Born Savage Read online

  He paused in the face of Ethan’s silence, but no answer came. He said almost softly: “You never reformed, did you, Ethan? You never wanted to because you are a man born without a conscience.”

  FIVE

  There was no immediate reaction, no expected explosion of a violent temper across the table. Ethan-was a man who lived in his own dark world. He masked his thoughts and brooked no outside interference.

  Looking now at his giant uncle, Ordway thought: When mother had her choice of Tim and him and chose Tim, Ethan should have found a wife elsewhere. A good woman, patient enough to remain silent during his black moods. Strong like my mother when Tim became restive for the old days.

  But he never got over it, never stopped hating, and I’ve often wondered what really happened the night I was born.

  Doc Cartwright had been standing by in Tulac, expecting the call most any day or night. But a bad snowstorm had come up that night, and Doc had answered another similar call to a trappers cabin. By the time Tim Ordway got to him they were both snowed in.

  Yet sometime before the storm reached its full-throated fury, Ellen Ordway had left the ranch, slipping away from it and Ethan, and only by the grace of God and an Indian pony given her by White Buffalo had she stumbled into the little Ute camp in the valley and borne her son in the friendly old man’s tepee.

  Channon Ordway, his face still bearing the black marks of the beating, brought himself back to the present “The answers, Ethan. I’m waiting. From the day I left here you never intended for me to get back alive, did you? You killed the Hermit and laid the blame on me, even as you took possession of the valley where I was born in a tepee. When I wrote Kathy I was on the way home—very much alive—you sent Sonny and his outfit south to finish the job and take my herd. They took a bad licking. How many years have you planned all this, Ethan? Since the day after my mother was buried and you sent me to Squaw Valley, thinking the Hermit might kill me?”

  Ethan Ordway’s eyes changed. They began to glow like black coals. He placed two huge hands, fingers spread, upon the table top. His arms and elbows were out as though he would push himself erect like a tower of strength and anger in the back room.

  He remained that way as he looked into Ordway’s battered face and one good eye. .

  Yet his voice held a peculiarly restrained quality as he spoke.

  “You want some answers, you’ll get them!”

  A deep breath filled his lungs and sighed out once more. “It was just thirty years ago this month when Tim and me came into this country on the dodge and settled. He wanted to turn straight and ranch, but the land we wanted, Pronghorn Basin, was so full of soddy dugouts it looked like a prairie-dog town.

  “If it had been left up to your father we’d never have got Pronghorn. He was too softhearted.”

  Ordway said, “We both know that. That was why my mother chose him instead of you. It’s why you hated me from the day I was born and her until the day she died.” “Listen to me!” Ethan almost thundered. “It was my gun and a necessary ruthlessness that cleared the basin and made it ours. That’s why from the day he died I considered everything as mine.”

  “He gave his life for you in this very saloon. He sacrificed himself because you were caught in a threeway gun brace.”

  “It makes no difference! Pronghorn was mine from that day and I only tolerated your ma because she wouldn’t leave when I ordered her to.”

  Unmoved, holding his own terrible killing urge under control, Ordway said: “You treated her everyday the same way I treated that Randolph girl today and for the same reason: to cover up the fact that she was too far above you.”

  It was true about Vernell Randolph. In this respect, Ordway knew, he was little better than an uncle who for years ignored the napkin Ellen Ordway placed by Ethan’s plate each meal.

  In this respect Ordway had gone him one better. He’d used his knife to shovel in potatoes. In her hearing he’d called Step a back-shooting son-of-a-bitch. And before her horrified eyes he had shot a man three times and killed him.

  Ordway looked across at his uncle. Their drinks were forgotten. This could be a shootout. Or could he bring himself to down Tim’s brother?

  “You have categorically admitted the ugly truth, Ethan,” he stated. “You waited all these years for Step and Sonny to grow up. You planned everything—maybe including Tim’s death, didn’t you?— you never got over my mother!”

  “I’ve heard enough!” Ethan shouted and pushed back from the table. His eyes were wild beneath his shaggy black hair still unstreaked with gray.

  “Ethan,” Channon Ordway went on in a terrible voice almost trembling with pent-up passion, “why did my mother flee from you and the ranch the night I was born?”

  Now Ethan Ordway came to his feet The room seemed to shrink, so big did he tower in it. He bent forward at the waist and placed his doubled fists on the table and rested himself on long, elbow-locked arms. His face was a frightful thing to see.

  “I’m through talking! Get on that fresh horse and ride out before Sonny and Step get here. It’s your only chance to stay alive!”

  “Not until I get an answer, Ethan!”

  “You’ll get an answer in hell where she went,” Ethan Ordway almost screamed. “You’re only half Ordway anyhow. She diluted your blood and made you a—”

  He never finished the rest of it, for Channon Ordway almost exploded over the table at him, six-shooter up and out Ethan had tried only once to whip him, about a year after Ellen Ordway was buried in the basin. Channon had swung the poll-ax in a flash and by a hairbreadth missed splitting Ethan’s skull.

  Now, after fourteen years, Channon Ordway swung again at his uncle’s head.

  The barrel lashed out in a thudding side swipe. Ethan crashed forward and the table tipped at a crazy angle and then skidded and fell over. Ordway, his one good eye flaming, landed on top of the giant.

  The barrel of the .44 began to thud down into Ethan’s upturned face the way Red Waldo’s iron fists had thudded into Channon’s own battered countenance. Soddenly. Cruelly. Again and again. Ordway against black Ordway.

  Channon finally came to his feet and stood panting more from anger than exertion. He sheathed the gun and stood looking down at a bleeding mass of bruised flesh who had just undergone a masterful job of pistol whipping.

  Ethan groaned, rolled over and half propped himself up on an elbow. He spat a stream of blood and then used his fingers to extract a loose tooth.

  “Finish me … while you have the chance,” he slobbered in a whisper. “You’ll never get another … before you die!”

  The door re-opened and Hanse came in. His face was imperturbable, as usual. Few things bothered this closemouthed, white-headed giant.

  “As I told Henry Cartwright the other day—him and Mike Adkins,” Hanse growled and bent over Ethan’s recumbent form, “I liked it better in the old days.”

  He rolled Ethan onto his back, stood at his head and secured a grip under both armpits. He brought up the giant with ease, shifted him over to one arm like a child, and picked up the overturned chair and table.

  “You just shot a man, and his friends either dealt themselves a hand or packed him out,” Hanse went on as he sat Ethan in the chair and let him fall forward with his face bloodying the green table. “No fuss, no feathers.”

  He poured whiskey into a palm like a grizzly’s claw, flung Ethan’s head back, smeared his smashed face and ignored the foul curses of pain.

  “Now you got to treat ‘em like babies,” he growled and went to the door. There he turned. I’ll send for Henry Cartwright to take care of him, Chann. Now you get out of here and have old Pete next door use some leeches to get that other eye of yours open before Sonny gets here.”

  Ordway sheathed his gun and stepped through the rear door onto a new porch, one of several which had been added to the rears of buildings formerly facing nothing but desertion and trash. He ducked past a striped barber pole and stuck his head through and spoke to a d
our-visaged individual who looked as though he’d been suckling a chunk of alum most of his life. Pete the barber also limped.

  Like Ethan, he greeted Ordway as though he’d been gone fifteen minutes instead of almost sixteen months. “Who kicked you in the face?” he snorted as though secretly pleased “Pete, I’m going to Mike’s office before seeing Bob Koonce in the courthouse,” Channon Ordway answered in kind. “Bring some tools and a few leeches. Hurry!”

  “Why?” asked the barber with infuriating slowness.

  “Because the law’s breathing a lot closer down my neck than it ever did you’rn, you old reprobate,” Ordway managed to grin.

  “Law? You mean Step? Bah!” he sneered at the open doorway and the back of a blue bolero jacket moving up the new boardwalk toward Mike’s two-story bank.

  Despite the brief ladling of personal levity, Channon Ordway’s world was as grim and as black as his growth of whiskers. He had written Kathy Perry weeks ago, swearing her to secrecy, informing her that he was very much alive and on his way home with a big herd. A man of twenty-seven returning to the range where he had been born, back to a snub-nosed girl who had loved him very much.

  He still couldn’t think of her as being married to a lout like Step, but the fact that she had told her husband everything contained in the letter had been the match that blew Channon Ordway’s world apart within a matter of hours.

  SIX

  Mike Adkins’ modest bank faced the new courthouse across the breadth of the street lying like a curved raw scar in the sun. The judicial center for several pioneer counties was still sixty miles away. Only the offices of Sheriff and Justice of the Peace were as-yet occupied.

  The lower floor and walls of the bank were of native stone, the upper floor being of hand-sawed planking. Ordway went inside and nodded to a startled teller. The man occupied the same little grilled window where unfortunate Kathy Perry once had worked to earn money for a wedding dress Channon now would never see. She’d worn it the day she married Step Eaton.

  Ordway took the stairs along the south wall and emerged into Mike’s huge expanse of office on the upper floor. The banker stood before a large plate glass window with a pair of imported Dutch binoculars glued to his eyes. He was looking out over the old part of town toward the promontory’s south tip.

  “Just watching Sonny and our respected sheriff and their gang of Wyoming cutthroats come up the valley,” he announced pleasantly, turning. “They’re on the road below the rim now.”

  “Minus one. Red Waldo. He won’t be along.”

  “You young ingrate. That’s going to cost me a three dollar and eighty cent checking account.” He produced a bottle and glasses. “How’d you get the eye?”

  Ordway told him how, plus the rest of it. Mike whistled. “Eric must have been desperate to have bought off your crew. Incidentally, it took the last of his money. You real sure?”

  “He paid off my trail crew double,” Ordway growled. “Well, he took his gamble and now he’s going to lose.”

  “He carries a lot of respect from people who had to stand by while Ethan and Sonny rustled him clean, Chann. But nobody dared to lift a hand or open their mouths. They’re the same people who want him for our first judge when this county really gets organized.”

  Pete limped in carrying a pail of hot water, towels, and a box containing shears, razor and comb.

  “Over here by the big window, Pete,” Ordway said and pulled up a chair. He sat down. “Do what you can before Sonny and Step get here to take some new orders from Ethan.”

  Pete yanked the apron around Ordway’s neck and sneered. “It’s alius hurry it up among you damned cow wrastlers. You go a month without a hair cut an’ then want it in two minutes. Yer paw an’ Ethan was the same way when the law was after us.”

  The rapid snip of the shears began and drowned out Pete’s growls. Ordway said, “Mike, what happened when Step got back here with the herd from Mexico and reported me dead?

  Mike handed him the drink and the apron moved as Ordway’s hand reached out and took the glass.

  “Hold still” snarled Pete. “How in the blue blazes can I… ah, go ahead an’ drink it!”

  Mike said, “Most of them, including Kathy, believed Step’s yarn that you were, killed in a revolution down there. Personally, I couldn’t see you giving up Kathy, turning native with some girl, and the rest of it.”

  Ordway elaborated on what had taken place at the herd and, later, at Randolph’s Rocking R ranch. “How do I stand legally on the ranch and the money Ethan got for the herd in Cheyenne, Mike?” he asked.

  “Ethan paid off the fifteen thousand loan and banked nearly thirty more profits here in his own name, Chann. He cooked up some papers, including your will, giving him all the ranch. Wasn’t a thing I could do except keep my opinions to-myself.”

  In a remarkably short time Ordway was trimmed and shaved. Pete pulled the last of the blood heavy leeches from beneath the puffed eye and drowned them in the bucket of soiled water.

  “All right,” he growled to cover his feelings. “Now go let Sonny close the other one.”

  He stalked out and Mike grinned. “Don’t let the old fraud fool you, Chann.” He pointed to his old saddle gun in a scabbard tied to the chair back of his desk. “He’s got his down there in the barber shop, too, Chann.”

  “He thinks like he walks, Mike.”

  “Him and Hanse and Henry Cartwright and me have talked quite a bit over our Thursday night poker games the past year. We know Ethan is responsible for the death of Eric’s brother. We’re pretty sure the same goes for old Tobe Whitehouse taking a bullet in the back. We figure Ethan has got to be stopped.”

  “Then why didn’t you?” asked Ordway shortly.

  “Sonny and his gunnies, Chann. They’re young and tough like we were in the old days. We’ve grown old, Chann. We’re liquor-sick like Lon Perry, or crippled like Pete. Can you imagine spraddle-footed old Hanse shooting from the back of a running horse? Hell, he weighs in at two hundred seventy.”

  “Then why the gun there?”

  “We figure that sooner or later Ethan will want the rest of the money in this bank and send Sonny’s masked men after it,” Mike Adkins answered softly. “Call us any damn thing you like, but we still know how to shoot”

  Ordway started for the stairway door. Knob in hand, he turned at the sound of Mike’s voice. “Where you going now?”

  “To see Bob Koonce in the courthouse, Mike. I want some more answers.”

  “Such as?”

  “I want to know why Tobe’s adopted son is still wearing a deputy’s badge,” was the short reply.

  He reached the street level and paused on the bank’s porch, looking along the curve toward Pete’s shop and the former back door of Hanse’s place. Nobody was in sight.

  But a chestnut gelding with four white hocks stood tied over in front of the courthouse with Ordway’s saddle on and, on the two-step stoop was the figure of a man the same age as Ordway. Koonce stood with a sawed-off Greener dangling in one hand.

  His face expressed nothing as Ordway crossed toward him. His brows were like two thick, black worms and there was tremendous power in medium-width shoulders and hands more suited to a much bigger man. Ordway started to speak, scowlingly, but the deputy beat him to it. -

  “Save it,” he said shortly. “There’s someone inside. I’ll wait here.”

  Ordway went up the steps and entered a hallway. At the first door to the left he turned the knob. He heard a rustle of organdie and turned. Kathy stood in the doorway leading from the sheriff’s inner office.

  He was appalled at the change in this once wholesome young girl. Her eyes were two overly bright spots in round dark skin of unnatural and unhealthy hue. She was thin and her hands were twisting nervously. And the protruding round ball at the waist of her dress told its own mute story.

  Poor kid! he thought pityingly. She spent her entire life being young mother to a whole brood of little Perry’s and now this, all because s
he believed a scoundrel after I took a couple of bullets in the back.

  “Hello, Kathy,” Ordway smiled and went forward with hand outstretched. Anything to put her more at ease. “I heard over town that you’d married.”

  “I knew they’d be quick enough to tell you.”

  “I guess things just didn’t work out for us, eh?”

  “There ain’t no use in us crying about it now, Chann,” she said and fought down a moist sniff, her eyes suspiciously damp. “What’s done is done. But I had to see you.”

  “What is it, Kathy?”

  “There’s a couple things I got to ask you.”

  Here it comes, he thought with dread. And what was he supposed to tell her? The truth? Try to lie?

  “Did Step shoot you in the back down there in Mexico like I heard a few minutes ago?” she asked.

  He sought for words, some way of cushioning the harsh, the brutal truth. He found none.

  “Somebody did, Kathy,” he answered her gently. “I didn’t actually see him.”

  “But he was with you, ridin’ right behind you, wasn’t he?” she persisted like a child without guile.

  “I’m afraid he was, Kathy, and I’m sorry for your sake.”

  “Well,” she said, and a long tired sigh came out of her. “I guess I must have knowed it was something like that all along.” She gave him a direct look that was completely disconcerting. “You’re going to kill my husband, ain’t you, Chann?”

  “I’m going to protect myself, Kathy. And I think it best if you go now. He’s due in any minute.”

  She nodded and left In the doorway she turned. “I guess you noticed I’m about ready to have a baby, Chann. I just want you to know I never loved Step deep down. But he had money from Ethan’s cattle and I’d have done most anything to get away from Pa’s drinkin’ and into a clean home of my own.”