confidence as she brought her arms in front and massaged chapped wrists. “It would have been a rather terrifying ride.”
Jud pocketed his knife and turned as a man’s gruff voice called. It was Hartman calling to them, but for a moment the voice did not sound exactly right.
“Rufe…Jud! Come on down here! The whole damned story’s been wrote out and ended! Fetch the lady back with you, and come on down here! See for yourselves!”
They went carefully and prudently, with Elisabeth remaining slightly to the rear, but their precautions proved unnecessary. Evart Hartman did not even have a gun in his hand where he sat atop his horse, gazing at something out of sight in the underbrush. Charley Fenwick did not have a gun in his hand, nor did the other two men with Charley, the same men Rufe finally remembered now and was able to identify. At least, he could identify their faces, although he had never met either of them, or heard their names. It was the same two men Jud and Rufe had seen walk out of the abstract office down in Clearwater, vigorously talking to Arlen Chase.
There was one man on foot, and this man had a pistol in his hand. He was the older cowboy Rufe and Jud had left chained in Elisabeth Cane’s barn along with Fenwick. But he simply stood there, staring.
Rufe did not see Arlen Chase until he and Jud eased around the underbrush to come up beside old Hartman. Chase was dead. It looked as though two bullets had hit him, both of them striking his chest. Impact had knocked him backward from the saddle. He was being held in a grotesque sitting posture by the strong and wiry limbs of the bush he had tumbled into.
Elisabeth looked once, then turned away. Even tough Jud did not like that look of entreaty, or supplication, or whatever it was that seemed to emanate from the corpse, from the way it was held up like that, in a begging posture. Jud turned away, too, but not entirely from revulsion. He eyed the pair of strangers and said: “Who shot him?”
One of the newcomers answered. “I did. He shot at us when we started through the underbrush to-ward him. I shot back, then my partner here, also fired back. We nailed him.”
Jud showed no particular remorse, but he frowned. “Why, stranger, why would he shoot at you?”
The horseman gazed around from face to face, be-fore answering Jud, and even then his answer was not very satisfactory. “It’s a long tale, friend. We’ll be glad to explain it fully, back in Clearwater, to the proper authorities.”
Rufe frowned a little. “Mister, for now, you can just sort of pretend we’re the proper authorities.”
Both the strangers looked entirely able to care for themselves. Neither one of them quailed the least bit under Rufe’s mildly unpleasant stare, but one of them, the man who took the blame—or credit—for downing Arlen Chase, looked back at the dead man, evidently completely unimpressed by the corpse’s posture, and said: “That man, gents, sold my brother and me six thousand acres atop a mesa in this here country, when we met him a couple of months back over in Nogales, while we were looking around for some grazing land. Then we came up here to look over what we’d bought, and the old feller at the abstract office told us, just this damned morning, that the title and deed to that land atop this here mesa was legally vested in a woman named Elisabeth Cane. We told Mister Chase we wanted our money back…or the deed to the mesa, free and clear, and he told us in the saloon, back there in town, he’d get it for us by to-morrow. That he’d deliver the deed as heir to Cane’s Mesa. And after that, when all hell busted loose down in town, and he lit out, we figured we’d best light out, too, in order kind of to protect our investment. Some fellers around the livery barn told us how to reach the mesa. We was heading up there, when this happened.” The stranger gestured toward the corpse in the bushes. “The damned fool shot at us when he saw us passing through the underbrush.” The stranger stopped speaking and gazed around.
It was Chase’s man, Charley Fenwick, who threw up his arms. “Gawd damn it,” he cried in exasperation. “First it was just her horses, then just her cattle, then it was burn her out…now this.” Fenwick looked at the man with the pistol hanging at his side, the other man Rufe and Jud had left chained in the barn. The cowboy looked back at Fenwick, and slowly leathered his weapon, turned just as slowly to mount his horse, and finally he spoke.
“I told you and Pete Ruff, consarn it, Charley. I been tellin’ you pair of idiots for the past three, four months, he was gettin’ us all in deeper and deeper.”
Jud pointed to the corpse and gave an order to the man who had just mounted his horse. “Get down, mister, fling Chase over his horse, lash him to it, and lead him on down to town.” Jud’s uncompromising look inspired the cowboy to obey.
Watching the cowboy work and looking as un-compromising as ever, Jud added a little more to what he had already said: “That lousy jailhouse down in Clearwater’s going to be full to the rafters.” He looked at Evart Hartman. “You reckon there’s enough honest folks down there to set up some kind of law court?”
Evart’s answer was cryptic. “You can bet new money on it.”
Jud looked at Rufe, eyebrows raised. Rufe looked at Elisabeth. “Ought to be getting’ back to the ranch,” he told her, and she, too, looked at Evart Hartman. This time, the old cowman did not wait to be ad-dressed. He smiled at the handsome woman.
“Looks Tome like we sort of owe you something, Miz Cane. I’ll send word out that we’ll need maybe ten, fifteen good range riders to help scour the desert and fetch back to your mesa all the Lance-and-Shield livestock we can find. All right, ma’am?”
Elisabeth avoided watching Arlen Chase being lashed limply, belly down, across his saddle when she replied to Hartman. “All right, Mister Hartman. But I don’t need charity.”
The old cowman squinted a moment, then glanced at Rufe, slightly raising and lowering his shoulders as though to say:
XVII
It was in Rufe’s thoughts that they should have ridden back to Clearwater Tomake certain justice was done. It was also in his mind that Evart Hart-man, now that he was convinced that Arlen Chase had been everything honest livestock men disapproved of—horse thief, cattle rustler, land thief— would grimly make a particular point of seeing that justice was done.
Jud may have been thinking along these lines, too, because, as he and Rufe and Elisabeth Cane reached the trail leading upward to the mesa top, Jud said: “Folks just naturally shy clear of unpleasantness, and maybe that’s how fellers like Chase manage to succeed. Seems Tome, we’d ought to hang around, down there in Clearwater, and make blessed sure things come out right.”
Elisabeth, who had been riding in silence most of the way, smiled at Jud. “It’s a big country. There aren’t many people in it, but once they know for a fact someone is stealing and lying, you can depend upon them to do whatever has to be done to put an end to it.”
Rufe listened, and said nothing. As far as he was concerned, the case against Arlen Chase did not need any more proving, and with Chase dead, and his gunfighter dead, also, and his cowboys like Fen-wick and that older rider willing to tell what they knew, there would be justice. Belated justice, for a fact—Matt Reilly, Constable Bradshaw, and another rider, the one who had taken his money from the stolen horses and gone back to Texas with it—had seriously crippled Elisabeth’s cow outfit, but even that was not beyond repair.
He eyed Elisabeth thoughtfully. “Did Chase have pretty fair quality cattle, ma’am?”
“Yes. He had scrubs, like everyone else, but his grade stock was fair quality. Why?”
Rufe glanced up the trail they were riding as he said: “Well, a funny thing crossed my mind just now. Arlen Chase’s mark was AC. And seems Tome someone said your pappy’s name was Amos Cane, and that figures out AC, too.”
Elisabeth’s dark eyes widened on Rufe. He knew exactly what she was thinking, but he hadn’t mentioned any of this with any thought in mind of stealing AC cattle, so he explained. “Suppose you could borrow some money, maybe from local stockmen like old Hartman, or maybe from some bank, if there is one in the country. Why, then, you could buy Chase’s iron…the AC…and that way you’d acquire his livestock, and, if you’d care to reregister his iron in your pappy’s name, why then we wouldn’t have all that re-branding to do. You’d have two irons, AC and your Lance-and-Shield brand.”
Even Jud, after some thought about this, smiled a little. He winked at Elisabeth, then spoke to his part-ner. “Every once in a while you do come up with something that could pass for a smart idea. Not often, but every now
