Crooked Trails and Straight Part 23

With Fendrick sitting in an easy chair just across the room, he found it a little difficult to say what otherwise would have been a matter of course.

"My bank's busted just now, boys. Have to ask you to let it stand for a few days. Say, till the end of the week."

Fendrick laughed behind the paper he was pretending to read. He knew quite well that Luck's word was as good as his bond, but he chose to suggest a doubt.

"Maybe you'll explain the joke to us, Ca.s.s," the owner of the Circle C said very quietly.

"Oh, I was just laughing at the things I see, Luck," returned the younger man with airy offense, his eyes on the printed sheet.

"Meaning for instance?"

"Just human nature. Any law against laughing?"

Cullison turned his back on him. "See you on Thursday if that's soon enough, boys."

"All the time you want, Luck. Let mine go till after the roundup if you'd rather," Mackenzie suggested.

"Thursday suits me."

Cullison rose and stretched. He had impressed his strong, dominant personality upon his clothes, from the high-heeled boots to the very wrinkles in the corduroy coat he was now putting on. He bad enemies, a good many of them, but his friends were legion.

"Don't hurry yourself."

"Oh, I'll rustle the money, all right. Coming down to the hotel?" Luck was reaching for his hat, but turned toward his friends as he spoke.

Without looking again at Fendrick, he led the way to the street.

The young man left alone cursed softly to himself, and ordered another drink. He knew he was overdoing it, but the meeting with Cullison had annoyed him exceedingly. The men had never been friends, and of late years they had been leaders of hostile camps. Both of them could be overbearing, and there was scarcely a week but their interests overlapped. Luck was capable of great generosity, but he could be obstinate as the rock of Gibraltar when he chose. There had been differences about the owners.h.i.+p of calves, about straying cattle, about political matters. Finally had come open hostility. Ca.s.s leased from the forestry department the land upon which Cullison's cattle had always run free of expense. Upon this he had put sheep, a thing in itself of great injury to the cattle interests. The stockmen had all been banded together in opposition to the forestry administration of the new regime, and Luck regarded Fendrick's action as treachery to the common cause.

He struck back hard. In Arizona the open range is valuable only so long as the water holes also are common property or a private supply available.

The Circle C cattle and those of Fendrick came down from the range to the Del Oro to water at a point where the canon walls opened to a spreading valley. This bit of meadow Luck homesteaded and fenced on the north side, thus cutting the cattle of his enemy from the river.

Ca.s.s was furious. He promptly tore down the fence to let his cattle and sheep through. Cullison rebuilt it, put up a shack at a point which commanded the approach, and set a guard upon it day and night. Open warfare had ensued, and one of the sheepherders had been beaten because he persisted in crossing the dead line.

Now Cullison was going to put the legal seal on the matter by making final proof on his homestead. Ca.s.s knew that if he did so it would practically put him out of business. He would be at the mercy of his foe, who could ruin him if he pleased. Luck would be in a position to dictate terms absolutely.

Nor did it make his defeat any more palatable to Ca.s.s that he had brought it on himself by his bad-tempered unneighborliness and by his overreaching disposition. A hundred times he had blacknamed himself for an arrant fool because he had not antic.i.p.ated the move of his enemy and homesteaded on his own account.

He felt that there must be some way out of the trap if he could only find it. Whenever the thought of eating humble pie to Luck came into his mind, the rage boiled in him. He swore he would not do it. Better a hundred times to see the thing out to a fighting finish.

Taking the broad-rimmed gray hat he found on the rack, Ca.s.s pa.s.sed out of the clubhouse and into the sun-bathed street.

CHAPTER II

LUCK MEETS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

Cullison and his friends proceeded down Papago street to the old plaza where their hotel was located. Their transit was an interrupted one, for these four cattlemen were among the best known in the Southwest. All along the route they scattered nods of recognition, friendly greetings, and genial banter. One of them--the man who had formerly been the hard-riding, quick-shooting sheriff of the county--met also scowls once or twice, to which he was entirely indifferent. Luck had no slavish respect for law, had indeed, if rumor were true, run a wild and stormy course in his youth.

But his reign as sheriff had been a terror to lawbreakers. He had made enemies, desperate and unscrupulous ones, who had sworn to wipe him from among the living, and one of these he was now to meet for the first time since the man had stood handcuffed before him, livid with fury, and had sworn to cut his heart out at the earliest chance.

It was in the lobby of the hotel that Cullison came plump against Lute Blackwell. For just a moment they stared at each other before the former sheriff spoke.

"Out again, eh, Blackwell?" he said easily.

From the bloodshot eyes one could have told at a glance the man had been drinking heavily. From whiskey he had imbibed a Dutch courage just bold enough to be dangerous.

"Yes, I'm out--and back again, just as I promised, Mr. Sheriff," he threatened.

The cattleman ignored his manner. "Then I'll give you a piece of advice gratis. Papago County has grown away from the old days. It has got past the two-gun man. He's gone to join the antelope and the painted Indian.

You'll do well to remember that."

The fellow leaned forward, sneering so that his ugly mouth looked like a crooked gash. "How about the one-gun man, Mr. Sheriff?"

"He doesn't last long now."

"Doesn't he?"

The man's rage boiled over. But Luck was far and away the quicker of the two. His left hand shot forward and gripped the rising wrist, his right caught the hairy throat and tightened on it. He shook the convict as if he had been a child, and flung him, black in the face, against the wall, where he hung, strangling and sputtering.

"I--I'll get you yet," the ruffian panted. But he did not again attempt to reach for the weapon in his hip pocket.

"You talk too much with your mouth."

With superb contempt, Luck slapped him, turned on his heel, and moved away, regardless of the raw, stark l.u.s.t to kill that was searing this man's elemental brain.

Across the convict's rage came a vision. He saw a camp far up in the Rincons, and seated around a fire five men at breakfast, all of them armed. Upon them had come one man suddenly. He had dominated the situation quietly, had made one disarm the others, had handcuffed the one he wanted and taken him from his friends through a hostile country where any hour he might be shot from ambush. Moreover, he had traveled with his prisoner two days, always cheerful and matter of fact, not at all uneasy as to what might lie behind the washes or the rocks they pa.s.sed. Finally he had brought his man safely to Casa Grande, from whence he had gone over the road to the penitentiary. Blackwell had been the captured man, and he held a deep respect for the prowess of the officer who had taken him. The sheer pluck of the adventure had alone made it possible. For such an unflawed nerve Blackwell knew his jerky rage was no match.

The paroled convict recovered his breath and slunk out of the hotel.

Billie Mackenzie, owner of the Fiddleback ranch, laughed even while he disapproved. "Some day, Luck, you'll get yours when you are throwing chances at a coyote like this. You'll guess your man wrong, or he'll be one gla.s.s drunker than you figure on, and then he'll plug you through and through."

"The man that takes chances lives longest, Mac," his friend replied, dismissing the subject carelessly. "I'm going to tuck away about three hours of sleep. So long." And with a nod he was gone to his room.

"All the same Luck's too derned rash," Flandrau commented. "He'll run into trouble good and hard one of these days. When I'm in Rattlesnake Gulch I don't aim to pick posies too un.o.bservant."

Mackenzie looked worried. No man lived whom he admired so much as Luck Cullison. "And he hadn't ought to be sitting in these big games. He's hard up. Owes a good bit here and there. Always was a spender. First thing he'll have to sell the Circle C to square things. He'll pay us this week like he said he would. That's dead sure. He'd die before he'd fall down on it, now Fendrick has got his back up. But I swear I don't know where he'll raise the price. Money is so tight right now."

That afternoon Luck called at every bank in Saguache. All of the bankers knew him and were friendly to him, but in spite of their personal regard they could do nothing for him.

"It's this stringency, Luck," Jordan of the Cattlemen's National explained to him. "We can't let a dollar go even on the best security. You know I'd like to let you have it, but it wouldn't be right to the bank. We've got to keep our reserve up. Why, I'm lying awake nights trying to figure out a way to call in more of our money."

"I'm not asking much, Jack."

"Luck, I'd let you have it if I dared. Why, we're running close to the wind. Public confidence is a mighty ticklish thing. If I didn't have twenty thousand coming from El Paso on the Flyer to-night I'd be uneasy for the bank."