Outcasts of Picture Rocks Read online

  The other was also tall and stern. But there, all similarity was at an end. He was as different from the sheriff as a thoroughbred is from a range cayuse. His face, darkly handsome beneath a costly white Stetson, was remarkable for its breeding. His black eyes were memorable for their verve and fire, their pride, likewise, pride that was further expressed in the very way he carried himself. He had the air of a man used to having his own way without any fuss; Val Verde rancher, Luke Chartres.

  Passing Race without so much as a glance in his direction, they took a table at some distance, gave their order, and leaned forward toward each other, continuing their conversation at a low pitch. But Race’s ears, trained to catch the vaguest whispers in the years when his living depended on stray bits of information, easily picked up this. “No, Pat,” in the low, courteous voice of Chartres, “we can’t rush this thing. A false move now might spoil everything. I’ve worked a whole year to get this opening, and you can be sure I’ll keep it moving. My time is valuable, too.”

  “Too valuable, I’d say,” in the sheriff’s blunt speech, “to warrant spendin’ a year of it for one horse. But I’m mighty glad you did, Luke. I’d give anything to raid that nest!”

  Hot blood roaring in Race’s ears drowned the rest. When he got control of himself, the Val Verde man was saying: “This won’t make you popular with your county, Pat.”

  The sheriff admitted it. “But,” he pointed out, “it will with the state!”

  “That’s right. And with you out for Congress next fall, that’s what counts. Well, if we pull this off, you won’t need Big Sandy’s help. It gets me, Pat,” and the tone of Chartres held a note of personal enmity that Race would long wonder at, “how this town can uphold the Jores.”

  “It’s natural. Big Sandy’s grateful to the Jores for puttin’ it on the map,” Dolan said. “Proud of the black luster they shed over it. Then, too, the old-time spirit survives here. Plenty of old-timers, like Dad Peppin, who remember Jerico Jore. Naturally, they make a martyr of him and heroes of his sons. I doubt if I can rustle a posse in this town, when the time comes. But to the rest of the state, they’re outlaws. And if I can put them behind bars, I’ll …”

  “You can,” Chartres was curbing him again, “if you don’t get in too big a rush. Remember, Pat, I don’t know where that pass is myself yet. We’ll just have to wait.”

  “Luke, I’d give a heap to know who’s workin’ with you.”

  Race’s ears were keen to the last pitch. But all he could catch was: “Sorry, Pat, I’m pledged. But I’ll pledge you this, when the time comes, my man will lead us through that pass into the basin without a Jore knowing it. And that time must come soon. I can’t stand this waiting.”

  “That’s easy to savvy, with the Caliente handicap comin’ up in September, and you with no entry. Well, Luke, I never took much stock in this golden horse story myself. But if half of what I hear is true, you’ll have a horse that will give Saval’s Meteor dust plumb around the track. And I know how much that means to you.”

  Chartres studied him. “Do you?” His voice was strained. “I doubt it, Pat. Nobody does. Nobody could! Why, it means so much, I … I’d sell my soul for such a horse! That’s what I’m doing. Going against all sense of honor, of common decency. Oh,” he said, shrugging, “you wouldn’t understand.” And tensely, after a time, he went on: “Saval beat me in every race last season, Pat. That’s all right. It’s all in the game. But when he makes every victory a personal insult! You don’t take any stock in that golden horse story. But I know! That horse has the blood of racing kings. If I can get him …” He rose to go then, abruptly.

  Not daring to risk recognition when they passed him, Race got up and, as unobtrusively as he could, sauntered out.

  Once in the street, his casual air vanished. He had a million things to do and not much time to do them in. The scheme he had outlined to René had fallen through, at least for the present. But already he had another. Every detail necessary to put it in operation must be attended to when René’s train came in at three that afternoon.

  So energetically did Race go about this business, he was at the station a full hour before time, impatiently pacing the platform, worrying about the outcome of his scheme.

  But when the train pulled in and the young man descended, his spirits shot up. For René looked far worse than he had a week ago on the tracks. He could barely stand, weaving, as Race greeted him, still feeling the motion of the train, the roar of the wheels still in his ears, the platform, the little cow town whirling by him, as a whole continent had whirled in the last five days.

  “Gee, kid, you look fierce.” It was impossible for Race to hide his ghoulish exultation. “That’s the stuff! Anybody’d swear you wasn’t but a jump ahead of the ol’ man with the scythe.”

  “I sure feel like it, Race.” Dim but game, the smile on the young fellow’s white face. “But I’ll be jake, when I get some rest.”

  But jake was the last thing Race desired him to be. Already he had him by the arm, dragging him down the street, raving: “No rest for you, kid! Things has happened here. Chartres has stole my thunder. Somebody’s promised to show him that pass. He’s workin’ with the sheriff. They’ve doped out about the same spread we had. Our scheme’s shot!”

  René’s heart lifted, eased of a tremendous burden. Then he wasn’t going to that basin to double-cross the Jores, should they befriend him, to betray a girl named Eden. “You mean”—he must hear Race say it—“you’ve give up?”

  “Not much,” was the grim retort. “I didn’t risk good money on this race to be left at the post.”

  “But,” panted René, breathless from the pace Race set, “if Chartres wants the horse and is takin’ the sheriff …”

  “That’s where you come in.” Race’s step quickened. “You’re goin’ up to that basin to warn the Jores about this. To fight with them. Outlaw yourself, if you must. Do any- and everything you can to keep Dolan and Chartres out of the Picture Rocks. Because,” he made plain his selfish purpose, “just as long as Luke Chartres wants that horse, there’s just one place he’s safe … in the Picture Rocks, guarded by the Jores.”

  That was Race—using the Jores’ deadly rifles, as he banked on using human qualities in them which he did not himself possess; as he was using this boy’s misfortune; as he would use any weapon he could lay hands on for Black Wing.

  “But,” the young fellow cried, “I thought Chartres had given him up!”

  “That’s what I thought!” Race cursed. “I was a fool to think it! No man in his senses would give up a colt of the Crusader strain … not if he knew what it had. If ever he sees Black Wing like I seen him, he’ll …”

  “But Black Wing belongs …”

  “To the first man to get him out of that basin,” Race cut in grimly. “And I’ll be that man! When Luke Chartres bats his patience out against the walls of the Picture Rocks, we’ll have our innings.”

  Stopping abruptly, he caught the boy by the arms, searching his pale face with eyes that were steady for once. “Kid,” he said tensely, “I brought you West. I staked you to this chance to live. This change of plan don’t let you out. Go up there, like I told you. When you get in, if you get in …” The terror his eyes betrayed, then, was not for René, not terror lest the boy be slain by the guards at Sentry Crags, but a sudden realization of how slim a thread his hope of Black Wing hung on. “If you get in, tell the Jores about Dolan. Then use your own judgment. You know what I want, that horse, first and last. This warnin’ should make you solid with the gang, but …”

  He held the reeling form up. “Get this, kid. Don’t figure on that passin’ you in. They’d never fall for it. Remember, you’re a tenderfoot in Arizona for your health, roughing it, drifted up there by accident. You heard this talk in town. Got that? Fine. One other thing. This Reno handle’s out. It’s a dead giveaway. You’re René Rand, see?”

 
The boy looked at him strangely. René, again? That’s what he’d always been, until the racetrack crowd tacked Reno on him. Well, it was just one lie less he had to tell the Jores.

  They had turned into the willow grove on the outskirts of town, where Race had secreted the two cayuses bought that afternoon, one saddled, the other bearing a pack.

  “Here’s your outfit,” Race told him. “Get goin’.”

  René couldn’t believe Race meant right then. And although his heart failed at the task before him and what strength he had seemed to forsake him, his white lips smiled the promise. “I’ll go, Race. But I gotta rest first. The trip … I’m all in. I couldn’t catch a pig in an alley like this. Give me a week.”

  “And let you git tanned up! Let you lose that graveyard look, the one chance to land you in the Picture Rocks. Not by a …”

  “Just a day. Honest, Race, I’m in no shape.”

  “The worse shape you’re in, the better,” was the heartless answer. “Hop on!”

  For the first time in his life, René Rand required help to mount. Once in the saddle, however, he seemed to gain strength.

  Yet, looking up at him, seeing his young, ravaged face in the pitiless glare of the sun, Race had one sharp qualm, not of shame at the unspeakable advantage he was taking of him, but of the danger he knew, as no man knew. One he had escaped by a margin so slight that the very memory made his flesh creep. No, nothing like this troubled Race Coulter, but fear lest this boy never reach Sentry Crags. However, and he was cheered by the thought, men like the Reno Kid died hard.

  “Remember,” he charged, putting the lead rope in René’s hand, “you owe me your life. And the debt ain’t paid until I get that horse.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  NOT A HEALTH RESORT

  Out of town, out beyond the last straggling valley ranch, René rode toward the gaunt black range looming west. His strength was gone. But he was borne up by a belated sense of homecoming, by the wild hope gathering in his breast, that maybe it wasn’t too late after all.

  Maybe this was what he had been dying for—the miles and miles of sage in purple flower, so sweet that the very dust kicked up by his cayuse and packhorse was perfumed. For the mountains—dear God, how he had longed for the mountains!—for these great stretches with nothing in them, not a fence, nor building, nor human being; just hush, so deep it blotted the roar in his brain; for this sky hung over him, not just a stingy, unfriendly strip that looked as if it didn’t care if a fellow got well or not, but a big blue one that spread itself all over everything, smiling, like it wanted to help; for air like this—so good he couldn’t get enough; air that would bring a dead man to life, he thought.

  But it made him dizzy. All the peaks and canyons in the mountain range ahead of him had joined hands around the great dome and were playing ring-around-the-rosy. That was altitude, he guessed. Folks got drunk on mountain air till they got used to it. It was one on him, all right. He’d been so sure one whiff of it would set him up. And here he had a whole lungful—well, half a lung—and he had to hang on to the saddle horn with both hands to keep from falling off.

  Anyhow, he was riding. Not like I used to, the sick fellow owned. Me and Flash … we used to go gallopin’. All the time!

  No! Not riding like that now—here on the Picture Rocks trail. Instead, his thin figure was swaying, the pallor of death was on his pinched face, and every atom of grit his soul possessed set on holding out until he reached the Picture Rocks. He could see its mighty barriers up there, deceptively near in the clear air. He had to go up there. For what? He forgot.

  Oh, yeah, he recollected, that horse … like sunshine.

  He owed Race a debt. Race had staked him to this chance—one in a hundred he’d get past Sentry Crags, past the Jores or Shang Haman. Shang might be guarding the pass. Shang who was a devil.

  If I’ve got to face the devil, he thought with grim humor, I’ll take my chance … with the one at Sentry Crags.

  Then he was too faint, too weary, too far gone to think. He just hung on, while slowly the westering sun sank, and the trail lifted him high above the sage plains into the foothills. Soundlessly, his horse’s feet fell on a springy carpet of needles, cast by fir and pine that locked green arms above him, singing a song so soothing that his head fell forward, his eyes closed, and a great drowsiness overcame him.

  A paroxysm of coughing roused him, and when he had fought it to a wan waterloo, when he could lift his head again, he saw that he was riding at the very foot of the great dome.

  Its massive, majestic rims loomed over him. Their shadow fell blackly upon him; fiery, the sky above them, as if the basin were, indeed, a volcano spouting flame. Sharp and gleaming as bayonets, its peaks stood up, piercing the sky and dripping sunset’s hue, like bayonets plunged in living red; and between the sharpest, reddest, splitting that thousand-foot cliff like a sword thrust, the narrow gap through which no man might pass—Sentry Crags!

  Slowly, his burning eyes lifted to the heights, where, like a lonely eagle, a sentinel was said to watch. He saw no one. But he felt eyes on him. And desperately, he strove to pull himself together to meet, to challenge, to tell the story as Race had coached him. But will could carry him so far and no further. Suddenly, will failing, blackness closed around him, and he felt himself falling, falling …

  As he fell, there rose from the red rims up there a strange figure, strange enough to grace the weirdest myth ever woven about this land of which men knew nothing but said much—the slight, pliant figure of a young fellow of perhaps nineteen, clad in tattered buckskin and tightly clutching a Winchester.

  His frayed buckskin hunting shirt was worn over soiled trousers of the same material, its fringed hem striking midway between knee and thigh, and confined at the waist by a weighted gun belt. Buckskin moccasins were on his feet. He wore no hat. And his long black hair, whipping back in the breeze that always blew up here, revealed a face singular for its contradictions—one instant, all but feminine in its sweetness; the next, wholly masculine in its ferocity; and eerie always, for a strange restlessness of expression.

  Eerily restless were his eyes, likewise. Now the deep, warm blue of a summer sky, then the sullen purple that presages a storm, or flame-shot black, as when the heavens are ripped open and lightning flashes from them.

  Lightning had flashed from them this last hour as, crouched up there, he had watched this strange rider coming—as last autumn he had watched another man approach the basin. And he had gripped the rifle, muttering: “It’s him … come back for Black Wing.”

  But as this man neared, he had seen it was not the same man. Nor was it a cowboy hunting stock, who would ride up to the crags and turn off. For no cowboy rode like that—all over his horse. Nor did he look like a prospector, although he trailed a packhorse. He fell into no class. Uncanny was this sentry in all else, but canny in guarding the Picture Rocks. Again, fiercely muttering: “It’s someone … come for him.”

  Rifle to shoulder, he leaped up, a challenge on his lips, but was stricken dumb with amazement as, right in the jaws of the pass, the rider fell from his horse, rolled over in the trail, and, bringing up against a boulder, lay motionless. Long the young sentinel watched, suspicious that this was a ruse. Then, in action swift as the play of light on rifles, he whirled, and in a bound, beautiful in its grace and ease, sprang to the back of a horse tethered in the brush and was thundering down the precipitous cliff at a headlong gallop, leaping fissures and deadfalls, dodging in and out of the broken canyons, outriding the avalanching shale that started with him, and swooping out on the level floor of the basin, where he veered sharply between the towering portals of the pass.

  Coming to a stop about a hundred yards from where the rider had fallen, he flung off his horse and, swiftly, soundlessly, with the caution of a wild thing whose caution is inborn, glided through the trees to a spot where he could see the figure lying by the trail. The
horses had shied from it and were grazing some distance back. And the youthful guard in buckskin shied back a bit and watched, his breath coming fast, his eyes burning with a great curiosity. As moments passed and he saw no movement in the still form, curiosity drew him up, step by step, rifle ready, every nerve alert. Stopping short when, within a few feet of it, his keen eyes made out an almost imperceptible rise and fall of the chest.

  Playin’ possum, he thought. And, as a small boy might do, had he actually met a possum in the trail and it played dead, he scooped up a small rock and shied it at the figure, at the same time covering it with his gun. But there was no reflex action, not so much as the flicker of an eyelash. The young fellow stared, puzzled by this.

  “He’s gone,” he muttered, his expressive eyes bewildered. He’s gone … and he’s left himself behind. They do it sometimes. Some don’t come back. Dave didn’t when he fell off his horse. I found Dave, too! But … Pain was clouding his wild face. Dave was shot! Shang done that! They say I’m crazy, and they shut me up.

  But this man had not been shot. Nor had he been thrown from his horse. Curiosity drew him close, held him, gazing down at René’s senseless face, his own swept by nameless grief. Not in years had he looked into a face so young, unless some mountain stream gave him back his own reflection; never, in all his life, but one. And that one had been white and still like this when last he’d seen it.

  “Shang done that!” he repeated passionately, lightning flaring through sudden mist. “He’ll pay for it!”

  But as a grieving child is diverted when its interest is attracted, so was this young being diverted by what he looked upon. Everything about René intrigued him. His clothing, the cheap store suit and cap Race had forced on him to obliterate the range stamp and bear out his tale of being a poor tenderfoot health-seeker, ill-fitting, uninteresting as they were, filled this lad with vast admiration and disdain of his own buckskin. Raptly, he studied him as one might a being from a strange planet, and with the same apprehension.