Marauders' Moon Read online

  “If that’s all, dad, I’ll go,” she said quietly.

  Tolleston snorted. “Mrs. Partridge is waitin’ in the kitchen, keepin’ your food warm. This is the second time this week she’s had to do that.”

  “How many times has she waited supper for you this week?” she asked him mockingly.

  “What’s that got to do with it?” Tolleston snapped. “When I’m late, it’s for a reason. And I can ride this range in safety because I carry a gun.”

  The girl was not looking at him now; she was watching Webb, a mixture of friendliness and curiosity in her voice. She said to Mac, “Did you come in to talk to dad, Mac?”

  Mac nodded. To her father she said, “You might introduce your guest to me, dad, instead of combing me over.”

  “He’s no guest,” Tolleston said grimly. “He’s a jailbird. You ride all over Heaven knows where with trash like him runnin’ loose in the county. For Pete’s sake, girl, can’t you see it? And you won’t tell me where you go?”

  For answer she leaned over and kissed her father, then left the room, glancing strangely at Webb as she went.

  Tolleston growled something in his throat and yanked out his tobacco sack. He rolled a smoke swiftly, lighted it, and stood on the hearth, teetering on his heels, looking at the floor.

  McCaslon cleared his throat and Buck looked up, then said, “Oh! Sit down.”

  It was a long minute before Tolleston spoke, and when he did he talked swiftly to Mac.

  “I want a man sent over to this man’s country—or what he claims is his country—to check up on his story. Who can you spare?”

  Mac thought a moment and said, “Regan, I reckon.”

  “Go get him. Bring another man along that you can spare for a couple of days, too. Better make it Budrow.”

  Mac went out and returned with Stoop and the innocent-looking man. Webb did not know which was Regan until Tolleston said, “Listen careful to this, Regan.”

  “Sure,” Stoop said.

  Tolleston addressed Webb. “Tell him where this place is you claim to come from. Tell him who you worked for, and for how long; who you claim to know; who your friends claim to be.”

  Webb told him he came from over in Big Joe County; that he worked for the Double Pitchfork; that he was breaking out horses for Henry Warren; that his friends were almost anyone in the county-seat town who would talk.

  When he was finished, Buck said to Stoop, “You got that? All right, get some grub from Charley and light out.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes. Now.”

  Stoop went out. The chunky man fiddled with his Stetson until Tolleston said a little less sharply, “Sit down, Budrow. This’ll take time.”

  Then Tolleston, talking to Budrow, again reviewed the bank robbery in town that morning and the part Webb had played in it. Webb noticed that Tolleston remembered and related everything, even down to Iron Hat Petty’s bit of dubious evidence.

  “Now, Budrow, what I want you to do is this,” Tolleston said. “I want you to ride down to Bull Foot.”

  McCaslon leaned forward, his mouth open to speak, but Buck did not even glance at him.

  “You’ve never been down there, and to the best of my memory, no Wintering man has ever seen you since you’ve been in this country, has he?”

  Budrow scowled. “No, I don’t reckon so. I come over the mountains from the west, and this is the first spread I made. It took a couple of months for you to feed me up, and I ain’t been to Wagon Mound only three, four times.”

  “Yes. So you won’t be known. We’ll hair brand a horse for you so your brand won’t give you away. You’ll travel tonight and put into Bull Foot tomorrow from the south. I want you to hang around Bull Foot, in the saloons, dance halls, gamblin’ layouts, and such. Talk to anyone that’ll talk—even the sheriff. And keep your eyes open. What I want is this—any kind of proof you can get that this bank robbery in Wagon Mount was planned by that Wintering crew. I don’t care how long it takes. Get a job with an outfit if you have to. If you see anybody spendin’ more money than usual, find out where it came from. Be inquisitive, act dumb, get drunk, pick up with saloon bums. Do anything that’ll get you this information. And when you get it, ride back to me with it.”

  McCaslon said slowly, “Buck, that’s liable to take a man a year. Is it worth it, just so’s you can put a noose on this man’s neck?” He jerked a thumb at Webb.

  “That isn’t all of it, Mac,” Tolleston slowly replied. “I like to see justice done, and I aim to see Cousins gets justice. But more than that, I think it’ll mean a toe-hold that’ll give us a chance to smash that Wintering crowd for good and all.”

  “How?”

  Tolleston’s eyes focused on Mac. “How?” he said gently. “This way. Maybe I got a longer memory than most of you. Maybe I haven’t, but it seems like I’m the only man here that can remember the day we picked up and left our range over there in Wintering to start all over again up here. I never forget it. It’s with me all the time, Mac—that and the picture of that Bannister outfit hootin’ at us from the hills as we drove our stuff off.” His voice was grave, measured, more impersonal than Webb had heard it before, and therefore, he guessed, richer in meaning than any other words Tolleston had spoken.

  “I remember it, Mac. I live for the day when I’ll pay off that score. But I can’t do it without men—and I haven’t got them.”

  “The whole country remembers it, Buck. All us old-timers, anyway.”

  “But not like me and you,” Tolleston said swiftly. “They, remember it, but they don’t get fightin’ mad over it. They’ve worked up new places here, had families and built up their herds. Men like Will Wardecker, who fought Wake Bannister like a wildcat and had his horse shot out from under him by one of Wake’s crew. He was crippled for life by that fall. But does he remember it? Hell, no! He says, ‘Let’s live in peace.’ There’s others like him. As long as they’re let alone they won’t fight.” He smiled narrowly now, and in his eyes was the light of a single wild idea. “Now they’ve lost their money in this bank robbery. They’re cleaned out, and they’ll be mad.” He paused to isolate what he was about to say.

  “Then if I can prove that the Wintering outfit—the Bannisters and that crowd of rabble—was behind this hold-up, I’ll have what I want. An army—a hog-wild, blood-hungry army. And once I get it on the move, I’ll have Bull Foot in ashes and Wintering County only a memory.”

  Mac sighed and nodded. Webb watched them both, trying to understand the depths of their hatred. He thought he could, for this was a private feud only on a bigger scale, and the success of feuds that left families decimated, a country ravaged, lay in a single man’s ability to enlist scores under his banner. But to the injustice of it, the bloody cruelty of its course, Buck Tolleston was blind.

  Right now he tried to roll another cigarette, and his fingers were trembling so that he dropped the paper in disgust. Taking a deep breath to steady himself, he said to Budrow:

  “That’s what I want from you, Budrow. It’ll be dangerous. If you’re caught you’re a dead man. They won’t feel kind over having a deputy shot on the doorstep of our sheriff’s office, no matter if the man was a crook and was running with their own bought outlaws. I’d do this myself if I could get away with it, but I can’t. And I’m not making you. Do it if you like.”

  “I’ll do it,” Budrow said bluntly, and rose.

  “Good,” Tolleston said briefly. “Sharpen up a knife. I’ll be out in a moment and we’ll change that Broken Arrow brand to a Double Diamond Bar.” To Mac he said, “Give him a hand, Mac.” He turned to Webb. “You stay here.”

  When the other two had gone, Tolleston sat down. He seemed to have forgotten that Webb was in the room, except that occasionally he would turn his head to regard Webb with something like curiosity. Finally he rose and walked over to the hearth and put his back to the now-dead coals.

  “That girl was my daughter, Martha,” he said apropos of nothing.

  Webb d
id not reply, waiting.

  “You told me this afternoon you could do almost any work around a ranch, didn’t you?”

  Webb nodded.

  “And probably like doin’ it?”

  “That’s why I’m punchin’ cows and breakin’ horses instead of counter jumpin’.”

  “And you’d rather stick up banks than do either,” Tolleston said quietly. Webb did not bother to reply to this.

  “Well, since you like to work on a spread, I don’t aim to let you,” Tolleston went on calmly. “I’ve got another job for you.”

  When Webb still said nothing, Tolleston went on: “My girl rides away from the spread two or three times a week. She’s gone all day. I want to know where she goes.”

  “You want me to spy on her?” Webb asked scornfully.

  “Yes. Spy on her,” Tolleston echoed, as if he were not ashamed of the word.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Mrs. Partridge has a fruit cellar out behind the house. It hasn’t got a window. I’ve got a pair of leg-irons around somewhere. Make your choice, and Wardecker be damned.”

  “You’ve made it for me.”

  “I thought so. And in case you have any fancy notions about breakin’ away from me and headin’ out of the country, I’ve got another piece of good news.”

  Webb watched him.

  “I fired a man last year for ridin’ his horses until he ruined ’em. I’ve got a windbroke sorrel of his out in the pasture that I aimed to pension. He’ll be yours. He can’t travel over a slow trot.”

  Webb grinned in spite of himself.

  “That leaves only one possibility,” Tolleston said slowly. “You might overtake Martha and want her horse. She wouldn’t give him to you. She’d fight.” Tolleston paused. “As crooked a man as you appear to be, I still don’t think you’d hit a woman. And you’d have to if you got that horse.”

  “Coming from you, that’s almost a compliment, Tolleston,” Webb observed.

  “It is,” Buck agreed bluntly. “Now, give us a hand with this horse outside.”

  At the horse corral, three riders were just dismounting, talking to Mac and Budrow as they removed the saddles from their tired horses. They were the three Broken Arrow hands who had been in the posse.

  Talk ceased as Tolleston and Webb approached.

  “Well?” Tolleston demanded.

  “Never saw anything but their dust,” one of the weary hands said. “They crossed over into Wintering on the road. We followed ’em to the mouth of Wailing Canyon, and then some line rider up on the rim started throwin’ shots at us.”

  “Did you smoke him out?”

  “Sure. But they was gone by the time we did.”

  “Still goin’ south?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Tolleston turned his head and looked steadily at Webb. “Well, well,” he said mildly, meaningly.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mitch Budrow stopped in Wagon Mound—so named because of the tall butte shaped somewhat like a Conestoga wagon which lay to the west—and passed the time of night with the hostler at the O. K. corral. He wanted to be seen. Then he mounted and rode south out of town, but as soon as he was out of sight he angled west off the road and lifted his horse into a stiff trot. He held this southwesterly course most of the night, so that, had he been observed by a man who knew the country, Mitch’s claim that he was heading for Bull Foot would not have been believed. But Mitch would never have claimed it, for he had never intended going there.

  It was still night when he crossed the county line. He observed the occasion without a trace of relief or apprehension, for Mitch Budrow held no illusions about the part he was playing. He would probably get it in the back some day, no matter what county he happened to be riding through, and he reflected without rancor that, although there are strange ways of paying back debts, this was the strangest.

  The grass of the small prairie he was crossing was lush, and he could hear the swish of its dew-laden richness against his horse’s legs. He was not sure of his trail, since he had made this trip at night only five times in twice that many months, but once he felt his horse slope steeply down the side of the swale he looked around him at the starshot blackness, almost certain. And when his horse crossed a stream he was sure, and he turned down it, at ease. If his guess was right, this was Copperstone Creek, and he had only to follow its rather direct course to arrive at Wake Bannister’s home ranch. Ever since he crossed the county line he had been riding on Bannister’s Dollar range, and if he were to ride till the next sunset in the same direction, he would still be on it. Mitch gave little thought to this, however; better men than himself had accepted the name of Bannister as meaning bigness and power and wealth.

  It was one of these big Bannister men that Mitch was thinking of, and trying not to. By the time the first faint shafts of the sun cut straight across the earth, bringing every blade of grass into momentary relief, Mitch knew what he was going to say. He lifted his gaze across the vast hollow ahead of and below him, and he saw that the sun had not yet touched the Dollar spread. But even in this muted light he could see its size, and he marveled quietly.

  Like many a western ranch, it lay on the banks of a creek. But this was not a ranch in the accepted sense of the word; it was almost a town. The big main house, which dominated the rest of the place through the simple fact that it had appropriated all the largest trees, was still a little strange to Mitch. He had never seen a tenth of its rooms, and he knew he never would. Being a dry-country man, used to adobe and stone and maybe a log shack in the high line camps, Mitch never got over his initial awe of seeing a whole vast two-story building made of thick, unspliced logs. So were its wings, and so were their wings. The whole affair angled and turned, doubled back until it seemed to Mitch that all the forests in all the mountains must have been cut to supply material.

  The barns and sheds, a good way from the house, were of stone, more familiar, and the huge and rambling combination bunk house and cook shack was of adobe that matched the huddle of houses behind it, in which the Mexican field hands lived. All of this, with the exception of the corrals, contrived to sprawl around a bare plaza, where the ranch store thrust up its tin roof behind its false front.

  By full sun-up, when the place came alive, Mitch had put up his horse in the small corral behind the store, as he had been ordered to do, and made his way to the main house. At a door in one of the wings close to the blacksmith shop he paused. There was a tangle of scrap iron and wheel rims to the side of the door, and Mitch surveyed it with the mild disapproval of an orderly man.

  He looked up to behold the blacksmith in his undershirt sleeves watching him from the wide door of the shop.

  “Morning,” the blacksmith said.

  “Morning,” Mitch replied, and said no more. He had been ordered not to. He let himself into the room which was Wake Bannister’s office and the nerve center of the Dollar spread. It was big, bare of furniture except for a rickety desk and a half dozen sorry-looking chairs. Mitch sat in one of them and rolled a smoke, and let the hot, stale air of the room take the chill off him.

  He was almost drowsing when the door opened to admit first a tuneful whistle and then a man. Mitch was on his feet when the man entered.

  Wake Bannister had been called many things in his fifty years, but he had never been called ineffectual. To begin with, his presence was awesome. Six foot six—massive-shouldered, white-haired, lazy as a cat, there was something almost electric in his being. Men felt it when they talked to him, felt it almost as much as they felt the sharp, piercing blue of his eyes. His face, while weather-burned and sun-wrinkled, had never mellowed, never softened. It combined the aggressive jaw with the thinker’s broad forehead, a contradiction which was the key to the man. His nose was thin, and the whitest part of his face was where the skin drew tight over its high bridge.

  Right now he caught sight of the waiting Mitch, and he paused in his stride, his whistle dying.

  “I thought I told you not to co
me here unless you had something to say,” he said mildly. He had a fine voice, too, soft and low and penetrant, but maybe this was because men stopped talking when he opened his mouth.

  Mitch shifted to his other foot. “I have.”

  “About that bank hold-up? I’ve known it for hours.”

  “But not all of it,” Mitch said.

  Bannister regarded him a moment, frowning, then said, “Pull up a chair. I haven’t smoked yet.” He sat down at the desk and offered Mitch a cigar, which was declined, then lighted one himself.

  “What’s up?” he asked finally.

  Mitch, more at ease now, told Bannister of Tolleston’s conviction that Webb was implicated in the bank stick-up, along with McWilliams.

  “The damn fool,” Bannister said quietly. “Go on.”

  “This Cousins is Tolleston’s prisoner now. He has him over at the Broken Arrow. Tolleston aims to hold him until he gets proof that Cousins was in on the hold-up.”

  Bannister was on the track of something. Mitch knew he could skip whole sentences now and Bannister would still follow his meaning.

  “That’s why I’m here. Tolleston told me to head for Bull Foot and stay there until I got some kind of proof that the five robbers were hired by this county. That would tie up McWilliams with them, and Cousins, too.”

  “You didn’t come here to tell me Buck is trying to frame a saddle bum.” Bannister said instantly.

  “No. Here it is: If Tolleston gets proof that Wintering County was behind the hold-up, he aims to use it as a pry. With that pry he’ll raise all the ranchers in San Patricio County out of their seats fightin’ mad, and when he has ’em fightin’ mad he aims to raid Bull Foot. Burn it down, plunder the county. He’s been waitin’ for this, dreamin’ of it—”

  “I know,” Bannister cut in quietly. He smoked in silence, Mitch watching him.

  “Had breakfast?” Bannister asked finally.

  “No.”

  “Go get it and come back.”

  Mitch rose, Bannister with him. As Mitch was going out, Bannister said, “I take back what I first said to you. You’ve got judgment, boy.”