Sage Brush Vengeance

Front matter

SAGE BRUSH VENGEANCE

By Robert Welles Ritchie Author of “King Solomon's Shoe,” “Too Much Spotlight,” etc.

“ME, I RIDES ALONE TO MAKE MY VENGEANCE,” SAID YOUNG JERE CUTTLES— EVEN WHEN THEY TOLD HIM THAT THE MAN WHO HAD KILLED HIS PARTNER WAS THE TOUGHEST ROAD AGENT AND GAMBLER ON THE OVERLAND TRAIL

II

HERE CUTTLES sweated in an agony of doubts and fears as he plodded back over the trail from Allaire's ranch to Fiddler's Bar. His simple mind, unaccustomed to grappling with anything more complex than day-by-day needs of life, launched itself futilely at the mystery of Pierre Allaire's disappearance—for mystery it appeared to Jere. Surely this partner of his would not have left the country without first telling him of the intention,

Only two hand-holds to the problem. First, that big stranger with the quick smile who'd asked him to be directed to Lem Collins; a fellow from the outside coming into the valley and wanting to find a man with a shady reputation. Then the queer carryings-on of Lem Collins himself. First off he'd denied having seen Allaire for a week and got his back hair roached up when Jere didn't seem to believe him. That same Lem standing in Allaire's doorway with a musket. “I'm in charge here now2”

“Them two's hooked up together somehow,” the youth muttered. Then, with a catch in his throat, “Sartin sure they've massacreed my podner!”'

Where to turn for help in solving this mystery? Whom could he enlist in the hunt for Allaire—if the good God still let him be in the land of the living? Or who would be on his side if Allaire's blood cried for vengeance? Jere knew nobody in the mushroom mining camp of Fiddler's Bar with its hundreds of boomers from over the Sierra crest. Only occasionally had he tramped in from his claim down river to exchange pokes of nuggets for cornmeal and sowbelly.

“But I jist gotta ease my troubles onto somebody2”

Night, and Fiddler's Bar was in full tilt. Lighted tents glowed like incandescent toadstools down the single street. Squeak of fiddles and moan of accordions spilled out through the doors of a dozen dance halls. Herds of men lurched from bar to bar; shaggy men with the bearded faces of baboons and the speech of the earth's far corners. In the Miners' Rest and the El Dorado where dance platforms crowded the bars men danced clumsily together like trained bears; those who wore a white patch of flour sack on the seat of their pants so designated themselves as coy partners to be sought with many bows and flourishes. Between dances the bartenders went into frenzies of activity; nothing served for less than an ounce of dust, and that bought a dozen drinks.

Aye, Fiddler's Bar; most remote of the California diggin's, told the silent white peaks circling it about that it was the ring-tailest camp north of Rich Bar—and to hell with all others.

INTO this welter of folly crept Jere Cuttles the Pike. Jere Cuttles, half starved, dazed from lack of sleep and tottering on his tired legs. Jere, looking for a sympathetic listener to whom he could pour out his burden of doubts and fears.

Chance united with a half formed resolution to direct him to the one man in Fiddler's Bar most likely to give him a kindly ear—Jacob Stupe, alcalde by popular choice and lawyer by his own determination. A big slow-spoken man was this Jacob Stupe; shrewd by inheritance of his Pennsylvania Dutch blood; a steady rock in all the roaring tides of the new camp. Jere knew that his partner Allaire was an acquaintance of “Judge” Stupe's; he'd often heard the volatile Frenchman make jests at the expense of the other's sober habit of mind.

He found Jacob Stupe nursing a long pipe and a mug of porter away from the monte tables in the camp's most respectable resort. In broken and halting bits Jere told his story of Allaire's disappearance. The other heard him through soberly.

“My young friend,” he said, “I see no reason for you to worry. If Allaire has gone away it is on proper business.”

Then the alcalde told Jere of a visit Allaire had made upon him the week before; Allaire accompanied by a big stranger—Stupe did not remember the latter's name—who was negotiating for the purchase of the Frenchman's beef herd. They wished Stupe to witness a bill of sale between them. Part payment for the herd passed from the stranger to Allaire in Stupe's presence—$3,000 if the judge recalled the figure correctly—and it seemed to be the understanding between them that Allaire was to accompany the purchaser to his home and there receive the remainder.

Jere followed the other's statement with troubled eyes. When he had done the youth launched a question. “Big fella, that-thar stranger, with fringes onto his huntin' shirt an' a sorta possum smile?”

Stupe nodded.

“An' whar from was he?”

“Somewhere over in Utah Territory along the Overland Trail, as best I can remember.”

JERE knotted his bony fingers together and gave Judge Stupe an agonized look. “Jedge, hit jist don' make sense, my podner sellin' out an' goin' away 'thought tellin' me ary thing about hit. An that-thar Lem Collins settin' in my podner's cabin a'claimin' of hisself in charge.

“Jedge Stupe”—suddenly Jere's head came up under the thrust of a smashing thought—“iffen that-thar stranger was wishful to meet up with Allaire—him comin' into strange country an' all—whyn't he ask me, when he meets up with me down to my claim, whar-at's Pierre Allaire, 'stead of wantin' to know whar he kin find that pole-cat Lem Collins?”

Jacob Stupe stroked his long beard without answer. Jere hurried on.

“An' whyfor should Allaire go all the way over the mountains to Utah Territory to kotch the rest of his money when all he's gotta do is set tight with his cow critters an' let the stranger fotch it to him?”

Stupe took a long pull at his mug and swabbed his beard with the back of his hand. “I don't see that we can do anything, my young friend, on such slight suspicion. It would be likely that Allaire would put his head cowman in charge of his properties if he were going over the mountains with this purchaser of his herd. I don't see anything out of the way in the stranger's asking for Collins. Likely he knows Collins and relied upon him to meet your partner.

“Go back to your claim, young fella,” Stupe finished with a paternal note, “and I promise you that if the Frenchman doesn't show up inside of a week I'll have this Lem Collins down here and put the screws on him.”

TWO days passed. Jere Cuttles, at work with his long handled shovel lifting the gravel from the bed of the diverted river into his rocker box, was not as intent upon his work as he should have been. Day and night a weight of anxiety pressed down on his brain like lead foil packed inside his skull. Over and over again until the rote became maddening he had reviewed the scant circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Allaire, weighing, surmising, driving futilely at a conclusion which always evaded him.

Suddenly he dropped. his shovel and started striding through the willows. That gunshot he'd heard down-river three days after the stranger had accosted him here on his claim, why hadn't he thought of that since?

The lanky youth took the trail following the windings of the river—the trail that crossed Cougar Mountain to carry down into the desert beyond. Here was open country unmarred by any settlement or miner's claim—Jere's own diggings were miles below the furor about Fiddler's Bar. The trail was but a meandering horse-track through wild oats and meadow grass well within sound of the river's voice.

Jere Cuttles could scarcely sense the subtle change that came over him once he was launched on this new business. As his grandfathers and their fathers before them had made themselves trail-wise in their pioneering over the passes of the Blue Ridge in their cheating of a skulking death ever ready to strike from forest shadows, so now he put into practice the craft that was in his blood. This narrow horse-track through virgin country began to tell him hidden secrets.

To back-track the trail of the stranger who'd come questioning Lem Collins was simple; where he'd tied his horse amid the willows on Jere's claim four hoofprints were plain in marshy ground—one of them made by a “skelped” hoof. But about two miles south of the Pike's claim, where foxgloves bordered a little crossing rivulet, other hoofprints bearing in from the range lands on the west side of the valley joined the trail and followed it on its south'ard course, The tracker dropped to his knees and studied these prints closely.

One was made by the horse with the skelped hoof—the stranger cutting back from Allaire's range onto the trail to Utah Territory.” There were two other horses in the party that had passed that way.

“Allowin's as how my podner mout be ridin' with that-thar big stranger, how-come a third?”

NOW the tracker was alert and tingling. The trail turned into a little flat where the old Indian campoodie stood. Jere looked for the landmark. He saw a circle of black smudge where the abandoned hut of grass and bark had been. Promptly he turned off the trail and strode to that circle.

Charred butt-ends of willow poles fringed the center pile of ashes. A few fragments of clay pots lay amid the crisp cinders. Jere's new-found impulse of a reader of blind signs prompted him to stir those cinders, to spread them out thin for his eyes to scan.

He picked from amid the ashes a scorched metal button—another. What appeared at first a calcined lump of willow butt proved to be a charred bootheel held together by steel pegs.

Jere sat back on his hunkers and pondered. The old campoodie would not have made a fire hot enough to consume a body even though it might destroy all but these relics of a man's clothing had been burned with the hut. No live man would set fire to an Indian campoodie to burn his clothes. But if they were a dead man's clothes2

The youth arose, trembling. He walked back to the trail and stood there slowly turning his eyes in widening sweeps across the little meadow. A white streak against the trunk of an alder tree screening the river caught his eye and he strode to investigate. There was a fresh wound in the bark where a horse's teeth had stripped off a piece—a tethered and restless horse. Beyond, the river widened in a dark pool.

Jere stood on a grassy bank a yard high over the green water and tried to peer into the depths. He could catch the dim outlines of great boulders ten feet below the surface, but there was frustrating shadows between.

He stripped off his clothes and plunged. The icy water drove knives into him and he was forced almost immediately to scramble up to the grassy slope. He beat himself furiously and dived again. Furiously he forced himself to explore the deepest crevices of the submerged rocks. Something white and grotesque came into his swimming vision. He put out a hand and touched it.

Jere Cuttles came to the surface and summoned his last atom of strength to drag himself up the bank. His eyes were bulging and his breath came in sharp whistles through the convulsions of chills.

“My podner! Oh my God—my podner!”

JUDGE STUPE and a dozen men from Fiddler's Bar with ropes and grapples made of hay hooks came next day under the guidance of a youth with the look of a destroying angel in his eyes. They brought to the sunlight the body of Pierre Allaire, naked and bound with rope about a weighting boulder.

A bullet hole had been drilled through the back of the dead man's skull.

III

PIERRE ALLAIRE'S body was buried in the flower flecked meadow by the side of the stream from whose watery cavern it had been recovered. Alcalde Stupe said a prayer over the bowed heads about the shallow grave. Jere Cuttles stood slope shouldered and moveless, his pale eyes following the falling clods.

When the others were moving toward their horses the lanky Pike still remained by the fresh mound.

“Podner,” he whispered, “I aims to take vengeance, an' that I do. By tooth and eye, by hair for hair I aims to take vengeance. God hear me!”

Then he took his horse with the others and rode with his chin on his chest.

By whispers and nods between man and man the burial party had become a company of vigilantes before ever the forks of the trail above Jere's claim had been reached. Such companies leap out of thin air when necessity arises—and there is no judge of necessity save themselves.

Jacob Stupe rode his horse alongside Jere and laid an arm over the boy's shoulder.

“My son, if you'd only come to me with your suspicions about Lem Collins the day after you did I'd been more ready to believe you.”

Jere, deep in grim thoughts, gave no sign. Stupe continued, “Our lodge”—he named a secret society potent in California life—“got a letter by Langton's express driver over from Quincy the day after you talked to me. Letter from Acacia Lodge, 'way down in Merced country, telling of the killing of our brother Jim Anstey by a man calling himself Edwards. That was three months ago. Description fits Lem Collins to a T. How long had he been working for Allaire?”

“Goin' on two months,” Jere said.

“Ever heard him say where he came from?”

“Wouldn't say, him; leastwise not when my pod—when Allaire tries to find out.”

“We'll hang him for two murders,” said the alcalde simply. “And the other fellow—the cattle buyer from over the mountains?”

“The Lord will deliver him inter my hands,” solemnly from the Missourian.

RED of blood was in the western sky and all the snow peaks were ensanguined when the men with law in their hands rode up the slope to the cabin of Allaire's ranch. They dismounted and approached, spread out and with revolvers at hip. The cabin door was open. No expected shot from a trapped murderer.

They entered. Confusion there, what with every foot of the dirt floor spaded over and heaped about in piles; what with even the stones of the fireplace dislodged. Evidence enough of frantic digging for hidden gold. Was it for the $3,000 Jacob Stupe had seen the stranger give to the murdered man in part payment for his stock? Pierre Allaire would not have thought of taking such a large sum with him if in truth he had agreed to accompany the purchaser to his home. Manifestly, the twain had killed him and then returned to the cabin to find what they believed to be hidden there.

And this had happened since the time Jere Cuttles came here seeking his foster-father. Could it have been—so Jere turned probabilities over in his mind—that on that morning following his interview with Lem when he returned to Allaire's cabin and was warned away by a musket in the cowman's hands that he had interrupted Collins in his work of searching for a dead man's treasure—in spading and prying after a hiding place?

“You know the way to the cowmen's camp,” Stupe said to Jere. “You lead and I reckon we can make it before dark.”

The vigilantes followed after the youth's horse over the miles of range along the slope of the western mountains. Shadows marched down from the purpling summits to flank them ere they came to destination. And none too soon. For as Jere and the leaders filed up out of a coulee north of the weather-beaten shack they saw a figure frantically saddling a horse in the corral beyond the house.

A dash—scattering shots and he who had attempted escape stood with hands high above his head. Despard the second cowman for Allaire's herd.

Riders formed a ring about the fellow. One dropped a noose over his head and tightened the slip-knot with a significant jerk.

“What's your hurry to get away?” Stupe asked the man. Answer came in a crackling Spanish oath.

“Where is Lem Collins?” the alcalde challenged.

“Not your dam' business,” in a snarl from the swarthy Basco. The head man of Fiddler's Bar bent a surprised glance at the fellow.

“Look-y here, Greaser, we mean business. We want Lem Collins for murder—and you, too, maybe. I give you another chance; where is your partner?”

“Go to hell!”

THE grave man on horseback slowly looked about in the clotting dark. His eyes fell on a white oak standing a little beyond the corral. A brief nod of his head thither and the horsemen closed about the Basco, driving him under the tree by the hustling of their horses' flanks. A man leaped down, fought briefly with the defiant cowman and had his arms triced behind him in no time. The loose end of the rope about his neck snaked up over a branch and was wrapped about a saddle horn.

“Where is Lem Collins?” Stupe thundered. The stubborn one's oath was strangled in his throat as his feet left the ground. A minute of horror as a body leaped and danced. Judge Stupe held up a hand and the rope was eased away. Despard crumpled choking on the ground.

Once again the wretch was made to look into the very eyes of death before his spirit was broken by the torture. He lay, at last, sobbing answers to questions put to him.

Collins had gone these two days since—gone a'horseback over the trail to Carson Valley over in the Utah desert. Yes, Collins had gone to join his friend Lucky Bill Hazard who lived at a place on the Overland Trail called Bitter Springs.

He, Despard, and Collins had planned to drive Allaire's cattle over to Hazard's ranch in the desert but Collins had become afraid over something and had ridden away in the night.

“What part did you have in the killing of Allaire?” Stupe drove into the strangled cowman's ear.

“Name of God, señor—nothing! I only guess the boss is killed by them when Collins begins digging the floor of the Frenchman's cabin. Before that I think he rides to Bitter Springs with that Hazard because he tells me watch well his cattle while he is gone.”

“How much of Allaire's buried gold did Collins give you to keep your mouth shut?” some one of the group put in.

“Not a penny,” whined the Basco. “I not even know Collins find that gold.”

There was a whispered consultation between the alcalde and some of the men. Despard, they decided, had a guilty knowledge of the Frenchman's slaying and should be taken to Fiddler's Bar to stand trial before a miners' court. The man was hoisted in a saddle before one of the riders and the trail for the settlement taken,

HERE CUTTLES had said no word during the test under the oak tree and now he rode a little apart from the others. Before the cavalcade had ridden far through the dark Judge Stupe pushed his horse alongside.

“Well, my son, what'd we best do about this proposition?” His voice held a kindly invitation to confidence. Jere was silent for a minute.

“Far's I'm consarned, they hain't no 'we' into it,” he said.

“You mean2”

“Judge, sir”—the boy turned to give the other a glance he would have seen to be full of flames had there been light—“back in the red oak kentry whar I was born an' whar my pappy was born, does somebody do yore family a hurt, yo' don't call in the hull county to make yore vengeance. Hit's the family's vengeance.

“Me, I rides alone to make my vengeance.”

“But, young friend, I've heard of this Lucky Bill Hazard,” the other expostulated. “Saw him myself, by jinks, when I came across three years ago. He's the toughest road agent and gambler on the Overland Trail and he's got a gang at his back—cutthroats and blacklegs. You can't fight the whole settlement of Bitter Springs. Now my lodge in Fiddler's Bar is interested in stringing up Collins for the murder he did down in the Merced country; Collins will be expecting us to trail him over there. If we could get a line on Collins and Hazard both—you feeling out the ground, for one man would be better than a crowd fer that—why2”

Long the worthy alcalde argued to beat down the Missouri youth's stiff necked devotion to the idea of a personal and single handed vengeance. Finally he won. In the star-strewn dark of the Sierra night the man and the boy came to agreement upon a plan, daring as the strategy of any fabled hero cast against overwhelming odds.

IV

THE tough frontier station of Bitter Springs, squatting like a congress of beetles in a valley of black sage, was the only eddy of life along five hundred miles of wheel tracks between the Mormon settlements at the head of Great Salt Lake and the first of the California gold camps on the Sierra's western slope. Great white wagons which threaded across the Overland Trail in the world's most spectacular caravan won through the blistering terrors of the Humboldt Sink to the north and east of Bitter Springs and came to the ugly town as to a promised Zion.

For there reprovisioning could be made in food stocks packed over the mountains from San Francisco and sold at almost their weight in gold. A few canny hay farmers—disappointed gold seekers turning back from El Dorado to squat on the valley's wild grasses—would open their meadows to starved trail cattle for a stiff price. The town's saloons and deadfalls offered sufficient excitement to men surfeited with months of monotony on the road out from Independence or Council Bluffs.

And Bitter Springs was Lucky Bill Hazard's personal domain. He had built it. He owned a major interest in all of the saloons and gambling tents. Largely he had populated it with blacklegs and shady characters fleeing the California diggings to find sanctuary from pursuing vigilantes; Sydney ducks driven out of San Francisco, discredited gamblers given ticket-of-leave from Sacramento, men with red hands. In the eyes of these refugees from the law Lucky Bill stood as a second Robin Hood. For the big fellow with the quick smile had a heart wide as outdoors for all crooks in trouble—and even for honest men in the same circumstance.

Lucky Bill was the Law—the only Law existing between Salt Lake and Sierra crest. At the time I introduce him to you there was no geographical area marked “Nevada.” Bitter Springs lay in the shadowy jurisdiction of the Territory of Utah and with the nearest peace officer nigh a month away in terms of travel.

THIS master of crooks and desperadoes had been back two weeks from his mission over the Sierras—and he counted the trip a failure for reasons which will appear—when a wagon train from the east straggled into Bitter Springs with a horror tale more grim than the average. The wagon company's draft cattle were tottering skeletons, its people nigh dead from thirst and the ravages of what was called mountain fever.

“They's a wagon broke down back yonder by the Sink,” a walking ghost under an alkali stained hat reported to Lucky Bill. “Ole man an' his daughter, both nigh dead with the fever, lyin' under the wagon. Best we could do for 'em was to leave a dram or so of water an' promise we'd get relief back when we hit this station.”

Not in the three years of his rule had a tale of hardship and want in the desert gone unheeded by Lucky Bill. He might rob emigrants over his card tables or charge them out of their boots at his store, but he never left them to die in the wilderness. So, with this news to spur him, he set out with four horses hitched to his light prairie wagon and water barrels under the hood. Beside him on the high driver's seat rode one Doc. Almy, drunkard and gambler who once in his cleaner days had been a surgeon in the Navy; Doc Almy with his almost forgotten black bag of pills.

It was mid-July and the heat dropped like drippings from a melting sky of tin Through the shimmering atmosphere mountains at a distance swelled and shrank like the sides of breathing monsters. Every stunted sagebush was a dead faggot charred by sun flames,

Not until near dark did the mercy wagon from Bitter Springs come upon the marooned prairie schooner canted over on one shattered wheel. One of two prone oxen hitched to the tongue lifted its head a few inches from the sand and tried to low.

Lucky Bill and Doc Almy found the abandoned sufferers on a pallet of blankets beneath the wagon box where the sun could not reach them. The man, who was in the middle age and with gray in his beard, lay in a stupor, eyes closed and scarcely breathing. Beside him a girl not many years beyond pinafores—Lucky Bill guessed she might be seventeen or eighteen—was stretched on her back, her wide eyes looking up at the dusty boards over her head. They slowly moved to fasten upon Lucky Bill's face when it bent over hers; but the action was automatic, there was no comprehension in the irises.

“Work on her first, Doc,” Lucky Bill whispered. “This little beauty can't afford to die.”

The master of Bitter Springs was not one to credit beauty in the opposite sex carelessly. Despite the burning flush spreading down from the double wave of chestnut hair over the brow, beauty lay on the girl's face like a caress. There was perfection in the curve of chin to throat and the full arch of lips; in all the features a certain spiritual quality which few of the sun-bonneted women of the wagon trains Lucky Bill was used to seeing could display. The flimsy calico which gowned her fell about lines of budding womanhood.

ALL this Lucky Bill took in with an avid glance. He thought himself a judge of pretty women—though in this almost womanless West he saw few enough. A woman's beauty thrilled him as no chance on the gaming table could.

While Doc Almy was busy with dripping rags for the brows of the fever sufferers and brandy sponges for their stiffened lips, Lucky Bill's broad humanity pushed him to the needs of the poor beasts under their ox bow. As tenderly as if he had been ministering to the girl under the wagon box, he bathed the protruding tongues and then brought water by the bucketful for the reviving oxen.

“The man won't live; the girl—maybe,” was Doc Almy's diagnosis when, long after sundown, he and Lucky Bill lifted the twain to a bed of blankets in the prairie wagon. Unconsciousness still held them. The apostate medico sat by the heads of the sufferers renewing the compresses on their brows while Lucky Bill drove through the dark on the homeward trail. The two oxen followed willingly enough, their noses lifted to the precious scent of water.

Some time during the dark hours when all was still but for the lisping of sand off the tires, the man in the wagon box called a woman's name in a high gasping voice, then breathed no more.

MARY, Pah-ute squaw, cook and housekeeper for the master of Bitter Springs, came loping down the single street of that frontier outpost on the back of a mule—all over the mule, it might be said, for Mary's physical specifications varied but slightly from those of a fair sized haystack. She sought out her boss where he was attacking a noonday steak in the town's single eating house.

“She wake-up,” was Mary's wheezed message. That was sufficient to send Lucky Bill out to his horse. He mounted, passed a message for Doc Almy to one of the loafers on the sidewalk, then put off at a gallop. The squaw followed as best she could on her slower moving mount.

Lucky Bill's hay ranch and the cabin he called home lay in a sparse meadow where an underground river came up to spread a narrow carpet of green three miles from the town—a tiny spot of softness in the gray immensity of the desert. No neighbors; only the circle of mountains with the gray heads of prophets to look down upon the devious comings and goings of Lucky Bill Hazard.

He strode into the house and then unconsciously went a'tiptoe as he approached the bedroom door. A flash of startled eyes met him as he stood in the doorway looking down at the girl on the bed. He saw a hand come up to pull close the opened throat of a shirt—one of his clean shirts. For a breath neither spoke.

“I am Bill Hazard,” he said, then, inwardly a little surprised at a feeling of diffidence.

“Then I am—this is2” The girl was finding difficulty in marshaling a rush of questions.

“My house,” he supplied. “And mighty welcome to it—er—Miss.”

“Then that Indian woman—” She found another question more pressing, “How long have I been here—and what place is this?”

“You've been here three days—mighty sick. And, ma'am, you're two-three miles from Bitter Springs on the Overland Trail. Twenty, or thereabout, from where we found you.”

On the ride out from town Lucky Bill had braced himself to meet one question he dreaded. Now it came. He answered it with no fumbling or silly evasion.