Ernest Haycox - The Greatest Westerns of Ernest Haycox

Again the whole weary business of inching to the rock rim and peering ahead took place; and again he slid ahead to cut down the distance between. But as Charterhouse seemed wholly absorbed in the prairie scene, Driver Haggerty grew more confident. He swung, got behind a vast granite thumb protruding to the sky, slipped into an arroyo and went slinking along it for a full fifty yards. When he popped up again he was directly behind Charter-house, and the intervening distance had diminished by half. Now Haggerty, utilizing every possible obstruction, wriggled forward, stopping, staring, listening, and proceeding. He threw aside his hat and wiped his stringy jaws, down the furrows of which fresh springing sweat kept coursing. Deeper crimson swelled the habitually dark skin; his eyes burned. A hundred yards removed, he halted and took a fresh chew of tobacco, discovering he had, in the course of all this belly marching, badly bruised and cut his hands. The downsweep of his saturnine mouth grew more pronounced; and he inched forward.

He was within possible revolver range when the first doubt came over him. Charterhouse had scarcely moved a muscle in the last twenty minutes; the man seemed to be welded to the earth. Sleeping? The possibilities brought Haggerty's features into sudden wolfish angles. His eyes stung with sun-glare, and though he dropped them and looked at the ground to relieve the pressure, there were little flecks of black blurring his vision. He brought up his gun, braced his elbows and took a test sight. Ordinarily he would have felt certain of bringing down any sort of game at this distance. But the tension, the blur constantly before him, and the strain of knowing that there might never be chance for a second shot caused him to lower the gun and roll into the next pothole. When he arrived at the rim of this one, he saw Charterhouse's hidden horse. He settled there, determined to go no farther; bringing up the gun, he saw a jagged hole in Charterhouse's coat below the neck and between shoulder points. Cold as ice inside, Driver Haggerty brought down his sights and lined them on the hole.

It was a good target, a good distance. It was nothing more than a swift off-hand draw. Yet Haggerty, swearing at his doubt and his puzzlement, swearing even at his unnecessary deliberation, squinted along his sights, lowered his gun, wiped his palms dry, and tried again. Deliberation seemed to throw him off; he had trouble bringing the muzzle into center—he who was able to skip a tomato can along the prairie. Squeezing down the trigger slack, a greater doubt than all before actually chilled him. He tipped the muzzle another time and twisted his neck, looking behind, fearing to see himself trapped. But nothing but barren surface was there, and venomously angry, he turned to his gun to make a quick shot.

Charterhouse stirred, brought up an elbow and started to roll on his back.

That ruined Haggerty's long, careful focus; in one wild prompting of rage he discarded all his deliberateness, leaped to his feet and flung a free shot at the now warned Charterhouse; the latter was still turning and the sight of Haggerty standing above, drawn and grim and with the killing lust flaming in those round red eyes, served to accelerate Charterhouse's movements. The bullet missed its mark by the thickness of paper, chipping up rock fragments. Still on his back, still rolling, Charterhouse drew on the tall plain bulk of the foreman and fired. The hammer fell on Haggerty's second shot, but Charterhouse's bullet had set the foreman back on his heels and his slug went high over Dead Man's rim and on down into the bench.

Haggerty trembled at the knees and his yellowish face paled. The clack of his tongue, trying to frame a word, sounded across the stillness of that dying afternoon and a shield of blood widened, ragged and ghastly, on his shirt front. Then pain screwed the man's face into a terrible grimace, and he fell forward, pitching down into the sharp bottom of the depression, rolling to the very feet of the shifting horse. He was dead before his lank body had stopped turning.

Charterhouse, badly shaken, sprang across the depression and stood up to view the back stretch of the ridge. He half expected to find more men rising to sight. But there were none and as his mind raced swiftly along, he knew that silent and tedious advance could mean only that Haggerty had tried to do the job single- handed. He stared at the foreman, without pity, without regret. In fact, his thoughts pulled away from the incident and settled on thought of consequences that might develop from the sound of those three shots beating out from the ridge and down to the fort. Going back to his point of view, he discovered men riding out from the parade ground slowly, seeming to be interested but not alarmed. The sun was sinking away in the west; shortly purple twilight would sweep like a veil over the prairie.

"And nothing decided yet," muttered Charterhouse.

For him, nothing had been decided. But he believed Curly and the allied renegades had hit upon their future course. The long inactivity was broken by a rider who streamed out from a distant angle of the ridge. He reached the fort and within fifteen minutes that same rider, or another, went beating away toward Angels. Shots echoed back, evenly spaced, and presently men appeared from afar and loped in. It reminded Clint of a bivouacked army drawing back its sentries prior to marching. The sun sank; twilight came, remained but an uncertain moment and deepened to darkness. Clint sighed and rose. He pulled his horse from the depression, mounted, and without so much as a glance back at the dead foreman, went down the ridge into the prairie. There was a light shining from the fort when he flanked it at the distance of a mile, but as he shot onward toward Box M to intercept Fitzgibbon, the light went out. Unbroken darkness, unbroken mystery settled down.

Once more the night wind murmured of things hidden; and although Clint Charterhouse was not an overly imaginative man, he reflected that on the wings of that breeze were all the voices of Casabella's dead warning him of wrath to come. The old, old story was about to repeat itself; across the sands was to be written another lurid chapter in bloody ink. Casabella politics.

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If Fitz had obeyed orders—and Charterhouse believed that puncher was an utterly trustworthy wheelhorse—the Box M party was now halfway on the road to Fort Carson; so he increased the pace of his tired pony, stopping every few minutes to listen for the reverberation of hoof beats. Even yet he had not made up his mind; even yet Curly's movements puzzled him. All that he had overheard in Angels tended him to the belief that the renegades meant a play around Fort Carson. Logically this would be a raid on Box M beef and a drive into the secrecy of Dead Man Range. Out of his own knowledge Charterhouse understood there could be no easier way of picking a fight and of drawing a Box M posse after the missing stock and thus opening up a battle. He had thought this was what Curly meant to do.

But Curly had ridden toward Angels with his whole party, a move that bore no relation to the Box M cattle in the north. It was probable that Curly might have figured the game was up—that he, Charterhouse, had overheard the plan in Angels—and was preparing for it. Such being so, what then would the renegades do?

"Something, that's sure," reflected Clint. "There was entirely too much riding in and out of Dead Man, too many messengers covering the country to Shander and Angels and back. That outfit is pitched to fight, and when a scope of hard suckers get on their ears, they'll strike one way if they can't strike another. There's been a leak from the ranch. They knew I was riding. They may even know Fitz is bringing most of Box M's strength away from home quarters. Then the thing for them to do would be to circle around us and smash right into old John Nickum's front yard. They might be doing it this minute."