BLIND CANYON

For a quarter of an hour Scott Tillman had hunkered on his spurs in the rough cedar brake, his stony gaze fixed on the smoke which drifted toward him from the new-built branding fire. The troubled plains wind brought him the smell of the dust stirred up by restless hooves, and the frightened bawl of the first calf to feel the burn of the hot iron.

Behind him he heard a man drumming big knuckles impatiently against the tough leather of high-topped boots. Tillman glanced back at the crouched figures of his own three men, and Bannock’s five men.

The beginnings of an eager, grim smile began to work at big Clive Bannock’s wide mouth. “We got us a job to do, Tillman. Let’s get at it.”

Regret weighed heavily in Scott Tillman as his glance returned momentarily to the pole corral half-hidden in the gathering of brush back down the canyon. He watched the man and the boy out yonder, burning a brand onto the thick hides of one struggling and loudly bawling calf after the other.

A futile wish brought a grimace to his thin face. He wished he could have kept this affair to himself and his own men. It was the devil’s own luck that they had ridden into Clive Bannock and his Slash B crew.

“There’ll be no shooting unless they start it, Bannock. I want no killing. Do you understand that?”

Bannock’s eyes were cold. “We’ll see,” he said.

Silently the men moved back in a crouch to where two cowboys held their horses behind a shelter of thick brush. Scott Tillman swung into the saddle, his hard gaze lingering for a moment on Clive Bannock. Bannock limped heavily as he took his horse and maneuvered him around for an easy mount.

Tillman was younger by twenty years than big Clive Bannock. He was as tall, but he didn’t have the great chest, the broad shoulders, the stout beltline that Bannock had. Everything about Bannock was big, even his broad, heavy face, and the bull neck that swelled his sweat-streaked collar. But it was the eyes that always ultimately drew a man’s guarded attention. They were dark eyes, almost black, and hard as the flint of a Comanche spearhead. His ambition matched his size, for Slash B cattle were scattered across Winchester preemptions from the Canadian River down to the Caprock.

As for Tillman, he appeared to be just another cowboy, come north to the great buffalo plains from the thorny brush of South Texas. He was string-thin, so that his clothes always hung a little loose around his flat stomach. But there was strength in his gaunt, wind-whipped face. It was a strength that even Clive Bannock knew.

The riders were within fifty feet of the corral when the boy spotted them and yelped. The man dived toward a rifle he had left leaning against the pole fence. Then he counted the horsemen, weighed the distance, and stopped with empty hands.

He met the riders with a forced smile instead of a loaded gun. “Get down. We can fix up a bucket of coffee while we finish branding this little jag of calves.”

Relief eased through Tillman. There wouldn’t be a fight, then. He had had his share of fighting a long time ago.

“Thanks, Owen,” he replied, “I reckon not. We’re just looking around. Good-looking bunch of calves. They show good breeding.”

Owen kept his grin, but something was rapidly draining out of it. The boy behind him was scared. His hands trembled, and his freckled, fifteen-year-old face had blanched white. Owen kept talking.

“They got good mammies behind them. Good bulls, too. I’m always careful when it comes to choosing cattle.”

Tillman nodded. “So I hear,” he said with irony. He rolled a cigarette with tense fingers, alert for any sign of a wrong movement. “But the best of them gets careless once in a while. Even Jess Owen might make a mistake and put a brand on a calf that didn’t match the one his mammy carried.” He licked the cigarette paper and watched sudden red wipe across Owen’s whiskered face.

The man eased a half a step closer to the gun. “Why, I could show you the mammies of these calves, if I hadn’t already weaned them.”

Tillman’s jaw ridged. “Then I don’t reckon you’d mind us bringing in a little bunch of cows we gathered back yonder and putting them in here with the calves.”

He turned half around in the saddle and signaled. In a few moments he heard the bawling of cows behind him. The calves in the pen started bawling louder, crowding against the south end of the corral in an effort to see the cows.

Tillman didn’t have to look. He’d already seen the cows with Wilma Dixon’s Lazy D brand on their hips. A couple of his cowboys had found them hidden up a fenced-in canyon, apparently to be left there until they had forgotten their calves and could return to their home range without arousing some nosy cowboy’s suspicion.

A Lazy D cowhand opened the gate. The calves spilled out among the bawling cows. They quickly began mating up with their mammies and hungrily making up for lost time. “Want to see any more, Owen?” Tillman asked.

Owen shrugged wanly. “Looks like we’ve seen enough. All right, I’ll ride in to town with you. But you big fellows with your association don’t think you can whip us little birds in our own court, do you?”

Tillman’s mouth tightened. No, he admitted to himself, he didn’t. Not a single conviction had the association managed to get, even against the most notorious of cow thieves like Curly Kirkendall.

The town of High Land had started with an adobe whisky post when the rolling plains had echoed to the slap of Sharps rifles in the rough hands of buffalo hunters. When the hunters and the buffalo were gone, great herds of longhorns had begun to drift up onto the broad buffalo plains. The settlement had grown into a wild gathering of saloons, gamblers, and doubtful women, where outcasts from the rest of Texas and from across the line in New Mexico could come and find others of their own kind.

But there was growing animosity among the cattlemen, both big and small. Had it not been for the gnawing distrust which festered between the big outfits and the little ones, they might long ago have joined forces and wiped High Land clean.

Even so, the town’s denizens feared that the cow outfits would someday form a coalition, organize a county, and kill the town by law. So they beat the ranchmen to the jump. Almost in secret, they had gathered a petition and gotten the county organized and their own officers elected, before the cowmen stopped sniping at each other long enough to realize how serious the situation had suddenly become.

Owen laughed. “Still want to take me to town, Tillman? Soon’s Judge Merriwether sees me, I’ll be loose again anyhow.”

Big Clive Bannock nodded his great head at the young man who rode beside him. Young Fletch Bannock edged his horse forward. “We ain’t taking you to town, Owen. We got our own court right here. And the verdict is guilty. That cottonwood down yonder by the creek looks just about right.”

Quick anger whipped in Tillman as he whirled on Clive Bannock’s son. “There’s not going to be any hanging. I told you—”

A hint of grim laughter danced in Fletch Bannock’s wild gray eyes. He was a kid of twenty-one, with his father’s big frame but a quick, lithe movement like that of a Mexican panther. The fuzzy attempt at a mustache on his upper lip might appear ludicrous to anyone who did not know about the two notches already carved on the well-polished gun which rode in the kid’s worn leather holster.

Fletch spat, “Shut up, Tillman. You’re outvoted here. If you don’t like it, you better just take a little ride over that hill.”

Tillman stiffened to the cold pressure of a gun against the small of his back. He knew it was Clive Bannock’s.

Right hand upon his gun, Fletch Bannock loosened his horn string with his left hand and began to shake down his rope. He edged his horse a little closer to the ashen-faced Owen.

“Put your hands behind you, Owen, and take it like a man.”

The thief slowly stepped backward until he was helpless against the pole fence. “It ain’t right,” he blurted. “A man’s got to have a trial.”

In desperation he dived for his gun. That was what Fletch Bannock had waited for. His own gun leaped into his hand and he fired. Owen slumped back against the fence and sagged down in a heap.

A helpless rage swelled in Tillman’s throat. He turned to Clive Bannock and saw the satisfaction in the big man’s face. “You had no call to do that, Bannock.”

“Matter of opinion. Has working for a woman these last few years made a woman out of you, Tillman?

“Now what about this button here? He’s old enough to know better than help Owen steal cattle. We might just as well take care of him, too, and show them small-time outfits that our association means business.”

Trembling in anger, Tillman stepped down and stood in front of the quaking boy. “You won’t lay a hand on him, Bannock. I’m mad enough to shoot you if you make one move toward him.”

He thought he had seen the boy before, swamping out a High Land saloon. A drifting, homeless kid, likely. He was at an age where he might still become either an outlaw or a preacher, depending on which way he was shoved.

“What’s your name, son?”

Stammering, the boy finally managed to say Chet Golightly.

“Now listen to me, Chet. You’re mighty lucky to be getting out of this alive. If you were a little older, you’d likely be lying there with Owen.”

He paused for emphasis. “Now, you catch your horse and head back east. Don’t stop to tell anybody goodbye. Just get on that horse and go!”

Swallowing, the boy nodded. His freckles stood out darkly on his white-drained face.

His cowboys backing him up, Scott Tillman watched Bannock’s men to be sure no one interfered with the boy. As the kid swung into his old broken-tree saddle, Tillman stepped up beside his horse.

“One more thing, son. Was there anybody else with you and Owen?”

The boy shook his head, “No, sir. Nobody but the woman.”

Tillman swallowed. “Woman? What woman?”

“I don’t know. I came out here only yesterday. She’s back yonder in Owen’s shack.”

He pointed vaguely up the canyon. Then he hauled his horse around and, bare-heeled, kicked into a lope.

Scott Tillman leveled an angry glance at big Clive Bannock. There would have to be a woman!

“Let’s put Owen’s body across his horse and then go find that shack,” he said darkly to his own cowboys.

As they rode out, he pulled in beside Clive Bannock. His jaw set, he nodded toward Bannock’s son. The boy already was carving a new notch into his gun, extracting his full measure of grim pride.

“You’re raising that boy into a man-killer, Bannock,” Tillman said. “The day’ll come when you’ll wish to God you could start him over again.”

Bannock shook his head. “No, Tillman. I want him tough. A man’s got to be tough to carve himself a place in this country. He’ll be as tough a man as I am. Tougher.

“You see, Tillman, my old man was a coward. Everything he ever got hold of somebody took it away from him. He was a great one for turning the other cheek. I hated the way we lived, and I got so I hated my old man. Soon as I was old enough to shift for myself, I ran off. I’ve never turned a cheek to any man. What I want, I get. And what I get, I keep.”

It was a good canyon for a cowman. The curing grama grass stretched like a golden carpet from one side to the other, its flag tops bending under the constant wind of the high Texas plains. A meandering stream of cool, clear water split it down the middle. Gray jackrabbits leaped out of the grass at the approach of the riders and skittered away to pause again at a distance and listen, their black-tipped ears moving back and forth. Scattered up and down the canyon were a couple of hundred longhorn cattle, carrying good flesh. They raised their horned heads at the sight of the riders and eased away.

“By George,” Bannock boomed, “I’m going to have this canyon. We’ll split up the cattle. Like as not, they were stolen from us anyhow. Then I’m moving some of my stuff up here.”

A hardness coiled in him, Tillman turned in the saddle. “Try it, and we’ll run you out, Bannock. Owen’s widow has still got first claim on this land. Any cattle we can’t prove were stolen will belong to her.”

The big ranchman savagely jerked his horse to a stop. “You haven’t got any right to talk to me like that, Tillman. I own the Slash B. You’re nothing but a foreman, a hired hand.”

“That’s right, Bannock. But Mrs. Dixon’ll back me up. If there ever comes a time she doesn’t, I’ll leave. Till then, I speak for the Lazy D. And I’m telling you, leave this canyon alone.”

Bannock’s hatred flared alive in his broad face. It had been like this between them ever since the first time they had met on the rolling plains, three years before. Just up from the lower country, Bannock had tried to bluff Wilma Dixon into giving up one of the big natural lakes she needed badly for summer water. She had been a widow less than a year then, a very young widow, and Bannock had thought the bluff would be easy to pull.

But Scott Tillman had stampeded Bannock’s herd before it ever got to the water. In the run, Bannock’s horse had fallen on him. The big ranchman still favored the leg that had snapped under the smashing weight of the horse.

Scott watched in relief as Clive and Fletch Bannock rode away, their men trailing out behind them. It wouldn’t be easy, explaining to Owen’s woman. But maybe it would be a little less difficult with the Bannocks gone.

Jess Owen had built his shack of pickets, border style, and chinked it with mud. He had put it up toward the head of the canyon, where a spring bubbled forth the cool water that gave life to the plains and started the stream on its crooked course down toward the Canadian.

She came out of the shack’s door and stood on the rock step, waiting for them. Tillman’s mouth dropped open. He had expected to see a graying woman about Owen’s age. Instead he found facing him a girl of eighteen or twenty, with a slender figure, smooth features, and long brown hair that drifted out over her shoulder in the easy plains wind. Tillman stepped down and took off his broad-brimmed hat.

Not yet seeing the body on the horse, she spoke first. “If you’re Curly Kirkendall, Uncle Jess says tell you to unsaddle and wait. He’s down the canyon. He’ll be back directly.”

Uncle Jess. Then she wasn’t Owen’s wife, after all. And if she didn’t know Curly Kirkendall, she couldn’t have been in this country long. Kirkendall had stolen cows from every ranchman in the high country, and not a one could prove it.

Crushing the hat clumsily in his work-roughened hands, Scott said hesitantly, “I’m not Curly Kirkendall, miss. And Jess Owen won’t be coming back. He’s dead.”

She lifted a small hand over her mouth, and her terrified eyes saw Owen’s body slacked across the saddle.

“Sorry, miss,” Tillman spoke. “He was stealing cattle.”

Tears worked slowly down her cheeks, but her brown eyes managed to shoot angry sparks. Tillman sensed that they were eyes unaccustomed to tears.

“And you killed him!”

“Fletch Bannock killed him, miss.” He lowered his head. “But we were there.”

She whirled around, her back to him, and covered her face with her hands. Tillman moved to place a hand on her thin shoulder, then drew it back. Gravely he glanced up at one of the cowboys and nodded toward Owen’s body.

“Better find a shovel, Chuck.”

When the grave was dug, Tillman went inside the shack where the girl had fled. His hat again was in his hands.

“We can go down to Peace Valley and get a preacher for him, if you want us to. Otherwise, I reckon we’re ready to bury him, if you are.”

There were no longer any tears in her eyes, but defiance burned there. “I’m ready, I guess. I’ll fetch a preacher up later.”

Dick Coleridge was a quiet-mannered cowboy who never took off for town after payday for a round of women, cards, and whisky. Scott had him say a few words before the cowboys shoveled the dirt back into the grave.

Scott followed the girl down toward the rude picket shack.

“You can’t stay out here by yourself, miss. You better come on along with us. Wilma Dixon owns the Lazy D. She’ll be glad to have you stay at the ranch till you make some kind of arrangements.”

Bitterly the girl shook her head. “Take favors from the people who killed Uncle Jess? I reckon there are women in High Land I can stay with.”

“Women like Prairie Kate and Wild Mary Donovan? You don’t look to me like you belong in that kind of company. We’ve got a lot to make up to you for. Why don’t you come on along with us?”

Finally she shrugged her shoulders. “All right. But you’re not doing me any favors. I’ll pay for my keep. Is that understood?”

Helping her gather up a few of her clothes, he noted that Owen had turned over the shack to the girl. Owen’s own bedding and clothes were in a small dugout shed down by the creek.

“Tell me what you were doing out here in the first place,” Scott said.

“Jess Owen was my dad’s brother. I reckon if I were honest about it I’d have to admit that they were both about the same caliber. My mother ran off from us when I was a little girl.

“We just kind of bummed around over the country. Dad did whatever he had to do to make us a living, and even then he generally gambled half of it away. Six months ago he was shot in a saloon. Uncle Jess had come up here. When he heard, he sent for me.”

Defiance stood strong in her voice and in her brown eyes. “Maybe they weren’t all they ought to’ve been. But they were kind to me; that’s what counted. There haven’t been many people that were ever kind to me.”

Scott Tillman swallowed, and he dropped his gaze to the boot-packed dirt floor. There was a sudden stirring in him.

“You’ll find other people can be kind, too, Miss Owen. I promise you.”

Riding out of the canyon, they met another group of horsemen coming in. Scott counted six. And riding in the lead was Curly Kirkendall.

Surprise lifted Kirkendall’s face as he reined up. Then the face settled into the easy grin it almost always held. “Howdy, Scott,” he said. “Kind of off your range, ain’t you?”

Scott nodded. “Maybe. But a cowboy’s got to go where his cattle are. And lately a lot of ours’ve been getting off their range. I reckon you know as much about that as we do.”

His tone was gentle, almost good-humored.

Kirkendall threw back his handsome head and laughed loudly and heartily.

Scott couldn’t help smiling with him. They were on opposite sides of the fence now. There couldn’t be any denying that. But there had been a time once, before Scott had realized he was riding up a blind canyon. And Scott never forgot that except for the wisdom of one man, he might be in Kirkendall’s place.

“If you’re going to Jess Owen’s, Curly,” he said, “you can save your time. You won’t find him.”

Curly’s smile faded as the meaning soaked in. His gaze finally touched the girl. He took off his hat, revealing the curly mop of flaming red hair that had given him his nickname. “This is Owen’s niece, I take it?”

Scott nodded “I’m taking her to Wilma Dixon, Curly. Mrs. Dixon will make a home for her till Miss Owen decides what she wants to do.”

For a long moment Curly Kirkendall looked at the girl, his eyes soft. Then the outlaw said, “You go with him, miss. You can trust Scott Tillman, and Mrs. Dixon, too.”

He donned his hat and rode on, his five men abreast of him.

John Dixon had built his ranch headquarters at a Comanche spring which swelled out of the grassy ground at the head of a long canyon. It was much like the location Jess Owen had chosen, except that it was far larger. The canyon walls helped shield it from some of the fury of the howling winter northers that burst down from the open plains above.

Even so, the plains wind always searched the place out, for the wind was a constant thing here on the Llano Estacado. It was a vibrant part of life, just as much as the endless, rolling land, the springs, and the snaky Canadian. Cool and pleasant, the wind brought the range to green awakening in the spring. With help of the hot sun, the toasting summer wind cured out the short grass that would be so desperately needed in the winter, when the same wind would come howling down with its dread chill, its ice and snow.

Riding by the rock barn, Scott motioned for his cowboys to pull in and unsaddle. With Nell Owen following him, he rode up the grass-covered slope to the main house. Like the barn, it was built of rock. John and Wilma Dixon had spent their first winter here in a dugout. That was the winter she had lost her baby. When spring came, Dixon and his cowboys built her the big house. But Dixon didn’t get to live in it long. A horse dragged him down the side of a canyon, and Wilma Dixon was left to manage her ranch alone.

She wasn’t really alone. Scott Tillman had owed John Dixon a debt that money couldn’t pay. He stayed and took charge for Wilma. Instead of going under, as people had predicted it would when John Dixon died, the Lazy D grew into a bigger place than ever, second only to Clive Bannock’s gun-won Slash B, which sprawled between its ragged boundaries down most of the way to the Caprock.

A bay horse was hitched to the fence on the shady side of the house. Scott knew it belonged to Doug McKinney.

“You can sit out here on the gallery,” Scott said to Nell Owen. “I better talk to Mrs. Dixon first.”

He helped her down from her horse and walked with her up to the porch. He pushed through the front door, with its oval-shaped, etched glass and the dust-catcher carving that framed it.

Wilma Dixon was still a young woman, in her midtwenties. Hard luck and grief had matured her, but they had not cost her any of the beauty that had won cattleman John Dixon six or seven years ago. Now she owned thousands of cattle and controlled hundreds of sections of preempted land. But always in her deep blue eyes Scott saw a vague unhappiness, a deep loneliness and yearning. Scott always had been able to solve any problem that the ranch might give. But for her greatest need, he had had no answer.

Doug McKinney stood on the far side of the parlor, a cup of coffee in his hand. He was a hardworking man who owned a small ranch down the canyon, its borders touching the Lazy D on one side, Bannock’s Slash B on the other.

He nodded at Scott Tillman, but there was reserve in his gray eyes. He never had really liked the Lazy D foreman. “Wilma tells me you thought you had the trail of some stolen cattle, Scott.”

Tillman chewed his lip and looked at Wilma Dixon. “We did. We trailed them to Jess Owen’s canyon outfit.”

Distastefully, he told them about running into Clive Bannock, and Bannock’s persistence in going along. He described the death of Jess Owen.

“We found out later that there was a girl at his shack. She’s his niece. We brought her along, Mrs. Dixon. I told her she would have a home here till something else could be worked out. I hope that’s all right.”

There was sympathy in Wilma Dixon’s voice. Tillman liked her for it. She had had grief enough of her own to be always ready to help someone else in need. “Please, Scott, bring her in.”

Doug McKinney took a quick step forward. “Just a minute, Scott, before you do. There’s something I want to ask you. You know Clive Bannock. You know what he is. Why do you keep working with him?”

Frowning, Scott said, “Because working together is the only way we’ll ever clear this country of crooks and thieves. It’s the only way we’ll ever make it a decent place. You’re right about Bannock. I don’t like him, either. But it takes iron to fight iron.”

McKinney made little attempt to hide his hostility. “I don’t know that Jess Owen was a thief. I can only take your word for it. We’ve known for a long time that Clive Bannock has wanted to get rid of us small outfits. I’ve got a suspicion you’d like it too, Tillman. Is that why you and Bannock and four or five other big outfits armed your association, so you could squeeze us little men out? So you could call us cow thieves and run us off?”

Color flared in Scott’s face, but he said nothing. This wasn’t the first time.

Wilma Dixon sprang to his defense. “Doug, that’s not fair, and you know it.

“The Lazy D has always been a friend to you. Why, you and I have known each other since I was a little girl. You threw your cattle in with John’s, and we all came up here together. You don’t think I’d turn against you now, do you?”

McKinney shook his head. There already were streaks of iron-gray in his hair, streaks that shouldn’t be showing up for years yet.

“You wouldn’t, Wilma. But Scott Tillman might.” He reached out and took Wilma Dixon’s hand. When McKinney looked at her, there could be no doubt how he felt about her, or why he had stuck with a hopeless ranch in the face of heavy odds, just to be near her.

“I’ve enjoyed the visit, Wilma. I’ll come back when I can.”

He paused at the door for a last word to Scott. “There are a good many of us small men, Scott. We can look mighty big in a fight. Remember that before you and your association undertake any high-handed murder.”

When McKinney had gone, Wilma touched Scott’s arm with her hand. “Scott, don’t hold this against Doug. He’s taken a lot of crowding from Clive Bannock. You can’t blame him for being hard to get along with.”

Scott shook his head. “No, you can’t blame him.”

He knew there was another reason for McKinney’s not liking him, but it wouldn’t do to tell Wilma Dixon. Maybe she sensed it herself—that she was the cause.

She still had hold of his arm, and the touch of her hand made him a little uneasy. “The girl is still waiting outside, Mrs. Dixon,” he reminded her.

“Yes,” she answered quietly. “Please bring her in.”

There was a strong pride in Nell Owen. She stuck to her declaration that she would accept no favors, that she would expect to pay for her keep. Wilma Dixon finally gave up arguing with her about it and let her have it her own way. Inwardly Scott smiled. There was something he liked about this girl. He wasn’t much surprised when, after only a couple of days of uncomfortable sitting around the house, Nell Owen decided to go back to her canyon. He knew by the determined set of her jaw that there wouldn’t be any talking her out of it. But he tried.

“It’s not the kind of country that a woman tackles alone,” he warned her.

“Wilma Dixon made out all right,” she said pointedly.

He rubbed his chin a little before he answered that one. “But John Dixon had the place well established before he died. And she wasn’t exactly alone, even afterward. She had help.”

Her brown eyes were stubborn. “Nearly everything I’ve ever done, I’ve had to do without help. I’ve gotten by; I’ll get by now. All my life I’ve had to be moving around. I’ve never had anything of my own, or a place I could look to as a home of my own.

“Well, now I’ve got a place, and I’m going to keep it. I’ll not let anybody talk me out of it, and nobody is going to chase me away. If they think they can, they’re in for a sad surprise.”

She left the next morning. Somewhat against her will, he went with her to Peace Valley to locate a couple of trustworthy cowhands for her.

He watched her sell, sight unseen, enough of her cows to pay immediate expenses, and watched the way she bought supplies she would need for the ranch. There was no indecision or frivolity about her.

An admiration grew in him as he watched. And when at last she climbed into an old but sturdy wagon she had bought, he took off his hat with a grin.

“I think you’re going to make it.”

Her little jaw took on that determined set again. “You’re doggone right I’ll make it!”

She flipped the reins like a teamster and took the bouncing wagon north, her two middle-aged cowhands following along on horseback. Scott watched until they faded together as one tiny dust speck far out on the plains. All the way home he thought about her, and he wondered why.

Saltiest of the little ranchmen in the high country was leather-tough Jock Classen. An old bachelor, he was a short, stocky kind that had a banty rooster fire to him. One night a couple of years back, he and two Mexican ranch hands had run off a bunch of would-be cattle rustlers. It got to be an open secret that they were Curly Kirkendall and his men. And every time someone mentioned Jock Classen, Curly would duck his head and grin.

Jock had had a rousing run-in with Clive Bannock, too, and Bannock had left in a hurry, with Classen’s shotgun boosting him along.

About a week after Jess Owen’s death, a neighbor rode over to Classen’s ranch and found Classen and both his Mexican hands dead. Classen had been shot in the back. His gentes had their guns out but evidently had never had a chance to use them.

Cold fury building in them, Classen’s neighbors soon discovered that most of Classen’s cattle had been rounded up and driven away. The job had been done two or three days earlier, according to signs. There was little use in trailing the cattle now, for they would be far across the New Mexico line before anyone could catch them.

The angry fingers pointed toward Curly Kirkendall. Yet there was puzzled uncertainty among the little ranchmen. Curly hadn’t bothered them since the big outfits had formed their association. Most of them figured the rustler was laying off them to help discourage them from joining with the big brands.

But the bloody tragedy of Jock Classen gave Scott Tillman a burning new hope that he might be able to pull the big outfits and the little ones together. Maybe this was what they needed to show them that their only hope was in unity. At Scott’s word, Lazy D riders spurred out all over the high country with word that there would be a meeting in Peace Valley after Jock Classen was buried.

Jock’s funeral didn’t last long. There weren’t any relatives to mourn for him, and Jock had never given the minister a chance to get acquainted with him. So there wasn’t much to do but read from the Book and lower the long pine box into the grave that had been cut down through the thick plains sod.

Anxiously, Scott scanned the crowd. Almost every ranchman in the high country was there—all of them but Clive Bannock. And he was one they would need most.

Doug McKinney’s gaze, suspicious and half-hostile, had rested on Scott through much of the service. “All right, Scott, you’ve gotten us here. Where’s your friend Bannock? Any agreement you make won’t be worth a dime unless he’s a party to it.”

Worriedly, Scott looked back over his shoulder, studying the thin wagon trail that led off in the direction of Bannock’s land. “He’ll get here directly, Doug. He promised he would. What do you say we go on down to the meeting house?”

For an hour or more they waited there in the gentle shade of a cottonwood motte along the creek. The men whittled, spat, and talked in low voices. A restlessness began to move through them like the vague unrest that stirs a herd of cattle when it begins to sense a coming storm. Time and again Scott Tillman glanced up the trail for sign of Clive Bannock, but he didn’t see him. It looked as if some of the men were about ready to leave.

Scott got up and stood in front of the group.

“I can’t figure what’s keeping Clive Bannock. He sent me word he’d be here. While we’re waiting, we might as well go on and talk.

“This thing shocked all of us, big or small. It could happen again. The only way we can scotch it is to work together. Fighting separately, we can’t stop it.

“I know a lot of you have been afraid of our association. You’ve thought it was a big men’s trick to cheat you. But it isn’t, I guarantee you that. Pull together, and we can clean out High Land and its thieves and throat-cutters. We can get us an honest government in this county, and we can make this country grow.

“Every man in this association will have an equal voice. Doesn’t matter whether he has a hundred cows or ten thousand. Every association member here will vouch for that.”

Doug McKinney frowned. “What about Bannock? Will you vouch for him?”

Hope was rising in Scott Tillman. In the faces of the men before him he could see the beginnings of agreement. They would get their association now, one that would be worth something. And because of it, the high country would be worth more, too.

“Yes, Doug, we’ll vouch for him.”

McKinney nodded, evidently satisfied. “All right, Scott. I guess it’s the only way. Where do you want me to sign?”

One after another, the small ranchmen signed their names on the long, white sheet of paper. Scott and three other charter members watched, smiles carved deep in their wind-tanned faces.

Hoofbeats pounded along the wagon trail as the last men were signing. Clive Bannock rode in. Four of his men were behind him, and young Fletch Bannock rode at his side, the silver of his polished gun glinting in the sunshine.

Heavy Clive Bannock rested his big hands on the horn of his saddle. A dry grin spread across his wide face that was badly in need of a shave. “Looks like you’re doing fine, Tillman. I’m right proud of you.”

Irritated, Doug McKinney stepped forward. “I’d’ve thought you’d be here, Bannock.”

The dry grin was still on Bannock’s face. “That end of the business I leave to Tillman. There’s just one thing I wanted to tell you men.”

Bannock’s forced grin suddenly faded out, and Scott felt a quick, vague uneasiness.

Bannock said, “Jock Classen is dead. He didn’t own his land; he just took it. So the way I see it, his place is open for the first man who steps in and pre-empts it.

“I’ve had my men moving my cattle over there today. I want every man here to know that Jock Classen’s place is mine now. And I stand ready to back up that statement with whatever it takes.”

For the space of time it takes a man’s face to flare and his fists to harden into knots, there was stunned silence among the ranchmen.

Then Doug McKinney exploded into fury. He whirled first on Scott. “So you were going to vouch for him! Well, you have. You helped him get us all here so there wouldn’t be anybody to stop him from taking Classen’s land.”

McKinney’s hand fell upon the long sheet of paper the men had signed. He tore it in half and quartered it. Then he turned on Bannock.

“This time we’ll stop you, Bannock. You’ve pushed us as far as we’re going to go.”

Fury rode Scott Tillman. But caution held a tight rein. He saw the cold spark that began to play in Fletch Bannock’s hard young eyes, and sensed the easy downward movement of Bannock’s hand.

“Do you think you’re big enough to whip the Slash B, McKinney?” Clive Bannock demanded coldly.

“Not alone, maybe. But we can do it together. That’s what Scott Tillman said. But we’ll start our own association, Bannock. We’ll whip all of you before we’re done.”

Scott saw the sudden clench of Fletch Bannock’s teeth a second before the boy spurred his horse forward. Fletch’s big gray slammed into McKinney and sent him sprawling. The boy had his gun in his hand and was waiting, a steely grin crawling along his lip.

“Don’t do it, Doug!” Scott yelled as McKinney’s gun came out of the holster. He swung his booted foot and sent the pistol spinning out of McKinney’s hand.

“Don’t you see he’s trying to kill you?”

But McKinney’s face was flushed scarlet. He jumped to his feet, and with a rush spun Scott back against a cottonwood tree. Scott gasped at the driving weight of McKinney’s fist high in his chest. He brought his own fist up, almost from the ground, and felt it jerk McKinney’s head back like the popping of a whip. The ranchman sagged, clutching vainly for the tree to hold him up.

Scott turned on the Bannocks, his bruised hands trembling in anger. “Go on, Clive. Get out of here before this turns into a slaughterhouse.”

Disappointment twisted Fletch Bannock’s slick face. His lips curled under the fuzzy imitation of a mustache.

“Maybe you’d like to try something, Tillman.”

Breathing hard, Scott met the kid’s hostile stare.

“Come on, Fletch,” said his father curtly. “We’re through here.”

Scott watched them go, his hopes dissolved, his skin flinching under the hostile stares of the small ranchmen who stood around him. Bannock had killed his cause, and had done it on purpose.

“You’re through, all right.” Scott muttered. “You may not know it, but you’re through.”

Scott Tillman usually knew where Curly Kirkendall could be found. Instead of riding straight back to the Lazy D, he angled west. The bitterness sank deeper and deeper into him as he rode. At dusk he drew rein before a carelessly built dugout that had been carved into the side of a hill and roofed over with sod. The front of it was made of mud-chinked poles, piled one on another in log-cabin fashion. A couple of wild-animal hides and a black-bottomed washtub hung beside the solid plank door, the prairie wind rocking them gently from one side to the other.

A man afoot suddenly appeared in front of Scott. He held a shotgun.

“Who are you, and what the hell do you want?”

Calmly, because he had been here before, Scott said, “I’m Scott Tillman. Tell Curly I want to see him.”

In a moment the dugout door swung inward and Curly Kirkendall appeared in a frame of yellow lamplight. “Get down and come in, Scott. Bryce, take his horse.”

Scott shook hands and sat in a rawhide bottomed chair inside the musty dugout. Without saying much, he smoked a cigarette and studied Curly’s laughing face.

“Well,” the rustler said good naturedly, “what did you come for this time, Scott? To tell me again that I’m heading up a blind canyon and to warn me about the booger man?”

Scott shook his head. “No, I’ve done that enough already, and it never does any good. It’s something else this time.”

He leaned forward, snuffing out his cigarette on the leg of his chair and frowning darkly. “You know about Jock Classen, I guess.”

Kirkendall’s smile left him. “I know about it.”

“Shot in the back, too. That didn’t look to me like your brand of work, Curly.”

“I didn’t do it, Scott. None of my men had a hand in it.”

Relieved, Scott leaned back again. “I didn’t think you did. But I wanted to hear you say it. Do you know who it was?”

Cautiously Curly replied, “Maybe. But it ain’t for me to say. There’s too many people around High Land that know too much about me. Was I to go to working my jaw too much, they might start talking, too.”

Scott argued, “Curly, I know we’re enemies, theoretically. But we’ve been friends a long time, too. You know that whatever you tell me here tonight won’t go any farther than this dugout. Lots of people think you killed Classen. If I knew who really did it, it might be of help to you.”

Curly ran his hand thoughtfully through his unruly red hair, his indecision apparently painful to him. Then he said, “It was some of that High Land bunch. That’s all I can tell you.”

“But I thought you had High Land pretty well in hand, Curly. I didn’t think you’d let anybody get away with something as bad as what happened to Jock.”

Curly asked, “How long since you’ve been in High Land, Scott?”

“Four months. Maybe five. I carry all my business down to Peace Valley.”

“Then maybe you ought to make a little run into High Land some day and get the sleep out of your eyes. You’ll find out somebody else is dealing the hands there now. Fact of the matter is, it’s got kind of unhealthy for me of late.

“Oh, it’s the same old bunch, mostly. But they’re listening to somebody else now. He tells them he’s going to run this whole country, and if they string along with him, they’ll all help sop up the gravy.”

Scott Tillman cursed under his breath. The ugly shape of the thing was beginning to come clear to him now. He told Curly what had happened in Peace Valley.

“I’ve been blind, Curly. I’ve been figuring you for the worst enemy we had. And all the time I’ve overlooked one a dozen times worse. Doug McKinney has seen it all along, but it’s too late for me to talk to him now.

“Bannock’s playing it both ways from the middle. He’ll whip out the little outfits first, and all the big outfits will get the blame; he’ll see that you get some of it, like you did with Jock Classen. And when he’s done with the little outfits, he’ll have High Land’s bunch with him to whittle down the big ranches.”

Curly nodded, a grimness shoving aside his humor. “That’s the way I see it.” An ironic grin came to the outlaw’s face. “Pretty picture, isn’t it, Scott? You couldn’t warn anybody now. After today there’s nobody would listen to you.

“And if I was to try to warn them, they’d just haul me down to a handy cottonwood and make my neck longer.”

*   *   *

Reining up at the Lazy D’s rock barn, Scott unsaddled and turned his horse loose. He pulled the heavy watch out of his pocket and slanted it so the dim moonlight revealed the hands. Past midnight. But up in the big rock house a dim light still glowed behind the curtains.

Quietly Scott pushed open the door of the bunkhouse and felt his way through the darkness to his bunk. He heard someone rouse and turn over in a cot back in the corner.

“That you, Scott?” came Dick Coleridge’s sleepy voice. “Mrs. Dixon said tell you she wants to talk to you. She said it was important, and she’d wait up.”

Scott hesitated. “Wonder what’s the matter?”

Dick sat up in bed and rolled a cigarette. “I don’t know. But Doug McKinney was here. He looked mad enough to bust.”

Uneasily Scott walked up the slope to the big house and knocked on the door. Wilma Dixon’s slender shadow fell across the curtain that covered the oval glass on the door. The door swung inward.

“Come in, Scott.”

The pleasant smell of coffee was heavy in the room. Silently Wilma went into the kitchen and came back with a cup for him and a cup for herself. She didn’t speak until she had sipped most of her coffee. But her deep blue eyes rested on him. There was a vague unhappiness in them.

“Doug McKinney was here today,” she said presently, looking down. “He told me what happened at Peace Valley.”

Scott put his empty cup on a small side table and stood up, looking bleakly across the room. “He can’t believe I didn’t help Clive Bannock plan that steal on Jock Classen’s ranch, can he?”

Wilma shook her head. She rose to her feet. Scott saw her lips tremble. “No, Scott, he can’t. And he gave me a pretty hard choice.”

She walked toward him. There was a faint glistening in her blue eyes. She took hold of his arms and pulled close to him.

“Kiss me, Scott,” she spoke softly.

He protested weakly. “But, Wilma…”

She said again, “Kiss me,” and stretched up toward him. He folded his arms about her and kissed her with gentleness. She stepped back then, and he could see disappointment in her eyes.

“You don’t love me, do you, Scott?”

He lowered his eyes. “I like you, Wilma. But that’s all there is.”

She nodded and turned half away. “I guess I’ve known it for a long time, deep down. But Doug loves me. And maybe I love him, too. I don’t know. As long as you’re around, I don’t know anything for sure.

Scott picked up his hat, almost crushing it in his hands. His gaze was still on the door. “Then I guess you want me to go.”

Wilma shook her head, her eyes brimming with tears. “No, Scott, I don’t want you to. But I’m afraid it’s the only way.”

Stiffly she walked to the rolltop desk in the corner of the parlor and picked up a piece of paper. It was a check, filled out. It was a big one.

“This ought to take care of anything we owe you, shouldn’t it, Scott?”

Nodding, he said, “Sure. I’ll be gone in the morning.”

Her voice was breaking when she called him at the door. “Scott, please don’t hate me.”

“No, Wilma,” he answered tightly. “I couldn’t hate you. There was nothing else you could do.”

In the bunkhouse again, he sat down heavily on his bunk and stayed there a long while, rubbing his forehead, trying to decide what to do.

Dick Coleridge was still awake. “What’s the matter, Scott?”

“I’m leaving in the morning,” Scott answered flatly.

He heard Dick exclaim under his breath. After a moment the cowboy said, “I’m going with you.”

Scott shook his head, although Dick couldn’t see him in the darkness. “No, Dick, you stay here. She’s going to need help, good help. And you’re the best I know of.”

Dick was quiet for a minute. “Where’ll you go, Scott?”

“I won’t go far. I owe too much to John Dixon to go very far from her as long as everything’s unsettled the way it is. If she needs me, I’ll be around.”

Next morning he was stirring before the cook was. In the breaking glow of dawn he gathered and packed his gear on an extra horse and saddled the horse he would ride. Under the baleful eye of the old bald-headed cook he ate a quick breakfast and got away before the rest of the cowboys were up. He didn’t want to explain to anyone why he was leaving. He knew he couldn’t if he had to.

By midmorning the steady gait of his horse had put a good many miles behind him. Scott knew where he was going. He slanted down over the rim of a canyon and into a wide, grassy valley where a cool blue stream worked its way down toward the Canadian. He watched the scattering of cattle which eased away from him as he approached. The sadness which had ridden with him since daybreak began to leave him. He liked this valley. Sometimes he wished he had set out to build his own herd instead of building someone else’s. He might have taken up this valley himself, or one like it. But he had owed John Dixon a debt, and he’d wanted to pay it.

He almost didn’t recognize the girl when he first saw her. She was wearing a loose, dirt-stained shirt and a pair of men’s trousers, perspiration coursing down her young face as she tamped loose dirt around a fence post with the handle of a shovel. The two old cowhands stood farther up the line, digging post holes for a new corral.

She didn’t see Scott until he spoke. Then her eyes widened quickly and she grabbed a gun which leaned against a stack of new-cut posts. She blinked away the stinging perspiration which had crept into her eyes, and laid the gun down again when she recognized the rider.

“Looks like you might need some help,” he said.

She didn’t reply at first. He couldn’t tell from her eyes whether she was going to be hostile or not. She rubbed a sleeve across her face and left a brownish streak.

“Maybe,” she said finally. “But I don’t reckon the foreman of the Lazy D would soil his hands on a post-hole digger for a greasy sack outfit like this?”

He swung down and picked up the shovel. He tamped down the dirt hard as he could, then tested the post to be sure it was tight. It was.

“I’m not the foreman anymore. I’m looking for a job. Need another hand?”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed again in distrust. “There’s bound to be a catch someplace.”

Scott smiled. “No catch. I just want a job. I’ll work cheap, and I’ll work hard.”

She stared levelly at him for a moment. He thought he could see a signal of laughter in her eyes.

“All right. Just throw your bedding in that little dugout shed where March and Pike have got theirs.”

He unpacked the lead horse and turned both animals loose. After neatly stacking his gear, he went back to where the girl and the two elderly cowhands were working.

Before long his shoulders began to ache from the unfamiliar labor with the shovel and post-hole diggers. He was used to hard work, but principally the kind that was done in the saddle. He watched the girl working as hard as if she had been a man. The way she did it, he knew such toil was a familiar thing to her. He guessed she wouldn’t know how to stay in the house and be a lady.

He noted the deliberateness with which she removed a big rock from a post hole and heaved it away as if it had been an enemy. He knew that whatever she owned, she would fight for.

“How come you grabbed that rifle when I rode up?” he asked her once when he paused to ease the ache in his shoulders. “Is that the way you treat company?”

Her jaw stiffened. “I couldn’t tell but what you might be one of Bannock’s men,” she answered, a hard determination in her eyes. “He sent me word he wanted this canyon to pay for the cattle Uncle Jess had stolen from him. I told him this valley is mine now, and that I’ll fight to keep it.”

There was work enough the next few days to keep everybody busy from daylight to dark. They built permanent pole corrals to replace the shaky ones Jess Owen had thrown up. He hadn’t put much work into his, probably because he figured on leaving here in a hurry some time.

They improved and braced up the picket shack that Nell Owen lived in, rebuilding its roof so the water would no longer leak in when it rained. The men threw up a shelter for themselves to replace the dugout shed. There were cattle to work, calves to brand. Carefully Scott examined all the cattle for evidence of burned-over brands, so that any stolen cattle could be returned to their rightful owners. The Owen place was going to be on an honest basis from now on, Nell Owen said.

But Jess Owen had been slick. Evidently he had taken only unbranded livestock to burn his brand on, like the calves he had hidden far up the canyon. There was no way to determine which cattle had been stolen and which had been his own, or who any stolen animals might belong to.

“He wasn’t a big-scale thief,” Scott told the girl. “Nothing like Curly. Besides, half the herds in the high country were started by somebody with a wide loop and fast horse. Reckon you’d just as well claim all the cattle with the JO on them and start even.”

The two saddle-stiff old cowhands soon came to accept Scott Tillman as their boss. They were good enough workers, but too many years had taken the starch out of them. Without anyone actually saying anything about it, they came to look upon Scott as the one who would give the orders. Even when Nell Owen told them to do something, often as not they looked at Scott to be sure it was all right.

It came about so naturally that Scott didn’t realize it until it was accomplished fact. He thought the girl might resent it, but if anything, it seemed she was glad.

One day Scott rode far down the canyon, looking for a few head that had strayed out. He found them and pushed them back. On the way home he spied the broad white tail of an antelope out on the grassy flat. Fresh game for the table was always welcome, for it kept an outfit from having to kill much of its own beef.

His second shot downed the antelope. He had gutted the animal and was ready to swing it up on his horse when he heard the hoof beats racing up behind him. He glanced back and saw Nell Owen’s frightened face as she slid her horse to a halt. She took a long look at the antelope, relief washing the color back into her cheeks.

“I heard the shots, and I saw your horse with an empty saddle,” she said, her breath short.

Strange, he had never figured her as even capable of being scared. But here she was, scared as a rabbit—scared for him.

She was silent for a long moment, regaining her composure.

“I’m sorry I scared you,” he said with sympathy. “But then again, I’m not. It’s kind of an honor, knowing that you were scared for me.”

She looked levelly at him. “Why not? You’ve been awfully good to me.”

He replied, “I’ve had a lot to make up for.”

“You’ve done that ten times over.”

She dismounted and began to tighten the cinch on her saddle. Scott stepped down and knelt in the shadow of his sorrel.

“I can’t figure out why you came here,” she said. “There are plenty of big ranches down south that would pay you three times as much as I ever can.”

Scott picked up a twig and began to poke at the ground with it. “Some things are more important than money, Nell.”

Her brown eyes probed at him, and her lips were drawn inward worriedly. “Is it because of Wilma Dixon?”

He nodded, and caught the sudden disappointment that crept into her face before her stubborn pride covered it up.

“She’d be a good wife, Scott,” the girl said, her voice strained. She turned away from him, her fist clenched white.

He stood up quickly. He reached out toward her, then changed his mind. “Look, Nell,” he said quietly, “there are some things you don’t understand. I don’t love Wilma. She’s a fine woman, that’s true, but I’m not in love with her.”

The girl was still turned away from him. “Why do you stay, then?”

Scott absently wrapped the bridle reins around his hand, knotting them against his knuckles, trying to figure out how to tell her. “I made a promise a long time ago to watch out for her. I’ve got to keep that promise, as long as she needs help. If it hadn’t been for John Dixon, I’d probably be an outlaw today, like Curly Kirkendall. That is, if I wasn’t already dead. Curly and I grew up together, down in the brasada of South Texas. We both came out of there as wild as Spanish ponies. We got in some pretty tight scrapes.

“One day Curly got the idea of robbing a bank. He figured that with all that money we could clear out of Texas and really live high someplace else. But John Dixon got wind of it. He tried to talk me out of it. When he couldn’t, he bent a gunbarrel over my head.”

“Curly got somebody else and tried it anyway. The other fellow was killed. Curly got away.

“That sobered me up in a hurry. I knew I owed John Dixon a debt that I couldn’t ever pay him in money. I went to work for him as a cowboy. When he came up here, I came with him. And he never told anybody what I’d done, not even Wilma. Doug McKinney was the only one who ever knew. That’s one reason he’s never trusted me, I guess. I can’t blame him.

“And that’s why I’ve stayed, because I promised John Dixon I would. Wilma will marry Doug someday, and he’ll be a good husband. Then I can leave. Till then, I’m always going to be around somewhere.”

He had been looking far across the creek toward the distant canyon wall, as he told Nell the story. When he faced her again, he found that she was looking straight into his eyes. A smile played along her lips.

“I’m glad you told me, Scott,” she said. “You know, we’re a lot alike, you and me. Maybe that’s why I’ve gotten so that I like to have you around.”

Her face reddened in embarrassment for what she had said, and she quickly turned away. Scott put his hand on her shoulder and gently turned her around toward him again.

Something happened to him as he looked into her earnest brown eyes. She wasn’t really pretty, like Wilma Dixon; there was even a plainness in her face. But there was something about her—some inner beauty—something that had nothing to do with a pretty face or pretty clothes. His hands on her arms, Scott felt his heartbeat quicken. He saw the softness come into her eyes and an unspoken word form on her lips. He saw the girl as he hadn’t seen her before. He pulled her gently toward him. She came with eagerness, her face uptilted to his.

The people on the JO seldom saw anyone else, but news drifted in occasionally with a passing rider. There was a story about rustlers burning out a little ranchman up high on the rolling plains country, sweeping most of his herd along in a lightning raid. There was news of a gunfight—some said it was provoked—between another little ranchman and Fletch Bannock. In quick retaliation, Clive Bannock and his riders had swept down upon the place, run the ranchman off, and taken over the land. The cattle had been pushed off onto neighboring small ranches. There had been another brush when a group of the small stockmen tried to chase the cattle back from where they had come.

Scott and the two cowhands were building a good dugout shelter for themselves the day Fletch Bannock came. Nell Owen had almost decided the Bannocks had been bluffing. But here came the Bannock kid, trailed by five hard-looking gunmen from High Land. They reined up a dozen paces from the new dugout.

Scott felt the weight of the six-gun on his hip, where he had strapped it when he saw the riders coming. He glared at the slick-faced boy who sat in arrogance on a fine grulla gelding.

“You’re not welcome here, Fletch,” he said.

The boy gave him a lopsided grin and pushed back his hat. His eyes were the gray of granite. “Well, now, here’s Scott Tillman. We about decided you run off to East Texas or someplace.”

“I said you’re not welcome, Fletch. Move on.”

Fletch leaned forward, the grin suddenly gone. “No, Tillman. You move! We’re taking this place for the Slash B, like we said we would.”

Anger began to roil in Scott. He looked around him, but could see no more riders anywhere. Fletch evidently had thought there would be nothing to it, running off a girl and an old stove-up cowboy or two.

“Where’s Clive?” Scott asked. “Can’t he do his own dirty work?”

The youthful gray eyes were heavy. Fletch’s fingers played ominously close to his gun butt. “Generally. Just thought I’d give him this valley as a surprise present. You better do like I told you, Tillman. I ain’t in the mood to wait around.”

Fletch’s draw came so quickly that Scott barely saw it. Scott tried to reach for his own gun but stopped himself. It would be suicide, he knew.

Fletch grinned crookedly. “Pretty fast, wasn’t it, Tillman? I could’ve blowed your brains out before you could get your hands on your gun. I got a good notion to do it yet.”

Then Nell Owen stepped out of the picket shack, behind Fletch Bannock and his men. Scott saw her before the others did, raising a six-gun to eye level.

She sent the singeing bullet right across the rump of Fletch’s fine grulla. The first wild jump of the squealing horse almost unseated the young gunman. Grabbing for the horn, he let the pistol drop. For a long moment, hanging low over the bucking horse’s side, Fletch managed to keep hold of the rigging. Then he let go and went tumbling to the ground on his face.

The five men with him raised their hands at the sight of the furious girl and her steady gun. At her command they unstrapped and dropped their guns.

Trembling in rage, Fletch Bannock pushed himself up on his hands. Dirt covered his face and burned his eyes. A trickle of blood worked down from the corner of his mouth.

“Get up, Fletch Bannock,” Nell Owen said evenly. “It’s your time to start crawling. You’re going back to the Slash B and tell Clive Bannock that a woman whipped you. You’ve had half the people in the high country scared of you—but they won’t be any more. Everybody will know you’re just a spoiled, bluffing kid.” She motioned with the point of the gun. “Now git!”

Shame and fury flushed the young killer’s face a crimson red. His lips were drawn back from his teeth as one of his men brought him the grulla horse, and he swung into the saddle.

Scott saw the Bannock rider reach into his boot top and hand something to Fletch. He heard Nell scream for him to look out. Then Fletch Bannock had whirled the grulla around and had the muzzle of the gun bearing down on Scott. Scott leaped to one side, stumbling as he heard the retort of the gun.

Somehow he jerked his own pistol out. Falling on his back, he looked up to see Fletch’s face above him, his mouth twisted in rage beneath the fuzzy mustache. The gun was aiming down again.

Scott felt the sledgehammer blow strike him with the heat of hell.

With a terrible effort he squeezed the trigger. Young Bannock swayed in the saddle, his horse plunging in terror. Then the kid went slack and tumbled to the ground, almost at Scott’s side. He lay in a twisted heap beneath the swirling dust.

Scott’s right shoulder and arm were numb and useless. His left arm went around his stomach, trying to hold back the sickness that came with a rush.

“I didn’t want to do it,” he murmured painfully. “Why did he have to try?”

Eyes wide in fear, Nell passed her gun to one of the two old punchers and fell to her knees beside Scott.

“Scott, Scott!” she cried. “I tried to hit him, but the gun jammed.”

The bullet burned in his shoulder with the heat of a blacksmith’s furnace. He gritted his teeth against the grinding pain. He felt Nell tearing the shirt away, at the same time screaming to the five Bannock men.

“Go on, get out of here, before we kill the whole lot of you!”

One of the men braved the gun to step off and turn Fletch Bannock over. “Give me a hand here,” he said to one of the others.

They lifted the body across a saddle. Then one man caught Fletch’s grulla and got on him.

He looked down at Nell Owen long enough to say gravely: “You better get that fellow away from here, miss, a long way away. Old Clive will bust loose like a wounded grizzly when we take his son home to him. He won’t stop hunting till he’s found Scott Tillman and killed him. He might even kill you, if you’re in the way.”

In a red maze of pain, Scott heard, rather than saw, the men ride away. He felt himself carried into the dugout. He groaned to the stabbing agony of a knife probing for the bullet. Then he gave in to unconsciousness under the searing of a cauterizing hot poker …

He awakened to the coolness of a wet cloth on his forehead, and the gentle touch of soft fingers on his face. “Scott,” the girl’s voice begged in desperation, “wake up. Wake up.”

He forced open his eyes and tried to rise. He fell back in blinding pain.

“Scott,” Nell persisted. “You’ve got to wake up. We have to move you.”

He fought back the smothering blanket of unconsciousness. Nell Owen’s soft lips brushed his forehead, and he saw the evidence of dried tears on her cheeks.

“I hate to do it, Scott,” she said, “but we can’t fight off Clive Bannock’s whole bunch. They’re bound to come.”

Scott’s head still reeled, and he struggled to clear his mind. “We can’t leave, Nell,” he said weakly. “They’ll take the ranch. You’ll never get it back.”

“We couldn’t hold it anyway,” she argued. “It’s not worth your life to try. We’ll carry you to the Lazy D.”

Scott shook his head. “No, that’s the first place they’ll look, and there’s no use drawing Wilma into it.”

Fear was beginning to choke the girl. “But where else can we take you?”

Again he tried to force himself up. This time, with Nell’s help, he made it. He sat weakly on the edge of the bed.

“I know a place. Clive Bannock probably won’t even know where it’s at. Even if he did, he’d never think to look there. We’ll go to Curly Kirkendall’s.”

The ride took an eternity, an eternity of agony for the man who slumped in the saddle, the blood sticky inside the rude bandage. Nell Owen rode beside him, holding him in the saddle by the strength of her own lithe body. Most of the time Scott was in semiconsciousness, yearning to tumble from the saddle and yield to the beckoning comfort of the cool earth.

“You have to stay awake, Scott!” Nell pleaded with him again and again. “You’re the only one who knows how to get there. You have to hold on!”

And somehow, long after daylight had surrendered to a pale sliver of moon, they found Curly’s dugout.

Curly Kirkendall strode out to meet them in the dull silver of the night. He cradled a rifle on his arm. His jaw dropped as he recognized the half-conscious man in the saddle. “Scott!

Nell’s eyes pleaded gently. “Please, Mr. Kirkendall. I know he’s been an enemy to you. But he needs help … needs it bad.”

Curly barked the names of two of his men, and they came running. Together they gently eased Scott out of the saddle. They carried him to the dugout and ducked as they packed him in through the low door.

“My bunk, boys,” Kirkendall said. Tensely he opened the shirt. “Bleeding some. Riding horseback that way could’ve killed him.” His voice rose in anger. “Why didn’t you at least use a wagon?”

Nell Owen’s face was sick with anxiety. “Too easy to trail. They might track us anyway.” Biting her pale lips as she rebound the bandage, she told Curly about the shooting of Fletch Bannock.

Gravely he nodded his head. “Don’t you worry, ma’am. Clive Bannock will turn this country upside down, but he wouldn’t think about coming here.” He knotted his fist. “And if he was just to luck onto us, he’ll wish to hell he hadn’t.”

Over in the corner a lank, black-stubbled man had been watching with sullen eyes. He dragged his feet across the dirt floor to Tillman’s bedside.

“Looky here, Curly,” he complained, “this Tillman has tried harder than anybody else in the high country to get us all sent off to the penitentiary. You mean you aim to keep him here now and protect him?”

Curly’s voice was even. “When we’re out shagging off Lazy D cattle, he’s an enemy, Bryce. But right now, as long as he’s in this camp, he’s a friend—the best friend I’ve got. And don’t you forget it for a minute.”

Though her body ached with weariness, Nell Owen sat in a camp-built rawhide chair and kept vigil beside Scott. She sat in silence, holding his still left hand tightly in her own. On a small cast iron stove a pot of coffee sat untouched. Occasionally her sleepless eyes drifted to the men who slept on rolled up blankets at the back side of the long dugout. Her body cried for rest, but she wouldn’t let herself relax. Scott might wake up. He might need her.

Near the back wall a blanket was flung aside and Curly Kirkendall stood up. She watched him with speculative eyes as he walked unsteadily to the stove and poured a cup of coffee. He frowned and ran his tongue along his lips.

“Cold,” he said disgustedly, and threw the coffee against the side of the dugout with the indifference to cleanliness that takes hold of men in camp.

He walked up behind the girl with concern in his face. “He doing any good?”

She nodded. “He’s resting all right.”

Curly Kirkendall placed his rough hand gently on her slender shoulder. “You ought to rest, too. I’ll roust Bryce off his bunk and make him go over in the corner with the rest of them. I’ll keep watch over Scott. I haven’t slept worth a plugged two cents anyway.”

Nell shook her head. “Thanks, but I’ll stay.”

Curly shrugged. “It’s up to you. But you look as miserable as a Mexican sheep thief.”

“I’ll stay by him, Curly. He stayed by me.”

Curly sat down on the edge of Scott’s bunk. An ironic smile began to play on his lips. Presently he said, “He’s lying there half dead, with the toughest man in the high country hunting him down to blow him apart. And yet I’d swap places with him in a minute, if I could.”

Nell’s eyes widened in question. Curly’s gaze lifted levelly to her face.

“You bet your life, I’d swap with him. If I’d ever had anybody that thought as much of me as you do of him, I wouldn’t be living in a dirty dugout and running off other people’s cattle. No sir, I’d be the biggest man in the country, and there couldn’t anybody ever stop me.

“Don’t you ever leave him, ma’am. He needs you now, and he’ll keep on needing you.”

A faint smile brightened Nell Owen’s weary face. “If he ever wants me, I won’t be hard for him to find.”

Scott Tillman awoke before daylight, a circular saw whirring in his head and a dull, hammering pain in his shoulder. He felt a weight lying across his legs. He eased up enough to see Nell Owen asleep, still sitting in the chair, her upper body fallen forward onto the edge of the bed.

He knew without being told that she had sat there all night. His heart warmed to her, and he half smiled as he looked at her now peaceful face. He dared not move for fear of awakening her. So he lay there looking upward, his eyes fixed on the sod roof. He tried to think, tried to plan, fighting against the throbbing ache in his head.

But he knew there was no use. There was no better place in the country for him than this, until he was again able to ride and use a gun.

And Nell had to stay with him, or Clive Bannock would find her. No telling what he might do to make her tell where Scott was hiding.

Through the next two days he felt his strength coming back to him slowly but steadily as the buildup of water in a mountain lake. He got off the cot and tried walking a little. Every time he moved, Nell Owen was there ordering him to sit down again, at the same time holding him so he wouldn’t fall. It did no good to tell her he could stand alone. Anyway, he liked the touch of her hand, and enjoyed the quiet strength with which she held him.

“There’s time enough for you to go walking around when that wound is healed,” she said. “Right now, you’d better not try to get far away from me.”

He grinned. “By the time I’m well, I probably won’t want to.”

From the first, he knew Bryce Fancher didn’t like him. Even when he didn’t see them, he could feel the man’s hot eyes upon him. The showdown came after one of Curly’s men, Wilkes, rode in from High Land.

“They say Clive Bannock’s hunted this country high and low,” the man reported. “He’s been to every ranch and turned it upside down. Now he’s offered a thousand dollars for whoever tells him where Scott Tillman is at.”

Bryce Fancher whistled between his teeth and cut his eyes toward Scott. “A thousand dollars!”

A quick grin split his black-stubbled face, then gave way to excitement. “Look, Curly, there’s no need in us being fools. You don’t owe this fellow anything, not after the way he’s chased us around the last couple or three years. A thousand dollars! And all we got to do to get it is tell Clive Bannock where Tillman is.”

Curly Kirkendall trembled in anger. “Shut up, Bryce.”

Fancher’s face darkened. “You’re making a fool of yourself, Curly. But I don’t aim to. I’m going to see Bannock.”

Curly Kirkendall took one step forward and swung his fist so fast that Scott hardly saw it before Bryce Fancher’s head jerked from its impact. The outlaw struck the packed floor on his back and rolled over onto his hands. Blood swelled into a ruby bead on Fancher’s split lower lip.

“Get up, Bryce,” Curly gritted. “Say another word about this and I’ll lay your skull open with a gun barrel.”

Fancher swayed to his feet and stiffly moved out the door, his eyes burning.

Curly jerked a thumb after him. “Better go keep an eye on him, Wilkes.”

Wilkes sauntered out after Fancher.

Scott raised up onto his elbow, the cot groaning under him. “You don’t have to fight my battles for me, Curly.”

Curly frowned. “Are you in any shape to fight them yourself?” He grinned then, and slapped Scott on the good shoulder. “Anyhow, you skinned a wildcat or two for me, back yonder.”

Nell Owen was working around the cast iron stove in the end of the dugout which served as a kitchen. Lying on his cot, Scott noticed how Curly’s eyes softened as he watched the girl. Something of the wild, happy-go-lucky light went out of them, and a pinched, regretful look took its place.

Curly’s mouth twisted in embarrassment as he caught Scott watching him.

“Scott,” he said presently, “there isn’t a girl from here to Canada that could beat her. I hope you know that.”

Scott nodded. “I know it.”

Curly’s face hardened in self-condemnation. “In my time I’ve known more girls than you could count out of a gate in an hour. And yet, somehow, I haven’t known a one. Maybe if I had…”

Bitterly, he said something under his breath and dropped his cigarette. He got up and stomped out the door.

Scott looked after him a moment. Then his eyes drifted back to Nell Owen. A proud smile touched his face as he eased his head wearily back down upon his pillow.

Curly’s excited voice brought him up again. “Scott! Nell! You got to get out of here. Bryce Fancher’s gone, and you can guess where he went!”

Nell Owen’s face paled a second. Then she was over it. “March! Pike! Get the horses saddled.” Her voice was as strong as it had ever been. “What do you think, Scott? Can you make it?”

“I guess so.” Anger swelled in him. “But I’m getting tired of running like a scared rabbit. I’m half a mind to stay here.”

Nell ripped off the old bandage and bound a new one in its place. “Don’t argue with me, Scott Tillman. You’re still not in any shape to stand up against Clive Bannock. Besides, if you stayed it would mean more trouble for Curly. I’d say he’s got about all he needs.”

March and Pike rode their horses up to the dugout door, leading Nell’s and Scott’s. Scott glimpsed the man named Wilkes, being helped back from the barn, a bloody streak down the side of his head.

Boosted up into his saddle, Scott almost swayed off on the opposite side. Then he got his balance. The saddle and the feel of a strong horse beneath him settled him some and bolstered his confidence.

Curly looked levelly at him. “Scott, I got a notion you’ll get your association now. What’s happened the last few days ought to pull the ranches together against Bannock. They’ll listen to you now.

“I want you to know that I’m fixing to leave this country. When all the ranches pull together, there isn’t any room for me anymore. That’s the way with the High Land bunch, too. When they see a strong association lined up against them, they’ll clear out as quick as they can get their horses saddled.”

Curly took off his hat. A lock of unruly red hair fell across his forehead as he turned to Nell. Without a word, he leaned forward and kissed her surprised face.

“Take care of our friend there,” he said grinning, nodding toward Scott.

“I will,” she said. Then to Scott, “Which way do you want to go?”

“The Lazy D.”

Her face dropped a little, and he knew what she was thinking. Wilma Dixon. But she nodded and said, “The Lazy D it is.”

Before the three men and the girl topped their horses over the rise and dropped down out of sight of the camp, Scott looked back. He saw Curly Kirkendall still standing there, watching them. Or, Scott thought, watching Nell …

Darkness was almost upon them when they heard the noise. It drifted in from behind them, so faint they could hardly catch it. Nell Owen stepped out of the saddle and stood listening. Her face was grave. “Gunfire,” she said.

Scott’s heart froze. “Curly’s camp. Bannock!”

Without hesitation he reined his horse back around. Nell Owen tried to stop him. “Whatever happens, Scott, we can’t get there in time to do any good. And you won’t stand a chance against the bunch Bannock will have with him.”

He wasted no breath in argument. “I’m going back.”

Anguish was in her face, but she knew what a man had to do, and she said nothing more. She rode at his side as the four of them spurred back toward Curly’s dugout, reeling the miles off behind them.

They found nothing but dead silence at the camp, a silence unbroken except by the faint crackle of flames inside the dugout.

Scott’s teeth clenched. “He wrecked it all. He set fire to what would burn and tore up the rest.”

There were bodies around the camp. In the darkness they managed to find three. All had been Curly’s men. Scott and Nell called and searched but could not find the outlaw leader.

“He’s lying out there dead someplace, and it’s too dark for us to see him,” Scott gritted. His left fist hammered in futile rage against his saddle horn.

“It was a massacre.”

“Come on, Scott,” Nell said quietly. “We can’t do any good here.”

He lowered his head. “No, I guess not. But it isn’t over. Curly, I promise you, it isn’t over.”

The moon rode high above the big rock house of the Lazy D when Scott, Nell, and the two old cowpunchers kneed their horses between the high poles of the front gate and trotted them up to the yard fence. Lamplight shone bright and welcome through the curtained windows.

Scott started to swing down by himself, but Nell protested quickly and caught his shoulder.

“You’re already getting too big for your britches. You wait till we help you down.”

She was smiling, but it was a thin smile that did a poor job of hiding anxiety.

Wilma Dixon answered the knock on the door. Her eyes widened in unbelief as the splash of lamplight spilled across Scott’s face.

He saw her tremble as her gaze fell upon his tightly bound shoulder.

“Scott!” she breathed. Her blue eyes went to Nell. “Bring him in,” she said quickly.

Inside, Wilma Dixon leaned against Scott and began to cry. “I thought … I thought … Oh, Scott, I didn’t know what to think.”

“I’m all right,” he told her gently, his good hand on her arm.

Nell turned away quickly, but not before Scott saw the sick look in her eyes.

Footsteps thumped upon the porch. Scott turned toward them, and Wilma Dixon stepped back. Doug McKinney pushed through the door. His jaw sagged in surprise. His eyes made a quick sweep over Scott, Nell, and the two cowhands. They were hard eyes when McKinney wanted them to be. But right now there was no hardness in them.

He stood back uncertainly. “Scott,” he said, “it’s good to see you.”

There was evident embarrassment in the way he stood stiffly, a wan smile creeping across his face. “It doesn’t come easy to admit I’ve been wrong, Scott. But I was. I’d like to shake your hand, if you’ll let me.”

Scott shoved forward his left hand.

“Bannock burned me out,” Doug McKinney said. “He’s been like a wild man since you … since Fletch was killed. I’ve been afraid he might hurt Wilma, seeing as you used to be foreman here. So I moved my men over here.”

“What about your own place?” Scott asked.

Doug shrugged. “Wilma’s more important to me than anything else.” The hardness came back into his eyes. “But I’ll tell you, Scott, it’s gone about as far as it can go. All the ranchers in the high country are ready to do something … anything. And it’s going to have to be done quick.”

Scott knotted his fist. His gaze moved from Doug to Wilma and then to Nell Owen. For a long moment he regarded her, his heart warming. Doug McKinney had abandoned his ranch to be able to protect Wilma Dixon. Nell Owen had left her own place to the heavy hand of Clive Bannock so she could save Scott.

Scott turned back to Doug McKinney. “You say the ranchers are all ready, Doug. Would they, come and come quick if we sent the word, if there was somebody to ride in front and know what he was doing?”

Sudden interest leaped into McKinney’s eyes. “They would.”

Confidence began to surge into Scott Tillman as he thought out his plan. “Then we’ll start, Doug, now—tonight!”

He leaned forward, eagerness burning new color into the face that had paled from pain. “Here’s how I see it. High Land is where most of Clive Bannock’s strength is. That’s where he gets the renegades to do his cattle-running and his burning-out. He’s got the county law siding him because they think he’s a cinch to come out a winner.

“But they’re wrong. We’re going to clean up High Land first. It’ll be like cutting off Bannock’s right arm. Then whatever we have to do about Bannock won’t be half as hard. He knows he can cut us out one by one and whip us. But if we can all work together, he can’t whip us, Doug. That’s why he did everything he could to undermine the association and keep us fighting one another.”

Enthusiasm was a spark that struck from a word and burst into bright flame among the group huddled in the lamplit parlor. Futile anger had been riding them all, and suddenly now they could see purpose ahead.

Only Wilma Dixon held back. “Scott, you’ve always been the one who was most against violence. Don’t you know High Land won’t give in easily? There’ll be blood spilled in its streets, and some of it will be ours.”

Scott shook his head. “I don’t think so. Curly said something to me. He said that as long as the ranchers were fighting each other, he’d do all right. But if they ever got together, if they ever formed a real association, he was going to clear out as fast as he could get his horse saddled. And he said he wouldn’t be the only one. I think we can run a bluff on High Land. I think we can whip it without having to fire a shot.”

At midmorning the first cow outfit arrived in High Land. Turk Dedecker, cardsharp and occasional cow thief, was out behind his picket shack washing his face in cold water in an effort to clear his pounding, drink-swollen head. He heard the splash of horses wading across the boggy river and looked up quickly, wiping the water from his red-veined face with a dirty, frayed towel.

Dedecker’s slack jaw dropped. His bleary eyes counted sixteen men—maybe seventeen. Every man carried a rifle as well as a belt gun. He caught the grim visage of the gray-haired man who rode in the lead. Suddenly Turk Dedecker’s heart began to pound. His nervous tongue flicked cross dry lips, and he knew he needed a drink. He stumbled into his shack and slammed its door behind him. For some reason then, he picked up the heavy cedar bar and dropped it into place. His trembling hands groped under his bunk until they closed upon a bottle. He sat down wearily and drank from it, and wondered dazedly what had gone wrong.

An hour behind the first outfit came the string of riders from the Lazy E. Most of the hands had been sent out the night before to carry Scott Tillman’s message to ranches all over the high country. But still there were an even dozen, counting the regulars and McKinney’s punchers. And on the way they were joined by Dodd Jernigan’s men from the Long J, and the brush-popping cowboys from the T Anchor down in the breaks, and old Charlie Merchant and his sons from their little valley spread.

Scott Tillman rode stiffly, a sharp pain jabbing him with each jolting step his horse took. But it wasn’t as bad as yesterday, and there was little of the agony in it that he had gritted his way through on that awful ride from Nell Owen’s ranch to Curly Kirkendall’s. He would make it now, he knew. In grim satisfaction he looked back over his shoulder and recounted the men. There were little men and big men in the group, men who until recent days had known only distrust of each other. Now they rode together.

Beside Scott a slender girl rode sidesaddle, her eyes returning to him again and again in worry. He had tried to make Nell Owen stay at the Lazy D, but she had stoutly insisted that she was a ranch owner and had as much right to go as anyone. So he finally let her come along, and he smiled with a touch of pride.

A mile from town the fanned-out riders topped over a rise and rode headlong into another party. A chuckwagon lumbered along behind it, two spans of mules straining in harness to keep up with the cowboys who rode ahead.

Tol Hervey angled over as the big groups merged into one. He raised a brown hand and showed stained teeth in a broad, mustache-framed grin. “Tickled to see you, Scott. With you back, we’ll give them hell.”

At just past ten-thirty they spanned out down the riverbank and splashed across toward the ragged scattering of picket shacks and adobes that was High Land. Scattered in an uneven circle about the town, riders from other outfits waited impatiently.

A smile broke across Scott Tillman’s face. It wasn’t a smile of humor, but rather one of satisfaction. There were fifty men here, maybe sixty.

That they had stirred up even the latest sleeping of High Land’s denizens he had no doubt. He could see heads raised cautiously above the swinging doors of the Paradise Bar, and the side curtains pulled aslant behind the windows of Wild Mary Donovan’s place down the street. At the adobe Plains Hotel a man stepped out the back door and looked apprehensively at the stable behind, as if wondering whether he ought to try to make it to his horse. Then, making up his mind, he trotted back into the building.

The whole thing had been Scott’s idea. Now he could feel the eyes of all the men resting upon him, appraising him. Nervousness was tugging at him. And weariness was beginning to tell, too, for the price of his wound was still a heavy one.

Raising his left hand, Scott pointed toward the largest building in town, a long T-shaped adobe which the High Land men had erected in smug triumph after their furtive theft of the county seat.

“We’ll meet at the courthouse.” He spoke as loudly as he could.

At the door he swung down joltingly, the weakness bearing heavily on his shoulders. The door groaned inward on its hinges, and a stringy man with black mustache and angry black eyes walked out onto the wide stone step. The tarnished badge on his grease-spotted vest blinked in the morning sun.

“Now look here, Scott Tillman,” he said, shaking a stubby finger, “I don’t know what you’re about, but I’m giving you fair warning. This is a peaceful town. We won’t stand for no…”

Studiously Scott ignored the hot words. “You got the keys to the jail cells, Sheriff?”

“Sure I have, but I don’t see…”

Scott’s voice was cold. “Give them here.”

The sheriff jawed half a dozen more angry words before his lips began to tremble and the words died in his throat. He handed over the keys. Scott slipped the gun from the man’s slack waistband and turned him around.

“Let’s get to the cells.”

He unlocked a cell at one corner of the combination courthouse and jail and pushed the sheriff in. He slammed the door shut.

The sheriff’s voice was almost a wail. “Tillman, I’m an officer of the law! You can’t … you can’t…”

“Where’s Judge Merriwether?”

The lawman’s stubby fingers clasped tightly the iron bars. “Over at the hotel. Now, boys…”

Tillman turned away from him. “Tol, how about you taking three or four of your boys over and getting the judge? Drag him out of bed if you have to, and pull him over here in his nightshirt. Make as much show of it as it’s worth. It’ll let everybody know we’re here for business.”

Five minutes later the men were back, pushing in front of them a pudgy, red-faced little man who held his checkered pants up with one hand and his plug hat on with the other. The judge was panting with every step and hurling epithets whenever he had the breath.

“Throw him in there with the sheriff,” Scott said sharply. “Whatever we decide to do with them, they’ll both take it together.”

One of the cowboys had a rope in his hand. He shook out a loop in it. The judge stopped cursing, his red face suddenly drained white.

Outside again, Scott Tillman addressed the horseback group. “I want all the ranch owners to meet with me here at the courthouse. I want the cowboys scattered out to every part of town.

“Eight or ten men go into every saloon and watch. Don’t drink with anybody and don’t play any cards. Just stand along the wall and watch. If anybody asks you what we’re doing here, tell them we’re organizing a cowmen’s association. Tell them we’re going to handle our own law and punish our own criminals. Tell them we’re drawing up a list of all known murderers, cow thieves, crooked gamblers, and any other deadbeats we know of. And when we get the list made up, we’re going to start dealing out a little justice.”

He held his breath as he watched the cowboys spread out over the town. He half expected some scared citizen to start shooting, but the thing went off quietly.

In a few minutes the town was covered with grim cowboys who watched and waited, guns in their hands and ropes on their saddles.

Out on the riverbank two wagon cooks had started shoveling out places for cook fires. This might be a long day, and cowboys had to be fed.

The ranch owners tramped into the courtroom and sat in the rawhide chairs that were scattered over the packed-earth floor. There were a dozen of them—thirteen counting Nell Owen. There were far more stockmen than this in the high country, but they hadn’t all gotten here yet. Probably not all had even received the message. But this was enough to do the job that faced them today, Scott thought.

The weakness pulling him down, Scott sat in a chair behind a table at the front of the room and faced the group. “There’s been a lot of talk about an association in the past. Some of you liked it, some of you didn’t. But I don’t think there’s any doubt among you now that we need one. If you didn’t think so, you probably wouldn’t be here. So I guess the first thing to do is to sign up.”

Nell Owen stood up. “I’ll be the first one.”

So the meeting went, with every man in the room signing the charter roll. Then came discussion of an association name. Next came the rules under which it would operate. Each member was to be assessed according to the number of his cattle to pay for range detectives; no member was to hire a known cattle thief; no member was to hire a cowboy fired by any other member for drunkenness on the job, gambling on the ranch, or cruelty to horses. No member—and this hurt some—was to kill any animals other than his own for beef.

And meanwhile, throughout the mud-built little town, the tension drew taut as a guitar string.

Turk Dedecker was the first one to break. The lank gambler sat in the Paradise Bar, where he had fled for company after realizing how utterly alone he was in his mud-chinked picket shack. His fingers, usually nimble, seemed to stumble over the deck with which he played solitaire. He tried to keep his eyes from lifting to the six hard-faced cowboys who stood with their backs to the adobe wall. He thought he remembered one of the men from a poker game a good while back. As he recalled, he had won a month’s pay in an hour’s time. He usually did.

For the fifth or sixth time he attempted to smile their way and said weakly, “A little game, anybody? I’ll buy the drinks.”

A half dozen pairs of hard eyes bored at him, and no one spoke a word. Hands trembling, Dedecker poured another drink and dashed it down.

Apologetically he arose and swayed toward the door. “If you boys don’t mind, I got business…”

He was surprised they didn’t move to stop him, but he didn’t pause to ponder over it. He left the building in a heavy trot and didn’t stop running until he had reached the livery stable. Under the watchful eyes of five cowboys he flung a saddle on his horse and swung up. But as he started to ride away, one cowboy stepped forward and gripped the reins.

“We better go ask Tillman about this jaybird,” he said.

They led the quaking Dedecker to the courthouse. Tillman walked out and raked the gambler up and down with a hot glare. “Let him go,” he said finally. “But if he ever comes back, he’s liable to stretch a rope.”

Turk Dedecker spurred out of town in a high lope and didn’t slow down until he had put High Land out of sight behind him.

A hundred pairs of anxious eyes watched him go. Before long, dust began to rise above stables and barns around the town. First it was one or two men riding out furtively, saddlebags bulging with what little gear they felt worth saving, blanket rolls tied behind their saddles. Then they left in groups of three and four, riding in every direction. The cowboys noted that in almost every instance they rode out slowly enough. But as soon as they had reached the opposite bank of the river, they spurred up and disappeared over the hill in a lope.

Shortly before noon a couple of cowboys came into the courtroom and announced that the hotel was virtually empty. There wasn’t a single person left in the Paradise Bar, either, except the owner. And he had approached a couple of the cowboys with a proposition to sell the place, stock and all, cheap.

Mary Donovan hadn’t given up, but three of her girls had left town in their fancy rig, headed south.

A cook began to clang on an old iron bar hanging from one of the chuckwagons lined up along the river. The cowboys filed down to the river to eat, a handful of them at a time. In a group, the owners left the adobe courthouse and walked down to the river. Scott Tillman was with them, and Nell Owen stayed close by his side.

A weak sickness still stirring in him, Scott ate little. Most of his meal he took from the coffee pot. Sitting in the river bank sand and leaning heavily back against the wooden spokes of a wagon wheel, he watched the single rider who had left the town in a slow trot, looking back over his shoulder.

Dick Coleridge walked up and sat on his heels beside Scott. “That’s the only one in the last half hour or so. Looks to me like all of them that are going have already left.”

Scott frowned into the tin cup. “Many holdouts left?”

“Yeah. Hard to tell exactly how many, but there’s a bunch of them gathered over yonder in that big adobe, the one with the smoke coming out the chimney. They’ve been scooting over there with their guns and all the grub they could carry under their arms. Looks like they might make a stand.”

“Any others around town?”

“Some. But most of the rest don’t act very excited. Reckon they figure they’re in the clear and don’t have much to worry about. The really bad ones have left or are over in that adobe.”

Scott glanced around toward Doug McKinney. “What do you think, Doug?”

McKinney rolled a cigarette, his narrowed eyes on the holdout adobe. “I think we could take them, Scott. But it’s up to you.”

His weight still against the wagon wheel, Scott gazed at the big adobe building. He could feel the speculative, apprehensive eyes of the crowd upon him. He said finally, “It’d be expensive, Doug. Too expensive.”

He pushed himself up onto his feet. “Dick, we’d just as well pull the boys out of the other places. Put all of them around that one building, back far enough that nobody’ll get hurt, but close enough that whoever’s in there will know there’s a party outside waiting for them. We’ll just sit back and let them do the sweating. They can’t stay there forever.”

That seemed to suit most of the cowboys. They weren’t too keen about getting shot at if they didn’t have to be. Disappointment drooped the shoulders of a few, however, especially the youngest.

“I thought we came here for some action,” one of them grumbled, loud enough so Scott would hear.

In quick irritation Scott turned to him. “The man we’re really after isn’t here. He’ll get here soon enough. Then you’ll have plenty to do.”

A cordon was set up about the holdout building, a cordon bristling with guns. From inside the building came sounds of shuffling feet as the besieged men prepared for what they expected to be a storming of their stronghold. But the storm never came. Watching from outside, Scott Tillman could almost feel the tension build within the trapped men. Outside, the cow outfits waited in patience that must have been nerve-wracking to those who sweated and fumbled with their guns in the adobe.

When at last he thought he had waited long enough, Scott Tillman arose and walked out in front of the cordon. He saw the sudden fear flash into Nell Owen’s face. A dull dread gnawed at him, the realization that one of the men inside might shoot him down. But it was a chance he had to take.

“How about it?” he shouted. “Are you all about ready to come out?”

There was a moment of heavy silence, then a voice answered, “To what, a hanging party? If you want us, you know here we’re at.”

Scott sensed the ragged edge of fear in the voice. He called: “I’ll make a deal with you. Come out without your guns and we’ll let you go—provided you leave town in ten minutes. We want no killing if we don’t have to have it.”

He waited for an answer. It didn’t come. For a good three minutes he stood there in the open, alone, waiting. Then, in disappointment, he walked back to the waiting line of his men.

Relief washed over him as he sat down again. The whole time he had stood there, he was braced against the possibility of a tearing bullet. Now he relaxed, and he was surprised to find his hands trembling a little. The shoulder was aching, too.

Quietly, Nell Owen sat down beside him. She took his hand, and he noticed the unnatural whiteness of her face. She didn’t speak, but she didn’t have to. Her eyes said all there was to say.

Half an hour they waited. Occasionally there came a hint of the buzzing of voices in the building.

Scott’s heart leaped as he saw the heavy wooden door inch inward. “Get ready,” he called quickly, jumping to his feet. “It may be a break.”

But just one man stepped out. Anxiously he looked across at the guns that faced him. His searching eyes fell upon Scott Tillman.

“That deal you promised. Does it still hold?”

Scott nodded.

Resignedly, the man said, “You win, then. Mind you, we wouldn’t give up if we thought there was a chance. But there’s not a man here that wants to commit suicide. They’re coming out now, all of them. They won’t be armed. Mind that none of your boys gets itchy fingers.”

One by one the men filed out of the adobe building, hands over their heads. The cowboys lined them up in a double row. There were eighteen of them. Three punchers took a quick look inside the building.

“That’s all,” they said.

Grimly, Scott Tillman faced the surrendered men of High Land. Among the bunch were gamblers, a few known thieves, and some men who were strangers to him. But he was reasonably sure that most of their names could be found on sheriffs’ dodgers in the courthouse, if the sheriff hadn’t burned and rented out his bad memory for a reasonable price.

“The deal is that you get out of town in ten minutes. You’ll be watched, every one of you. You’ve got just enough time to catch your horses and leave. And remember this. Any man who ever comes back to this part of the country takes his life in his own hands. Now move out.”

One by one the men rode out over the hill. None of them carried their guns, and few carried any belongings except what they wore on their backs. Silent cowboys rode along with them to the hilltop and stopped there, watching them until they passed out of sight far across the next rise.

A slow grin built on Scott Tillman’s face. “Well,” he said to Nell Owen, Dong McKinney, and whoever else was listening, “that just about takes care of everybody but the sheriff and Judge Merriwether.”

He walked to the courthouse, a dozen men behind him. At the door he turned and said, “A couple of you bring your ropes in. We want to make sure our county law gets all the show it paid for.”

Judge Merriwether stood up and grabbed the bars of the cell door, blustering like a March wind. “Now see here, Tillman, I demand that you turn us loose. You’ll be dealt with to the full extent of the law for this.”

In exaggerated concern, Scott half turned and motioned toward the ropes held by two cowboys. “Under the circumstances, Judge, I’m afraid you better stay here for your own good. We’ve got some boys around here that are plenty riled. I might not be able to stop them if they were to get some fool kind of a notion.”

Merriwether sagged. His tone suddenly changed to one of pleading.

“What is it you want, Tillman? The sheriff and I have always been fair men. We’ll try to do anything you want, so long as it’s honest and just.”

With his good hand Scott Tillman thoughtfully rubbed his jaw. “Well, there’s one way I might be able to talk to the boys. If I could show them a written resignation from the two of you, and told them you weren’t ever coming back, there’s just a chance they might let you go.”

“Resign?” There was a note of outrage in the pudgy jurist’s flabby face. But his bluff crumbled and his shoulders sagged. “All right. We’ll sign.”

He hadn’t even looked at the sheriff. But it was clear that there wouldn’t be any argument from the stringy lawman.

In satisfaction Scott leaned against the courthouse and watched the deposed sheriff and judge spur their horses into a stiff trot and disappear over the hill.

“We’ll call another election,” he said. “And there won’t be enough votes left in High Land to keep us from getting some honest government for a change.”

From down toward the riverbank he heard a sudden stir. Then half a dozen cowboys came riding up to the courthouse. Between them sagged another rider. Scott heard Nell Owen’s muffled exclamation as her hands came up in front of her mouth. Scott’s heart took a sudden glad leap.

“Curly,” he breathed. “Curly Kirkendall!”

“We caught him riding in across the river,” a cowboy spoke. “He said he wanted to talk to you.”

Curly Kirkendall looked half dead as he eased down out of the saddle and leaned weakly against his horse. Scott grasped his hand.

“We heard the shooting last night and went back, Curly,” he said. “But we couldn’t find you. We thought you were dead.”

Curly’s eyes rested upon Nell Owen. They softened. “You went back for me?” She nodded, and he smiled weakly.

Inside the courthouse, after a drink to clear his head, Curly told his story. As he spoke, his eyes were on the girl, a bright fondness in them.

“When Clive Bannock rode in yesterday, we walked out and met him like we didn’t know there was anything wrong. He didn’t say a word. He just pulled his gun, and his men opened fire on us.

“Bill and Shorty fell in the first blast. They nicked me, but I managed to get back in the dugout. We stood them off till dark. By then there weren’t but three of us left. Shug Gatlin was pretty hard hit.

“We tried to slip out of there in the dark. Shug and I made it, but they killed Wilkes. We were close enough to hear them when they busted into the dugout. Bannock roared like a lion when he didn’t find you, Scott. They searched through the dark but couldn’t see us. Finally they rode off toward the Slash B. But I heard Bannock say he’d find you all right, come morning.

“We headed out afoot, trying to get to the Lazy D, but Shug never made it. He died before we was halfway there. I finally got there, but you were already gone.

“Mrs. Dixon fed me. I was there when Bannock rode in, looking for you. She’s a real woman, that Mrs. Dixon. She hid me and then stood there with a gun under her sleeve while they searched the house out for you. I would’ve killed Bannock right there, if I’d ever got a chance to get close to him.”

His tired face twisted in hatred. “There was only one good thing about the whole business, Scott. I got Bryce Fancher. I saw him fall.” He added gravely. “Clive Bannock won’t be long in getting here. I met a good many of the people you ran out of town. The first one of them that runs into Bannock, he’ll come to get you, Scott.”

Scott nodded. “I know. That’s why we’re waiting.”

It was sundown when the wait ended. A cowboy came splashing across the river and spurring up the dirt street to the courthouse.

“He’s coming, Scott. I counted twelve with him.”

Scott’s mouth hardened into a grim, colorless line. “All right, Dick,” he said, turning to Coleridge. “Spread out like I told you.”

The cowboys split off into two groups and fanned out away from the courthouse into two long, gun-bristling skirmish lines. The head of each line was near the river, and both lines ended at the adobe courthouse.

Clive Bannock’s men hit the river and forged across it without hesitating. Then, on the town side, Bannock raised his hand for his men to stop. He looked at the stern lines of horsemen who faced him.

At the distance Scott could not see the man’s face. But he knew what would be in its heavy features—stolidness, hatred, a grim determination.

Bannock hesitated for only a moment. Then he raised his hand and dropped it in a forward arc, motioning his men on. Sitting up in his saddle, straight as a rifle barrel, he came riding in between the two lines of armed men who formed a deadly lane about him. There was apprehension on the faces of the men who followed him, but there was nothing in Bannock’s face, nothing but a black hatred.

Twenty paces from the courthouse door, he reined up. In hostility he glanced around him and back of him at the cow outfits.

“My men are out of it,” he said loudly enough for all to hear. “I got no quarrel with anybody except one man. Scott Tillman! I want you to come out!”

Slowly the cowboys began to pull back. Bannock’s men pulled away, too. There was no fight in them now, not after the sight of the cowboys who outnumbered them so badly.

“Tillman,” Clive Bannock called again, “this is just between me and you, nobody else.”

He sat there on his horse, his face dark and heavy, his manner like that of a black-robed judge passing down the sentence of death.

“Everything I’ve ever tried to do, it’s been you that stopped it, Tillman. It was you that broke my leg and put this lameness on me. It was you that stopped me when I tried to make my ranch bigger. It was you that killed my son. Now it’s going to be either you or me. I want you to come out, Tillman, and face me.”

Despair sank deeply into Scott Tillman. Somehow he had known it would be like this. It had had to be. He tried to lift his right hand, but it was no use. His bullet-torn shoulder was heavy as lead, and the fingers hardly moved. With his left hand he reached across and drew his gun. He thumbed the hammer and raised the pistol experimentally. The left hand was shaky and uncertain. He knew it would fail him, but he knew there could be no other way. He took a step toward the door.

Nell Owen rushed in front of him, her eyes brimming. “Scott,” she cried, “I’ve never begged anybody for anything in my life. But I’m begging you—don’t go out there.”

Despairing, he drew her to him. “Do you know any other way?”

There was no answer, no answer except the wracking sobs that came from deep within her as she held tightly to him. Gently he pushed her back.

Curly Kirkendall grabbed his arm. “If you won’t think about yourself, Scott, think about her,” he said, pointing his chin toward the girl. “Let me face him! I’ve got as much to hate him for as you have—a whole lot more.”

Scott smiled weakly, shaking his head. “Watch out for Nell, will you, Curly?”

Then he moved out onto the wide stone step, the gun in his left hand. His heart thumped dully within him. He tried to force back the fear which struggled in him, the fear that choked him and brought a tremor to the futile hand which gripped the gun.

He stepped down. Everything seemed to melt away from in front of him, and he saw nothing but Bannock’s eyes, the iron-hard eyes that gazed at him in hatred.

Scott heard the footfall behind him. Too late he turned around and felt the gun jerked out of his hand. He grabbed at it and saw the hard fist which drove at his chin. He sprawled out in the sand and lay there, trying to push himself up on his elbow.

He heard Curly’s voice like a coil of barbed wire. “It’s not a crippled arm you’re facing now, Bannock. It’s me, Curly Kirkendall. You tried to get me blamed for it when you killed Jock Classen. You burned out my place last night and killed five of the best men I ever had. Now here you are, ready to kill a man who isn’t able to fight for himself. But you’re facing me, now, Bannock. Kill me, if you can.”

Clive Bannock’s arm flashed up with lightning speed, the same kind of speed Fletch Bannock had had. His gun belched flame before Curly’s did. Curly buckled, the breath gusting out of him. He fired once as he fell, and Bannock jerked. Bannock gripped the saddle horn to steady himself, and arched the gun downward once again.

Doubled in pain on the ground, Curly brought up his gun with both hands. The guns thundered together. Bannock slumped forward over the neck of his plunging horse, and the pistol slipped from his fingers as he tried desperately for a hold on the mane. Then he tumbled to the ground and lay crumpled in a heap, a handful of the horse’s mane gripped tight in his dead fist.

Scott was on his feet as Nell Owen and half a dozen ranch owners burst out of the door. Scott knelt beside Curly. His heart swelling in his throat, he tried to lift Curly with his good hand.

“Quick,” he cried, “somebody help me carry him inside.”

In pain Curly said, “No, Scott, don’t move me.” He struggled hard for breath. Nell Owen knelt beside the young outlaw, lifting his head gently into her lap.

Scott found it hard to speak. “You’re a fool, Curly.”

A thin smile broke across Curly’s knotted-up face. “Always was, Scott. Always was.”

He coughed. “I think I’ve found the end of that blind canyon you’ve always been talking about, Scott.”

With a terrible effort Curly lifted his hand and placed it on Nell Owen’s arm. He raised his eyes to hers. “Take care of her, Scott. She’s one in a million.”

Scott tried to answer, but he couldn’t. Then there wasn’t any use, for Curly wouldn’t hear …

Under the broad noonday sun, the gentle wind of the buffalo plains, stirring in their faces, Scott Tillman and Nell Owen reined up at the head of the JO canyon and looked down upon what had been the ranch headquarters.

The corrals were there, but the timber which had been snaked down from the hills for the building of more pens had been piled up and burned. The picket shack was nothing but a heap of cold, gray ashes, rapidly being whipped away by the constant wind. Here and there the improvements that had been built by sweat and strain and muscled backs lay scattered and broken by vengeful hands.

Scott glanced at the girl and saw her momentarily harden in anger.

“A pretty bad mess, isn’t it?” he asked her.

She nodded. The anger left her, a healthy determination taking its place. “But we’ll build it back, better than it ever was. We’ll build the corrals first, because we’ll have lots of cattle to brand, Scott.”

She swung to the ground, and he dismounted with her. She led her horse along toward the charred ruins of the house.

“We’ll build the house back, only this time we’ll build it of stone. We’ll build it so it can grow as we need it, Scott. And we’ll build it strong, so it’ll be here for our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren to see.”

Smiling, Scott took hold of her arm. “Are you proposing to me, Nell?”

Her face colored in realization of what she had said. Then she smiled too. “Well, so I was. What do you say?”

He pulled her toward him, and she came with quick eagerness. The prairie wind caught his answer and carried it along to be lost down the silent, green canyon.