Chapter IX

Jim Torrance came stalking back into the Stag Horn. He had been away so short a time that he found things here pretty much as he had left them. Sally Dawn Cannon stood where he had seen her last and did not seem to have moved. Only a few paces from her, talking quietly into each other’s attentive ears, were Clark Murdo and the marshal, Rufe Biggs, keeping their eyes on her all the time. The only change in grouping that Torrance could note was this: A dozen men, hard hombres he judged them, and Murdo men, had gathered just behind Murdo and Biggs; they looked ready at the drop of the hat for anything they might be called on to deliver.

As Torrance entered, the room grew hushed and every eye turned to him. He stepped to one side of the door and got his back to the wall before he spoke. Then it was the girl whom he addressed.

“Everything’s all right now,” he said. “You’ll be free to go in about two minutes!”

“Like hell!” roared Murdo, tense and worried and truculent. “All you’re doing is a lot of wild talking. You’d better fold up and blow before you get yourself dehorned. _Sabe, hombre?_”

Torrance ignored him. To Rufe Biggs he said:

“We stepped out to the graveyard. Somebody seems to have been digging out there. The boys are bringing you what we found. Here they come now.”

They squeezed through the door, carrying the redwood box on their shoulders. It was Lying Bill Yarbo who set something down on the box when it had been deposited on the floor before Rufe Biggs.

“Here’s the headboard that went with the coffin,” said Yarbo. “Step up and read it, gents.”

Neither Biggs nor Murdo moved or spoke; they looked swiftly at each other and looked away even more swiftly. Other men crowded close. One sang out: “Hell, they’ve dug Bordereau up! Can’t they let a dead man lie in peace?”

“Maybe this dead man didn’t want to lie in peace until he’d had his own funeral and not somebody else’s,” drawled Torrance, and kept watching Murdo. “Lift the lid off, boys.”

A shout went up: “It’s Doc Taylor! It ain’t Steve at all! By the Lord, it’s Doc Taylor in Steve’s box!”

“You’ll find he’s had his head bashed in,” said Torrance. “Whether that killed him outright or whether he smothered after his quick burial, I don’t know. Maybe the coroner can find out. Anyhow, Biggs, he’s yours now. And you might ask your friend Murdo what he did with Bordereau and why he put Taylor in his place!”

“Why, damn you!” yelled Murdo, and again he went for his gun--and again he thought better of it.

“That’s twice you’ve done that, Murdo,” said Torrance. “Mean anything by it?”

Murdo, like Steve Bordereau in this, was a certain type of gambler, the cold-blooded, calculating type that will bet as high as any man--but only on a dead sure thing. Right now, though he had a hard, gun-slinging pack at his back, the odds for him personally did not appear to strike him as right. He got himself in hand, throttling down his anger, which he so seldom let sweep him away, and spoke coolly and with the affectation of a sneer.

“Seems like, for a stranger, you’re getting around,” he said.

“And at that I’ve still got quite some traveling to do,” returned Torrance. To the roomful of silent, puzzled men he added: “Later on you boys can figure out just what happened, but one thing ought to be clear enough to the thickest skull right now: First, Bordereau isn’t any more dead than you are; he wasn’t even bad hurt. The Cannon girl shot him high up, in the right shoulder I think it must have been. He put his hand up as he fell back and got blood on it and got the blood smear on his forehead. Then he got him his hunch to play dead, and you can take it from me he had his reasons for wanting to do that! Then some busybody brought the doctor in, and some helping friend of Bordereau’s cracked the doc over the head to keep him from going out and spilling the beans. That done, they have the funeral right away, Doc Taylor taking Bordereau’s place while Bordereau goes off somewhere and holes up until his wound heals. I’d say Marshal Biggs would be inside his rights to gather Murdo in and hold him on suspicion.”

A lean and foxy-faced young fellow, that same gimlet-eyed young hellion who had come out to Torrance’s place looking for the vanished girl, began whispering in Murdo’s ear. Murdo listened, then grinned.

“You’re right, kid,” he said, and then spoke his piece to all who cared to listen--and that meant all within earshot. “Torrance and some other boys go out and do some digging in the graveyard. They come back with Steve’s headboard and a coffin! Who’s to tell us it was Steve’s coffin in the first place? And if it was, who’s to say they didn’t lift Steve out and put Taylor in? Who’s here to say they didn’t kill Taylor themselves?”

“That’s right,” said Biggs quickly. “Dammit, that’s right!”

“Better watch your step, Echo Biggs,” warned Torrance. “Anyhow get this straight: You can’t arrest this girl for killing Bordereau when more than one of us knows Bordereau hasn’t been killed. Now I’m going to tell you all a little story. About six years ago a pardner of mine and myself were down at a little border town called Las Lunas, sixty miles from Nacional. We had forty thousand dollars between us and were taking our time to sink it in a cow outfit. One day when Danny was alone at the cabin some gent stepped in, shot him in the back of the head and made off with our stake. And the gent that did that went to a good bit of trouble to make it look as though I had murdered my own pardner.”

Murdo, though slow with his gun tonight, was quick with his tongue.

“A pardner-killer, huh?” he said. “So that’s what you are!”

“The gent that killed Danny,” Torrance continued imperturbably, “stepped right along. But he still kept up his play at getting me blamed for his night’s work. Twenty miles farther along he wrapped a bandana about his face, held up two sheep men that everybody knew had been hoarding for a long time, robbed them, killed one, said to the other, ‘Me, I’m Jim Torrance, and when you hear me coming you better hide,’ and kept on going. And only a year ago the same gent, or I’m guessing wrong, plugged a man down in Nacional when I was in town, and tried to throw that on me. His game was and still is clear enough. He knows damned well I’ll get him some day, if he can’t fix it up so that some hot-headed party swings me to a cottonwood first.”

“What the hell’s this got to do with us?” demanded Rufe Biggs.

“Plenty. I came up this way looking for a man that calls himself Jim Torrance whenever he pulls a fast one. I’ve got a reason or two to bet any man of you a thousand dollars to a hundred that that gent is Steve Bordereau. And, if you want to know, that’s why Bordereau is playing dead right now. He’s the sort that shoots a man in the back, that tries to manhandle a girl, that sets his yellow dog onto smashing Doc Taylor over the head and burying him just to give him a chance to hide out. He means to make his final clean-up here, then drift along somewhere else where they don’t know him, take a new name--and maybe get to be mayor or something like that.”

“Got any proof of all this, Stranger?” demanded Biggs, beginning to look a trifle uncertain.

“Somebody’s already said,” Torrance told him, “that this place isn’t any courthouse. Besides, I’ve talked myself out for one night.” He turned to Sally Dawn Cannon. “If you’re ready we’ll step along.”

She started forward eagerly. Rufe Biggs put out an involuntary hand to detain her, but Murdo moodily shook his head. Biggs dropped his hand and seemed relieved to do so, and Sally Dawn came swiftly to Torrance’s side. She stepped around the grewsome thing lying there on the floor staring up at her, and shuddered; but once outside in the clean night air, with friends about her, shudders were forgotten and an ecstasy thrilled through her. She put her two hands impulsively on one of Jim Torrance’s hard brown ones. She said with a catch in her voice:

“Some day when I can get a good dictionary I’m going to read it all the way through.” He jerked up his black brows at her, as much as to ask: “Who’s crazy now? You or me?” Then she ran on: “Maybe that way I can find the words to thank you! But for you, where’d I be now? But for you, I’d all my life go on thinking I’d killed a man.”

He chuckled at last, the way she loved to hear him.

“Shucks,” he said. “If you’d nailed Steve Bordereau proper, that wouldn’t have been anything to keep you awake, and you’d have saved me a job.”

Then they mounted, all of them, and rode out of town. For a few minutes Jim Torrance and Sally Dawn rode neck and neck. That was while he said to her a word or two he felt impelled to speak. He said:

“You’ve got good friends and unless I’m a liar you’re going to have a lot more real soon. You can go back to your ranch when you want to. Why not stay with the Peppers tonight? And when you go back home, why not have them come along, and Bill Yarbo and a couple of the other boys? And keep this in mind: You haven’t lost your ranch yet; you can bet your sweet life that Bordereau pulled a crooked trick or two getting you folks out on a limb; stick to it and you’ll beat him yet.”

At the edge of town they rode into the deep dark under a thick grove of big pines; when she said something to Torrance, still thinking him at her side, it was Lying Bill Yarbo who answered.

“Where’s Jim Torrance?” she asked.

He didn’t exactly know. No one else knew. They called for Torrance and got no answer.

He had dropped back, cut into a side trail and was already well ahead of them hurrying to his own place. He said to his horse, with whom he grew conversational at times when they had it all to themselves: “Here we’ve been putting in a lot of time messing around in a girl’s affairs and letting our own slide. Let’s change all that.”

At his ranch he went out to the barn and threw down a plentiful lot of hay into the mangers; the stock would be finding short browsing and feeling the want of warm shelter. He pulled his saddle and bridle, gave his horse a good rubdown and a here’s-thanks-old-boy slap on the rump, went out into the corral and tossed a skilful noose over his liveliest black mare’s neck. This one he saddled and left in readiness; thereafter he went into his house for a shave, a bite, and ten minutes’ relaxation flat on his back.

And then the thing happened which he might have expected, had he had all his wits about him. For of course he had lighted a lamp, and he had not covered his south window--and here came Sam Pepper on the run.

And Sam’s words, as he bounced into the house, ran even faster than a spry Sam Pepper could travel. There was a gleam in his eye, there were red spots in his cheeks, there was something akin to venom on his ready tongue. From the doorway he cussed Jim Torrance up hill and down dale.

“What’s eating you?” demanded Torrance, leaning on his elbow.

“You--you--you--” There Sam bogged down. But he grew vocal instantly. “You wanted me to help you, and I done it. You was going to let me in on a lot of secret doings--and, instead, you run out on me! What’s more, you only set me wondering about a lot of other things! I got a notion to cut your gizzard out and fry it in hawg fat and make you eat it!”

Torrance stood up. Of a sudden Sam Pepper, thinking himself about to be attacked by a man to whom killing was just a chore, leaped back out through the door, which, perhaps subconsciously, he had kept open against retreat.

“Don’t shoot, Jim. Don’t shoot!” he pleaded. “I was just funning. Shore I was, Jim.”

Torrance laughed at him and sat back on the edge of his bed. Pepper sidled back into the room. And then, brushing him aside, Lying Bill Yarbo came barging in.

“What the merry hell’s going on here?” shouted Bill Yarbo, comporting himself like a storm wind blowing its heartiest. “You’d run out on me, would you? And connive with this tricky, lying Sam Pepper? The truth ain’t in him and you ought to know it; and still you let him come in and powwow with you unbeknownst to others. Torrance, are you a damn’ fool on top of other things?”

Here was another cue for a laugh from Jim Torrance that started low down somewhere in his anatomy and rose into a glorious crescendo. He got to thinking, “If I went out gunning for a couple of boys to keep me from going to sleep on my feet, I couldn’t do better than S. Pepper and L. B. Yarbo.” But all that he said to them about all this was said in that laugh of his. He was a man with a tight smile, with now and again a mellow chuckle--with a laugh like that maybe once a year.

Sam Pepper stared, pop-eyed; Lying Bill glared. It was Lying Bill Yarbo who spoke.

“What’n merry hell are you talking about?” he demanded, and his big burly fists were doubled into young parboiled hams at his sides.

“Since you ask,” said Torrance, “I’m going for a chat with Steve Bordereau.”

“You do know then where he’s at?” gasped Sam Pepper, goggling.

“I’ve got a notion. My horse is saddled. I’m riding right away.”

“I’m going along,” said Yarbo heavily.

“Don’t you let him, Jim!” stuttered Sam Pepper. “There’s like to be trouble when you find Bordereau. Me, I’m your man. Yarbo here, he’d let you down--he’s the damnedest coward in seven states and--”

Lying Bill made a lunge at him but with almost incredible alacrity Sam Pepper scuttled across the room and established himself behind the headboard of Torrance’s bed.

“Pepper’s such a damn little liar,” snorted Lying Bill.

This time Torrance didn’t laugh; he was no longer in the mood for any light comedy. He saw what ailed them both, each man hating the hide the other walked in, each wishing his own subconsciously acknowledged failing upon the other. He said curtly:

“You boys stood in with me tonight and I’m obliged. I’ll be glad any time to do the same for both of you. Now I’ve got me a job that belongs to me and I’d better take it on single-handed.”

“Dammit, you ain’t got no gratitude!” yipped Sam Pepper. “If you had, you’d ask me along. You made a deal with me, remember; me, I done my part and you ain’t done yours!”

“Oh, hell, come along if you want to,” grunted Torrance. He got up and jammed on his hat. “You’ve got a ride ahead of you though.”

“Me, too!” boomed Bill Yarbo. “If there’s apt to be a showdown with Steve Bordereau, I’ve got a right to be in it. Hell’s bells, man, I’m the best friend Sally Dawn’s got; me and her old man, King Cannon, was boys together and--”

“He never seen King Cannon but once,” cried Pepper, “and then Cannon booted him clean off’n his ranch.”

Yarbo made a dive at him and Pepper slid up close behind Torrance’s back. Torrance sang out sharply:

“Look here, you two horn toads! You’re both welcome to trail along if you’re fools enough to do it, but I can’t bother with you if you can’t keep your damn mouths shut about each other. If you want to start something, better stay here and do it. I’ve got something else to do than trying to stand betwixt you.”

“I’ll leave him alone if he’ll leave me alone,” muttered Sam Pepper.

“Me too,” grumbled Lying Bill, though with reluctance.

“Only,” added Sam, “it would be a heap sight better if he went back home and stayed there!”

“You--!” shouted Yarbo.

But under that cold, low-lidded look that they got from Jim Torrance they grew silent. And in the end, not over ten minutes later, the three mismated musketeers rode out together--toward a meeting with Steve Bordereau.