The Continental Op (Novelettes and short stories)

Originally appeared in The Black Mask, September 1925

I

Boiling like a coffee pot before we were five miles out of Filmer, the automobile stage carried me south into the shimmering heat, blinding sunlight, and bitter white dust of the Arizona desert.

I was the only passenger. The driver felt as little like talking as I. All morning we rode through cactus-spiked, sage-studded oven-country, without conversation, except when the driver cursed the necessity of stopping to feed his clattering machine more water. The car crept through soft sifting sand; wound between steep-walled red mesas; dipped into dry arroyas where clumps of dusty mesquite were like white lace in the glare; and skirted sharp-edged barrancos.

All these things were hot. All of them tried to get rid of their heat by throwing it on the car. My fat melted in the heat. The heat dried my perspiration before I could feel its moisture. The dazzling light scorched my eyeballs; puckered my lids; cooked my mouth. Alkali stung my nose; was gritty between my teeth.

It was a nice ride! I understood why the natives were a hard lot. A morning like this would put any man in a mood to kill his brother, and would fry his brother into not caring whether he was killed.

The sun climbed up in the brazen sky. The higher it got, the larger and hotter it got. I wondered how much hotter it would have to get to explode the cartridges in the gun under my arm. Not that it mattered — if it got any hotter, we would all blow up anyway. Car, desert, chauffeur and I would all bang out of existence in one explosive flash. I didn’t care if we did!

That was my frame of mind as we pushed up a long slope, topped a sharp ridge, and slid down into Corkscrew.

Corkscrew wouldn’t have been impressive at any time. It especially wasn’t this white-hot Sunday afternoon. One sandy street following the crooked edge of the Tirabuzon Cañon, from which, by translation, the town took its name. A town, it was called, but village would have been flattery: fifteen or eighteen shabby buildings slumped along the irregular street, with tumble-down shacks leaning against them, squatting close to them, and trying to sneak away from them.

That was Corkscrew. One look at it, and I believed all I had heard about it!

In the street, four dusty automobiles cooked. Between two buildings I could see a corral where half a dozen horses bunched their dejection under a shed. No person was in sight. Even the stage driver, carrying a limp and apparently empty mail sack, had vanished into a building labelled “Adderly’s Emporium.”

Gathering up my two grey-powdered bags, I climbed out and crossed the road to where a weather-washed sign, on which Cañon House was barely visible, hung over the door of a two-story, iron-roofed, adobe house.

I crossed the wide, unpainted and unpeopled porch, and pushed a door open with my foot, going into a dining-room, where a dozen men and a woman sat eating at oilcloth-covered tables. In one corner of the room, was a cashier’s desk; and, on the wall behind it, a key-rack. Between rack and desk, a pudgy man whose few remaining hairs were the exact shade of his sallow skin, sat on a stool, and pretended he didn’t see me.

“A room and a lot of water,” I said, dropping my bags, and reaching for the glass that sat on top of a cooler in the corner.

“You can have your room,” the sallow man growled, “but water won’t do you no good. You won’t no sooner drink and wash, than you’ll be thirsty and dirty all over again. Where in hell is that register?”

He couldn’t find it, so he pushed an old envelope across the desk at me.

“Register on the back of that. Be with us a spell?”

“Most likely.”

A chair upset behind me.

I turned around as a lanky man with enormous red ears reared himself upright with the help of his hands on the table — one of them flat in the plate of ham and eggs he had been eating.

“Ladiesh an’ gentsh,” he solemnly declaimed, “th’ time hash came for yuh t’ give up y’r evil waysh an’ git out y’r knittin’. Th’ law hash came to Orilla County!”

The drunk bowed to me, upset his ham and eggs, and sat down again. The other diners applauded with thump of knives and forks on tables and dishes.

I looked them over while they looked me over. A miscellaneous assortment: weather-beaten horsemen, clumsily muscled laborers, men with the pasty complexions of night workers. The one woman in the room didn’t belong to Arizona. She was a thin girl of maybe twenty-five, with too-bright dark eyes, dark, short hair, and a sharp prettiness that was the mark of a larger settlement than this. You’ve seen her, or her sisters, in the larger cities, in the places that get going after the theatres let out.

The man with her was range country — a slim lad in the early twenties, not very tall, with pale blue eyes that were startling in so dark-tanned a face. His features were a bit too perfect in their clean-cut regularity.

“So you’re the new deputy sheriff?” the sallow man questioned the back of my head.

Somebody had kept my secret right out in the open! There was no use trying to cover up.

“Yes.” I hid my annoyance under a grin that took in him and the diners. “But I’ll trade my star right now for that room and water we were talking about.”

He took me through the dining-room and upstairs to a board-walled room in the rear second floor, said, “This is it,” and left me.

I did what I could with the water in a pitcher on the washstand to free myself from the white grime I had accumulated. Then I dug a grey shirt and a suit of whipcords out of my bags, and holstered my gun under my left shoulder, where it wouldn’t be a secret.

In each side pocket of my coat I stowed a new .32 automatic — small, snub-nosed affairs that weren’t much better than toys. Their smallness let me carry them where they’d be close to my hands without advertising the fact that the gun under my shoulder wasn’t all my arsenal.

The dining-room was empty when I went downstairs again. The sallow pessimist who ran the place stuck his head out of a door.

“Any chance of getting something to eat?” I asked.

“Hardly any,” jerking his head toward a sign that said:

“Meals 6 to 8 A. M., 12 to 2 and 5 to 7 P. M.”

“You can grub up at the Jew’s — if you ain’t particular,” he added sourly.

I went out, across the porch that was too hot for idlers, and into the street that was empty for the same reason. Huddled against the wall of a large one-story adobe building, which had Border Palace painted all across its front, I found the Jew’s.

It was a small shack — three wooden walls stuck against the adobe wall of the Border Palace — jammed with a lunch counter, eight stools, a stove, a handful of cooking implements, half the flies in the world, an iron cot behind a half-drawn burlap curtain, and the proprietor. The interior had once been painted white. It was a smoky grease-color now, except where home-made signs said:

“Meals At All Hours. No Credit” and gave the prices of various foods. These signs were a fly-specked yellow-grey.

The proprietor wasn’t a Jew — an Armenian or something of the sort, I thought. He was a small man, old, scrawny, dark-skinned, wrinkled and cheerful.

“You the new sheriff?” he asked, and when he grinned I saw he had no teeth.

“Deputy,” I admitted, “and hungry. I’ll eat anything you’ve got that won’t bite back, and that won’t take long to get ready.”

“Sure!” He turned to his stove and began banging pans around. “We need sheriffs,” he said over his shoulder. “Sure, we need them!”

“Somebody been picking on you?”

He showed his empty gums in another grin.

“Nobody pick on me — I tell you that!” He flourished a stringy hand at a sugar barrel under the shelves behind his counter. “I fix them decidedly!”

A shotgun butt stuck out of the barrel. I pulled it out: a double-barrel shotgun with the barrels sawed off short: a mean weapon close up.

I slid it back into its resting place as the old man began thumping dishes down in front of me.

II

The food inside me and a cigarette burning, I went out into the crooked street again. From the Border Palace came the clicking of pool balls. I followed the sound through the door.

In a large room, four men were leaning over a couple of pool tables, while five or six more watched them from chairs along the wall. On one side of the room was an oak bar, with nobody behind it. Through an open door in the rear came the sound of shuffling cards.

A big man whose paunch was dressed in a white vest, over a shirt in the bosom of which a diamond sparkled, came toward me; his triple-chinned red face expanding into the professionally jovial smile of a confidence man.

“I’m Bardell,” he greeted me, stretching out a fat and shiny-nailed hand on which more diamonds glittered. “This is my joint. I’m glad to know you, sheriff! By God, we need you, and I hope you can spend a lot of your time here. These waddies” — and he chuckled, nodding at the pool players — “cut up rough on me sometimes, and I’m glad there’s going to be somebody around who can handle them.”

I let him pump my hand up and down.

“Let me make you known to the boys,” he went on, turning with one arm across my shoulders. “These are Circle H. A. R. riders” — waving some of his rings at the pool players — “except this Milk River hombre, who, being a peeler, kind of looks down on ordinary hands.”

The Milk River hombre was the slender youth who had sat beside the girl in the Cañon House dining-room. His companions were young — though not quite so young as he — sun-marked, wind-marked, pigeontoed in high-heeled boots. Buck Small was sandy and pop-eyed; Smith was sandy and short; Dunne was a rangy Irishman.

The men watching the game were mostly laborers from the Orilla Colony, or hands from some of the smaller ranches in the neighborhood. There were two exceptions: Chick Orr, short, thick-bodied, heavy-armed, with the shapeless nose, battered ears, gold front teeth and gnarled hands of a pugilist; and Gyp Rainey, a slack-chinned, ratty individual whose whole front spelled cocaine.

Conducted by Bardell, I went into the back room to meet the poker players. There were only four of them. The other six card tables, the keno outfit, and the dice table were idle.

One of the players was the big-eared drunk who had made the welcoming speech at the hotel. Slim Vogel was the name. He was a Circle H. A. R. hand, as was Red Wheelan, who sat beside him. Both of them were full of hooch. The third player was a quiet, middle-aged man named Keefe. Number four was Mark Nisbet, a pale, slim man. Gambler was written all over him, from his heavy-lidded brown eyes to the slender sureness of his white fingers.

Nisbet and Vogel didn’t seem to be getting along so good.

It was Nisbet’s deal, and the pot had already been opened. Vogel, who had twice as many chips as anybody else, threw away two cards.

“I want both of ’em off’n th’ top — this time!” and he didn’t say it nicely.

Nisbet dealt the cards, with nothing in his appearance to show he had heard the crack. Red Wheelan took three cards. Keefe was out. Nisbet drew one. Wheelan bet. Nisbet stayed. Vogel raised. Wheelan stayed. Nisbet raised. Vogel bumped it again. Wheelan dropped out. Nisbet raised once more.

“I’m bettin’ you took your draw off’n th’ top, too,” Vogel snarled across the table at Nisbet, and tilted the pot again.

Nisbet called. He had aces over kings. The cowpuncher had three nines.

Vogel laughed noisily as he raked in the chips.

“’F I could keep a sheriff behind you t’ watch you all th’ time, I’d do somethin’ for myself!”

Nisbet pretended to be busy straightening his chips. I sympathized with him. He had played his hand rotten — but how else can you play against a drunk?

“How d’you like our little town?” Red Wheelan asked me.

“I haven’t seen much of it yet,” I stalled. “The hotel, the lunch-counter — they’re all I’ve seen outside of here.”

Wheelan laughed.

“So you met the Jew? That’s Slim’s friend!”

Everybody except Nisbet laughed, including Slim Vogel.

“Slim tried to beat the Jew out of two bits’ worth of Java and sinkers once. He says he forgot to pay for ’em, but it’s more likely he sneaked out. Anyways, the next day, here comes the Jew, stirring dust into the ranch, a shotgun under his arm. He’d lugged that instrument of destruction fifteen miles across the desert, on foot, to collect his two bits. He collected, too! He took his little two bits away from Slim right there between the corral and the bunkhouse — at the cannon’s mouth, as you might say!”

Slim Vogel grinned ruefully and scratched one of his big ears.

“The old son-of-a-gun done came after me just like I was a damned thief! ’F he’d of been a man I’d of seen him in hell ’fore I’d of gave it to him. But what can y’ do with an old buzzard that ain’t even got no teeth to bite you with?”

His bleary eyes went back to the table, and the laughter went out of them. The laugh on his loose lips changed to a sneer.

“Let’s play,” he growled, glaring at Nisbet. “It’s a honest man’s deal this time!”

Bardell and I went back to the front of the building, where the cowboys were still knocking the balls around. I sat in one of the chairs against the wall, and let them talk around me. The conversation wasn’t exactly fluent. Anybody could tell there was a stranger present.

My first job was to get over that.

“Got any idea,” I asked nobody in particular, “where I could pick up a horse? One that can run pretty good, but that isn’t too tricky for a bum rider to sit.”

The Milk River hombre was playing the seven ball in a side pocket. He made the shot, and his pale eyes looked at the pocket into which the ball had gone for a couple of seconds before he straightened up. Lanky Dunne was looking fixedly at nothing, his mouth puckered a bit. Buck Small’s pop-eyes were intent on the tip of his cue.

“You might get one at Echlin’s stable,” Milk River said slowly, meeting my gaze with guileless blue eyes; “though it ain’t likely he’s got anything that’ll live long if you hurry it. I tell you what — Peery, out to the ranch, has got a buckskin that’d just fit you. He won’t want to let him go, but if you took some real money along and flapped it in his face, maybe you could deal. He does need money.”

“You’re not steering me into a horse I can’t handle, are you?” I asked.

The pale eyes went blank.

“I ain’t steering you into nothing whatsomever, Mister,” he said. “You asked for information. I give it to you. But I don’t mind telling you that anybody that can stay in a rocking chair can sit that buckskin.”

“That’s fine. I’ll go out tomorrow.”

Milk River put his cue down, frowning.

“Come to think of it, Peery’s going down to the lower camp tomorrow. I tell you — if you got nothing else to do, we’ll mosey out there right now. It’s Sunday, and we’ll be sure of catching him.”

“Good,” I said, and stood up.

“You boys going home?” Milk River asked his companions.

“Yeah,” Smith spoke casually. “We gotta roll out early in the mornin’, so I s’pose we’d ought to be shakin’ along out there. I’ll see if Slim an’ Red are ready.”

They weren’t. Vogel’s disagreeable voice came through the open door.

“I’m camped right here! I got this reptile on th’ run, an’ it’s only a matter o’ time ’fore he’ll have t’ take a chance on pullin’ ’em off’n th’ bottom t’ save his hide. An’ that’s exac’ly what I’m awaitin’ for! Th’ first time he gets fancy, I’m goin’ t’ open him up from his Adam’s apple plumb down to his ankles!”

Smith returned to us.

“Slim an’ Red are gonna play ’em a while. They’ll git a lift out when they git enough.”

Milk River, Smith, Dunne, Small and I went out of the Border Palace.

III

Three steps from the door, a stooped, white-mustached man in a collarless stiff-bosomed shirt swooped down on me, as if he had been lying in wait.

“My name’s Adderly,” he introduced himself, holding out one hand toward me while flicking the other at Adderly’s Emporium. “Got a minute or two to spare? I’d like to make you acquainted with some of the folks.”

The Circle H. A. R. men were walking slowly toward one of the machines in the street.

“Can you wait a couple of minutes?” I called after them.

Milk River looked back over his shoulder.

“Yes. We got to gas and water the flivver. Take your time.”

Adderly led me toward his store, talking as he walked.

“Some of the better element is at my house — danged near all the better element. The folks who’ll back you up if you’ll put the fear of God in Corkscrew. We’re tired and sick of this perpetual hell-raising.”

We went through his store, across a yard, and into his house. There were a dozen or more people in his living-room.

The Reverend Dierks — a gangling, emaciated man with a tight mouth in a long, thin face — made a speech at me. He called me brother, he told me what a wicked place Corkscrew was, and he told me he and his friends were prepared to swear out warrants for the arrest of various men who had committed sixty-some crimes during the past two years.

He had a list of them, with names, dates, and hours, which he read to me. Everybody I had met that day — except those here — was on that list at least once, along with a lot of names I didn’t know. The crimes ranged from murder to intoxication and the use of profane language.

“If you’ll let me have that list, I’ll study it,” I promised.

He gave it to me, but he wasn’t to be put off with promises.

“To refrain even for an hour from punishing wickedness is to be a partner to that wickedness, brother. You have been inside that house of sin operated by Bardell. You have heard the Sabbath desecrated with the sound of pool-balls. You have smelled the foul odor of illegal rum on men’s breaths!

“Strike now, brother! Let it not be said that you condoned evil from your first day in Corkscrew! You have seen men whose garments did not conceal the deadly weapons under them! In that list is the black record of many months’ unatoned sinfulness. Strike now, brother, for the Lord and righteousness! Go into those hells and do your duty as an officer of the law and a Christian!”

This was a minister; I didn’t like to laugh.

I looked at the others. They were sitting — men and women — on the edges of their chairs. On their faces were the same expressions you see around a prize ring just before the gong rings.

Mrs. Echlin, the livery man’s wife, an angular-faced, angular-bodied woman, caught my gaze with her pebble-hard eyes.

“And that brazen scarlet woman who calls herself Señora Gaia — and the three hussies who pretend they’re her daughters! You ain’t much of a deputy sheriff if you leave ’em in that house of theirs one night longer — to poison the manhood of Orilla County!”

The others nodded vigorously. Echlin’s eyes had lit up at his wife’s words, and he licked his lips as he nodded.

Miss Janey, school teacher, false-toothed, sour-faced, put in her part:

“And even worse than those — those creatures, is that Clio Landes! Worse, because at least those — those hussies” — she looked down, managed a blush, looked out of the corners of her eyes at the minister — “those hussies are at least openly what they are. While she — who knows how bad she really is?”

“I don’t know about her,” Adderly began, but his wife shut him up.

“I do!” she snapped. She was a large, mustached woman whose corsets made knobs and points in her shiny black dress. “Miss Janey is perfectly right. That woman is worse than the rest!”

“Is this Clio Landes person on your list?” I asked, not remembering it.

“No, brother, she is not,” the Reverend Dierks said regretfully. “But only because she is more subtle than the others. Corkscrew would indeed be better without her — a woman of obviously low moral standards, with no visible means of support, associating with our worst element.”

“I’m glad to have met you folks,” I said as I folded the list and put it in my pocket. “And I’m glad to know you’ll back me up.”

I edged toward the door, hoping to get away without much more talk. Not a chance. The Reverend Dierks followed me up.

“You will strike now, brother? You will carry God’s war immediately into blind tiger and brothel and gambling hell?”

The others were on their feet now, closing in.

“I’ll have to look things over first,” I stalled.

“Brother, are you evading your duty? Are you procrastinating in the face of Satan? If you are the man I hope you are, you will march now, with the decent citizens of Corkscrew at your heels, to wipe from the face of our town the sin that blackens it!”

So that was it. I was to lead one of these vice-crusading mobs. I wondered how many of these crusaders would be standing behind me if one of the devil’s representatives took a shot at me. The minister maybe — his thin face was grimly pugnacious. But I couldn’t imagine what good he’d be in a row. The others would scatter at the first sign of trouble.

I stopped playing politics and said my say.

“I’m glad to have your support,” I said, “but there isn’t going to be any wholesale raiding — not for a while, anyway. Later, I’ll try to get around to the bootleggers and gamblers and similar small fry, though I’m not foolish enough to think I can put them all out of business. Just now, so long as they don’t cut up too rough, I don’t expect to bother them. I haven’t the time.

“This list you’ve given me — I’ll do what I think ought to be done after I’ve examined it, but I’m not going to worry a lot over a batch of petty misdemeanors that happened a year ago. I’m starting from scratch. What happens from now on is what interests me. See you later.”

And I left.

The cowboys’ car was standing in front of the store when I came out.

“I’ve been meeting the better element,” I explained as I found a place in it between Milk River and Buck Small.

Milk River’s brown face wrinkled around his eyes.

“Then you know what kind of riff-raff we are,” he said.

IV

Dunne driving, the car carried us out of Corkscrew at the street’s southern end, and then west along the sandy and rocky bottom of a shallow draw. The sand was deep and the rocks were numerous; we didn’t make very good time. An hour and a half of jolting, sweltering and smothering in this draw, and we climbed up out of it and crossed to a larger and greener draw, where the mesquite grew in small trees and bees zizzed among wild flowers.

Around a bend in this draw the Circle H. A. R. buildings sat. We got out of the automobile under a low shed, where another car already stood. A heavily muscled, heavily boned man came around a white-washed building toward us. His face was square and dark. His close-clipped mustache and deep-set small eyes were dark.

This, I learned, was Peery, who bossed the ranch for the owner, who lived in the East.

“He wants a nice, mild horse,” Milk River told Peery, “and we thought maybe you might sell him that Rollo horse of yours. That’s the nicest, mildest horse I ever heard tell of.”

Peery tilted his high-crowned sombrero back on his head and rocked on his heels.

“What was you figuring on paying for this here horse?”

“If it suits me,” I said, “I’m willing to pay what it takes to buy him.”

“That ain’t so bad,” he said. “S’pose one of you boys dab a rope on that buckskin and bring him around for the gent to look at.”

Smith and Dunne set out together, pretending they weren’t going eagerly.

“Where’s Red and Slim?” Peery asked.

“Stayin’ in a while,” Small told him. “Slim’s a million ahead in a poker game.”

Presently the two cowhands came back, riding, with the buckskin between them, already saddled and bridled. I noticed each of them had a rope on him. He was a loose-jointed pony of an unripe lemon color, with a sad, drooping, Roman-nosed head.

“There he is,” Peery said. “Try him out and we’ll talk dinero. I warn you, I ain’t so damned anxious to get rid of him that I’ll let him go for nothing. But you try him first — trot him down the draw a little ways and back. He’s downright sweet.”

I chucked away my cigarette and went over to the buckskin. He cocked one mournful eye at me, twitched one ear, and went on looking sadly at the ground. Dunne and Smith took their lines off him, and I got into the saddle.

Rollo stood still under me until the other horses had left his side.

Then he showed me what he had.

He went straight up in the air — and hung there long enough to turn around before he came down. He stood on his front feet and then on his hind ones, and then he got off all of them again.

I didn’t like this, but it wasn’t a surprise. I had known I was a lamb being led to the slaughter. This was the third time it had happened to me. I might as well get it over with. A city man in range country is bound to find himself sitting on a disagreeable bone sooner or later. I’m a city man. I can sit any street car or taxicab in the world, and I can even ride a horse if he’ll coöperate. But when the horse doesn’t want to stay under me — the horse wins.

Rollo was going to win. I wasn’t foolish enough to waste strength fighting him.

So the next time he traded ends, I went away from him, holding myself limp, so the tumble wouldn’t ruin me.

Smith had caught the yellow pony, and was holding its head, when I took my knees off my forehead and stood up.

Peery, squatting on his heels, was frowning at me. Milk River was looking at Rollo with what was supposed to be a look of utter amazement.

“Now whatever did you do to Rollo to make him act thataway?” Peery asked me.

“Maybe he was only fooling,” I suggested. “I’ll try him again.”

Once more Rollo stood still and sad until I was securely up on him. Then he went into convulsions under me — convulsions that lasted until I piled on my neck and one shoulder in a clump of brush.

I stood up, rubbing my left shoulder, which had hit a rock. Smith was holding the buckskin. The faces of all five men were serious and solemn — too serious and solemn.

“Maybe he don’t like you,” Buck Small gave his opinion.

“Might be,” I admitted as I climbed into the saddle for the third time.

The lemon-tinted devil was getting warmed up by now, was beginning to take pride in his work. He let me stay aboard longer than before, so he could slam me off harder.

I was sick when I hit the ground in front of Peery and Milk River. It took me a little while to get up, and I had to stand still for a moment, until I could feel the ground under my feet.

“Hold him a couple of seconds—” I began.

Peery’s big frame stood in front of me.

“That’s enough,” he said. “I ain’t going to have you killed on my hands.”

I shook my head violently, trying to clear it, so I could see him better.

“Get out of my way,” I growled. “I like this. I want more of it.”

“You don’t top my pony no more,” he growled back at me. “He ain’t used to playing so rough. You’re liable to hurt him, falling off carelessly like that.”

I tried to get past him. He barred my way with a thick arm. I drove my right fist at his dark face.

He went back, busy trying to keep his feet under him.

I went over and hoisted myself up on Rollo.

I had the buckskin’s confidence by this time. We were old friends. He didn’t mind showing me his secret stuff. He did things no horse could possibly do. Looking down, I was surprised not to see his kidneys and liver — because I knew damned well he was turning himself inside out.

I landed in the same clump of brush that had got me once before.

I couldn’t see much when I got up — only the yellow of Rollo.

I heard Peery’s bass voice, protesting to somebody:

“No, let the damned fool kill himself if he wants to.”

I heaved myself wearily into the saddle again.

For a while I thought Rollo had had enough. He was a well-behaved animal under me. That was fine. I had ridden him at last.

Nonsense! He was fooling.

He put his nose in the sand. He put it in the sky. And, using his head for a base, he wagged his body as a puppy would wag its tail.

I went away from him — and stayed where I landed.

I didn’t know whether I could have got up again if I had wanted to. But I didn’t want to. I closed my eyes and rested. If I hadn’t done what I had set out to do, I was willing to fail.

Small, Dunne and Milk River carried me indoors and spread me on a bunk.

“I don’t think that horse would be much good to me,” I told them. “Maybe I’d better look at another.”

“You don’t want to get discouraged like that,” Small advised me.

“You better lay still and rest, fella,” Milk River said. “You’re liable to fall apart if you start moving around.”

I took his advice.

V

When I woke up it was morning, and Milk River was prodding me with a finger.

“You figuring on getting up for breakfast, or would you like it brung to you?”

I moved cautiously until I found I was all in one piece.

“I can crawl that far.”

He sat down on a bunk across the room and rolled a cigarette while I put on my shoes — the only things, except my hat, I hadn’t slept in. He had something to say, so I gave him time, lacing my shoes slowly.

Presently he said it:

“I always had the idea that nobody that couldn’t sit a horse some couldn’t amount to nothing much. I ain’t so sure now. You can’t ride any, and never will. You don’t seem to have the least notion what to do after you get in the middle of the animal! But, still and all, a hombre that’ll let a bronc dirty him up three times hand-running and then ties into a gent who tries to keep him from making it permanent, ain’t exactly hay wire.”

He lit his cigarette, and broke the match in half.

“I got a sorrel horse you can have for a hundred dollars. He don’t take no interest in handling cows, but he’s all horse, and he ain’t mean.”

I went into my money-belt — slid five twenties over into his lap.

“Better look at him first,” he objected.

“You’ve seen him,” I yawned, standing up. “Where’s that breakfast you were bragging about?”

Six men were eating in the chuck-shack when we came in. Three of them were hands I hadn’t seen before. Neither Peery, Wheelan, nor Vogel was there. Milk River introduced me to the strangers as the high-diving deputy sheriff, and, between bites of the food the one-eyed Chinese cook put on the table, the meal was devoted almost exclusively to wise cracks about my riding ability.

That suited me. I was sore and stiff, but my bruises weren’t wasted. I had bought myself a place of some sort in this desert community, and maybe even a friend or two. In less than a day I had accomplished what, by milder means, would have taken weeks, or months. These cowhands were kidding me just about as they would have kidded each other.

We were following the smoke of our cigarettes outdoors when running hoofs brought a swirl of dust up the draw.

Red Wheelan slid off his horse and staggered out of the sand-cloud.

“Slim’s dead!” he said thickly.

Half a dozen voices shot questions at him. He stood swaying, trying to answer them. He was drunk as a lord!

“Nisbet shot him. I heard about it when I woke up this mornin’. He was shot early this mornin’ — in front of Bardell’s. I left ’em aroun’ midnight last night, an’ went down to Gaia’s. I heard about it this mornin’. I went after Nisbet, but” — he looked down sheepishly at his empty belt — “Bardell took m’ gun away.”

He swayed again. I caught him, steadying him.

“Horses!” Peery bawled over my shoulder. “We’re going to town!”

I let go of Wheelan and turned around.

“We’re going to town,” I repeated, “but no foolishness when we get there. This is my job, and if I want any help I’ll tell you.”

Peery’s eyes met mine.

“Slim belonged to us,” he said.

“And whoever killed Slim belongs to me,” I said.

That was all on the subject, but I didn’t think I had made the point stick.

VI

An hour later we were dismounting in front of the Border Palace, going indoors.

A long, thin, blanket-wrapped body lay on two tables that had been pushed together. Half the citizens of Corkscrew were there. Behind the bar, Chick Orr’s battered face showed, hard and watchful. Gyp Rainey was sitting in a corner, rolling a cigarette with shaky fingers that sprinkled the floor with tobacco crumbs. Beside him, paying no attention to anything, not even looking up at our arrival, Mark Nisbet sat.

“By God, I’m glad to see you!” Bardell was telling me, his fat face not quite so red as it had been the day before. “This thing of having men killed at my front door has got to stop, and you’re the man to stop it!”

I noticed that the Circle H. A. R. men had not followed me into the center of the room, but had stopped in a loose semi-circle just inside the street door.

I lifted a flap of the blanket and looked at the dead man. A small hole was in his forehead, over his right eye.

“Has a doctor seen him?” I asked.

“Yes,” Bardell said. “Doc Haley saw him, but couldn’t do anything. He must have been dead before he fell.”

“Can you send for Haley?”

“I reckon I can.” Bardell called to Gyp Rainey, “Run across the street and tell Doc Haley that the deputy sheriff wants to talk to him.”

Gyp went gingerly through the cowboys grouped at the door and vanished.

I didn’t like this public stuff. I’d rather do my questioning on the side. But to try that here would probably call for a showdown with Peery and his men, and I wasn’t quite ready for that.

“What do you know about the killing, Bardell?” I began.

“Nothing,” he said emphatically, and then went on to tell me what he knew. “Nisbet and I were in the back room, counting the day’s receipts. Chick was straightening the bar up. Nobody else was in here. It was about half-past one this morning, maybe.

“We heard the shot — right out front, and all run out there, of course. Chick was closest, so he got there first. Slim was laying in the street — dead.”

“And what happened after that?”

“Nothing. We brought him in here. Adderly and Doc Haley — who lives right across the street — and the Jew next door had heard the shot, too, and they came out and — and that’s all there was to it.”

I turned to Gyp.

He spit in a cuspidor and hunched his shoulders.

“Bardell’s give it all to you.”

“Didn’t see anything before or after except what Bardell has said?”

“Nothin’.”

“Don’t know who shot him?”

“Nope.”

I saw Adderly’s white mustache near the front of the room, and I put him on the stand next. He couldn’t contribute anything. He had heard the shot, had jumped out of bed, put on pants and shoes, and had arrived in time to see Chick kneeling beside the dead man. He hadn’t seen anything Bardell hadn’t mentioned.

Dr. Haley had not arrived by the time I was through with Adderly, and I wasn’t ready to open on Nisbet yet. Nobody else there seemed to know anything.

“Be back in a minute,” I said, and went through the cowboys at the door to the street.

The Jew was giving his joint a much-needed cleaning.

“Good work,” I praised him; “it needed it.”

He climbed down from the counter on which he had been standing to reach the ceiling. The walls and floor were already comparatively clean.

“I not think it was so dirty,” he grinned, showing his empty gums, “but when the sheriff come in to eat and make faces at my place, what am I going to do but clean him up?”

“Know anything about the killing last night?”

“Sure, I know. I am in my bed, and I hear that shot. I jump out of my bed, grab that shotgun, and run to the door. There is that Slim Vogel in the street, and that Chick Orr on his knees alongside him. I stick my head out. There is Mr. Bardell and that Nisbet standing in their door.

“Mr. Bardell say, ‘How is he, Chick?’

“That Chick Orr, he say, ‘He’s dead enough.’

“That Nisbet, he does not say anything, but he turn around and go back into the place. And then comes the doctor and Mr. Adderly, and I go out, and after the doctor looks at him and says he is dead, we carry him into Mr. Bardell’s place and put him on those tables.”

That was all the Jew knew. I returned to the Border Palace. Dr. Haley — a fussy little man whose nervous fingers played with his lips — was there.

The sound of the shot had awakened him, he said, but he had seen nothing beyond what the others had already told me. The bullet was a .38. Death had been instantaneous.

So much for that.

I sat on a corner of a pool table, facing Mark Nisbet. Feet shuffled on the floor behind me and I could feel tension making.

“What can you tell me, Nisbet?” I asked.

He didn’t look up from the floor. No muscle moved in his face except those that shaped his mouth to his words.

“Nothing that is likely to help,” he said, picking his words slowly and carefully. “You were in in the afternoon and saw Slim, Wheelan, Keefe and I playing. Well, the game went on like that. He won a lot of money — or he seemed to think it was a lot — as long as we played poker. But Keefe left before midnight, and Wheelan shortly after. Nobody else came in the game, so we were kind of short-handed for poker. We quit it and played some high-card. I cleaned Vogel — got his last nickel. It was about one o’clock when he left, say half an hour before he was shot.”

“You and Vogel get along pretty well?”

The gambler’s eyes switched up to mine, turned to the floor again.

“You know better than that. You heard him riding me ragged. Well, he kept that up — maybe was a little rawer toward the last.”

“And you let him ride?”

“I did just that. I make my living out of cards, not out of picking fights.”

“There was no trouble over the table, then?”

“I didn’t say that. There was trouble. He made a break for his gun after I cleaned him.”

“And you?”

“I shaded him on the draw — took his gun — unloaded it — gave it back to him — told him to beat it. He went.”

“No shooting in here?”

“Not a shot.”

“And you didn’t see him again until after he had been killed?”

“That’s right.”

I got down from my perch on the table and walked over to Nisbet, holding out one hand.

“Let me look at your gun.”

He slid it swiftly out of his clothes — butt-first — into my hand. A .38 S. & W., loaded in all six chambers.

“Don’t lose it,” I said as I handed it back to him, “I may want it later.”

A roar from Peery turned me around. As I turned I let my hands go into my coat pockets to rest on the .32 toys.

Peery’s right hand was near his neck, within striking distance of the gun I knew he had under his vest. Spread out behind him, his men were as ready for action as he. Their hands hovered close to the bulges that showed where their weapons were packed.

“Maybe that’s a deputy sheriff’s idea of what had ought to be done,” Peery was bellowing, “but it ain’t mine! That skunk killed Slim. Slim went out of here toting too much money. That skunk shot him down without even giving him a chance to go for his iron, and took his dirty money back. If you think we’re going to stand for—”

“Maybe somebody’s got some evidence I haven’t heard,” I cut in. “The way it stands, I haven’t got enough to convict Nisbet, and I don’t see any sense in arresting a man just because it looks as if he might have done a thing.”

“Evidence be damned! Facts are facts, and you know this—”

“The first fact for you to study,” I interrupted him again, “is that I’m running this show — running it my own way. Got anything against that?”

“Plenty!”

A worn .45 appeared in his fist. Guns blossomed in the hands of the men behind him.

I got between Peery’s gun and Nisbet, feeling ashamed of the little popping noise my .32s were going to make compared with the roar of the guns facing me.

“What I’d like” — Milk River had stepped away from his fellows, and was leaning his elbows on the bar, facing them, a gun in each hand, a purring quality in his drawling voice — “would be for whosoever wants to swap lead with our high-diving deputy to wait his turn. One at a time is my idea. I don’t like this idea of crowding him.”

Peery’s face went purple.

“What I don’t like,” he bellowed at the boy, “is a yellow puppy that’ll throw down the men he rides with!”

Milk River’s dark face flushed, but his voice was still a purring drawl.

“Mister jigger, what you don’t like and what you do like are so damned similar to me that I can’t tell ’em apart. And you don’t want to forget that I ain’t one of your rannies. I got a contract to gentle some horses for you at ten dollars per gentle. Outside of that, you and yours are strangers to me.”

The excitement was over. The action that had been brewing had been talked to death by now.

“Your contract expired just about a minute and a half ago,” Peery was telling Milk River. “You can show up at the Circle H. A. R. just once more — that’s when you come for whatever stuff you left behind you. You’re through!”

He pushed his square-jawed face at me.

“And you needn’t think all the bets are in!”

He spun on his heel, and his hands trailed him out to their horses.

VII

Milk River and I were sitting in my room in the Cañon House an hour later, talking. I had sent word to the county seat that the coroner had a job down here, and had found a place to stow Vogel’s body until he came.

“Can you tell me who spread the grand news that I was a deputy sheriff?” I asked Milk River, who was making a cigarette while I lit one of the Fatimas he had refused. “It was supposed to be a secret.”

“Was it? Nobody would of thought it. Our Mr. Turney didn’t do nothing else for two days but run around telling folks what was going to happen when the new deputy come. He sure laid out a reputation for you! According to his way of telling it, you was the toughest, hardest, strongest, fastest, sharpest, biggest, wisest and meanest man west of the Mississippi River.”

“Who is this Turney?”

“You mean you don’t know him? From the way he talked, I took it you and him ate off the same plate.”

“Never even heard any rumors about him. Who is he?”

“He’s the gent that bosses the Orilla County Company outfit up the way.”

So my client’s local manager was the boy who had tipped my mitt!

“Got anything special to do the next few days?” I asked.

“Nothing downright special.”

“I’ve got a place on the payroll for a man who knows this country and can chaperon me around it.”

He poured a mouthful of grey smoke at the ceiling.

“I’d have to know what the play was before I’d set in,” he said slowly. “You ain’t a regular deputy, and you don’t belong in this country. It ain’t none of my business, but I wouldn’t want to tie in with a blind game.”

That was sensible enough.

“I’ll spread it out for you,” I offered. “I’m a private detective — the San Francisco branch of the Continental Detective Agency. The stockholders of the Orilla Colony Company sent me down here. They’ve spent a lot of money irrigating and developing their land, and now they’re about ready to start selling it.

“According to them, the combination of heat and water makes it ideal farm land — as good as the Imperial Valley. Nevertheless, there doesn’t seem to be any great rush of customers. What’s the matter, so the stockholders figure, is that you original inhabitants of this end of the state are such a hard lot that peaceful farmers don’t want to come among you.

“It’s no secret from anybody that both borders of this United States are sprinkled with sections that are as lawless now as they ever were in the old days. There’s too much money in running immigrants over the line, and it’s too easy, not to have attracted a lot of gentlemen who don’t care how they get their money. With only 450 immigration inspectors divided between the two borders, the government hasn’t been able to do much. The official guess is that some 135,000 foreigners were run into the country last year through back and side doors. Compared to this graft, rum-running — even dope-running — is kid stuff!

“Because this end of Orilla County isn’t railroaded or telephoned up, it has got to be one of the chief smuggling sections, and therefore, according to these men who hired me, full of assorted thugs. On another job a couple of months ago, I happened to run into a smuggling game, and knocked it over. The Orilla Colony people thought I could do the same thing for them down here. So hither I come to make this part of Arizona nice and lady-like.

“I stopped over at the county seat and got myself sworn in as deputy sheriff, in case the official standing came in handy. The sheriff said he didn’t have a deputy down here and hadn’t the money to hire one, so he was glad to sign me on. But we thought it was a secret — until I got here.”

“I think you’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River grinned at me, “so I reckon I’ll take that job you was offering. But I ain’t going to be no deputy myself. I’ll play around with you, but I don’t want to tie myself up, so I’ll have to enforce no laws I don’t like. If you want to have me hanging around you sort of loose and individual-like, I’m with you.”

“It’s a bargain. Now what can you tell me that I ought to know?”

He blew more smoke at the ceiling.

“Well, you needn’t bother none about the Circle H. A. R. They’re plenty tough, but they ain’t running nothing over the line.”

“That’s all right as far as it goes,” I agreed, “but my job is to clean out trouble-makers, and from what I’ve seen of them they come under that heading.”

“You’re going to have one hell of a lot of fun,” Milk River repeated. “Of course they’re troublesome! But how could Peery raise cows down here if he didn’t get hisself a crew that’s a match for the gunmen your Orilla Colony people don’t like? And you know how cowhands are. Set ’em down in a hard neighborhood and they’re hell-bent on proving to everybody that they’re just as tough as the next one — and tougher.”

“I’ve nothing against them — if they behave. Now about these border-running folks?”

“I reckon Bardell’s your big meat. Whether you’ll ever get anything on him is another thing — something for you to work up a lather over. Next to him — Big ’Nacio. You ain’t seen him yet? A big, black-whiskered Mex that’s got a rancho down the cañon — four-five mile this side of the line. Anything that comes over the line comes through that rancho. But proving that’s another item for you to beat your head about.”

“He and Bardell work together?”

“Uh-huh — I reckon he works for Bardell. Another thing you got to include in your tally is that these foreign gents who buy their way across the line don’t always — nor even mostly — wind up where they want to. It ain’t nothing unusual these days to find some bones out in the desert beside what was a grave until the coyotes opened it. And the buzzards are getting fat! If the immigrant’s got anything worth taking on him, or if a couple of government men happen to be nosing around, or if anything happens to make the smuggling gents nervous, they usually drop their customer and dig him in where he falls.”

The racket of the dinner-bell downstairs cut off our conference at this point.

VIII

There were only eight or ten diners in the dining-room. None of Peery’s men was there. Milk River and I sat at a table back in one corner of the room. Our meal was about half eaten when the dark-eyed girl I had seen the previous day came in.

She came straight to our table. I stood up to learn her name was Clio Landes. She was the girl the better element wanted floated. She gave me a flashing smile, a strong, thin hand, and sat down.

“I hear you’ve lost your job again, you big bum,” she laughed at Milk River.

I had known she didn’t belong to Arizona. Her voice was New York.

“If that’s all you heard, I’m still ’way ahead of you,” Milk River grinned back at her. “I gone and got me another job — riding herd on law and order.”

Something that could have been worry flashed into her dark eyes, and out again.

“You might just as well start looking for another hired man right away,” she advised me. “He never kept a job longer than a few days in his life.”

From the distance came the sound of a shot.

I went on eating.

Clio Landes said:

“Don’t you coppers get excited over things like that?”

“The first rule,” I told her, “is never to let anything interfere with your meals, if you can help it.”

An overalled man came in from the street.

“Nisbet’s been killed down in Bardell’s!” he yelled.

To Bardell’s Border Palace Milk River and I went, half the diners running ahead of us, with half the town.

We found Nisbet in the back room, stretched out on the floor, dead. A hole that a .45 could have made was in his chest, which the men around him had bared.

Bardell’s fingers gripped my arm.

“Never give him a chance, the dogs!” he cried thickly. “Cold murder!”

“He say anything before he died?”

“No. He was dead when we got to him.”

“Who shot him?”

“One of the Circle H. A. R., you can bet your neck on that!”

“Didn’t anybody see it?”

“Nobody here admits they saw it.”

“How did it happen?”

“Mark was out front. Me and Chick and five or six of these men were there. Mark came back here. Just as he stepped through the door — bang!”

Bardell shook his fist at the open window.

I crossed to the window and looked out. A five-foot strip of rocky ground lay between the building and the sharp edge of the Tirabuzon Cañon. A close-twisted rope was tight around a small knob of rock at the cañon’s edge.

I pointed at the rope. Bardell swore savagely.

“If I’d of seen that we’d of got him! We didn’t think anybody could get down there, and didn’t look very close. We ran up and down the ledge, looking between buildings.”

We went outside, where I lay on my belly and looked down into the cañon. The rope — one end fastened to the knob — ran straight down the rock wall for twenty feet, and disappeared among the trees and bushes of a narrow shelf that ran along the wall there. Once on that shelf, a man could find ample cover to shield his retreat.

“What do you think?” I asked Milk River, who lay beside me.

“A clean getaway.”

I stood up, pulling up the rope. A rope such as any one of a hundred cowhands might have owned, in no way distinguishable from any other to my eyes. I handed it to Milk River.

“It don’t mean nothing to me. Might be anybody’s,” he said.

“The ground tell you anything?”

He shook his head again.

“You go down into the cañon and see what you can pick up,” I told him. “I’ll ride out to the Circle H. A. R. If you don’t find anything, ride out that way.”

I went back indoors, for further questioning. Of the seven men who had been in Bardell’s place at the time of the shooting, three seemed to be fairly trustworthy. The testimony of those three agreed with Bardell’s in every detail.

“Didn’t you say you were going out to see Peery?” Bardell asked.

“Yes.”

“Chick, get horses! Me and you’ll ride out there with the deputy, and as many of you other men as want to go. He’ll need guns behind him!”

“Nothing doing!” I stopped Chick. “I’m going by myself. This posse stuff is out of my line.”

Bardell scowled, but he nodded his head in agreement.

“You’re running it,” he said. “I’d like to go out there with you, but if you want to play it different, I’m gambling you’re right.”

IX

In the livery stable, where we had put our horses, I found Milk River saddling them, and we rode out of town together.

Half a mile out, we split. He turned to the left, down a trail that led into the cañon, calling over his shoulder to me:

“If you get through out there sooner than you think, you can maybe pick me up by following the draw the ranch-house is in down to the cañon. Don’t be too hard on the boys!”

I turned into the draw that led toward the Circle H. A. R., the long-legged, long-bodied horse Milk River had sold me carrying me along easily and swiftly. It was too soon after midday for riding to be pleasant. Heat waves boiled out of the draw-bottom, the sun hurt my eyes, dust caked my throat. That same dust rose behind me in a cloud that advertised me to half the state, notwithstanding that I was riding below the landscape.

Crossing from this draw into the larger one the Circle H. A. R. occupied, I found Peery waiting for me.

He didn’t say anything, didn’t move a hand. He just sat his horse and watched me approach. Two .45s were holstered on his legs.

I came alongside and held out the lariat I had taken from the rear of the Border Palace. As I held it out I noticed that no rope decorated his saddle.

“Know anything about this?” I asked.

He looked at the rope, but made no move to take it.

“Looks like one of those things hombres use to drag steers around with.”

“Can’t fool you, can I?” I grunted. “Ever see this particular one before?”

He took a minute or more to think up an answer to that.

“Yeah,” finally. “Fact is, I lost that same rope somewheres between here and town this morning.”

“Know where I found it?”

“Don’t hardly make no difference.” He reached for it. “The main thing is you found it.”

“It might make a difference,” I said, moving the rope out of his reach. “I found it strung down the cañon wall, behind Bardell’s, where you could slide down it after you potted Nisbet.”

His hands went to his guns. I turned so he could see the shape of one of the pocketed automatics I was holding.

“Don’t do anything you’ll be sorry for,” I advised him.

“Shall I gun this la-ad now?” Dunne’s brogue rolled from behind me, “or will we wa-ait a bit?”

I looked around to see him standing behind a boulder, a .30–30 rifle held on me. Above other rocks, other heads and other weapons showed.

I took my hand out of my pocket and put it on my saddle horn.

Peery spoke past me to the others.

“He tells me Nisbet’s been shot.”

“Now ain’t that provokin’?” Buck Small grieved. “I hope it didn’t hurt him none.”

“Dead,” I supplied.

“Whoever could ’a’ done th’ like o’ that?” Dunne wanted to know.

“It wasn’t Santa Claus,” I gave my opinion.

“Got anything else to tell me?” Peery demanded.

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Yeah. Now if I was you, I’d ride right back to Corkscrew and go to bed.”

“You mean you don’t want to go back with me?”

“Not any. If you want to try and take me, now—”

I didn’t want to try, and I said so.

“Then there’s nothing keeping you here,” he pointed out.

I grinned at him and his friends, pulled the sorrel around, and started back the way I had come.

A few miles down, I swung off to the south again, found the lower end of the Circle H. A. R. draw, and followed it down into the Tirabuzon Cañon. Then I started to work up toward the point where the rope had been let down.

The cañon deserved its name — a rough and stony, tree and bush-choked, winding gutter across the face of Arizona. But it was nicely green and cool compared to most of the rest of the State.

I hadn’t gone far when I ran into Milk River, leading his horse toward me. He shook his head.

“Not a damned thing! I can cut sign with the rest of ’em, but there’s too many rocky ridges here.”

I dismounted. We sat under a tree and smoked some tobacco.

“How’d you come out?” he wanted to know.

“So-so. The rope is Peery’s, but he didn’t want to come along with me. I figure we can find him when we want him, so I didn’t insist. It would have been kind of uncomfortable.”

He looked at me out of the end of his pale eyes.

“A hombre might guess,” he said slowly, “that you was playing the Circle H. A. R. against Bardell’s crew, encouraging each side to eat up the other, and save you the trouble.”

“You could be either right or wrong. Do you think that’d be a dumb play?”

“I don’t know. I reckon not — if you’re making it, and if you’re sure you’re strong enough to take hold when you have to.”

X

Night was coming on when Milk River and I turned into Corkscrew’s crooked street. It was too late for the Cañon House’s dining-room, so we got down in front of the Jew’s shack.

Chick Orr was standing in the Border Palace doorway. He turned his hammered mug to call something over his shoulder. Bardell appeared beside him, looked at me with a question in his eyes, and the pair of them stepped out into the street.

“What result?” Bardell asked.

“No visible ones.”

“You didn’t make the pinch?” Chick Orr demanded, incredulously.

“That’s right. I invited a man to ride back with me, but he said no.”

The ex-pug looked me up and down and spit on the ground at my feet.

“Ain’t you a swell mornin’-glory?” he snarled. “I got a great mind to smack you down, you shine elbow, you!”

“Go ahead,” I invited him. “I don’t mind skinning a knuckle on you.”

His little eyes brightened. Stepping in, he let an open hand go at my face. I took my face out of the way, and turned my back, taking off coat and shoulder-holster.

“Hold these, Milk River. And make the spectators behave while I take this pork-and-beaner for a romp.”

Corkscrew came running as Chick and I faced each other. We were pretty much alike in size and age, but his fat was softer than mine, I thought. He had been a professional. I had battled around a little, but there was no doubt that he had me shaded on smartness. To offset that, his hands were lumpy and battered, while mine weren’t. And he was — or had been — used to gloves, while bare knuckles was more in my line.

Popular belief has it that you can do more damage with bare hands than with gloves, but, as usual, popular belief is wrong. The chief value of gloves is the protection they give your hands. Jaw-bones are tougher than finger-bones, and after you’ve pasted a tough face for a while with bare knuckles you find your hands aren’t holding up very well, that you can’t get the proper snap into your punches. If you don’t believe me, look up the records. You’ll find that knock-outs began to come quicker as soon as the boys in the profession began to pad their fists.

So I figured I hadn’t anything to fear from this Chick Orr — or not a whole lot. I was in better shape, had stronger hands, and wasn’t handicapped with boxing-glove training. I wasn’t altogether right in my calculations.

He crouched, waiting for me to come to him. I went, trying to play the boob, faking a right swing for a lead.

Not so good! He stepped outside instead of in. The left I chucked at him went wide. He rapped me on the cheek-bone.

I stopped trying to out-smart him. His left hand played a three-note tune on my face before I could get in to him.

I smacked both hands into his body, and felt happy when the flesh folded softly around them. He got away quicker than I could follow, and shook me up with a sock on the jaw.

He left-handed me some more — in the eye, in the nose. His right scraped my forehead, and I was in again.

Left, right, left, I dug into his middle. He slashed me across the face with forearm and fist, and got clear.

He fed me some more lefts, splitting my lip, spreading my nose, stinging my face from forehead to chin. And when I finally got past that left hand I walked into a right uppercut that came up from his ankle to click on my jaw with a shock that threw me back half a dozen steps.

Keeping after me, he swarmed all over me. The evening air was full of fists. I pushed my feet into the ground and stopped the hurricane with a couple of pokes just above where his shirt ran into his pants.

He copped me with his right again — but not so hard. I laughed at him, remembering that something had clicked in his hand when he landed that uppercut, and plowed into him, hammering at him with both hands.

He got away again — cut me up with his left. I smothered his left arm with my right, hung on to it, and whaled him with my own left, keeping them low. His right banged into me. I let it bang. It was dead.

He nailed me once more before the fight ended — with a high straight left that smoked as it came. I managed to keep my feet under me, and the rest of it wasn’t so bad. He chopped me a lot more, but his steam was gone.

He went down after a while, from an accumulation of punches rather than from any especial one, and couldn’t get up.

His face didn’t have a mark on it that I was responsible for. Mine must have looked as if it had been run through a grinder.

“Maybe I ought to wash up before we eat,” I said to Milk River as I took my coat and gun.

“Hell, yes!” he agreed, staring at my face.

A plump man in a Palm Beach suit got in front of me, taking my attention.

“I am Mr. Turney of the Orilla Colony Company,” he introduced himself. “Am I to understand that you have not made an arrest since you have been here?”

This was the bird who had advertised me! I didn’t like that, and I didn’t like his round, aggressive face.

“Yes,” I confessed.

“There have been two murders in two days,” he ran on, “concerning which you have done nothing, though in each case the evidence seems clear enough. Do you think that is satisfactory? Do you think you are performing the duties for which you were employed?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Let me tell you that it is not at all satisfactory,” he supplied the answers to his own questions. “Neither is it satisfactory that you should have employed this man” — stabbing a plump finger in Milk River’s direction — “who is notoriously one of the most lawless men in the county. I want you to understand clearly that unless there is a distinct improvement in your work — unless you show some disposition to do the things you were engaged to do — that engagement will be terminated!”

“Who’d you say you are?” I asked, when he had talked himself out.

“Mr. Turney, general superintendent of the Orilla Colony.”

“So? Well, Mr. General Superintendent Turney, your owners forgot to tell me anything about you when they employed me. So I don’t know you at all. Any time you’ve got anything to say to me, you turn it over to your owners, and if it’s important enough, maybe they’ll pass it on to me.”

He puffed himself up.

“I shall certainly inform them that you have been extremely remiss in your duty, however proficient you may be in street brawls!”

“Will you put a postscript on for me,” I called after him as he walked away. “Tell ’em I’m kind of busy just now and can’t use any advice — no matter who it comes from.”

Milk River and I went ten steps toward the Cañon House, and came face to face with the Reverend Dierks, Miss Janey, and old Adderly. None of them looked at me with anything you could call pleasure.

“You should be ashamed of yourself!” Miss Janey ground out between her false teeth. “Fighting in the street — you who are supposed to keep the peace!”

“As a deputy sheriff you’re terrible,” Adderly put in. “There’s been more trouble here since you came than there ever was before!”

“I must say, brother, that I am deeply disappointed in your actions as a representative of the law!” was the minister’s contribution.

I didn’t like to say, “Go to hell!” to a group that included a minister and a woman, and I couldn’t think of anything else, so, with Milk River making a poor job of holding in his laughter, I stepped around the better element, and we went on to the Cañon House.

Vickers, the sallow, pudgy proprietor, was at the door.

“If you think I got towels to mop up the blood from every hombre that gets himself beat up, you’re mistaken,” he growled at me. “And I don’t want no sheets torn up for bandages, neither!”

“I never seen such a disagreeable cuss as you are,” Milk River insisted as we climbed the stairs. “Seems like you can’t get along with nobody. Don’t you never make no friends?”

“Only with saps!”

I did what I could with water and adhesive tape to reclaim my face, but the result was a long way from beauty. Milk River sat on the bed and grinned and watched me.

“How does a fellow go about winning a fight he gets the worst of?” he inquired.

“It’s a gift,” was the only answer I could think up.

“You’re a lot gifted. That Chick give you more gifts than a Christmas tree could hold.”

XI

My patching finished, we went down to the Jew’s for food. Three eaters were sitting at the counter. I had to exchange comments on the battle with them while I ate.

We were interrupted by the running of horses in the street. A dozen or more men went past the door, and we could hear them pulling up sharply, dismounting, in front of Bardell’s.

Milk River leaned sidewise until his mouth was close to my ear.

“Big ’Nacio’s crew from down the cañon. You better hold on tight, chief, or they’ll shake the town from under you.”

We finished our meal and went out to the street.

In the glow from the big lamp over Bardell’s door a Mexican lounged against the wall. A big black-bearded man, his clothes gay with silver buttons, two white-handled guns holstered low on his thighs, the holsters tied down.

“Will you take the horses over to the stable?” I asked Milk River. “I’m going up and lie across the bed and grow strength again.”

He looked at me curiously, and went over to where we had left the ponies.

I stopped in front of the bearded Mexican, and pointed with my cigarette at his guns.

“You’re supposed to take those things off when you come to town,” I said pleasantly. “Matter of fact, you’re not supposed to bring ’em in at all, but I’m not inquisitive enough to look under a man’s coat for them. You can’t wear them out in the open, though.”

Beard and mustache parted to show a smiling curve of yellow teeth.

“Mebbe if el senor jerife no lak t’ese t’ings, he lak try take t’em ’way?”

“No. You put ’em away.”

His smile spread.

“I lak t’em here. I wear t’em here.”

“You do what I tell you,” I said, still pleasantly, and left him, going back to the Jew’s shack.

Leaning over the counter, I picked the sawed-off shotgun out of its nest.

“Can I borrow this? I want to make a believer out of a guy.”

“Yes, sir, sure! You help yourself!”

I cocked both barrels before I stepped outdoors.

The big Mexican wasn’t in sight. I found him inside, telling his friends about it. Some of his friends were Mexican, some American, some God knows what. All wore guns. All had the look of thugs.

The big Mexican turned when his friends gaped past him at me. His hands dropped to his guns as he turned, but he didn’t draw.

“I don’t know what’s in this cannon,” I told the truth, centering the riot gun on the company, “maybe pieces of barbed wire and dynamite shavings. We’ll find out if you birds don’t start piling your guns on the bar right away — because I’ll sure-God splash you with it!”

They piled their weapons on the bar. I didn’t blame them. This thing in my hands would have mangled them plenty!

“After this, when you come to Corkscrew, put your guns out of sight.”

Fat Bardell pushed through them, putting joviality back on his face.

“Will you tuck these guns away until your customers are ready to leave town?” I asked him.

“Yes! Yes! Be glad to!” he exclaimed when he had got over his surprise.

I returned the shotgun to its owner and went up to the Cañon House.

A door just a room or two from mine opened as I walked down the hall. Chick Orr came out, saying:

“Don’t do nothin’ I wouldn’t do,” over his shoulder.

I saw Clio Landes standing inside the door.

Chick turned from the door, saw me, and stopped, scowling at me.

“You can’t fight worth a damn!” he said. “All you know is how to hit!”

“That’s right.”

He rubbed a swollen hand over his belly.

“I never could learn to take ’em down there. That’s what beat me in the profesh.”

I tried to look sympathetic, while he studied my face carefully.

“I messed you up, for a fact.” His scowl curved up in a gold-toothed grin. The grin went away. The scowl came back. “Don’t pick no more fights with me — I might hurt you!”

He poked me in the ribs with a thumb, and went on past me, down the stairs.

The girl’s door was closed when I passed it. In my room, I dug out my fountain pen and paper, and had three words of my report written when a knock sounded on my door.

“Come in,” I called, having left the door unlocked for Milk River.

Clio Landes pushed the door open.

“Busy?”

“No. Come in and make yourself comfortable. Milk River will be along in a few minutes.”

I switched over to the bed, giving her my only chair.

“You’re not foxing Milk River, are you?” she asked point-blank.

“No. I got nothing to hang on him. He’s right so far as I’m concerned. Why?”

“Nothing, only I thought there might be a caper or two you were trying to cop him for. You’re not fooling me, you know! These hicks think you’re a bust, but I know different.”

“Thanks for those few kind words. But don’t be press-agenting my wisdom around. I’ve had enough advertising. What are you doing out here in the sticks?”

“Lunger!” She tapped her chest. “A croaker told me I’d last longer out here. Like a boob, I fell for it. Living out here isn’t any different from dying in the big city.”

“How long have you been away from the noise?”

“Three years — a couple up in Colorado, and then this hole. Seem like three centuries.”

“I was back there on a job in April,” I led her on, “for two or three weeks.”

“You were?”

It was just as if I’d said I had been to heaven. She began to shoot questions at me: was this still so-and-so? Was that still thus?

We had quite a little gabfest, and I found I knew some of her friends. A couple of them were high-class swindlers, one was a bootleg magnate, and the rest were a mixture of bookies, conmen, and the like. When I was living in New York, back before the war, I had spent quite a few of my evenings in Dick Malloy’s Briar Patch, a cabaret on Seventh Avenue, near where the Ringside opened later. This girl had been one of the Briar Patch’s regular customers a few years after my time there.

I couldn’t find out what her grift was. She talked a blend of thieves’ slang and high-school English, and didn’t say much about herself.

We were getting along fine when Milk River came in.

“My friends still in town?” I asked.

“Yes. I hear ’em bubbling around down in Bardell’s. I hear you’ve been makin’ yourself more unpopular.”

“What now?”

“Your friends among the better element don’t seem to think a whole lot of that trick of yours of giving Big ’Nacio’s guns, and his hombres’, to Bardell to keep. The general opinion seems to be you took the guns out of their right hands and put ’em back in the left.”

“I only took ’em to show that I could,” I explained. “I didn’t want ’em. They would have got more anyway. I think I’ll go down and show myself to ’em. I won’t be long.”

The Border Palace was noisy and busy. None of Big ’Nacio’s friends paid any attention to me. Bardell came across the room to tell me:

“I’m glad you backed the boys down. Saved me a lot of trouble, maybe.”

I nodded and went out, around to the livery stable, where I found the night man hugging a little iron stove in the office.

“Got anybody who can ride to Filmer with a message tonight?”

“Maybe I can find somebody,” he said without enthusiasm.

“Give him a good horse and send him up to the hotel as soon as you can,” I requested.

I sat on the edge of the Cañon House porch until a long-legged lad of eighteen or so arrived on a pinto pony and asked for the deputy sheriff. I left the shadow I had been sitting in, and went down into the street, where I could talk to the boy without having an audience.

“Th’ old man said yuh wanted to send somethin’ to Filmer.”

“Can you head out of here toward Filmer, and then cross over to the Circle H. A. R.?”

“Yes, suh, I c’n do that.”

“Well, that’s what I want. When you get there, tell Peery that Big ’Nacio and his men are in town, and might be riding that way before morning. And don’t let the information get out to anybody else.”

“I’ll do jus’ that, suh.”

“This is yours, I’ll pay the stable bill later.” I slid a bill into his hand. “Get going.”

Up in my room again, I found Milk River and the girl sitting around a bottle of liquor. I gave my oath of office the laugh to the extent of three drinks. We talked and smoked a while, and then the party broke up. Milk River told me he had the room next to mine.

I added another word to the report I had started, decided I needed sleep more than the client needed the report, and went to bed.

XII

Milk River’s knuckles on the door brought me out of bed to shiver in the cold of five-something in the morning.

“This isn’t a farm!” I grumbled at him as I let him in. “You’re in the city now. You’re supposed to sleep until the sun comes up.”

“The eye of the law ain’t never supposed to sleep,” he grinned at me, his teeth clicking together, because he hadn’t any more clothes on than I. “Fisher, who’s got a ranch out that-away, sent a man in to tell you that there’s a battle going on out at the Circle H. A. R. He hit my door instead of yours. Do we ride out that-away, chief?”

“We do. Hunt up some rifles, water, and the horses. I’ll be down at the Jew’s, ordering breakfast and getting some lunch wrapped up.”

Forty minutes later Milk River and I were out of Corkscrew.

The morning warmed as we rode, the sun making long violet pictures on the desert, raising the dew in a softening mist. The mesquite was fragrant, and even the sand — which would be as nice as a dusty stove-top later — had a fresh, pleasant odor. There was nothing to hear but the creaking of leather, the occasional clink of metal, and the plop-plop of the horses’ feet on hard ground, which changed to a shff-shff when we struck loose sand.

The battle seemed to be over, unless the battlers had run out of bullets and were going at it hand to hand.

Up over the ranch buildings, as we approached, three blue spots that were buzzards circled, and a moving animal showed against the sky for an instant on a distant ridge.

“A bronc that ought to have a rider and ain’t,” Milk River pronounced it.

Farther along, we passed a bullet-riddled Mexican sombrero, and then the sun sparkled on a handful of empty brass cartridges.

One of the ranch buildings was a charred black pile. Nearby another one of the men I had disarmed in Bardell’s lay dead on his back.

A bandaged head poked around a building-corner, and its owner stepped out, his right arm in a sling, a revolver in his left. Behind him trotted the one-eyed Chinese cook, swinging a cleaver.

Milk River recognized the bandaged man.

“Howdy, Red! Been quarreling?”

“Some. We took all th’ advantage we could of th’ warnin’ you sent out, an’ when Big ’Nacio an’ his herd showed up just ’fore daylight, we Injuned them all over the county. I stopped a couple o’ slugs, so I stayed to home whilst th’ rest o’ th’ boys followed ’em south. ’F you listen sharp, you can hear a pop now an’ then.”

“Do we follow ’em, or head ’em?” Milk River asked me.

“Can we head ’em?”

“Might. If Big ’Nacio’s running, he’ll circle back to his rancho along about dark. If we cut into the cañon and slide along down, maybe we can be there first. He won’t make much speed having to fight off Peery and the boys as he goes.”

“We’ll try it.”

Milk River leading, we went past the ranch buildings, and on down the draw, going into the cañon at the point where I had entered it the previous day. After a while the footing got better, and we made better time.

The sun climbed high enough to let its rays down on us, and the comparative coolness in which we had been riding went away. At noon we stopped to rest the horses, eat a couple of sandwiches, and smoke a bit. Then we went on.

Presently the sun passed, began to crawl down on our right, and shadows grew in the cañon. The welcome shade had reached the east wall when Milk River, in front, stopped.

“Around this next bend it is.”

We dismounted, took a drink apiece, blew the sand off our rifles, and went forward afoot, toward a clump of bushes that covered the crooked cañon’s next twist.

Beyond the bend, the floor of the cañon ran downhill into a round saucer. The saucer’s sides sloped gently up to the desert floor. In the middle of the saucer, four low adobe buildings sat. In spite of their exposure to the desert sun, they looked somehow damp and dark. From one of them a thin plume of bluish smoke rose. Water ran out of a rock-bordered hole in one sloping cañon-wall, disappearing in a thin stream that curved behind one of the buildings.

No man, no animal was in sight.

“I’m going to prospect down there,” Milk River said, handing me his hat and rifle.

“Right,” I agreed. “I’ll cover you, but if anything breaks, you’d better get out of the way. I’m not the most dependable rifle-shot in the world!”

For the first part of his trip Milk River had plenty of cover. He went ahead rapidly. The screening plants grew fewer. His pace fell off. Flat on the ground, he squirmed from clump to boulder, from hummock to bush.

Thirty feet from the nearest building, he ran out of places to hide. I thought he would scout the buildings from that point, and then come back. Instead, he jumped up and sprinted to the shelter of the nearest building.

Nothing happened. He crouched against the wall for several long minutes, and then began to work his way toward the rear.

A hatless Mexican came around the corner.

I couldn’t make out his features, but I saw his body stiffen.

His hand went to his waist.

Milk River’s gun flashed.

The Mexican dropped. The bright steel of his knife glittered high over Milk River’s head, and rang when it landed on a stone.

Milk River went out of my sight around the building. When I saw him again he was charging at the black doorway of the second building.

Fire-streaks came out of the door to meet him.

I did what I could with the two rifles — laying a barrage ahead of him — pumping lead at the open door, as fast as I could get it out. I emptied the second rifle just as he got too close to the door for me to risk another shot.

Dropping the rifle, I ran back to my horse, and rode to my crazy assistant’s assistance.

He didn’t need any. It was all over when I arrived.

He was driving another Mexican and Gyp Rainey out of the building with the nozzles of his guns.

“This is the crop,” he greeted me. “Leastways, I couldn’t find no more.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked Rainey.

But the hop-head didn’t want to talk. He looked sullenly at the ground and made no reply.

“We’ll tie ’em up,” I decided, “and then look around.”

Milk River did most of the tying, having had more experience with ropes.

He trussed them back to back on the ground, and we went exploring.

XIII

Except for plenty of guns of all sizes and more than plenty of ammunition to fit, we didn’t find anything very exciting until we came to a heavy door — barred and padlocked — set half in the foundation of the principal building, half in the mound on which the building sat.

I found a broken piece of rusty pick, and knocked the padlock off with it. Then we took the bar off and swung the door open.

Men came eagerly toward us out of an unventilated, unlighted cellar. Seven men who talked a medley of languages as they came.

We used our guns to stop them.

Their jabbering went high, excited.

“Quiet!” I yelled at them.

They knew what I meant, even if they didn’t understand the word. The babel stopped and we looked them over. All seven seemed to be foreigners — and a hard-looking gang of cutthroats. A short Jap with a scar from ear to ear; three Slavs, one bearded, barrel-bodied, red-eyed, the other two bullet-headed, cunning-faced; a swarthy husky who was unmistakably a Greek; a bowlegged man whose probable nationality I couldn’t guess; and a pale fat man whose china-blue eyes and puckered red mouth were probably Teutonic.

Milk River and I tried them out with English first, and then with what Spanish we could scrape up between us. Both attempts brought a lot of jabbering from them, but nothing in either of those languages.

“Got anything else?” I asked Milk River.

“Chinook is all that’s left.”

That wouldn’t help much. I tried to remember some of the words we used to think were French in the A. E. F.

“Que désirez-vous?” brought a bright smile to the fat face of the blue-eyed man.

I caught “Nous allons à les États-Unis” before the speed with which he threw the words at me confused me beyond recognizing anything else.

That was funny. Big ’Nacio hadn’t let these birds know that they were already in the United States. I suppose he could manage them better if they thought they were still in Mexico.

“Montrez-moi votre passe-port.”

That brought a sputtering protest from Blue Eyes. They had been told no passports were necessary. It was because they had been refused passports that they were paying to be smuggled in.

“Quand êtes-vous venu ici?”

Hier meant yesterday, regardless of what the other things he put in his answer were. Big ’Nacio had come straight to Corkscrew after bringing these men across the border and sticking them in his cellar, then.

We locked the immigrants in their cellar again, putting Rainey and the Mexican in with them. Rainey howled like a wolf when I took his hypodermic needle and his coke away from him.

“Sneak up and take a look at the country,” I told Milk River, “while I plant the man you killed.”

By the time he came back I had the dead Mexican arranged to suit me: slumped down in a chair a little off from the front door of the principal building, his back against the wall, a sombrero tilted down over his face.

“There’s dust kicking up some ways off,” Milk River reported. “Wouldn’t surprise me none if we got our company along towards dark.”

Darkness had been solid for an hour when they came.

By then, fed and rested, we were ready for them. A light was burning in the house. Milk River was in there, tinkling a mandolin. Light came out of the open front door to show the dead Mexican dimly — a statue of a sleeper. Beyond him, around the corner except for my eyes and forehead, I lay close to the wall.

We could hear our company long before we could see them. Two horses — but they made enough noise for ten — coming lickety-split down to the lighted door.

Big ’Nacio, in front, was out of the saddle and had one foot in the doorway before his horse’s front feet — thrown high by the violence with which the big man had pulled him up — hit the ground again. The second rider was close behind him.

The bearded man saw the corpse. He jumped at it, swinging his quirt, roaring:

“Arriba, piojo!”

The mandolin’s tinkling stopped.

I scrambled up.

Big ’Nacio’s whiskers went down in surprise.

His quirt caught a button of the dead man’s clothes, tangled there, the loop on its other end holding one of Big ’Nacio’s wrists.

His other hand went to his thigh.

My gun had been in my hand for an hour. I was close. I had leisure to pick my target. When his hand touched his gun-butt, I put a bullet through hand and thigh.

As he fell, I saw Milk River knock the second man down with a clout of gun-barrel on back of his head.

“Seems like we team-up pretty good,” the sunburned boy said as he stooped to take the enemy’s weapons from them.

The bearded man’s bellowing oaths made conversation difficult.

“I’ll put this one you beaned in the cooler,” I said. “Watch ’Nacio, and we’ll patch him up when I come back.”

I dragged the unconscious man halfway to the cellar door before he came to. I goaded him the rest of the way with my gun, shooed him indoors, shooed the other prisoners away from the door, and closed and barred it again.

The bearded man had stopped howling when I returned.

“Anybody riding after you?” I asked, as I knelt beside him and began cutting his pants away with my pocket knife.

For answer to that I got a lot of information about myself, my habits, my ancestors. None of it happened to be the truth, but it was colorful.

“Maybe we’d better put a hobble on his tongue,” Milk River suggested.

“No. Let him cry!” I spoke to the bearded man again. “If I were you, I’d answer that question. If it happens that the Circle H. A. R. riders trail you here and take us unawares, it’s a gut that you’re in for a lynching. Ahorcar, understand?”

He hadn’t thought of that.

“Sí, sí. T’at Peery an’ hees hombres. T’ey seguir — mucho rapidez!”

“Any of your men left, besides you and this other?”

“No! Ningún!”

“Suppose you build as much fire as you can out here in front while I’m stopping this egg’s bleeding, Milk River.”

The lad looked disappointed.

“Ain’t we going to bushwack them waddies none?”

“Not unless we have to.”

By the time I had put a couple of tourniquets on the Mexican, Milk River had a roaring fire lighting the buildings and most of the saucer in which they sat. I had intended stowing ’Nacio and Milk River indoors, in case I couldn’t make Peery talk sense. But there wasn’t time. I had just started to explain my plan to Milk River when Peery’s bass voice came from outside the ring of light.

“Put ’em up, everybody!”

XIV

“Easy!” I cautioned Milk River, and stood up. But I didn’t raise my hands.

“The excitement’s over,” I called. “Come on down.”

Ten minutes passed. Peery rode into the light. His square-jawed face was grime-streaked and grim. His horse was muddy lather all over. His guns were in his hands.

Behind him rode Dunne — as dirty, as grim, as ready with his firearms.

Nobody followed Dunne. The others were spread around us in the darkness, then.

Peery leaned over his pony’s head to look at Big ’Nacio, who was lying breathlessly still on the ground.

“Dead?”

“No — a slug through hand and leg. I’ve got some of his friends under lock and key indoors.”

Mad red rims showed around Peery’s eyes in the firelight.

“You can keep the others,” he said harshly. “This hombre will do us.”

I didn’t misunderstand him.

“I’m keeping all of them.”

“I ain’t got a damned bit of confidence in you,” Peery growled down at me. “You ain’t done nothing since you been here, and it ain’t likely you ever will. I’m making sure that this Big ’Nacio’s riding stops right here. I’m taking care of him myself.”

“Nothing stirring!”

“How you figuring on keeping me from taking him?” he laughed viciously at me. “You don’t think me and Irish are alone, do you? If you don’t believe you’re corralled, make a play!”

I believed him, but—

“That doesn’t make any difference. If I were a grub-line rider, or a desert rat, or any lone guy with no connections, you’d rub me out quick enough. But I’m not, and you know I’m not. I’m counting on that. You’ve got to kill me to take ’Nacio. That’s flat! I don’t think you want him bad enough to go that far. Right or wrong, I’m playing it that way.”

He stared at me for a while. Then his knees urged his horse toward the Mexican, ’Nacio sat up and began pleading with me to save him.

Slowly I raised my right hand to my shoulder-holstered gun.

“Drop it!” Peery ordered, both his guns close to my head.

I grinned at him, took my gun out slowly, slowly turned it until it was level between his two.

We held that pose long enough to work up a good sweat apiece. It wasn’t restful!

A queer light flickered in his red-rimmed eyes.

I didn’t guess what was coming until too late.

His left-hand gun swung away from me — exploded.

A hole opened in the top of Big ’Nacio’s head. He pitched over on his side.

The grinning Milk River shot Peery out of the saddle.

I was under Peery’s right-hand gun when it went off. I was scrambling under his rearing horse’s feet.

Dunne’s revolvers coughed.

“Inside!” I yelled to Milk River, and put two bullets into Dunne’s pony.

Rifle bullets sang every which way across, around, under, over us.

Inside the lighted doorway Milk River hugged the floor, spouting fire and lead from both hands.

Dunne’s horse was down. Dunne got up — caught both hands to his face — went down beside his horse.

Milk River turned off the fireworks long enough for me to dash over him into the house.

While I smashed the lamp chimney, blew out the flame, he slammed the door.

Bullets made music on door and wall.

“Did I do right, shooting that jigger?” Milk River asked.

“Good work!” I lied.

There was no use bellyaching over what was done, but I hadn’t wanted Peery dead. Dunne’s death was unnecessary, too. The proper place for guns is after talk has failed, and I hadn’t run out of words by any means when this brown-skinned lad had gone into action.

The bullets stopped punching holes in our door.

“The boys have got their heads together,” Milk River guessed. “They can’t have a hell of a lot of caps left if they’ve been snapping them at ’Nacio since early morning.”

I found a white handkerchief in my pocket and began stuffing one corner in a rifle muzzle.

“What’s for that?” Milk River asked.

“Talk.” I moved to the door. “And you’re to hold your hand until I’m through.”

“I never seen such a hombre for making talk,” he complained.

I opened the door a cautious crack. Nothing happened. I eased the rifle through the crack and waved it in the light of the still burning fire. Nothing happened. I opened the door and stepped out.

“Send somebody down to talk!” I yelled at the outer darkness.

A voice I didn’t recognize cursed bitterly, and began a threat:

“We’ll give yuh—”

It broke off in silence.

Metal glinted off to one side.

Buck Small, his bulging eyes dark-circled, a smear of blood on one cheek, came into the light.

“What are you people figuring on doing?” I asked.

He looked sullenly at me.

“We’re figurin’ on gettin’ that Milk River party. We ain’t got nothin’ against you. You’re doin’ what you’re paid to do. But Milk River hadn’t ought of killed Peery!”

Milk River bounced stiff-legged out of the door.

“Any time you want any part of me, you pop-eyed this-and-that, all you got to do is name it!”

Small’s hands curved toward his holstered guns.

“Cut it!” I growled at Milk River, getting in front of him, pushing him back to the door. “I’ve got work to do. I can’t waste time watching you boys cut up. This is no time to be bragging about what a desperate guy you are!”

I finally got rid of him, and faced Small again.

“You boys want to take a tumble to yourselves, Buck. The wild and woolly days are over. You’re in the clear so far. ’Nacio jumped you, and you did what was right when you massacred his riders all over the desert. But you’ve got no right to fool with my prisoners. Peery wouldn’t understand that. And if we hadn’t shot him, he’d have swung later!

“For Milk River’s end of it: he doesn’t owe you anything. He dropped Peery under your guns — dropped him with less than an even break! You people had the cards stacked against us. Milk River took a chance you or I wouldn’t have taken. You’ve got nothing to howl about.

“I’ve got ten prisoners in there, and I’ve got a lot of guns, and stuff to put in ’em. If you make me do it, I’m going to deal out the guns to my prisoners and let ’em fight. I’d rather lose every damned one of them that way than let you take one of ’em away from me!

“All that you boys can get out of fighting us is a lot of grief — whether you win or lose. This end of Orilla County has been left to itself longer than most of the Southwest. But those days are over. Outside money has come into it; outside people are coming. You can’t buck it! Men tried that in the old days, and failed. Will you talk it over with the others?”

“Yeah,” and he went away in the darkness.

I went indoors.

“I think they’ll be sensible,” I told Milk River, “but you can’t tell. So maybe you better hunt around and see if you can find a way through the floor to our basement hoosgow, because I meant what I said about giving guns to our captives.”

Twenty minutes later Buck Small was back.

“You win,” he said. “We want to take Peery and Dunne with us.”

XV

Nothing ever looked better to me than my bed in the Cañon House the next — Wednesday — night. My grandstand play with the yellow horse, my fight with Chick Orr, the unaccustomed riding I had been doing — these things had filled me fuller of aches than Orilla County was of sand.

Our ten prisoners were resting in an old outdoor store-room of Adderly’s, guarded by volunteers from among the better element, under the supervision of Milk River. They would be safe there, I thought, until the immigration inspectors — to whom I had sent word — could come for them. Most of Big ’Nacio’s men had been killed in the fight with the Circle H. A. R. hands, and I didn’t think Bardell could collect men enough to try to open my prison.

The Circle H. A. R. riders would behave reasonably well from now on, I thought. There were two angles still open, but the end of my job in Corkscrew wasn’t far away. So I wasn’t dissatisfied with myself as I got stiffly out of my clothes and climbed into bed for the sleep I had earned.

Did I get it? No.

I was just comfortably bedded down when somebody began thumping on my door.

It was fussy little Dr. Haley.

“I was called into your temporary prison a few minutes ago to look at Rainey,” the doctor said. “He tried to escape, and broke his arm in a fight with one of the guards. That isn’t serious, but the man’s condition is. He should be given some cocaine. I don’t think it is safe to leave him without the drug any longer. I would have given him an injection, but Milk River stopped me, saying you had given orders that nothing was to be done without instructions from you.”

“Is he really in bad shape?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll go down and talk to him,” I said, reluctantly starting to dress again. “I gave him a shot now and then on the way up from the rancho — enough to keep him from falling down on us. But I want to get some information out of him now, and he gets no more until he’ll talk. Maybe he’s ripe now.”

We could hear Rainey’s howling before we reached the jail.

Milk River was squatting on his heels outside the door, talking to one of the guards.

“He’s going to throw a joe on you, chief, if you don’t give him a pill,” Milk River told me. “I got him tied up now, so’s he can’t pull the splints off his arm. He’s plumb crazy!”

The doctor and I went inside, the guard holding a lantern high at the door so we could see.

In one corner of the room, Gyp Rainey sat in the chair to which Milk River had tied him. Froth was in the corners of his mouth. He was writhing with cramps. The other prisoners were trying to get some sleep, their blankets spread on the floor as far from Rainey as they could get.

“For Christ’s sake give me a shot!” Rainey whined at me.

“Give me a hand, Doctor, and we’ll carry him out.”

We lifted him, chair and all, and carried him outside.

“Now stop your bawling and listen to me,” I ordered. “You shot Nisbet. I want the straight story of it. The straight story will bring you a shot, and nothing else will.”

“I didn’t kill him!” he screamed. “I didn’t! Before God, I didn’t!”

“That’s a lie. You stole Peery’s rope while the rest of us were in Bardell’s place Monday morning, talking over Slim’s death. You tied the rope where it would look like the murderer had made a getaway down the cañon. Then you stood at the window until Nisbet came into the back room — and you shot him. Nobody went down that rope — or Milk River would have found some sign. Will you come through?”

He wouldn’t. He screamed and cursed and pleaded and denied knowledge of the murder.

“Back you go!” I said.

Dr. Haley put a hand on my arm.

“I don’t want you to think I am interfering, but I really must warn you that what you’re doing is dangerous. It is my belief, and my duty to advise you, that you are endangering this man’s life by refusing him some of the drug.”

“I know it, Doctor, but I’ll have to risk it. He’s not so far gone, or he wouldn’t be lying. When the sharp edge of the drug-hunger hits him, he’ll talk!”

Gyp Rainey stowed away again, I went back to my room. But not to bed.

Clio Landes was waiting for me, sitting there — I had left the door unlocked — with a bottle of whisky. She was about three-quarters lit up — one of those melancholy lushes.

She was a poor, sick, lonely, homesick girl, far away from her world. She dosed herself with alcohol, remembered her dead parents, sad bits of her childhood and unfortunate slices of her past, and cried over them. She poured out all her hopes and fears to me — including her liking for Milk River, who was a good kid even if he had never been within two thousand miles of Forty-second Street and Broadway.

The talk always came back to that: New York, New York, New York.

It was close to four o’clock Thursday morning when the whisky finally answered my prayers, and she went to sleep on my shoulder.

I picked her up and carried her down the hall to her own room. Just as I reached her door, fat Bardell came up the stairs.

“More work for the sheriff,” he commented jovially, and went on.

I took her slippers off, tucked her in bed, opened the window, and went out, locking the door behind me and chucking the key over the transom.

After that I slept.

XVI

The sun was high and the room was hot when I woke to the familiar sound of someone knocking on the door. This time it was one of the volunteer guards — the long-legged boy who had carried the warning to Peery Monday night.

“Gyp wants t’ see yuh.” The boy’s face was haggard. “He wants yuh more’n I ever seen a man want anything.”

Rainey was a wreck when I got to him.

“I killed him! I killed him!” he shrieked at me. “Bardell knowed the Circle H. A. R. would hit back f’r Slim’s killin’. He made me kill Nisbet an’ stack th’ deal agin Peery so’s it’d be up t’ you t’ go up agin ’em. He’d tried it before an’ got th’ worst of it!

“Gimme a shot! That’s th’ God’s truth! I stoled th’ rope, planted it, an’ shot Nisbet wit’ Bardell’s gun when Bardell sent him back there! Th’ gun’s under th’ tin-can dump in back o’ Adderly’s. Gimme th’ shot! Gimme it!”

“Where’s Milk River?” I asked the long-legged boy.

“Sleepin’, I reckon. He left along about daylight.”

“All right, Gyp! Hold it until the doc gets here. I’ll send him right over!”

I found Dr. Haley in his house. A minute later he was carrying a charge over to the hypo.

The Border Palace didn’t open until noon. Its doors were locked. I went up the street to the Cañon House. Milk River came out just as I stepped up on the porch.

“Hello, young fellow,” I greeted him. “Got any idea which room your friend Bardell reposes in?”

He looked at me as if he had never seen me before.

“S’pose you find out for yourself. I’m through doing your chores. You can find yourself a new wet nurse, Mister, or you can go to hell!”

The odor of whisky came out with the words, but he wasn’t drunk enough for that to be the whole explanation.

“What’s the matter with you?” I asked.

“What’s the matter is I think you’re a lousy—”

I didn’t let it get any farther than that.

His right hand whipped to his side as I stepped in.

I jammed him between the wall and my hip before he could draw, and got one of my hands on each of his arms.

“You may be a curly wolf with your rod,” I growled, shaking him, a lot more peeved than if he had been a stranger, “but if you try any of your monkey business on me, I’ll turn you over my knee!”

Clio Landes’ thin fingers dug into my arm.

“Stop it!” she cried. “Stop it! Why don’t you behave?” to Milk River; and to me: “He’s sore over something this morning. He doesn’t mean what he says!”

I was sore myself.

“I mean what I said,” I insisted.

But I took my hands off him, and went indoors. Inside the door I ran into sallow Vickers, who was hurrying to see what the rumpus was about.

“What room is Bardell’s?”

“214. Why?”

I went on past him and upstairs.

My gun in one hand, I used the other to knock on Bardell’s door.

“Who is it?” came through.

I told him.

“What do you want?”

I said I wanted to talk to him.

He kept me waiting for a couple of minutes before he opened. He was half-dressed. All his clothes below the waist were on. Above, he had a coat on over his undershirt, and one of his hands was in his coat pocket.

His eyes jumped big when they lit on my gun.

“You’re arrested for Nisbet’s murder!” I informed him. “Take your hand out of your pocket.”

He tried to look as if he thought I was kidding him.

“For Nisbet’s murder?”

“Uh-huh. Rainey came through. Take your hand out of your pocket.”

“You’re arresting me on the say-so of a hop-head?”

“Uh-huh. Take your hand out of your pocket.”

“You’re—”

“Take your hand out of your pocket.”

His eyes moved from mine to look past my head, a flash of triumph burning in them.

I beat him to the first shot by a hairline, since he had wasted time waiting for me to fall for that ancient trick.

His bullet cut my neck.

Mine took him where his undershirt was tight over his fat chest.

He fell, tugging at his pocket, trying to get the gun out for another shot.

I could have jumped him, but he was going to die anyhow. That first bullet had got his lungs. I put another into him.

The hall filled with people.

“Get the doctor!” I called to them.

But Bardell didn’t need him. He was dead before I had the words out of my mouth.

Chick Orr came through the crowd, into the room.

I stood up, sticking my gun back in its holster.

“I’ve got nothing on you, Chick, yet,” I said slowly. “You know better than I do whether there is anything to get or not. If I were you, I’d drift out of Corkscrew without wasting too much time packing up.”

The ex-pug squinted his eyes at me, rubbed his chin, and made a clucking sound in his mouth.

His gold teeth showed in a grin.

“’F anybody asks for me, you tell ’em I’m off on a tour,” and he pushed out through the crowd again.

When the doctor came, I took him up the hall to my room, where he patched my neck. The wound wasn’t much, but my neck is fleshy, and it bled a lot — all over me, in fact.

After he had finished, I got fresh clothes from my bag and undressed. But when I went to wash, I found the doctor had used all my water. Getting into coat, pants and shoes, I went down to the kitchen for more.

The hall was empty when I came upstairs again, except for Clio Landes.

She went past me without looking at me — deliberately not looking at me.

I washed, dressed, and strapped on my gun. One more angle to be cleaned up, and I would be through. I didn’t think I’d need the .32 toys any more, so I put them away. One more angle, and I was done. I was pleased with the idea of getting away from Corkscrew. I didn’t like the place, had never liked it, liked it less than ever since Milk River’s break.

I was thinking about him when I stepped out of the hotel — to see him standing across the street.

I didn’t give him a tumble, but turned toward the lower end of the street.

One step. A bullet kicked up dirt at my feet.

I stopped.

“Go for it, fat boy!” Milk River yelled. “It’s me or you!”

I turned slowly to face him, looking for an out. But there wasn’t any.

His eyes were insane-lighted slits. His face was a ghastly savage mask. He was beyond reasoning with.

“Put it away!” I ordered, though I knew the words were wasted.

“It’s me or you!” he repeated, and put another bullet into the ground in front of me. “Warm your iron!”

I stopped looking for an out. Blood thickened in my head, and things began to look queer. I could feel my neck thickening. I hoped I wasn’t going to get too mad to shoot straight.

I went for my gun.

He gave me an even break.

His gun swung down to me as mine straightened to him.

We pulled triggers together.

Flame jumped at me.

I smacked the ground — my right side all numb.

He was staring at me — bewildered. I stopped staring at him, and looked at my gun — the gun that had only clicked when I pulled the trigger!

When I looked up again, he was coming toward me, slowly, his gun hanging at his side.

“Played it safe, huh?” I raised my gun so he could see the broken firing-pin. “Serves me right for leaving it on the bed when I went downstairs for water.”

Milk River dropped his gun — grabbed mine.

Clio Landes came running from the hotel to him.

“You’re not—?”

Milk River stuck my gun in her face.

“You done that?”

“I was afraid he—” she began.

“You—!”

With the back of an open hand, Milk River struck the girl’s mouth.

He dropped down beside me, his face a boy’s face. A tear fell hot on my hand.

“Chief, I didn’t—”

“That’s all right,” I assured him, and I meant it.

I missed whatever else he said. The numbness was leaving my side, and the feeling that came in its place wasn’t pleasant. Everything stirred inside me...

XVII

I was in bed when I came to. Dr. Haley was doing disagreeable things to my side. Behind him, Milk River held a basin in unsteady hands.

“Milk River,” I whispered, because that was the best I could do in the way of talk.

He bent his ear to me.

“Get the Jew. He killed Vogel. Careful — gun on him. Talk self-defense — maybe confess. Lock him up with others.”

Sweet sleep again.

Night, dim lamplight was in the room when I opened my eyes again. Clio Landes sat beside my bed, staring at the floor, woebegone.

“Good evening,” I managed.

I was sorry I had said anything.

She cried all over me and kept me busy assuring her she had been forgiven for the trickery with my gun. I don’t know how many times I forgave her. It got to be a damned nuisance. No sooner would I say that everything was all right than she’d begin all over again to ask me to forgive her.

“I was so afraid you’d kill him, because he’s only a kid, and somebody had told him a lot of things about you and me, and I knew how crazy he was, and he’s only a kid, and I was so afraid you’d kill him,” and so on and so on.

Half an hour of this had me woozy with fever.

“And now he won’t talk to me, won’t even look at me, won’t let me come in here when he’s here. And nothing will ever make things right again, and I was so afraid you’d kill him, because he’s only a boy, and...”

I had to shut my eyes and pretend I had passed out to shut her up.

I must have slept some, because when I looked around again it was day, and Milk River was in the chair.

He stood up, not looking at me, his head hanging.

“I’ll be moving on, Chief, now that you’re coming around all right. I want you to know, though, that if I’d knowed what that — done to your gun I wouldn’t never have throwed down on you.”

“What was the matter with you, anyhow?” I growled at him.

His face got beet-color and he shuffled his feet.

“Crazy, I reckon,” he mumbled. “I had a couple of drinks, and then Bardell filled me full of stuff about you and her, and that you was playing me for a Chinaman. And — and I just went plumb loco, I reckon.”

“Any of it left in your system?”

“Hell, no, chief! I’d give a leg if none of it had never happened!”

“Then suppose you stop this foolishness and sit down and talk sense. Are you and the girl still on the outs?”

They were, most emphatically, most profanely.

“You’re a big boob!” I told him. “She’s a stranger out here, and homesick for her New York. I could talk her language and knew the people she knew. That’s all there was—”

“But that ain’t the big point, chief! Any woman that would pull a—”

“Bunk! It was a shabby trick, right enough. But a woman who’ll pull a trick like that for you when you are in a jam is worth a million an ounce, and you’d know it if you had anything to know anything with. Now you run out and find this Clio person, and bring her back with you, and no nonsense!”

He pretended he was going reluctantly. But I heard her voice when he knocked on her door. And they let me lay there in my bed of pain for one solid hour before they remembered me. They came in walking so close together that they were stumbling over each other’s feet.

“Now let’s talk business,” I grumbled. “What day is this?”

“Monday.”

“Did you get the Jew?”

“I done that thing,” Milk River said, dividing the one chair with the girl. “He’s over to the county seat now — went over with the others. He swallowed that self-defense bait, and told me all about it. How’d you ever figure it out, chief?”

“Figure what out?”

“That the Jew killed poor old Slim. He says Slim come in there that night, woke him up, ate a dollar and ten cents’ worth of grub on him, and then dared him to try and collect. In the argument that follows, Slim goes for his gun, and the Jew gets scared and shoots him — after which Slim obligingly staggers out o’ doors to die. I can see all that clear enough, but how’d you hit on it?”

“I oughtn’t give away my professional secrets, but I will this once. The Jew was cleaning house when I went in to ask him for what he knew about the killing, and he had scrubbed his floor before he started on the ceiling. If that meant anything at all, it meant that he had had to scrub his floor, and was making the cleaning general to cover it up. So maybe Slim had bled some on that floor.

“Starting from that point, the rest came easily enough. Slim leaving the Border Palace in a wicked frame of mind, broke after his earlier winning, humiliated by Nisbet’s triumph in the gun-pulling, soured further by the stuff he had been drinking all day. Red Wheelan had reminded him that afternoon of the time the Jew had followed him to the ranch to collect two bits. What more likely than he’d carry his meanness into the Jew’s shack? That Slim hadn’t been shot with the shotgun didn’t mean anything. I never had any faith in that shotgun from the first. If the Jew had been depending on that for his protection, he wouldn’t have put it in plain sight, and under a shelf, where it wasn’t easy to get out. I figured the shotgun was there for moral effect, and he’d have another one stowed out of sight for use.

“Another point you folks missed was that Nisbet seemed to be telling a straight story — not at all the sort of tale he’d have told if he were guilty. Bardell’s and Chick’s weren’t so good, but the chances are they really thought Nisbet had killed Slim, and were trying to cover him up.”

Milk River grinned at me, pulling the girl closer with the one arm that was around her.

“You ain’t so downright dumb,” he said. “Clio done warned me the first time she seen you that I’d best not try to run no sandies on you.”

A far-away look came into his pale eyes.

“Think of all them folks that were killed and maimed and jailed — all over a dollar and ten cents. It’s a good thing Slim didn’t eat five dollars’ worth of grub. He’d of depopulated the State of Arizona complete!”