Rider on the Buckskin Read online

His mare had been lagging, and he dug her sharply in the barrel with spurs to bring her up alongside Sam Cauble’s gray, heavy-handed on the reins as always. He glanced around at Cauble, who sat canted over in the saddle favoring his game leg. Sam looked cold and miserable, his thin face pinched, sallow. He rode with chin almost touching the wet front of his canvas coat that was stiff from the cold and its heavy coating of brown paint.

  Cauble, having nicely restrained himself in town, was, as usual, drinking. And, as usual, he appeared to be drinking just enough to keep himself sealed off in his own private world. That had been the way with the man these many years. Whiskey, good or bad, was as necessary to him as food. With it he deadened the pain of his bad leg and quieted an uneasy conscience.

  Just now he stirred, as he had every half mile or so since leaving town, and reached into the pouch of his saddle for the flat stoneware quart bottle he always carried. He looked around, found Pleasants watching him, and offered the bottle.

  Pleasants only shook his head, eyeing him wryly and with a faint amusement. So Cauble drank, dropped the bottle back into the pouch, and settled into his slouch again.

  “You look beat up, Sam,” Pleasants commented. “Cold and shriveled. Better take another pull.”

  Cauble lifted his head and eyed Pleasants sourly a moment. “I can handle the cold right enough. But there’s other things I can’t.”

  “Such as what?”

  Cauble’s eyes mirrored a faint anger then as, reaching up with a forefinger to trowel the wet from both sides of his bristling moustache, he queried: “Think Echols swallowed your fancy story?”

  Abruptly Pleasants realized that this man, ordinarily mild of manner, was in an unaccountably ugly mood. “Better do like I said, take another nip and wash the sand out of your craw.”

  The other shook his head. “Won’t help.” With unexpected vehemence he burst out: “Damn it, Lute, I’m scared! Scared clean down into my bones.”

  Pleasants was genuinely puzzled. “Scared of what?”

  “Of you! Of your having gone so hog greedy with this fence.” Cauble laughed loudly, mockingly. “You and your savin’ all this grass for feedin’ culls.”

  Lute Pleasants’s square face took on a chill look. “Suppose you let me do the thinking for the both of us.”

  “That’s the trouble, you been doin’ it all. And your thinkin’s wrong, dead wrong.” When Pleasants had nothing to say, Cauble went on in abrupt seriousness. “Lean back and take a long look at your hole card, Lute. Look back five years. You came here with our money and bought Beavertail for a song. Six months later I drifted in, a plumb total stranger, and hired on with the crew. We rigged it so even the Lord himself couldn’t guess we’re brothers. We been saltin’ away.…”

  “Half-brothers, Sam. The old woman married a good man after she got rid of your father.”

  Cauble decided to overlook the slur and said quietly, still seriously: “We’ve had it good. As soft a spot as two strays like us could dream of havin’. For the first time in ten years we’re livin’ under our right names and sleepin’ easy nights, with not a soul wise to who we really are. Now you get it in your hard head to risk the whole caboodle on a fool gamble.”

  “But it isn’t a gamble.” Pleasants, whose thoughts ran straight and clear on this matter, wondered why he was bothering to argue. “We’ll make money, a stack of it.”

  “What’s wrong with the way it’s been till now? With the way it was for twenty years between Anchor and Beavertail? With both outfits using our creek meadows for winter graze, and both summerin’ high on Anchor range?”

  Lute Pleasants sighed impatiently. “Look, Sam. We’re not related to the Bonds like old Ruthling was. So it isn’t up to us to give Anchor more than we get back. Like I told Echols, it’s a plain business proposition to put in this fence and ditch the creek bottom.”

  “It’s no plain business proposition to turn your neighbors against you,” Cauble retorted acidly. “This fence’ll about finish Anchor and you damn’ well know it. Then there’s this other,” he went on, giving Pleasants no chance to interrupt. “This loco notion of yours to sneak in some night and dig out our bed of the creek up there on Anchor where she splits to feed both layouts. Hell, man, they could easy find out about that even if you wait till the freeze. Then you’d have Echols on your neck for stealin’ water.”

  Pleasants’s sloping shoulders lifted wearily. “I’ve gone over it with you at least ten times and damned if I do again. Only I still say that with the fence and the new ditches we’ll make about double what we have each year so far.”

  The man’s cool and precise tone, his cocksureness, only stirred Cauble’s rancor to a higher pitch. And now the older man was prodded to rashness as he dryly pronounced: “Beats me how you nurse a grudge. You’d never in this world have thought of the fence, of wirin’ Anchor off in the hills, if Kate Bond hadn’t turned the cold shoulder to your courtin’ her. If she hadn’t.…”

  Suddenly, so fast it was hard to see his hand moving, Lute Pleasants reached over, snatched a hold on the front of Cauble’s coat, and nearly hauled him from the gray’s back. He struck his half-brother two vicious, open-handed blows across the face, tilting the other’s head around. Then, as the gray shied, he shoved Cauble away so roughly that the older man almost fell from the far side of the saddle.

  “Any more talk like that and I’ll beat your head flat!”

  There was a wicked, killing light in Pleasants’s dark eyes. Cauble noticed that and was nonetheless furious beyond caring as he reached up and wiped away the blood already staining his mustache at one corner of his mouth. His move had drawn Pleasants’s attention from his other hand. And now that hand all at once lifted into view from his far side, fisting his .45.

  He reined hard away from Pleasants, laid the gun across the swell of his saddle, and hoarsely burst out: “It’s been about two years since you belted me like that. The last time you was told I’d never take it again. Now open your big hairy ears and take in what I got to say.”

  Their animals had come to a stand. And Lute Pleasants, warned by the other’s half-crazed look, was careful to keep his hands folded on the horn of the saddle. Sam Cauble was too enraged, and perhaps too far gone with drink, to be trusted with his finger on the trigger.

  So now Pleasants’s tone was mild as he said: “Just plain forgot myself, Sam. Put that away and.…”

  “Like hell! I said to sit there and listen, and you’ll damn’ well do it! Think back. Remember? Remember who held the horses that night five years ago and saw it all happen? Remember who used the shotgun and then gun-whipped the driver and came close to kickin’ his guts loose?”

  “Careful.”

  “Me be careful? It’s you that could be in hot water, hot to boilin’, not me.”

  “If you ever breathe so much as a word about that night.…”

  “Now we’re gettin’ somewhere,” Cauble cut in, his thin lips tight in a derisive smile. “You begin to remember I cut some ice in this pond after all.”

  Pleasants was thinking: Stall him, cool him down. Aloud he drawled: “Say the word and I’ll buy you out, Sam. You can pack up your tools and pull out any day you say.”

  “And go back to mendin’ gates and trimmin’ windows like any other busted-down carpenter, eh?” the other came back at him, his breathing laying a misty vapor before his thin face. “Suppose I did? Suppose I up and took off. Disappeared, took on another name. Then I could write a certain party up north, couldn’t I? Party by the name of Rivers.”

  He saw Lute Pleasants’s face lose its ruddiness and blanch with fury. He was taking grim satisfaction in that as he went on: “So we got that squared away. I could see you swingin’ by the neck if I wanted. Sort of hauls you up short to think I’m still half this partnership, don’t it? Well, Lute boy, from now on in I have a say in what we do.”

  Pleasants’s wary glance dropped to Cauble’s gun, seeing it still lined at his middle. He had barely enough grip on himself to r
ealize that either because of the whiskey or out of sheer desperation Sam Cauble was right now very, very dangerous. So he sat rock-solid in the saddle, saying lamely: “You’ve always had a say in what we’ve done.”

  “Not by a long shot. I claimed in the beginning this fence was a mistake. That was because of Echols, because we’d had the bad luck to settle near the cousin of the man you beat so bad that night. Well, I got soft in the head and let you persuade me Echols could never tie us in with that other, even if he did work up a grudge against us. But now, Lute boy, that’s over with.”

  “What does that mean … over with?”

  “On the way in you were tellin’ me how you’re goin’ to give Phil Crowe that leftover wire, so he can string the fence on across his place as far as the breaks. Wire Anchor up there tight in the hills, you said. With not enough feed and no way out except to drive their beef sixty miles east over the peaks. And with winter coming on you allowed they’d never make it.”

  “That’s the general idea,” Pleasants admitted grudgingly.

  “Crowe, you said, would take the bait because of that rustlin’ charge old Bond brought against him before he died years back.” Pausing, Cauble hefted the Colt menacingly. “Crowe’s just a sour enough old coot to throw in with you and shut Anchor out of the valley. But you know what? You ain’t even going to put the proposition to Crowe. Know why? Because your partner says it’s a risky, fool thing to do. We keep our fence, but we don’t sell Crowe the notion of stringin’ one.”

  Pleasants was held mute by rage and contempt. His thoughts must have mirrored themselves on his face, for in another moment Cauble was telling him: “Right now you’d give your left arm to pull out my windpipe. All right, stew in your damn’ bile. But when you’ve cooled down tonight, you’ll see how right I am. I say to let things be like they are. We can give this feeder business a try. But you’ll forget draggin’ Anchor down to ruin so you can buy the outfit cheap, like you been plannin’.”

  “Who said that’s what I planned?”

  “I say so. I know you like … like I do the feel of this here Forty-Five.”

  Cauble let the words sink in. Then, seeing Pleasants about to speak, he added hurriedly: “I been totin’ most of the weight around here lately, don’t forget. Livin’ up there in that patched-up tent at the fence camp, bossin’ those three hardcases you hired. Tonight, for a sample, I ride that wire from midnight on. In this foul weather. Just because of your harebrained notion that Anchor’ll sooner or later try and cut fence on us. All right, I’ll go along on that. But when this fence is finished come the end of the week, I’m movin’ on down to the layout to start fixin’ up the wagon shed like I did the porch last summer. I’ll sleep inside and eat grub that don’t rot the belly out of a goat.”

  Pleasants waited, wanting to be certain that Cauble had finished. When he was sure, he said tonelessly: “You’ve got a lot off your chest, Sam. Too much maybe.”

  “Time I got it off.” The lame man pointed down the road ahead with the .45. “Trot along now. And keep those hands restin’ right easy where they are.”

  Pleasants grudgingly prodded the mare with spurs and she started on. She had carried him a good two hundred yards before he caught the muffled pound of Sam Cauble’s gray sounding from behind him. Looking around, he saw Cauble cutting from the road toward the mouth of a shallow draw in the creek bluff.

  The dam that had been holding his temper in check burst then, and he cursed obscenely at not having thought to tie a rifle to his saddle for this ride into town today. Going on, his thoughts seething, he presently followed the road as it swung away from the creek through thickets of chokeberry and hawthorn, glistening with the rain. Then shortly he was traveling up the long grade of the creek bluff, in less than a minute enveloped in a light fog that deadened the hoof falls of the mare as she made higher ground.

  By the time the road’s puddled ruts had leveled out across the grassy bench above, Pleasants’s thinking was coming a little straighter. Ordinarily he was a man to hold a tight rein on his emotions; he was a cool and heady thinker. But this run-in with Sam had been too personal, had rubbed raw too many old sore spots for him not to feel it strongly and be deeply embittered by it.

  He saw Sam as being wrong on every point. The man was stone blind not to see the opportunity staring them in the face. Looking back across the years, he could pick out other times when his half-brother had interfered, when he’d been too faint-hearted. Sam had become a real liability, his appetite for drink alone meaning there was perpetually great risk in trusting him.

  Just now the man’s blunt and deadly earnest threat of betraying him loomed high over all their other differences, made them seem almost petty. Sam Cauble had, as he had bragged, the power to destroy him.

  A premature dusk was thickening the light around Beavertail’s drab clutter of pens and outbuildings when Pleasants turned the mare into the barn corral and walked on over to the gray-weathered frame house. The air had turned colder and a few fluffy flakes of snow were beginning to drift down out of the leaden sky.

  The cook was the only other man on the place. He had finished an early supper, so Pleasants ate alone at the table in the kitchen, brooding all the while on how he was to deal with Cauble. Only once did he speak to the cook.

  “Charlie, you keep salting this mush so heavy and I’ll wash your face with the next batch.”

  “You want new cook, you go to hell and look for him,” was the Chinaman’s placid answer.

  Later, after Charlie had gone to the bunkhouse taking the dogs with him, Pleasants sat in the room across the hallway that served him as both office and bedroom, wondering if there was any way at all of making his peace with Sam Cauble. Presently, and with a stark and somehow pleasing finality, he knew that there wasn’t.

  He made his decision then, made it unalterably and without emotion, and was afterward genuinely amazed to think that he hadn’t arrived at it years ago.

  Lute Pleasants had the unique faculty of never doubting himself, and of rarely worrying once he had made up his mind to something. It was that way with him now. Knowing how he was to deal with this situation, he reached over, turned down the lamp, and blew it out, slumped down more comfortably in the barrel chair alongside his desk, and in two more minutes was fast asleep.

  When he wakened, at once alert and refreshed, the room was chill, the isinglass window of the stove in the near corner glowing a dull cherry red. He came erect and struck a match to see the hands of the clock over the desk naming the hour to be ten past one o’clock in the morning, which was quite satisfactory.

  An hour and twenty minutes later he was riding a roan gelding up the last climbing reach of a shallow timbered coulée high in the hills toward the line of his new fence, knowing exactly where he was. A faint moon glow shone through the overcast to reveal objects at perhaps a hundred-foot distance. The ground was ankle-deep with snow and more was falling steadily out of the blackness overhead.

  The chuck wagon and tent of his fence camp, he knew, were half a mile to the north of this point. Better than a mile southward, and higher in the hills, Anchor’s headquarters sprawled across the center of a broad, lush-grassed park rimmed by spruce and aspen.

  Pleasants came out of the saddle when he reached the fence, eyeing the ground to this side of the two nearest posts. No shadow of hoof prints disturbed the smooth surface of the snow, telling him that Sam Cauble hadn’t yet ridden this way.

  He took a pair of wire-cutters from a coat pocket now and stepped over to the fence, deliberately cutting the three tight strands of barbed wire that sang and whipped away as he made the cuts, rolling in on the posts to either side.

  Leading his horse southward along the fence, he made four more cuts, then swung clumsily up into the saddle once more, afterward looking off to the north in the direction from which he expected Sam Cauble would be coming. He heard nothing, saw nothing moving against the blackness, and shortly put the roan through the cut fence and lined out in the d
irection of Anchor.

  He’ll think … Lute was right after all, and come stormin’ along primed for bear. He laughed softly in his absolute certainty that Cauble, when he rode along here, would notice the breaks in the fence and try following him without wasting the time to backtrack him.

  He had ridden on for several hundred yards when, rounding a clump of pines, he all at once saw a pale glow of firelight reflected from the snowy slope of a timber-capped ridge directly ahead. Reining in instantly, puzzled and wary, he tried to understand the meaning of the fire. Then abruptly he thought he knew.

  The old pass trail, all but abandoned now with the improved road crossing a lower pass to Bend on the far side of the Bear Claws, crossed the line of his fence at a padlocked gate that was less than a quarter of a mile to the south. It was more than likely that someone riding the trail had rounded the end of the fence and was camped above.

  This notion had barely firmed in his mind when, from not too far behind him, the gusty whickering of a horse suddenly shattered the night’s stillness. He instantly pulled the roan hard to the left and headed up a slope that shortly brought him to the margin of the pines.

  He slid quickly aground, roughly shortening his hold on the reins and clamping a hand about the roan’s nose as he used the other to draw his heavy rifle from the saddle’s scabbard.

  In ten more seconds he made out a faint moving shadow below that gradually took on the shape of a horse and rider. As he watched, the man below pulled his animal to a stand.

  Pleasants dropped the reins and lifted the rifle. This Winchester was his favorite weapon, a .45-75, heavier than the popular .44-40 and of seldom-seen caliber. It was deadly accurate. And now, knowing it so well, he lined it at the horseman below with a fierce exultancy rising in him at the certainty that this had to be his half-brother and that Sam was as good as dead.

  But that instant his target began moving again, slanting off across the foot of the slope. Then, almost before he realized what was happening, the night had swallowed that indistinct shape.