Clattering Hoofs Read online

  Sandra felt a hint of wariness about his indolent ease. It seemed to her a mask worn by a man always alert and even suspicious. She found confirmation of this view in an incident that occurred the third day of Sloan’s stay at the ranch.

  Late in the afternoon a man rode into the yard and dismounted in front of the house. Sandra chanced to be with their guest on the porch. She had just brought out a pitcher of lemonade and a glass for him.

  The horseman tied his mount and came up the steps. He was heavy-set, middle-aged, with bleached blue eyes in a deeply tanned face. Scores of tiny wrinkles went out from the outer corners of the eyes like spokes from a hub. His cowboy boots were old and scuffed, his Stetson faded and floppy. Dust had sifted into the creases of the corduroy trousers and coat. The checked shirt had been washed so often that all the life had gone out of the color.

  He said, smiling at the girl: “My throat’s dry as a lime kiln, Miss Sandra. Does that rate me a drink of yore lemonade?”

  She nodded. “It’s ice-cold. I’ll get a glass for you. This is Mr. Sloan, sheriff.” To Cape she said, “Sheriff Norlin.”

  There was the slightest steely hardening in Sloan’s eyes. She would not have noticed it if she had not been watching. The men looked at each other steadily as they shook hands. What they said had nothing to do with what they were thinking.

  Norlin mopped his face with a bandanna, after he had murmured “Pleased to meet you,” and mentioned that it was nice to get in the shade after being cooked by a blistering sun for four-five hours. The younger man remarked that he didn’t ever remember it being hotter at this time of year.

  Sandra went in for a glass and when she returned Norlin was telling Sloan that Lopez had been forced to abandon the stolen herd just this side of the line. A troop of cavalry had come on the raiders by chance and sent them scuttling into the brush. That was good, Sloan said. And how about Scarface? Had they heard anything of him?

  “No.” The sheriff rubbed the palm of his hand across an unshaven face meditatively and slanted a searching look at Sloan. “Looks like he has holed up and pulled the hole in after him. I reckon if anybody could give us information ——”

  He dropped the sentence there. Sloan was of no help.

  “Maybe someone who knows him might give you a line on where his hangouts are,” Cape said smoothly.

  Norlin admitted to himself that he was unduly suspicious. He had in his pocket a letter from the deputy sheriff Mosely describing the young man who had sat opposite him at breakfast the morning after the raid. It fitted very accurately this youth who called himself Cape Sloan. The fellow could not have been in two different places at the same time. Yet he did not act just like an innocent man. There was a touch of challenge in his manner that was almost insolent, a sort of a “You-be-damned, prove it if you can” air.

  “I’ve brought some sugar,” Sandra told the sheriff, “in case you like your lemonade sweet.”

  He sampled the lemonade and said it was just the way he liked it. “Cooler up in the mountains,” he suggested, cocking an eye at the other man.

  Sloan recognized this as a trial balloon. “Should think it would be,” he agreed.

  “Did you say you came by way of Globe?”

  “I didn’t say.” Cape’s voice was cool and indifferent. It invited no further discussion of the subject. “I’ll throw in with the sheriff about the lemonade, Miss Ranger. Best I ever drank.”

  “It tastes better because the day is so hot.” She looked into the pitcher. “There’s a dividend left for you.”

  “No, no. I’ve had my share. You drink it.”

  Sheriff Norlin had an elusive little notion flitting through his mind that he had seen this young man before. There was something faintly familiar about his voice, or was it in his manner of speaking?

  “Not yore first visit to this part of the country, Mr. Sloan, I take it,” he said.

  “You think I don’t look like a tenderfoot, sheriff.” There was a slight drawling derision in the tone. “I reckon that’s a compliment, coming from an old-timer.”

  Sandra was a little annoyed at Cape Sloan. She knew he was taking an impish pleasure in sidestepping the sheriff’s questions even though a frank answer would involve him in no trouble. For some reason he had built up a defense so quick to assert itself that it was almost belligerent.

  “I had a letter from Mosely today,” Norlin said. “You’ll be glad to know it clears you, Mr. Sloan.”

  “Since I knew it would, I won’t throw my hat up in the air and cheer about it.” the young man answered dryly.

  After the sheriff had left, Sandra’s guest offered a drawling comment. “If I’d known my pasear into your country was going to upset so many of your citizens, I reckon I would have brought a letter of introduction from the governor.”

  Sandra’s honest eyes met his directly. He had raised the question. She would tell him the truth. “I think you are a good deal to blame yourself. You act like a small boy with a chip on his shoulder. If you were more frank and friendly ——”

  “Friendly with the fellows who want to hang me for something I didn’t do?” he inquired with his sardonic smile.

  “Sheriff Norlin isn’t trying to hang you,” she said sturdily. “I don’t want to find out anything you don’t want to tell. I’m on your side anyhow. But since I’m not a complete fool I can see you are holding something back.” She raised a hand quickly to head off his interruption. “You have a right to your secrets. That’s not the point. You were dodging Sheriff Norlin’s questions just to irritate him. What difference does it make whether you did or didn’t come through Globe?”

  “No difference,” he admitted. “But Norlin had just one legitimate point of interest in me, my connection with the Scarface gang. When he discovered I hadn’t any he ought to have been through. But after he got Mosely’s letter he rode twenty miles to see me.”

  “To make sure you fitted the description Mr. Mosely gave of you. That was his duty.”

  “After he saw me he still wasn’t satisfied.”

  “Because of your . . . evasions.”

  He brushed the sheriff out of the picture. “In spite of those . . . evasions . . . you are still for me. Isn’t that what you said?”

  His cool hard eyes drilled into her. She felt a pulse of excitement begin to beat in her throat. No balanced judgment would ever decide her feelings toward this man. It was not only that he had done her a great service at much risk to himself. Something reached out from that lean body with the whipcord muscles, from the strong reckless face, that drew her irresistibly to him.

  She said, in a low voice: “I think you have been wild and lawless and that there is something . . . shocking . . . in your past. But whatever you have done, you are not evil. A man’s actions, at some crisis, and what he really is, are two different things. I don’t have to be told what is troubling you to know that I am on your side.”

  Swiftly she turned and walked into the house. The man’s gaze followed her. He was astonished at what she had said, at the insight which had probed through the incriminating facts to the essential truth. She lived on the other side of a gulf he could not cross. None the less a warm glad excitement filled his breast.

  He beat it down, almost savagely. His way of life was chosen. It was one that probably would include violence and bloodshed. There was no room in it for a woman like Sandra Ranger, nor for any of the pleasant and kindly friendships that might temper his ruthlessness. He was in a tight spot from which he did not expect to get out alive. But he had set himself to a task. He meant to go through with it unless his enemies destroyed him first.

  9. Concerning a Gent on the Make

  THE NAME OF JUG PACKARD CAME UP ONE EVENING WHILE the Ranger family were sitting with Cape Sloan on the porch facing the shadowy outlines of the Huachucas. The ranch guest had dropped a casual question to which he knew the answer.

  “Yes,” replied John. “There’s right smart ore there. Copper, and some gold.”

&n
bsp; “In paying values?”

  “You must have heard of the Johnny B—near the mouth of Geronimo Gulch.”

  “Seems to me I have. Is it locally owned?” Cape kept his voice indifferent. Nobody could have guessed by hearing him that he was doing more than making talk to pass time.

  “Jug Packard holds a controlling interest.”

  The young man stifled a yawn with his forefingers. The obvious lack of interest was fraudulent. He had not heard the name for years, but the sound of it set a pulse of excitement strumming in him. “Lives in New York, with an office on Wall Street, I reckon,” he suggested.

  “No, sir. Lives at Tucson, when he isn’t at the mine, Mostly he stays right at Jugtown, where the works are. His family put on considerable dog at Tucson, but the old man dresses like he did when he didn’t have a nickel. A tramp wouldn’t say “Thank you” for anything Jug wears.”

  “I see. An old-timer, a diamond in the rough.”

  “An old-timer all right. He’s been here since Baldy was a hole in the ground, but I wouldn’t call him exactly a diamond or rave about his heart of gold.”

  “A millionaire?”

  “He’s got money enough to burn a wet mule.” Ranger added, after a moment: “Jug is a crabbed old tightwad. Hangs on to a dollar so hard he squeezes the eagle off it before he turns it loose.”

  “But otherwise an estimable citizen,” Sloan commented. His sardonic face was in the shadow of the vines and told no tales.

  “Hmp! Not unless rumor is a lying jade,” returned Ranger. He was a man who spoke his mind, and he did not like the mine owner. “I wouldn’t trust him farther than I could throw a bull by the tail. Some nasty stories about Jug have floated around. By the way, your friend Uhlmann used to be a foreman or pit boss or something or other for him.”

  “Did he mention that he was my friend?” the younger man asked with frosty irony.

  Ranger leaned back in his chair, drew on his pipe, and released the smoke slowly. “Jug came in as a mule skinner for a freight outfit,” he said. “The pachies ambushed the party on the Oracle road and would have got the whole caboodle if Bob Webb and two-three of his boys hadn’t happened along and drove them off. Jug was wounded, so Bob took him to Tucson and looked after the bills till he got on his feet again. They say Mrs. Webb nursed him. Anyhow, later Bob took him down to the Johnny B and gave him a job.”

  “Mr. Packard seems to have made good there,” Sloan said dryly.

  “Jug is one of those fellows born to make money. If he sees a dime around that isn’t nailed down he gets it. No doubt he saw right away that there was a fortune in the Johnny B. Jug is mighty competent, the kind that is bound to get to the top. Webb was kinda easy-going. He relied on Jug a lot. In three-four years he was superintendent and had a small interest in the mine. All he needed was that toe-hold.” The cattleman stopped talking. He put his boots on the porch railing and relaxed.

  His daughter prodded him. She was in the lane of lamplight that streamed from the window of the parlor. “Well, go on,” she urged.

  It was her eyes, Sloan decided, that quickened a personality interesting and exciting. They were shining now like pools of liquid fire. He did not know that she had divined intuitively that this story somehow concerned him greatly.

  “Webb was killed when a charge exploded unexpectedly in one of the drifts,” her father continued. “After that Jug took charge, though Mrs. Webb still owned most of the property. He organized it into a stock company, and by that time he held the next biggest interest to Mrs. Webb. The mine ran into a streak of bad luck. They lost the pay vein, and none of the drifts seemed to have much ore. For a couple of years the Johnny B shut down. The stock went down to almost nothing. Jug bought it right and left, a good deal of it from Mrs. Webb, who had to get money to keep herself and her two kids. When the mine opened up again Jug owned nine-tenths of the stock. Almost right away they struck a bonanza.”

  “Fortunate for Packard,” Sloan remarked.

  The girl looked at him quickly. He was covering up carefully, but back of his arid reserve she read a deep bitterness. “You think Mr. Packard just happened to hit pay ore?” she asked.

  “That’s his story. You can take it or leave it” Ranger’s resentment at the man exploded into words. “No, I think he pulled off some kind of shenanigan. Maybe he knew the ore was there and shut down to get control.”

  “Who kept the mine books?” Sloan asked abruptly.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “He might have been looting the mine before it shut down—pocketing the profits so as to have enough to buy up the stock later.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyhow, he has the Johnny B, however he got it.”

  “And Mrs. Webb—what did she do about it?” Sandra asked.

  “What could she do?” Ranger answered. “Jug had been too slick for her.”

  “So the story ends there.”

  “No. After a while young Webb came back and raised a row. He was a wild young coot, I gather. Got off on the wrong foot and killed a fellow named Giles Lemmon, who was one of Jug’s men. They gave him twenty years in the penitentiary.”

  “Which made it nice for Mr. Packard,” Sloan drawled. “Showing how all things work together for good to them that love the Lord.”

  “How dreadful!” Sandra murmured. “For him and his poor mother, if she was still living.”

  “She was then,” Ranger replied. “She isn’t now. Two years after he went to prison I read in the paper of her death.”

  “And the son—he’s still in the penitentiary?”

  “I reckon so, Sandra. Maybe he deserved what he got. When a man kills he can’t kick if he has to pay the price. But one thing is sure. Jug Packard brought about that killing. He was more to blame than the boy.”

  “Men with as much money as Packard don’t go to prison,” Sloan said, a cynical bitterness in his face.

  “Oh, I hope that isn’t true in this country,” Sandra cried.

  “In the land of the free, where all men are born equal,” the ranch guest mocked.

  “It isn’t true, Sandra,” the girl’s father said. “Though I’m afraid it is true that a rich man can often buy delays and even avoidance of punishment that a poor one can’t afford. In Packard’s case there was no evidence that he had committed a crime. I’ve said too much. I don’t know he slickered Mrs. Webb out of her mine. That’s only my private opinion.”

  Sloan rose and said he thought he would be turning in for the night. Sandra was shocked at his face. His mouth was a thin tight slit and there was something wolfish in his tortured eyes.

  10. Sandra Guesses a Secret

  JIM BUDD WAS TRANSFERRING A BOX OF GROCERY SUPPLIES from a wagon to the kitchen when Sloan drifted across the yard to meet him. The cook stopped in the doorway, box in front of him, and gave the ranch guest a morning greeting.

  “How is you this fine day, Mr.—Sloan?”

  “Fine as the wheat, Jim. Go ahead. I’ll come into the kitchen.”

  Budd deposited the groceries on the table and turned to find out what the other wanted to say to him. Sloan wasted no time.

  “I understand a colored boy who cooks at the Johnny B mine will probably drop in to see you this afternoon,” he said.

  “Yassuh, he ’most generally does on his way to town. Miss Sandra tell you Sam wuz comin’?”

  “She said he might. Do you know how long he has worked at the Johnny B?”

  “More’n ten years, he tole me.”

  “I want you to do me a favor, Jim. Find out from him if you can where Stan Fraser is now. Years ago he used to run the engine at the mine. Put it sort of careless. Make out you once knew him. And whatever you do, don’t let him know you’re asking for me.”

  “Okay, Mr.—Sloan.”

  Sandra came into the kitchen and Cape explained his presence with an apologetic laugh. “I’ve got so little to do that I go around gassing with everybody and interfering with their work. But you’ll be rid of m
e tomorrow. I’ll be on my way.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “I’m not dead sure. Think I’ll try to pick up a job on some ranch.”

  She said nothing more about it, but she made up her mind not to let him ride for any outfit in this part of the territory if she could help it. She believed he was in great danger here. He ought to go away to a place where he was unknown, where he was not surrounded by enemies. It would be madness for him to stay here, especially so since he was brooding over some dark purpose of revenge. That he was the son of Bob Webb she felt sure. Either he had been released from prison or he had escaped. If he got into fresh trouble, even though he might be out on parole, he would be dragged back again without a trial.

  The intensity of her feeling was disturbing. When they met, excitement flooded her breast and left her a little breathless. She wondered if this were love, and told herself she hoped not. There could be no happy consummation to such madness. How could one walk through life happily beside a man who strode with such reckless feet along perilous trails? A silly question, she put it to herself severely, about a man who was showing not the least interest in her.

  She took to her father the problem of Cape Sloan’s future. He was in the room he used as an office, checking a bill from a hardware store. Sandra waited while he finished adding a column.

  “Aren’t you ashamed, Mr. Ranger, to have an ex-convict here as a guest?” she asked.

  He frowned at her. “What nonsense have you in your head?”

  “I’m talking about Mr. Sloan, alias Webb. I’m not sure he is a released convict. He may be an escaped one.” She added, with a smile: “In which case of course you are an accessory and will have to go back with him.”