CHAPTER I

 

JIM BRAND SAT his calico horse with gloved hands folded over the saddlehorn, and frowned down at the corpse. It lay at a tired angle in the cold, with the driving wind building a wind-flurried snowdrift across it.

Grunting with weary and petulant displeasure, Jim Brand dismounted stiffly and left the calico horse with reins trailing, crouched over the dead man and brushed snow off the blue-hued face to look at it. He murmured an oath and shivered a little, against the cold, and stooped squinting at the calm, dead countenance. Nothing was familiar about it until, brushing powder snow off the coat, he found pinned to the lapel a ball-pointed star. Deputy sheriff.

Brand rocked back on his heels to think that over. “Damn,” he said aloud to the corpse, and if it had been the old days he would have simply mounted up and ridden away, judiciously avoiding the implications of the whole business.

As it was, he lifted his bleak, sardonic glance to the northern sky and considered the tall, broad wall of black cloud covering that half of the world, trying to judge the speed at which it was rushing forward to meet him. Mountaintops were lost in its scudding darkness; it was a low, dark overhang that obscured everything in that direction. A light, chill breeze swept the plateau flats, cooling his flesh and making him hunch his neck inside the sheepskin collar of his mackinaw. He pulled the battered hat lower across his eyes and, touched by a mounting irritation, returned his discomfited attention to the dead deputy.

It was a very large bullet hole in the left chest, just beside the ball-pointed star, that had caused the deputy’s instant death. Jim Brand grunted, taking note of the powder burns on the frayed hole in the man’s coat. So it had been pointblank, then. Either the deputy’s murderer had been unsure of his marksmanship or else he had accosted the deputy in a friendly way.

The deputy’s gun was still in its holster, tied down by a rawhide strap about the hammer. Brand lifted it out and found that it had not been fired.

What he found on several papers in a worn wallet told him very little beyond the deputy’s name, which was John Henry Kirby. “A likely enough name,” Brand observed wryly. “Well, John Henry, I hope you’re warm enough now.” It was probably as close as he would get to saying a prayer over the dead man.

There were four dollars and some odd change in the man’s pocket, and after a small struggle with his principles, Jim Brand decided to leave the money where it was. The truth was he had left Spanish Flat three days ago at the high end of a winning streak, and there was ample gold lining his own money belt.

He stood up, brushing snow from his gloved hands, and glowered darkly down at the corpse. One downward kick at the earth with his boot toe told him what he had already regretfully decided: the ground was frozen much too hard for digging.

Standing by the calico pony’s shoulder, he was a short and almost frail-appearing man, thin almost to the point of gauntness. Without the mackinaw and heavy boots he would have weighed not much over a hundred and forty pounds. His skin was pale, though cold-flushed, rather than weather-beaten; in the card rooms he frequented there was little weather to be beaten by. Nonetheless the two and a half pounds of holstered Colt revolver at his hip added measurably to the effectiveness of his size with a cool competence of its own.

His eyes closed down to narrower angles and he rested his elbow against the saddle, scrubbing a gloved palm over his jaw, studying the dead man’s enigmatic face and debating what to do. The deputy had a strong and angular face; in death it was expressionless.

Jim Brand’s mood hardened; he thought impatiently of leaving the deputy for the spring thaw, which was months away. But a further thought stopped him: wolves tearing down through the snow. He grunted with indecision and self-disgust. He looked again at the onrushing wall of the storm.

His eyes were closely lidded to shield them from snow glare; his face was long and hollow at the cheeks, dark-browed, bitter and brooding and yet at the same time displaying a deep-set, ironic humor. His long lips were guarded by a thin, neatly trimmed black mustache. It was part of his role to look like what he was: an itinerant gambler.

He dropped to his knees and put his hands on the dead man. The flesh was still soft despite the freezing air; the man had not been dead very long. Brand grunted and heaved, and after no small effort had the man upright, balanced against his thin shoulders. Brand grunted and heaved again, and presently succeeded in throwing the corpse across the saddle. The calico pony shied away and Brand uttered a bad-humored oath, flicked his quick hand out and snatched the reins, and wrapped them tightly around his hand before tying the deputy down.

When he was done he looked up at the length and breadth of the jagged black cloud front, giving the grim sweep of darkness a searching glance. In this short time, the storm had rushed forward with ominous haste. A cold wind moaned across the flats, biting at his cheeks and nose and ears, with sharp teeth, lifting little flurries of powder snow off the ground.

He knew he had to find shelter. With a tight hold on the ill-mannered horse, he squinted toward the mountains and tried to recall which of yonder canyons housed the town of Rifle Gap. All trails were obliterated by snowdrifts. No doubt the town was dried up and largely blown away by now, but if a few of the old buildings were still standing, a man might at least build a fire out of the wind.

But the canyons all seemed to have been cut by the same giant plow.

Still puzzling it over, he allowed his eyes to drop thoughtfully to the ground, and that was when he noticed something that made him lead the horse a pace forward and stoop down.

In the snow-cleared patch where the body had been were little holes regularly spaced about an inch apart in the hardpan. The little indentations followed a curving line for about two feet, and that was all. Once he had seen similar tracks in the surface of a Texas beach, but not in line nor at regular intervals. Twenty-two-caliber bullets? Rowels of Californio spurs? A hobnail protruding from a boot heel?

He let the detail rest in the back of his mind, and turned to the stirrup. Grunting with displeasure, he swung up behind the saddle and felt the dead man’s head bump his foot. He swore with weary energy and gigged the pony forward toward the mountains.

He rode forward with the deputy taking up comfortable saddle space and taxed his pungent vocabulary, bitterly speculating on the turn of luck that had brought him into this barren country at the time of an oncoming blizzard and made him stumble across the body of a stranger whose occupation Brand had always distrusted.

What had brought the deputy up here in the face of a norther? It would not have been a pleasure trip. No towns lay within a day’s ride, as far as Jim Brand knew, except the ghost town of Rifle Gap. The lawman must have ridden up into the mountain country from Antelope or Arrowhead or one of the other mining camps or cow-towns down in the distant valleys. Perhaps Deputy Kirby had been on an errand of law, sent to find and arrest a fugitive. If so, the fugitive had apparently turned the tables on him.

Another thing was this: what rider was roaming this country with a rifle big enough at the bore to put such a hole in the deputy’s chest? There was a good possibility that the killer still prowled these hills.

“Jumping at shadows, maybe,” Jim Brand said aloud. “If it moves, kill it. I’ve known that feeling myself, a time or two. Damn you, Kirby.” Presently he began to see a trigger-happy laughing man with a big-bore gun behind every rock outcrop and scrub bush and piñon tree and snowbank.

Riding behind the saddle was not comfortable, nor was the bite of the sharply dropping temperature, nor the day that darkened slowly under the relentless forward march of the black cloud mass. He tugged his hat lower across his eyes and felt each movement of the horse’s hipbones jar him. Overhead, seemingly from nowhere, a black hooknecked bird soared on silent wings. Brand’s taut nerves made him lift his rifle from the saddle scabbard under his leg, rein the horse in, and point the weapon skyward. The bird glided a wide, lazy circle. Brand thumbed back the rifle’s hammer and squinted along the barrel, waiting for the bird to soar nearer. It reached the far end of its swing and curved lithely back; but it was not coming toward him. Rather, it was turning southward, and now ran along the air currents toward the distant desert.

Soon it would be out of range. Brand took careful aim, then let the hammer down gently with his thumb and replaced the rifle in leather without firing it. “If you can outrun this blow,” he said to the bird, “more power to you.”

A black bird—a sign? Brand grinned with one side of his mouth. If he was anything, it was practical man. He had no use for omens. He rested his left hand, holding the reins, on the corpse’s rounded back, and prodded the horse’s flanks with his small, blunt spurs. The horse’s ears, he noticed, were laid sharply back along its head; the wind had died and all that remained to hear was the soft crunch of hoofs in the silent snow.