The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 2 (26 page)

Jerry cleared his throat. “I was goin' to ride with them, Mr. Bowdrie. I really was. Thought I was.”

“Point is, you didn't. If you're restless here, ride up north to the XIT. Friends of mine up there, an' they're hirin' for the roundup an' trail drive. That'll be work enough to keep you out of trouble.”

“Last night,” Lily said, “after you went to the barn to sleep, I made a cake. Icing and all. I haven't even cut into it yet.”

Bowdrie's head came up like a hound dog scenting a coon. “Now, that's something I haven't had in more than a year. Shall we ride a little faster?”

Bowdrie Follows a Cold Trail

Puffs of dust rose from the roan's shambling trot, and Chick Bowdrie shifted his position in the saddle. It had been a long ride and he was tired. From a distance he had glimpsed a spot of green and the vague shape of buildings among the trees. Where there was green of that shade there was usually water, and where there were water and buildings there would be people, warm food, and some conversation.

No cattle dotted the grassland, no horses looked over the corral bars. There was no movement in the sun-baked area around the barn.

He walked the roan into the yard and called out, “Anybody t' home?”

Only silence answered his hail, the utter silence of a place long abandoned. The neat, carefully situated and constructed buildings were gray and weather-worn, and the gaping door of the barn showed a blank emptiness behind it.

It was strange to find no people in a place of such beauty. Trees shaded the dooryard and a rosebush bloomed beside the door, a rosebush bedraggled and game, fighting a losing battle against the wind, the dust, and the parched earth.

“Nevertheless,” he said aloud, “this is as far as I go tonight.”

He stepped down from the saddle, beating the dust from chaps and shirt, his black eyes sweeping the house and barn again. He had the uneasy sense of a manhunter who knows something is wrong, something is out of place.

The hammerheaded roan ambled over to the water hole and dipped his muzzle into its limpid clearness.

“Somebody,” Chick muttered, “spent a lot of time to make this place into a home. Some of the trees were planted, and that rosebush, too.”

The little ranch lay in the upper end of a long valley that widened out into a seemingly endless range that lost itself against the purple of far-off hills.

The position of the house, barn, and corrals indicated a mind that knew what it wanted. Whoever had built this place had probably spent a lot of days in the saddle or up on a wagon seat planning just how he wanted it. This was not just a ranch for the raising of cattle; this was a home.

“Five will get you ten he had him a woman,” Bowdrie said.

Yet why, when so much work had been done, had the place been abandoned? “And for a long time, too,” Bowdrie told himself.

There were tumbleweeds banked against the side of the barn and caught under the water trough in the corral. This place had been a long time alone.

The dry steps of the house creaked under his weight. The closed door sagged on its hinges, and when he tugged on it they creaked protestingly, almost rusted into immobility. Yet when the door opened, his boot rested on the step and stayed there.

A man's skeleton lay on the floor; his leather gunbelt, cracked and dried to a stiff, dead thing, still clung to his waist.

“So that was it. You built it but never got a chance to enjoy it.”

Bowdrie stepped into the room, glancing around with thoughtful attention. Here, too, was evidence of careful planning, the keen mind of a practical man who wanted to make life easier both for himself and for his woman.

The neat shelves, now cobwebbed and dusty, the carefully built fireplace, a washbasin built of rocks with a drilled hole from which a plug could be removed to drain off the water, all contrived to eliminate extra steps.

Bowdrie stepped over and looked down at the body. From the bones of the chest he picked up a bullet, partly flattened. “That was probably it. Right through the chest, or maybe even the stomach.”

He glanced again at the skull. “Whoever killed you must have really wanted you dead. He finished you off with an ax!”

The skull was split, and nearby lay the ax that had been used. The man had been shot first; then the killer made sure by using the ax.

A gun lay not far away, evidently the dead man's gun, an old .44. The killer had used a .41.

In another room he found a closet, the warped door open. Inside were a few odds and ends of women's clothing. He studied the closet, some items hanging askew, some fallen to the floor. “Whoever killed you probably took your woman,” he muttered, “an' whatever clothes he took, he just grabbed off the hangers an' the hooks. At least, that's what it looks like.”

A man's clothing hung in another corner of the closet, a black frock coat and pants, obviously his Sunday best. In the inside coat pocket was a letter addressed to “Gilbert S. Mason, Esq., El Paso, Texas.”

Dear Gil:

After many days I take my pen in hand to address you once more. It is pleased I am to learn that you and Mary have found a home at last, knowing as I do how long you have wished for one. It will be a lovely place for little Carlotta to grow up. I am completing my business in Galveston, but before returning to Richmond I shall come west to see you.

Your friend,
Samuel Gatesby

Folding the letter, Bowdrie placed it carefully in a leather case he carried inside his shirt. He then began a methodical search of the premises.

Other than the clothing, there was no evidence of the woman or the child. If dead, their bodies had been disposed of elsewhere, but after another glance at the closet he decided they had been hurriedly taken away.

In a drawer of an old writing desk that he had to break open he found a faded tintype. It was a picture of an attractive, stalwart young man and a very pretty young woman, taken, according to the note on the back, on their wedding day.

Gilbert S. and Mary Mason, and the date was twenty years earlier. In the drawer was an improvised calendar. Made from year to year, the dates were crossed off until a period in September, sixteen years ago.

In the kitchen he glanced at the skeleton again. “Well, Gil,” he said, “you had a right beautiful wife. You had a little girl. You had a pretty home and a nice future, and then somebody came along. Gil, I'm goin' to make you a promise. I'll find who it was and what became of your family, even if it has been sixteen years.”

The West was often a hard and lonely land where heat, cold, drought, and flood took a bitter toll in lives, but in this valley Gil Mason had made a home, he had found all a lonely man could dream of, only to lose it to a murderer.

“My guess, Gil, is that you didn't have horses and cattle enough, and not very much money. You were killed for your woman.

“You were a good-lookin' man who'd fixed up a nice home, so I'm bettin' she didn't go willingly.”

He buried the bones, wrapped in a blanket and placed in a crude coffin slapped together from some extra planks stored in the barn. He buried them behind the barn, and from another section of plank he placed the name and added
“Murdered, September …”
and the year.

A month later, with other business out of the way, Bowdrie was loafing around a stage station called, by some, Gabel's Stop. There was nearby a general store, a saloon, and a few other activities. What Bowdrie had come to think of as Mason's Valley was only a few miles back in the country.

The stage station was operated, dominated, and had been constructed by Gabel Hicks. Tipped back against the wall of the station, Gabel Hicks spat a stream of tobacco juice into the dust of what he called a street. It wasn't often that he found a listener like this young sprout.

Chick Bowdrie, his own chair tilted back and his toes on the porch on either side of the chair, listened absently. Hicks was an old-timer and a talker, but he had a lot to say, and had lived through it all. Bowdrie,long since, had learned that one learns a lot more by listening than by talking.

The sun warmed the street into dozing contentment. “Yep! Been here nigh onto forty year! Come west in a covered wagon. Fit Injuns all over these here plains and mountains. You youngsters, you think things is rough now! You should've been here when I come! Why, even twenty years ago! Now? The country's ruined! Crowded too much! Why, there's a ranch ever' fifty, sixty miles now! A body can hardly ride down a trail without runnin' into somebody else!”

“She must've been quite a country fifteen, twenty years ago,” Bowdrie commented. “I'll bet this was wide-open, empty country back then! Not many riding the trails then.”

“More'n you think.” Gabel Hicks spat again, drenching a surprised lizard. “Some of them still around, like Med Sowers, Bill Peissack, Dick Rubin. They were all here. Old Johnny Greier, the town loafer, he was here. He wasn't no loafer then. He was a hardworkin' young cowhand … before he took to drink.”

Chick Bowdrie let his chair legs down and picked up a stick. With a flick of his hand to the back of his neck he took out a razor-sharp throwing knife from under his collar and began to whittle. “Must've been a hell of a country then. Mighty little water, and no women around. Must've been right tough goin'.”

“Women?” Hicks spat. “There was women. Even Johnny Greier had a woman when he came into this country. Purty, too, although not as purty as some. That Mary Mason, now, she was a humdinger!”

Chick Bowdrie's knife cut a long splinter from the stick. “Where'd they all get to?” he demanded. “I ain't seen a pretty woman since I hit town! Come to think of it, I haven't seen a woman!”

He inspected the stick. “Some of those pretty women must have had girl-kids, and they'd be about right for me now. What happened?”

“Sure they had kids. Some of them still around, but they surely don't come down here, except to the store. That Med Sowers, now? He's got him a right purty daughter. Accordin' to what I hear, she's due to be comin' home soon. Been away to school most of her life. Boardin' school for young ladies. Med asked me to kind of watch out for her.”

“Daughter? Well, maybe I'll just hang around and look.”

“No chance for no driftin' cowhand! That Med's a wealthy man, although you'd never guess it to look at that place of his! Like a pigsty! Yessir, like a pigsty!”

He spat. “O' course, she ain't rightly his daughter, comes to that. She's his ward. I guess that means he has the handlin' of her.”

Hicks's face turned grim. “He's had the handlin' of more than one woman. Can't say I'd want any gal of mine in his hands. He's a bad 'un.”

Chick yawned and got to his feet; the knife disappeared as he did so. Hicks's wise old eyes measured him, the two guns, coupled with the hawklike face and the deep, dimplelike scar under the right cheekbone.

“Stayin' around long?” he asked.

“Maybe.” Chick hitched his gunbelts into an easier position. “Might stay longer if I get a ridin' job.”

“Averill's been takin' on a few hands.”

Bowdrie grinned. “Not while I've got forty dollars!” he said.

Hicks chuckled. “Don't blame you none. When I was a young feller, I was just the same. If I had me an extry dollar, I was a rich man.”

Chick Bowdrie walked across the street to the Lone Star. It had taken him nearly a month, but he was learning things. McNelly had been doubtful at first. After all, sixteen years was a long time. Finally he told him to go ahead.

Bowdrie had begun by using the Rangers' services to get information from Richmond and Galveston. Samuel Gatesby had been a respected businessman, a Southerner who had good New York connections and came back strong following the Civil War.

Gilbert Mason had been a major in the Confederate Army who married a childhood sweetheart and who had come west full of ambition and energy as well as love for his lovely young wife. The West, according to reports, had swallowed them.

Bowdrie checked further on Gatesby. The man had acquired large cotton and shipping interests, but had been a lifelong friend as well as a brother officer of Mason. Bowdrie paused under the awning of the Lone Star to reread the letter he had received a few days past:

Samuel Gatesby disappeared after leaving El Paso sixteen years ago. His two brothers, both wealthy men, offered rewards of several thousand dollars for information. Gatesby was never heard from again. Tugwell Gatesby wishes to be informed of anything you may learn. If necessary, he will come west to make identification.

There was a crude grave marked by an unlettered stone near the house in the valley. Bowdrie had a theory about that grave but did not believe it contained Gatesby's remains.

Johnny Greier looked hopeful when Bowdrie entered the saloon, as the rider in the black flat-crowned hat had been good for a drink several times in the past three weeks. Bowdrie took a seat at a table and gestured for Greier to join him.

Johnny hurried over, lurching a little, and the disgusted bartender heaved himself out of his seat at the far end of the bar and brought two glasses and the bottle. “Bring us a couple of plates of that free lunch,” Bowdrie suggested, and dropped a coin on the table.

Waiting until the bartender had returned to his seat, Bowdrie poured a drink for himself, and after Greier had taken one glass, Bowdrie refilled it for him, then moved the bottle away.

Johnny looked up, hurt showing in his eyes. “You eat something before you have any more,” Bowdrie ordered. “We've some talkin' to do.”

“Thanks. Most folks don't 'preciate an ol' man, just because I take a drink now and again.”

“Johnny, there's something I want to know, and you may be the only man in town with gumption enough to tell me.”

Johnny's features seemed to sharpen, and the bloodshot eyes stared, then fell. “I don't know anything,” he said. “Whatever I knew, the whiskey's made me forget.”

“I think you do know, Johnny,” Bowdrie said quietly. “I think that's what started you drinkin'.”

Chick filled Johnny's glass again, but the old man did not touch it.

“Johnny, what became of Mary Mason?”

Johnny Greier's face went white and sick. When he looked at Bowdrie again, the alcoholic haze seemed gone from his eyes. Chick Bowdrie's black eyes were hard and without mercy.

“She's dead. Now, don't ask me no more.”

“Johnny …” Bowdrie spoke gently, persuasively. “A man named Gil Mason built himself a home, something he always wanted, and he brought his wife out to enjoy it, and their small daughter was with them.