YO’RE makin’ a big mistake,” said Jube Cameron seriously. “It ain’t because I’m losin’ yuh, Reb. I don’t need to tell yuh that. But a man that turns down a chance like this don’t know what he’s doin’.”
Santee shook his head again, regretful but decided. It struck him how seldom a man—in this case, his employer—could be so completely wrong when he believed he was absolutely right.
Jube had just offered him the foremanship of the C 8 ranch. It was just one more straw added to the heap of ironies that ringed the puncher about. Reb said no; he voiced his intention of leaving altogether, and offered a dozen excuses which Cameron declared to be evasions and refused to accept. After that, Reb ceased to explain himself, but he stood pat. Now he was meeting the arguments the rancher advanced why he had to remain. He owed it to Ronda’s father at least to listen.
“Does anybody else know whut yo’re aimin’ to do?” Cameron bored in. He was genuinely concerned, studying Reb shrewdly. “Have yuh told yore friends, Reb, or have yuh stopped listenin’ to ’em?”
This searching barb, and others, failed to find lodgement in Reb. “I told yuh, Cameron, I’m driftin’ on,” he said patiently, his smile harassed, a little worn. “I might better take it on the loose now, than let yuh down later when yo’re dependin’ on me.”
He clung to that doggedly. All the cunning the rancher had exercised before, and that he thought had given him power over Reb, could not move him now. Jube knew better than to lose his temper. His face became heavy, his manner ponderous.
“Are yuh feelin’ sick?” he probed insistently. “Is there somethin’ the matter with yuh? ... Yuh don’t look any too happy since yuh got back from Lander.”
This was too close home for comfort. Reb’s ingenious countenance lengthened. He assumed a woebegone look.
“Cameron, now yuh mention it, I don’t feel so good,” he confessed. “Reckon I need a change. I—I got aches an’ pains regular since I been workin’ fer yuh steady, an’ sometimes my head feels light.” He heaved a sigh.
For a moment Jube looked at him searchingly: then without warning he fetched Reb a blow on the back that staggered him, and burst into a guffaw of rumbling mirth.
“Dang yuh, yuh near had me that time!” he roared, his features reddening as he shook. “Reckon I ought to know yore breed if I’m ever goin’ to, yuh footloose young scallawag.... Come on up to the office an’ I’ll give yuh yore time, it that’s what yuh want. We’ll have a drink on it an’ yuh can look me up the next time yuh drift into the Basin.”
Half an hour later Reb rode away from the C 8, jobless. He sang a song and affected light-heartedness as long as Jube Cameron’s eyes could follow him. After that he relaxed imperceptibly under the shadow that had come to him so suddenly in Lander.
“Reckon I had to lie to Jube,” he thought soberly. “I’m havin’ to lie more an’ more to everybody. It ain’t much—but it’s hell when I don’t want to.”
He had taken the best course with Cameron, he saw now. The rancher had insisted on some good reason why he was quitting. Santee had been forced to play his cards with cunning. They seemed to sum up to the fact that he had no reason he could put a name to. Cameron drew the inevitable conclusion that he was simply irresponsible, a drifter, driven on his aimless way by the restlessness that was in him.
Six months ago that would have been true of Reb. Had it not been for the peculiar and telling force with which the Basin country had hit him—his meeting with Ronda Cameron—it would have been true now. But he had concealed these things beneath a laughing armor, absorbed and buried the impact which the girl and her home had had for him: perhaps even she and Billy Farragoh would believe in the lame reasons for leaving which Reb had given his employer. They would feel sorry to see him go but they would understand, and after a time they would forget....
“That’s the greatest kindness I can do Ronda now,” he mused bleakly. “Lettin’ her forget all about me.”
He was riding toward Ghost Creek as he thought these things, paralleling the willow-garnished border of a creek feeder at several hundred yards. It was summer now, rich and lustrous: the grass was deep and green, the sky smiling, the air soft and balmy. Flowers dotted the slopes, wild sweet scents assailed the nostrils; but Santee was oblivious of his surroundings until something tugged sharply at his shirt-front and buzzed away with an angry note.
Reb jerked backward away from it by instinct; and as his mind leaped to the present with a jar, he allowed himself to slip on, tumbling out of the saddle with lax grace. He knew what it was that had come so close to him, even before the belated crack of a rifle report followed. He had barely struck the ground when he found his feet; an instant later he gripped the pony’s bridle and peered under its neck, six-gun in hand.
His movements from the time he had leaned back in the first flash of awareness had not taken more than five seconds, yet already the white puff of rifle smoke was dissipated, for he could not locate it. A minute passed—another—while he scanned the line of willows from which he believed the shot had come: and now the hundred minute sounds and scents of the peaceful day drove in upon him.
He paid them no more heed than before, a dread alertness on him. Although he could not suppose the hidden marksman to believe his attack successful, there were apparently to be no more shots despite the fact that a determined man could have dropped his pony and made it hot for him—perhaps sooner or later got him.
“Somebody with no guts,” he muttered, his lips twitching with a cold, sardonic amusement. “Reckon it’s jest as well for me.”
He did not swing astride the roan and ride straight for the willows as he might have done could he have trusted the bravery of the man who lay there still, or else had crept away. Leading his mount and remaining shielded by it, he angled toward the treacherous cover, waiting for the moment the would-be assassin might believe to be another sure chance.
It never came. Reb reached the willows unmolested. No pony stood tethered on the other side. When he swung up and rode forward there was no sign to be read, nothing. Reb pursed his lips and squinted, looking away.
“Whoever done that was a damned careful man,” he mused. “Now what feller like that do I know who’s got it in fer me?”
It was a rhetorical question. As a matter of fact Doc Lantry had leaped into his mind at once. For an instant he felt the impulse to get to the dugout in a hurry—he felt sure he would find Doc there before him—and face the man out. Then he shook his head.
“No,” he said, “I won’t do that. Lord knows I got reason enough. But I ain’t shore it was him: an’ if it was, somethin’ drove Lantry to this, an’ I know what it is. He’s jealous. He’ll get over it when I ride away. An’ I’ll go at my own pace. I don’t figger to be chased.”
He knew what the result of a clash between himself and Lantry would be. There could be only one—death for Doc, blood on his own hands. He didn’t want that.
When he rode up to the dugout later on, Lantry was there. Reb unsaddled deliberately and stepped in. Doc was fiddling with his pipe. He looked up with a show of interest.
“Back, eh?”
Reb was preoccupied. “Where’s the Kid?” he countered.
Doc was watching him furtively. His tone was too hearty, overbold. “I dunno, Reb. He’s been gone a couple days.”
“Yuh shore? Yuh ain’t been away yoreself?”
“No.”
“Rest of the boys around?”
“No, they’re away too.”
They talked on, Lantry never turning his back. Wariness kept him from putting the questions Reb guessed were burning on his tongue. He hummed to himself, pottering about. Reb paid no attention to him directly.
The truth was, something else weighed on his mind. He would have to wait now for the Sundance Kid’s return to tell him of his decision to leave. He didn’t want to. At the same time, he recognized that he didn’t want to tell the Kid and the boys that he was pulling out at all.
A new thought came—one he would not have entertained before. Why throw up the Wild Bunch even now? The Kid at least was a faithful friend. The jobs they did together were an occupation. He could perhaps persuade the Bunch to leave with him and they could operate elsewhere. The attempt on his life, little as it had bothered him, warned that he could never be wholly safe again; it was just enough to supply the spark of stubbornness needed to bulwark this resolve.
Curiously, the change in the direction of his thoughts made a difference in his feeling about that shot on the range, too. Like a match to powder, his deciding to stick it out with the boys awakened a resentment against the intended murderer that strengthened the longer he thought about it. Somebody trying to put him out of the way, eh? It brought him to life in a way he had not thought possible when he had said good-bye to Ronda.
He went outside, and without caring whether Lantry watched or not, looked for the heated pony Doc must have recently released if he had fired that unwarning shot and then ridden hard to be here first. He didn’t find it. Doc’s favorite mount dozed in the corral: it had not worn a saddle for hours. It proved nothing, but it served further to remind Reb of Lantry’s shrewd caution.
He said nothing, but instead went about using his own method to produce results. Pointed and contemptuous indifference was something Doc was not constituted to withstand for long. For the rest of the day he stuck close to the dugout. He and Lantry watched each other in an unremitting cat and mouse game. Though Reb seemed as cool as ever, it set up a tension in Lantry which the arrival of Gloomy Jepson did nothing to relieve.
Gloomy came into the dugout with the air of an accomplishment and flung down his saddle.
“Wal, Doc, we got ’em away—” he began; and stopped abruptly, when Lantry made agitated signals for him to be silent, behind Santee’s back.
Reb turned around. “Got what away?” he queried.
Gloomy had been about to discuss the steers which had been run out of the Basin: a matter Doc emphatically did not want Reb to know anything about until it could no longer be avoided. He knew the towheaded one already suspected him of something—else why had he kept so silent about the attempt on his life which Ike Lucas had promised to make today? Anything—such as this rustling in the Basin—might serve Reb as an excuse for the explosion Lantry sensed to be boiling up in him.
“Some frisky young bulls pawin’ an’ fightin’ out near our east fence,” Doc inserted suavely. “I sent Gloomy an’ a couple others out to push ’em away before they knocked down the wire.”
Reb saw through this. He could have riddled the evasion in short order, but he let it go, glancing at Gloomy. Jepson was examining a torn rope-callous on his palm. He shook his head when he caught Santee’s eye.
“Well, Gloomy, better pour a little whisky on that. I reckon yo’re about ready to collapse.”
“I’m about ready to do somethin’,” Gloomy returned cryptically. After Reb smiled and turned away he shot a resentful stare at Lantry.
It was a strange evening the three passed. Little was said. Two of them, at least, were waiting—and perhaps all three, for Gloomy read a note of suspense in the atmosphere, stolid as he ordinarily was. He followed his usual custom of aloof indifference. Doc Lantry was the last to roll into his bunk, and that only after Reb had decided the Logans would not return tonight, and Gloomy had long been snoring.
In the morning Reb saddled up and rode away without a word. He returned to the scene of his close call and circled it at a distance of a mile. Still he found no suspicious sign—but on the crest of a swell a brace of miles from the dugout he did find a set of tracks he was unable to recognize. He followed it for a ways, his interest growing.
“Looks like a hombre with mysterious business, whoever he is,” he murmured. “I’d say he was watchin’ fer somethin’—or somebody.”
For the first time it came to him that it might not have been Doc Lantry who had fired the shot at him after all, despite his willingness to give the outlaw a break. “Here I was huntin’ fer proof that it was him—an’ now I’m provin’ it wasn’t,” he grinned. “Maybe,” he added after a moment.
He intended to find out the answer. Without ado he set off on the trail he had discovered. It led for miles in a series of loops around the Ghost Creek ranch, and then struck off toward the Owl Creek Range. Reb pursued, his brows knit in speculation.
“He shore hemstitched our range fer fair,” he mused. “But who in time is it?”
The solution to the riddle lay somewhere to the fore. Santee pushed on into the Owl Creek rises, keeping a keen watch ahead, on each side and to the rear. At no time was the trail easy to follow; nowhere did it fade out altogether.
He was tracing it across an open space in a wooded valley, miles from the Basin range, when, looking ahead, he saw in the rocky walls beyond, a narrow canyon crevasse he felt sure the unknown had been headed for. He drew up and eased himself in the saddle, considering.
“That’s no good,” he thought. “I can’t get in there without bein’ seen. This’s a real out-of-the-way place all right—he’s prob’ly holed up.” He turned it over thoughtfully, while the blue roan cropped grass and looked around. “I’ll watch,” he decided.
He left the trail, heading for cover. The man was bound to come out some time. If his business took him toward Ghost Creek, he would come this way. Reb nodded over this, his eye-corners crinkled, and settled to wait.
He was prepared for a long vigil, but as it turned out it was but a short one. In ten minutes’ time another rider appeared roughly in the direction from which he had come, and headed for the canyon. Doc Lantry’s gaunt, hard frame was easily recognizable.
It fetched a grunt from Reb. “I wasn’t so far wrong about him, after all,” he told himself. Only the sharpening of his blue eyes would have told what this meant to him.
Doc rode on. After a little he disappeared in the mouth of the canyon. When the rattle of his pony’s hoofs ceased on the bare rock, Reb came out of his concealment. All his movements were precise now, his muscles driven by a brusque compulsion not of the mind. He climbed the roan carefully up a rocky shoulder to a point from which he could look into the little canyon.
At first he saw nothing. Then he made them out against the dun background—Lantry standing beside his horse in the cuplike hollow, talking to a second man, ragged of appearance, with eagle vigilance and a rifle slanting in his grasp—Ike Lucas. Even at several hundred yards Santee recognized him instantly. Something caught him up then, bitter and uncompromising. It was the crisis—not for Reb, not so much for Lucas—as for Doc Lantry. Santee knew what had crawled in the man’s brain for so long, and what Doc had done about it at last. His mouth hardened.
“So that’s the way of it!” he gritted.
In the instant that he recklessly pushed the roan forward to slide to the canyon floor, Lantry and Lucas looked up, startled by the clatter of small stones, and saw him.