Jud hauled down the lariat and coiled it slowly and thoughtfully. He did not look at the remaining prisoner, not until he had the rope ready to be re-slung from a saddle swell, and snapped it against his legs a couple of times. Then he glanced over. “How about you, mister?”
The cowboy’s answer was quietly offered. “I guess I got to set here. If you ain’t going to lynch me, why then I expect I’m just going to have to set here.”
Jud looked over at Rufe, shrugged, and went over to lend a hand at boosting the rider onto his feet and shoving him along into the barn. This one was not a boy, and evidently neither was he a liar. He could have told the same kind of story, but he hadn’t done it. He was a typical range man: loyal.
He made no secret of it, but by the time he had done this, he had also obviously decided that Rufe and Jud had never intended to hang anyone.
They shoved him down in a pile of hay and left him there, walked out front, eyed Charley Fenwick, and got the chains they had used on the youth to chain up Fenwick. He was beginning to come around when they boosted him up and hustled him down to the same pile of hay, and let him fall. He even muttered some profanity as he rolled and came to rest beside the other rider. Then he looked around. It was just as dark inside the log barn now as it had been two hours before. Maybe it was even darker, although it was hard to tell when a man’s eyes could absorb just so much darkness.
Rufe took Jud out back where they lit up and relaxed in the warm, pleasant night. Those overhead clouds had surreptitiously been broadening, deepening, and thickening ever since sundown, until now, an hour after midnight, they had most of the sky blocked out. And they were low clouds, the kind that normally were rain-swollen.
But the air did not smell exactly right, yet, which Jud commented on casually as he stood, smoking and gazing upward and around as though this was the only thing on his mind.
Rufe flexed his right hand several times, listening to his partner’s comments upon the possibility of rain, then he raised a skeptical pair of eyes and said: “When you get it all sorted out about whether it’s going to rain or not…let’s ride.”
Jud turned. “Where?”
Rufe looked sardonic even in that dismal, ghostly darkness. “Chase’s cow camp. It won’t be the dice table at Tucson, but it’s a hell of a lot closer.”
“What about those fellers in the barn?”
“They’re not going anywhere,” said Rufe, still working his knuckles to loosen them, and keep them loose. “And if you’re worrying about Miz Cane comin’ out to gather eggs in the morning and finding them there…well, they’ll be worse off after that meeting than she’ll be.”
Jud sighed. “All right. But…oh, nothing. Let’s get to riding.”
They went back inside for their horses, and, al-though the chained prisoners could make out most of what they were doing during the process of saddling up, neither side spoke to the other side.
When Jud walked his horse out front, then swung astraddle, that lowering sky was seemingly frozen in place. It did not appear to have increased its rain cloud encroachment at all over the past hour.
In the direction of the main house there was still hushed darkness. This time, as Rufe and Jud left the yard, they did not bother being shadowy about it. In fact, Jud lit a cigarette behind his hat before they had quite cleared the far environs of the yard, and settled back in the saddle looking ahead and off to his left, completely assured that things at the ranch were as they should be.
Rufe, seeking some approximation of the time, searched for a moon glimmer through those fishbelly clouds, and had no success whatsoever. He surmised, though, that it had to be perhaps about two o’clock in the morning.
The only reason that time might be relevant was because he and Jud wanted to hit Arlen Chase’s camp at the quietest time of the night, for even though anyone who might be sitting up over there, listening and waiting, might think oncoming horse-men would be the arsonists returning and would therefore be unlikely to ambush Jud and Rufe, it was Rufe’s opinion that under these circumstances a man needed all the help he could get from a dark night, from a mistaken listener, and of course from a benign fate—if there were such a thing.
It was a good thing they had been able to get a good night’s rest the previous night, Jud said, as they rode along, because, sure as hell, they weren’t going to get any sleep tonight. He also said he had a feeling that if they could keep on hitting Arlen Chase as they had been doing, they just might accomplish something.
“He’s likely lyin’ in his bedroll sleeping like a baby, confident his boys came over, fired the barn, and rode off clean. Instead, we got the three of them. With some luck, we’ll get him while he’s sleepin’ too.” Jud smiled through the darkness. “Hit him hard and of-ten, Rufe. Never let him get his feet square under him. How’s that sound for strategy?”
Rufe laughed. “Great. Tell me something. Smart as you are, how’s it come you didn’t become a general in the Army?”
Jud made a gesture. “I figured a little on it, you see, but blue ain’t my color. Always made me look like I got dark bags under my eyes, so I chose range ridin’ instead.”
Rufe snorted in derision, and Jud leaned over his saddle horn, laughing.
VIII
They had to retrace their earlier route and be-yond for several miles, and, while they had every reason not to expect another encounter as they’d had earlier, they were within a mile or so of the mesa’s eastward rim when they distinctly heard horses again.
This time, though, it turned out to be animals in a large corral. In fact, when they finally got up close enough Tomake the animals out, it appeared that the corral was almost a small pasture. It looked as though its post-and-rider fence encompassed three or four acres of land.
The cow camp would be somewhere beyond this enclosure, so they left their horses tied in a clump of second-growth jack pines and reconnoitered forward, fanning out a little, but doing this in a manner that allowed them to sight each other all the while they were moving stealthily forward.
There were no lights. If someone was awaiting the return of Arlen Chase’s night riders, he was doing it in darkness.
They finally made out a structure. It was crude and lowroofed, the walls made of rough logs that had not been fitted very well, and between were liberal coatings of mud plaster.
They came together and considered this building. It looked like either a large storage house, or perhaps a bunkhouse. They split off, each man coming around toward the front of it from one rough side. When they met out front, they had their answer. It was a storehouse. If it had been Chase’s bunkhouse, it would not have had that huge iron hasp and lock on the outside of the door.
There were several other buildings, and one in particular held Rufe’s attention. It was longer than the others, and a mudwattle chimney arose above the east wall. Rufe tapped his partner’s arm. “Cook shack,” he whispered.
Jud agreed, and offered a suggestion. “Yeah. By rights Chase’s old dough belly ought to be sleeping in there. Want to look?”
They went carefully around the building in utter silence and starless gloom, found a door ajar whose leather hinges were on the verge of wearing through, and without a sound walked inside.
The table was long and an iron stove stood against that distant east wall with its stovepipe shoved up the mudwattle chimney. They divided the room between themselves, with the long gang table in the center, and went step by step along until they came to the cook stove and, beside it, the big kindling box. Here, wooden pegs in the log wall held every size of cooking pan and cow-camp utensil, suspended downward. Here, too, they found a wall bunk behind a flour sack partition with a lumpy, bedraggled-looking shape in it, peacefully sleeping. Jud remained beside the bunk while Rufe went on along to complete their examination of the cook shack. He stood longest beside a window that overlooked the main yard.