“Hell of a mess you slick-tongued me into,” Chuckaluck groaned. “D’yuh see the gleam in her eyes when you started that marryin’ talk?”

  Twister whooped with glee and slapped a bony thigh. “An’ she’s inside right now goin’ around in circles cookin’ up a supper plumb fit for a perspective bridegroom. Wait’ll you chomp down on them sourdough biscuits she’s slingin’ tuhgether. Maybe you’ll change yore mind an’ get romantical.”

  “’Tain’t so dang funny,” muttered Chuckaluck. “Mentionin’ marriage to a widder lady like her is like holdin’ a pan of oats in front of a starvin’ broomtail. ’Tain’t right less’n yo’re gonna feed her the oats.”

  “Yuh might do worse,” Twister said gravely. “From what I’ve seen of the Circle Dot it’d make a right nice place for a man tuh settle down an’ spend his agin’ years. With a man tuh take hold an’ start things rollin’ … after puttin’ the said Tom Gilmore in his rightful place …”

  Chuckaluck snorted irritably. “You think of the dangdest idees. From what she says aboot this Gilmore, he’s the kingpin of the Davis Mountains. Where’d we come out buckin’ him?”

  Twister rolled a cigarette with great deliberation, and applied a match to the twisted end. Spurting blue smoke from both nostrils and gazing out across the richly grassed basin lying deserted and ungrazed in the twilight, he said flatly:

  “You talk a lot with yore mouth, Chuckaluck. You know as well’s I do that we ain’t ridin’ on out of these here mountains without settlin’ Tom Gilmore’s hash. You knowed it, just like I did, when we rode on that water-hole an’ saw how it’d been pizened by some two-legged skunk. With a lone widder thrown in for good measure … shucks, a twenty-mule team couldn’t drag you outta here ’thout takin’ a crack at squarin’ things up.”

  Deep inside, Chuckaluck knew Twister was right, though he would never admit it out loud. The die had been cast when they rode out of the canyon onto the scene of man-made death. Even without the added urge to aid a lone widow who stubbornly refused to desert her property in the face of threats and intimidation, a poisoned water-hole was something neither of them would pass up without investigating.

  For years, they had been taking on other people’s troubles with no thought of personal gain, giving the best that was in them to right injustices, riding on toward a far horizon each time a job was satisfactorily completed. Somehow, they seemed to gravitate toward trouble. Twister just had a nose for it.

  A dust-cloud balled up in the red glow of sunset rimming the southern edge of the basin. A single rider dipped down into the bottom and they watched him approach without comment.

  He neared the ranch at a rapid gallop, a heavy black-sombreroed man who sat a thick-bodied black with a solid air of proprietorship as he swung around the corral and rode up in front of the house out of sight of the partners.

  Big-roweled spurs clanked obtrusively through the silence of twilight as the rider swung off and approached the door around the corner from them. An authoritative voice boomed:

  “Mrs. Kelso,” and there was the answering thump of a pan, then hurrying footsteps inside.

  Twister spun his cigarette away into the light haze of dusk as the widow’s voice came to them clearly:

  “Oh, it’s you, Pete Hutchins? Haven’t they hung you yet?”

  “Now listen, Maria …”

  “Don’t you go trying to soft soap me, Peter Hutchins. I’ve told you to stay off the Circle Dot. Go back and tell Tom Gilmore I’m not quitting yet. You tell him …”

  “I’m not carrying any talk to Tom Gilmore,” came the fierce interruption. “I’ve told you that a hundred times. If you’d only just marry me, Maria …”

  “And I’ve told you a hundred times, no! You clear on out of here before I take my rifle to you. You, with your talk of marrying after you up and killed the finest man that ever set foot on earth. It’s just another of Tom Gilmore’s tricks, that’s all, and I’m not so easy taken in. Just you step on that horse and start riding, Pete Hutchins.”

  “Not till I’ve found out what’s going on here. Who belongs to them horses in the corral? You found you some riders now that you got nothing to ride herd on?”

  Twister got up lazily as the sneering tone came around the corner of the house to them. He hooked his thumbs in his gun-belt and moved forward deliberately.

  Lifting himself to his feet with a sigh, Chuckaluck followed along a few paces in the rear.

  The Widow Kelso stood in the doorway with arms akimbo on aproned hips, facing a heavy-set, glowering man who stood solidly a few feet in front of her. As the partners approached unnoticed, she replied shrilly:

  “You’ll be laughing out of the other side of your mouth in about two minutes. Happens there are men in the world that don’t tuck their tails and run when Tom Gilmore cracks the whip.”

  “The lady is plumb right, Mister,” Twister intervened in an ominously silky tone. “If yo’re roddin’ things for Gilmore like she says, you can take him word we’re in a mood tuh start crackin’ a whip our ownselves.”

  Hutchins turned slowly to face the thin, scarred-face puncher. His dark face wore a heavy scowl, and he made a movement toward the holstered .45 at his hip, checking his hand abruptly when Twister tensed and a dangerous glint sprang into his gray eyes.

  “The widow has got me all wrong,” Hutchins exclaimed angrily. “I been trying to get her to let me help her ever since …”

  “Ever since you killed my man,” the widow’s voice lashed out. “You’re in cahoots with Gilmore, and when he couldn’t get the Circle Dot any other way he sent you to try and marry me.”

  Hutchins shook his head from side to side with an infuriated oath. In the half-light of dusk he looked curiously like a two-legged bear shaking his head in bafflement at being balked of his prey.

  “I don’t blame you for being mad at me, Maria. I hated it like all get out about Rufe. But what could I do … when he come at me that morning slinging lead?…”

  Twister moved close to him in a springy half-crouch, his eyes boring into the rancher’s face. “Yo’re liable tuh start dodgin’ some more lead right quick, Mister. My pardner here is fixin’ tuh marry the widder; so you shore won’t be welcome no more.”

  Hutchins started, and stared past Twister at Chuckaluck’s embarrassed face, then transferred his gaze to the Widow Kelso, where he received his answer from the flustered way she avoided his eyes. With a surly grunt he swung on his heel and trudged to his black, flung his burly body in the saddle and galloped away.

  “Supper’s most ready,” the widow announced unsteadily. “I’ll light a lamp and you can come in and set.”

  As she disappeared inside with a swish of her apron, Twister turned consolingly to Chuckaluck:

  “Don’t you worry none aboot meetin’ up with competition for the widder’s hand. Next time that yahoo comes around, I’ll put a real bug in his ear.”

  “That’s real kind an’ thoughtful of you,” Chuckaluck groaned. “You lissen tuh me, you loose-jointed, lame-brained …”

  “Grub’s on,” the widow called out cheerily, and Chuckaluck’s voice subsided to a vengeful muttering as they went in.

  The scrubbed kitchen table was set with two tin plates and a crockery mug of steaming coffee at each place. A huge pot of frijoles boiled with sowbelly rind stood in the center of the table, flanked by two plates loaded down with sourdough biscuits, each the size of a man’s two fists.

  Mrs. Kelso stood back nervously while the men came in and sat down in awkward silence, hovering over the hot wood range and peeping anxiously into the oven while they dipped out generous portions of the beans, and found the huge biscuits marvelously light and flaky beneath crisp brown crusts.

  Industriously sopping up juice that was trying to overflow the edge of his plate, Twister said loudly, “These here biscuits, now, Chuckaluck, they remind me of the ones you cook like a sponge reminds me of a hunk of lead. It’d be a lucky man that knowed he was gonna set down tuh food like this every night.”

  Chuckaluck glared across the table at him and made vague noises out of a stuffed mouth while the widow pretended not to hear but darted pleased glances toward the table.

  “Yes, sir,” Twister went on happily, dipping out a second generous helping of the Mexican beans, “this here meal’ll set yore mind plumb at rest, I reckon. I don’t blame you for not preposin’ till you taste the lady’s cookin’, but now you ain’t got nothin’ more tuh worry aboot.”

  Chuckaluck choked on half a biscuit and resorted to his coffee to wash it down, and at that crucial moment their hostess approached the table proudly bearing a deepdish pie made of soaked dried apples in a biscuit-dough crust.

  Perhaps it was just the heat from the range, but there was undeniably a warm glow of color on her leathery cheeks as she slid the pie in front of Chuckaluck. She looked, Twister thought to himself, not a day over the fifty hard years she probably had behind her, and he suddenly realized with a little gulp of alarm that maybe his funning about Chuckaluck and her wasn’t quite fair—and besides, there was a faraway look in Chuckaluck’s eyes as he sniffed the aroma of the pie that gave Twister a funny feeling of insecurity. What a hell of a mess it would be if Chuckaluck was to fall for the widow, or her cooking.

  “That Pete Hutchins,” he said hastily. “I sorta liked his looks, ma’m. Neighbor of yores?”

  Mrs. Kelso snorted disdainfully and stepped back. “He owns the Rafter X, laying south of my range and next to Gilmore’s Lazy T. He keeps denying it, but I know he’s in cahoots with Tom Gilmore to get this basin. It was him that killed Rufe two years ago.”

  “How’d it happen?” Twister asked, cutting himself a vee of the steaming pie.

  “I never rightly understood.” The widow dropped into a rocker and folded thin, calloused hands in her lap. “Rufe came home swearing mad from town one night and wouldn’t say why except he was going to kill Pete. He rode out towards the Rafter X next morning, and they brought him home wrapped in a blanket. Pete claims he didn’t know what caused it … that Rufe just rode up cussing and made him draw that morning. But Rufe, he wasn’t like that. Peaceable and neighborly, that was Rufe.” Mrs. Kelso lifted a corner of her apron and dabbed at reddened eyes.

  “An’ then Tom Gilmore begun tryin’ tuh run you off?” Twister mused.

  “Before Rufe was in his grave. He came around saying he knew a widow couldn’t run the Circle Dot and he wanted to help out by paying me a good price. But Rufe had been refusing to sell and I didn’t see any reason for doing different.”

  Twister munched gravely on his pie, his scarred right cheek twitching as it always did when he was absorbed in thought. The pie wasn’t very sweet, but he reckoned the widow was short of sweetening.

  “Then Gilmore started makin’ trouble, huh?”

  “I can’t prove it was him,” the widow admitted. “But my fences got cut and my stock run off. My boys had some trouble with Lazy T hands in town, and got shot up. Then Gilmore hired gun hombres from Mexico and word went around that it wouldn’t be healthy for any hands to stay on the Circle Dot. After they left, I couldn’t do much by myself.”

  “Are Gilmore and Hutchins in cahoots?”

  “Well … no … they pretend not to be, but that’s just to pull the wool over my eyes,” Mrs. Kelso explained fiercely. “They’re both after my ranch. I saw right through Pete Hutchins first time he come riding and suggested we should get hitched.”

  Twister murmured, “Maybe he had et yore apple pie, ma’m. That’d be reason enough for any man tuh start lookin’ for a preacher. Take Chuckaluck, now …”

  “You talk too dang much an’ don’t do nothin’,” Chuckaluck exploded, pushing back his chair. “From what this lady says, it ’pears tuh me Tom Gilmore needs killin’. Le’s be ridin’ to the Lazy T.”

  “You be careful,” the widow warned sharply. “He’s got three, four gunmen on the payroll. Like as not Pete will already have been there and told him about you-all.”

  “That’ll be just fine,” Chuckaluck said grimly. He stalked toward the door, turned to glower at Twister. “You comin’?”

  “Hold yore hawses,” Twister said amiably. He got up, apologizing for his partner’s rudeness:

  “That’s just Chuckaluck’s way, ma’m. Y’see, he’s takin’ holt a’ready just like he was a’ready married to you an’ roddin’ the Circle Dot.” He grinned cheerily and followed his infuriated partner out to the corral to throw saddles on their horses and look for Tom Gilmore.

  3

  The early darkness of a Texas night lay softly upon the wide flat basin of the Circle Dot as Twister and Chuckaluck rode away. Behind them, against the black curtain of the mountainside, lighted windows of the Kelso ranch gave them a cheery farewell.

  Twisting in the saddle to look back, Chuckaluck spoke above the soft plopping of their horses’ hoofs in thick trail-dust:

  “I can’t he’p feelin’ sorry fer the ol’ gal … sorta. She’s tough as stretched rawhide, but this here country’s jest a leetle bit tougher’n she is. When we kill off Tom Gilmore … then what?”

  Riding slightly in the lead as was his wont, Twister thoughtfully rolled a cigarette. “That ain’t our worry,” he asserted. “In fac’, I ain’t no-way in favor of lockin’ horns with this here Gilmore. We got us a good supper, an’ our hawses have done had a bait of hay. We kin ride straight tuh Fort Davis an’ keep a-ridin’.”

  “Yo’re a lyin’ coyote,” Chuckaluck told him amiably. “You wouldn’t no more ride off an’ leave a widder woman in thuh lurch than you’d poke yore thumb in leetle children’s eyes. Hell’s bells, Twister, I betcha she’s nigh starved tuh death livin’ there alone. I’m guessin’ she used up her last speck of sugar in that apple pie she fed us.”

  “An’ then it didn’t have no superfluity of sweetenin’. An’ them apples! They wasn’t mostly but rinds where thuh worms had done et out all thuh good.”

  “It was thuh best she had,” Chuckaluck defended the Widow Kelso hotly. “You ongrateful sech an’ sech. Ain’t yuh got no bringin’s up a-tall?”

  In the velvety darkness, Chuckaluck couldn’t see the grin on Twister’s scarred face. They rode on in silence, and the eerie wail of a gaunt coyote drifted downwind across the basin with its rich growth of grass. With a disgusted grunt for Twister’s lack of appreciation for true hospitality, Chuckaluck got out his mouth organ and began drawing chords from it that sounded as though he were answering the howling of the distant coyote.

  “I reckon,” said Twister drily, after he had stood it as long as he could, “you got some plan fer helpin’ thuh widder in what you call yore brains.”

  Chuckaluck paused in his mournful playing. “Shore. If Tom Gilmore’s causin’ her trouble, we’ll get rid of Tom Gilmore. Any fool had oughtta be able tuh figger that out.”

  “An’ that’s why you did,” Twister drawled. “I don’t rightly see how killin’ Gilmore is gonna do the ol’ lady any good. She cain’t eat him … even if we was to dress him out an’ haul him back to her. Her cattle’re all pizened awready. We jest come along a leetle too late.”

  “It ain’t never too late,” Chuckaluck asserted stoutly. “From what I’ve seed of thuh Circle Dot I’d guess it’s one of thuh richest spreads I ever laid eyes on. With a good man tuh take hold …”

  “Meanin’ Chuckaluck Thompson?” Twister interrupted.

  “Yuh know dang well I ain’t got no sech idee. But Pete Hutchins now … mebbe-so he ain’t in cahoots with Gilmore like she thinks.”

  “Which is all thuh more reason fer us not tuh go off half-cocked,” Twister put forth persuasively. “I say there’s uh myst’ry hereaboots. I’m plumb willin’ tuh he’p thuh widder lady but I ain’t aimin’ tuh jest start out shooting people on sight. She don’t rightly know, f’rinstance, that Gilmore poisoned her water-holes. Looks tuh me more like Hutchins’ work. An’ what I’m wonderin’ is what makes ’em both so dang anxious tuh git thuh Circle Dot. An’ why did Mister Kelso go gunnin’ fer Pete Hutchins without tellin’ his wife what ’twas aboot?”

  “Yo’re allus findin’ a myst’ry in ever’thing,” Chuckaluck grunted sourly. “You cain’t never take nothin’ fer granted. I s’pose you wanta settle down here in thuh Davis Mountains an’ start detectin’. In thuh meantime thuh widder’ll be starvin’ tuh nearer skin an’ bones than she awready is.”

  “All we need is a few days fer a look-see,” Twister argued. “We could bring some grub out from town an’ plump the widder up a bit while we’re snoopin’ out thuh truth. There’s a barb-wire fence ahaid,” he ended abruptly. “I reckon this must be the line between the Circle Dot an’ Pete Hutchins’ Rafter X.”

  The trail led between high gateposts of cedar with the rough bark still clinging to the trunks. The wire gate was thrown back, leaving a wide gap in the fence, and Twister pulled his mount up, eyeing the open gate thoughtfully.

  “Now that’s dang funny,” he muttered.

  “A clue, I reckon?” was Chuckaluck’s sarcastic response. “What the hell’s funny aboot a open gate? Gawd knows the widder ain’t got no live stock she’s afeered will git out.”

  “Sometimes I don’t see how a man kin be so dumb an’ keep on livin’,” Twister groaned. “What’s funny aboot it is that this here gate is between the Circle Dot an’ the Rafter X … an’ that Pete Hutchins musta rode through it not long ago.”

  “I still don’t see how that cuts no ice. He knows she ain’t got no cows tuh git out.”

  “But how aboot his gittin’ in?” Twister interrupted fiercely. “He knows aboot thuh poisoned water on thuh Circle Dot. Think he’d ride through an’ leave thuh gate open so his stock kin wander through an’ git turned into buzzard bait?”

  “B’golly,” Chuckaluck agreed weakly. “Yo’re right fer onct. Does look kinda funny.…”

  Twister swung out of the saddle lithely and dropped reins to the ground. He picked up the gate and was in the act of closing it when a faint sound out of the night-blackness brought him to a rigid attitude of listening. Chuckaluck had his mouth organ between his lips again and was beginning a soft melody, and Twister stopped him with a low, whispered warning.