Crooked Trails and Straight Read online

  Nor did it make his defeat any more palatable to Cass 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 anticipated 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, Cass passed 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 lust 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 passed. 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 glass 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 unobservant.”

  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.”

  “Twenty thousand on the Flyer. I reckon you ship by express, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Don’t mention it to anyone. That twenty thousand would come handy to a good many people in this country these times.”

  “It would come right handy to me,” Luck laughed ruefully. “I need every cent of it. After the beef roundup, I’ll be on Easy Street, but it’s going to be hard sledding to keep going till then.”

  “You’ll make a turn somehow. It will work out. Maybe when money isn’t so tight I’ll be able to do something for you.”

  Luck returned to the hotel morosely, and tried to figure a way out of his difficulties. He was not going to be beaten. He never had accepted defeat, even in the early days when he had sometimes taken a lawless short cut to what he wanted. By God, he would not lose out after all these years of fighting. It had been his desperate need of money that had made him sit in last night’s poker game. But he had succeeded only in making a bad situation worse. He knew his debts by heart, but he jotted them down on the back of an envelope and added them again.

  Mortgage on ranch (due Oct. 1), $13,000

  Note to First National, 3,500

  Note to Reynolds, 1,750

  I O U to Mackenzie, 1,200

  Same to Flandrau, 400

  Same to Yesler, 300

  ———

  Total, $20,150

  Twenty thousand was the sum he needed, and mighty badly, too. Absentmindedly he turned the envelope over and jotted down one or two other things. Twenty thousand dollars! Just the sum Jordan had coming to the bank on the Flyer. Subconsciously, Luck’s fingers gave expression to his thoughts. $20,000. Half a dozen times they penciled it, and just below the figures, “W. & S. Ex. Co.” Finally they wrote automatically the one word, “To-night.”

  Luck looked at what he had written, laughed grimly, and tore the envelope in two. He threw the pieces in the waste paper basket.

&nbs
p; * * *

  CHAPTER III

  AN INITIALED HAT

  Mackenzie was reading the Sentinel while he ate a late breakfast. He had it propped against the water bottle, so that it need not interfere with the transportation of sausages, fried potatoes, hot cakes, and coffee to their common destination.

  Trying to do two things at once has its disadvantages. A startling headline caught his eyes just as the cup was at his lips. Hot coffee, precipitately swallowed, scalded his tongue and throat. He set down the cup, swore mildly, and gave his attention to the news that had excited him. The reporter had run the story to a column, but the leading paragraph gave the gist of it:

  While the citizens of Saguache were peacefully sleeping last night, a lone bandit held up the messengers of the Western and Southern Express Company, and relieved them of $20,000 just received from El Paso on the Flyer.

  Perry Hawley, the local manager of the company, together with Len Rogers, the armed guard, had just returned from the depot, where the money had been turned over to them and receipted for. Hawley had unlocked the door of the office and had stepped in, followed by Rogers, when a masked desperado appeared suddenly out of the darkness, disarmed the guard and manager, took the money, passed through the door and locked it after him, and vanished as silently as he had come. Before leaving, he warned his victims that the place would be covered for ten minutes and at any attempt to call for help they would be shot. Notwithstanding this, the imprisoned men risked their lives by raising the alarm.

  Further down the page Mackenzie discovered that the desperado was still at large, but that Sheriff Bolt expected shortly to lay hands on him.

  “I’ll bet a dollar Nick Bolt didn’t make any such claim to the reporter. He ain’t the kind that brags,” Mackenzie told himself.

  He folded the paper and returned to his room to make preparation to return to his ranch. The buzz of the telephone called him to the receiver. The voice of Cullison reached him.

  “That you, Mac. I’ll be right up. No, don’t come down. I’d rather see you alone.”

  The owner of the Circle C came right to business. “I’ve made a raise, Mac, and while I’ve got it I’m going to skin off what’s coming to you.”

  He had taken a big roll of bills from his pocket, and was counting off what he had lost to his friend. The latter noticed that it all seemed to be in twenties.

  “Twelve hundred. That squares us, Mac.”

  The Scotchman was vaguely uneasy without a definite reason for his anxiety. Only last night Cullison had told him not a single bank in town would advance him a dollar. Now he had money in plenty. Where had he got it?

  “No hurry at all, Luck. Pay when you’re good and ready.”

  “That’s now.”

  “Because I’ll only put it in the Cattlemen’s National. It’s yours if you need it.”

  “I’ll let you know if I do,” his friend nodded.

  Mackenzie’s eye fell on a copy of the Sentinel protruding from the other’s pocket. “Read about the hold-up of the W. & S. Express? That fellow had his nerve with him.”

  “Sho! This hold-up game’s the easiest yet. He got the drop on them, and there was nothing to it. The key was still in the lock of the door. Well, when he gets through he steps out, turns the key, and rides away.”

  “How did he know there was money coming in last night?”

  “There’s always a leak about things of that sort. Somebody talks. I knew it myself for that matter.”

  “You knew! Who told you?”

  “That’s a secret, Mac. Come to think of it, I wish you wouldn’t tell anybody that I knew. I don’t want to get the man who told me in trouble.”

  “Sure I won’t.” He passed to another phase of the subject. “The Sentinel says Bolt expects to catch the robber. Think he will?”

  “Not if the fellow knows his business. Bolt has nothing to go on. He has the whole Southwest to pick from. For all he knows, it was you.”

  “Yes, but——”

  “Or more likely me.” The gray eyes of the former sheriff held a frosty smile.

  In spite of that smile, or perhaps because of it, Mackenzie felt again that flash of doubt. “What’s the use of talking foolishness, Luck? Course you didn’t do it. Anybody would know that. Man, I whiles wonder at you,” he protested, relapsing into his native tongue as he sometimes did when excited.

  “I didn’t say I did it. I said I might have done it”

  “Oh, well! You didn’t. I know you too well.”

  But the trouble was Mackenzie did not know him well enough. Cullison was hard up, close to the wall. How far would he go to save himself? Thirty years before when they had been wild young lads these two had hunted their fun together. Luck had always been the leader, had always been ready for any daredeviltry that came to his mind. He had been the kind to go the limit in whatever he undertook, to play it to a finish in spite of opposition. And what a man is he must be to the end. In his slow, troubled fashion, Mac wondered if his old side partner’s streak of lawlessness would take him as far as a hold-up. Of course it would not, he assured himself; but he could not get the ridiculous notion out of his head. It drew his thoughts, and at last his steps toward the express office where the hold-up had taken place.

  He opened a futile conversation with Hawley, while Len Rogers, the guard who had not made good, looked at him with a persistent, hostile eye.

  “Hard luck,” the cattleman condoled.

  “That’s what you think, is it? You and your friends, too, I reckon.”

  Mackenzie looked at the guard, who was plainly sore in every humiliated crevice of his brain. “I ain’t speaking for my friends, Len, but for myself,” he said amiably.

  Rogers laughed harshly. “Didn’t know but what you might be speaking for one of your friends.”

  “They can all speak for themselves when they have got anything to say.”

  Hawley sent a swift, warning look toward his subordinate. The latter came to time sulkily. “I didn’t say they couldn’t.”

  Mackenzie drifted from this unfriendly atmosphere to the courthouse. He found Sheriff Bolt in his office. It was that official’s busy day, but he found time not only to see the owner of the Fiddleback, but to press upon him cordially an invitation to sit down and smoke. The Scotchman wanted to discuss the robbery, but was shy about attacking the subject. While he boggled at it, Bolt was off on another tack.

  Inside of a quarter of an hour the sheriff had found out all he wanted to know about the poker game, Cullison’s financial difficulties, and the news that Luck had liquidated his poker debt since breakfast time. He had turned the simple cattleman’s thoughts inside out, was aware of the doubt Billie had scarcely admitted to himself, and knew all he did except the one point Luck had asked him not to mention. Moreover, he had talked so casually that his visitor had no suspicion of what he was driving at.

  Mackenzie attempted a little sleuthing of his own. “This hold-up fellow kind of slipped one over on you last night, Bolt.”

  “Maybe so, and maybe not.”

  “Got a clew, have you?”

  “Oh, yes—yes.” The sheriff looked straight at him. “I’ve a notion his initials are L. C.”

  Billie felt himself flushing. “What makes you think that, Nick?”

  Bolt walked to a cupboard and unlocked it. His back was toward the cattleman, but the latter could see him take something from a shelf. Turning quickly, the sheriff tossed a hat upon the table.

  “Ever see this before?”

  Mac picked it up. His fingers were not quite steady, for a great dread drenched his heart like a rush of icy water. Upon that gray felt hat with the pinched crown was stamped the individuality—and the initials—of Luck Cullison.

  “Don’t know as I recognize it,” he lied, not very readily. “Not to know it. Why?”

  “Thought perhaps you might know it. The hold-up dropped it while getting away.”

  Mackenzie’s eyes flinched. “Dropped it. How was that?”
r />   “A man happened to come along San Miguel street just as the robber swung to his horse. He heard the cries of the men inside, guessed what was doing, and exchanged shots with the miscreant. He shot this hat off the fellow’s head.”

  “The Sentinel didn’t tell any such a story.”

  “I didn’t give that detail to the editor.”

  “Who was the man that shot the robber?”

  “Cass Fendrick.”

  “But he didn’t claim to recognize the hold-up?” Mackenzie forced himself to ask this in spite of his fears.

  “Not for certain.”

  “Then he—he had a guess.”

  “Yes, Mac. He guessed a man whose initials are the same as those in that hat.”

  “Who do you mean, Nick?”

  “I don’t need to tell you that. You know who.”

  “If you mean Luck Cullison, it’s a damned lie,” exploded the cattleman. He was furious with himself, for he felt now that he had been unsuspectingly helping to certify the suspicions of the sheriff. Like an idiot, he had let out much that told heavily against his friend.

  “I hope so.”

  “Cass Fendrick is not on good terms with him. We all know that. Luck has got him in a hole. I wouldn’t put it a bit above Cass to lie if he thought it would hurt Luck. Tell you it’s a damned conspiracy. Man, can’t you see that?”

  “What about this hat, with the two holes shot through the rim?”

  “Sho! We all wear hats just like that. Look at mine.” Billie held it out eagerly.

  “Has yours an L. C. stamped in the sweat band?” Bolt asked with a smile.

  “I know you ain’t his friend, Nick. But you want to be fair to him even if he did oppose your election.” Mackenzie laid an appealing hand on the knee of the man seated opposite him.