Born Savage Page 9

  Somebody had pulled it from the dead horse, cleaned the blood away, and put it over a saddle rail beneath a shed. Swiftly he switched saddles and the food pack. The mare had traveled about twenty-five miles today, he guessed, but he knew she would be good for a few more tonight Somewhere in the night a couple of horses could be heard loping. Ordway paused under the shed, his eyes straining across to the store building. He saw two dim shapes clatter into view from Hansen’s south porch and gallop across the fifty yard space.

  Sonny’s voice came clearly. “I’d give a hundred dollars to know where Step is right now and what he’s got in mind.”

  “All right,” laughed the other. “Maybe I could put a bullet in Hanse’s big belly and make him talk before he cashed in his chips.

  Ordway strained his ears for the answer. It was drowned out by the black mare. Before he could grab her satiny nose she lifted it and shrilled a harridan’s call to the two mounts from which Sonny and another range tough were dismounting.

  “Hey!” exclaimed Shackleford in a low voice. “That sounds a whole lot like that horse-hungry black bitch who’s been losing a chunk of my money to Mike Adkins.”

  “You can get it back from his bank anytime.”

  “Shut up, damn yon!” hissed Sonny. They started across the corral and Ordway slowly eased himself into the saddle a foot at a time.

  “Hey, Lon!” Sonny whispered cautiously. “Lon! You around?”

  “Course he ain’t,” scoffed the other, loudly. “He’s home with all the neighbors, braggin’ about what a fine, up-standin’ son-in-law he’s got.”

  Ordway dug in the round rowels and a four-footed black thunderbolt exploded from beneath the shed. She landed sprinting and a wild startled yell went up from one of the two men on the ground. A gun boomed and then another.

  Ordway fired a shot at one figure and then the other, but which one was Sonny he didn’t know. The two lances of orange flame slanted downward. More pistol reports went booming into the blackness and then Ordway was gone.

  Sonny Shackleford stood cursing futilely, his yellow-flecked eyes flaming. From the ground at his feet came gurgling groans as a man twisted and writhed and threshed his legs in the final throes of death. A spur lashed convulsively against Sonny’s ankle. It sent a poker-hot stab of flame through the bone and Sonny cursed the dying man.

  He was still standing there spraddle-legged in the corral, eyes flaming with hatred, when Ethan and the others arrived at a run. Ethan’s gaunt frame came towering through the night “Sonny!” he called.

  “Right here,” Sonny snarled, and told what had happened. “He musta thought John was me. He guessed wrong by three feet. Ethan, we’ve got to spread out and get him or he’ll cut us down with that long range Sharps. One at a time.”

  “Of course he will, you young fool. So why play his game? I think I know what he’s planning to do. Let him do it. Then I’ll toss the bait and let him come right into the trap.”

  Ordway on the swift-footed mare was already out of town and down below the north rim of Squaw Valley. He knew what he was going to do, had intended setting out as soon as he burned Pronghorn. But the unexpected presence of the Randolphs had forced him to return to Tulac, to return them to the protection of Bob Koonce. He had some riding to do but some latent instinct was taking him first to the Rocking R.

  Step Eaton was somewhere out here in the night. He didn’t dare to be seen in Tulac. Even Mike or Hanse would shoot him down. He would be shocked sober, but his nerves would be raw and screaming for whiskey. And where would he find it?

  At the Randolph place, even if he had to take it at the point of a gun.

  “My God!” Channon Ordway suddenly spoke aloud, and a cold chill went along his spine. “In the living room today. Step heard me say I’d burn that place out!”

  He rolled in the silver spurs. “All right, you horse-hungry black bitch,” he said to the mare as wind began to lash at his face. “Now run, damn you!”

  He was three miles away when he saw that he had guessed right, and guessed too late. An orange glow was beginning to light up the sky, expanding ominously like a great new moon rising swiftly. The Hermit’s architectural monstrosity was afire.

  It was easy to guess what had happened. Step had circled the place like a red-eyed wolf, noticed the absence of window lights too early in the evening, and broken in.

  It was another good guess that not until he was in the high-ceilinged white living room, on the spot where he had suffered humiliation and terror, going over in his mind the scene, that Chann’s words had suddenly exploded in his liquor-soaked, hate-filled brain.

  Ordway arrived on the panting mare. The eight or nine minaret-type turrets were buried in a great pillar of fire at least one hundred and fifty feet high.

  The Randolphs, much of their family fortune squandered by the Hermit, their cattle stolen by Ethan Ordway, their bank funds exhausted, their home torched; the Randolphs were wiped out. Randolph was at least partly to blame.

  Ordway circled the ranch in search of Step but found no trace. The back-shooter had fled into the night. Ordway sat there and watched the fire. Somewhere out there in the night one of his cattle bawled.

  He wondered if it bore the rawly burned Rocking R stamp.

  A few minutes later the Randolphs themselves arrived.

  He didn’t turn his head as they rode up. He didn’t want to face them, to answer, to explain. Nor did they speak. There was no sound but the distant crackle of flames from that tall pillar of fire.

  A new sound came to Channon Ordway s ears. The sound of a woman crying. Only twice in his life had he ever been affected by it The first time had been when they brought home in a wagon to Pronghorn the body of Tim Ordway, after the gun fight in Hanse’s saloon in which Ethan had come out alive. Ordway could still remember the small, choked sounds of a woman who also had lost everything. His mother.

  The second one had been Kathy, on the day he had left for Mexico. She hadn’t wanted him to go.

  Channon Ordway turned his head and saw Vernell She sat with her face in hands, shoulders shaking, and every choked sound that came out of her must have been a knife slash at every nerve, every breath, every emotion in her body. All the hopeless agony in a woman’s soul came from those muffled, mewling sounds.

  Mrs. Randolph was more composed. She sat erect in the saddle, looking short and stubby in the flickering light, tears making wet streaks down the cheeks of her heartshaped face. She stared woodenly, straight ahead.

  Eric Randolph’s face was icy, composed. No emotion was upon it, nothing in the icy eyes back of the steel-rim spectacles. Now he turned and looked at Channon Ordway.

  “Are you responsible for this?” he asked in a calm voice.

  “Yes, “Ordway said. “I burned it with my big mouth.”

  “There’s only one reason why I didn’t kill you when we rode up. I am hoping you’ll kill your uncle.”

  Ordway lifted the reins and looked at him, at the two women. He said equally calmly, “Since this afternoon in Tulac there has been some doubt in my mind that he is my uncle. It is my guess that he probably is my father. By brutal rape. I think that’s the reason why my mother fled the house the night I was born, and came here, in order not to desecrate it.”

  He left them there and rode out, eastward into the night. He climbed the tiring black mare up over the east crest and left the valley behind. The night swallowed him.

  Two afternoons later, and about eighty miles or so to the east, Channon Ordway reached his destination. He was in country more virgin than that whence he came, a vast panorama of mesas and crags, and creeks sometimes hundreds of feet below.

  The flat, grassy valley snuggled below more of the serrated crests rarely bare of snow until midsummer. He had ridden two days to ask an aged Indian where Ethan Ordway would bring a herd of cattle stolen a couple of dozen at a time. He had found the herd itself.

  Around him as he rode through the tall grass were frolicking and sleeping spring calv
es. Others stood with forefeet spread wide to get lower under their mammies, tails twisting in ecstasy while they tugged milk from mothers bearing the Pronghorn brand. Ethan had made no effort to blot out or change the Rocking R.

  About twenty Indian curs came yelping, as Ordway reached the village and pulled up before an emaciated old man of at least eighty. White Buffalo extended a thin hand and there was pleasure in the still clear eyes.

  There was no talk inside the tepee until the pipe was lit and the usual words spoken, with appropriate gestures in six directions: “The Sky is my father and the Earth is my mother. To the East, the Giver of Light. To the South, the Bringer of Warmth. To the West, the Thunder of the Rain Clouds. To the North, the Great Cleanser.”

  That done, Ordway accepted some really good beef stew and got down to business with the old man.

  “You’ve been gone a long time,” the old man said.

  “I was supposed to be dead in Mexico.”

  “That’s what the white men said.”

  “You knew better?”

  “I knew,” the ancient one replied.

  “Why did you accept the stolen cattle my uncle brought last summer?”

  “To keep them for you. But you’ve come alone.”

  “I’ll need some help, my father. Twenty of the young men from over on the reservation …”

  At daybreak the following morning, twenty young Ute bucks dressed mostly in old hats, brush jumpers, blue denim pants and moccasins started the Randolph cattle on the return journey west. It was a bawling mass of confusion that first day, a little better the second day, and after that the drive became slow routine.

  Ordway himself took no active part in the drive. With all those little calves along, it was less a cattle drive and more like herding a band of sheep. The Utes knew their business and were patient They considered this not work but an opportunity to break up the boredom of dull reservation fife.

  Ordway’s work lay in the surrounding country. He had to know what, if anything, Ethan intended doing while the cattle and the new calves were being returned to the home range.

  Mounted upon one shaggy Indian pony after another, and often riding the fleet, black mare, his was the role of the hunter. He rode circle daily; grim, unshaved, wary. By now he was convinced that Ethan had no intention of molesting the herd. But too much was at stake, including Ordway’s life, to cease vigilance.

  Day after day the herd moved along, averaging about seven or eight miles between suns. Yet by the time it had covered half of the eighty miles to Pronghorn Basin, Ordway knew that somebody was playing shadow. It might be Step. It could be some skulking member of Sonny’s bunch to watch and report progress. It could be the tawny young tough himself, although this was doubtful For two or three more days Ordway played cat-and-mouse with a man who knew his business. Once he caught sight of the man on a distant knoll all of a thousand yards away. At another time Ordway had closed in to within five hundred yards when the skulker’s horse vanished into the brush clump of a ravine.

  “Real smart one, huh?” Ordway grunted. “Trying to pull me into an ambush maybe.”

  Still, the fellow’s actions were at times puzzling. Well, it didn’t matter much now. Up ahead was a spring where he and Koonce had camped many times during hunting trips of past years. If Bob could get away from Tulac he’d be there tomorrow night If not he’d try to leave a message. Meanwhile, the time had come to tie a knot or two in that skulking horseman’s short-tail.

  That evening when camp was made, Ordway went to old White Buffalo. He told the old man that the herd was in no danger of attack and stampede and that the posting of unarmed guards would no longer be necessary. White Buffalo nodded and said that was good. His people wanted no trouble.

  At daybreak the following morning Ordway saddled the black mare. She was rested and aching for a run. In the first gray of dawn as the mist-wet leaves hung limp and lifeless, Ordway began riding circle near the head of the bedded down herd, eyes on the wet grass. Trailing was second nature to him, and, sure enough, the emboldened skulker had sneaked in closer than usual during the dark hours!

  Not very long ago either, Judging from the amount of dew in the trades. Ordway swung back into the saddle, turned around and rode carelessly back east, the way he had come. Once out of sight, however, he broke the long winded mare into a muscle-warming trot and then a lope. He went a mile south. Then another mile. Now he swung the mare west and began to stretch her out hard. She ran like a she-demon out of hell, effortlessly.

  For seven hard miles he drove her. After letting her blow for a few minutes he now headed her north again, crossing an open space more than a mile across. Game trails ranged the length of this, and it would be the logical route for the skulker to follow while keeping ahead of the herd.

  By the time Ordway crossed to the other side there was a look of grim satisfaction on his face for the first time in days. His man hadn’t reached here yet He’d been circled and cut off.

  Channon Ordway dismounted under cover. Squatting on his heels he built a cigarette. A jay scolded noisily above his head and the sun worked its warmth deeper into his shoulders. He rubbed a work-hardened finger over his face and discovered that all scabs from Red Waldo’s blows had healed and fallen away.

  His eyes were watching the grassy expanse for two miles east.

  A big buck deer, with a magnificent cluster of prongs, came up out of a hidden draw where he’d hid out near water all night A cagey old fellow, that one. It was why no hunter or wolf pack had cut him down. He’d go up above where the timber afforded protection, grazing and sleeping all day, and he wouldn’t be down for water until just before sundown.

  Ordway’s saddle creaked as the black mare swung her head. He leaped just in time and grabbed her nose. “Oh, no you don’t!” he grunted at her.

  The rider had emerged from a motte not more than two hundred yards away. He rode leisurely, leaving a plain trail He was looking back over one shoulder every couple of minutes, and grinning as though at some huge joke. He was Harl Griddle, a middle-aged cow thief, and no killer.

  A few minutes later, when he turned around, he found himself facing a black apparition. Ordway sat the mare with the deadly Sharps in his hands, cocked and half way to his shoulder.

  “Just keep on coming,” he called from fifty yards away. “I want in on the joke.”

  The man obeyed. The grin was gone from his face. It was a blank as it had been the day he’d watched Channon Ordway kill Jude Waldo in a gun fight in Cheyenne.

  “What’s funny, Harl?” Channon asked him.

  “Shucks now, Chann,” Harl replied. “I wasn’t laughin’ at you. I was laughin’ at Ethan. He’s had me down here for a week to keep an eye on the herd and let him know how it’s commin’.”

  “And that’s supposed to be funny, huh?”

  “You don’t savvy,” grinned the other. “He paid me one hundred extra, easiest money I ever made. Leastwise doin’ honest work”

  “I can save you anymore trouble,” Ordway said. “Just tell him I’m putting the cattle in Pronghorn for the present”

  “I’ll shore do that,” the other said, relief showing in his face. You want me to go now?”

  “Where is Ethan?” Ordway asked.

  “Headquarterin’ in Hanse’s saloon. Not very welcome either. People are some riled up the way you burned out the Rockin’ R. Then when Ethan appointed Sonny as sheriff, and put the Rockin’ R up for tax sale tomorrow they really riled!”

  Ordway sat dumbfounded for a few moments. You should have known, Chann. You should have remembered that Ethan never made a move in his life unless he had an ace or two up his sleeve. He’s not only taking Squaw Valley legally, but you’re driving Randolph’s own cattle back and putting them in Ethan’s hands on Ethan’s Pronghorn range!

  “What happened to the Randolph’s?” Ordway demanded,

  The cow thief shrugged his burly shoulders. “Faded. Gone. Vamoosed.” Harl shrugged again. “Nobody knows.”
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br />   “Where’s Step?”

  “No sabe. Some say he might have left the country.”

  “Where’s Koonce?”

  “Around. But it’s a dozen rifles against a Greener if he tries to leave town.”

  Ordway let the man go, and rode toward the herd, frowning. There was something about this that didn’t fit. Ethan wanted him dead and intended that it would be so. But not now apparently. With Ordway dead the unarmed Utes would scatter like quail and then Ethan would have a trail drive on his hands.

  Ordway shook his head and rode on. Later he heard a faint rifle shot Late that afternoon, riding an Indian pony now, he left the two stolid Utes riding point, after giving them instructions about a bed ground. Tonight would be the last one. Tomorrow the herd of almost four thousand head of cows and calves would spill in a red tide over the east brink of Pronghorn and spread out to luxuriate in the basin’s green carpet.

  Well, he remembered. He had promised Eric Randolph in those first minutes of their odd meeting that he would try to find out who had stolen the man’s cattle and where they were. He had kept his word. He had more than made good his promise.

  He had brought the stolen herd to home country again. To Ethan!

  At the back of the herd, he saw a wagon different from the one old White Buffalo’s family used. This was a small, canvas topped affair and Ordway was momentarily puzzled until he rode closer and recognized the team. They didn’t look like sleek surrey horses now. They were tired, dusty. The wagon was the kind that Eric Randolph would have bought hurriedly at some small out-of-the-way ranch, with little time to bargain. It rocked along from side to side and appeared to contain nothing but the barest necessities of camp life.

  Mrs. Randolph was driving and Vernell rode close by.

  But Eric Randolph was not within sight

  ELEVEN

  The older woman sat upright in the spring seat with gloved hands holding the reins. She was guiding the team around rocks and over rain-leached cuts in the terrain. From inside the canvas came the melancholy bawl of calves.