Gunsmoke Masquerade Page 8

  One of these came toward Paight as the Fencerail man rode in on the fire. He was gray-haired, and his sun-darkened face with its white mustache bore a kindly and benign look. Streak guessed correctly that this must be Tom Buchwalter, and again he had the feeling that Fencerail’s claims on being in the right in this trouble must have a solid basis of fact. Buchwalter looked like an honest man.

  Streak had reined in behind Paight and was lifting his left foot clear of stirrup, about to dismount, when a coarse loud voice called: “You, stranger! Lift ’em!”

  Streak’s head came around. There, less than ten feet away, close to a thicket of scrub oak, stood a man staring at him over the twin holes of a shotgun’s double barrels. The eyes were unwinking and coldly furious in their hard concentration. The face, what little of it Streak could make out as it checked the shotgun’s stock, was thin and predatory. Streak settled back into the saddle, slowly lifting his hands.

  “Prenn!” Tom Buchwalter spoke crisply, commandingly.

  The west-slope rancher ignored him, not taking his eyes from Streak, his weapon held rock-steady and centered on Streak’s chest. “You’re goin’ to do some talkin’,” Prenn drawled coldly, “and you’ll do it fast. If you’re Tex Kincaid, I’m Little Eva. I knew Tex. He cashed in over a year ago. Now come down off there easy and reachin’ for the clouds. Bill, take the weight off his belt. Tom, I’ll chairman this meetin’ from here on for a spell.”

  Chapter Nine

  Tom Buchwalter hadn’t been able to peg what was wrong. But something was, definitely. These men, five of them, all small west-slope ranchers, had come here to the needle rock with eagerness and anticipation. Their faces had plainly showed the easing of their long tension. To them, this was to be the end of the long wait. The message Buchwalter’s riders had taken to them during the day had been simply that they were to meet at the needle rock at 10:00 that night, that the drive would be made into the valley at dawn of the following morning, and that Buchwalter had found a way of making it without danger. When they had all gathered and he started his talk, Buchwalter had been supremely confident. He had given them much the same story he’d told Bill Paight last night, becoming eloquent as he explained point after point they questioned. Then an insistent and nagging doubt had entered his mind. That doubt was centered on Morgan Prenn. Buchwalter had counted on Prenn to sway the others if they needed swaying. But Prenn had turned strangely silent after his first eagerness. Buchwalter didn’t know why.

  Prenn had, until now, been the most hot-headed of their number. It was he who had wanted to raid Crescent B the day they all learned of Pete Dallam’s death. It was Prenn who had said lustily: “To hell with my outfit, everything! I’ll see it burned to the ground and every critter I own layin’ dead if I can even things with Frank Bishop!” But tonight, Prenn was silent, his shotgun lying in the crook of his arm as Buchwalter’s talk ran on. It almost seemed as though he wasn’t listening. So Buchwalter dwelt at length on this stranger his men were breaking out of jail, this Tex Kincaid, the Silver City killer. He pointed out that Bishop didn’t have a man in his crew who would dare face Kincaid with guns. All this time he was speaking mainly to Prenn, trying to fan alive that spark of fanatical hatred the man had so far shown toward Bishop. But the spark somehow died as he talked, for Prenn remained silent. Finally Buchwalter spoke to the man directly, saying: “Morg, what ails you? You haven’t said a word.”

  Prenn shrugged. “Nothin’ ails me,” he replied. “You’ve got it all thought out. What’s there for me to say?”

  “You act like you aren’t much interested, now that we’ve got our chance.”

  “We’ll see how it comes out,” was all Prenn would say.

  From there on, Buchwalter could see doubt begin to take the others. Snell, for one, had always been a doubtful quantity. He had a family, a wife and two kids. He couldn’t afford to lose his slender source of livelihood. Now he kept asking about the stranger. What made Buchwalter so sure that the sight of Kincaid would turn back Bishop and the crews of the other big east-slope outfits and open the way for the sheep?

  “Simple enough,” Buchwalter replied. “Kincaid’s a fighter. Not only with his guns but his hands. If necessary, he’ll ride square up to Bishop, throw a gun on him, and . . .” He stopped speaking, his head cocked abruptly to a listening attitude. “I’ll let him speak for himself,” he said shortly. “This must be him and Bill now.”

  Prenn was on his feet before Buchwalter had finished, striding cat-like into the shadows beyond the reach of the fire’s glow. The others, warned by his strange manner, followed suit. Presently Buchwalter was alone. He walked over toward Paight as his man rode into sight, relieved at seeing a rider he didn’t recognize close behind. Then the jail break had been successful. He was almost up to Paight when Morg Prenn called: “You, stranger! Lift ’em!”

  The stranger’s quick glance toward Prenn didn’t escape Buchwalter. As he said sharply—“Prenn!”—he saw the stranger lift his hands. Then Prenn was speaking, his barbed words a final and devastating requiem to Buchwalter’s soundly laid idea of what was to take place tonight and tomorrow.

  The others closed in slowly around Prenn and the stranger. The look on Bill Paight’s face was one of utter bewilderment, almost of hurt. Buchwalter himself could find nothing to say as Prenn’s words trailed off and the stillness settled down around them. Even the muted roar of the waterfall seemed hushed, as though waiting for what the stranger had to give as his answer to Prenn’s indictment.

  Streak, feeling the suspicion that was focused on him, aware that only a slender thread of reason was holding back the unleashing of Morgan Prenn’s fury, had a bad moment. Then, slowly, a smile came to his face. He didn’t dismount, as Prenn had ordered, but drawled: “Sure, Tex is dead. Last spring I rode a hundred miles to help at his burying. But Tex wouldn’t have minded my using his handle to break out of that hoosegow. I had to get out.”

  Prenn’s right eye still stared down the ribbed sighting channel between the shotgun’s twin barrels. “Go on,” he said tonelessly. “Talk! You ain’t got much time!”

  “My handle’s Mathiot . . . Ned Mathiot,” Streak said easily. “I’m from Silver and I came up here looking for somebody. So far all I’ve collected from a week’s ride is a half a beating and a ninety-day jail sentence from a judge with a sour liver. In ninety days the man I’m hunting will have hightailed too far for me to follow. So it was a case of breaking that jail. You’d have done the same.”

  Now Prenn took the butt plate of his weapon from shoulder, half lowered it to his thigh. “Keep on goin’,” he drawled.

  “What else do you want to know?”

  Prenn jerked his head in Buchwalter’s direction. “Tom, here, claims you were askin’ questions down in Agua about a stranger that come through a couple weeks ago. That right?”

  “Right,” Streak replied.

  Prenn’s gun rocked up to shoulder once again. “Then, brother, you’d better think quick! The gent you’re tryin’ to find was hired by Frank Bishop to bushwhack Pete Dallam and Mike Sternes. He did a damn’ good job. If you’re a friend o’ his, we’re seein’ what your guts look like after they’ve been combed over by a double load o’ buckshot! This close, it’ll about tear you in two!”

  Streak could hardly believe his hearing. Ed Church a killer, a double killer? He glanced at Buchwalter, who said soothingly: “Morg, we’ve got to hear what he has to say.”

  “Yeah,” Prenn drawled. “Nothin’ holdin’ him.”

  In the following brief silence, Streak knew that Prenn’s trigger finger was tightening. For a moment he had no notion of what he could do to keep the man from accomplishing his threat. Then all at once he was a man fighting for his life. “Save your lead, Prenn,” he said quickly. “Save it if you want to see that bushwhacker stop some. I’ve been hunting him all over four states for the last six months. When I meet up with him, it’s either him or me.”

  The barrels of the shotgun were no longer as st
eady as though locked in a vise. “You’re huntin’ him?” Prenn queried flatly. “What for?”

  “To beat half my life’s wages out of him. To see him cash in slow, with a hole low enough through his guts so it’ll take him a long time. He was my partner, Prenn. Six months ago he left Silver with every dollar I had to my name, left me with a sheriff on my tail. I pulled out of Silver ahead of a posse. I’ve been hunting that double-crosser ever since.”

  Prenn slowly lowered the gun, took both barrels off cock, and rested the butt plate on the toe of his boot. “Friend!” he breathed, “that was awful close.” He looked at Streak, and now there was no fury in his eyes. Instead, they showed relief and awe.

  Streak brought his hands down and rested them on the horn of the saddle. “Now it’s my turn to ask a few,” he drawled. “You say my partner was hired by Bishop to do a double killing. That’s about the sort of work he’s good for, providing he can shoot from cover. What’s happened to him?”

  “No one knows,” Buchwalter said, and once again Streak was impressed by the man’s mild but firm manner. “He disappeared completely on that splay-foot gelding of Snyder’s. Until this morning I thought Frank Bishop had killed him when he came to get his pay for the bushwhack, killed him so that no one would ever know Pete and Sternes weren’t killed in a genuine shoot-out. Since this morning I’ve known he was alive.”

  “How do you get that?” Streak asked.

  “You were on the street. You should know. My men weren’t responsible for the try that was made on Bishop. His own men certainly weren’t. So there’s only one other possibility, as I see it. Your friend did come back up here to collect his pay for his double bushwhack. Bishop did try to kill him and bury the secret. But your partner got away somehow. He was the one forted up behind that second-story window this morning. He tried to kill Bishop, missed, and hightailed. Maybe you heard they ran across his sign and tracked him a ways. That sign was of a splay-foot horse.”

  Streak took this in with a strong excitement running through him. To conceal his feelings, he swung slowly down out of saddle and ground-haltered the gray. Although Buchwalter’s theory couldn’t possibly fit Ed Church, Streak knew he was onto something. It was a slender enough clue but it might be a beginning. Ed Church had ridden Hank Snyder’s splay-foot gelding out of Agua Verde on the night Pete Dallam and Mike Sternes met their deaths. Today someone had ridden a splay-foot into town, tried to kill Frank Bishop, and ridden the animal out again when he failed. Could it be the same horse? If so, that man, whoever he was, must be found and made to tell what he knew about Ed Church.

  Streak had to say something to ease further suspicion of him from these men. So what he told them was: “Then I’m not too late. If he’s still around, I stay on. Here’s as good a place as any to stay. And if you’ve got work for me to do, I can maybe pay back the favor Paight did me tonight.”

  He was looking at Tom Buchwalter as he spoke. Fencerail’s foreman gave him a kindly smile, then shook his head gravely. “You could’ve helped if you’d been this Kincaid. Now you can’t. We’ll have to give the whole thing up.”

  Streak frowned. “Why? Why not bring your woollies in?”

  “Because you’re not the man we needed. With someone like Kincaid backing our play, we might’ve got a few thousand head of sheep through. Now we don’t stand a prayer.”

  “We might as well get on home and sleep it off,” Prenn said. “Shucks, I thought we had a chance.”

  “But they don’t know I’m not Kincaid,” Streak insisted.

  “They damn’ well would if it came to a showdown,” Prenn growled, disgust in his tone. His rancor wasn’t directed particularly at Streak but nicely summed up the fading hopes of the others.

  “We ran into Bishop’s crew there at the jail, Tom,” Paight announced matter-of-factly. “They had the same idea we did, breaking Kincaid out. Art stopped some lead.”

  “Was he bad hurt?”

  “Not bad. He’ll be laid up a few days, though.”

  “Then that’s one less man we can count on.” Buchwalter shrugged, turned away from Paight, and went over to the fire. He picked up a long stick and started to break the fire up, spreading the coals so that they would be easier to extinguish. “Well, all we can do is pray for another chance.”

  “Couldn’t we think this over?” Streak asked him. “What were you set to do in the morning?”

  “Drive a band of a thousand head in over the east pass above Elbow Lake,” Buchwalter told him. “If that had worked, if we’d found we could outbluff Bishop long enough to drive the band across to our side of the valley, we’d have brought in the rest.”

  “How many altogether?”

  “Close to six thousand.”

  “That’s a lot of sheep to get anywhere in a hurry.”

  “You’re tellin’ us!” Prenn said ruefully. “We stand to lose everything but our shirts. We can sell back to the outfit we bought ’em from, of course, but we’d take a big loss. If we only had Pete here! He’d have figured out a way. He’d have ridden smack into those east-slope jaspers and talked his way through.”

  Remembering something Buchwalter had said a moment ago, Streak asked: “You mean you’ve all along counted on being able to bring a mess of sheep in across that pass over east and drive through Bishop’s land?”

  Buchwalter nodded. “That was Pete’s idea. Like Prenn says, Pete would have made it work somehow. He was going to bring them in a thousand at a time. There’s a thousand beyond the pass now. They’ve been there since a few days before Pete died. Right across here”—he lifted a hand toward the lofty peaks close above, straight northward—“we’re holding five thousand more. We’ve had them there because the feed’s better.”

  “Why don’t you bring them in from this way, straight across?” Streak asked. “Then you wouldn’t have to cross the valley. You’d drive right down onto your own graze.”

  “Friend,” Prenn said, “you just leave the thinkin’ to us. There’s only one way into this valley exceptin’ from smack across the desert, west and south. That one way is through the east pass. A mule couldn’t make it in from the north.”

  “A mule could,” Paight corrected him. He pointed off into the darkness up the creek. “Even a man on a horse could. Pete’s done it. He’s the one that found the way around the falls. Follow this cañon straight on up and you can make it to the other side without getting above timberline.”

  “Then why can’t sheep come across the same way?” asked Streak.

  “The creek divides right here and the two cañons it follows are the only way down,” Paight explained patiently. “The fork we came up is impassable for sheep. They’d panic and be drowned getting down around the falls. Below, the water’s too deep. The other branch is even worse. No man I know has ever traveled it, even afoot, more than halfway up here. Nope, it won’t work, Mathiot.”

  Streak was looking upstream, up along the gray ribbon of the foaming creek. Although he couldn’t be sure, there seemed room enough on the east bank to allow the passage of sheep. He turned and his glance lifted briefly upward, to the high rock pinnacle that rose sheerly overhead. “You say you could drive this far and no farther?” he asked.

  Paight nodded, eying him narrowly. He had read something into Streak’s words that went deeper than their drawled casualness.

  “Let’s have this straight,” Streak said finally, and now he had the attention of the others. “What’s behind this scrap you’re having with Bishop?”

  “What difference does it make what’s behind it?” Prenn muttered.

  “I want to know. Buchwalter, what’s behind it?”

  Fencerail’s foreman straightened from raking the coals from the fire. “At first it wasn’t sheep,” he said. “At first it was a question of water. Two years ago every rancher in the valley belonged to an Association, Pete along with the rest. Over east, right below the pass, is a big meadow leased by the Association from the government. It’s big enough to graze twice as man
y head of cattle as there are in the valley now. But it’s good only in summer. It’s snowed under every winter, so the outfits don’t dare overstock for fear of winterkill. The valley’s pretty well shut in below, all but the lower end of the east slope, and the big brands own that.”

  “Go on, tell him about the Association,” Prenn put in bitterly.

  “I’m coming to that, Morg,” Buchwalter said. “Mathiot, two years ago the big augurs of the Association got the idea of throwing up a dam below that government lease and catching snow-melt water, storing it over the summer. It was a good idea . . . for them. The east-slope outfits could double their alfalfa yield through the summer with more water. But what about the west-slope outfits, Fencerail, Broken U, Yoke, and the others? We were left out in the cold. Yet, as members of the Association, we were supposed to share the expense of throwing up that dam. You can guess the rest.”

  “You pulled out of the Association?” Streak asked.

  Buchwalter gave a slow nod. “I wasn’t here then. I was brought in afterward . . . after Pete and the rest had quit the Association and turned to the idea of raising sheep as the only thing that would save them. I’ve been a sheepman all my life. That’s why I’m here. Now that I am, I’m not much good to anybody. We’ve been held up by two things. First, by Bishop taking a stand that no sheep were to come in. Second, because the government hasn’t yet given us a permit to drive through the lease. We were promised that a federal officer would be in to look things over and decide on the permit. That was over a month ago. He’s never showed up. Meantime, Pete and Sternes have been killed. Now we’ll never get that permit. The government wouldn’t be foolish enough to issue it and start a war. So we’ve turned to the only thing left us . . . a try at making the drive without a permit. We either bring in sheep or starve. Without the summer feed we’ve always had up on the lease for our cattle, we won’t last another year.”