The Strong Land Read online

  “Hi, Sandy.” Cholly waved a fork at him. “Set yourself down and I’ll get some coffee. Up early, ain’t you?”

  “Uhn-huh.” The Kid pulled the thick cup toward him. “Sort of reckoned I’d ride up to the Forks. Few things I need. Shirts and stuff.”

  Cholly dished out a couple of thick slabs of beef and four eggs. “Better eat,” he said. “I wouldn’t want you puttin’ on them shirts on an empty stomach.” While Cholly refilled the Kid’s cup, he said in a low voice: “What did you all do to the boss? He was shore riled up when he came in and saw you hadn’t showed up with the rest of the hands.”

  “Reckon he was just sore. I tied in with an old mossyhorn up in the breaks and lost my rope. Durned steer had one horn, looked long enough for two steers, and a stub on the other end.”

  Cooper chuckled. “You ain’t the first who lost a rope on Ol’ Stob. You were lucky not to get killed.”

  “Rough country, over thataway,” the Sandy Kid suggested. “Ever been over there?”

  “No farther’n the creek, and I don’t aim to. Only one man ever knowed that country, unless it was the Apaches, and that was Jim Kurland. He always claimed there was gold over there, but most folks just laughed at him.”

  “Rancher?”

  “No, sort of a prospector. He mined some, I guess, afore he came here. Dead now, I reckon. He headed off into that country about a year ago and nobody ever saw hide nor hair of him again. His wife, she died about three, four months ago, and his daughter works down to Wright’s Store. She handles the post office in there, mostly.”

  Jim Kurland. It was a name to remember. The Sandy Kid knew he was walking on dangerous ground. The killer of Kurland, if it was his skeleton the Kid had found, was probably still around, and any mention of Kurland’s name might lead to trouble. It would be wise to proceed with caution.

  The Sandy Kid was no hero. He had never toted a badge, and like most cowhands of his day he looked upon the law as a nuisance originated mainly to keep riders from having a good time. He went his own way, and, if someone made trouble for him, he figured to handle it himself. He would be ashamed to ask for help and figured all sheriffs were the same.

  He was interested in gold. If there was a mine as rich as that ore seemed to indicate, he wanted it. Why, with a little gold a man could buy a spread of his own and stock it with those new whiteface cattle that carried so much more beef than a longhorn. A man could do right well with a little money to go on.

  When he rode into the Forks, he headed right for the store. He was not planning on doing any drinking this day. It was Sunday, but Sim Wright kept his store open seven days a week the year around. The Sandy Kid, who was a lean six feet and with a shock of sandy hair and mild gray eyes, swung down from the roan and crossed the boardwalk to the store.

  At first he thought it was empty. Then he saw the girl who stood behind the counter, her eyes on him.

  He jerked his hat from his head and went toward her. “Ma’am,” he said, “I better get me a couple of shirts. You got anything with checks in it?”

  “Big checks?” She smiled at him.

  “Uhn-huh, that’s right.”

  She shoved him the shirts, one of them with black and white checks as big as those on a checkerboard.

  He fingered them thoughtfully. Then he said: “Ma’am, is your name Kurland?”

  “That’s my last name. My first name is Betty.”

  “Mine’s Sandy,” he told her. “They call me the Sandy Kid.”

  He hesitated, and then slid a hand into his pocket and took out the pocket knife and laid it on the shirts.

  Her face went white as she caught it up. She looked at the Kid. “Where did you get this?”

  Slowly, carefully he told her. As he talked, she stared at him with wide eyes. “You think,” she asked when he had finished, “that he was murdered? But why?”

  “He had gold samples, ma’am. Folks will do a powerful lot for gold. I would myself. I sort of figured I’d keep quiet about this, and sort of hunt that claim myself, and, when I found it, I’d stake her out. Then I heard about you, an’ I figgered you’d like to know about your pappy and have him buried proper.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “That I don’t know. I reckon, if a body was to try, he could find out, but you’d have to keep still about findin’ him for a while.”

  “If I keep still, will you find the murderer? If you do, I’ll give you that claim.”

  “No, ma’am, I couldn’t take your claim. Menfolk in my family wasn’t raised no such way. But I don’t have a particle of use for a coyote that would murder a man like that, so, if you want, I’ll have a look around in my spare time.”

  Her eyes were large and dark. It was nice looking into them. The Sandy Kid reckoned he had never looked into eyes that were like hers. And her lips—she had right nice lips. Not too full and not thin, either. He liked that. Her neck was sure white. She was smiling at him, amused.

  He flushed a deep red. “Reckon you must think I never saw a girl before,” he said. “Well, I reckon mebbe I never did really look at one. Somehow, they never sort of called themselves to mind.”

  “Thank you, Sandy.”

  * * * * *

  All the way back to the ranch he was thinking how nice that name sounded from her lips.

  The Bar W lay like an ugly sore in the bottom of the flat. There were three adjoining pole corrals, an unpainted frame bunkhouse, and a ranch house of adobe. The cook shack was also adobe, and there was smoke coming from the chimney when he rode in with his shirts.

  It was still quite early, for the ranch was only a short piece from town. He unsaddled the roan and walked back toward the cook shack for coffee. They were all there. Nobody said anything when he came in, but Cholly threw him a warning glance. The Kid got a cup and filled it with coffee. Then he sat down.

  “What happened to you last night?” Wald demanded, glaring at him across the table.

  “Me? I had me a run-in with that Old Stob horned ladino. Lost my rope.”

  “You still got that rock?”

  “That?” The Sandy Kid shrugged carelessly. “No. I threw it away. Reckon it was just iron pyrites or something.”

  Nothing more was said, but he felt uncomfortable. He had found Jasper Wald an unpleasant man to work for, and the sooner he got himself another job the better off he would be. There was something in Wald’s baleful glance that disturbed him.

  “In the mornin’,” Wald said after a few minutes, “you work that Thumb Butte country.”

  The Kid nodded, but made no comment. The Thumb Butte area was six miles across the valley from the badlands where he’d had the run-in with Old Stob, that red-eyed mossyhorn. Was it accident or design that had caused Wald to send him to the other side of the ranch?

  Yet the next day he realized that his new working ground had advantages of its own. He worked hard all morning and rounded up and turned into a mountain corral forty head of cattle that he had combed out of the piñons.

  Switching his saddle to a bay pony, he took off into the draws that led south and west, away from the ranch. An hour’s riding brought him to the Argo trail, and he cantered along to the little town at Argo Springs. Here was the only Land Office within two hundred miles or more where a mining claim could be registered.

  A quick check of the books, offered him by an obliging justice of the peace who also served in five or six other capacities, showed him that no mining claim had been located in the vicinity of the badlands. Hence, if the killer of Jim Kurland had found the claim, he was working it on the sly. He did some further checking, but the discovery he made was by accident. It came out of a blue sky when Pete Mallinger, at the Wells, Fargo office, noticed his brand.

  “Bar W, eh? You bring one of them boxes over here? The ones Wald’s been shippin’ to El Paso?”

  “Me? No, I just rod
e over to get myself some smoking.” He grinned confidentially. “The boss doesn’t even know I’m gone.”

  “I wouldn’t let him ketch you. He’s a tough one, that Jasper Wald is. Throw a gun on a man soon’s look at him. Got money, too, he has. He’s buyin’ up most of that Agua Dulce Cañon country.”

  The Sandy Kid rolled a smoke and listened, his eyes sweeping the narrow street with its hitching rails and clapboarded buildings. Jasper Wald was not making enough on the Bar W to buy any land, not even with all his free-and-easy branding operations. Nothing you could really complain about, but nevertheless the Bar W brand was showing up on almost everything on the range that came within sight of a Bar W hand.

  Before he left, the Kid managed to get his hands on the address in El Paso. The boxes were being shipped to Henry Wald, a brother of Jasper, and they were notably heavy.

  The Sandy Kid strolled thoughtfully away from the door of the Wells, Fargo office and crossed the dusty street to the saloon. He might as well have a drink while he was here. He pushed through the swinging doors into the bare, untidy barroom. Dutch Schweitzer was leaning an elbow on the bar, staring at him.

  “Howdy.” The Sandy Kid strolled up to the bar and ordered a drink. “Looks like we’ve both strayed on the same morning.”

  Dutch looked at him with sullen eyes. “No, I’m on the job. The boss sent me over here. He didn’t send you.”

  “Sure he didn’t. I rounded up enough stock for a full day in that country where I’m working. It’s dry work, so I ambled over for a drink.”

  “At the Wells, Fargo office?”

  The Kid shrugged. He picked up his glass and tossed off his drink. “I’m on my way back,” he said, and turned to go. Schweitzer’s voice halted him.

  “Wait.”

  The Sandy Kid turned. Suddenly he felt cold. He had never met a man in a gun battle, but there was cold deadliness in the big German’s eyes. The Kid stood with his feet apart a little, and his mouth felt dry. He felt sure Dutch meant to kill him.

  Schweitzer had been drinking but was not drunk. The man had an enormous capacity for liquor, yet he rarely drank to the point where he was unsteady or loose talking. Only when he drank he grew mean and cruel.

  “You’re a smart kid. Too blamed smart,” he said meaningfully.

  Two men in the back of the room got up and eased out through the rear door. The Sandy Kid could see that the bartender was obviously frightened.

  Curiously the Kid was not. He watched Dutch carefully, aware that the man was spoiling for trouble, that he had a fierce, driving urge for brutality. Some inner canker gnawed at him, some bitter hatred that he seemed to nurse for everything and everybody. The Sandy Kid knew it was not personal animosity. It was simply that in these moods Dutch Schweitzer was a killer, and only the tiniest spark was needed to touch him off.

  In that mental clarity that comes in moments of great stress, the Kid found himself aware of many things—a wet ring on the bar where his glass had stood, the half empty bottle near Schweitzer, the two empty tables in the back of the room. He saw the sickly pallor on the bartender’s flabby face and the yellow hairs on the backs of Schweitzer’s hands.

  “You stick your nose into trouble.” Schweitzer lifted the bottle with his left hand to pour a drink. Then his face suddenly twisted with blind, bitter fury, and he jerked the bottle up to throw it at the Kid.

  Afterward, the Kid could never remember any impulse or feeling. He simply drew and fired without any thought or plan, and he fired at the bottle.

  It exploded in a shower of glass and drenched Schweitzer with whiskey. He sprang back, amazed, and, when he looked up at the Kid, he was cold sober. Slowly, his eyes wide and his face pale, Schweitzer lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I ain’t drawin’,” he said, astonishment making his voice thick. “I ain’t makin’ a move.”

  “See that you don’t,” the Sandy Kid said flatly. He glared at the bartender, and then backed through the swinging doors and holstered his gun. With a wary eye on the saloon, he crossed to his horse, mounted, and rode out of town.

  He moved in a sort of daze. He was no gunfighter and had never fancied himself as such. He was only a drifting cowhand who dreamed of someday owning his own spread. He had never found any occasion for split-second drawing, although he had practiced, of course. He had been wearing a six-gun for years, and he practiced throwing it hour after hour, but more to ease the monotony of long nights on night guard than from any desire for skill. It had been something to do, like riffling cards, playing solitaire, or juggling stones. Like all Texas men of his time he had done his share of fighting and he had done a lot of shooting. He knew he was a good shot and that he nearly always got what he went after, but shooting as quickly and accurately as he had done in the saloon had never been considered.

  Out of town, he did not ride away. When Dutch Schweitzer returned, he would tell Jasper Wald what had happened. There would be trouble then, the Kid knew, and the least he could expect would be to be fired. Yet there was something he would do before he left town. Riding around the town in the juniper-clad hills, he dismounted and seated himself for a long wait.

  He saw Dutch ride out a short time later. He saw the streets become less peopled, and he saw the sun go down. When it was dark, he moved down to the Wells, Fargo office. When Dutch left, he had been driving a buckboard, and that meant something to the Kid.

  Using his knife, he cut away the putty around a pane of glass, and then reached through and unfastened the window. Raising it, he crawled in.

  For an instant he stood still, listening. There was no sound, so he struck a match and, shielding it in his hands, looked around for the box. He identified it quickly enough by the address. It was not large but was strongly built. With a hammer he found lying on a shelf, he pried up one of the top boards. He struck another match and peered into the box. Inside, wrapped in sacking, was a lot of the same ore he had found in the leather bag under the skeleton of Jim Kurland.

  He blew out the match, and then pushed the board back in place, hitting it a couple of light taps with the hammer. Then he went out, closed the window, and replaced the pane of glass, using some slivers of wood to hold the pane in place.

  Jasper Wald, then, had killed Jim Kurland and found the claim. Or perhaps he had found the claim first. The ore was extremely rich, and he was shipping it a very little at a time, to El Paso, where his brother was probably having it milled.

  A slow process, certainly, but it was high-grade ore, and no doubt Wald had made plans to file on the claim when there would be no danger of Kurland’s disappearance being linked with the proceedings. Everyone from the Forks to the Stone Tree Desert and Agua Dulce Cañon knew Kurland was the only mining man around and also that he regularly penetrated the badlands of the Stone Tree.

  The Sandy Kid took to the trail and put the roan to a fast trot. He was foolish, he told himself, to be mixing into something that was no concern of his. It would have been wiser to forget what he had seen after he came out of that crack in the mountain. Even now, he reflected, it was not too late to travel to some far-off place like the Blue Mountains or maybe that Grand Cañon country of Arizona, which he had never seen but had heard cowhands lying about.

  Little as he knew about gold, he could tell that the ore he had seen was fabulously rich, for the rock had been lined and threaded with it, and being so heavy it had to be rich ore. Such a boxful as he had seen in the express office might be worth two or three thousand dollars.

  Now that he thought about it, he had an idea where that claim was located. Not more than a half mile from where he had jumped into the crack to escape the steer, the plateau broke sharply off in a sheer cliff, some fifty or sixty feet high, that overhung the waterless, treeless waste of Stone Tree Desert and could even open upon the desert itself. That rupture, obviously the result of volcanic disturbance, could have exposed the vein from which the ore had c
ome.

  Pure speculation, of course, but the Sandy Kid had an idea he was nosing along the right trail. Also, he was aware that his interest did not arise from chivalry. He was not going into this to help a lady in distress. Trouble with Jasper Wald and his two hard-bitten henchmen was not lightly to be invited, and, if he did go into it knowing what he was facing, it was only partly because of the way Betty Kurland had looked at him that he was following through.

  It was a fool thing, he told himself. He had no particular urge to get money. Much as he’d like a ranch, he didn’t want to have his head shot off getting it. He admitted to himself that, if it had not been for Betty, he would never have gone all the way into this fight.

  “The devil with it!” he said viciously. “I’ll go back to the Bar W and roll my soogan and hit the trail!”

  But when he came to the last forks, he kept on toward the mountains. He circled when he hit the willows and let the pony take its own gait. He was just edging out toward the cliff edge where he could see over into the Stone Tree when a rifle bullet hit the fork of his saddle with a wicked thwack, and then the bullet whined off ahead of him. It was a wonder it hadn’t glanced back into his stomach or hit the pony’s head.

  The echo of the report drifted over him as he hit the ground running, and he grabbed the bridle and swung the bay pony back into the brush. Then he slid his Winchester .44 out of the saddle scabbard and crawled like an Indian toward the cliff edge. That shot meant that somebody wasn’t fooling, so the Kid wasn’t planning on fun himself. He was some shakes with a Winchester, and, when he got to cover where he could see out, he looked around, trying to locate the spot the varmint had shot from. There was nobody in sight.

  The Sandy Kid was not a trusting soul. His past dealings with Comanches had not been calculated to inspire any confidence in the serene and untrammeled appearance of woods or mountains. So, after a long look, he left the bay pony tethered to a bush and crawled to the very lip of the cliff. When he glanced over, he could see something that looked like a pile of waste and rock taken from a mine tunnel, but he wasn’t looking for that. All in good time he could have an interest in the gold.