Not now, though. He not only had both hands occupied, but he was unarmed when Jud stepped up and shoved the cold gun barrel into the man’s side. Ruff turned in swift astonishment and stared. Jud was a complete stranger to him. He seemed unwilling or unable to speak for a moment, but only that long, because when Jud said—“Turn around and go back inside, mister, and keep both your hands up high.”—the cow-camp range boss recovered and glared at Jud.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” he snarled.
Rufe answered, from behind the man. “Go in-side!”
The range boss had not been able Tomake any kind of a worthwhile assessment until now. He turned his head and craned around, saw Rufe, and decided he was, indeed, outmatched. Then he curled a furious lip in the direction of old Abe Smith, but whatever he might have said was cut short when Jud jammed him hard with the gun barrel, making the range boss gasp as he turned to reënter the bunkhouse.
They turned up the lamp inside. Ruff shrugged into his shirt, staring quizzically at his captors. Abe Smith confirmed the range boss’s dawning suspicions.
“They’re the pair Elisabeth Cane hired on couple days back.”
Pete Ruff looked at Rufe. “What you doin’ over here?”
“Looking for Arlen Chase.”
“He ain’t here. He ain’t nowhere on the mesa,” snapped Ruff.
“Yeah,” retorted Rufe, “we know. He’s down in Clearwater with his gunfighter. Well, directly now we’re going to ride down there and look him up, but first off we’ve got Tomake blessed certain no one’s behind us, skulking along for a chance to back-shoot us.”
“How you figure to do that?” asked Pete Ruff.
Rufe shrugged. “Kill the pair of you, like we did those other three, the ones you sent over to burn the lady’s barn.”
Old Abe Smith acted as though he were going to faint, and even the hard-eyed, tough half-breed range boss turned suddenly much less hard and abrasive.
“It wasn’t my doings,” said the half-breed. “Mister Chase come up with it, lock, stock, and barrel. I never even picked the fellers to ride over there.” He turned toward the cook. “Is that the truth, or not, Abe?”
Smith’s voice was reedy when he replied: “Don’t you ask me nothing. I’m just the…. ”
Jud growled and Abe’s lips snapped closed as Rufe offered them a way out. “You can ride down to Clear-water with us, tell the law down there what Chase has been trying to do up here…steal her horses and cattle, burn her out, shoot up her place…or you can get buried right here.”
Abe Smith hardly allowed the last echo to fade. “I’ll go with you, by Gawd. I’ll go, because I never approved of actin’ like that toward no woman. I’ll…. ”
The range boss spoke up gruffly. “All right. Let’s get the hell down there.”
IX
They went first to rig out animals for the two fresh captives, then all four of them walked back out where Rufe and Jud had left their animals, and it was there, while they were getting ahorseback, that the range boss, looking skeptically at Rufe, said: “You scairt the whey out of old Abe about the fellers who went over to burn the barn…now tell me what really happened over there? You fellers never killed nobody”
Jud said: “Didn’t we, then?”
Ruff shook his head. “Mister, on a night like this, no farther off than the Cane place is, if there’d been much gunfire, the sound would have carried.”
Jud smiled. “From inside a barn?” He gestured. “Line out your horse and shut up.”
They crossed back through the yard of Chase’s unkempt cow camp and picked up the wide trail southeastward. There was no talk now, not that Rufe or Jud would have objected, but since they held all the initiative, and they were silent, neither the range boss nor the camp cook spoke up.
Finally they arrived at the pass leading down off the mesa. It became clear why Elisabeth had said no one could come up, or go down, without being intercepted. The trail led straight through Chase’s camp, which had clearly been no accident.
The trail was wide and well marked. In fact, it would only take a little work in some fallen-in places Tomake it fit for wagons again. But since the passing of Elisabeth’s parents, no one had maintained the road, so now it was simply a wide, very good saddle-back trail.
Heat rose up from down below. The farther down they rode, the more noticeable this was. Apparently summer was already over the desert country.
Jud turned to the cook, who was riding on his left side by Jud’s order, and said: “How old are you?”
Smith replied with a succinct answer: “Sixty-six.”
Jud gazed placidly at him as he made a vocal judgment. “Hell, you’ve lived long enough. My pappy didn’t make it that far along by seven years.”
Abe Smith lacked Pete Ruff’s iron obviously. He shot Jud a frantic look. “I didn’t do a blessed thing. They never confided in me, and they never asked me for no help.”
The range boss, who was riding on Rufe’s left side, leaned to speak, and Rufe’s arm shot out to jolt him into silence. They exchanged a look, and the range boss eased back in the saddle, furious but silent. Rufe did not know what his partner was leading up to, and he was interested enough not to want any digressions.
Then it became clear what was on Jud’s mind. “A man who feeds folks three times a day for a fact hears a lot. Like you told us, old bastard.” Jud grinned at Abe Smith. “You’ve heard’em talking about running off the lady’s horses and cattle, eh?”
Abe squirmed in the saddle, stared flintily dead ahead, out over the dark desert, then he swung helplessly to glance back. But Pete Ruff was like a hawkish, mahogany statue back there and offered not a sound.
Jud leaned and rapped the old man’s leg. “No-body lives forever, do they…old bastard?”
“Men talk,” blurted out the anguished old man. “They always got to be talking about something. It don’t usually mean much, but.…”
Jud lifted out the gun and rested it in his lap, gazing across at the cocinero, and finally Pete Ruff came to old Smith’s aid.
“Hell, tell’em,” he growled.
Whatever Ruff’s reason, it was all the encouragement old Smith needed. He said: “Yeah, I’ve heard all the talk, only nobody done stole her livestock, mister. They run’em down off the mesa out over the desert. They was all branded. Chase wouldn’t take that kind of a chance, so they just got scattered out all over the desert.”
Rufe looked at the range boss and got a bleak nod of confirmation. “That’s true. Maybe they got stole down there. I’ve got no way of knowing because none of us ever went back down looking for’em. But we sure as hell never stole them. The idea was to clean her out.”
“It didn’t work,” stated Rufe.
The range boss shrugged thick, compact shoulders. “So…she was to get burned out,” he explained, then looked bleakly over at Rufe. “Me, I’d have burned her out first, long ago.” He did not look even slightly conscience-stricken as he made this announcement. “It’d be doin’ her a favor. It don’t make one lick of sense for a single woman owning all that good land up there, trying to run a ranch by herself. The best thing that could have happened would have been for her to get forced off the mesa and into a house down in town, where single womenfolk had ought to be.”
Rufe did not argue, did not speak at all when the range boss had finished his challenging statement. His was a very commonplace range-country conviction, and even Rufe did not entirely disagree with it. A place like Cane’s Mesa was not settled, fenced, orderly cow country. It was not a place where a lone woman could have managed, but, hell, it wasn’t up Tomen like Chase and his range boss to decide for Elisabeth Cane. It was her decision.