“I know you did. But she ain’t proved she’s the one yet.”

  “She will. As soon as she sees Dad. Or as soon as Winters gets back from Pueblo.”

  “Bill’s a mighty sick man right now,” Porter said significantly. “Supposin’ he wasn’t to live long enough for her to get out to see him?”

  “Not much chance of that,” Dick argued. “He ain’t really sick. Just down in the back, sorta, so he don’t feel like ridin’.”

  “Lots of things can happen in a couple of days. You need another drink.” Porter got the bottle out and passed it over. “Buck up and let’s start some figuring. You’ll not only lose the ranch but you’ll more’n likely go to jail too if she proves she’s got a right to it.”

  Dick choked over his drink. “Jail? How come?”

  “Bill ain’t due to live very long any way you look at it,” Porter explained. “When he dies an’ that girl inherits the ranch instead of you, there’ll be a strict legal accounting. We’ve been rustlin’ cattle out from under the old man’s nose for months, thinkin’ we wouldn’t get caught because the ranch’d be yours after he died anyhow, and it was just sort of stealing from yourself. But her coming makes everything different.”

  “You’re in it with me,” exclaimed Dick excitedly. “You’re jest as guilty as me.”

  “Which is what I’m thinkin’ about,” said Porter grimly. “I don’t hanker to give up a good thing, an’ I sure ain’t got no yearnin’ for jail. That’s why I stalled ’em at the hotel.”

  Dick put the bottle to his mouth again. When he took it down, he hiccoughed and said, “You didn’t do any more’n put it off for a day or so.”

  “Unless maybe Bill Freeman was to kick the bucket before she gets to him.”

  “There’s still Mr. Winters,” Dick reminded him. “He knows Dad’s name is Wilcox like she claims.”

  “Sure he does. But that doesn’t prove she’s his daughter. Lots of gals around the country named Wilcox that can’t show no legal right to inherit the Four-V’s. Looks to me like she might have a hard time provin’ it if Bill Freeman was to die before she gets to him.”

  “She most likely has got letters and things.”

  “You told me yourself that Bill hadn’t wrote back East but once since he came here. And he didn’t get no answer to that letter.”

  “One letter would be enough,” muttered Dick dispiritedly. He took another pull at the whiskey bottle and slumped down in the saddle.

  “All right then,” said Porter angrily. “Maybe she can prove she’s the daughter of a rancher whose real name is Wilcox, living in Powder Valley under another name. Except for Winters an’ us, there ain’t another living soul can prove Bill Freeman is him.”

  “But Mr. Winters knows. When Dad told me about it a few years back, he said Winters knew all about it.”

  “Winters ain’t the type to’ve ever told anybody else.”

  “What of it? He knows. An’ he’ll be back in Dutch Springs in a couple of days.”

  “Somethin’ might happen to him too,” Porter suggested curtly.

  “You mean …?”

  “I mean we’re in a bad spot less’n we do somethin’ right quick. The Four-V records show over two thousand head of cattle on our range, and you an’ me know there ain’t but a little more’n half that many if they’re ever counted.”

  “We shouldn’t ever have done it,” Dick cried out despondently. “I didn’t want to help you.”

  “The hell you didn’t. You wanted money to gamble with.”

  “But I didn’t think it was really wrong. I figured they’d all belong to me some day anyhow, an’ I didn’t see why I couldn’t start sellin’ some off now.” Dick tilted the bottle and took another drink. His tongue was beginning to feel thick, and his voice sounded fuzzy.

  “Go ahead an’ get plastered,” Porter said shortly. “You ain’t got the guts of a chipmunk without a few drinks in yore belly.”

  Dick put the bottle up to his mouth again. The liquor didn’t burn as it went down now, and it didn’t make him cough. He straightened his shoulders and began to feel blustery and grown-up. “That was a mighty purty gal back to the hotel,” he said thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t be so bad havin’ her around the ranch, huh?”

  “Except you wouldn’t be there to see her,” Porter taunted him. “If she gets next to Bill Freeman, you’ll end up in jail.”

  “That’s not right,” Dick protested thickly. “I didn’t mean to do nothin’ wrong.”

  “Be mighty handy for us if Bill Freeman was to die tonight,” said Porter callously.

  “But he ain’t that sick.” Dick was beginning to sway a little in the saddle. He caught hold of the horn with his left hand while the fingers of his right hand lovingly gripped the neck of the whiskey bottle.

  “Nobody but us knows how sick he is,” Clay Porter reminded him. “Remember, I tol’ ’em in town he was pretty bad off. I reckon nobody won’t be too much surprised if he was to kick off tonight.”

  “Are you figuring on … do you mean you’re gonna do somethin’ to him tonight?” Despite the liquor, the boy was horrified at the thought.

  “Would you rather spend the rest of your life in jail for stealin’ cows?” Porter asked bluntly.

  The shock of the question sobered the boy a trifle. He shakily lifted the bottle for another swig of false courage. “I don’t care if something does happen to him,” he announced angrily. “He’s always tellin’ me what to do like I was still a kid in knee-pants. Never givin’ me no money of my own.”

  “Shore,” drawled Porter, “he’s been holdin’ his money back hoping that gal would come out here so he could give it to her, I reckon. What’s she done to deserve it? You’ve worked like a dog on the ranch all these years.”

  “I sure have. I’d of run away long ago ’cept I thought I’d get the ranch when he died.”

  “You still can get the ranch,” Porter assured him craftily, “if Bill Freeman dies tonight.”

  “There’s still Mr. Winters to tell what he knows.”

  “You leave Winters to me. Lots of things can happen to a man on a trip back from Pueblo.”

  “You mean … you’ll kill him too?”

  “Why not? We got to, ain’t we? We’re both in this too deep to back out now.”

  Dick took another drink. The bottle was almost half empty now. He held it up to the light of the moon and was impressed by the amount he had drunk. Almost a pint, by golly, and he’d never had more than three drinks in a row in his life before. And he wasn’t drunk either. He’d never felt clearer-headed in his life. He could see now that Clay was right. Even if that girl was Bill Freeman’s daughter, she didn’t have any business coming here now and claiming the ranch right out from under his nose. For years, he had regarded it as his actual rightful inheritance. Years ago, when Bill Freeman took the boy into his confidence, he had explained that he never expected to hear from his wife or daughter again, and that if he didn’t the ranch would legally descend to his adopted son according to the state laws.

  Bill Freeman was an old man, without many more years to live. Since his fall from the horse, his back pained him a lot, and he hardly got out of the house at all. It wasn’t like he enjoyed life. The law let a man shoot a horse after he broke his leg, didn’t it? What was so different about helping a sick old man out of his misery?

  Dick took another drink and began to feel quite lightheaded and gay. Clay Porter was a mighty fine partner. He wouldn’t let a fellow down. He didn’t care how much money a fellow gambled, and he’d even buy a bottle sometimes. If Bill Freeman was out of the way, the future would be mighty fine.

  Dick swayed dangerously in the saddle as he turned to look at Clay. “Yo’re right,” he said thickly. “Thass the thing tuh do, right enough. If the ol’ coot dies tuhnight, you an’ me can run thuh ranch the way we wanta.”

  “Now you’re talkin’ like a growed-up man,” Porter told him. “We’re gettin’ close to thuh ranch,” he went on evenly. “Better not hit that bottle no more till you get there.”

  “I can take it,” Dick boasted. “Seems like likker don’t hardly bother me none a-tall. I’ve done already drunk more’n half of it.”

  “Save the rest till after you get to the ranch,” Porter advised him. “The old man’ll be in bed when we get there. No need for him to wake up at all.”

  “I gotcha,” Dick assured him. “That way it won’t hurt none.” He giggled drunkenly. “He won’t never know it’s happened.”

  “That’s right. The ranch house is right around the bend yonder. You ain’t too drunk, are you?”

  “Me, I ain’t hardly drunk a-tall. Won’t hurt him, huh, while he’s layin’ in bed asleep?”

  “Won’t hurt a bit,” Porter assured him heartily. Their horses rounded the bend and the buildings of the Four-V’s ranch were spread out before them in the moonlight. There were no lights in any of the buildings because Bill Freeman was the only one there and since his illness he had been going to bed very early. It was lucky, Clay Porter reflected, that there weren’t any other ranch hands on the Four-V’s right now. It was the slack season of the year, and Porter had paid off the two regular hands a couple of months earlier so as to have a free hand in the rustling operations he and Dick had been jointly engaged in. Later, he had planned to hire new hands who wouldn’t be aware that the herds had been depleted.

  They rode briskly up to the ranch house, and Dick dismounted, lurching drunkenly as his feet touched solid ground.

  Clay Porter leaned forward and caught the reins of Dick’s horse, said swiftly in a low tone, “You go ahead on in. I’ll take yore hawse down to the corral an’ unsaddle him. You know what’s got to be done?”

  “Shore. I know.” The boy stumbled away toward the front door, clutching the half-empty whiskey bottle tightly.

  Porter waited there until the door closed behind the whiskey-dazed youth, then turned and rode down to the corral leading Dick’s horse by the bridle reins.

  4.

  Pat Stevens and Sam Sloan got away from the Lazy Mare ranch early the next morning. Both men were exceedingly interested in the claims made by Joan Wilcox the preceding evening, and were eager to put it right up to Bill Freeman and see what his reaction would be. They were prompted by sheer curiosity more than anything else, though neither of them admitted it.

  In truth, they had both been more than a little bored with life until the girl and her fiancé arrived from the East and tossed this minor problem in their laps. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t any of their business whether Bill Freeman was actually named Wilcox or not. Under ordinary circumstances, they would have sat back and waited for Mr. Winters to return from Pueblo and tell the girl who her father was.

  But these weren’t ordinary circumstances. For months, things had been going along with disconcerting smoothness in Powder Valley. With a hard-working, efficient foreman and a good crew of hands on the Lazy Mare, there was nothing to keep Pat busy on his ranch; and Sam Sloan was merely marking time until they obtained legal title to an adjoining piece of property which he planned to move onto with his wife and baby son. In the meantime, he and his family were visiting at the Lazy Mare, and months of continued inaction had begun to gall both men.

  They weren’t used to inaction. For years past they, with big, one-eyed Ezra, had formed a hard-riding, fast-shooting trio with a reputation for taking the law into their own hands whenever the opportunity presented itself—and there had been no lack of opportunity in that section of the lawless West during the many years while they were converting Powder Valley from a terror-ridden hangout of owl-hooters to its present civilized status.

  Now, they found the job too well done for their own peace of mind. Increasingly in the past few years, they’d been forced to ride far from the Valley in search of excitement; and this small mystery precipitated by the arrival of Joan Wilcox was a pretext eagerly seized by them for sticking their noses into an affair that was really none of their business.

  Knowing and liking Bill Freeman as they did, and heartily disliking the adopted son whom they had expected to inherit the Four-V’s ranch on Bill’s death—they had been greatly pleased by this new development and they were both frankly hopeful that the Eastern girl would succeed in proving her legal claim to the ranch.

  Too, they had been puzzled by Clay Porter’s rather queer attitude toward the entire matter last night. In the first place, Clay had shown a remarkable lack of surprise at the suggestion that his employer’s name might be Wilcox instead of Freeman—as though maybe it wasn’t news to him at all. At the same time, there was his definite denial that Bill Freeman could possibly be the girl’s father, and his ill-humored refusal to allow her to go to the ranch to see for herself.

  His statement that Bill was too sick to have visitors sounded fishy to the sheriff and his friend. If Bill was all that sick, they thought they would have heard about it before.

  “But I still don’t see why Clay Porter acted that-away,” Sam Sloan argued with, Pat as they rode together through the crisp air of early morning. “Like, by golly, ’twas his ranch the girl was after. Clay ain’t got no claim on the ol’ man, has he?”

  “Not that I know of. Except he might be feared he’d lose his job as foreman if the girl was to move in.”

  “That don’t make sense,” Sam scoffed. “Clay’s a good man an’ he could get another job easy.”

  “He’s a good friend of Dick’s,” Pat went on thoughtfully. “Might be it made him mad to think maybe Dick was going to get beat out of the ranch.”

  “That Dick ain’t worth a damn,” said Sam angrily. “Hangin’ around town gamblin’ an’ drinkin’ ’fore he’s even half growed up. He never did no real work around that ranch when Ezra an’ me lived close by.”

  “We’ll find out about it soon enough,” Pat told him cheerfully. “Mighty good to be out straddling a hawse before sunup with some place to go. We both been gettin’ too much fat on our backsides sitting around playing casino.” He drew in a deep breath of the cool morning air, rising in his stirrups to look searchingly across the wide and peaceful expanse of the Valley spreading out in front and to both sides as far as the eye could see.

  They were riding at an angle across the floor of the Valley, following a general northwesterly direction that by-passed the town of Dutch Springs on their right and would carry them up the opposite slope directly to the headquarters of the Four-V’s ranch.

  Sam settled back to silence in his own saddle, looking with satisfaction at the herds of fat cattle grazing along the way and conjuring up mental pictures of the herds that would soon be wearing his own brand on the Hazeltine ranch that lay just south of the Lazy Mare.

  They continued in silence at a mile-devouring jog-trot, each engrossed with his own thoughts and in the simple pleasure of riding the range together again—and in having some definite place to go.

  It was more than an hour later, and the sun was well above the horizon behind them when Pat nodded toward a low group of buildings in the distance and said, “Is that the Four-V’s layout yonder?”

  “That’s it,” Sam assented. “The old place looks sorta run to seed, don’t it?”

  “Not like Bill used to keep it up,” Pat muttered. “I reckon that’s on account of him not hirin’ no more help. Seems to me like I heard in town last week that Clay Porter and Dick are doin’ all the work without any other help.”

  “It’s a big spread for two of ’em to handle. I never knowed Bill to pinch pennies on hirin’ help before. When Ezra an’ me lived up the Valley, he allus had three or four hands besides the foreman.”

  “Looks plumb deserted this mawning,” Pat muttered as they drew nearer. “Wonder what that cow’s bawling for?”

  “I bin wonderin’ that too,” Sam muttered anxiously, listening to loud and continuous mooing of a cow in one of the dilapidated sheds below the ranch house. “No smoke comin’ from the chimney,” he noted, “an’ only a couple of hawses in the corral.”

  “Clay and Dick must be saddled and out already. Bill’s most probably up to the house by himself. Let’s ride by the sheds and see has a cow got her leg hung up in the wire or something.”

  They swung their horses down toward the mournful lowing of the cow, and as they got closer they heard the frantic bawling of a calf added to the louder sound.

  “Lookit him there,” Sam exclaimed. “A little ol’ white-face penned up outside tryin’ to break down the fence an’ get in to his mama. The way she sounds, I’ll betcha they rode off this mawnin’ without milkin’ her or even turning the calf in to suck.”

  “Sounds like it,” Pat agreed grimly, for they were close to the shed now and the lowing of the unseen cow had a note of agony in it. Just outside the shed, the small calf was in a wire enclosure, braced on four wobbly outspread legs with its nose pressed against the wood siding of the shed while it rolled its eyes and frantically answered its mother’s voice.

  Pat swung off his horse and threw back the bar locking the doors of the shed. He had to step aside quickly to avoid the rush of a muley cow out the doors as they opened. She disregarded him completely, trotting to her fenced-in calf and thrusting her head through between the wires to lick its face. Her udder was distended and full of milk, the four teats extended stiffly, and milk began to drip from them as she licked her hungry calf.

  “Ain’t been milked for at least twenty-four hours,” said Pat angrily. “What kind of a layout are they running here?” He stepped over the low fence and picked the calf up bodily, lifted him over the barbed wires and set him on the ground beside his mother where he instantly seized one of the swollen teats in his mouth and began sucking gustily.

  Her bellowing ceased at once and she turned her head to look at Pat with great, mournful eyes as though thanking him for what he’d done.

  Pat turned away disgustedly, seized his horse’s reins and led him up the slope toward the house, telling Sam hotly over his shoulder, “Looks like Bill’s foreman ain’t doin’ such a good job while Bill’s laid up. A man that’d neglect a fresh cow that way ought to have his ears cut off.”