capable shoulders rose and fell meaningfully. “Somebody might get hurt, an’ I’d like to see that avoided, if it’s possible.”
Tolliver’s laugh came out to Jack where he stopped on the path leading to his horse at the hitch rack. “Thanks, Sheriff. Link Tolliver’s seen his share o’ trouble, I allow, an’ I ain’t seen anyone hereabouts that could teach him much. Let ’em come, Sheriff. They’ll get the damnedest surprise o’ their cowstealin’ lives!”
Masters clamped his jaw shut as a hot reply came lunging up from inside. He nodded curtly and walked back to his horse, tightened the cinch, swung aboard, and reined back up the trail toward Mendocino, the town that lay a couple of miles beyond the little swale that hid the view of the Modoc from its sight.
In Mendocino, the tag end of a gentle summer had come to a close and the cowmen were left with only one task left undone. They had grassed-out fat cattle to peddle, the hay was up, and the firewood was in. The roundups were winding up their arduous labors, and the cowmen were beginning to drift into town to talk in the shade of the old sycamores, where a light carpet of dead leaves betokened winter. Prices, possible outlets, and the condition of critters were the standard norms of daily conversation. Jack Masters watched the repetitive cycle that year, as he had every year since he had been a young cowboy—newly come to the high uplands of the Mendocino country to put down roots of his own.
He was in the Goldstrike Saloon, one of Mendocino’s two such establishments, when Wes Flourney, his young, effervescent deputy, came bouncing in. Masters smiled at the younger man.
“Say, Jack, d’ya hear about Ned Prouty?”
Jack thought of short, waspish Ned—grizzled and hard as flint, but fair and honest, one of the few remaining pioneer cowmen of the Mendocino. He shook his head slightly, gazing indifferently out over the buzzing groups of cattlemen standing and sitting around the saloon, busy with talk of cows and beef. He was almost beyond the reach of Wes’s voice, and the words for a second didn’t penetrate, but, when they did, Sheriff Masters swung abruptly around, the tolerant smile gone from his lean, tanned face.
“What’d you say, Wes?”
“Ol’ Ned an’ that Tolliver
Jack paid for his lukewarm beer, faced around again, and frowned. “Wes, you keep an eye on things in town. I’m goin’ out to the Pothook.” Wes nodded speculatively.
The Pothook was one of the historic cow outfits of the Mendocino country. When Jack rode up to the sprawling old house, he noted the solemn, hard eyes of the riders hanging around the bunkhouse and the barn. He nodded as he rode by, up to the hitch rail, and went on to the house on foot. A square-jawed, short, and muscular young man met him with a harsh smile. “Reckon you want to see Pa?”
“That’s right, Bud. How is he?”
The shorter man shrugged coldly. “About as good as any old fella shot in the back can be, I reckon.”
“Shot in the back?”
The young man, one of Ned Prouty’s sons, nodded and beckoned the sheriff inside. “Come on, Jack, he can talk to you all right.” They were almost to the doorway of the old man’s bedchamber when another man, dark and square-jawed and a little taller than Bud Prouty, came out with a savage expression on his swarthy features. Jack nodded to him. Cal Prouty was one of the best cowboys in the Mendocino country. He glared at Jack for a long moment, then pushed past without a word. Bud flushed a little but made no excuse for his brother. Jack shrugged and entered the sick room.
Ned Prouty was deathly pale but his faded gray eyes were like twin coals under the bushy eyebrows. “Howdy, Jack. Set yourself.” Masters sat, dropped his hat to the floor beside his chair, and looked questioningly at the little hump of flesh under the white blankets and quilts.
Prouty nodded slightly. “Asked the varmint to keep that danged hound o’ his from chasin’ Pothook cows. He’s hell on ’em, Jack, calves, too.” The thin old shoulders rose and fell. “He said to keep my cows away from his place, an’ I told him that this was a free range country where a man’s gotta fence ’em out if he don’t want ’em on his land. Well, he got sore, I reckon. Anyway, he started talkin’ rough. I called him. He didn’t say nothin’, just stood there on his porch an’ glared at me. He wasn’t armed…or, at least I didn’t see no gun. I told him to keep the damned dawg offen my cows or I’d kill it. Went back to get on my horse an’ damned if he didn’t pot me as I was ridin’ away. I got damned near home afore I fell off. The boys found me an’ brung me in. That’s all there is to it, Jack…couple of words an’ a shot in the back.” He nodded bird-like, matter-of-factly, and waited for Jack to speak
“How’s the wound, Ned?”
“Doc Sunday says I’ll make it all right. Close, he says, but not fatal.”
“How soon’ll you be up an’ around, Ned?”
“Week mebbe. Ten days. Why?”
Jack got up, put his hat on absently, and looked out the window at the waving, dry grass on the range beyond the house. “Well, I’ll go down an’ arrest him for attempted murder, Ned. I’ll have to hold him until you can testify against him, so let me know as soon’s you get up, and come in, will you?”
“Bet your life, Jack.”
The sun was well past the meridian when Jack rode down the dusty little trail, age-old and bare, that led down to Cobb’s Ferry. This time his face was a mask of wariness and resolution. Once having tried to avoid trouble he knew was coming, Sheriff Jack Masters felt no reluctance at all about ruthlessly stamping it out after his warning had been ignored. He rode directly up to the adobe house without dismounting, leaned over in the saddle, and called out for Tolliver to come out.
There was an unreal silence around the old house and Masters sensed a tension before the door opened slowly and a heavily muscled young man came out. He wore a gun tied down in its worn, shiny holster on his right leg. He didn’t say anything right away, looking Jack over with a challenging insolence. “Who you want?”
“Link Tolliver.”
“He ain’t here.”
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know.”
Jack tossed a look past the house to the decayed old corral of tree trunks, round and massive but rotting away with age. There were three strange horses in there with fresh sweat on them and three saddles lay in the dust just outside, but Tolliver’s huge gray mare wasn’t in sight. He looked around the house and saw that the hound was gone, too. Apparently the cold-eyed young man was telling the truth.
He brought his gaze back to the baleful, sullen face. “What’s your name,
“Name’s Tolliver. Ben Tolliver. Though I don’t see as it’s any o’ your bizness, lawman.”
Masters regarded the other with a somber glance as he took up the slack in his reins. “Ben, when Link gets back, tell him I’m lookin’ for him an’ I’ll be back in the mornin’.” He was turning his horse when he heard a shuffling sound on the slab porch and looked back. Two more men were standing beside Ben. He took a long look at them and felt misgivings. Each was as hard-looking as Ben, with tied-down guns, ferret-like faces, and malevolent, cold eyes. He rode back down the trail to Mendocino, aware that three pair of hostile eyes followed him in silence.
Wes Flourney walked into the sheriff’s combination jail and office with the first streaks of the new day. He nodded at Jack, who sat behind his desk with a sober, worried look on his face. “It ain’t that bad, is it, Sheriff?”
“What?”
The deputy shrugged. “Whatever you’re thinkin’ about. Man, your face looks like the last rose of summer.”
