Born Savage Read online

  ‘That’s right,” the girl nodded from back of it. “We take no chances with murderers, Mr. Ordway.”

  “Don’t blame you a bit,” he grinned, twisting on his rump and lowering his feet to the floor. “Helps salve the conscience.”

  At her angry flush he went on unabashedly: “It’s the glasses. You don’t look right without ’em. The Hermit was wearing ’em the day he used that gun on me.”

  “He used this weapon on you? Then it’s a pity he didn’t save his life later by—oh!” she almost stamped her foot on the floor. “Please get up from there and come downstairs!” This man was so exasperating!

  She led the way and with Ordway between them, his own gun at his back, they started down. The peso spur rowels made odd rolling sounds as they descended the curved stairs.

  The girl spoke back over her shoulder. “I am at least pleased that your male vanity prevents your spur rowels from tearing at the carpeting. It was imported from China.”

  “These spurs, ma’m?” he drawled at the back of her slender neck below a copper-colored hair bun. “They’re not mine, really. I stole ’em off the feet of a dead Mexican general after I killed him in a box canyon fight just west of Parral, in the state of Chihuahua.”

  A disdainful sniff came audibly. Her lips compressed as she made a mental note not to speak with the brute again. He had a way of getting back at her and seemingly enjoying himself at her expense.

  At the bottom of the stairs, however, he blandly ignored the guns and went over to a window, where he bent down and peered through at the corrals and cattle and the herd out beyond. To her amazement he began to chuckle over something he seemed to find vastly amusing.

  “You find it amusing that we’ve stolen your cattle and are rebranding than?” she demanded contentiously despite her self-promise of but moments ago.

  “A little,” he chuckled. He straightened and grinned at her out of one good eye. “You see, ma’m I stole ’em too.”

  She gave her uncle a baffled look, a question in her own eyes. Randolph said imperturbably: “What he probably means, my dear, is that he first shot poor old Went to obtain the valley. He likely intends now to succeed where his notorious family associate, Ethan Ordway, failed; that is, take over our brand, too.”

  Her eyes surveyed Ordway mockingly. “Is that true?” she smiled.

  “Not all of it, ma’m,” he answered gravely. “I was born during a bad snowstorm, in a Ute Indian tepee, on about the spot where you built those new branding chutes to rebrand my herd. My godfather, an old fellow called White Buffalo, told my mother that one day this valley would be mine.”

  “And you believed all this … this pagan prophesy to the extent of killing an elderly recluse.”

  “I believed only that part of it,” he answered quietly.

  His voice turned cool, devoid now of the drawl she knew he used only when he mocked her.

  “You see, Miss Randolph, there was more. It also was said that I’d find myself a beautiful white squaw here. But there is a girl in Tulac named Kathy Perry with whom I’m very much in love. So I really couldn’t find myself a white squaw, now could I? Will you lead the way… ma’m?”

  From her position over a hot stove Mary Randolph gave Ordway a smile that was a mixture of regret, sadness, and trepidation. But there, was welcome, too, and a place for one had been set at a table where exquisite silverware gleamed against a snowy tablecloth and. napkin.

  She said gently, “If you’d care to finish my rather awkward efforts to cleanse your poor battered face, Mr. Ordway, I’ll have your food ready.”

  He gave her a reassuring smile and went to a sink equipped with cistern hand pump. On a shelf above it was a photo of three smiling boys, ages about eleven, thirteen, and fifteen. Imps all, from their looks.

  “Yours?” he asked, soaping his hands in the pan of warm water.

  She nodded. “They’re in school abroad. Well bring them here next year. Were there others in your own immediate family?”

  He said, “Yes, Mrs. Randolph,” and bent over to soap his face and swollen left eye.

  He finished his ablutions while the girl and her uncle stood apart, silent and aloof: Ordway took a comb from a pocket of the bolero jacket and put his dark hair in order.

  “Do you feel better now?” Mrs. Randolph inquired.

  “Physically, yes,” he said. “But if I were you I’d remove that photo of the boys to another place.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, ma’m,” Channon Ordway answered her. “You see, because of what your husband and niece have done to me today I’m going to burn out the Rocking R and take over the valley, Indian-named after my mother and my birth here in a tepee. And because of your kindness, and those three boys there on the shelf, I’m going to do it with a certain sense of regret.”

  THREE

  In a strained silence broken only by the suddenly increased bawls of cattle under stamping irons in the two eight-cow branding chutes, Channon Ordway sat down to eat in the house he had calmly informed the occupants he intended to burn. He placed a napkin across his chapped legs and with consummate skill used silver knife and fork to cut into the juicy roast He began to eat He became aware that the girl was watching him with growing puzzlement and, perhaps, a somewhat clearer understanding of his background. And this would never do. There was a heaping portion of creamed potatoes on the chinaware plate and Ordway used the knife.

  He shoved it deep under the pile, lifted it, and transferred the whole of the load into his mouth. When he belched, the girl could take no more of his coarse baiting. She fled the room and he didn’t dare look at Mrs. Randolph, for whom he was beginning to have a deep respect She apparently felt that her husband and niece were wrong, probably had argued against their violently arbitrary action and the risk of disarming a noted killer on the way home from Mexico. But there was no question of where her blind love and loyalty positioned her: she’d stand by Randolph and the girl to the last glowing ember in a burned house built by an eccentric.

  Ordway finished the meal and started to use the napkin but thought better of it. When his handkerchief came away from his mouth it was spotted with red. The fist-made cuts had broken open again.

  “I am so sorry,” she murmured as he rose and pushed back.

  “Don’t be,” he told her gently. “My own mother would have said that sometimes these things simply happen. She married my outlaw father and reformed him. You married one with too much stubborn, foolish pride.”

  Eric Randolph’s face remained coldly aloof, his mouth Scot-stubborn. He gave a curt nod, backed up by Ordway’s .44 Colt, and they walked through two more rooms before emerging into a great living room fronted by a long veranda enclosed by figured railing. Here were bookshelves from floor to ceiling, a varnished ladder to get at the high ones, a massive, paper-covered secretary where Randolph apparently conducted his correspondence, and a glassed-in case containing thirty or forty rifles and pistols.

  One of the rifles was a single-shot 45.—70 and the bandoleer of long cartridges draped on a peg beside it was all too familiar. Eric Randolph obviously considered Ordway as good as dead, and the thought angered the prisoner.

  The rancher said, “If you’ll be seated, Vernell will bring coffee. Although it undoubtedly means little to you, sir, she feels very unhappy over the matter of Red Waldo, binding your wrists too tight and our negligence in failing to take precautions for your comfort”

  He indicated a leather chair and himself took seat in a large settee, also of leather. Randolph waved the pistol. “Make yourself comfortable until the sheriff arrives. He and one of the hands who hurried to Tulac will be here in a few minutes.”

  “I expect Step will be right glad to see me,” Ordway replied dryly, as Vernell came in with two cups of black coffee. “We were such good compadres ever since we were lads.”

  “And you are hoping that it will make some difference in the final discharge of his duties as an officer of the law?” she asked acidly.


  “Oh, no, ma’m!” he protested vigorously. “You got my word Step won’t let me get away. Not him!”

  She was still antagonistically puzzled over that remark when the sheriff finally arrived. One horse loped on past the spired mansion to the corrals, where its rider excitedly reported to Sonny and Red Waldo at the branding chutes. The other horse, a gleaming black mare with racing lines, came to a halt at about the spot where a mounted man presumably had sat his saddle and shot Wentworth Randolph to death in his front doorway.

  A man firing a .45-70-500 Sharps rifle.

  Ignoring Eric Randolph’s freezing command backed up by the Colt, Ordway got to his feet and glanced out the front window. Step Eaton, much heavier and unhealthily florid of face from too much steady drinking, was tying the black mare’s reins to a veranda support. In keeping with his new tenure as sheriff, he wore black suit and white shirt, string tie and white Stetson.

  No doubt about it, Ordway thought, Step had really been living it up with that fifteen thousand he’d taken as Ordway lay bleeding and unconscious from the cowardly shot in the back.

  Step jauntily crossed the porch and banged a shave-and-a-haircut (pause) two-bits on the eight-foot-tall French doors. With this to announce his presence and humming a gay tune, he opened the door and came in too late to heed Eric Randolph’s sudden warning cry. He had stepped squarely into fist range of a man he’d left for dead fifteen months ago.

  One of Ordway’s hands snapped Step’s pistol from the holster beneath the coat of gleaming black broadcloth. The other, balled into an iron fist, smashed the sheriff alongside the head and sent him reeling a dozen feet Step Eaton hit the leather settee and sat down heavily beside the startled Randolph.

  Ordway stood facing them, legs braced apart, Step’s cocked gun in his deadly capable right hand. His black eyes above the mustache and whiskers bored mercilessly into the panic-stricken ones of Eaton.

  “Chann …” the sheriff whispered chokingly, face already dead.

  “With no apologies for feminine company present, what have you got to say in the one minute you have left to live, you back-shooting, money-robbing, son-of-a-bitch?” Ordway asked with rising fury.

  “Chann …” It came in a final, desperate, choked whisper.

  He couldn’t finish. A pocket of air, musk-tasting, had lodged spastically somewhere in his constricted throat. He swallowed hard in an attempt to regain speech, to stall off death as terror of death mounted. A muscle quivered beneath a chin, left barber-slick and with an odor of fermented roses. “Chann … I… Chann …”

  Randolph said cuttingly, tossing Ordway’s pistol, “Here. I can’t turn you over to such a coward.” Acting as though he hadn’t heard, Channon Ordway looked down at what appeared to be the girl’s legs. A second time now, she thought In his savage rage and hatred he’s still baiting a woman.

  Now he stepped back and tossed the sheriff’s gun into the black-trousered lap. “Get up, Step,” he ordered. “As long as these arrogantly bungling, ineptly proud people figure I killed their looney relative who peppered me and my pony in the back one day, killing another man in their bat-infested temple won’t make a great deal of difference. Get up and use the gun, you would-be murdering scum.”

  Eaton, however, made no move to touch his pistol. His eyes, dulled by shocking, numbing fear of death, looked up in mute appeal to the grim apparition. “Shoot if you want,” he choked huskily. “I won’t”

  Ordway stepped over and took his rifle and bandoleer from the glass-enclosed gun rack. He slung the weight of the big cartridges over his shoulder and buckled. He stood like death itself over the cringing figure of the man he’d known when they were children and their fathers rode the outlaw trails together long before that.

  He said harshly: “Did somebody pay you to shoot me in the back and take that cattle-buying money, Step, or did you think of it all by yourself?”

  But again he was met by mute silence and a shake of the head that might have meant anything.

  He turned to the girl. “Go bring my grulla horse to the back door without arousing suspicion of Sonny’s outfit out there branding my cattle. The way I feel right now I won’t wait until later to burn down the Hermit’s insane eyesore. I’ll torch it before I go.”

  “I fully believe that,” she answered coolly, “and I’ll do my best.”

  “No double-cross?”

  “I said I’ll do my best,” she answered and left them.

  In the kitchen she held up an admonishing finger to her lips to enjoin silence from her aunt and made her way to the surrey team corral. The grulla,’ fed and well rested, already had made itself at home. It stood hipshot with mouse-colored chin resting in equine camaraderie over the rump of one of the span.

  But when she approached it with Ordway’s bridle the wary grulla came alive fast and spun away. To her great, almost panicky dismay, she was discovering that there was much difference in the training of a range mount from that of the buggy team. This one not only would not accept the bridle, it demanded to be roped.

  “And that man Ordway knew it too, I suspect!” she told herself fiercely.

  This left but one choice. She gingerly took down Ordway’s rawhide reata of stiffened coils from the cactus-tree fork of the flathorn Mexican saddle. In her anger she noticed the mirror fastened to the top of the flathorn and automatically surmised that, like other Caballeros, he used it to preen himself as he rode along. Then she remembered how he had acquired his boots and silver spurs with the peso rowels and she didn’t know who to be angry at: Ordway or herself.

  The reata was iron hard to her hands and after a few awkward tries, which the grulla easily dodged, she stood in the center of the corral, feeling helpless for the first tune in her life. She had hunted with Eric since the time, so many years ago, he had found her in Burma where Wentworth Randolph had abandoned her Eurasian mother. She’d mothered his and Mary’s three wildcat sons while they were gone. She had..

  “Oh, damn!” she angrily exclaimed.

  “Havin’ trouble?” inquired a bland voice that was positively infuriating.

  Red Waldo, unseen, had climbed the pole fence and dropped to the ground, and was waddling toward her like a fat Indian buck. Unknown to her, he had given Sonny a significant wink before leaving the chutes.

  “Quite obviously I am, Mr. Waldo,” she answered coolly.

  “Anything ol’ Reddie kin do?”

  “Yes. Please lasso that mount belonging to Mr. Ordway.”

  “Now how come Mista’ Ordway didn’t come out here to the lot an’ lasso that hoss hisself?” he demanded with little glints of suspicion in his red-rimmed eyes.

  “I would think you could guess. His hands were swollen after the manna in which you trussed them. Deliberately, I suspect”

  “Hands all swollen, huh?” he said thoughtfully, and a hidden gleam brightened lashless orbs. “Pore boy. Here. Gimme.”

  He built a loop with a flick of his hairy wrist and with another flick he roped the grulla. It came forward meekly and made no protest as the heavy saddle and bull-snout taps thumped over its short coupled back. He hauled up and notched the latigo leather.

  “There,” Waldo grinned at her, handing over the reins. “You couldn’t a caught him with a bridle in a month of Sundays. Cow hoss pride. You orta learn how to throw a rope.”

  “Just give me a little time to practice after today, Mr. Waldo, and I assure you I need not again call upon anyone for assistance.”

  “Ya’ know, I don’t think you will either, lady,” he admitted with rare grudging admiration.

  He stood watching as she closed the gate and led the grulla toward the back of the towering white house so much like a miniature castle of wood instead of stone. Everybody in the whole country had known from the beginning that there was something wrong with the man who had built it, and odd about the house itself. Take now how the Hermit had peppered twelve-year-old Chann Ordway in the back that time, Waldo remembered.

  Everything wrong abou
t all these people. Must be something plenty wrong in that house right now, too, Red told himself.

  He wheeled and strode to the pole fence, climbed it swiftly for a man of his squat build, and dropped to the ground once more. He hurried over to one of the eight-cow branding chutes, now jammed with bawling cattle. A branding fire was going good, with a tender watching a cluster of Rocking R stamping irons made in Denver.

  Sonny deftly stamped the last of his four in the chute in a way his rustler father would have approved, came out of the pungent cloud of smoke, gave the iron tender a contemptuous look.

  “I coulda done better with a heated cinch ring between two holding sticks right on the open range,” he sneered, and wiped a sleeve across his ruggedly handsome young face.

  He pushed back his long blond locks and rearranged his hat.

  “Sonny,” Red Waldo said.

  “What’s with that high falutin’ filly? I’d like to get my hands on her someday.”

  “She allows as Chann’s hands are all swole up on account of the way I tied his wrists with piggin’ string,” grinned Waldo. “She allows as how I was so cruel it wasn’t accident-like at all,” he winked.

  “That how come she saddled his hoss?” Sonny demanded suspiciously.

  “Uh-huh. But how come you reckon Eric an’ Step didn’t just bring along the prisoner, and one of them do it?”

  Sonny bent suddenly and grasped the dangling ends of the thongs in the tip of his gun sheath. He had untied them from around his leg to give full freedom while working the stamping iron, “Maybe I’d better go have a look-see,” he said thinly.

  “No,” his pardner corrected. “Maybe I better go have a look-see. When Chann killed my brother in Cheyenne that was bad enough. But when he shot a good hoss from under me with that bloomin’ Sharps cannon…”

  He shifted his gun sheath into place at one heavy hip. “And besides, didn’t the gal say as how his hands was all swole up to where he cain’t use ’em?”

  He circled a corral and, under cover, began an approach toward the front veranda where Step Eaton’s racing mare made a black sheen against the railing.