Nelson Nye - Rafe

Filling the place with its stink he struck a lucifer, igniting the weed he had in his mouth while he stuffed a half dozen others into his shirt. The banker kept still, but there was in his look the definite promise of hard times to come. He was the kind who forgot nothing, who demanded six bits for every dime he put out. There would be a hereafter. Rafe never doubted that.

But it did him good to see the man writhe. He said, spewing smoke like a half-clogged chimney, "Let's get down to brass tacks. How did old Bender git his hooks on that ranch?"

Chilton finally said, "He won it at cards."

When Rafe's eyebrows went up the banker grudgingly said, "Don Luis was a plunger, one of those all-or-nothing fools. Vain, flamboyant, proud as a peacock. And, like all of his tribe, couldn't see beyond his nose. He couldn't imagine a time," Chilton said with contempt, "when Ortegas wouldn't be right next to God, when all they had known would leak away through his lingers. Don Luis the Magnificent! He hadn't the sense to pound sand down a rat hole!"

"But the ranch?" Rafe prodded.

"Bender had just come into the country. Had lost this fellow Rafe in the War and had just lost his wife; didn't seem to care whether school kept or not. He was at the bar in Jack Dahl's place when Ortega came in, the crowd opening up to let him through. Wanted Bender's horses so bad he could taste them. You wouldn't have known he was drunk, I'll say that for him. He could really put it away."

"You was there?"

Chilton nodded. "Bender was pretty well tanked himself, but not so far gone he'd sell stock he had driven all the way from the Ozarks. Don Luis kept raising the price. Bender kept stubbornly shaking his head. All this while they kept pouring it down. Finally Ortega offered to put up his ranch on the turn of a card—the land and the buildings against Bender's horses.

"I'd been pointed out to Bender; matter of fact, Dahl had made us acquainted. Knowing I was a banker Bender asked what I thought, and I told him I'd put up thirty thousand against it. Well, Bender won; next day he came along and asked for the money."

"An' just like that you put it up."

Chilton's stare eyed him coldly. "Finally, yes. But not in one chunk. First time he got half; twice, later, for improvements, he picked up the rest."

"What improvements?"

"The deal," Chilton said, "was between him and me." A grin twitched his lips and he got out of his chair. "Your outfit's ready." And, before Rafe hardly knew what was happening, he was outside the bank. "All you need worry about," Chilton said just before he shut and bolted the door, "is getting rid of Spangler. Don't come back till you've done it."

Two hours later, deep into the desert, Rafe pulled up for the sixth time to rest his horses and take a long scowl at the country behind. He'd got away from town without any trouble. It had been blowing pretty fierce, and the scud of grit had evidently chased most of the loafers inside. He'd run out of the wind before he'd come three miles, and this was when he'd taken his first look. Nothing showed then, or at any of his later stops, nor could he see any sign of movement now.

The sun was a ball of blazing fire. Distant mountains were half lost in the haze. The white glare was beginning to cook his face and he frustratedly scrubbed it with the back of a hand. The landscape curled and writhed in the heat, and in all those miles of barren waste the only motion to be glimpsed was the twist of a dust devil blowing itself apart.

Rafe was not reassured. The emptiness only increased his uneasiness, deepening his sense of isolation. Though he couldn't find a thing, he was convinced he was being followed; it had been gnawing at him for more than an hour. Now he saw a chance to make sure.

Up ahead about a mile was a long dark ridge, a volcanic spine blown clean of sand and lifting perhaps a dozen feet above the floor. This would give a man cover, and if he cut west behind it and observed proper caution he should be able to come back on his tracks in a circle. It would mean being stuck out here for the night. It would waste a lot of time he wasn't sure he could afford. But he couldn't afford to be drygulched, either, and he was getting damned tired of being played for a fool.

There was a dip in the terrain just beyond the ragged outcrop and, once out of sight in the trough of this sink, Rafe turned the mare west at a lope, hauling his pack horse along willy-nilly.

He kept up this pace for almost a mile, watching the lather come out on Bathsheba, watching the dwindling height of the spine. The lowering sun pitched their shadows behind them, and in a far play of pale blues and purples now revealed a low huddle of hills off ahead that he had not previously been even vaguely aware of. He stopped again, peering narrowly, not learning a thing but rather nervously wondering if they were actually hills or piles of drifted sand like the dunes in which he had been found by Bunny's dad. He began to wonder if maybe these weren't the very ones.

Not that it greatly mattered. Sand can drift considerable distances if a big enough puff of wind gets under it, and the winds out here were freaky for sure. And he might have come farther behind this spine than he'd thought. The ridge was still with him, lower, less rugged, barely shielding him now from the view he'd abandoned.

With a yank at the lead rope he kneed Bathsheba again into motion. He didn't dare push them any more in this heat with the ground so heavy underfoot; without a horse in this country a man was soon dead. Going forward at a walk he kept one eye peeled for trouble while the other eye probed the mysterious hills which might prove, if he reached them, to be some weird trick of light and shadow, a mirage.

Suddenly Rafe went stiff in the saddle. A puff of smoke showed above those hills and, while he stared, another, and another. In alarm and fury he swore like a mule skinner as, twisting around, the eyes seeming about to pop from his head, he spied a standing column of smoke in the south.

It made no difference if these signals were the work of Indians or Spangler. They were talking about him!

He twisted the lead rope about the horn and kicked Bathsheba into a gallop. It wasn't the smoke he was afraid of, but the person or persons to whom it was sent. They might be riding now to block off both ends, to fix up an ambush that could bury him here!

He jerked Bathsheba's head around and in the cold sweat of panic stampeded straight south.

It was the mare that finally brought him to his senses. She abruptly set back on her heels and stopped. The ground dropped off into a lemon and brick-red crisscross of gullies and arroyos, a veritable badlands maybe ten miles across.

In a maze like that a man could lose not only his pursuers but himself as well. Rafe thought about this, knowing he didn't have much choice. It was only a question of time before, guided by those smokes, they would nab him. Down there the watchers couldn't point him out.

He took a good look around, fixing marks in his head. Then he threw in the steel and they were on their way. Bathsheba, snorting, showing her distrust, kept trying to hold back, but he forced her down. Slithering, twisting, at times even sliding, they reached the gulch floor in a scramble of rubble. The pack horse coughed in the swirling dust, and the mare, seeming frantic, almost unseated Rafe.

"Now, here!" he snarled, cuffing her laid-back ears, "you'll go where I say whether you like it or not!" and gave her another jolt with the spurs.

Bathsheba snorted, fought her head, but when Rafe shook out a length of rope, the mare, who had sampled such persuasion before, abandoned her stand and trotted sullenly ahead. It was hotter than the hinges down at these lower levels; not a breath stirred and what there was smelled like metal coming off a blast furnace.