Pete Ruff wore a small, smug smile while the four of them rode aimlessly. It was old Abe Smith who complained a little, from time to time, and, when Jud finally halted alongside a tumble-down old carriage shed some distance from the nearest other building, Smith said: “I ain’t going Tomake a peep. You can depend on that. I don’t want no trouble. At my age all folks want to do is hang on a little longer.” He looked at the old shed and wagged his head. “It’ll have rats as big as dogs in it, boys.”
Jud dismounted and disappeared inside the old building. While he was gone, Pete Ruff started another cigarette, but Rufe told him to throw it away. They did not need a lighted torch to alert any possible wakening townsmen. Ruff obeyed, then smiled more broadly as Jud returned, knocking dust and cobwebs off himself. “There ain’t a place around here you can hide us,” Ruff said.
Jud came over, looked at Ruff, and also smiled. Without explaining the smile, he gestured for the prisoners to dismount. He was still smiling when he drew his gun to herd them into the old carriage house. Rufe kept watch and said nothing, but once they were inside, the weak, ghostly light filtering through the sagging, ancient roof showed a large, earthen-floored, trash-littered vacant space. Rufe wrinkled his nose; there was a strong smell of sour mash inside the old building.
Jud herded his captives to the center of the room, then ordered them to halt, stepped around in front, heaved mightily, and a dusted-over, heavy wooden trap door came up, for the second time. Earlier Jud had almost fallen, when he’d snagged a boot toe in the ring latch.
Pete Ruff stopped smiling and leaned to look straight down. Abe Smith made a slight strangling sound in his throat. Rufe came forward also to look down. This was where that smell of sour mash was coming from. Someone, at one time, had manufactured whiskey down in that hole.
Jud dropped a match to see how deep the dugout was. Then, satisfied, he told Pete Ruff to climb down in there. Ruff turned in quick, hard hostility and Jud cocked his Colt.
Ruff went to the edge, shoved his legs over, peered down, reversed himself, gripping the edge, and let his body hang to its full limit, then let go. The hole was about ten or twelve feet deep, and as dark inside as any such hole would have been. Pete Ruff landed hard, and cursed as he got painfully up to his feet. They could see his lifted face.
Abe Smith bitterly complained. He even asked for one of the lariats off a saddle outside. Jud gruffly ordered him to descend as Ruff had done, and, al-though old Abe cried out that his bones were too brittle, that he was an old, helpless, innocent, completely uninvolved individual, he nonetheless sat upon the edge exactly as the range boss had previously done, groaning all the while, swung around, and dropped down. His landing was perfect; in fact, although he almost fell, he managed not to by bumping into Ruff. Then he looked up piteously
“Don’t close the lid,” he pleaded. “I told you…I won’t try to rouse nobody, only don’t close the damned lid. A feller could suffercate down in here.”
Jud leaned to lift the lid. As he raised it, he ignored Smith and spoke directly to the range boss: “You start hollering and raise the town, mister, and you’ll trade this hole for another one around here somewhere…wherever their graveyard is. You’ve done your part…now keep out of it until we come back for you.”
He lowered the lid with Abe Smith’s quavering lamentations becoming muted to whisper strength through the heavy wooden cover.
Jud looked over at Rufe. “Someone’s sure on our side tonight.”
Rufe’s reply was neutral about that. “How did you find it?”
“Damned near broke my foot catching it in the ring.” Jud led the way back to the horses. They led the AC animals quietly down a back alley until they came to the public corrals, off-saddled them, turned them in, flung the saddlery in some shadows where it would probably not be found and stolen, then they went in search of some hay. This proved easier to find than Jud’s bootleg whiskey hole. There were several loose stacks out back of a livery barn. They helped themselves, forked feed to the AC animals, then took their own horses around to the main roadway, climbed aboard, and casually rode on down to where a pair of lanterns hanging outside a whitewashed log building indicated the location of Clearwater’s livery barn.
There was supposed to be a night man around, but they did not find him even though they looked in the harness room, the feed room, even a little office scented with horse sweat.
In the end, they cared for their own animals, and by then the paleness over against the eastern rims was steadily widening along toward sunrise. It would still be another hour or so before the sun actually appeared, but now that scent they had detected earlier, of cook stove coals, was beginning to get stronger, which meant that the housewives of Clearwater were firing up to cook breakfast.
They walked back out front, and nearly fell over a small, wiry old man who was coming sleepily in from where he had been sleeping in a hay wagon. He was rubbing his eyes and did not see either Rufe or Jud until they side-stepped to avoid the collision. Then he dropped his fists and blinked in surprise.
Rufe grinned at him. “You need some coffee, part-ner,” he said, and the startled night man agreed with a big yawn, followed by a strong nod of his head.
“Sure do. How come you fellers up so blasted early?”
“Light sleepers,” stated Rufe. “You the night-hawk?”
“Yeah,” mumbled the small, sinewy, elfin-like hostler. “Come on down to the harness room and I’ll fire up the stove for coffee.” He looked around. “Where’d you leave your animals?”
“Already stalled and fed,” replied Rufe, turning with Jud to follow the older man. They needed in-formation about Clearwater and, next to a bartender, the best source in any town was either a liveryman or one of his hostlers.
The livery barn hostler’s repeated yawnings inspired a reaction in Jud. Before they entered the harness room, he had yawned three times.
The night man kept up a running fire of mumbled conversation as he lit a lamp, hung it from an over-head nail, then shaved kindling into a small castiron stove, and, when he had that appliance crackling, busied himself with making a fresh pot of coffee.
He really did not require answers to most of his questions. Nor did he usually wait for an answer be-fore going on to the next question, or on a tangent of robust swearing at either the coffee pot or the stove.
When he finally turned, though, everything ordered the way he felt that it should be, his small, keen eyes made a steady study of the larger, younger men. They looked exactly like what he thought they were—commonplace range riders. There was no reason for them to look otherwise, that is exactly what they were—except, perhaps, to the folks back in the Gila Valley, and also except to some men chained up in Elisabeth Cane’s log barn, and down in someone’s old bootleg whiskey hide-out, much nearer than the Cane log barn.
Jud offered openers by saying Clearwater appeared to be a fine town. The hostler pursed his lips, pinched down his eyes, and heavily pondered for a moment before replying to the effect that, yes, Clearwater was a good enough place to live, but it had its drawbacks.