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  There was no time for reply because at that moment rough hands grabbed Channon Ordway from behind and pinioned his arms, and Red Waldo lunged forward and struck without further warning. His big fist smashed into Ordway’s face.

  Ordway acted instinctively. Even though he couldn’t get his hands up for protection, he had instinctively rolled his head to one side and down. The brutish blow, struck at his mouth, hit crunchingly against the cheek bone beneath Ordway’s left eye. His whole face went numb as he took the second blow in his mouth, and blood spurted.

  The girl cried out. Randolph issued a crisp order in the voice of a man used to being obeyed. Sonny Shackleford laughed loudly.

  Ordway, instead of straining at the hands holding him, suddenly lunged his full weight backward. It gave him room to lift a Mexican boot and big spur holding a peso rowel of pure silver. The boot lashed out and caught Waldo squarely in the solar plexus.

  A strangled “ooof” went out of the short man as he half collapsed and clamped both hands to his stomach. He half bent at the waist, gasping for breath, and Sonny went off into howls of laughter at the expression on the stricken man’s countenance.

  Waldo straightened and sucked in a single long breath. There was murder in his eyes as he lunged again.

  “Stop it!” the girl cried out, and Eric Randolph added his own voice to the din. But Sonny was enjoying himself too much and Waldo was insane with rage. He smashed blow after blow into Ordway s face.

  “Now, damn you,” he panted fiercely. “Here’s where you pay fer killin’ my brother!”

  Pain was beginning to sicken Channon Ordway as he spat blood into the hated man’s face. In his wildest imaginings he had never believed that anything like this could happen to him. Killed by a gun, yes. But not this.

  Apparently the girl thought so too for she herself put an end to it Her light shotgun went to her shoulder, barrels elevated to the night sky and both hammers clicked. “One more second, Mr. Shackleford, and I’ll fire a shot that will stampede this herd back south for miles!”

  “Hold it boys,” Sonny laughed. “That’ll do, Reddie. You’ll get more fun watching him stretch rope.”

  Waldo stepped back as Ordway, his mustache blood-wet, spat again. Eric Randolph’s eyes were sheer blue ice as he faced the young gang-leader. “There seems to be a difference of opinion as to who gives the orders here, my friend. Were going to settle that right now.”

  “Aw, now, wait a minute, Eric,” chuckled the young tough. “I was raised with this catamount. He’s tougher than his paw ever was.”

  “And damn near as mean as Ethan,” panted Waldo, placing a finger against one side of his bulbous nose and blowing hard. “You’ll find out soon enough if he gits loose, Eric! Who’s got some piggin’ string?”

  “I have,” Vernell Randolph said, surprisingly, and withdrew some from a pocket of her fringed riding skirt “I brought it along for this purpose.”

  She looked straight at Ordway, still in the grip of four men. “But please accept my word we had no intention of allowing matters to get out of hand.”

  “That’s a comfort,” he said dryly and spat wet red.

  Maybe she felt justified, under circumstances, in picking out a man’s role for herself in this conflict of hate and violence. Randolph’s remarks about having night-hunted in far places, plus the deft, sure manner in which the girl handled a weapon explained much. But Ordway had been privately educated by a gentle eastern-bred mother who believed different, and had taught him the same ideals.

  Like the brutal beating he’d received, he hadn’t believed that such a thing as a woman handling a gun could happen either.

  Red Waldo drew the thongs viciously tight around Ordway’s wrists, from behind, deliberately doing so to affect circulation. He stepped back with a grunt of satisfaction. “There, that’ll hold him for you two dudes.”

  “Are you suggesting,” she said with asperity, “that we are incapable of getting him safely into the hands of Sheriff Eaton?”

  “I ain’t suggestin’ nothin’, lady,” growled Waldo. “All I know is he’s Black Channon Ordway, he’s killed seven men includin’ my brother, and that if he gits loose he’ll sure as hell kill yer four-eyed uncle.”

  He said to Eric Randolph. “If you got any sense you’ll still ride outa here with that woman an’ let us whip his hoss out from under a tree limb.”

  “You have your orders,” snapped Randolph. “Now get moving or I’ll deal with you now,”

  “How?” demanded Waldo, suddenly belligerent.

  “Sonny,” Eric Randoph spoke to the younger leader. “We are going to settle the matter of authority once and for all time, understand?”

  “It’s all settled boss,” Sonny replied almost meekly. “What you say goes.”

  Like hell! Channon Ordway thought.

  Ethan Ordway was mixed up in this. He had to be!

  Ordway’s giant, gaunt-faced, brooding uncle had wanted Squaw Valley ever since an eastern “dude” had slipped in unobtrusively and bought it all. Now he intended to have it, and a hell of a lot more!

  TWO

  Ordway’s grulla night horse was led up. Rough hands boosted him into the saddle. Eric Randolph neck-tied the reins and then mounted his own horse with the grulla’s tether rope in one hand.

  The girl also was up and waiting, her light shotgun in a pommel sling. Her horse skittered sideways and before she could rein up she was almost beside Ordway, her eyes compellingly locking with his for one brief, hostile moment.

  Whatever she saw in them—contempt, sardonic disdain—it brought a night-hidden flush to her cheeks.-“Well?” she challenged him. “Say it, Mr. Ordway.”

  “I once played poker with a hangman who’d executed twenty-seven criminals, Miss Randolph. First time, he said, made him a little sick. Along about the fifth he didn’t mind. By the time he’d hung fifteen he was always real hungry afterward and ate a big plank steak.”

  “What in the world …” she began and trailed off.

  “Tonight you destroyed something innate inside every woman, something you can never regain or repair. You’ve coarsened the fiber and I’m glad.”

  “Why?” she countered, the flush deepening. In the chill of the early morning dampness her cheeks felt hot.

  “You’ve brought yourself a little nearer down to my level, Miss Randolph, and I am going to treat you accordingly.”

  Waldo laughed shortly, displaying yellow, fight-broken teeth in a malevolent grin. “Have a nice trip, damn you. It’ll be the last one you’ll ever take, Chann.”

  Eric Randolph and his spirited niece led off down the long gentle slope. Pine and fir, sparse here, threw shaggy outlines against the sky.

  The great peaks surrounding them, bald up there above timberline, were still snow-capped. Ordway began to shiver uncontrollably. It was more than cold. It was his hands. They were freezing and yet hell’s own fire seemed to be pitch-forking through them because Red Waldo had been diabolically vicious with the piggin’ string.

  He had wanted to make Ordway beg his captors, particularly the girl, for release.

  Two miles farther on they crossed a great mesa, broad and grassy in the gray dawn now breaking over the Colorado wilderness. Several times the girl had looked back and now she finally slowed her bay pony until the grulla paced up alongside.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Ordway?” she asked with a consideration bordering upon anxiety.

  “Just fine,” he answered stonily. He stared straight ahead. The blood was dry upon his mustache now. The searing agony had crept up into his shoulders, and he could begin to feel it in the back muscles of his neck.

  “Again, I’m sorry we didn’t divine Red Waldo’s intentions. They’re an uncouth group of ruffians, but when a determined Scot like my uncle must fight a man such as Ethan Ordway in order to survive there is no choice.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell Ethan that when I see him today,”” he answered.

  The sympathy, the apology went out of he
r. Her full red lips lost their curve and straightened. The bay lunged ahead and pulled up in its proper place again.

  Eric Randolph shot his niece a quizzical glance through the steel-rimmed spectacles. “What’s the matter, kitten?” he asked in a low voice. “Did our bold, bad bandit say something disconcerting.”

  “He puzzles me,” she confessed. “No matter how much I want him to pay with his life for the murder of Wentworth Randolph, he baffles me.”

  They entered Squaw Valley shortly after the sun turned the east rim into a golden-edged hedge. The valley was fifteen miles in length and approximately six and a half miles wide; one hundred sections of grass and timberland in total.

  Six hundred and forty thousand acres, purchased by an eccentric, world traveling ascetic who had never put a single head of cattle on it. A lot of people, Ordway remembered, wondered why somebody hadn’t shot the man and gotten possession. Now it appeared that about the time Channon Ordway left the country for Mexico somebody had.

  A great white house with spired turrets like tiny minarets at seven or eight comers loomed ahead. Its construction by workmen brought in from Denver and Cheyenne had at first caused a small amount of awe and then, later, derisive laughter.

  Eric Randolph gave the grulla’s tether rope to his niece and fell back stirrup-to-stirrup beside Ordway. He gave his prisoner a quizzical smile, his pale eyes sharply etched back of the same kind of spectacles his late brother had worn.

  “Quite a place, eh?” he remarked with a wave of his hand. “Were you ever inside?”

  “Only to the front porch,” murmured Ordway. “Fifteen years ago.”

  He was almost beyond pain now. Something was wrong with his vision. He felt as though he’d been drugged. He sat woodenly erect, numb in body and mind, both feet shoved deep into bull-snout tapaderas. This alone kept him from falling.

  “An architectural monstrosity. Poor old impractical, restive, unhappy Went. I believe that at the time he built it he had some rather vague ideas of becoming a Moslem and converting the rest of America.”

  “He was damned handy with that shotgun your niece is carrying,” Ordway heard himself say from far off.

  An exceptionally attractive woman of perhaps thirty-eight or forty appeared in the back doorway as they pulled up. There was something of terrible anxiety in her mien as though she had been watching a good part of the night for this return. The manner in which her husband gave smiling reassurance showed he loved her very much.

  The ice in his blue eyes had melted into warm sky.

  “Mission accomplished without incident, my dear,” he said cheerily. “Here’s the calm, stoical brute who shot poor Went. Hardly less trouble than an uncautious leopard.”

  “And the cattle, Eric …” she spoke hesitatingly.

  “They’re entering the lower end of the valley this moment, Mary. No more trepidations, please. Just some breakfast. Vernell and I are famished and, no doubt, so is our man.”

  “Has the sheriff been notified?”

  “Sonny will send one of their men before they arrive here and start rebranding in the new corrals.”

  He carried the shotgun to his buxom wife, kissed her lightly on the cheek, and came back as the girl dismounted. The complacent grulla lifted its head in answer to a whinny of welcome from two surrey horses in a new corral, then promptly closed its eyes.

  Randolph came back and looked up at Ordway. All traces of amiability had vanished. His eyes were blue ice again, his demeanor that of a man used to giving orders and being obeyed.

  “Get down,” he ordered curtly. “I can and will apologize for the beating you suffered. Otherwise you will be fed and held for the arrival of Sheriff Eaton.”

  Ordway, however, couldn’t move. His legs were dead and the man seemed to be talking from at least a hundred yards away. Impatience and then anger seized Randolph.

  “I said for you to dismount!” he snapped.

  Slender though he was, the fingers of this transplanted Scot were like blacksmith tongs as he reached up and grabbed Channon Ordway by the left arm. He jerked.

  Ordway left the saddle. He fell as a sack falls. He struck hard on his battered face against ground trampled hard by horses’ hoofs. A thousand stars exploded into his brain and roared out through his ears.

  “Get up, I said!” came the implacable command. “I think the brute is faking to gain sympathy.”

  Vernell, however, had caught sight of his bound wrists, the thongs sunk deep in swollen flesh. A sharp, piercing cry broke from her.

  “Oh, my God, Eric! Look … his hands. They’re swollen and blue! Red Waldo deliberately cut off circulation.”

  “By George, you’re right,” came the suddenly rueful reply. “I’m afraid I was a bit rough with the scoundrel. Mary, bring some hot water and cloth. He’s bleeding at the mouth again, too.”

  Somebody knelt at Ordway’s back. A knife blade, cold like a trout’s fin, slid in and nicked his skin as it cut the almost hidden piggin’ string. It was then that the real agonizing hell of a kind he had never known began to flow through Ordway’s battered, bleeding, abused body.

  He was only dimly aware of the two pairs of feminine hands working over him. Vernell’s were chafing circulation back through his wrists, while those of Mrs. Randolph, using a wet cloth, bathed away the new and dried blood on his unshaved face.

  More clearly now, Ordway heard the older woman’s voice in gentle reproof of her husband. “Eric, it isn’t like you to do a thing such as this. Was it necessary to bribe his men to leave, to rob him, to condemn him without giving the man a chance to defend himself? Has this fight against Ethan Ordway, this country itself so soon begun to coarsen you?”

  Vernell gave her aunt a startled look across Ordway’s lax body. “Why, that’s almost exactly what this man said to me, Aunt Mary.”

  Randolph said ruefully: “Why, I’ll apologize to you, my dear. Could I ask you to blame it upon circumstances rather than your husband himself?”

  He hauled Ordway to his feet and slung an arm around his own neck. The girl, surprisingly strong, did likewise. Half dragging, half carrying him at a stumbling walk, they went into a huge kitchen painted solid white and thence up curving, thickly carpeted stairs. They worked Ordway along a hallway to a huge bedroom facing the south end of Squaw Valley.

  They lowered him onto the bed and lifted his feet. The girl then unbuckled and withdrew the bandoleer of cartridges.

  “It’s so heavy, Eric! But then I suppose a killer’s mind must work with certain logic.”

  “Not killer, my dear. Just a hunter who knows how to stalk and down his game.” An exclamation broke from him as he examined the cartridges. “I say! These are odd looking cartridges. Not regulation loads at all!”

  “No,” Ordway heard her agree as he kept his eyes closed, feigning unconsciousness. “He needed one of them when he sat his horse at the east veranda and shot poor Wentworth and left him dead in the doorway before riding on to Mexico!”

  They crossed to the hallway door and it creaked as she opened it. The room was bright with window-filtered sunlight. The little finger of conscience poking hard at her all day, ever since they had surprised and disarmed him, was hurting her again as she looked in bafflement at the trail-dirty, trail-smelling, fist-battered figure in half-length, heavy leather chaps lying stretched out on the coverlet.

  Then a new sound intruded upon the room and the finger touch was gone, replaced by a look of sheer loathing on her aristocratic face with the oddly shaped eyes.

  Black Channon Ordway, murderer of her father, gun fighter, revolutionist from Mexico, and driver-owner of the cattle the Rocking R had taken by guile, was sound asleep.

  He was snoring!

  The door closed almost with a snap. Ordway opened his one good eye and grinned at the ceiling. Then he rolled over and really did begin to sleep.

  He slept the slumber of a man taken pity upon by nature to relieve exhaustion and pain. Hours later when he awoke to the sound of his own dr
iven cattle bawling lustily, new strength had seeped back into his body. So had a gnawing hunger for food.

  He lay there for a few moments, clenching and unclenching his hands. The swelling was gone. Except for thong chafe at the wrists his gun hand was as fast as ever. But one thing was certain. He had to get out of here in a hurry, before Step Eaton arrived.

  If he ever left this ranch in handcuffs, riding ahead of the man who once before had shot him in the back, he’d never reach Tulac and jail alive.

  Step couldn’t afford to, and wouldn’t, bungle again!

  Ordway yawned lustily and sat up, stretching his arms far overhead. He felt good.

  Careful not to let his boots thump upon the floor, he eased himself off the bed and to the window. From its two-story height he looked down upon a scene of bustling activity as Sonny and Red Waldo and their men were preparing to start branding Ordway’s own cattle.

  As he watched, the sound of footsteps ascending from below smote his ears. He quickly stepped back from the window to the bed, sat down, and stretched out full-length on his back once more. He had to close only one eye in full. Red Waldo’s savage blow against the point of the cheekbone had done a pretty good job of closing the other.

  His breath was earning regularly as if in deep slumber when the key grated, the hinges protested from many years of disuse, and two people entered. Two pairs of footsteps cautiously crossed the carpeting, Randolph holding Channon Ordway’s own six-shooter.

  “Battered and beaten and not a care in the world,” Randolph murmured. “No conscience in these brutes. Only the basic instincts: live and propagate.”

  “It’s the only way I can salve my conscience because of the manner in which we have literally stolen his whole herd of cattle,” the girl murmured in reply. “But you are right, of course, Eric.”

  Randolph bent over Ordway and prodded him with the muzzle of his own sequestered .44. But a hand with the speed of a snake’s head darted out and snapped the Colt from the surprised Scot. Ordway snapped upright in the bed—and then sheepishly handed back the gun while looking almost into the two bores of the familiar engraved shotgun.