The Bounty Hunters, page 7
When the sun was only an hour high there was a sudden burst of firing from the rocky hill to the southwest.
Travis hugged the ground as bullets whined off the rocks a little short of his position. At first he figured the range was too far. Then, to his surprise, he heard the Apaches scrambling away through the rocks in frantic flight.
He stood up to see what was going on and one of the Indians threw a quick shot at him. Travis fired back and the Indian grunted and fell. The marksman high in the rocks dropped the other one.
“Travis!” Link Colman called. “Come out with your hands up! Try running and you’ll get what they got!”
“Travis!”
Colman was getting impatient. He was also getting worried. The sunset was flaming in the west. In a little while it would be dark, and then Travis could cause all kinds of mischief. Worst of all, he might get away.
“Make it easy on yourself, Travis! Your horse is dead and it’s twenty miles to the next town! If I don’t get you the Apaches will!”
Behind him Colman heard the click of a gun being cocked, and he thought, Oh no, not again! He carefully turned his head and saw Travis standing by a big rock with the open-top Colt trained on him. The dying sun was behind Travis, in Colman’s eyes, and Colman swore softly. There was no way he could bring his rifle around and get off a shot before Travis killed him.
“Drop the rifle,” Travis said.
Colman ground his teeth and obeyed.
“Now the gunbelt.”
Colman unbuckled the gunbelt and let it fall. “Travis,” he said, “how the hell did you get up here without me seeing or hearing you?”
“Same way the Apaches sneaked up on me, I guess,” Travis said. “Move back away from the guns.”
Once more Colman obeyed. He had no other choice. He knew that Travis, despite his quiet, casual tone and half-friendly expression, was a very dangerous man, a desperate man. If he had to he would squeeze the trigger and not lose much sleep over Colman. So Colman backed away from the guns, and Travis stepped forward and picked them up with his left hand, keeping his own gun on Colman.
“I’ll leave them down there,” Travis said, pointing down toward his dead horse. “But I’m going to have to borrow your horse. I’ll leave him in the next town. I hate to leave a man afoot, but I’m sort of in a hurry.”
Colman scowled. “I reckon you know what they do to horse thieves.”
Travis was almost smiling, but other than that his hard brown face was expressionless. “I don’t think you’ll make a fuss about it, Colman,” he said. “You’d have to explain how I got the horse. Besides, if you turned me over to the law you’d lose the bounty Grayson has offered for me.”
“I doubt if I would have actually handed you over to Grayson,” Colman said. “I just wanted to prove I could do it. But if you leave me afoot it will be a pleasure to hand you over to him.”
“Your luck will have to improve a lot,” Travis told him.
“It will,” Colman told him. “I know I’ve been looking like some kind of clown ever since I met up with you. But whether you realize it or not that’s bad for you. I’m not a very funny man, and I don’t have much of a sense of humor. You’ll regret making a fool out of me.”
“You’re giving me too much credit,” Travis said. He hesitated. “I don’t usually give advice, Colman, but I’ll make an exception in your case. Go after someone else. This is something between me and the Grayson gang. Stay out of it. It’s going to get dirty and dangerous before it’s over. And they won’t like you sticking your nose in any more than I do.”
“I don’t know if you’ve heard of me or not, Travis,” Colman said in a hard tone. “But I’ve got a reputation to protect. When I go after someone I don’t quit till I get him. Before it’s over I may wish I hadn’t set out after you, but that won’t stop me. The only thing that will stop me is a bullet.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Travis told him.
Chapter 8
After Travis had ridden off on Colman’s blue roan, Colman descended the rocky slope to get his guns. He found them near the dead horse and strapped the gunbelt on, afterwards checking both pistol and rifle. Travis had also left his canteen, saddlebags and blanket roll, for which Colman was sourly grateful. He did not much look forward to carrying the stuff twenty miles to the next town.
But it had already occurred to him that he might not have to walk that distance. Some of the Apaches must have had horses, although they often traveled on foot. The question was, where had they left them?
He looked about and then began making his way along the base of the curving ridge on his right. It was already dark and there was no moon yet, and the ground was rocky and rough. He stumbled several times and made a lot more noise than he wanted to.
He had not gone far when a sound stopped him dead in his tracks. A small rock was tumbling down the steep slope not far ahead of him. He swept the slope with a sharp glance as he ducked behind a boulder. He could see nothing but rocks and brush, but he felt certain there was an Apache up there, perhaps wounded, but with little doubt armed and dangerous. The Indian must have waited until dark and then begun crawling through the rocks, trying to reach the horses, which were probably in the arroyo that began just ahead.
Colman looked about. He could not reach the arroyo without exposing himself, and it would take him so long to go back and circle around that the Indian would undoubtedly reach the horses before he did.
He listened, but could not hear the Indian moving. The Apache was lying motionless in the rocks, watching Colman’s position and waiting for him to move and expose himself.
Colman cussed silently. He was not even sure there was an Apache up there. A lizard or almost anything might have loosened the rock. But he had to assume that it was an Apache and act accordingly.
It seemed that the only thing he could do was to wait until daylight and see what developed then. The Apache had him trapped, but he also had the Apache trapped. Or so he thought anyway.
A cold wind rose and Colman crouched shivering behind the rock, watching the boulder-strewn slope. Time dragged by like a wounded snail. Once he thought he heard a small sound in the rocks, but decided it was only the wind stirring the stunted shrubs. Off to the east, the way Travis had gone, an orange moon floated up in the sky. From time to time Colman glanced at the moon, checking its progress. At last the moon dimmed and the sun flushed the eastern sky with its rose and gold light.
Colman had not heard the Apache move during the entire night. He felt certain he would find a dead Indian on the slope. Instead he found a bloody trail which led him along the ridge and down into the arroyo where the Indian ponies had been. The wounded Apache had ridden one of the horses and led or driven the others away down the sandy arroyo without making any sound that Colman could hear.
Colman set out on his long walk silently cussing Travis. He looked forward to the day when he would hand him over to Sam Grayson. The only thing that worried him was that Grayson’s men might get Travis first.
Chet Ramsey lay dead in front of the old shack. The shack itself was empty, except for a crude bed and a few other pieces of furniture Ramsey had made. Billy Primrose and Nita Ramsey had come and gone. They had made good time. A lot better than Travis had expected. They must have known he would be following them.
The way it looked to Travis, Chet Ramsey had come out of the shack and Primrose had shot him. The first bullet had not killed him. He had been shot twice, once in the head at close range. Whether he had told them where his money was or not, Travis had no way of knowing. Ramsey had not told him where the money was and he had not asked.
But before Travis had left, Ramsey had told him, “If anything happens to me, the money’s yours. I don’t want Nita to have a cent of it.”
Travis had learned a long time ago not to put much faith in the promises Ramsey made, especially when he was upset about something. And when he had left he had figured that Chet would probably outlive him and change his mind a dozen times before he died. But now Ramsey was dead, and Travis had no idea where the money was. If Nita and Primrose had gotten their hands on it, it would not last very long.
Travis dug a grave in the pines with a broken shovel and buried Ramsey, piling rocks on top of the grave. Then he took care of his horse and cooked his supper in the old shack, at the rock fireplace. The food had no taste. He felt strangely numb and empty. Chet Ramsey had not been a man he could admire a great deal, but whatever his faults, Ramsey had been the only one who had tried to do anything for Travis since his parents had died. Now there was no one left who cared what happened to him. In his way, Ramsey had cared, whenever he could stop thinking about himself long enough.
And Travis felt responsible for his death. He should have killed Billy Primrose in Tucson. It would not do much good to kill him now. And for all he knew Primrose might have relatives somewhere who would come after him. The Grayson gang was enough for him to worry about.
But Travis knew he was kidding himself. He could not let them get away with it. They had caused Ramsey enough trouble before coming back and killing him.
The next morning he picked up their trail and followed it to Santa Fe.
Through the window of a small restaurant, Lorna Mason saw Travis ride by. So he had come to Santa Fe after all, she thought. She should have been angry, but wasn’t. She remembered Link Colman’s request, but she had no intention of sending off any telegrams. She did not owe Colman anything and she did not like him. But when she thought about Travis she sighed and her eyes grew dreamy.
But she did not try to see Travis again. It would do no good. She was a married woman and if possible she meant to patch things up with her husband. There could be no future with a man like Travis, any more than there could be one with a fugitive and outlaw like Barney Pierce. Sooner or later the Grayson gang would kill Travis, and the law would get Barney. No, it was no use thinking about either of them. It was time she got silly notions out of her head and started thinking about the future. She did not want to end up alone, and she certainly did not want to end up a widow.
Her best bet was Joe Mason—if she could just make him see that.
She had finally found out where he was. He had not stayed in Santa Fe long, but he had headed for a mining town in Colorado, a small place called Nowhere. She believed there was another town called Nowhere someplace in Arizona. The one in Colorado was a supply town for the mines in the surrounding area, but once she got there, she was sure she would find him. Sooner or later he would come into town. There had been a fresh strike near there and a lot of people were pouring into the area. There was even talk of building a railroad to the town.
But Lorna would have to go most of the way by a roundabout stage route that had her thoroughly confused. She hoped the drivers would keep her from getting lost or ending up on the wrong stage.
She remained in Santa Fe several days longer, waiting for an expected letter from Barney Pierce. Finally she got a short note. “I’m headed for Nevada. If things don’t work out with your husband, meet me in Carson City. Love, Barney.”
She was a little disappointed by the briefness of the note and its impersonal tone. But she knew Barney. He wanted her to make up her own mind and then she could not blame him for her decision.
In fact she had already made up her mind. Only Joe Mason could change it for her.
There was a crowd on the street of Nowhere, watching the stage arrive. When Lorna Mason stepped out in her green dress, the rough-garbed crowd stared in amazement. There was an audible intake of breath and low mutters of surprise. The men in the crowd were used to fancy women, some of them real lookers, but most of them had not seen anything like Lorna Mason in a long time, if ever. She had the look of a lady, but many of the men took her for some famous actress come here to entertain them in one of the saloons, since there was no theatre. In rough mining towns, saloons were often converted into theatres for an evening, and sometimes even into churches.
In the crowd stood a man with a short chestnut beard. There was a remote smile in his clear gray-blue eyes. His lean, tan face showed no expression as he looked at Lorna Mason. She did not see him, for she barely glanced at the crowd before she entered the Miners Hotel, the attentive young clerk carrying her bags.
The man with the chestnut beard turned and went along the crowded street. He had half expected someone else to arrive on the stage—Billy Primrose and Nita Ramsey. In Santa Fe he had learned that they were asking for directions to the isolated town. It seemed that everyone was coming to Nowhere. That always happened when there was news of a fresh strike. In a week or two most of them would be gone, moving on to the next disappointment on the bonanza trail.
Travis entered the Golden Nugget Saloon. It was a little early for the usual saloon crowd, but there were several men in the place. A freckle-faced, red-haired young man stood at the bar not far from Travis. The redhead glanced idly at him and then exclaimed in surprise, “I’ll be damned! Dan Britton!”
“Call me Baker,” Travis said.
“Baker?” Red Hickey echoed. “It may be Baker now, but it was Dan Britton back in Virginia.”
“Must have me mixed up with someone else,” Travis said, motioning to the bartender for a beer.
Just then a big red-faced man in a plaid coat came in and Red Hickey beamed at him. “Hello, Mort! What you been up to?”
“Not a hell of a lot,” Mort said, glancing at Travis out of bold, friendly blue eyes.
“Mort, this here’s—what did you say yore name was again, Dan?” Hickey said.
“Baker,” Travis said. “Tom Baker.”
“Yeah,” Hickey said. “Tom Baker. And this here big rascal is Mort Ritchie. He’s from Texas. You can tell by his size. Everything’s big down there. I hear they got mosquitoes big enough to eat a man up in one night.
“Where did you hear them lies?” Mort Ritchie asked. “Just one man won’t last our mosquitoes a whole night. Not unless someone’s already slipped in and fed them some horses or something.”
“Like I say,” Red Hickey said, “they grow everything big down there, including liars.”
“No, it’s true,” Travis said. “I was down there a while back and a fellow got carried off by a swarm of mosquitoes. A posse went after them, but all they found was the man’s hat and boots.”
Ritchie looked at Travis in surprise, then said to Hickey, “See what I mean?”
“You boys are pullin’ my leg,” Hickey said.
Ritchie had thought of something else. He elbowed Hickey and said, “Got a letter back from my girl in Brownsville, Red. She said I’d been going nowhere a long time and it looked like I finally got there.”
The two of them had a big laugh about that. They seemed to have forgotten Travis. Which was all right with him. But he knew they would remember him as soon as they ran out of anything else to talk about. With Red Hickey around, there wasn’t much point in calling himself Tom Baker any longer. Everyone in Nowhere would soon know his real name. And with Lorna Mason in town, it was only a matter of time before everyone knew Dan Britton and Ben Travis were one and the same man.
He sighed, then shrugged and smiled a faint, wry smile. Maybe someday he would find a place where no one would know who he was. Paying for his drink he left the saloon, not interrupting the laughter of Hickey and Ritchie to say goodbye. With little doubt he would soon see them again anyway.
Red Hickey glanced at Travis as he went out through the swing doors. “I knew him back in Virginia when we were boys,” Hickey said. “Never knew anyone like him. He could just watch somebody do something and then he could do it better than they could, even if he’d never done it before.”
“I just found that out,” Mort Ritchie said. “But I would of swore he was from Texas. Only a Texan can lie like that.”
Hickey shook his head. “No, he’s from Virginia. His folks owned one of the biggest plantations in the state before the war wiped them out. Real southern aristocrats. But old Dan never put on airs. He was as common as you or me.”
“That’s purty common,” Ritchie said.
“He don’t seem much like he used to, though,” Hickey added. “Not long after he left Virginia we heard he got in a shootin’ scrape out here somewhere and killed some fellows. After that we never heard any more about him. I just figgered he caught a bullet himself and crawled off somewhere and died. It’d be just like him to do that and not tell anybody.”
“Maybe that’s what happened,” Ritchie said.
Hickey glanced toward the swing doors. “Could be,” he said.
Chapter 9
The owner of the Miners Hotel, one Quigley by name, was an enterprising little man with an egg-shaped head and a solemn squint. He was getting on in years and most of his hair was gone. The rest had turned white. A potbellied little man with a long thin nose and a lot of nervous energy. Behind his hotel he had built two rows of one-roomed shacks out of rough-sawed lumber, scrap lumber, tarpaper and almost anything else he could find. Some of the shacks had small cookstoves, but most didn’t. All of the shacks had a bed of some kind and perhaps a chair or two.
Quigley knocked on the door of one of the shacks, then opened the door and saw the man he knew as Tom Baker sitting in a chair by the window, cleaning a long-barreled revolver. Quigley looked uneasily at the pistol. Then he noticed that Baker had a cigarette between his lips and that seemed to worry him even more.
“You don’t smoke in bed, do you?” Quigley asked. “I don’t allow no smoking in bed. If one of these shacks go, they’ll all go.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Travis replied.
“My hotel too,” Quigley said.
Travis glanced mildly at the little man and continued his work in silence.
“When you expect them people to get here?” Quigley asked.
