Marshal Jeremy Six #4 the Proud Riders Page 2

  Lockhart hit the ground on his left shoulder. He let out a grunt, and then a curse. He rolled swiftly aside, eyes flashing, to avoid the stumbling hoofs of his own confused horse.

  Jeremy Six reached out, leaning away from the saddle, to gather up the reins of Lockhart’s riderless horse. He collected the horse and calmed it down soothingly while he dismounted and brought his gun to bear on Lockhart’s chest.

  Lockhart was getting his feet under him. His right arm bled freely. “Holy Judas,” he said, half in awe.

  “Relax,” Jeremy Six said.

  “You bastard. You had no Goddam right to—”

  “What’s the matter? Scared, Lockhart?”

  “Scared? Goddam. Goddam! I ain’t scared and you know it. I’m mad, Six.”

  Jeremy Six was too tired to laugh otherwise he might have chuckled. He pulled the bandanna off his neck and tossed it to Lockhart. “Wrap that around your arm,” he said. His gun shifted an inch. “And move easy, Lockhart.”

  “Aagh,” Lockhart said in resignation. He began to knot the bandanna around his wounded arm.

  Six said, “Just for the record, I captured you on United States soil, Lockhart. I can’t help it if your horse spooked and brought you across the line. That’s your problem. Next time train your horse better.”

  “You bastard,” Lockhart said through gritted teeth. “What the hell’s the point of it, Six? You can’t prove a thing. You got no evidence on me. Did you see me with any stolen cows? Did I confess anything? Hell, go on—you can’t pin a thing on me.”

  “Maybe I won’t have to bother trying,” Six said. He took Lockhart’s gun and slipped it into his own waistband. “Mount up,” he said.

  “What the hell for? You throw me in jail, okay, I cool off a week or two, then the judge lets me loose. What’s the use, Six?”

  Six’s eyes were dreary and dismal: tired and angry. He said, “We’ve had our fill of your kind, Lockhart. You run off a man’s cattle and sell them dirt-cheap below the border, and spend what little money you get for them on whisky and cheap women and cards. In a week it’s all gone and you come back to steal somebody else’s cattle. You’ve never spent five seconds thinking about the poor gent you stole that beef from—the man who’s put sweat and muscle and years into raising those cattle so that he can support his family and do a little good in the world. You’re a bunch of parasites, Lockhart, and I’m sick to death of the whole lot of you. Have you got any idea what the loss of eighty head of prime beef does to a man like Tracy Chavis?”

  Lockhart wasn’t having any of it. His face had closed up, into a guarded sardonic smile. “Who’s Tracy Chavis?” he said mockingly.

  Jeremy Six leaned toward him, lifting his arm—he was ready to swat the man with the back of his hand; but then a cooler second thought made him lower his arm and he only said in a husky voice, “If you make one wrong move I’ll kill you, Lockhart. Now move out.”

  Chapter Two

  Six tossed the cell keys on his desk. He glanced wryly at Tracy Chavis. What could he say? Chavis had seen him ride into town with the prisoner. One-third of nothing, Six thought. He hadn’t brought the cattle back.

  He said, “If Ike Lockhart is as thick-headed as I think he is, he’ll come busting into town with that other redheaded son of his and try to bust Seth out of jail. That way I’ll have a charge to pin on all three of them—attempted jailbreak. That’ll send them away for a few years.” He held up his hand to hold Chavis. “I know, Tracy. It doesn’t get your cows back for you. But at least it may keep them from rustling you again.” He gave Chavis a miserable look; it always graveled Jeremy Six to have to apologize. But he said, “I am damned sorry about this, Tracy.”

  “I know,” said Chavis. He was grinding his fist into his palm. His face had settled into a dangerous kind of desperation: an expression of unfeeling calm. “I was sort of hoping you’d be able to get those cows back, Jeremy.”

  “I know.”

  “My back’s right up to the wall,” Chavis said. He shook his head slowly, vaguely. “But that’s none of your lookout. Sorry, Jeremy—didn’t mean to lay my troubles on your doorstep.”

  “I should have got your steers back, Tracy. I’ve got a tongue-whipping coming, if nothing worse.”

  “It’s just,” Tracy Chavis muttered, “that I always wanted my wife and that lad of mine to have something they could depend on. The way things are turning out, I’ve got nothing left but a mortgage that’s coming due the end of July. That gives me something like two and a half months to raise two thousand dollars. We’d have squeaked it through with those eighty head at twenty-five dollars a head.”

  Jeremy Six thought dismally, I’d hand you the money if I had it. The town marshal’s salary was a hundred a month and fines. A man didn’t get rich on that.

  What he said was, “We’ll find one way or another to work it out, Tracy. The bank will give you an extension if I talk to them—”

  “Not this time,” Chavis said in resignation. “They sold the note to that California outfit. The big money-men in San Francisco don’t care what excuse you’ve got. Pay off on time or get foreclosed. That’s the way they operate. No extensions.”

  “Then,” said the marshal, “we’ll raise the money.”

  “Not ‘we’, Jeremy. Me. I’ll get it raised, don’t worry about it.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But I’ll get the money.” Chavis turned to the window and busied his hands packing his meerschaum pipe.

  Six sat down behind his desk, propped his feet up and took out his revolver. The top drawer of his desk contained his most practical and necessary belongings—his gun-cleaning equipment—and he put them to use, cleaning the worn revolver. A dirty weapon might misfire; and a misfire might mean the difference between living and dying, in the sudden kind of world Jeremy Six inhabited. It was a world of drifters and toughs, of good citizens and outlaws, ranchers and rustlers, soldiers and sinners, gamblers and gunmen. It was a world that had been paid for at the rate of about one dead man for every quarter-mile.

  Tracy Chavis was a lean, sun-whacked cattleman who had waged a grim, uncomplaining fight against three straight years of drought, a bout of Texas tick fever, and a winter norther that had thinned his already gaunted herd. Looking up at the long sour turn of Chavis’ leathery features, Six couldn’t blame the tall rancher for feeling a little sorry for himself.

  But he knew Chavis, and knew it wouldn’t take Chavis long to snap out of it. Chavis was a fighter. A dozen years ago, before Jeremy Six himself had come to Spanish Flat, it had been Tracy Chavis who had tamed Spanish Flat down from a raw-edged outlaw town. In his youth, Chavis had been a rough man; fast with a gun and fast with his fists; and his youth was not that far behind him: Chavis was somewhere in his upper thirties, Six knew, but he wasn’t sure exactly where. Thirty-six or thirty-seven, probably. There was a lot of youth, a lot of whipcord vitality in Tracy Chavis, and the settled life of a married rancher hadn’t driven all the glimmerings of wildness out of him: there was at times a high-powered glint of strong humor in his crow footed eyes; there was at other times the flash of a mercuric vitriolic temper.

  Six had watched Tracy Chavis as a friend, as a rancher, sometimes as a lawman on posse duty; he knew Chavis’ strengths, which were many, and knew his weaknesses, which were few—predominantly a tendency to be impatient, to rise quickly to anger, to work and fight harder than he had to. But his faults might have been infinitely worse. Six liked the man; he was proud to have him for a friend; and now, when Chavis was in trouble, Six could not help sharing the grief.

  He said, “Come on over to the Drover’s Rest. I’ll set you up to a drink.”

  “All right,” said Chavis without enthusiasm.

  The early afternoon sun blasted the street like a brass hammer. A busy circuit of wagon and pedestrian traffic kept the intersections crowded; there was a good deal of calling back and forth, teamsters shouting with guarded tongues because of ladies in sight on the sidew
alks, horsemen breasting the street occasionally, men hurrying on errands: it was the tag-end of springtime and the town bustled with vigor.

  It was too early for heavy trade in the Drover’s Rest. Corner-fronted, the big saloon dominated its intersection with haughty arrogance. Hal Craycroft, who owned the place, had recently repainted the outside of the place; its legend, painted in crescented letters, glistened freshly from the high false front:

  DROVER’S REST

  GENTLEMEN’S BAR GAMING TABLES – SALOON – FINE WHISKIES

  The Drover’s Rest was cattleman’s headquarters in Spanish Flat, just as the Buckhorn served the farmers from up the valley (Cain was a farmer, the ranchers snorted) and the dives of Cat Town, across the tracks, attracted the miners and railroad men and the loafers and idlers and toughs who always gravitated to the seamy parts of the West’s large towns. Biggest and finest of the town’s palaces of chance and dance, the Drover’s Rest sported a ninety-foot mahogany bar, backed by two mirrors which flanked an enormous painting of a fleshy nude woman, or at any rate an almost-nude woman surrounded by transparent veils, lolling back on a Queen Anne divan. The painting was fifteen feet long.

  Tracy Chavis had a ritual. A hearty, gusty man, it was his habit upon entering the Drover’s Rest to pause in the doorway, rise two or three times on his toes with his arms akimbo, study the painting above the bar, and finally utter a comment. Sometimes it was on the order of “She sure brings it all with her,” and sometimes it was more like “I never could abide fat women. Hal, that painting’s a disgrace. You ought to burn it.” Chavis’ wife, Connie, was as slim and beautiful as she had been on their wedding day eleven years ago.

  Today, though, Tracy Chavis didn’t even glance at the painting when he came into the saloon. He pushed the batwing doors aside with his wide shoulders and walked right over to the bar. Before the marshal reached the bar, Chavis spoke curtly. “Whisky and two setups, Hal.”

  Hal Craycroft set out a bottle and glasses; he made no remark, but his shrewd eyes met Jeremy Six’s. The marshal shook his head almost imperceptibly, and Hal Craycroft drifted away down the long slot behind the bar, lifting his apron to wipe the mahogany surface as he moved away.

  Chavis flooded his glass. He didn’t wait for Six; he tossed his head back and swallowed his drink whole. And poured another.

  Six kept his own counsel. Craycroft was watching, worried, and Craycroft started to come back. Six shook his head. Craycroft smiled disarmingly and came on down until he was right in front of them. He reached down under the back bar and pulled out a long roll of cloth. “Seen this, Jeremy? Mrs. Lopez just got it done. Banner for the big horse race on July Fourth.” He began to unroll the banner on the bar. It was only two feet wide but it was so long that it almost covered the length of the bar. Craycroft spoke while he was walking away, unrolling the banner: “We’re going to string this up across the main street. What this town needs, a little real Fourth-of-July spirit.”

  The banner was woven in brilliant reds and yellows. ANNUAL INDEPENDENCE DAY CROSS-COUNTRY HORSE RACE—SPANISH FLAT, 1886.

  Chavis only glanced at it once and took a sip from his second drink. Jeremy Six summoned up a cheerful reply and tried to make his voice sound hearty. “That’s fine, Hal. Ought to be a pretty big day.”

  “Sure. And a fine time’ll be had by all,” said Craycroft. He waited a moment, but Chavis didn’t even look at him, and Craycroft turned both palms upward and shrugged his shoulders at Six.

  Six settled his hip against the bar side, rubbed his jaw with a thoughtfully-moving finger, and made his voice sound idle. “You look like your face could hold a two-day rain, Tracy. Quit worrying about that money. You’ll worry yourself into an early grave.”

  “It’s Connie and Peg I’m worrying about, Jeremy. I just can’t see letting some highpockets big-city bank evict my wife and daughter from the place where Peg was born and Connie helped me build from scratch.”

  “Will you quit that?” Six demanded.

  Craycroft came back down the bar, rolling up the banner. He stowed it away underneath, and said conversationally, “Looks like Ben Chandler’s horse is going to be damn near impossible for anybody to beat in that race. You know that big blaze-faced black stud of his? Got some thoroughbred blood, from the look of him.”

  Jeremy Six said, “I know one horse that could beat him.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That palomino stallion up in the Sangres.”

  Craycroft laughed uneasily. “That’s a wild horse, Jeremy. Nobody’s ever throwed a saddle on him.”

  “I didn’t say anybody had,” Six answered. “But just the same, I expect the palomino could throw dust in the face of Ben Chandler’s black or any other horse in this Territory.”

  “Well,” Craycroft said, “it’d be fun to see him try, anyway. At least Chandler’d have some competition. Way it is now, he’ll walk off with the purse.”

  Tracy Chavis stirred. “How big’s the purse on that race, Hal?”

  “Five hundred. We’re trying to raise enough to boost it to a thousand.”

  Chavis glanced at Six. Six regarded him speculatively. “You’ve got some pretty good horses on your string, Tracy, but nothing that can touch Chandler’s black for speed.”

  Chavis brushed it aside with an absent wave of his hand. “Never mind, Jeremy. Hal, tell me something. What’s the deadline for signing up to run in this race?”

  “First of July.”

  “What about side bets?”

  “Whatever you can get covered,” Craycroft answered. “What you got in mind, Tracy?”

  “Maybe,” Tracy Chavis murmured, “I’ll just catch me a wild stud. I’ll be seeing you, gentlemen.” He strode swiftly out of the saloon, leaving the marshal and the saloonkeeper to smile and shake their heads.

  In the small office behind the Glad Hand saloon, Clarissa Vane possessed a sanctuary. She could close the door against the racket of the saloon and, beyond it, the narrow streets of Cat Town; she could shut out the drunken laughter, the scrape of chairs and the lusty shouting, and banging of the tinny little orchestra that alternated its half-hour stints with Nimble-Finger Buchler’s barrelhouse piano. Clarissa’s girls entertained the men of Spanish Flat in a bar room that was probably as comfortable as any place this side of the Drover’s Rest, but it was still a bar room; and Clarissa had a background that made it necessary for her to retreat from the realities of Cat Town every so often and pretend, if she could, that the world was better than it was.

  Someone once had mentioned that Clarissa had a good upbringing, a high-class background; someone else, in the saloon, had said loudly, “Yeah. Her foreground’s pretty good too.” Laughter, then guffaws. Clarissa endured it with a steel-plated smile. It was her business, her livelihood and her life, running a dive on the wrong side of the tracks. It was dirty and disagreeable at times, but it had its compensations. Money was one of them.

  Another was Jeremy Six.

  She knew she had made the grade with the marshal on the day when, coming into her office on his nightly rounds of Cat Town, he had removed his hat. It had been a hallmark with Six that he only removed his hat in the presence of ladies. It had taken Clarissa a long time to win him, or at least to win that much of him. She was not in a hurry; she did not believe in love at first sight; she accepted with grace the favors and attentions the marshal saw fit to bestow upon her.

  There were times when Six’s attentiveness took the form of a confidence. He was a hard man, with the touch of isolation about him; but there was no man alive who was so tough that at some time or other he didn’t want somebody to confide in. Clarissa lived in the same hard-skinned world of shadow and violence that Six inhabited; she knew his language. Now and then, he came to her and spoke in that language.

  He lay on the divan in her office, boots off and hat off, with his sock feet uptilted on the arm of the divan and his head on his wrist. He said, “Five days and nothing at all.” Translating it, Clarissa knew what he was talki
ng about. He’d had Seth Lockhart in jail for five days, expecting Lockhart’s father and brother to come storming into Spanish Flat and try to break the redhead out of jail. There hadn’t been a sign of them.

  “I can’t hold him too much longer,” Six said. “Another week and the circuit judge will be here. I’ll have to put up or shut up. We haven’t got any witnesses against the Lockharts. I’ll have to let him go.” Just saying it made him grit his teeth. “You don’t know how it gets, Clarissa. Having to let a man go when you know he’s guilty as hell.”

  “That’s the law,” she said. “If you don’t like the law, Jeremy, then you’re in the wrong line of work.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “I remember,” she said gently, “one time not too long ago when you decided to give up your job. How long were you gone? Not long. You came back to the job.”

  “Sure,” he grumbled. He sat up and reached for his boots. “Well,” he said, “I don’t get paid to lie around here and complain about the work.”

  She said, “What about Tracy Chavis? What’s he up to?”

  “Last I heard, he’d sent his whole crew out to locate that palomino stallion. His whole crew’s two men, in case you didn’t know. He had to get rid of the rest of the Chainlink crew last fall. No money to pay them with.” He grimaced. “It makes you want to cry.”

  “We’ve all got a hard luck story to tell,” Clarissa said. “You can’t take on the whole world’s grief, Jeremy.”

  He was about to answer when somebody banged a heavy fist against the door. A familiar voice shot through the door: “Boss? Hey, you in there?”