It was hot and still. The desert of southern Arizona’s Apache country was rarely pleasant in the summer, and this day was no exception. “Bronco” Smith, who trailed just behind Red, mopped his lean face with a handkerchief and cursed fluently, if monotonously.
He had his nickname from the original meaning of the term wild and unruly and the Smith was a mere convenience, in respect to the custom that insists a man have two names. The “Dutchman” defied the rule by having none at all, or if he had once owned a name, it was probably recorded only upon some forgotten reward poster lining the bottom of some remote sheriff’s desk drawer. To the southwestern desert country he was simply and sufficiently, the Dutchman.
As for “Yaqui Joe,” he was called just that, or was referred to as the “breed” and everyone knew without question who was indicated. He was a wide-faced man with a square jaw, stolid and silent, a man of varied frontier skills, but destined to follow always where another led. A man who had known much hardship and no kindness, but whose commanding virtue was loyalty.
Smith was a lean whip of a man with slightly graying hair, stooped shoulders, and spidery legs. Dried and parched by desert winds, he was as tough as cowhide and iron. It was said that he had shot his way out of more places than most men had ever walked into, and he would have followed no man’s leadership but that of Big Red Clanahan.
The Dutchman was a distinct contrast to the lean frame of Smith, for he was fat, and not in the stomach alone, but all over his square, thick-boned body. Yet the blue eyes that stared from his round cheeks were sleepy, wise, and wary.
There were those who said that Yaqui Joe’s father had been an Irishman, but his name was taken from his mother in the mountains of Sonora. He had been an outlaw by nature and choice from the time he could crawl, and he was minus a finger on his left hand, and had a notch in the top of his ear. The bullet that had so narrowly missed his skull had been fired by a man who never missed again. He was buried in a hasty grave somewhere in the Mogollons.
Of them all, Joe was the only one who might have been considered a true outlaw. All had grown up in a land and time when the line was hard to draw.
Big Red had never examined his place in society. He did not look upon himself as a thief or as a criminal, and would have been indignant to the point of shooting had anybody suggested he was either of these. However, the fact was that Big Red had long since strayed over the border that divides the merely careless from the actually criminal. Like many another westerner he had branded unbranded cattle on the range, as in the years following the War Between the States the cattle were there for the first comer who possessed a rope and a hot iron.
It was a business that kept him reasonably well supplied with poker and whiskey money, but when all available cattle wore brands, it seemed to him the difference in branded and unbranded cattle was largely a matter of time. All the cattle had been mavericks after the war, and if a herd wore a brand it simply meant the cattleman had reached them before he did. “Big Red” accepted this as a mere detail, and a situation that could be speedily rectified with a cinch ring, and in this he was not alone.
If the cattleman who preceded him objected with lead, Clanahan accepted this as an occupational hazard.
However, from rustling cattle to taking the money itself was a short step, and halved the time consumed in branding and selling the cattle. Somewhere along this trail Big Red crossed, all unwittingly at the time, the shadow line that divides the merely careless from the actually dishonest, and at about the time he crossed this line, Big Red separated from the man who had ridden beside him for five long, hard frontier years.
The young hardcase who had punched cows and ridden the trail herds to Kansas at his side was equally big and equally Irish, and his name was Bill Gleason.
When Clanahan took to the outlaw trail, Gleason turned to the law. Neither took the direction he followed with any intent. It was simply that Clanahan failed to draw a line that Gleason drew, and that Gleason, being a skillful man on a trail, and a fast hand with a gun, became the sheriff of the country that held his home town of Cholla.
The trail of Big Red swung as wide as his loop, and he covered a lot of country. Being the man he was, he soon won to the top of his profession, if such it might be called. And this brought about a situation.
Cholla had a bank. As there were several big ranchers in the area, and two well-paying gold mines, the bank was solvent, extremely so. It was fairly, rumor said, bulging with gold. This situation naturally attracted attention.
Along the border that divides Mexico from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was an ambitious and overly bloodthirsty young outlaw known as Ramon Zappe. Cholla and its bank intrigued him, and as his success had been striking and even brilliant, he rode down upon the town of Cholla with confidence and seven riders.
Dismounting in front of the bank, four of the men went inside, one of them being Zappe himself. The other four, with rifles ready, waited for the town to react, but nothing happened. Zappe held this as due to his own reputation, and strutted accordingly.
The bank money was passed over by silent and efficient tellers, the bandits remounted, and in leisurely fashion began to depart. And then something happened that was not included in their plans. It was something that created an impression wherever bad men were wont to gather.
From behind a stone wall on the edge of town came a withering blast of fire, and in the space of no more than fifty yards, five of the bandits died. Two more were hung to a convenient cottonwood on the edge of town. Only one man, mounted upon an exceptionally fast horse, escaped.
Along the dim trails this was put down to chance,
but one man dissented, and that man was Big Red
Clanahan, for Big Red had not forgotten the
hard-bitten young rider who had accompanied him
upon so many long trails, and who had stood beside him
to cow a Dodge City saloon full of
gunfighters. Big Red remembered Bill
Gleason, and smiled.
Twice in succeeding months the same thing happened, and they were attended by only one difference. On those two occasions not one man survived.
Cholla was distinctly a place to stay away from.
Big Red was intrigued and tantalized. Although he would have been puzzled by the term, Big Red was in his own way an artist. He was also a tactician, and a man with a sense of humor. He met Yaqui Joe in a little town below the border, and over frequent glasses of tequila, he probed the half-breed’s mind, searching for the gimmick that made Cholla foolproof against the outlaw raids.
There had to be something, some signal. If he could learn it, he would find it amusing and a good joke on Bill to drop in, rob Cholla’s bank, and get away, thumbing his nose at his old pard.
The time was good. Victorio was on the warpath and had run off horses from the army, killed some soldiers, and fought several pitched battles in which he had come off well, if not always the victor. The country was restless and frightened and pursuit would neither be easily organized nor long continued when every man was afraid to be long away from home.
“Think!” Red struck his hairy fist on the table between them. “Think, Joe! There has to be a signal! Those hombres didn’t just pop out of the ground!”
Yaqui Joe shook his head, staring with bleary eyes into his glass. “I remember nothing— nothing. Except …”
His voice trailed off, but Big Red grabbed his shoulder and shook him.
“Except what, Joe? Somethin’ that was different! Think!”
Yaqui Joe scowled in an effort to round up his thoughts and get a rope on the idea that had come to him. They had been over this so many times before.
“There was nothing!” he insisted. “Only, while we sat in front of the bank, there was a sort of light, like from a glass and the sun. It moved quickly across the street. Like so!” He gestured widely with his hand, knocking his glass to the floor.
Clanahan picked up the glass and filled it once more. He was scowling.