever got public, but it won’t. When you make that list, it’ll include the men you suspect but can’t prove anything on. You’re too fair to make it a grudge list, and I reckon all the rest of our decent ranchers are. I’m goin’ to get a list from each one of ’em. When I compare them, it’ll give me a pretty good idea of what’s right.”

“But what if the lists were stolen from you, Johnny? It would take fifty years for the smoke to blow away.”

“They won’t be. You’ll mail them to me. Print them, and don’t sign them.”

“Then what?”

“The day after I’m elected, I’ll give these unwanted hardcases just twenty-four hours to leave town.”

“And get blown off your horse for your pains.”

“That’s my chance,” Johnny said stubbornly. “Besides, I owe it to Pick.” His voice fell suddenly, and he said in a grim tone, “Major Fitz, as long as I live, I’ll be on the trail of the man who murdered Pick. Maybe this list will help to find him.”

“True enough.”

“Another thing,” Johnny went on, “I reckon I was Pick’s heir.”

“Of course.”

“All right. Some way, somewhere, Pick was bound to leave a clue to where he was workin’. The jasper that murdered Pick will know that, and he’ll think likely Pick told me the location of his claim. So this jasper will try and beef me, won’t he?”

“It’s reasonable—too reasonable,” Fitz said dryly.

“Then the first jasper that shoots at me will be the man I want. And I’ll get him,” Johnny said grimly. He rose, about to speak, then paused, as if searching for a way to say what he wanted to. “Reckon you’d turn me loose in your tool shop for a while, Major?” he asked finally.

“I think I know what you want, Johnny. I had the blacksmith make the coffin this morning. I’ll have the buckboard hitched and send a driver to town with it.”

Johnny shook his head. “Thanks, but Pick wouldn’t have wanted that. There’s a little patch of young Navajo pines out on one of them rises to the east. Pick liked it. It’s on Bar 33 range. Would you give him land to lie in?”

“Of course,” Fitz murmured.

Twenty minutes later, Johnny drove quietly from the ranch buildings. The day had turned hot and clear, and the Nations a hundred miles off looked close enough to shoot over. The last fresh whisper of spring was in the air as Johnny pulled the team up on the crest of the knoll and climbed down.

The job was quick, for the ground was soft and the box small. By dinnertime Johnny was back at the Bar 33.