The Cowpuncher
BRADFORD
SCOTT
LEISURE BOOKS 
NEW YORK CITY
Huck and Lank paused from time to time to examine the walls of the side tunnel and to chart the course of the vein mentally. Old Tom got well ahead of them, reached the main corridor while they were still far behind. But his sudden howl brought them towards his gallop.
“It’s one of them damn corpses from the cave!” Old Tom bawled. “I seed him lookin’ ‘round the corner and then he jest dis’peared!”
“Corpse, hell!” growled Brannon, dashing down the corridor.
He caught a glimpse of a denser shadow flitting through the ring of radiance cast by his lamp, and his hand streaked to his gun. There was a
crack,
a spurt of hot fire from the darkness; and Huck’s knees buckled. He sprawled motionless on the rocky floor of the shaft. His lamp clattered on the floor and went out.
Chapter III Al Fresco Breakfast
Chapter XII Don Fernando’s Legacy
Chapter XVI “We Will Kill You, If We Can”
Black and ominous against the white fire of the full moon, a crag fanged into the silver blue of the Colorado sky. Far below, a black gorge glowered between its crowding walls of stone. Silent, apparently deserted, lip full of shadows, its rimrock frosted by pale light, it lay like a sullen pool of dark water, yawning like a newly dug grave.
And it was a grave—a place of death and agony, of greed and hate and vengeance to come. A grave, with the towering crag rearing like a gaunt tombstone and the watcher upon the crag like a devilish spirit of evil brooding over the deeds done under the blanket of darkness.
Sinister-beautiful was the watcher, with eyes of fire and a coat of tawny velvet. Fangs as white as the moonlight glistened as a lip lifted in a soundless snarl. The tip of the long tail twitched incessantly. Great muscles, long and lithe, bunched beneath the glossy coat. Razor-edged claws scraped the stone.
The panther was unflaggingly interested in something going on in the gorge. Ears, attuned to catch the
cheep
of the field mouse in its burrow or the mounting of the sap in the tree-trunk, pricked stiffly forward as inexplicable sounds drifted up from the darkness. Knife-keen eyes glowed with a fiercer fire as a faint waver of light appeared on
the far-off canyon floor below. The panther’s lips drooled as the smell of meat arose to his sensitive nostrils. His paws worked up and down; his hind quarters tensed.
Then, a flickering shadow in the moonlight, he went backward off the crag, landed on his madly clawing pads and tore furiously down the mountainside. He was hundreds of feet away from his previous dizzy perch before the crashing echoes of the explosion left off, leaping from crag to crag. The panther knew instinctively that death was there in that dark valley—horrible lingering death—and he fled from it madly, his nerves twanging at the burst of mansound.
Following the explosion came a moment of tingling silence—a silence broken by a rushing murmur that swiftly grew to a steady roar. The panther snarled over his shoulder at the unaccustomed sound and fled the faster.
Where the mouth of the gorge opened out upon the mesa, a clanking column paused at the sound of the distant explosion. Leading the column was a tall man who wore a helmet of glittering steel. He was slim, straight as a lance, bearded and swarthy. Pride sat upon his high-nosed face, pride and cruelty and ruthlessness. His eyes, black and glittering, burned with a fanatic light. His sinewy hand rested upon the hilt of his sword in its jeweled scabbard.
Beside him walked a man equally tall, equally spare, garbed from head to foot in somber black. Hemp sandals shod his soles, a small black cap sat on his tonsured head. The hair that curled from
beneath the cap was white as new-fallen snow. His features were deeply lined and tormented; his eyes burned with innate kindness and an unutterable melancholy. He trembled visibly as the boom of the explosion throbbed upon the sultry air. Turning his fretted gaze upon the tall Spaniard, he spoke in a voice quivering with emotion:
“A fitting climax indeed, Don Fernando, of blood and cruelty and persecution and murder. For this deed, generations yet unborn will curse your name. Why could you not show at least one final gesture of mercy toward these humble people you have so greatly wronged?”
“Peace!” commanded the soldier in a harshly resonant voice. “Tell your beads, Father, and con your psalter, but do not come between me and those whom the king has given me!”
“God help them!” cried the old priest. “A higher king than yours has given them
me,
and I tell you, Don Fernando de Castro, that you have sinned greatly in your dealing with these poor savages and that the hour will come—nay, may even now be at hand—when God’s finger will be heavy upon you for the evil you have so lightly done!”
He turned and plodded wearily down the dim trail. With a muttered curse the hidalgo glared after him, and callous as he was, he shivered at the ring in the priest’s ominous words—a premonitory trembling, perhaps, brought on by the icy breath of a dark wing brushing the face of the doomed.
Behind the hidalgo clanked the column of armed men, glancing nervously at the dark and wooded slopes on either hand. To one side rushed a swift
stream. On the other pushed dense thickets of chaparral. Overhead a dark cloud drifted across the face of the moon and the warm night seemed to turn chill with a strange, unnatural cold. An owl hooted with a weird, screaming note. A frog croaked hoarsely.
Following the armed column was a long mule train bearing heavy burdens that gave out a dull, metallic clanging. From time to time the patient pack-animals lifted attentive ears to some tiny sound that escaped the duller perceptions of the drivers. Now and then they cast apprehensive glances toward the dark slopes ahead. They gave startled squeals as lurid jets of fire spurted unexpectedly from the darkness.
The column was taken by complete surprise. Yells of terror answered the sullen boom of the old smooth-bores and the sharp whistle of unseen arrows. From the thickets on either side rose a weird, whickering screech, pulsing and ululating, racking the brain and numbing the heart. It seemed to coil around and stifle the commands roared by the tall leader.
Ringed by flickering fire and whistling death, the Spaniards fought bravely against the hidden foe, and bravely died. Dark figures leaped from the shadows, ponderous axes rose and fell, ringing loudly on the mail, smashing through the metal, cleaving poorly protected joints, gouging out a crimson flood wherever the white flesh glimmered in the veiled and clamorous moonlight.
The tall hidalgo, his sword a flickering flame, died like a cornered wolf fanging his teeth at death,
a ring of his dead around him, slaying a final foe with a convulsive impulse of the muscles even after death had claimed him. The wounded died groaning under the thud of vicious axes reddened to the hand-grips.
With harsh gutturals, the grim
Indios
of the mountains, their vengeance complete, drove off the loaded mules. Silence again fell upon the dark slopes, the lonely silence of the dead.
But not all life was stilled on that bloody battlefield. Deep in a dense thicket a little way up the slope a still-breathing figure lay; and crouched beside it, animal eyes striving to pierce the gloom, atavistic ears interpreting truly the faintest sound, a second figure pulsed with lusty though sluggish life.
The old priest was horribly wounded. Blood dabbled his snowy hair. Blood stained the breast of his robe. He was unconscious, breathing stertoriously. The dull-witted Mexican boy, his personal attendant who followed him with doglike devotion, was unhurt. With desperate strength and animal cunning, he had snatched his master from the field, eluded the sharpened perceptions of foes far keener than he, and brought him to precarious safety.
Silently the Mexican boy slipped away, and brought back water to quench the padre’s thirst and bathe his burning brow. For long minutes the priest lay silent and motionless, thoughts speeding through his brain, the mind tasting the clearness of approaching death. And with those thoughts crystallized what he conceived to be his last duty
to the men of his blood and to his king beyond the seas. He signaled the boy to raise him in his arms.
Fumbling with trembling fingers, he ripped a large piece of cloth from his linen under-tunic. He muttered a word and the Mexican boy reached out and broke a long mesquite thorn.
The priest took the thorn, glanced about uncertainly, then scratched his arm deeply with the point. Blood welled from the wound. The priest dipped the thorn into the red stream and painfully began to trace lines upon the linen.
For a long time he worked, pausing often to rest as his hand grew feebler and his eye dim. Finally he was finished. He folded the linen with shaking fingers and passed it to the boy.
“To the Officer of the King. Only to the Officer of the King,” he commanded.
“To the Officer of the King,” parroted the youth. “To the Officer of the King.”
With a sigh Padre Diego Escalante sank back, his duty done, and closed his weary eyes. He knew that the boy would neither forget, nor disobey. Only to the Spanish governor would he relinquish what Padre Diego had written in blood, telling its story of blood and treasure.
Dusk was falling when the Mexican boy glanced for the last time at the silent figure with the thin hands peacefully folded upon the cavernous breast. Then, like the animals to which he was so nearly kin, he slipped from the thicket to begin his long journey toward where the Officer of the King had his dwelling beside the shallow waters of the Rio Grande.
He did not know, as his masters had not known, that the wrath of an outraged and exploited people had swept the King’s officers from the land, nor did any remain to whom he could deliver the message penned by a dying hand.
And back in the somber gorge was silence broken only by the wailing of the lonely wind and the rush and thunder of waters. The brooding walls of the canyon guarded well their dread secret. A secret known now by none who lived in the peaceful moonlight and breathed the sweet night air.
Long Way to Texas
Huck Brannon had a headache. A regular skookum he-wolf of a headache—the kind that hopped about inside the head, leaping from brain cell to brain cell on hobnailed boots, crashing against the ceiling of his skull with spiked mallets and kicking an occasional iron hoof at sensitive nervecenters for good measure. It was a headache worthy of the labor he had done to acquire it.
And the headache was just about all he could call his own in the whole world. An inventory of his pockets revealed them as empty as the belly of a yearlin’ after a hard blizzard. His store clothes, which he had put on for his stopover in K.C., after delivery of the herd, were crumpled, stained, dusty, and showed abundant indications of hard wear and sleeping in unconventional places.
Huck shook as he discovered his watch was gone. He had a sentimental attachment for that watch. He had won it from a Mexican gambler in a Texas border town two years previous, just a short time before that gambler had tried to shoot Huck because his senorita—the gambler’s, not Huck’s—had cast too many doe-eyed glances at the tall, black-haired, gray-eyed young Arizona cowhand.
The Mexican had lost his gun, as well as the watch, and a good slice of finger. This incident had
cost Huck one .45 cartridge, the type to fit a longbarreled, single-action, blued-steel Colt sixgun with a wooden hand-carved grip worn smooth by much practice of the draw.
The senorita lost her interest in Huck, because he “try to keel my caballero,” and Huck lost, in addition to the cartridge, some skin off his bronzed cheek, scraped off by the senorita’s sharply pointed fingernails.
Yes, Huck had reason to prize that watch, but it was gone now. He had vague recollections of another poker game in connection with that watch, just the night before. A poker game which had taken place after he had had more drinks of Dishonest Abe Strealy’s Take-a-Chance Saloon whiskey than go well with stud poker.
It appeared that the rest of the Bar X boys had vanished also. As Huck sat up in bed, staring about with eyes that cringed blearily against the glaring daylight, a clock outside chimed the hour of twelve. Each stroke was like a hammerblow on Huck’s ringing head, causing the demon inside of it to give a spasmodic leap and land with all four feet.
Must
have four feet, Huck decided numbly.
Couldn’t
raise all that hell with only two! Or maybe the demon walked on his hands as well as his feet.
As the clock boomed the last stroke of the hour, Huck interpreted the bright sunlight streaming through the window and decided it couldn’t be midnight. That meant it was noon, if the clock knew what it was talking about, and clocks usually do. Which also meant that the bouncing caboose which was to haul the Bar X boys back to the
Bar X ranch in Texas, west of the Pecos, had been on its way for some four hours.
In that caboose were Huck Brannon’s “working” clothes—chaps, high-heeled boots, overalls, gunbelt, holsters, six-guns, and the rest of a fighting ranny’s junk. All he had with him in this grubby rooming house were the clothes he stood in and that infernal headache.
It gradually dawned on Huck, somewhat tardily, that he would either have to walk to Texas or send a wire to Old Man Doyle, the Bar X owner, for his fare. Even the rioting demon in his skull couldn’t keep Huck from the instant decision that the second alternative was a forbidding one. And the first little better…
He squirmed like a snake in a cactus patch at the thought of Old Man Doyle’s raucous hooraws of laughter. Of the celestial amusement of Ah Sing, the Chinese cook, when Huck should arrive with his tail between his legs like a hound pup not old enough to take care of itself out of sight of its mammy.
He shifted uneasily, and the spring under the mattress groaned as he thought of Sue, Old Man Doyle’s daughter. Sue wouldn’t laugh at him—if he knew her at all, and hadn’t he known her since she was knee-high to a jack-rabbit? Her clear amber eyes would smile at him and she would tell him in that rich, cool voice that it didn’t matter—that being stranded in K.C. could happen to anyone. And she would laugh
with
him about it—not
at
him the way the rest would.
He squinted hard at the yellow stream of sunlight pouring in, conscious of a brand-new feeling of elation and well-being. The whiskey no longer bucked in his head. His square shoulders came up solidly. He tried to discover the source of this sudden tingling of satisfaction. It couldn’t have been the last time he saw Sue. Or could it?
She’d been riding alongside him when he and the rest of the Bar X boys had pushed the herd along to the terminal at Stevens Gulch where the long, crooked arm of the railroad bent its way to within twenty-five miles of the Bar X Ranch.
The morning had been still fresh and bright and new when they had started the herd up trail.
“Wait for me—wait for me, Huck,” she had called, tearing after the cavvy and pulling up beside him. She sat her paint-pony as firmly and easily as any cowpoke. He remembered how the sun pushing its way over the crest of the far-off hills had cast a curious glow over Sue’s face and struck dancing glints from her raven black hair.
“Mornin’, Sue,” he said, wheeling around to greet her. “What’s the rush?”
“No rush, in particular,” she said, suddenly confused. “I was just riding. Haven’t I got a right to see Dad’s cattle off to K.C.?”
“Shore—shore you have,” he said, grinning at her, “but you’ll scare the beef right off these steers rushin’ up on ‘em that way.”
He was used to Sue riding alongside him. She had been doing it for a long time—out on the range, during roundups, combing the brake. And it was
no different that morning, too, except—He didn’t know. But there
was
a difference. In Sue. In himself.
“Darned if I see,” he said, looking at her again, “how you manage to look so all-fired pretty this early in the mornin’.”
Sue turned slowly and gave him a long slow look with those striking amber eyes. His look swept over her. She was tall and lithely graceful with sunburnished skin that set off the perfect white teeth that showed in her rare, quick smiles. Right now, Huck could see the faint flush apparent beneath her bronze-stained cheeks.
She sighed. “Huck, sometimes I think you’ll never stop treating me like a child.”
Again he looked at her, long and deeply, aware of some curious, subtle change, some new stir within him—the surge of an undercurrent of feelings he didn’t understand himself.
“Yeah,” he said softly, the ghost of a smile playing around his lips. “You are kinda grown up. I guess I just didn’t notice how much you’d growed. One minute you were a kid called Sue; and the next minute you’re a grown up lady I have to call Miss Doyle.” His soft voice was half serious, half mocking.
She dealt the mockery right back at him.
“That’s right, Mr. Brannon,” she said. “I think you should call me Miss Doyle.” Then she suddenly burst into laughter. “And if you do, I’ll have Dad run you right off the range.”
And they laughed together; until a curious silence fell between them. But it wasn’t like their old comradely silences. It was alive and charged. It was
something they both felt, and both avoided mentioning.
“How long will the run take you, Huck?” she asked finally.
“Why, not more than three or four days.”
“I’ll miss you—you and the boys I mean, Huck.”
“May be a little peaceful at that,” he said. “But we’ll be back before you know it.”
The bawling cattle had finally been stowed in the cattle cars and Huck was passing the time of day with Sue. He remembered how cool her hand had been in his, and the soft look on her face.
“Take care of yourself, Sue,” he said, “and don’t forget which side to get on your hoss.” It had sounded dull, wool-witted; not light and easy as he’d meant it to be. It had always gotten a rise out of her. But not this time.
“All right, Huck,” she said slowly. “I won’t forget. Don’t stay too long, Huck.”
Suddenly she had thrown her arms around his neck, pressed her lips to his, hard. Then she’d turned, vaulted into her saddle and was galloping away down the trail.
He had stood stock still for a moment, staring after her. Then as the train jerked into motion, he turned and vaulted into the slowly moving car.
Even now he could taste her lips on his. They—But what was he thinking about? He was only a waddy in her father’s crew and a waddy with itching feet besides. What did he have to offer Sue Doyle? Of course, Old Man Doyle did like him—No, it was crazy.
A horsefly buzzed around his head. He slapped
at it absently and the movement brought him back to the dingy room with its ugly painted walls, its scarred and raddled furniture.
The dancing demon returned, but less malevolently than before.
The question now was, what to do? His room was paid for up to and including today, but half of today was already gone, and there was no provision for meals in his deal with the sour landlady, who had a baleful eye for six-foot cowpunchers with grin-wrinkles at the corners of their eyes and slight upward quirks at the corners of their wide, good-humored mouths.
He slapped cold water on his face, combed his hair and brushed off his clothes.
Outside, the white-golden sunshine and the autumn air, keen and crisp as old wine, was restorative. Suicide began to seem a project of unnecessary harshness. The dancing demon tired a little and Huck’s head began feeling a trifle less like an overstuffed melon.
A new complaint began to make itself felt, however. This time it was his stomach. Not, as in the case of his head, from what was in it; rather from what was not.
On the faint hope that the freight which was to carry the boys back to the Bar X might have been delayed, Huck headed for the railroad yards.
The train was gone, of course. The caboose had rolled out right on schedule, he learned from an unsympathetic yardmaster who had had more than one man’s helping of trouble with cow-trains and cowpunchers and had scant use for either.
With a sigh, bitterly conscious of his empty pockets and emptier stomach, Huck sought a pile of railroad ties and perched disconsolately on them, running bronzed fingers through his short thick black hair, wondering among other things what had become of his broad-brimmed Stetson. Maybe it had gone with the watch in the poker game. And that sombrero had cost him forty good dollars new. He sighed again. The sigh brought results from an unexpected quarter:
“Feelin’sorta low, son?”
Huck glanced quickly around and saw nothing but what seemed to be more cross-ties. Then a somewhat thicker tie than the rest sort of heaved up at one end and showed a face—a face abandoned without signs of struggle to an untidy chaparralthicket of hair and whiskers, out of which shone two twinkly eyes and a mess of wrinkles topped by a battered slouch hat.
The grin was contagious and, little as he felt like grinning right then, Huck could feel a response to it tugging at his own lips. “If I had the hat I ain’t got, I could walk under a snake’s belly and not touch a scale,” he replied.
The little old man, sitting up, clucked sympathetically. “I know how you feel,” he said, “I been there too. Sorta had a night of it last night, eh? Train go off and leave you?”
Huck nodded gloomily. The old man gave him a shrewd glance, cast a speculative eye toward a rickety little restaurant perched cheerfully on the embankment overlooking the railroad yards, and returned to Huck.
“Could you do with a cup of coffee ‘bout now, son?”
In spite of his pride, Huck swallowed automatically and ran his tongue over his lips. The old man understood his moment of hesitation.
“I got the price,” he chuckled. He raised a gnarled hand to cut off Huck’s protest.
“Now don’t go gettin’ uppity, and figgerin’ you don’t wanta eat with a hobo. I done told you I been in yore boots ‘fore now.”
“It isn’t that,” Huck said. “It’s just that I haven’t a cent on me. And I can’t stand my turn buyin’.”
The old man chuckled again. “Want to know how you could return the favor?” he asked.
Huck nodded. “Sure.”
“All right—do it this way. The next time you find some feller who’s sorta up ‘gainst it, you spend on him jest the same amount I spend on you t’day. Okay?”
Huck gave the little old man a long look from his level gray eyes. The look was returned, unflinchingly, from the blue eyes that had so much humor and savvy in their depths.
“Yes,” said the cowboy quietly, “I’ll do that; and thank you kindly.”
Half an hour later, Huck Brannon heaved a deep sigh and reached for the makings. Tobacco and papers had in some way escaped last night’s all-but-clean sweep, and he deftly rolled a cigarette with the slim fingers of his left hand, held it out to his table companion and manufactured one for himself.
“And now,” said the old man, “I reckon the sensible
thing to do will be to head you back toward Texas. I figger you haven’t rode the rods or the blinds much, have you, son?”
Huck admitted he hadn’t.
“If you had,” continued the other, “I’d shove you onto the Limited which pulls out jest ‘bout dark t’ night; but that ain’t no chore for a feller what ain’t onto the ropes. A sidedoor Pullman is yore best bet, I callate. There’ll be a manifest freight headin’ in the gen’ral direction you’d oughta take in an hour or so. We’ll mosey over to the yard and I’ll point her out.”
“You’re not going in my direction?” Huck said regretfully.
“Nope, I got a little chore to do—somewheres else.”
Huck noticed the slight hesitation on the old man’s part. He let the question ride.
They talked on over several cigarettes, since they had until dusk before Huck could board the freight. The old-timer entertained with an unending stream of his adventures on the road, and Huck told a yarn or two about range-life. The remarks and questions the oldster asked showed he knew at least something about herding.
“You don’t talk jest like the av’rage cowhand, son,” he remarked as he rose from the table.
“I had a year in college,” Huck told him. “Coupla bad years—blizzards, droughts—sorta set my dad back, and then his cayuse set his foot in a badgerhole one stormy night. The storm had started a stampede just before that, and—well, Dad and the bronc were in
front
of that stampede.”