were you born with?'
'The same. Rafe Bender.'
The banker's hard eyes crawled over him like beetles. His cheroot lobbed out smoke. 'Can you make it stick?'
'I'm goin' to sure as hell try!'
X
'Well, it figures,' Chilton sighed after another intent look. 'What about your hands? This ain't going to be duck soup.'
'I ain't goin' to be caught like that again, neither.' Rafe scowled, impatient with so much jawing. 'Am I still on the payroll or ain't I?'
Chilton puffed some more, finally pitched his stogie into a spittoon. 'I don't figure to pour good money after bad—'
'Hell's fire!' Rafe snarled. 'You ain't put a cent in my pockets up to now!' Looking rabid, he leaned over Chilton's desk. 'I got to eat, too! I been pretty hard used goin' after your chestnuts—'
'All right,' the banker said in a considerably milder tone, 'we can do business. But make sure you remember I can't afford to have my name linked with failures. Next time you come out the bottom side of the deck you better spread your wings and keep right on going.'
Though he fumed inside, Rafe was unable to find a match for such words. In any deal with this kind of whistleberry, a man was outvoted from scratch. Just the same, determined to have the last say, he growled. 'I'll need a canteen, a good high-powered rifle—better get me a tellyscope, too, while you're at it. An' a couple of weeks' grub, an' a pack horse to tote 'em. An' if you don't want that guy I tied up bargin' in, better send someone out for this stuff in a hurry.'
They glowered at each other. But Rafe, in this matter, was top dog, and both knew it. Looking riled enough to chew up bar iron, Chilton called in one of his clerks and gave instructions. 'An' fetch 'im around to the back,' Rafe said, boldly helping himself from Chilton's box of cheroots.
Filling the place with its stink he struck a lucifer, igniting the weed he had in his mouth while he stuffed a half dozen others into his shirt. The banker kept still, but there was in his look the definite promise of hard times to come. He was the kind who forgot nothing, who demanded six bits for every dime he put out. There would be a hereafter. Rafe never doubted that.
But it did him good to see the man writhe. He said, spewing smoke like a half-clogged chimney, 'Let's get down to brass tacks. How did old Bender git his hooks on that ranch?'
Chilton finally said, 'He won it at cards.'
When Rafe's eyebrows went up the banker grudgingly said, 'Don Luis was a plunger, one of those all-or- nothing fools. Vain, flamboyant, proud as a peacock. And, like all of his tribe, couldn't see beyond his nose. He couldn't imagine a time,' Chilton said with contempt, 'when Ortegas wouldn't be right next to God, when all they had known would leak away through his lingers. Don Luis the Magnificent! He hadn't the sense to pound sand down a rat hole!'
'But the ranch?' Rafe prodded.
'Bender had just come into the country. Had lost this fellow Rafe in the War and had just lost his wife; didn't seem to care whether school kept or not. He was at the bar in Jack Dahl's place when Ortega came in, the crowd opening up to let him through. Wanted Bender's horses so bad he could taste them. You wouldn't have known he was drunk, I'll say that for him. He could really put it away.'
'You was there?'
Chilton nodded. 'Bender was pretty well tanked himself, but not so far gone he'd sell stock he had driven all the way from the Ozarks. Don Luis kept raising the price. Bender kept stubbornly shaking his head. All this while they kept pouring it down. Finally Ortega offered to put up his ranch on the turn of a card—the land and the buildings against Bender's horses.
'I'd been pointed out to Bender; matter of fact, Dahl had made us acquainted. Knowing I was a banker Bender asked what I thought, and I told him I'd put up thirty thousand against it. Well, Bender won; next day he came along and asked for the money.'
'An' just like that you put it up.'
Chilton's stare eyed him coldly. 'Finally, yes. But not in one chunk. First time he got half; twice, later, for improvements, he picked up the rest.'
'What improvements?'
'The deal,' Chilton said, 'was between him and me.' A grin twitched his lips and he got out of his chair. 'Your outfit's ready.' And, before Rafe hardly knew what was happening, he was outside the bank. 'All you need worry about,' Chilton said just before he shut and bolted the door, 'is getting rid of Spangler. Don't come back till you've done it.'
Two hours later, deep into the desert, Rafe pulled up for the sixth time to rest his horses and take a long scowl at the country behind. He'd got away from town without any trouble. It had been blowing pretty fierce, and the scud of grit had evidently chased most of the loafers inside. He'd run out of the wind before he'd come three miles, and this was when he'd taken his first look. Nothing showed then, or at any of his later stops, nor could he see any sign of movement now.
The sun was a ball of blazing fire. Distant mountains were half lost in the haze. The white glare was beginning to cook his face and he frustratedly scrubbed it with the back of a hand. The landscape curled and writhed in the heat, and in all those miles of barren waste the only motion to be glimpsed was the twist of a dust devil blowing itself apart.
Rafe was not reassured. The emptiness only increased his uneasiness, deepening his sense of isolation. Though he couldn't find a thing, he was convinced he was being followed; it had been gnawing at him for more than an hour. Now he saw a chance to make sure.
Up ahead about a mile was a long dark ridge, a volcanic spine blown clean of sand and lifting perhaps a
