Leslie Charteris: The Saint Goes West

They watched him walking away down towards the corral, the well-worn cartridge belt drooping under his right hip and the holstered Colt purposefully tied down to his thigh. He could so easily have looked melodramatic, and yet the stoical naturalness of him made that word impossible.

Morland turned to the Saint with a little bewildered gesture, as if all these things were too much for him.

“What does he mean? Does he think the Sheriff would be on Valmon’s side?”

“You can never tell,” said the Saint philosophically. “Such things have happened.”

Morland’s lips tightened.

“Well, I’m going to find out!” He stuck his pipe in his mouth at a stubborn angle which to Simon had the ironic pathos of unconscious futility. “If... if I could borrow your car, I could pick up my wheels on the way in and have them fixed, and then someone could fetch the station wagon in this evening.”

“Help yourself,” said the Saint cordially, and held out his keys.

Jean Morland came slowly back to the porch after she had seen her father start. She turned again beside the Saint, who was smoking a cigarette there with one hip hitched on the rail, and looked down the canyon where Morland’s dust was creeping down towards the desert.

One of her hands curled into a small fist, but it was much longer than that before her eyes moved. And then suddenly she turned on him, almost savagely, and said, “Why are you all so cruel to him?”

“Nobody’s been cruel, Jean,” he said steadily. “The boys are ready to fight for him. Hank Reefe is toting the old family six-shooter for him. They just don’t talk a lot.”

She brushed back her hair helplessly.

“Oh, I know. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t ever have said that. But it seems cruel. As if you were all laughing up your sleeves at everything he says.”

“We could be, in a sort of way. If he had some of these boys back on his home ground in Richmond, Virginia, he could probably make them look pretty naive. Well, out here he looks pretty naive to them. But it isn’t unkind. He seems to have a lot of ideas of his own, so they figure the best thing is to leave him to it and let him find out for himself. Then he’ll get it out of his system. You see, they know.”

“And you think you know, too.”

“I don’t know much. I’ve only just arrived. But if I have to take somebody for an authority, I’ll take Hank and the boys. After all, they’ve been here for a while... I only want to do the best I can for you.”

He smiled, and the Saint’s smile could be as quietly irresistible as it could be quietly deadly. Quite naturally he touched her arm.

“Why don’t you show me around this morning,” he said, “and let me get my bearings on the battlefield?”

“Of course,” she said, and she went on looking at him with that open-eyed straightforwardness that was more baffling than any coquetry. “Yes, I’d like that.” And there was nothing but the sincere direct statement of fact in her voice. But it was as if she was realising, with a little surprise and puzzlement, that they were not new acquaintances any more. Or had they ever been strangers?... “You could go on ahead and saddle the horses, and I’ll be ready as soon as I’ve cleared up some of these dishes. Mine is a pinto — the only one in the corral. You can choose your own.”

“Okay,” he said.

After he had saddled the pinto his own choice was immediate — a beautiful golden palomino with lines that would have stood out in any company. He was just tightening the cinch when he heard the girl’s step behind him, and turned to find her standing with her eyes fixed on the horse in an uncertain kind of stillness.

“I should have known you’d pick Sunlight,” she said slowly.

Simon unhooked the stirrup from the horn and returned her gaze innocently.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s the horse that killed my uncle. Nobody else has ridden him since then.”

The Saint paused to light a cigarette, and then he deliberately put his foot in the near stirrup and swung lightly into the saddle. The palomino didn’t stir. Simon stroked its sleek neck.

“It seems like an awful waste of a good horse,” he murmured.

“Let’s follow the brook up to Valmon’s boundary and see what the scenery’s like around there.”

The stream crossed the boundary line near the north-west corner of the Morland ranch. For a full mile around that corner the country was a cluster of tall rolling hills, but it seemed to Simon from where they halted to survey it, with Jean Morland pointing out the landmarks, that all the higher crests were on the Circle Y. She confirmed this.

“But the spring starts lower down,” she explained. “It rises on Valmon’s side. Then it does a horseshoe turn back on to our land.”

“Which I suppose makes it easier for Max to turn it back again,” said the Saint.

He gazed thoughtfully at the painted grandeur of the landscape, wishing that he had nothing else to look for than the beauty which Nature had squandered there in a riot of heroic sculpture. He had a passing notion that with water established in that sort of formation it should have been possible to tunnel or drill on Morland’s side of the hills and bring a new stream gushing from the same buried reservoir, but he was not much of a geologist, and anyway the point was not instantly constructive or even closely related to his original quest. He wished too that he had been free to share the spell of the scene, with no other consideration on his mind, with the girl who had so simply and so unaccountably, in less than a day’s span, become one of his oldest friends, but that also was just an unprofitable dream, so long as Dr Ludwig Julius was in Arizona. His face was a tanned mask studying the terrain, and his right hand rested unconsciously on the butt of the Magnum that he had belted on that morning as automatically as Reefe had put on his Colt.

“Let’s ride on some more,” he suggested.

He turned the palomino into a trail that looked as if it might find a way to the top of one of the higher slopes from which there should be a fair panorama of Valmon’s property. As they climbed, the wild brush-pocked hills opened and spread below them, pushing back the rugged horizon to let broad tablelands press up to the north-west. The trail, if it had ever really been a trail, petered out unobtrusively, until the Saint was breaking new ground all the time and his eyes were kept busy in search of ways to circumvent steeper slopes and increasing obstacles of tumbled rock. Presently he was on a spoon-shaped ledge from which at first sight all progress seemed to be blocked by a precipitous mass of broken boulders.

He reined his horse there and turned cross-saddle to estimate the view, as Jean Morland urged the pinto’s nose up to his knee. Below and to the left, near the foot of the hills which they were climbing, he could now see some of the scattered buildings of the J-Bar-B, looking like toy models at the distance of two miles or more. There was one section of shallow canyon behind him where he could see a stretch of water sparkling in the sun, but he couldn’t locate the rest of its course.

Then something said BOOM! in a thick throaty cough like the bursting of a giant drum, and the sound went echoing and rippling through the hills in a thinner diminuendo of repetitions. The horses started and moved nervously, their ears rigidly cocked, and Simon’s face hardened.

“Max isn’t wasting any time,” he said.

But Jean Morland was frowning at the settling cloud of dust that had mushroomed from behind one of the rock castles some way to the north.

“The stream doesn’t go there,” she said.

“Maybe that’s where Max is planning for it to go,” said the Saint. “He’d get his new channel ready in advance, but he won’t set off the last blast that would turn the stream until his ultimatum has run out.”