“You seen Shevlin?” he asked Brazos. His speech was thick, but to himself his purpose was clear.
“I got to see him. Right away.” Brazos threw him a sharp glance. Gentry was drunk, yes, but he wasn’t fighting drunk.
What showed in his eyes was anxiety, not animosity.
“He headed out toward Parry’s claim,” Brazos said. “Over in the box canyon.” Gentry stepped into the saddle and rode into the night. Drunk or sober, he had always been able to ride anything he could get astride of. Now the night air began to clear his whiskey-fogged mind.
One thing stood out; Lon Court had a little list.
Shevlin, Hollister, Babcock… who else? Why, you damned fool, he told himself, your name will be on that list!
After all, what was he to Stowe? There had never been any sentiment in Stowe, but always plenty of greed; and now when Gentry’s mind was capable of thinking, and he remembered that his own share of that gold would come to more than a hundred thousand dollars, he had the answer. Ben Stowe wouldn’t share that kind of money with anybody.
Somebody, Gentry had never known who, must have mortgaged everything he owned to put up the cash to buy the gold from the stores, an operation handled by Stowe himself. Only Stowe, his unknown backer, Ray Hollister, and Gentry himself knew the setup.
Ben Stowe had been hot to have Hollister hunted down and killed; then it would surely be Gentry’s turn. After that, who would be the next target in the shooting gallery?
CHAPTER 8
The soft desert night, dark beneath the stars, seemed still, yet it was a night of restlessness, a night of movement.
Ben Stowe had returned to his desk, irritable at the necessity for rearranging plans because of Mike Shevlin, but not actually worried by it. Within an hour Lon Court would have his message, and the message called for immediate action.
In his room in the jail building, Wilson Hoyt lay awake. He had made his final rounds, and all had been in order, yet his instinct warned him that behind the soft darkness and the quiet, trouble stirred.
Throughout his life he had ridden on the side of the law. Of course, in every community where he had held office there were certain things he was expected to overlook, because the town gave its tacit consent to them. There had been towns where men carried guns because it was the thing to do; there were other towns, in more thickly settled communities, where guns were not allowed to be carried, and in those towns he had forbidden strangers to carry them within the city limits.
His role, as he saw it, was not to take care of morals but to keep the peace. In a life on the frontier he had come to accept rough living by rough men, and he interfered only when such a way of living threatened the peace of the town and its citizens. He was here to prevent disorderly conduct, within reason, to prevent theft or murder, and to punish the offenders if such things were attempted or carried out. Here, the town had accepted high-grading as a fact of its community life, so he had done the same.
He had been warned that a man named Ray Hollister would come to town one day and try to cause trouble, and he had been told that Hollister was a dangerous man. Wilson Hoyt had checked the records and the memories of Hollister and had found this to be true. The man was undoubtedly a trouble-maker.
But now this man Shevlin had appeared in town and had laid it on the line for him. Wilson Hoyt knew that the time had come when he must take a stand.
Trouble was surely here. It was being brought about by high-grading, and the peace of his town, quiet until now, was to be ripped apart. Shevlin had given him a choice, and Wilson Hoyt lay awake this night, trying to make up his mind what to do–and how to do it.
His instinct, and his better judgment too, told him that the thing to do was to end the high-grading and deliver the gold to its owners. He would, of course, promptly be fired, but that did not especially disturb him. He had been hunting a job when he had found this one. He could look for one again.
As Hoyt lay on his cot trying to make up his mind, Ben Stowe chewed on a dead cigar; and at Dr. Rupert Clagg’s, Mike Shevlin was sitting down at a table with the doctor, his wife and daughter, and Laine Tennison.
Not many miles away, Red was arriving at Boulder Spring with a message for Lon Court; and Gib Gentry, wishing to warn his friend, was taking the trail to Burt Parry’s claim.
Ben Stowe foresaw no interruption in his plans that could last more than a few days. Shevlin was a dangerous obstacle, but Lon Court would remove that obstacle smoothly and efficiently.
Ray Hollister was somewhere around, but the ranches of his friends were watched day and night, and when he was located he would be picked up.
But even as he sat alone in his office, Ben Stowe had no way of knowing that there was a meeting at the Three Sevens.
The ranch house was ablaze with lights, and Hollister was there, seated at the head of the table.
Eve Bancroft was watching him with admiring eyes; Babcock loitered at the back of the room. The others at the table were ranchers or their foremen, and they were listening to Hollister.
On the rugged slope of the mountain, half a mile or more away, Ben Stowe’s watcher lay sprawled on his back staring at the stars with wide-open, unblinking eyes. There was little about him that resembled anything human, for he had been roped and dragged for two miles along the rough mountain through broken lava and cactus, bunch grass and cat-claw. Ray Hollister had done the dragging, then had shaken loose his loop and ridden away. Babcock, more merciful, had paused by the man who looked up at him, ruined beyond recovery, but still conscious. “That draggin’ wasn’t my idea,” Babcock said, and fired the bullet that put the dying man beyond misery.
The riders at the Three Sevens all wore guns. On their horses there were Winchesters. They had come prepared to attack the monster that was destroying their cattle business. They would blow up the mine and drive out Ben Stowe and his crew; then the ranchers’ water would be pure again, their business would once more be the focal occupation of the Rafter country.
They were, on the whole, honest, forthright men, protecting their livelihood by the only means they knew, protecting, as they believed, their range land from destruction. They were men born to a life of violence, men who did not approve of violence but who had been led to its use by a fanatic, a fanatic who was also an envious, embittered man, fighting tooth and nail for a position in the world that nothing fitted him to hold.
Dr. Rupert Clagg faced Mike Shevlin across the table, over their teacups.
Dottie and Laine sat with them.
Dr. Clagg, who had seen others like Mike Shevlin in many places in the West, knew what a force such a man could be. On his occasional journeys back to the East, he had become impatient with those who spoke with tolerant smiles of the West, or of what they referred to as “the western myth.” Back of every myth there is a stern, harsh reality shaped by men and women of truly heroic mold. Those soft-bellied ones who come later find it easy to refer to things beyond their own grasp as myth; but the men Dr. Clagg had known were men who created myth every day of their lives, usually without any consciousness of doing so, but quite often with awareness that they were experiencing a life that was extraordinary.
Dr. Clagg had been in Dodge when the twenty-eight buffalo hunters who made the fight at Adobe Walls against more than a thousand Indians, returned from their fight. He was familiar, as were all western men, with the escape of John Coulter from the Blackfoot Indians, a run compared to which the run from the battlefield of Marathon pales to insignificance. He knew the story of Hugh Glass and the grizzly; the story of the ride of Portugee Phillips through a raging blizzard and thousands of Indians to bring help to Fort Phil Kearny; and he knew well the story of the Alamo.
The stuff of which such myths are made was born every day in the West, but at the moment of birth they were not myth; they were hard reality, the very stuff of life itself.
Dr. Rupert Clagg, who was more of such a man as these than he himself realized, recognized another in Mike Shevlin.