Sour Creek Valley Read online

  I said, “Now, Randal, you’ve gone and worked yourself up to where you’re a rancher that can afford to wear real solid-silver spurs, as I see, and handmade boots and all the rest. You ain’t fond of the idea of having the folks around here ever know that you used to wear a nightstick quite a bit.”

  “You may put it that way,” he said. “I really welcome frank talk.”

  “Yes, you do!” I exclaimed. “And you’re gonna get it. I don’t like you, Randal, and I never did. You were low and mean and ornery, and there ain’t hardly anything in the world that would do me so much good as to sink a hand in your ribs again.”

  He gave a little grunt and a step back at that.

  “But,” I continued, “I know what I can do, and what I can’t. What I can’t do is to make any more trouble. I’ve had my dose. I’ve been licked good and proper, and I ain’t gonna forget it. Nothing is ever gonna give the law a chance to send me back to Fulsom again. Now, Randal, I’m up here, not on a bat, the way that you saw me down in the town, but mighty quiet and sober. I’m a hardworking man, and I want to get a job, and I want to stick to it. You understand?

  “Now, the folks around here ain’t any too fond of employing jailbirds, and you know it. The easiest thing in the world to get me out of this section of the country would be by just letting the word get out that I’ve been serving a prison sentence. But the minute that I hear any talk like that, I’m gonna know who started it, and I’m gonna come for you. When I get to you, I’m gonna forget all about prison. If they get me and send me back on account of you and that sort of talk … it’ll be murder, Randal. And I mean it.”

  I did mean it, too. When I thought of losing a chance to go straight, on account of a rat like this here Randal, it sickened me. I would like to have wrung his neck right then and there. But Randal understood me. He was pretty gray as he stared at me. Then he began to nod.

  He had a long, thin face with deep-set eyes, and now an idea began to work up in those eyes. All at once, he fetched a hand into a vest pocket, brought out a wallet, and sifted a few bills out. He held them out to me.

  “Here’s seventy-five dollars,” he said.

  “And that’s my price for beating it and keeping my mouth shut?” I asked. “You can go to the devil first, Randal. Your money is dirt to me.”

  That was pretty free and independent talking. In more than one part of the range that I could name, it would’ve got a man shot, right there and on the spot. It looked like this was not one of them parts of the range.

  Randal just smiled back at me, saying, “Now, don’t you be a fool, Blondy. The thing for you to do, kid, is to step into that store up the street and get yourself a suit of clothes. They’ve got a big assortment, and maybe they’ll have a suit that’ll fit you. They carry hats and shoes, too, and shirts and neckties. You haven’t got enough money there to buy the world, but you got enough to fit yourself out decently. Well, Blondy, that’s what I want you to do, and after you get yourself made up, you come over to the hotel, and you’ll find me waiting for you in the lobby. It’ll be lunch time then, and you and me will go in and surround some chops or whatever looks good to you in the eating line. You do what I tell you, and don’t you ask any questions until it’s all over.”

  I shouldn’t have taken that money, of course. Looking back on it, I can see that I was a fool and sort of a crook to take it. But I’ll give you my word that it wasn’t the idea of getting something for nothing that appealed to me so much. What flabbergasted me, really, was the mystery that was behind all of this.

  The ex-sergeant of police wasn’t any extravagant, generous sort of a fellow. I aim to believe that you can mostly spot a generous man by a sort of a stupid, walleyed look that he has. You try your hand at it. Just look over the men that you know and you’ll see what I mean quick enough, because the tight-fisted fellows are apt to have a pretty wide-awake look—as if they were trying to make out whether you were worth noticing or not. The generous folks have a sort of a stupid look. When you ask them for something, they get a sort of sick expression.

  There wasn’t anything stupid about this here fellow Randal. He was as sharp as a rat. There was something up his sleeve. He wanted to get something out of it, and I naturally wondered what it could be. It was a case of my wits against his wits, and I was willing to bet that my brains were as hard as my fist, so far as he was concerned. I decided that I would do what he said.

  I went up the street to a store, and I found a pretty good-looking brown suit, which I got right into. There was a hard job finding shoes that would fit, but I managed it after a fairly tight squeeze. I sashayed out of that place with a new hat on my head, looking like a million dollars, you bet.

  The ex-sergeant was waiting in the lobby of the hotel. He gave me one squint up and down and nodded. “You take to it easy,” he said. “You got a knack for spending, I see.”

  He led me into the dining room, and we settled down to see how much food could be got onto one table. After that, we saw just how quick that table could be emptied again. Pretty soon he came around to cigar time and sat back and clamped his teeth in a nice-looking black cigar. I stuck to cigarettes that I rolled myself, because I wanted to keep my head clear.

  Chapter Three

  He said, “Now, big boy, you figure that this is all pretty queer, and after I’ve handed out enough money to dress you up, you wonder what I’m going to try to get out of you. Ain’t that right?”

  “I dunno,” I answered, “but maybe it’s just because you’re a naturally generous chap, and you’re willing to let bygones be bygones.”

  You see, I wanted to bluff him out and make him think that I was about ten shades simpler than the fact. He just leaned a bit over the table, puffed out a cloud of smoke, and grinned at me through it.

  “You lie like the devil,” he said.

  I couldn’t help grinning back. “Maybe you and me are gonna be able to understand each other,” I said.

  “I guess we are,” he answered. “I hope we are. But the first thing for you to write down in red is that I haven’t forgot a thing. I still wear a strip of tape on my side where you busted me in the ribs … and after I take that tape off I’ll still remember. I’m not a friend of yours, big boy, and don’t you forget it.”

  “Randal,” I said, “for a crook, you talk like an honest man. You sort of warm up my heart. Now start going and spill the beans. You want my scalp, and you’ve bought me a new outfit. When do you pull the knife?”

  He grinned again. He seemed to like this aboveboard talk as much as I did. Then he said, “I don’t know when the scalping will take place. You’re a pretty hard one, Kitchin, and I don’t know just how I’ll be able to go about cracking you. In the meantime, I have to forget about what I want to do to you. I have to think just about what you can do for me.”

  “Go on. This sounds all better and better, I got to admit. When does the music and the dancing begin?”

  “Poison is bad stuff,” he said, “but when you want to get rid of the ground squirrels, it has its uses. You’re the poison that I want to use now. You hear me talk?”

  “I hear you talk. You got a poison job, and I’m to be the goat. Go ahead.”

  “That’s exactly it. I’ve got a bad job on my hands, and I need somebody like you. But first I have to put the cards on the table … not that I want to, but that I have to in order to get you interested.”

  I nodded. It looked pretty clear that he was talking honest—not because he liked honesty, but because he saw that it was the only policy that would work in this case.

  He went on to say that he had come out of a family where everybody was pretty well fixed. When he was a youngster, just out of college, his dad had set him up in business and given him a flying start, but his ways weren’t saving ways. He liked the things that money gives you, but he didn’t cotton to the ways that money is made. So, pretty soon, he went bust.


  Right about then his father went on the rocks, too, and it busted the old man’s heart. He died, and there was nothing in the estate for young Randal. He looked around and got himself a job on the side, in the police force of the big town, without letting any of his family know what he was doing. Maybe it was like taking a thief to catch a thief. Anyway, he done pretty good as a policeman and worked up to a job as a sergeant, when he got word that his dad’s brother, Stephen Randal, had died. Lacking any other heirs that he was fond of, he had split his cash between Harry Randal’s brother and sister. What he left to Harry, the sergeant, was his ranch.

  It was a going ranch and very prosperous. When Harry had a look at it, he felt that everything was pretty fine for him. Then, about a month after he took possession, over came his grandfather, Henry Randal.

  The ex-sergeant explained, “This old goat, my grandfather, is one of those foxes that lose their strength when they get old, but that don’t lose their wits, you understand? He has about three million in land and money, and when he visited me, he opened up and showed me his bank account, the statement of the stocks, and the loans that he had outstanding. It was a list as long as your arm, I tell you. He said to me … ‘Harry, I think that you’re a bright boy, but I don’t know about your working qualities. This ranch of your uncle’s was always a hard proposition to make pay. Your uncle did well here because your uncle was a man who worked about twenty hours out of every day. One reason that this ranch is hard to make pay is that, though the grass is good here and there is plenty of water for the cows, the ranch backs up on a regular hole-in-the-wall country, and it’s hard to keep the rustlers from edging in and getting away with the cream of the calf crop every year. Your Uncle Stephen managed to scare the rustlers off because he was a hard-boiled fellow, as maybe you know. They feared him morning, night, and noon, and don’t you forget it. But, Harry, I don’t know that you’re going to do so well. You are bright, but I don’t see you working twenty hours out of every twenty-four. You are brave enough, but I don’t know that you’ll make the rustlers lose any sleep. You see, I understand what troubles you have ahead of you.

  “‘Now, Harry, I’ve showed you a property worth three million. I can go another step and tell you something else, and that is that I don’t like your brother. He’s gone in for a banking job in a city. I hate the cities and the people that stay in them. Your sister has married a fathead who doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Neither of them are going to get a penny of my money. That leaves you, Harry, as the sole natural heir, so far as I’m concerned. But, mind you, I have a lot of doubts about you, and the way that you can clear those doubts up is to take hold on this ranch and make a paying proposition out of it. Every quarter I’m going to send out an expert accountant that I can trust to go over your books. If those books don’t show an increase on the right side, you’ll hear from me to the effect that you needn’t worry about your inheritance any more.

  “‘Harry, if you can take hold of that ranch and work it satisfactory to me … and well enough to make a real profit out of it … you are going to get every penny of my money. You understand? I have a heart that is due to stop working in about a year or two. I haven’t any illusions about my future, at all. I’ll die within about twelve months, or two years, at the outside. I want to leave my fortune in one lump to a man who can take good care of it. Think it all over, my boy, and when you’ve finished your thinking, start in and work like the devil. You have to have patience, courage, and brains, and strength to win out. What your other moral qualities may be I don’t know, and I don’t care … I’m not any saint myself. If you can make this ranch pay, you’re as good a man as your Uncle Stephen was, and he was my favorite son.’

  “Right there he finished. He wouldn’t stay to dinner. He got onto his horse, in spite of his eighty years and his bad heart, and he rode twenty-five miles back to his own ranch.

  “You know me. You think I’m a crook. Maybe I am. I know you. I know you’re a crook, too, and there hasn’t been time for you to let your hair grow since you got out of the pen. Besides that, you hate me. And I hate you, because you broke a rib for me and fractured a good deal of my self-respect. Very well. Let’s look at the other side of the picture.

  “You’re broke. You need a job. You know the cattle country and the cattle business. On the other hand, I am in a bad fix. I have a big ranch, and I’ve loaded up my staff of cowpunchers with regular two-gun bad men … hard-boiled eggs with reputations that need a shorthand reporter, working a week, to write them up. I got those hard fellows because I wanted to run out the rustlers in the backcountry. You see? Now that I’ve got them in, I’ve found out that they work hand in glove with the rustlers themselves. At least, that’s my suspicion. I dread the next roundup, because I know that it’s going to show me short hundreds of cows. That will be where my pretty dream busts all to pieces and the three million go up in smoke.

  “I got my place full of these hard-boiled fellows, but now that I have them, I can’t run them. If I fire them, they’ll simply go over to the rustlers, and I’ll be in worse than ever. Fire one, and they’ll all quit, because they’re as thick as thieves. I can’t show my face in the bunkhouse without getting laughed at now. I’ve hired three ranch managers in the last three weeks, and not one of them has lasted twenty-four hours with that crew of yeggs.

  “Very well. What I want is a two-fisted, two-gun fighting fool who will beat that crowd into order and make them like it. I’m willing to take a long chance and try you out. I’m desperate. That ugly mug of yours looks good to me right now. What do you say, young fellow? What do you say to taking on the job, Kitchin?”

  I rolled this idea under my tongue. It sounded good, and it sounded bad. I had my two hands, and they were pretty strong hands. What with the life I had led the last two years, of hard labor in the prison and boxing every month, I was as hard as nails. There was two hundred and twenty pounds of me to be hard. I didn’t worry about what would happen if it came to a hand-to-hand rough-and-tumble mix-up—but where would I be if the guns were pulled? I was never any hand at guns, as you may have gathered from what I’ve said about revolvers before. If some handy two-gun dick was to bob up in a nasty humor, where would I be? Nowhere, of course. However, there is nothing like a hard job to make you rise out of yourself. This looked to me like a lost cause, and there was enough Irish in me to make me like lost causes. What I couldn’t really do, I might be able to bluff through.

  I said to Randal, “Well, where do I get off? I get a year or so of bullet-eating and fighting and excitement. And after that?”

  “I’m glad to see that you’re a practical man with an eye on the future, old son,” said this Randal. “I’m mighty glad to see it. It proves to me more than ever that you and me will get on. And now, what do you say your reward ought to be?”

  I thought it over. There ain’t anything like hitching your wagon to a star. And I answered, “It looks to me like your main job is being a grandson. And my main job is everything else. Well, Randal, I suppose that the best that I can ask from a hard customer like you is a fifty-fifty split.”

  Randal grinned. “You get half of the three million, and I get the other half?” he asked, very soft.

  “That’s about it,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Guess again. No, I’ll make you a proposition, and a big one. That ranch I’m on is a good thing … for the right man. Uncle Stephen cleared fifty thousand a year for the last ten years that he was on it. Now, old-timer, what I say is … if you can make the ranch pay for me, you can make it pay for yourself. If this game works, I take the three million, of course, and you get the ranch. You can’t budge me a cent higher than that.”

  I knew he meant what he said. I leaned back in the chair and sighed. “All right,” I said. “Put that in writing. I’m ready for a cigar now.”

  Chapter Four

  He didn’t like the idea of putting a contract like th
at in writing. As he pointed out, I could use that contract to blackmail him, in case I threw up the overseer job on the ranch. Then I showed him that, in case I couldn’t make a go of the thing, I wouldn’t be able to get much out of him. The only opinion that he had to be afraid of was his grandfather’s, and the only person that could let him win his grandfather’s respect—and money—was me.

  Randal thought it all over very slowly, his eyes fixed on a far corner of the room, not a shadow of a frown on his face. I could tell that he was a deep one by that. Your simple chap will wrinkle his face into a knot when he’s working out a problem, but your real deep one never bats an eye. Finally, he looked me in the eye.

  “Old-timer,” he said, “I think that you’re about as downright bad a case as … I am!”

  “You flatter me,” I said. “But does the thing go through?”

  “It goes through as slick as a whistle,” he said. “I’m putting all my dice in this one box, and I can’t keep any up my sleeve. So here goes!”

  He pulled an old envelope out of his pocket, and he tore it open. On the two sides of it, in a fine, clerical hand he wrote out that contract, signed it, and passed it over to me.

  Of course, he hadn’t missed a chance to put in some “ifs” and “buts” that changed the whole meaning, but I had him cross them out until the contract made slick reading for me. Then we made a copy of it and took it to a notary public to sign.

  After I had put my agreement in my wallet, Randal said that we had to get ready to go out to the ranch. The reason that he had bought me the new suit was partly because he wanted to open my mind and get me prepared for something big to come, and partly because I would have to make a pretty good impression on the boys at the ranch. If I walked in on them dressed like a tramp, they wouldn’t respect me none.