The Plains of Laramie
L
AURAN
P
AINE
LEISURE BOOKS
NEW YORK CITY
Parker stayed close enough to these two so that no one firing at him, even if he was hit, could escape also hitting one of his prisoners. He had a peculiar, cold feeling between the shoulder blades as he made that crossing, as though venomous eyes were burning a hole in him with their icy determination to kill him. He’d thought, when first those two range riders had walked their mounts past the jailhouse, that they were not just ordinary hands, and that they hadn’t just happened to ride into Laramie this particular day and this particular time.
Behind him on both sides of the plank walk, as he stepped with his prisoners into the hot shade in front of the jailhouse, men were easing quietly out of the stores, armed and silent and solemn-faced. Two of those other cowboys turned abruptly and went toward a saloon. The other two then did the same thing, acting indifferent, acting completely unconcerned. Something was going on.
A covey of prairie chickens darted frantically through the brush as Jack Masters threaded his way down off the slight bluff that overlooked the ferry landing. He heard their scared
croaks
as they tried to keep within distance of each other, as they lumbered through the underbrush, but his blue eyes were drinking in the raw beauty of the scene ahead, where the Modoc River swung in a wide, graceful arc through the flat prairie. The river was a clean, steely color under the late fall sunshine. Jack let his gaze wander from the great sweep of land on the far side of the river to the squatty adobe house that nestled next to the sloping riverbank, where a pair of flat-bottomed ferries hugged the bank drowsily, their weathered sides and decks rippling gently under the force of the current.
Masters felt the hint of autumn in the air. It was warm but there was a coolness, too, that meant winter wasn’t far off. He dismounted slowly and tied his horse to a patched hitch rack near the house. An odor of water and marsh mud came to him. He methodically loosened the latigo a little and gave the cinch a mild tug that left it hanging below his horse’s stomach.
Jack Masters wasn’t a talkative man. A sheriff of many years’ standing, he had come to look on people and life in general as a routine that required a little steering, a little regulating now and then, but
not a lot of unnecessary vocal labor. He turned away from the hitch rack, gave an unconscious tug at his sagging gun belt, and surveyed the familiar scene with thoughtful, quiet eyes.
Cobb’s Ferry was an old place; no one remembered who the first owner and founder had been. Probably some enterprising Yankee emigrant with an eye to a comfortable living—and possibly trail-weary, too—had built some barges and worked up the business that had, down through the years, become a mainstay of life and an essential service to the territory. There wasn’t a man, woman, or child who didn’t cross the Modoc at Cobb’s Ferry at least a dozen times a year. It was the shortest and best route between the hamlet of Mendocino and the comparative metropolis of Rawlins, whence came the supplies for the little cow town.
Jack’s somber gaze went to the ancient adobe house. Since the new owner—a blustering, meanvisaged man by the name of Tolliver—had bought out the aged prior owner, a little friction had come up. In the first place, Tolliver had trebled the crossing rates, which, naturally, didn’t go over very well with the local folks in Mendocino. Then, too, Tolliver, a heavy drinker, was given to high-handed ways and sly remarks. Jack had heard all of these things, and he knew that the temper of the cowmen and their families was dangerously near the eruption point. For that reason and no other, he had ridden down to the ferry to have a talk with Link Tolliver. Sheriff Masters was a firm believer in quenching trouble before it flared up, if possible. He sauntered over toward the house, his high-heeled boots leaving small, disconnected imprints in the dry path; his spurs rang out softly, musically in the hushed atmosphere.
A liver-colored hound, gaunt and red-eyed, growled ominously as Jack stepped up onto the little slab gallery someone had built many years before to shade the square front of the house from summer’s everlasting glare in the treeless clearing. He looked appraisingly at the hound, saw the sleepy, annoyed look in its eyes, and walked on up to the half closed door and banged on it with his gloved fist. There was a squeaking, groaning sound from within and a thick, heavy-bellied man in a red undershirt, with mud-colored eyes and a three days’ growth of graying whiskers, loomed up in the doorway.
Link Tolliver was every bit as tall as Sheriff Masters, even in his bare feet. He was paunchy and sagging, though, where Jack was straight and lean. He nodded owlishly at the sheriff and stood impassively barring the doorway.
Jack forced a smile with an effort. “Howdy, Link. Was ridin’ by an’ thought I’d stop in an’ have a little talk with you.”
“Yeah?” The big, heavy-jowled face was wary. Tolliver made no move to ask the sheriff in. “What about?”
Jack shrugged, backed up a little, and sat on the railing that went around the small gallery. He thumbed his black Stetson to the back of his head. There was mild annoyance in his eyes at the lack of cow-country hospitality in the gross man before him. Without any preliminary he opened up. “There’s talk up in town, Link. Some of the folks seem a little irked at your new prices fer crossin’ the river, an’ some of the boys sort o’ resent your remarks when they’ve got their women an’ kids along.”
Tolliver shifted a little on his splayed feet, his
blank eyes balefully on the lawman. “Well, s’long as it’s my ferry, I kin charge what I damned well please. Ain’t no law governin’ that…yet. An’ if folks don’t like the things I say…why, then, I reckon they don’t have to come here, do they?”
Masters flushed a little and looked away, letting his glance slide over the drowsing hound so that Tolliver wouldn’t see the cloudy look in his eyes. “No, I don’t reckon folks
have
to cross here, Link.” He got off the railing and started for the edge of the porch. “Only I thought I’d drop by an’ let you know that there’s some bad blood buildin’ up. If I were you, I’d sort o’ go a little easy. These cowmen around Mendocino haven’t been too many years away from gun law, you know, an’ maybe someone of ’em’ll get hostile.” The lean, capable shoulders rose and fell meaningfully. “Somebody might get hurt, an’ I’d like to see that avoided, if it’s possible.”
Tolliver’s laugh came out to Jack where he stopped on the path leading to his horse at the hitch rack. “Thanks, Sheriff. Link Tolliver’s seen his share o’ trouble, I allow, an’ I ain’t seen anyone hereabouts that could teach him much. Let ’em come, Sheriff. They’ll get the damnedest surprise o’ their cowstealin’ lives!”
Masters clamped his jaw shut as a hot reply came lunging up from inside. He nodded curtly and walked back to his horse, tightened the cinch, swung aboard, and reined back up the trail toward Mendocino, the town that lay a couple of miles beyond the little swale that hid the view of the Modoc from its sight.
In Mendocino, the tag end of a gentle summer had come to a close and the cowmen were left with only
one task left undone. They had grassed-out fat cattle to peddle, the hay was up, and the firewood was in. The roundups were winding up their arduous labors, and the cowmen were beginning to drift into town to talk in the shade of the old sycamores, where a light carpet of dead leaves betokened winter. Prices, possible outlets, and the condition of critters were the standard norms of daily conversation. Jack Masters watched the repetitive cycle that year, as he had every year since he had been a young cowboy—newly come to the high uplands of the Mendocino country to put down roots of his own.
He was in the Goldstrike Saloon, one of Mendocino’s two such establishments, when Wes Flourney, his young, effervescent deputy, came bouncing in. Masters smiled at the younger man.
“Say, Jack, d’ya hear about Ned Prouty?”
Jack thought of short, waspish Ned—grizzled and hard as flint, but fair and honest, one of the few remaining pioneer cowmen of the Mendocino. He shook his head slightly, gazing indifferently out over the buzzing groups of cattlemen standing and sitting around the saloon, busy with talk of cows and beef. He was almost beyond the reach of Wes’s voice, and the words for a second didn’t penetrate, but, when they did, Sheriff Masters swung abruptly around, the tolerant smile gone from his lean, tanned face.
“What’d you say, Wes?”
“Ol’ Ned an’ that Tolliver
hombre
, over at the ferry, tangled this mornin’. Tolliver shot him. He’s over at his ranch now an’ his two boys swear they’re goin’ to kill Tolliver.”
Jack paid for his lukewarm beer, faced around again, and frowned. “Wes, you keep an eye on
things in town. I’m goin’ out to the Pothook.” Wes nodded speculatively.
The Pothook was one of the historic cow outfits of the Mendocino country. When Jack rode up to the sprawling old house, he noted the solemn, hard eyes of the riders hanging around the bunkhouse and the barn. He nodded as he rode by, up to the hitch rail, and went on to the house on foot. A square-jawed, short, and muscular young man met him with a harsh smile. “Reckon you want to see Pa?”
“That’s right, Bud. How is he?”
The shorter man shrugged coldly. “About as good as any old fella shot in the back can be, I reckon.”
“Shot in the back?”
The young man, one of Ned Prouty’s sons, nodded and beckoned the sheriff inside. “Come on, Jack, he can talk to you all right.” They were almost to the doorway of the old man’s bedchamber when another man, dark and square-jawed and a little taller than Bud Prouty, came out with a savage expression on his swarthy features. Jack nodded to him. Cal Prouty was one of the best cowboys in the Mendocino country. He glared at Jack for a long moment, then pushed past without a word. Bud flushed a little but made no excuse for his brother. Jack shrugged and entered the sick room.
Ned Prouty was deathly pale but his faded gray eyes were like twin coals under the bushy eyebrows. “Howdy, Jack. Set yourself.” Masters sat, dropped his hat to the floor beside his chair, and looked questioningly at the little hump of flesh under the white blankets and quilts.
Prouty nodded slightly. “Asked the varmint to keep that danged hound o’ his from chasin’ Pothook cows. He’s hell on ’em, Jack, calves, too.” The thin
old shoulders rose and fell. “He said to keep my cows away from his place, an’ I told him that this was a free range country where a man’s gotta fence ’em out if he don’t want ’em on his land. Well, he got sore, I reckon. Anyway, he started talkin’ rough. I called him. He didn’t say nothin’, just stood there on his porch an’ glared at me. He wasn’t armed…or, at least I didn’t see no gun. I told him to keep the damned dawg offen my cows or I’d kill it. Went back to get on my horse an’ damned if he didn’t pot me as I was ridin’ away. I got damned near home afore I fell off. The boys found me an’ brung me in. That’s all there is to it, Jack…couple of words an’ a shot in the back.” He nodded bird-like, matter-of-factly, and waited for Jack to speak
“How’s the wound, Ned?”
“Doc Sunday says I’ll make it all right. Close, he says, but not fatal.”
“How soon’ll you be up an’ around, Ned?”
“Week mebbe. Ten days. Why?”
Jack got up, put his hat on absently, and looked out the window at the waving, dry grass on the range beyond the house. “Well, I’ll go down an’ arrest him for attempted murder, Ned. I’ll have to hold him until you can testify against him, so let me know as soon’s you get up, and come in, will you?”
“Bet your life, Jack.”