“You ain’t foolin’ me none, Pelham,” he snarled with concentrated venom. “You kin mebby pull the wool over a gal’s eyes, but I weren’t born yestiddy. I got a good idee of what goes on over to thuh Bar L, an’ we ain’t havin’ none on thuh Triangle A. I’ll thank you tuh git outta thuh way an’ let Miss Peggy give me my supper.”

  “Please, Henry. Don’t rile him up,” Peggy’s imploring voice sounded behind him.

  He controlled his anger with an effort and stepped aside to let Peggy hand the irascible old foreman a plate of beans and salt pork with two sourdough biscuits soaking up the hot red juice.

  The old man took the proffered plate and stamped away toward the bunkhouse. Peggy sighed deeply, and Pelham saw a glint of tears in her eyes as she turned back toward the kitchen door. He caught both her shoulders in his strong hands and turned her about to face him.

  “Don’t mind an old man like Hank. He’s like all the rest of them hereabouts. They hate me because I’ve succeeded where they have failed. They’ll change their tune in the years to come.”

  Peggy made a dismal attempt to smile reassurance, but it was a wretched failure. In a small choked voice she said, “I wouldn’t care … if it was anybody but Hank. He’s been so good to me.” She pulled away from his grasp and re-entered the kitchen, dabbing at her misty eyes with the hem of her apron.

  Henry Pelham followed her inside and sat at the well-scrubbed little kitchen table while she served him, without apology, from the scanty supply of food on hand.

  It wasn’t a cheerful meal, though Peggy tried her gallant best to divert their thoughts away from the subject that was uppermost in their minds.

  Pelham maintained an outward joviality, though he was inwardly raging at old Hank’s unfair attitude which had hurt the girl so deeply. He’d show them, by God. He’d show them all. He’d start buying up their damned run-down ranches and turning them into pastures for Bar L stock. In a few years he’d control all the good grazing land in the vicinity, and they might keep on hating him for it, but by God they’d show him outward respect or he’d know the reason why.

  He left Peggy soon after supper was finished. They couldn’t find very much to talk about. He put his arm about her thin shoulders and kissed her tenderly on the lips, and she stood in the doorway and watched him ride away with a set hard look on her face.

  She had felt no emotion when he kissed her. She felt nothing now. It seemed to her that she was drained of all capacity for emotion. Perhaps that was best, she told herself wisely. If one felt nothing it was difficult to be hurt. She could marry Henry Pelham now without regrets.

  If only Charlie hadn’t …

  She swayed in the doorway and flung up a forearm to cover her eyes. She discovered that she hadn’t wholly lost her capacity for emotion. Thinking of Charlie and how he had turned away from her this afternoon when she needed him most brought an acute pain that was almost beyond endurance. But she had been schooled to endure many things during the past three years, and she supposed she would learn to endure this pain in the years that lay ahead.

  But she went to her lonely bed to toss sleeplessly for a long time, and then fell into troubled sleep wherein she had a nightmare that she was drowning in quicksand while Charlie Barnes stood on the bank with a coiled lariat in his hands and would not throw it out to save her. Far different from the happy dreams of most young girls the first night after they have become engaged.

  Henry Pelham loosed his pent-up wrath on the horse beneath him when he was well away from the Triangle A. Savage curses dripped from his lips as he drove sharp rowels cruelly into the beast’s sides. He had been a fool to humble himself by trying to placate Hank Greenow. The way to handle men like that was to ride over them rough-shod. Peggy, too. He had been unwontedly meek before her. What had it gotten him? Her lips had been cold and hard when she kissed him good night. She didn’t even make any pretense that she cared for him. Sure, she had accepted his proposal of marriage, but she made it very clear it was only because of what he could give her. Well, that was all right, but by God in the end he’d break her spirit too. And again the rowels dug deep into flesh.

  He rode up to the Bar L corrals at a headlong gallop, his face still flushed with sultry anger, and the old hostler came limping toward him excitedly as he flung himself from the back of his panting mount.

  “That you, Mr. Pelham?”

  “It’s me. Put my horse up, Limpy.”

  The clubfoot stopped him as he started to turn away. “Jes’ a minute, Mr. Pelham. I was jes’ gonna tell you … Pat’s horse jes’ come in by hisself a few minutes back. I was headin’ up to the bunkhouse to tell thuh boys …”

  Pelham swung on him with a black frown. “Pat’s horse? When? What do you mean?”

  “His saddle horse, Mr. Pelham. The one he rode tonight. He went out with that Mex gal after supper. She come back twenty minutes ago alone, an’ Pat’s horse jes’ come in without Pat. An’ I heered a shot out yonder a little bit before she come ridin’ back.”

  “A shot, eh? And Pat’s horse came back without him? What Mexican girl, Limpy?”

  “That purty new un. Tonita, her name is.”

  “God damn Pat,” raged the Bar L owner. “I told him to stay away from those Mexican girls. The sheriff went soft on Tonita today, and I figured …” He cut himself short, his voice suddenly going harsh, “Rout the men out of the bunkhouse and tell them to saddle up. I’ll have a talk with that girl.”

  “There’s somethin’ else I reckon you oughtta know,” Limpy said hesitantly. “That new man you hired … he rode out, too, an’ ain’t showed up yet.”

  “Charlie Barnes?”

  “Dunno his name. Heavy-sot feller … not packin’ no guns.”

  “And he hasn’t come back either? Damn Pat and him both. I can’t afford to have any trouble around here. Get the boys out, Limpy. I’ll …”

  He was interrupted by a gruff shout from beyond the corral. He and Limpy turned and stared at the bulky figure of the Bar L foreman limping painfully toward them in his high-heeled boots that weren’t built for walking.

  Pelham’s angry frown deepened and he demanded curtly, “What’s been happening around here, Pat?”

  Pat essayed a painful grin as he hobbled up. “That danged Mex spitfire pulled a fast one on me. When I stepped off my haws to invite her down fer a little lovin’ she stampeded my haws an’ spurred her own off, leavin’ me to hoof it back. Wait’ll I git my hands on her ag’in.”

  “Damn you and your lallygagging,” Pelham exploded. “You know we can’t have anything like that around here. I’ve warned you men time and again that there’s to be no trouble. Limpy heard a shot. What was it?”

  “A shot? Yeh, I … I heard it, too, Boss.” Pat pulled out a dirty bandanna and nervously mopped his swarthy face, avoiding Pelham’s angry eyes.

  “Well, what was it?” Pelham snapped.

  Pat mumbled, “I’ll tell you, Boss, it was this way. I heard that shot too, right after the gal an’ my haws quit me sudden-like. It come from close by an’… Boss, you shore ain’t gonna like this …”

  “Not going to like what? Damn it! Speak up, man.” Pelham caught the foreman’s burly shoulder and shook him angrily.

  “You ain’t gonna like what’s layin’ out yonder. It’s … that sheriff that ain’t dry behind the ears yet. That Edwards kid. He’s deader’n a stuck pig. Shot through the back.”

  “Les Edwards? Dead? What are you talking about? Who did it?”

  “Danged if I know,” Pat disclaimed. “He was layin’ there when I found him. That gal, mebbe. She’s hell on wheels, I’m tellin’ you.”

  “That,” said Pelham bitterly, “isn’t going to make it any better.” He narrowed his hot eyes at Pat. “Let me see your guns.”

  The foreman hesitated, started to refuse. His air of bravado vanished when a change came over Pelham, when his hands clawed down toward the .45’s in his holsters and his voice came in a thin trickle like icy water seeping through a frozen aperture:. “Give me your guns.”

  “Yeh. Well … shore, Boss, shore.” Pat lifted them awkwardly with his fingertips, reversed them and shoved the butts toward Pelham while his eyes cringed from the deadly gaze that bored into his.

  Pelham took them and put first one muzzle and then the other to his nose and sniffed deeply. His expression was unchanged, cold and merciless, when he handed them back. “One of your guns has been shot. So you gunned the sheriff, Pat. You met him out there and quarreled about Tonita. God damn your soul to hell. I ought to blast your guts.…”

  “Wait, Boss. Lemme tell you. There’s another feller out there, too. Mebbe we kin hang the killin’ on him.” Pat’s face was pasty with fear and he was panting.

  “Oh yes. Charlie Barnes?” Pelham arched his heavy brows at Limpy. “But Charlie was unarmed.”

  “He was when he come, Boss. But when he rid out later he hadda gun strapped aroun’ his belly. I seen it. He musta borrowed one from some of thuh boys.”

  “Charlie Barnes?” Pelham mused. A cruel smile twitched his lips. “Sure. Why not? Then the Bar L can’t be blamed …”

  “I reckon that’s him ridin’ in now,” Limpy whispered tensely, indicating the approach of a lone rider.

  Pelham nodded. “All right,” he told Pat curtly. “You witnessed the killing. You can swear to it. When we take that gun-belt off him, you buckle it on you in place of the one you used on Edwards. That’ll hang him sure. Doc Conroy has a newfangled way of telling what gun a bullet was shot from, and if they test the bullet in Edwards it’ll fit the gun in Barnes’ belt. Take it easy now, and we’ll grab him.”

  Charlie Barnes rode up to the little group unsuspectingly. He nodded and said, “Howdy,” then stepped down off his roan. His lower jaw sagged open when Pelham drew both guns and covered him with a single lightning-fast movement.

  He grated, “We don’t like killers on the Bar L payroll, Barnes. Not sheriff-killers. Unbuckle his gun-belt, Pat. We’re taking him in to jail.”

  10

  After Hank Greenow had sopped up the last spoonful of bean juice with a piece of biscuit and slowly devoured the savory morsel, he pushed back the tin plate from in front of him and got out a stubby corncob pipe and a tin of coarse tobacco. By setting the pipe in front of him on the table and resting the stump of his left arm on the stem, he poured and tamped a load of tobacco in the blackened bowl.

  When it was lit and drawing well he turned out the bunkhouse lamp and went to the doorway, where he settled his lean old body on the threshold for a long vigil.

  His seamed face indicated nothing of his thoughts as he sat there sucking on his pipe, occasionally glancing toward the ranch house, where curtained kitchen windows glowed with light from within.

  He was a lonely, and somehow a pathetic figure as he sat there on the threshold hunched over his corncob pipe. An old man is always a pathetic figure when he has passed the zenith of life and feels things slipping away from his grip. An uncompromising realist, Hank knew that matters had finally come to a showdown. Peggy couldn’t stand much more. She had already stood too much during these past three years. He had stood by and watched the prettiness and vivacity fade from her face, had seen the rounded flesh of young womanhood turn to stringy muscles, had witnessed the acknowledgment of defeat dull the eyes that had been bright and sparkling with happiness only a few years previously.

  For months now, Hank had stood aside silently and watched Henry Pelham ride to the Triangle A more and more frequently. Tonight was the first time old Hank had committed an overt act to indicate his disapproval of the growing intimacy between Peggy and the Bar L owner.

  But today Hank had made a discovery that changed a lot of things. The showdown was coming sooner than he had hoped for. Tonight, perhaps.

  He had knocked the sizzling dottle from his pipe and refilled it three times when he heard the front door of the ranch house open. He could hear the murmur of Peggy’s voice as she told her visitor good night. He sat alone in the darkness and his old eyes glowed queerly when the sound of Henry Pelham’s galloping horse faded away into the night-silence.

  Still he did not change his hunched posture on the threshold of the bunkhouse. He sucked on his pipe and watched while the kitchen lights went out and a faint glow from Peggy’s bedroom window told him the girl was preparing for bed.

  Soon that light, too, disappeared and the Triangle A ranch lay in complete darkness.

  Hank reloaded his pipe for the fourth time, and carefully shielded the match flame from any eyes that might be watching for a sign that all was not exactly as usual at the Triangle A. Not that he actually suspected the presence of an unseen watcher in the darkness, but the imminence of action made him acutely alert to any possible danger. If he had been seen that afternoon when he made his startling discovery there might well be those who would spy upon him to see what, if anything, he was going to do about it.

  He patiently smoked his fourth pipe out, then knocked the cob bowl against the edge of the step with a gesture of decision. Peggy should be asleep by this time. There was nothing to delay him further.

  He needed no light to find his gun-belt inside the dark bunkhouse. A one-handed job of buckling it about his waist was somewhat difficult, and it was for that reason as much as anything else that he seldom wore a gun nowadays—that, and because there had been nothing to fight back at until tonight.

  His short saddle-gun rested in its leather boot upon two nails driven into the wall above his bunk. He lifted it down lovingly, drew it from its scabbard and experimented with the awkwardness of aiming and firing one-armed. By supporting the muzzle with the stump of his left arm he found he could handle the lever action effectively. He nodded grimly to himself as he slid the .30 caliber weapon back into its boot. Old and crippled he might be, but by God he could still throw lead with either rifle or hand-gun. He figured there was one more good fight left in his old carcass, and tonight would be as good a time as any to prove it.

  He went out of the bunkhouse and strode directly to the corral, where he had penned his horse after unsaddling him that evening. He rested the rifle against an outside rail, shook a loop into a short catch-rope and stepped inside the corral with the coils hugged against his body with his left arm.

  The single horse in the pen snorted and shied away from him in the moonlight, and Hank made a short toss that snagged the loop securely about the animal’s neck. He led him out and tossed his rigging on, buckled his carbine and leather boot under the left stirrup leather with butt forward so he could draw the rifle while still mounted. He swung into the saddle and made a wide circle around the ranch house so Peggy wouldn’t awaken and hear him.

  Once well away from the triangle of cottonwoods he lifted his mount into a steady distance-devouring lope, pushing him east and a little north, skirting the broken foothills for mile after mile until turning sharply north into a wide canyon that led directly upward into the mountainous country.

  For the first half mile the floor of the canyon was wide and level, though it climbed upward rapidly. Then the steep walls began crowding in and the course became narrower and more precipitous. The stubble grass gave way to bare rocky stretches strewn with boulders washed down in spring freshets, and Hank was forced to slow to a trot to give his tiring mount a chance to pick a path around the frequent obstructions.

  It grew noticeably colder as they climbed upward, and the slanting rays of moonlight no longer reached the bottom of the sheer-sided gulch that cut on into the heart of the mountains.

  At a point where a narrow ravine cut a sharp path in the right wall of the main canyon, Hank pulled his horse into the cut and urged him up over the rim at a fearfully steep slant.

  Slipping precariously and sliding back when his foothold gave way, the animal lunged on under the urging of Hank’s voice and spurs, driving on out over the top of the canyon wall, lathered and spent and trembling in every limb.

  Hank pulled him up to let him blow, his keen old eyes searching ahead down the long slope that lay beyond, drawn like a magnet by the lighted windows of a cabin that gleamed upward from the bottom of the next valley.

  He nodded with grim satisfaction at the sight. He had been right, then. Hidden Valley was no longer hidden and deserted. Passing this way by chance that afternoon he had made the accidental discovery that had brought him, in the dark of night, back up a trail known only to himself.

  He was coldly alert now as he reined his horse to the right along the top of the ridge that led into one of the funnel ends enclosing the small oval-shaped valley that took its name from the fact that it could be reached only through two narrow and tortuous passages; one of them leading up from the east boundary of the Bar L, and the other climbing out northward into the much-traveled road through Bloody Gap from which one could ride on into the interior of the state or turn sharply south into the dangerous stretch of desert country leading to the Border and Mexico.

  Hank let his mount pick his way along the top of the ridge at a walk so their progress would be as silent as possible as approach was made to a commanding position overlooking the narrow entry from the south.

  From the valley floor below, the muted lowing of cattle drifted upward on the wings of a night-breeze. He had sighted the herd being held in Hidden Valley this afternoon, and it was their presence that had brought him back tonight. This section of the mountains had never been grazed since a rancher named Dooley had tried it twenty years before and had his entire herd wiped out in an early fall blizzard that blocked both exits. There were numerous small guarded meadows of rich grass like Hidden Valley, but they were so widely separated and so difficult to reach that no one had repeated Dooley’s mistake of trying to graze them.

  Yet, here was an unannounced herd in Hidden Valley, and the long-unused cabin below held human occupants. Hank knew he would have heard about it if some newcomer had decided to repeat Dooley’s disastrous experiment, and the fact that the herd was being held there secretly meant only one thing to the old man who’d spent the best part of his life combating Border rustlers. He was convinced it was stolen stuff awaiting a chance to be slipped across the Border, and he had his own suspicions about the identity of the rustlers. It was to confirm those suspicions that he now took up his lonely vigil half-way down the slope of the southern bottle-neck leading out of the valley.