If Arlen Chase triumphed finally, he would have to bury her out beneath those cottonwood trees in-side the iron fence, and until he triumphed—when she thought about it at all, she was willing to con-cede that he probably would beat her and take over Cane’s Mesa—until that happened, she would con-cede him nothing whether he slowly stole all her cattle and horses, slowly cut her off and starved her out, or whether through a miracle she survived Arlen Chase.
It was springtime when she rode and discovered Chase’s horses, wearing their AC shoulder brand, running with her own horses. One week later she found her sole remaining bull dead in a shallow arroyo, shot cleanly between the eyes.
II
Springtime on top of Cane’s Mesa was an amalgam of Colorado’s last frosts and cold nights, and New Mexico’s Santa Anna winds that came dryly hot in a swooping updraft along the scored faces of the red-rusty sandstone bluffs, pushing back the cold a little, yet not strong enough them-selves to impart their curling heat.
The grass fairly jumped out of the ground. The trees around the grasslands brightened, and, if they were hardwoods, they came into full greenery complete with the downy cotton from cottonwoods, and the pollinated buddings from all the other varieties. It was the beginning of the best time of year, because neither the northward ice fields nor the southward infernos ever more than weakly met upon Cane’s Mesa, which was what made summertime there, and late autumn, and even most winters as perfect for people as well as for livestock.
When a pair of horsemen cursed and grunted and scrabbled their way up atop the mesa from the west, and passed through a mile of solid pine and fir forest, clambering around ancient deadfalls nearly as tall as a mounted man and longer than most village roadways, then came to the thinning last fringe of dark trees to catch their first view of the mesa’s huge rolling to flat grasslands, it was probably like get-ting from this life to the next one, at least for men born and bred to the saddle and to stockmen’s ways.
They just simply reined down and sat there, like struck dumb, bronzed and weathered, faded and hard-eyed carvings, until the one called Jud said: “Now this is what a man spends his life dreaming about, and knows damned well don’t exist.”
The other man smiled, looped his reins so the horse could rest after his recent three-hour odyssey of travail, with scratched shins and seared lungs from the climb, and pointed.
“Smoke, Jud. Early for supper and late for dinner, I’d say.”
Jud studied the distant, very faint tendril rising al-most arrow-straight against the pale, flawless sky and made his guess. “Branding. It’s that time of year again.” Then Jud swung from the waist to look be-hind, but if there had been a troop of cavalry back through the dark forest, or a whole band of feathered war whoops, he couldn’t have seen them because sunlight never reached fully to the forest’s floor, and the trees stood thickly as hair on a dog’s back.
When Jud straightened back around and caught his partner’s sardonic smile, he shrugged. “I don’t want it put on my headboard that they caught Jud Hudson from behind.”
The smiling man turned back to gazing out where that faraway smoke arose. “No one’s any closer be-hind us than the Gila Valley, and that’s a month’s damned hard riding back yonder.” The speaker lifted his reins. “Want to bust right out, like we got a right?”
Jud considered. He was heavy boned but not heavy in build. He probably would have been heavy, if he’d had that chance, and, in fact, throughout all his thirty-five years he’d never had a chance to vegetate.
His partner was finer boned, leaned-down, sinewy as old rawhide and perhaps ten or fifteen pounds lighter, but he looked as weathered, as faded, as though he were about Jud’s age. His name was Rufus Miller, and he was wanted back across a moonscape of desolation, of deadly desert and ghostly nights, for the same crime Jud Hudson was wanted for— stage robbery.
Jud hung fire over the decision on whether to ride forth boldly in plain sight or not. A month of trailing by moonlight and becoming shadows by sunlight had fixed in Jud Hudson a habit of reticence. He gestured. “We could stay among the trees and get most of the way down there.”
Rufe turned to follow after, but, as he rode and studied this huge plateau, it became clear to him that, when they ran out of forest to protect them, they were going to be miles southward of that standing smoke. It also struck him that down south where those trees played out, there had to be a series of damned near perpendicular bluffs, because he could see 100 miles straight outward and downward without a single blessed knoll or ridge to interrupt the view.
Rufus Miller was a calm, pensive man, gray-eyed, capable, range-born and rough-raised. Earlier, like Jud, he had let his spurs down a notch in the towns so that they would make music on the plank walks, and he’d worn his gun in a special holster, twisted slightly away from his hip. But a man gets over those things—if he manages to survive his youth in a country where every other gun-carrying rooster is just as quick Tomake, or accept, challenges.
Rufe had survived and so had Jud, but they’d done some things others who had also survived had not done, like raiding the coach in the Gila Valley But again, if a man can survive his errors and doesn’t repeat them, there’s hope for him.
There was not a worthwhile man alive who hadn’t done his share of wild, senseless things. Unless he had done them, he never quite acquired the cross-hatch of invisible scars upon his inner self that, when he finally matured, made him wiser than many, more careful than most, and more understanding than the mill run of folks.
And that lousy stagecoach had turned out not to have one damned mail pouch on it. Nothing, not even a good watch, because the only passengers had been an old man and his little bird-like, frightened wife, and, hell, a man wouldn’t take an old man’s watch right there in front of his wife. Like-wise the driver. He’d had three $10 gold pieces he’d been hoarding to buy his boy a speckled pony for Christmas.
They had ridden away fast, and empty-handed, and from the first high hill they had seen the cowman posse boiling up dust in flinging pursuit. So— becoming outlaws hadn’t proven any more profitable than mustanging had been, or than range riding had been, or than horse-breaking had been, except that outlawing created reverberations, and they hadn’t dared go back west of the Gila country where they’d been range riding, so they kept heading northeast, skirting around the worst of the desert country profanely assuring one another that the whole damned planet couldn’t be that bad. And now, by God, it turned out that the whole damned planet wasn’t that bad.
Jud drew rein, stepped to earth, peered steadily out across the golden sun smash, then turned and beckoned for Rufe to join him. “There’s a big old log ranch out there, all by itself. That’s where the smoke’s rising up…out back behind the barn where the corrals are. You see?”
Rufe saw. The air was as clear as crystal glass, so the Cane place looked two miles closer than it was. Even so, those mighty log structures would have been visible from an even greater distance.
“That,” announced Rufe, after thoughtful consideration, “is a pretty big outfit.”
Jud said: “But the fire isn’t. Maybe they only got one or two riders.”
Rufe started back for his horse. “In that case, they sure need a couple more, this being marking season.”
Jud went to his horse more slowly, inhibited by all the days and nights of secrecy and hiding. They understood one another better than brothers. Rufe leaned atop his saddle horn. “Jud, this can’t last for-ever. Anyway, we’re so far off even if those cowmen were still trailing us, their damned clothes’d be out of style by the time they got over this far. And those folks down there probably never even heard of the Gila country.”