Sour Creek Valley Page 11

  In those three days, we caught up about half the ends of work that had been allowed to fall loose during the time that Randal was running the ranch. Believe me, that was a lot! I had to begin to give the horses extra feeds of grain, and Randal kicked a lot at that.

  “Catching up in the ranch work isn’t what counts,” he told me. “That’s piddling, small business. Because the main thing is that old man Henry Randal will be over here in a few days, and when he comes he’ll have a count of the cows. When he makes that count, he’s gonna find that we’re about a hundred short. The one main thing for you to do is to get those cows replaced. You understand? And the next big thing is for you to block up the mouths of those cañons that lead to the range from the mountains.”

  You might say that he was right. I knew it. But in the meantime, the tools that I had to use for the bigger work needed sharpening. I was aiming to temper those tools all over again, sharpen them to a good, biting edge, and then see what I could do with them. There’s no use trying to break ground with dull drills, as any fool knows. I was getting my results.

  For three days the boys were tired, sore, and mean. Then they began to buck up. They got lean and hard and active again. They didn’t talk so much, which is a good sign. When they had any spare time, you would see them getting out their guns and blazing away at anything for a target, not publicly, but on the side. Which showed that I hadn’t pulled the wool over their eyes. They knew that when the pinch came, the big job would probably have to be done with Colts and Winchesters.

  They were seeing that I knew my business. They were getting to know every nook and corner of the range. They were getting to know the cows, and they were taking a mighty big interest in their work. When you hear a cowpuncher come in for noon and tell the boys at the table all about how he worked a bogged yearling out of the mud, and when the rest of the boys are willing to sit there and listen, you know that you have your men in the right humor for their work. That was the way that it was with that crew.

  At the end of a week I had things about where I wanted them, and I took the boys on their first spin into the limestone cañons that looked out of the face of the southern mountains. That day we found out why it was that the ranch had been left alone for so long and the rustlers hadn’t bothered us none. It was a queer story, and the way that we came at it was queer, too. I’ll tell you about it.

  That evening I took the boys down to the head of the range, and we camped near the beginning of Sour Creek. The next morning, we lit out on our best ponies. Shorty and a dumpy, dark-faced gent by name of Hawkes was riding in the lead. When they turned a corner of the ravine that we were in, I heard one of them sing out, and then a gun barked.

  We got around that corner in a bunch, with spurs and quirts going. There, in the near distance, we saw three gents pelting away for the tall timber. Just before they got out of sight around the next bend, Shorty tries a snap shot, and the bullet made the horse of one of the three rear and plunge. The gent that was in the saddle flopped on the rocks.

  His horse couldn’t have been bad hurt, because it ran right on out of sight, but the rider lay where he fell. When we got to the spot, the three horses and the other two riders was gone out of view, complete. A shower of lead came from some high rocks, to show where they had gone for shelter.

  I’ll tell you how fit my boys were. They wanted to rush those rocks right off, but I wouldn’t let them. I showed them that if the pair of yeggs wanted to, they could pick off the lot of us while we were climbing to get at them. Then, if they wanted to, they could ride off again and get clean away, because behind those high rocks there were plenty of ways for them to ease off into the back country.

  But here we had what had been wanted for a long time, but couldn’t be had—a rustler—if he was a rustler—in our hands. We went back and collected our yegg just as he was sitting up and beginning to hold his head and cuss.

  He had a lump the size of an egg on the back of his head, where he had landed on the rocks, and he kept feeling that lump with very tender fingers, and then cursing us in fancy Spanish. He began to tell Randal he would pay for that day’s work, and Randal looked like he expected to pay. I grabbed the guy and yanked him to his feet.

  “Now, kid,” I said, “you leave off the Spanish and talk English.

  “Yo no sabe …” he began.

  “You lie!” I said. “I talk Spanish, too, but I can see by the look of the whites of your eyes that you’re a Yank, kid, and Yank talk I’m gonna have out of you!”

  At that he shrugged his shoulders, as much as to say that he wouldn’t say a word.

  So I said, “We’ll give this gent a running chance. Frisk him, Rusty!”

  Rusty frisked him. What he got was a pair of Colts and a little, mean, two-barreled Derringer strung on a horsehair string around his neck, besides a big knife. Regular arsenal, that bird was.

  “Now,” I said to Rusty, “you get rid of all your guns and knives.”

  He did it, and he shelled out about as much as the yegg.

  “Now,” I said to the yegg, “you get ten yards’ start for the rocks. If you get to them, you’ll be free. But if this fellow stops you and brings you back, you’ll agree to tell us what you got on your chest. Is that fair?”

  He gave a look at Rusty, and it was easy to see that by the size of Rusty he didn’t think that the big boy had much speed. Besides, except when Rusty was excited, he looked sort of sleek and lazy and contented with doing nothing.

  “All right,” said the stranger. “I’ll take that chance.”

  He got his ten yards’ start, and away he went, with Rusty after him. Well, it was a beautiful thing to see how the stranger flew for the rocks. But it was a lot more beautiful to see Rusty running in true sprinting style, with a nice, high-knee action. He ran like a trotting horse, and he nabbed his man inside of seventy-five yards. The thug meant fight, and he tried to roughhouse Rusty. That was just to make us laugh. Rusty tied him in a figure eight and brought him back, limp.

  We all felt pretty good. I put the stranger down on a rock and told him to talk.

  “Why should I talk?” he asked. “If you take me in, I charge you with assault with intent to kill. You got nothing on me, and all you’ll buy will be a term in jail.”

  “Kid,” I said, “that’s a pretty good bluff, but once you get to a jail, they’ll take a look at the rogues’ gallery, and they’ll find the place in it where you used to fit.”

  He wilted a little at that and gave me one of those nasty, ratty, side looks that will live in the back corners of your mind for a long time and wake you up in the middle of the night, remembering. Then he said, “All right. You take me in. I’m not gonna talk none.”

  I said to Shorty, “Have you got any ideas?”

  Shorty grinned. He was a bad hombre, was Shorty.

  “All right,” I said. “Just take him out of sight, because I don’t want Pepillo to see anything nasty.”

  Have I forgotten to tell you that Pepillo was along? What I mean to say is that he was always along, and never stayed ten seconds away from me, because he was always afraid that if he got around the corner from me, those big hands of Shorty’s would be clamped on him. So there was Pepillo, sitting on a rock, smoking a cigarette with his sombrero pushed onto the back of his head. He was a little thinner and a little browner from the riding that he had been doing. Otherwise, he was fit and as sassy as ever. Which was a wonder. He had a great way with a horse, gave it a free hand, like a woman riding, and, since he never fought his horse, the horse never fought him. He was always playing along, having a good time, while the rest of us were working hard in the saddle.

  “Do not mind me, señor,” said Pepillo. “Only … that man is not a Mexican. He has broken his word, and Mexicans never do that.”

  The boys give him a laugh, but Pepillo shrugged his shoulders. Just then his smile was wiped out and he turned gray.
Off yonder, where Shorty had taken his man, there was a yell—not a yell, really, rather a scream.

  I started for the place, but before I got there, here was Shorty leading his man back to us. What Shorty had done, I don’t know, but he still had a mean grin on his face, and the crook was as limp as a rag. He didn’t have any spirit of independence left in him—not any to speak about.

  He sat right down where I had put him in the first place, and he talked like a little boy reading a lesson out of a book. If he ever stopped for a minute, I only had to jerk a thumb toward Shorty, and that would loosen up his tongue again.

  What he told us was a like a blow to the face. He said that Almadares, after making his clean-up on the range, had gone to Valentin Mauricio and asked for his niece, Leonor, which had been arranged beforehand. Mauricio was very agreeable about it, but when they went to get the girl, she was gone!

  Mauricio swore that he didn’t know anything about her disappearance. Almadares swore that was a lie, and that the fact was that Mauricio must’ve sent the girl away on purpose to beat Almadares out of what was coming to him by rights. It was a grand mix-up.

  “Look here,” I busted in, “this here Almadares is a sort of a perfect man, ain’t he … handsome and young and all that?”

  “There is only one Almadares,” said this gent, with a swagger of his head. “There is only one!”

  “Well,” I said, “then he must be right, and Mauricio lied, eh? No girl would turn down an Almadares. Now would she?”

  “Not if she had good sense,” the crook replied. “But Valentin’s niece ain’t so very straight in the head, they say. She’s got a kind of a crazy way about her, and you never know where she’s gonna jump the next second.”

  “All right,” I said. “But go on.”

  He went on, all right. There was a grand bust between the two big rustlers. Mauricio got his men together, and because he knew that he was going to have a battle ahead, he tried to steal a march by surprising Almadares in the middle of the night. He did surprise Almadares, too. But though he waded through some of the men of Almadares, he didn’t get to Almadares himself. That devil got the last of his men together and went through the Mauricios like a hot knife through butter.

  The Mauricio gang headed for the tall timber, and they got to it. But while their backs were against the wall, Almadares just posted his men all around the spot, and he sat down to a siege.

  That was a good many days ago. In the meantime, Almadares and his men ran out of provisions, in spite of what they could shoot, close and handy, and that was why this crook and the other pair had come down—to fetch off a few of the Randal cows to fill the pot.

  “If Almadares and his crew are hungry,” I said, “I suppose that old Mauricio and his lot are just about starved by now.”

  “They are boiling leather and chewing it,” said that rat of a man.

  Chapter Nineteen

  You will see the idea that popped into my head. You’ll see it just as quick as I did.

  I asked the informer: “How many men has old Mauricio?”

  “About twenty-two,” he answered.

  “And how many has Almadares?”

  “Seventeen, now that I’m gone.”

  “Eh? Seventeen keeping twenty-two bottled up?”

  “You forget, señor. One of the seventeen is Pablo Almadares. And he is the same as ten.”

  Mind you, this wasn’t any Mexican getting enthusiastic about Almadares. It was a Yank, the same as you or me. There was no doubt that he meant what he said. He simply rolled his eyes when he talked about his boss.

  Altogether, counting the party of Almadares and the party of Mauricio, there were not more than forty men up there in the mountains. Counting Randal and myself, there were eleven of us in this party. Eleven looks pretty small beside forty. However, if I went back to the ranch and drummed up everybody that was able to shoot straight, I could bring out a party of sixteen, not counting Randal and me, which made it eighteen.

  Now, with eighteen men, well-armed and prepared for their work, well rested and ready to hit hard and fast, something ought to be done.

  I asked the stranger: “Kid, what’s your name?”

  “Chisholm.”

  “You lie,” I said. “Now, you let me have the straight of it.”

  “So help me!” he insisted.

  “You come through with the facts. You can’t deceive me. I know too much about you already.”

  “All right,” said the kid, snarling. “You guys are too much for me. I’ll tell you. My name is Chet Roscoe.”

  He said it the way he might mean it, with his teeth set and his eyes glaring at me, as if he dared me to accuse him of all the crimes that he might have committed under that name. When I looked at him again and nodded, it seemed to me that a sort of a look of relief came into his eyes.

  I yanked a Colt out of its holster, and I jammed it under the nose of this fellow. “You skunk!” I cried. “Lemme have your name!”

  He was so mad that he almost bit at the muzzle of the gun, and he shrank back, licking his lips, because I’d been a little stronger than necessary with the handling of that gat. There he crouched and cringed and looked at me and started to speak. He looked at the others, and he shrank again. Then he beckoned me, and I leaned over close to him.

  “I’m Sammy Dance,” he said. “For heaven’s sake, don’t let nobody know.”

  Well, I’d never heard of any Sammy Dance, but I knew that it must be the name of a gent that had done something pretty low as well as bad. A mere killer doesn’t have to hide his head on the range. But when a man has killed some old man or a woman, then things are bad for him west of the Rockies. I aimed to guess that this Sammy Dance must’ve done some such thing. I stepped back from him, full of disgust. But I needed him too bad to be too mean to him.

  I said, “Sammy, will you lead us up there where Almadares and old Mauricio are fighting it out?”

  He put up both hands as though I was trying to hit him. He cried, “Mister, have a heart! Almadares would never rest till he got me!”

  “Almadares won’t have a chance,” I said. “Because we’re gonna scoop the whole lot of them in.”

  He started to shake his head, but I didn’t have time to argue the case with him.

  I started the boys back toward the ranch house, and on the way, I told them what I expected of them. It would have been one thing to take them right up through the mountains and tell them what I wanted after I got them there, but they weren’t the kind that had to be handled with gloves. They were all men, and the manlier that you treated them, the better they would respond to the treatment.

  As we rode along, I told them everything that I hoped to do, the same as if they were lieutenants, and had to lead a lot of men apiece, instead of having to lead only themselves. I told them that I expected to leave the ranch about three in the morning of the next day with all our men loaded down with our best guns. We would ride along for the foot of the mountains, and there we would change ourselves and our saddles to the backs of our best horses—the same ones that we were riding now. Then we would sneak up through the mountains, with Sammy Dance to show us the way, and we would surprise Almadares and his crew and scoop them in. While Mauricio and his gang were thinking that we were reinforcements and helping clean up Almadares, we would turn around and smear Mauricio all over the face of the map.

  Maybe that sounds like a pretty ambitious sort of a program, and no doubt it was. All the same, I was pretty sure that it would work. While we tackled Almadares, we would have the other gang of Mexicans working for us, and that would actually put the odds in our favor. After we polished them off, we would be able to deal with Valentin Mauricio pretty neat.

  I talked this over with the boys, and Shorty didn’t agree. He said that the minute that gringos showed up in the offing, there wouldn’t be anything to it. All of the grea
sers would throw in together, and they would fight like devils. However, Shorty was for trying the thing. Even if the Mexicans all threw together for the fighting of us, we would still have a pretty fair chance of beating the lot of them. The odds wouldn’t be more than two to one, as Shorty pointed out. And we’d have the advantage of surprise to work for us. Altogether, it looked good to him. So did it to big Rusty McArdle.

  Rusty had been chafing a mite during the last few days; he knew that he wasn’t showing up in the best light while all the work was riding range and such. He was fair aching for a scrap, and this here mix-up that I promised the boys was so much to his liking that he was smiling to himself all the way back to the ranch house. Once in a while you would hear soft laughter. And you would know that it came from Rusty!

  The rest of the boys bucked up very well, too. They figured that it would be a serious scrap, but not one of them backed up a mite. When I looked them over, I got more confident every minute. Oh, they were a sweet lot of lambs, they were. There would be a hot time for anybody that had the nerve to try to comb their wool. I tell you that no general ever felt a mite happier in his army than I did in mine!

  When we got back to the house, I asked Randal if there was any place where we could put Sammy Dance away where he couldn’t get out. He said that there was a perfect place in the cellar. I went down and looked at it, and there I found just what I wanted. It was mostly dug out of the bedrock, that little room. It had a window about a foot square that no man could ever wriggle through, and it had a door that you couldn’t knock down with a battering ram. We turned Sammy loose in there. I put in a cot for him, fixed him up with some grub, and he took things comfortable with his cigarettes, so that you could see that it wasn’t the first time that he had made himself at home in quarters where he couldn’t leave without permission. After that, I locked the door, put the key in my vest pocket, and went up the stairs with Pepillo.