Fight for Powder Valley! (11 page)

“That's right. Get Biloff … but how you gonna do it? … He's in Denver … He daren't show his face here …”

“We'll go to Denver after him,” Pat shouted. “I will. I'll explain exactly how things are here. I'll show him he can't build his dam nohow.”

“That's the ticket … now Pat's talkin' sense … get him out here … we'll string Biloff up to a cottonwood tree …”

“That makes sense,” Pat told them grimly. “I won't lift a finger to stop you from swinging Biloff at the end of a rope. But these settlers are different.
They
didn't steal our land by lying to us.”

“Do you think Biloff will listen to you?” John Boyd asked anxiously. “More'n likely, he'll give you the horse-laugh, Pat. 'Cordin' to law he ain't done nothin' wrong.”

“He'll listen to me,” Pat promised grimly. He raised his voice to the other men: “I'll start for Denver in the morning. Go back home and take off your guns. That's not the way to fight this thing. Not yet,” he ended ominously. “Not till I see Biloff. If he won't listen to reason … well, I'll be ridin' with you. That's a promise. But not against women and children. Let's fight someone that can fight back.”

As the men began to disperse and turn back to town, Boyd muttered, “Lucky you was here to stop us, Pat. I reckon we was all blood-crazy. Scares me to think what might have happened. I saw a sheep camp burned out once … down in the San Luis Valley. I used to wake up at night years afterward hearin' the screams of them sheepherders in my dreams.”

Pat nodded somberly. “A mob is something no man can figure, John. It's like a snowball rolling down a hill.”

“By golly,” Sam said in an aside to Ezra, “it'll be good to see Denver again, huh? You reckon that little redheaded gal is still down on Larimer Street?”

Pat demanded, “Who said anything about you going to Denver?”

“Shucks, Pat, you know we cain't let you expose yoreself to the wicked sins of the big city without no one to watch over you. You bein' a married man to boot …”

“I'll have enough trouble in Denver without worrying about you two,” Pat said flatly. “You'll be needed here to keep the lid on things until I get back.”

Ezra started to protest, but Sam nudged him sharply in the ribs. “Yep. I reckon yo're right,” he said mournfully. “C'mon, Ezra. We might's well be ridin'.”

Pat stared after them suspiciously as they rode away. He didn't like Sam's tone. Sounded as if they were cooking up something. But he had plenty of other things to worry about if he caught the morning train from Hopewell Junction. He wondered if he'd better take Sally, decided against it even though he knew she would enjoy the trip. This was going to be a man's job.

9

Pat Stevens had to leave the Lazy Mare at four o'clock the next morning to reach Hopewell Junction in time to catch the train to Denver.

Sally was up at three-thirty preparing him a hot breakfast. She hummed happily to herself as she spread a fresh cloth on the dining table, set out a platter of sizzling steak, and a bowl of cream gravy to go on the cold biscuits left over from supper.

For the first time in weeks a great load of dread was lifted from Sally's mind. It seemed to her that Pat's decision to go to Denver to interview the president of the land company was the first sensible thing that had been done since the surveyors came to Powder Valley.

She had complete faith in her husband's ability to persuade Biloff to call the whole project off. All he had to do was to present the true facts. Mr. Biloff would have to agree, once he was convinced it was utterly useless for him to go on with the dam and irrigation ditches.

It all looked just that simple to Sally Stevens. She smiled admiringly at her tall husband when he strode into the breakfast room, freshly shaved and dressed in his best clothes for the city journey. He was a fine figure of a man. He wore the new boots he had ordered from Pueblo that spring, with russet leather tops inlaid with small diamonds of white leather and decorated with an intricately stitched design; a pair of tan trousers that Sally had pressed with a hot iron the night before, a red flannel shirt, buttoned at the throat with a black four-in-hand tie about his neck.

Sally served him a generous breakfast of meat and biscuits and hot gravy, and saw that he had a steaming cup of coffee at his elbow. Then she sat opposite him and rested her chin in her palms, surveyed him with sparkling eyes.

“You're so darned handsome it scares me to have you go to the, city alone, Pat. Don't you look too hard at any of those pretty Denver girls that'll be flirting with you.”

Pat stuffed a square inch of steak in his mouth and balanced half a gravied biscuit on his fork. “This is business, honey. Mighty important business. I reckon I'll have my mind on something more important than girls.”

The joking twinkle went out of Sally's eyes. “You're not looking, for trouble?”

He shook his head. “I never look for it. But Biloff is a hard man. He'll take a lot of convincing.”

“You're not … packing a gun, Pat?”

He shook his head again, thoughtfully chewing a mouthful of steak and biscuit.

“Nope,” he reassured her. “I'm not a big enough fool to go up against the city with a lone gun. If I can't do the job with talking … well, we'll have to try something else.”

“He'll surely understand,” she cried. “When you explain how things are …”

Pat smiled across the breakfast table grimly. “Trouble is, Sally, I ain't at all sure he cares whether the farms can be made to go or not.”

She wrinkled her forehead and complained, “I don't understand.”

He said, “You wouldn't. That's what they call smart business, Sally. Don't you see how it stands? Even if he
knows
people can't raise crops, what's it to him as long as they
think
they can and buy the land from him? In fact,” Pat went on deliberately, “might be best for him if they do starve out after a year or so. Then he can sell the land all over again to some other hopeful cuss from back East.”

“But that's terrible! It's downright stealing to take people's money for land he knows won't support them.”

Pat nodded. “You and me call it stealing. But men like Biloff call it smart business.”

“I can't believe any man would be so heartless,” Sally cried out.

“That's because you've lived here in Powder Valley so long where we figure things different. I'm not saying Mr. Biloff is like that,” Pat went on hastily, noting the look of dismay on his wife's face. “I sure hope he ain't. I hope he'll listen to reason.” He shrugged his wide shoulders and cleaned up his plate with half a biscuit. “But I'm not bankin' too much on making him see the light.”

Sally hurried around the table and clung to him when he pushed back his chair and got up. “You'll be careful,” she implored. “Don't let your temper get the best of you no matter what happens. You're not used to city ways.”

Pat laughed shortly. “I aim to do all the persuadin' I can,” he drawled.

“You've got to do it, Pat.” Sally held him tightly. “It's the only chance. After what happened last night …”

He nodded somberly. “The boys ain't going to hold back any longer if I come back with bad news,” he admitted. He turned Sally's face up and kissed her lips, then strode out through the living room where he got a soft-brimmed Stetson and a sheepskin-lined leather jacket from a wall hanger.

It was not quite daylight when he went out to the corral and saddled a horse. Sally stood in the open doorway silhouetted by the yellow lamplight behind her and waved to him as he rode away through the frosty air of pre-dawn.

It was sun-up when Pat rode through Dutch Springs without stopping, and he had fifteen minutes left before train time when he reached Hopewell Junction.

He left his horse at a livery stable to await his return, bought a round-trip ticket to Denver in the little depot that had been the scene of his first meeting with Sally more than ten years before.

She hadn't been Mrs. Stevens, then. She had come from Denver expecting to meet a husband whom she had seen only a couple of times, and had been met by a hard-faced stranger with the news that her husband had been murdered.

They had faced plenty of trouble and danger together during the ensuing days, Pat reminded himself grimly. This time, though, it was a different sort of trouble—the kind that couldn't be settled by blazing guns but infinitely more vicious than any he had ever faced before.

He was the only passenger to get on when the little combination train puffed into the station. There was one uncrowded passenger coach directly behind the coal tender, with a motley assortment of freight and cattle cars hooked on behind, and a caboose at the very end.

The train crew had some switching to do at the cattle pens below the station, and three punchers crawled into the caboose for the trip to the Denver stockyards after four cars of bawling yearlings were added to the train.

Pat was sitting in the coach while the switching took place, and he didn't see the three men get aboard. If he had seen them he wouldn't have been so easy in his mind about his trip to the city.

It was almost a day's journey for the little combination train to Pueblo where Pat's coach was switched on to the main line of the D. & R.G.W. The frequent stops between Pueblo and Denver gave Pat a sleepless night, and when he got off at the city terminus the next morning his eyes were red-rimmed from lack of sleep and he wore an unbecoming stubble of beard on his bronzed face.

He went directly to the Oxford Hotel close by, the regular meeting place of cowmen from all over the west while in Denver, and paid for the luxury of a room with a bathtub and running hot water.

He took his time about shaving and breakfast because he knew city men seldom reached their offices before eight o'clock, and it was a few minutes after that hour when he strolled up Seventeenth Street to tie Exchange Building whose four stories towered two above those of its neighbors.

The office of the Colorado Western Land and Development Company was on the second floor. Pat trusted himself in the open grillwork elevator to take him up. He entered a small, plainly furnished outer office with a row of straight wooden chairs lined up against the wall.

A girl smiled at him from behind a wooden partition. He took off his Stetson and told her he wanted to see Mr. Judson Biloff.

The girl told him Mr. Biloff had not yet arrived, and would he mind waiting. Pat politely assured her he didn't mind at all.

As he turned back to a chair he saw a large brightly colored lithograph on the wall. He walked over and studied it with his hands on his hips. In huge block letters at the bottom, he read, P
OWDER
V
ALLEY
P
ROJECT
.

It took him a long time to make head or tail of it. It looked like no portion of Powder Valley he had ever seen. There was a large neatly blocked-out city labeled Dutch Springs, with large buildings that were marked “Courthouse,” “Church,” etc. A wavy line of green seemed to mark the course of Powder Creek, and the area on each side was laid out in squares and rectangles of varying sizes. Many of the plots were marked in bold lettering, “
SOLD
.”

The girl came around her partition to Pat's side as he stood before the lithograph. She asked brightly, “Are you interested in purchasing a nice irrigated farm?”

Pat shuddered but did not look at her. He asked, “You folks got this for sale?”

“All the farms that aren't marked ‘Sold.' But they're going fast. It's a wonderful investment.”

Pat said, “It looks mighty pretty, ma'am. Good farmin' country, I reckon?”

“It's an earthly paradise. The richest land in the West. Why, they don't even have to plow the ground. Just go out and scatter seeds and rake them in. It will grow anything.” She spoke in a sing-song that showed the words had been memorized.

Pat frowned. “I know that part of the country pretty good. Never knew it was all fixed up this pretty.”

“The project isn't quite completed,” she told him glibly. “That's not an actual photograph, but an artist's conception of the way the desert valley will flower when the irrigation is in.”

Pat said mildly, “I reckon that artist feller had a heap of imagination,” and turned away.

The girl hesitated, biting her lips. Sometimes she didn't understand these tall, soft-voiced Westerners.

A short, stout man came bustling in the door. He had a round, beaming face and he carried a bulging leather brief case. He wore a flashy plaid suit, a bowler hat tipped back on his head, gray spats and a celluloid collar with a black bow tie almost hidden by three chins.

He said, “Morning, Gertie. The Chief in yet?”

“Why, Mr. Schultz. I thought you were still in Kansas.”

“Not me, cutie. Not old Schultzie.” He tapped his brief case importantly with a pudgy manicured forefinger. “Wait'll the Chief sees these documents. Have I cleaned up, or have I cleaned up?”

“Had a good trip, eh?” Gertie retreated demurely behind her partition while Pat looked on and listened with interest.

“A good trip, did you ask, kiddo? Did I have a good trip, she asks me?” Schultz laughed and winked at Pat. “Why, I had those dry-land Kansas hicks scrambling for Powder Valley farm-sites like a flock of hungry Dominickers going after a feeding of cracked corn. It's Westward Ho from Kansas, that's what it is.”

“You'd better go in Mr. Biloff's private office and wait for him,” Gertie suggested. “He'll be down soon.”

Pat sat stiffly in one of the straight chairs and rolled a cigarette while the land salesman went through a wooden door marked P
RIVATE
.

He thumbed a match and put fire to the crimped end of the brown paper, dragged smoke into his lungs and it seemed to him it was the first clean breath he had tasted since entering the office.