Chapter I

When Jim Torrance, riding up from the South, crested the live-oak-studded knoll from which he saw the rip-roaring little town of Sundown for the first time, the place looked as clean and pretty as a fresh picture, and as peaceful as the little dove cooing on a dead limb over his head. But that was because Sundown was still a good three miles away, and besides it was only mid-afternoon and not yet first-drink time.

“I’m turning off here to go into town, Skeeter,” he told the boy helping him with his handful of stock. “You go straight on with the horses. You’ll know the place when you get there; just watch for an old wheel track turning off where there’s a dead pine leaning over a big white rock. Likely I’ll overtake you anyhow. It’s only about seven miles.”

“Gee, Jim,” said Skeeter, “me, I’d like to see Sundown, too. I’ve heard a lot about it.”

“Not today, kid. In two-three days I’ll pay you off and you can ride where you please. Better hobble Barney and old Molly when you get there. I’ll see if maybe I can get you a pie in town.”

The boy, convoying the dozen head of likely looking saddle horses and the two heavily laden pack mules, rode on through the oaks, down the farther side of the knoll, into the straggling pines on the slopes beyond, and vanished in the creases of the hills which grew more rugged and more thickly timbered as they rolled away toward the far blue mountains in the north. Jim Torrance sat where he was a moment, rolling a thoughtful cigarette and looking toward Sundown with lazy-lidded eyes.

In the late October sunshine, as yellow as butter, under a sun-drenched sky as deep a violet hue as the towering mountains in the for background, at the end of a dusty road, wavering chalk-white across the valley lined with quivering aspens in their brilliant autumn dress, was a clutter of houses--and that was Sundown, where colors clashed and laughed, the warm red of bricks, the white of adobe walls, the weathered brown of shake roofs--and down in the valley there was a girl with a bright red neckerchief, riding a dappled gray horse. She was at considerable distance, on another road approaching Sundown from the north.

Jim Torrance and the girl rode into town at the same time; they were for an instant abreast as they came in front of Stag Horn Saloon. He was seeing many things today for the first time, since, on the single other occasion of coming into this neighborhood, he had kept straight on from the farther side of the knoll where he had left Skeeter, and had not come any nearer Sundown. So also for the first time he saw Sally Dawn Cannon. She did not appear to notice him at all, though at the sound of his horse’s hoofs she glanced his way. It was the most fleeting of glances, indifferent, flashing elsewhere.

He had the trick of taking in everything with those keen dark eyes of his, of registering swift impressions, of filing them away for possible future reference. He thought, “She’s a little beauty if there ever was one.” Not quite like other girls either, a sullen, smoldering beauty, with brooding, smoky eyes.

He passed her and dismounted under the big poplar with butter-yellow leaves that cast its black blot of shade in front of the saloon, and she rode straight on. As he jingled down to the edge of the wooden sidewalk, he turned his observant eyes upon the two men who were standing there; they were watching the girl go by and spoke of her.

“Prettiest girl inside a hundred miles, Bordereau,” said one of them--a short, stocky, immensely broad man, dressed in store clothes like a town dweller, yet with the hard hands and weathered face of a rancher.

“Yes,” nodded Bordereau, and rolled his cigar and squinted after her. A tall, darkly handsome man in frock coat and high hat, quiet-voiced, even unctuous, it was a simple thing to mistake Steve Bordereau for a prosperous undertaker. “Yes,” he said again, “she’s been getting better looking all the time. Classier now than Florinda, even.”

“If she was dressed right, she’d be.” Then the heavy-set man laughed. He said, “Now if you just had a girl like her in your place, you’d double your intake!”

Steve Bordereau pursed a full lower lip.

“It’s an idea, Murdo. I’ll get her.”

“Like hell you will!”

“What’s this, Thursday? I’ll have her upstairs at midnight just exactly one week from tonight. Midnight. Dressed right, too.”

“Bet?” challenged Murdo. There was only one way to settle things with men like these two, one of whom owned and the other helped operate the Stag Horn.

“Two to one,” said Bordereau coolly. “Five hundred of yours calls a thousand from me.”

Murdo stared at him, seemed about to agree, then shook his head.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve, Steve. I know you. No bets.”

* * * * *

Jim Torrance tied his horse at the hitching rail under the poplar, hung his spurs over the saddle horn and went into the saloon. There were not half a dozen men in the place, cattle hands from the look of them, and only one bartender behind the longest and most famous bar in this part of the country. Torrance photographed them all with that low-lidded glance characteristic of him; his survey began with the bartender and came back to him, taking stock of his pale-blue eyes, his pale, sleek hair that looked like the pictures in the barber shops, his mustaches like a buffalo’s horns. Jim Torrance spun a silver dollar on the bar, ordered his drink and asked:

“Know anyone up around here named Jim Torrance?”

“Howdy, Stranger,” said the bartender. He set forth bottle and glass and leaned forward conversationally on his elbows. “Jim Torrance?” he repeated. “Can’t say as I do. What’s he look like?”

“About my size and build,” Torrance told him.

“Who’s he askin’ for, Jurgens?” rapped out a voice from one of the men lounging over a round table farther down the room. “What’s he want?”

“You’d be sure to ask, now, Sam, wouldn’t you?” grunted Jurgens. “Well, he’s asking for a man name of Torrance, Jim Torrance.”

“What you want him for, Stranger?” demanded Sam, and got to his feet, a little dried-up man of fifty or thereabouts, seeming to rattle around in his blue overalls and faded blue denim shirt like a dried pea in a weathered pod. He had just about the shrewdest, brightest little eyes that ever twinkled and gleamed and widened and narrowed in a man’s face, eyes that just now, and at most times, were as eager as a six-year-old’s at Christmas time. He came hurrying forward.

“It’s old Sam Pepper,” Jurgens advised Jim Torrance. “The damn’ grasshopper’s got his nose in everybody’s business and knows most everything.”

Old Sam Pepper, a wisp of a graying man standing something like five feet and a half in his high-heeled half-boots, peered straight up into Jim Torrance’s face. All the men in the room had looked the stranger over pretty thoroughly, as was but natural and customary; strangers weren’t everyday occurrences in and about Sundown; but no man of them all regarded him with such frank and thoroughgoing interest as did Sam Pepper.

He took stock of everything--Torrance’s checkered shirt and neck scarf, his worn chaps, black and shaggy and dusty, the two crossed belts dragged low by their twin burdens of guns and cartridges, the worn, dusty boots beginning to grow lopsided on their high, rocking heels. But his greatest and gravest concern was the stranger’s face. He made Jim Torrance out to be tall and lean and gaunt, but as hardy and sinewy as a man whose muscles and tendons were all fine drawn steel wire; he stared up into a pair of keen, hard, dark eyes with their trick of being low-lidded as though always he was squinting at the sun, or probing under the surface of other men, and a mouth that was set and stern and somehow grim, a mouth that did not seem ever to have learned how to smile, a mouth, one would hazard, that knew less how to soften than to grow savage and cruel.

Sam Pepper was intrigued, but then, as Jurgens had suggested, he was forever growing curious about affairs not his own and men with whom he had no dealings. He said a second time, and more briskly, “What you want him for, Stranger?”

The stranger ignored him as a wolf hound ignores a poodle.

“Seems to me I’ve seen you somewheres,” Sam Pepper hurried on, just to make way for his second question. “What’s your name, Stranger?”

Then another man spoke up in a deep, throaty voice that sounded downright jovial in contrast to Sam Pepper’s reedy, rasping utterance, and Jim Torrance looked down the shadowy room to the speaker, a big, sturdy, bald-headed fellow a dozen years younger than Sam Pepper and some two or three times as big.

“Askin’ for Jim Torrance, be you?” he demanded. “Well, me, I know him. Seen him lately, too. I and him was pardners for a short time, over to Miller’s Camp. A man about your size; yep, about your build, too.”

Sam Pepper snorted for any to hear. Then in a lowered voice, hardly above a discreet whisper meant for the stranger alone, he said: “That’s only Lying Bill talking, Stranger. Lying Bill Yarbo. The truth ain’t in him and never was. Anything he says goes just the other way round; if he’d of said he hadn’t never saw or heard of Jim Torrance, well you’d know they’d been together not ten minutes ago.”

Lying Bill Yarbo shoved back the little poker table and came stalking forward.

“If you’re of a mind to advertise your business all over town, Stranger,” he said, for men to hear out on the street a block away--and they were long blocks in Sundown--“why you just let that feller that’s talking to you--Sam’l Pepper, his name is, whereas it ought to be Peeper--know about it and you won’t have to pay to get it published.” Then a heavy frown dragged at his shaggy, black eyebrows. “What’s he been saying to you about me? What’s he been whispering?” He balled up an oversized fist and took another forward stride, whereupon Sam Pepper whipped back and darted toward the door; and men laughed, and the bartender, bored as most of his fraternity grow to be habitually, almost smiled. Jim Torrance’s expression, or lack of the same, was undisturbed.

“You say you know Jim Torrance?” he said mildly. “Might I ask if he’s around town, or has been lately?”

Lying Bill Yarbo took a deep, preparatory breath, then began his rumbling recital.

“Like I say, him and me was pardners over to Miller’s. But that was quite a while ago, ’bout fifteen-sixteen year. Sixteen year, that’s what; I’m remembering now. It was when there was that big explosion the Billings boys was to blame for, a dozen men blowed higher’n kites. I rec’lec’ how a leg with the boot still on it was blowed in through the cabin door where me and Jim was having us our dinner. That was Cy Patten’s leg, and Cy got well and made him another one out of one that got blew off a piano over to Molly Blaine’s place. And now, the other day, not more’n say two weeks ago, you could of blowed me over with a puff of smoke when a feller sings out, ‘Hi, Bill!’ and I look around and see Jim Torrance. Seems as though--”

Jim Torrance downed his drink and went out; the last words he heard were Jurgens’, saying, “I never heard tell of that there explosion over to Miller’s, Bill,” and Lying Bill Yarbo answering crustily, “Shucks, there’s lots of things you never heard about.” He saw Steve Bordereau and Murdo standing in the shade where he had left them; the girl had passed out of sight. He continued along the wooden sidewalk, avoiding the trap of a broken board for bootheels, and presently heard hurrying steps behind him. Then Sam Pepper, breathless with haste, his short legs making two of one of Torrance’s strides, came up with him.

“Seeing how you’re a stranger in town,” said Sam Pepper, “and are looking for information, I got to warn you that Lying Bill Yarbo--”

“I’ve been warned,” said Torrance.

“I’ll ask folks that I see, folks that might know,” Pepper ran on. “Who’ll I say is wanting to know? What name, Stranger?”

For a split second Jim Torrance appeared to be considering. Then he said, in that same somehow incongruously mild tone of his, “I’m Torrance. Jim Torrance.”

Sam Pepper’s eyes flew wide open, his jaw dropped and he came to a dead halt. Of a sudden there were a dozen questions he was on edge to ask. But Torrance stopped a moment and looked at him in a way that dried up all questions. Then Torrance went on, and Sam Pepper, fairly itching with a brand-new curiosity, stood where he was and watched.

He saw Jim Torrance go into the one other saloon Sundown boasted--a squalid, dingy barroom and dance place frequented by the more patently riffraffian of the community’s population, swarthy breeds for the most part, with a sprinkling of low-life whites--and still waited. Torrance came out and Pepper darted in. In short order he ascertained that the stranger had asked whether a man named Jim Torrance had showed up there of late. Out Sam Pepper hurried again and saw Torrance go into the Stage Stop hotel and reappear within two or three minutes. Again Pepper made inquiries; yes, a stranger asking for a man named Torrance was just in here. And out Sam popped again, this time to see his latest and greatest interest in life, his new mystery man, step into the bake shop. He came out with something in his hand that looked like a pie. No doubt it was a pie. Just the same, Sam Pepper made sure.

“Yep, it was a pie!” he said under his breath, out on the street again. And when the newcomer mounted his horse and rode away, carrying an apple pie, Sam Pepper goggled after him. It didn’t seem to make sense somehow.