Novel 1962 - High Lonesome (v5.0) (2 page)

There had been a time…and it was then he thought of Obaro.

Considine never was far from thoughts of Obaro. The town was west and south, and was named for the ranch on whose range the town had begun—the O Bar O. It was a ranch that became a stage stop, then a supply point, and finally a town.

Considine had been a puncher on that ranch, and in the years there he had a friend, a girl, and a dream.

Pete Runyon had been his friend, a top hand on any man’s outfit; and together, full of hell, they had ridden the range, working hard, playing hard, occasionally getting into brawls, sometimes with others, often with each other.

In those days there had been a lot of unbranded stock on the range, and occasionally when they wanted a night on the town they rounded up a few head of mavericks and drove them into town to sell. The trouble was that the big ranchers believed all stuff, unbranded or not, belonged to them.

Originally there had been a lot of cattle that were owned by nobody, and during the War between the States thousands of head had been left unbranded because the men were away at war. Afterward there was no way to trace title to any of that stock, and the big outfits claimed them.

Considine and Runyon were fired for selling stock, and warned off the range.

During the winter that followed the two lived on rustled stock. They rounded up unbranded stock, but now they were no longer too particular, and occasionally they caught up a few wearing brands.

Then Pete Runyon filed for the sheriff’s office and was elected…and he married the girl.

Two nights later, Considine was waiting at a water tower for the Denver & Rio Grande train. He swung aboard, walked through the two passenger cars collecting from the passengers, and dropped off the train where a horse was waiting. A week later he got the same train on the way back.

South of the border he killed a man in a fight over a poker game and joined the Kiowa and Dutch. Four months later, Hardy joined them.

There was a bank in the town of Obaro that was usually well supplied with gold, and it was the boast of the townspeople that it had never been robbed. Robbery had been attempted on three different occasions, and they had created a special Boot Hill graveyard for the robbers. Seven men were buried there, and Considine knew all about that Boot Hill, for he had helped to bury the first man himself.

Every store and office in the town had its rifle or shotgun at hand, and any stranger was under suspicion if he approached the bank. It was the town’s bank, and the people of the town intended to protect it. Anyone attempting to rob the Bank of Obaro must run a gauntlet of rifle fire…in a town notorious for its marksmanship.

T
HE FOUR RODE steadily. Dutch was doing his own thinking. There was one thing in particular he liked about working with Considine. You always made a smooth getaway. No breakneck rides. Somehow he always managed to outguess the pursuit, and most of it was due to careful preparation beforehand.

Considine always made the beginning of the pursuit so tough that it broke the horses of the posses. Pursuit rarely lasted beyond the point where Considine would have the spare horses waiting.

The ride up that sandy draw, for example, and then up the rocky slide—that was enough to take the starch out of any horse. Nor could they ever be traced by their horses, for the horses used in the holdups were never their own mounts.

“Where to now?” Hardy asked.

“Honey’s,” Considine answered.

The Kiowa tilted his hat brim lower. Honey’s place was not far from Obaro, and the Kiowa did not like Obaro. It was Pete Runyon’s town, and Pete was a smart, tough sheriff. All the tougher because he had been an outlaw himself, and all the town knew it.

“Are you thinking of Obaro?” Hardy asked.

“Why not?”

Hardy grinned at the thought. “‘Never was a horse that couldn’t be rode, an’ there never was a rider who couldn’t be throwed.’”

Dutch squinted his eyes into the heat waves. The horse that couldn’t be ridden might throw a lot of riders before the last one rode it. The trick was to be the one who made the ride…only how did a man know?

And the town of Obaro, with Runyon for sheriff…it was a tough horse for any rider to top off.

Chapter 2

I
N THE SAND Tank Mountains there was a lonely corner unknown to the casual traveler. When Table Top Peak showed through a certain notch, the knowing rider would turn off the trail into the barren-looking hills.

Picking his way through the rocks and cacti, a rider could enter a box canyon and climb a trail that led out of it and up along the canyon’s rim to a cirque, or hanging valley.

This was no more than a pocket, but here was usually good grass, and a dripping spring hidden behind a gnarled and ancient cedar. It was a place where several men might remain concealed, unseen even by a rider passing close by…although in the memory of those who knew of the place, no rider had ever come that close.

Three dim trails led from the pocket into the rough country of the Sand Tanks, trails by which a man on the dodge might swiftly lose himself.

When the War between the States came and the few men who knew of the spring were killed or died off, the spring was forgotten, except by an occasional Apache or Pima.

But Dave Spanyer remembered it. There had been a time when he had visited the spring often, a time when he had been glad of its seclusion. He was a grizzled, tough man, seasoned by time and trouble. Now he had come again to the spring, and this time he brought a grown daughter with him.

Drawing rein, he fiddled with building a cigarette while his eyes glanced toward the notch where the shoulder of Table Top was visible. His eyes dropped to the ground. Bunch grass grew in the trail, and some sage…although trail, as such, there had never been.

The great mass of the Sand Tanks lay before them, where there was little brush and less grass. He started his horse without speaking to Lennie and walked it toward a vivid streak of quartz that slashed across the face of a rock. At the rock he turned again and was within the box canyon.

The trail that led upward along its edge was faint, but Dave Spanyer started up, followed by Lennie. Higher and higher through a wilderness of rock and cactus they mounted. Suddenly, when almost at the top, the trail dipped sharply down and around the rocks, and Lennie was riding into the hanging valley behind her father.

The edge broke off sharply, and before them was a view of an enormous expanse of country—desert mountains and valleys—streaked with the white of dry washes. They were two thousand feet above the surrounding country here, and just below the rim.

“There’s a spring behind that tree,” Spanyer said.

“Pa…it’s lovely. It really is!”

“You get down and make some coffee. I’ll fetch some wood.”

But her words had caught at his attention, and he looked around him. The grass was green, and the cedars and piñons offered their deeper green and the darkness of their shade, making shadow patterns on the rocks.

“Never thought of it before, Lennie. I reckon this here is really beautiful.”

He walked over to where a sharply tilted strata of rock had broken off, forming a sort of alcove. Here the words scratched under the overhang were easily read, even after fifteen years.

HERE LIES
BURT CARNAVON
DEAD BY THE GUN
1866

“Lived by it, died by it,” Spanyer muttered. “He was a good man…mighty good.”

“Who was?”

Spanyer turned irritably. It always angered him when somebody got close to him without his knowing. Once nobody could have done it, not a rattler, a coyote, or an Apache. His irritation faded when he looked at his daughter. She had a mouth like her mother, the sort of mouth a man always looked at twice.

Damn it, she wasn’t a kid any more! She was filling out fast, and it worried him. This was no way to raise a girl. A boy now, or a colt…with them he knew what he was doing, but Lennie was constantly surprising him with her womanly attitudes and ways.

“Feller buried here.”

“Did you know him, Pa?”

“I buried him.”

He picked up some fallen branches and broke off some dead roots from a gnarled stump.

“Pa…will we have other folks around us where we’re going?”

“I reckon.” He glanced at her. The wistful note in her voice worried him. “It’s been lonely for you, ain’t it, Lennie? You’d set store by neighbors now, wouldn’t you?”

It wasn’t right for a man to keep his daughter in a shack in a cow town. She needed to meet folks, to learn things from other women. She needed to meet some men, some decent men, and he was a mighty poor guide to such a trail.

Burt now, he had been a decent man. God knows he had been no angel, but decent around women, even if quick with a gun. Up to a point he’d been quick…trouble was, a man could never be sure when he wouldn’t meet somebody who was quicker. Or when his gun wouldn’t misfire.

A long time later, when she was huddled into her blankets, he bent over and pulled a couple of sticks back from the fire. It was dying down and he did not want it to burn any longer.

When he lay down he put his gun belt close at hand, with the butt where he could lay a hand on it. He stared up at the stars through the cedar branches, and then his eyes closed.…

His eyes flared wide…only a few coals remained of the fire. Startled to awareness by an ancient sense of danger, he lay perfectly still, listening.

The moon was up, a half-moon partly hidden by foliage. At first he heard only water trickling, and then his ears identified the sound that had awakened him.

Riders.…

He sat up and pulled on his boots. “Lennie?”

“I heard them, Pa.”

By grabs, she was a girl! Never missed a trick. Well, he had never concealed the hard facts of life from her. She knew what danger was, and she had seen him kill one man…a man who had made an indecent remark to her. He was a brawny, hairy man, who made a brawny, hairy corpse because he had made such a remark, paying no attention to the grizzled wisp of a man at her side.

“Get dressed and stand to the horses.”

Lennie drew her skirt to her and wriggled into it under the blankets. She was dressed as quickly as he was, and was standing by the horses to keep them quiet.

Dave Spanyer had a good view of the trail. For three hundred yards every inch of it could be covered from up here, but no posse had chased him in years, and he knew of no outlaws around who might know of this place.

Four riders…

They must have been traveling all night. There was something familiar about the way the second man sat his saddle, something about the bulk of his huge body.

Dutch…and riding second. Any outfit Dutch rode with had to be solid, and any man who led Dutch anywhere would be quite a man.

He watched them ride along the trail, and even in the moonlight he could see they rode better horses than any cowhand was likely to be riding. They were still some distance from the opening into the box canyon…were they coming here?

If that was Dutch, he knew of this place. Were they coming here, or riding on toward Obaro?

“We’ll saddle up,” he whispered to Lennie. He threw a saddle on the sorrel’s back and reached under the belly for the girth. He felt the sorrel swell his belly and tried to stop him. The sorrel whinnied—caught some vague smell of horse, no doubt, a smell carried on the wind. And the harm was done.

He grabbed his rifle and crouched, waiting. It was quiet, too quiet. This was no job for one man, and Lennie, as if hearing his thought, slid her rifle from its scabbard and moved to the edge of the pocket.

Considine stood among the rocks on one of the back trails that led to the pocket and watched the girl take her position. With her first move he had recognized her as a woman. Now, with the sky lightening with the coming day, he could see her more clearly. He stepped out into the open and she turned sharply with the rifle on him.

“It’s all right, I’m friendly,” he said.

“Not if I can help it!” she said. Nevertheless, he could see her eyes were bright with interest or excitement.

Behind him he heard Dutch speak. “’Lo, Dave. Figured you had cashed in a long time ago.”

Dutch turned his head. “Come on in, boys. I know this old rawhider.”

Considine looked at the girl. She was a beauty, really a beauty. “Did you hear that?” he said. “We’re friends. Dutch knows your Pa.”

“My Pa,” she replied shortly, “knows a lot of folks I wouldn’t mess with, so you walk in ahead of me and don’t cut up any or your friend will have a friend to bury.”

Considine was tall, lean, and raw-boned. His dark features were blunt but warm, and when he smiled his face lighted up. He smiled now.

“We’ll walk in together. How’ll that be?”

Chapter 3

H
E’S ALL RIGHT,” Dutch said, looking past the girl’s head at Considine. “I rode with Spanyer.”

Dutch gestured toward Considine. “Dave, meet Considine.”

“Heard of him.” The wary old eyes glanced at Considine and then away. Then Spanyer indicated his daughter. “This here’s Lennie. She’s my daughter. We’re headin’ for Californy.”

Dave Spanyer was a slope-shouldered man who looked older than his years, but he was weather-beaten and trail-wise, and obviously not a man to take lightly. Considine knew the type. Most of them had come west early, as mountain men or prospectors, and they had lived hard, lonely lives, relying on their own abilities to survive.

“Going to marry her to some farmer?” Dutch asked.

“She ain’t going to marry no outlaw, if that’s what you mean.” Spanyer glanced at Considine, who was out of hearing. “If you’re riding with him you’d better fight shy of Obaro.”

“You don’t know him.”

“I know Pete Runyon.” Spanyer looked toward his daughter, who had walked over to their horses. It was growing light now, and a good time to move on. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

Dave Spanyer watched them ride on, walking to the edge of the trail to watch them go. Lennie came up beside him.

“Stay away from men like that, Lennie. They’re no good. There’s not many of these new outfits that are worth riding with, but these men…Well, I don’t say they ain’t good men in their way. That Dutch, I knew him a long time back, and Considine, everybody knows him.”