Stryker left the Circle line cabin at three o’clock by his snap-lid pocket watch. He had slept five or six hours before the arrival of Adriana Cotten.
On into the waning afternoon he found himself breathing the girl’s perfume. The train began to slacken—by four-thirty it was down to a drizzle, by six it had quit. At half past six the sun was palely visible on its downward slide and the stage road brought Stryker around a muddy bend in sight of Espanola.
The broad muddy waters of the Rio Grande came flowing out of the northeast, joined the Chama under a railroad bridge. Thickets of brush choked the bottoms. The town, as lonely and weather-beaten as the arid countryside, squatted on the point of land to the east of the junction. Sun-blasted into the land’s own yellowed tan, the low adobes of Espanola were littered without evident pattern across several acres.
Small, hardscrabble, dirt-scraping farms surrounded the lonely pueblo. At the near end of town Stryker found a farmer hurriedly ploughing with a wooden plow hauled by a single ox. The hard rain had softened the ground and there might not be another rainfall in two months—the farmer was taking advantage of what few blessings could be found here.
Stryker reined in and waited for the farmer’s furrowing to bring him close to the road.
Lamps began to wink on in town. The ox came to the road and the farmer hollered in Spanish, turning and stopping the animal.
Stryker said, “I’m looking for Buck Madrid.”
The farmer’s big sombrero shaded his face. When he tipped his head back to look up Stryker saw the gleam of dark eyes in an angry brown face.
“You want to kill him, señor?”
“No. I just want to talk. Where do I find him?”
“Que lástima,” the farmer muttered.
“What?”
“It is a shame, señor, that you do not come to kill Buck Madrid. You look like the kind of man who could do it.” The farmer shrugged elaborately, laid down his reins and walked over to the fence. He pointed northwest. “Back that way, señor, the way you came. One mile and you find a road to the north. Turn left there and ride that road, maybe two hours. You find the ladrón there, on his ranch, maybe. If he is not there perhaps they will tell you where to find him. In his grave, one can hope.”
Stryker said, “Obliged, amigo.”
He swung the buckskin around and rode back along the road.
The surcharged clouds moved sullenly away to the east. The westering sun caved in with a bloody splash. Dusk was followed by dark. The night glittered under a field of stars that expanded steadily to cover the entire sky. Against the danger of potholes the storm might have drilled into the wagon road he followed, Stryker let the horse choose its own easy pace and path.
The ranch road lifted him up the side of the black mesa and into a thick stand of timber. A fork in the road was marked by a standing mailbox. Stryker dismounted and pushed his face up close to it. In the vague starlight he barely made out the legend painted in a crescent across the side of the wooden box.
RAFTER CROSS RANCH—J. B. MADRID, PROP.
Stryker remounted and turned in at the mailbox. A puddled wagon track climbed steeply along the side of the mesa, winding between pine trunks. Stryker’s alert attention swept the deep pockets of blackness, any of which could conceal a marksman. He drew his revolver and held it loosely.
The road reached a crest and turned through a cut in the cliff. The notch stood in sharp silhouette against the stars. Raindrops dripped sluggishly from the treetops. The buckskin’s hoofs padded softly in the spongy road. The cut would be superb for an ambush—and if Rafter Cross employed many toughs of the caliber of Jules Meecham and Pete Voss the chances were good that any guard posted in the notch might take a shot at a night-riding visitor before asking questions.
Stryker dismounted, drew his gun and walked, leading the horse. He put all his attention on the boulders flanking the road.
He threaded the notch without incident and reached a point where the walls fell back and the plateau fanned out across a flat plain clumped with juniper and pine. He mounted again, holstered his gun and left the rocks, riding onto the plateau.
Lamplight filled windows a mile ahead. Stryker urged the buckskin to a canter. The camp ground swallowed the sound of his progress.
The ranch headquarters had a musty look in the night—forlorn and lonesome on the wide plain. His eyes picked out the main building, a long adobe structure built in the Spanish pattern. A U-shape formed three sides of an open patio. The butt ends of heavy beams protruded from the low walls at ceiling level, like cannons emerging from the gunports of a sailing man of war.
A group of smaller structures lay back from the main house. Stryker counted five buildings and a series of large log corrals. He identified a barn, cookshack, bunkhouse, wagon barn and tack shed. A wooden-bladed windmill towered over the ranch.
Stryker saw the outline of a rifleman standing guard on the platform near the top.
The tip of the sentry’s cigarette alternately glowed and dimmed, a red coal in the night.
Stryker could not tell whether the guard had seen him. Deliberately he brought his mount to a halt, reached into his pocket and found a sulphur match. He lit it with his thumbnail and held it overhead until the wind blew it out.
The red button of the sentry’s cigarette flipped outward, arched down. It landed on the ground with a splash of sparks. Stryker heard a voice call out.
He rode ahead. The house door slammed. In the lamplight that spilled from windows Stryker saw three men deployed along the length of the galleried porch of the main house. The silhouette of a man’s head and shoulders blocked a window of the bunkhouse.
Stryker reined before the porch, sat his horse, hands folded over the saddle horn.
One of the three men on the porch stepped forward. His face remained in deep shadow. He carried a shotgun, muzzle lowered but pointed in Stryker’s general direction.
The man on the porch asked Stryker, “Do I know you?”
A voice behind him said, “That’s Nat Stryker.”
The first man said, “All right. What’s on your mind, Stryker?”
“You Madrid?”
“Do I look like him?”
“I wouldn’t know, friend.”
“I’m Ollie Pryor. That mean anything to you?”
“Should it?”
Pryor snarled, “Quit waltzing with me, Stryker. I got you outgunned by a country mile and you know it.”
“I didn’t come all this way to talk to you, Pryor. Where’s Madrid?”
The shotgun shifted in Pryor’s grip. He stood squat in the shadows, blunt-shouldered and round-headed. The door behind him crashed open. A gaunt man appeared in the light.
“Who’ve you got there, Ollie?”
“Stryker.”
“Nat?” The gaunt man had a deep bass voice. He stepped into the light. “What do you know? We was figuring maybe you wasn’t comin’.”
Stryker said, “Evening, Lloyd.”
His voice held neither pleasure nor its opposite.
Lloyd Handy said, “Quit bristling, boys. Nat, come inside.”
“I want to talk to Madrid.”
“He’s here. Come on in.” Handy stepped back, called, “One of you out there take care of the man’s horse.”
Stryker climbed onto the porch. Ollie Pryor had to throw his head back to look into Stryker’s face. Pryor had an unfriendly, petulant look about him.
He growled, “Seeley, grab that horse—” and turned on his heel to follow Stryker into the house.
The main parlor was wide, long and low-ceilinged. Scattered around the floor were bright-hued Zuni rugs. A buffalo head hung over the big stone fireplace. The furniture was old and sturdy—solid Mexican ranch furniture, hewn out of heavy wood. Some pieces were upholstered in dark leather. The lamps were turned high.
Lloyd Handy had the face of a hawk. His obsidian eyes were bleak, as if he had not laughed in a long time. His long arms hung down past twin revolvers in a fancy silver-studded belt.
Three men at a round table sat watching the door. The table held cards. A fourth chair was vacant, evidently Handy’s.
Two of the card-players were Jules Meecham and Pete Voss. Meecham grinned without humor at Stryker. Pete Voss tugged at his straw-colored beard and said nothing.
The third man was obese, so fat he was grotesque—his body filled the immense chair in which he sat. He had no lap. His big head was bald and glistened with sweat, although the evening was not hot. A black handlebar mustache drooped past his lips. The rest of his featureless face was folded in rolls of fat. Even his eyes were hidden behind puffy cheeks.
Stryker stood just inside the door, waiting for Ollie Pryor to come in past him. When Pryor slammed the door Stryker put a hard glance on him until Pryor looked away.
Lloyd Handy said, “This is Nat Stryker, men.”
The fat man spoke with a curiously high-pitched voice.
“I’m Buck Madrid.”
“All right,” Stryker said.
“You’ve had time to size us up,” said Madrid. “Come over here and sit down. I don’t like to look up at a man when I’m talking to him.”
“I think better on my feet,” Stryker said gently.
Rebuffed, Madrid rearranged the swollen curves of his face to show his displeasure. Stryker glanced at Ollie Pryor, who had stopped within ten feet of him.
Stryker said, “Get over by the table. You too, Lloyd.”
Handy’s gaunt face broke into a brief grin.
“You never did trust nobody, did you?”
“And I’m still alive. Go on. Get over to where I can see you. Both of you.”
Handy uttered an elaborate sigh.
“Come on, Ollie. Nat, ain’t no need to fill the air with bullets. Relax. You’re among friends.”
“Sure I am.”
Stryker watched while the two gunmen moved across the big room to Madrid’s card table. Handy sat down in the vacant chair after pulling it around to face the room. Pryor walked around the table to stand behind Pete Voss.
Buck Madrid said, “You’re careful. I applaud that.” He opened a pack of ready-made Turkish cigarettes and lit one. He withdrew from his sleeve a silk handkerchief and used it to wipe beads of oily sweat from his bald head.
When he had poked the handkerchief away into his cuff he said, “You’ll want to know what I’m hiring you for, I expect.”
“You haven’t hired me yet,” Stryker said.
“Then I’m to take it you rode all this distance just to turn me down?”
“There was a hundred dollars with your message.”
“I see. And that was enough to stir your curiosity?”
“Could be,” Stryker said.
Madrid tapped ash from his cigarette into a glass tray by his elbow. Jules Meecham, lizard-eyed and little, picked up the forgotten pack of cards and began to riffle it quietly.
Madrid said, “I want you to settle a homestead for me. It will be worth three hundred dollars a month to you, with a bonus of five hundred when the job’s done.”
“Why?” said Stryker.
Madrid’s hand moved vaguely.
“Lloyd. Show him.” Lloyd Handy grinned.
“Sure.” He stood up, crossed the room with lanky strides and pulled open the top drawer of a roll-top desk. “Come over here a minute, Nat. Ain’t nobody going to eat you.”
He walked back to the card table, carrying a rolled-up sheet of paper, which he spread out on the card table. Ollie Pryor reached over Voss’s shoulder to plant the glass ash tray on one corner to keep the map from rolling up.
Stryker came forward and stopped four feet away from the table—far enough to be out of range if one of the seated men should choose to throw the table at his belt buckle.
Lloyd Handy’s skeletal index finger slid onto the map.
“That’s the Rio Chama, running north and south. You’re six miles west of the river now. Rafter Cross runs from the Black Mesa north into the badlands. Right across the Chama, that’s Circle C ranch. All of it, from the Chama clear across to the Rio Grande. Belongs to an old bastard called Howard Cotten, him and his kids.”
Buck Madrid cleared his throat and said, “You didn’t come down the Rio Grande, did you?”
“No,” said Stryker.
“Then you don’t know how it lies. It’s a sand-bottom river, no good for fording. You might get across on a horse but a herd of cattle would just plow itself into a bog and never get across. Cotten’s only got one route to the railroad pens to get his steers to market. He’s got to drive them across Rock Ford. Show him, Lloyd.”
Handy’s thin finger moved up along the looping course of the Rio Grande and stopped.
Madrid said, “The Santa Fe tracks go along the south bank of the river to Espanola. They cross over there. But Cotten can’t drive his cattle that way because the road’s too narrow—half his herd would fall over the side of the mountain. And he can’t go north—it’s all badlands. And if he comes west he’s trespassing on my land. So he’s got to use Rock Ford. It’s the only hard-bottom crossing point on that whole stretch of the Rio Grande.”
Madrid sat back. He drew deeply on the cigarette.
He murmured, “I want him stopped. Two weeks from now he’ll start his beef roundup. Another week and he’ll be ready to head them for market. If he’s delayed as much as two weeks beyond that the market will be glutted with steers and the price will drop to nothing.”
Stryker only glanced at the map. He was studying Madrid’s fat, sleepy face.
Finally he said, “Where does this get you?”
“What?”
“This a grudge fight?”
The question made Madrid laugh.
“Good God. Do I look the type?”
“You don’t look hungry,” said Stryker.
A brief light, white-hot, glittered from the surfaces of Madrid’s half-concealed eyes.
He said, “You’re wrong, Mr. Stryker. I am hungry. For space. I didn’t buy out the old Spaniard who owned this ranch just to bury myself on sixty thousand acres of desert—and that’s all I own up here on the plateau.”
“Can’t you move west?”
“No. That’s the Navajo reservation. Anyway it’s nothing but scrub. It’ll hardly feed the few sheep the Indians have got. No, I’m boxed in here. The only way I can move is east—by absorbing Circle C. In time I’ll have a cattle ranch that will stretch from here to Taos. The railroad is getting ready to start selling off the land along its right-of-way—that’s another million acres—at two bits an acre. But I can’t raise that kind of money with nothing but this scrub outfit to put up for collateral.”
“Then why’d you buy this place?”
“Because it was the key to the whole territory,” Madrid said. “I bought the place for a song and I posted no-trespassing notices along the Rio Chama. I offered to buy old Cotten out, offered him a good price. He wouldn’t sell. All right. Now I’m going to force him to sell. Simple enough?”
“Maybe,” said Stryker. “This homestead you want me to settle. I guess it’s right there on the south bank of Rock Ford. Is that it?”
“It is. You can hire a Mexican to make the necessary improvements. All you’ve got to do is squat there and see to it that nobody trespasses on your land—especially no cattle herds coming across the river from Circle C.” Lloyd Handy murmured, “You run into any trouble, you just call on your old Mends up here at Rafter Cross.”
Jules Meecham was grinning. “Smart. Starve the old bastard out and he’ll quit.”
Stryker said, “Not so smart. You’ve forgotten one thing. If Circle C’s been using the ford they can claim right of prior use. Any homestead down there would have to allow them right of way.”
“In time, maybe,” said Madrid. “But it would take them months to get the case into court. By that time they’ll be too broke to hire a lawyer. We’ve had three lean seasons in a row up here. Cotten’s already mortgaged up to his eyebrows. If he doesn’t get a good price for his herd next month he’ll go under.”
Stryker said, “It might work—if Cotten’s damn fool enough to let you get away with it.”
“Why not? What can he do?”
Stryker’s bleak face stirred.
“You haven’t cornered the market on gunslingers. Who’ll stop Cotten from hiring an army to carry the fight right up to your door?”
Madrid’s shoulders lifted half an inch and dropped.
“I can outlast him if it comes to a fight. But I doubt the old man’s got the stomach for a range war.”
“But you have,” Stryker said dryly. “You don’t even carry a gun, do you?”
“Why should I when I can buy them for a dime a dozen?”
Madrid’s contemptuous glance flicked from man to man. Lloyd Handy was the only one who flushed. The rest were beyond insult.
Including Stryker.
He said in a low voice, “You’re a scavenger, Madrid. You’re like the others of your kind—you won’t find out until it’s too damned late that you can’t count dirty money without getting dirty hands.”
Madrid’s voice hardened.
“Whoever eats my bread is obliged to sing my songs, Stryker. I don’t take backtalk from my hired hands.”
“You haven’t hired me yet.”
“Don’t make me laugh. You’re a hired gun, Stryker. Maybe tougher than some—but still a hired gun. Hired guns don’t quit, my friend. They can’t. There’s nothing else you can do but sell your time to me. It’s that or miss out on whatever price you put on yourself. Or I put on you.”
“Maybe.”
Jules Meecham said in a quiet way, “Maybe somebody’s offered him a better deal, Mr. Madrid. I told you what happened last night. Nat killed that Mex to save the Cotten kid’s hide.”
Madrid asked, “Is that it, Stryker?”
His voice was deadly.
“Maybe,” Stryker said evenly. “But I’ll tell you this much. You’re offering a tough job and you’re paying birdseed. The man who settles that homestead on Rock Ford is going to earn better than a few hundred silver dollars.”
“Then what do you want?”
Stryker’s face revealed none of his feelings.
“For a job like that I’d want a cut.”
“How much?”
“Say twenty per cent of the ranch.”
Madrid laughed at him.
Lloyd Handy said, “A man can bury himself with his mouth, Nat.”
Madrid’s laughter dissolved.
He said, “I’m not building up a cattle empire to hand over one-fifth of it to a worthless gunnie.”
“Suit yourself,” said Stryker. “That’s my price.”
“And if I don’t meet it?”
“Then you hire yourself another homesteader,” said Stryker.
Madrid braced both hands against the arms of his chair and levered himself to his feet. He was not particularly tall but he weighed at least three hundred pounds. His high-pitched voice was controlled but dangerous.
“That’s agreeable to me. But look around this room and count up the odds before you leave, Stryker. And when you get on your horse—don’t stop riding until you’re halfway to Arizona or Texas. I mean that. If you let any grass grow under you in this part of the country I’ll take it to mean you’ve set yourself against me. And neither you nor any man alive is tough enough to buck my whole crew and stay on his feet.”
Stryker’s glance traveled from Handy to Meecham, to Pryor and finally, past Voss, back to Madrid.
Stryker said, “If you want to skin a big cat you need a big knife. Bigger than any I see here.”
“Only takes one bullet, Nat,” Lloyd Handy murmured.
“From your gun? You want to try it now, Lloyd?”
Buck Madrid said, “I’ll pick the time—if it comes to that. But I doubt you’d be that much of a fool.”
Stryker moved back toward the door.
He said, “I’ll pick the time, Madrid. I don’t take threats. If I feel like leaving this country behind it’ll be in my own good time.”
Lloyd Handy’s gaunt face turned, picked up a bright wash of lamplight.
“Sundown tomorrow,” he said. “After that I make it open season on you, Nat. Don’t push that onto me. You and me, we fought some pretty ones together.”
Stryker was at the door.
He said, “Call out my horse, Lloyd.”
Handy glanced at Madrid. The fat man nodded. Handy went to a front window, pushed it open and leaned out. His bellowing voice rolled across the yard.
At the table Pete Voss’s eyes glinted.
Stryker said, “Both hands on the table, Pete. Now.”
Voss’s eyes dropped. His hands came up from under the table and stretched out flat on its surface.
Lloyd Handy moved back to the table and Jules Meecham said in a tinder-dry voice, “Next time don’t hesitate, Pete.”
“Next time I’ll make it stick,” said Pete Voss.
Stryker said, “You’ll need a bigger crowd behind you than you’ve got now.”
“Then we’ll get a bigger crowd,” Lloyd Handy said imperturbably. “Don’t fight the odds, Nat.”
Jules Meecham said, “Last night he sided with the Cotten kid. How do we know he won’t ride right over to Circle C and hire on? I say we ought to take our chances now, while we got him in front of us.”
“No,” said Buck Madrid. His small eyes lifted toward Stryker. “Good night, Stryker.”
Hoofbeats made a soft signal in the yard outside.
Stryker said, “Stay indoors till I’m clear of the yard.” He backed out, pulled the front door shut, walked without evident hurry to his waiting horse. He mounted with hardly a glance at the gunman who had brought out the horse. He lifted the horse to an immediate canter and swept out of the yard.