Chapter Sixteen: RUSTLERS’ WAR

Once on the road to the Running W, Leach motioned Mickey Hogan to drop behind the others. Mickey was Leach’s foreman, his top hand and gun fighter. It was Mickey who enabled Leach to keep peace among his twenty hands—saddle bums and saloon riffraff.

“How much time did Fitz give us?” Mickey asked when Leach had finished.

“He never said.”

“I’ll need a couple of days, anyway. You got any ideas?”

“Well, there’s them Winkler brothers up in that old Ophir mine. They’re a tough crew and they don’t like us much.”

Mickey shook his head. “Maybe not, but they’re plumb scared of us. They’re out.”

Leach named a list of men known as rustlers, but at each name, Mickey shook his head. Nevertheless, when they reached the Running W, Mickey took only the time to change horses before he rode off with five of his men. For Leach, the rest of that day and the next was intolerable. The longer Mickey stayed away, the more certain Leach grew that he was having no luck in tracking down the rustlers.

And that was true in the beginning. Mickey’s first visit was to the Winkler boys up in the old abandoned Ophir mine. They were insolent, but they offered an alibi which Mickey had to accept; three of them were down sick. With their blankets pulled around them, rifles slacked in their arms, they stood in the doorway and faced Mickey and his five riders.

“All right,” Mickey said. “I reckon you’re tellin’ the truth. But if I thought you wasn’t—”

“You’d blow our heads off,” Winkler said. “Well, ride on, Hogan. You’ve come to the wrong place. When we steal anything you want, we’ll admit it and be ready to scrap for it. You can tell that to your boss.”

“I believe you,” Mickey said mildly, and wheeled his horse out.

So Mickey made the rounds. On the afternoon of the second day he and his riders pulled up at Cass Briggs’s place in the bottomlands of a creek over on the west edge of the county.

Cass was drunk and belligerent. “Steal Fitz’s stuff?” he said thickly. “Why, why shouldn’t a man? His beef will walk just as good as another man’s, won’t it?”

Mickey regarded him thoughtfully. “Take a pasear around the corrals, boys,” he said to his men

Cass straightened up. “Wait a minute,” he said loudly. “You’ll find tracks over there, but no beef. I had five head here until last night.”

“Whose beef?”

“Kennicott’s,” Cass answered sullenly.

Mickey said, “Look around, boys.”

While they were gone, Mickey watched Cass, whose increasingly furtive air he could not quite understand. Mickey, in the course of his business, was pretty well acquainted with these shifty, closemouthed men who practiced on a small scale what Leach Wigran did on a large one. He knew their hide-outs, their markets, their methods, their needs, and their characters. It was another world remote from the brisk and businesslike air of Cosmos, but one in which Mickey was thoroughly versed.

The Running W riders returned. “There’s been cattle out there all right.”

“How many?”

“I dunno.”

Mickey returned his attention to Cass. “I haven’t seen you in town much lately, Cass.”

“I been here.”

“You couldn’t have been somewhere else—say over on Bar 33 range—with George Winkler, could you?”

“I tell you, I been here,” Cass said irritably.

“Or over the Calicoes in Warms,” Mickey went on idly. “Maybe these bad rains up in the Calicoes is what stove up those Winkler boys.” Mickey was talking idly, hit or miss, giving little attention to what he said. But he saw now that something he had said had touched Cass. Cass tried to look him in the eye, but failed.

“I was here,” Cass said sullenly.

“But with the Winkler boys, though.”

Cass spat. “All right, what if they was over?”

“So they were?”

Cass straightened up defiantly. “Anything wrong with asking your friends over to have a few drinks?” When Mickey said nothing, he added, “They got drunk and slept outside. I couldn’t help that, could I?”

Mickey didn’t answer immediately. Presently, he said, “That’s funny, Cass, that you five should have been together just for a parley.” He paused. “So you did drive the beef over to Warms?”

“We did not!” Cass said hotly. “I sold ’em my share for the price of a couple of bottles.”

Mickey said quickly, “Your share of what beef?”

“Kennicott’s.”

“I thought you said you only got five head.”

“That was my share, I said. We worked it together.”

“I hadn’t heard anything about it in town,” Mickey said gently. “Usually Kennicott squawks the loudest.”

“He don’t know it,” Cass mumbled.

Mickey let his hand fall to his gun. “Cass,” he said gently, “you’re lyin’. What did you do with that Bar 33 beef? Drive it over to Warms?”

“I dunno what you’re talkin’ about,” Cass said earnestly. “Don’t get so quick, Mickey. Come in and have a drink. I tell you it wasn’t no Bar 33 beef. I dunno whose it was. I was drunk, and so was they. We just took it from over west of town and drove it down here in the breaks, and then we come home and we was drunk for a couple of days. I sold ’em my share.”

Mickey drew his gun, raised it. “Cass, you and the Winklers took that Bar 33 beef. None of you’ve been around Cosmos for a week now. The Winkler boys are stove up from that mountain rain. Nobody’s missin’ beef except Fitz. Are you goin’ to tell me you stole it?”

“I didn’t!” Cass cried.

Mickey smiled and leveled his gun. Cass made a lunge to get inside the house, but Mickey’s gun roared before Cass could make a move.

Slowly, Cass started to claw at his chest and then he sat down abruptly, and his head sagged down on his chest.

Mickey regarded him coldly. “I never thought he’d have the nerve,” he said mildly. He shrugged. “Well, the beef’s gone. Let’s go back to the Winklers’.”

It was midnight before Mickey rode into the Running W. He and his riders had a little trouble with the Winklers, had had to burn them out, which took a little time. However, Mickey had a feeling of a job well done as he lifted his saddle on the corral poles and walked toward the house.

The front room of the Running W was bare and cluttered with gear and filthy with dust and papers. At Mickey’s entrance, Leach jumped to his feet, his hand traveling toward his gun. By the light of the single lamp Leach looked deathly pale.

Mickey, puzzled, closed the door behind him. “What’s the matter, Leach? You’re spooky.”

Leach regarded him with red-rimmed, bloodshot eyes. “An hour after you left, one of the boys rode in with word that the herd of beef we was holdin’ for Fitz is stole, too.”

Mickey said softly, “Stole?”

“Drove over the Calicoes. I been out trackin’ it. But it was took to Warms, sure as hell.”

“How long had it been gone?”

“A couple of days.”

Mickey sank into a chair, and he and Leach looked at each other. “Then I must’ve made a mistake,” Mickey said quietly, and he told Leach about Cass and the Winklers. Leach didn’t even show interest. He sat there, his head sunk on his chest, staring at the table. Presently, he said, “Mickey, I can make this good with Fitz. I mean I got the money to do it, but”—and he raised harried eyes to regard Mickey—“what am I goin’ to tell him? That they’ve got us on the run?”

“Who?”

“I wish I knew,” Leach said savagely. “Fitz ain’t pleasant to face. This time he’s going to be wild.”

Mickey thought a long moment. “Tell him you found Cass and the Winkler boys with the beef high up in the Calicoes. You took care of them, all right, and then you got to thinkin’ and you decided to drive the stuff over to Warms—all of it, so long as you was close as you was. Then give him the money. What can he say?”

“He’ll know I’m lyin’.”

“He’d never know I was lyin’,” Mickey said quietly.

Leach seemed not to hear this for several moments, and then he raised his head with a jerk. “That’s it, Mickey! You tell him. Can you do it?”

“I never seen the lie I couldn’t tell with a straight face,” Mickey boasted quietly. “Sure I’ll tell him.”

“Right now. You ride over right now.”

“Wait till tomorrow,” Mickey drawled. “That’ll give us time enough to have drove the beef over and come back.”

Mickey started out at sunup for the Bar 33. At dark he was not back. He did not return that night, nor the next day. At midnight he was still not back. Leach, his eyes frantic, paced up and down the room, listening occasionally.

Sometime that night, as Leach lay on the rough and soiled sofa, staring at the ceiling, a thunderous knock on the door brought him to his feet with a leap, gun out.

He waited a moment, and then crossed to the door, listening, his hand on the knob. Then, gathering himself, he yanked the door open.

Something was standing there on the sill. Instinctively, protectively, wildly, Leach fired, but the body did not move. It simply toppled into the room at Leach’s feet.

Leach looked down at it. It was Mickey. He was dead and stiff. On his chest was pinned a note, and, stooping slowly, Leach read it.

This was a mistake, Leach. Get that beef back or get out.

And Leach, trembling there in the guttering flame of the lamp, knew that war was declared, and he was afraid.