SMOKE OF THE .45
[Illustration: “Wal, you’d better untie Gallup. He don’t look happy.”]
SMOKE OF THE .45
BY
HARRY SINCLAIR DRAGO
AUTHOR OF “OUT OF THE SILENT NORTH”
FRONTISPIECE BY
FRANK TENNEY JOHNSON
NEW YORK
THE MACAULAY COMPANY
Copyright, 1923,
By THE MACAULAY COMPANY
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO
THOMAS A. BRANDON
—COMPANION OF MANY TRAILS—
THROUGH WHOSE EYES
I LEARNED TO LOVE
THE DESERT.
CONTENTS
I Out of the Past
II The Red Hand
III By His Own Hand
IV Foot-Loose
V The First Clue
VI Outside the Law
VII If This Be Love
VIII Straight Talk
IX Two Old Men
X Molly Kent
XI More Than a Bet
XII Molly Explains
XIII “He Is My Friend”
XIV For the Heart of a Girl
XV Madeiras Gets a Chance
XVI Bitter Fruit
XVII Gallup’s Price
XVIII “Kill Him, the Thief”
XIX “Come and Get Him”
XX Without Pay
XXI Two Dead Men
XXII The Face in the Window
XXIII The Gun Speaks
XXIV Johnny Dice Comes Back to Life
XXV Madeiras Asserts Himself
XXVI Between the Lines
XXVII Time to Act
XXVIII Johnny Talks at Last
XXIX Evidence to Convict
XXX Madeiras Appears at Last
XXXI The Death Chant
XXXII The Debt Is Paid
XXXIII Fulfillment
SMOKE OF THE .45
CHAPTER I
OUT OF THE PAST
September had come and gone, leaving the desert brown and somber
against the graying sage. The first of the cold rains had fallen.
Round-up time was past. The cattle left in the hills were moving
down to lower pastures. Unerringly they sensed the brief Indian
summer yet to come, which would turn the grasses green for a few
brief days before the cold, snow-bringing winds of late October were
upon them.
There was that in the air on the range which said the year’s work
was over.... The world was waiting. But in the little towns plumped
down beside the shining rails of the Espee and the Western Pacific,
all was activity and bustle. The steer shipping was on and the
held-over wool clip was going aboard the cars. It was the harvest
time of the mountain desert—the pay day of the range.
Pockets were well lined. There had been famine—days on end of hard
work, of no spending. Now was the time of plenty, of satisfied
appetites. Winnemucca, Golconda, Elko, Halleck, Standing Rock, in
the heart of Ruby Valley—they were all alike—boisterous, turbulent,
prosperous; save that Standing Rock, newer than its sister towns,
was more boisterous, more continuously turbulent, and less concerned
with its future prosperity.
And yet there was one who entered its hospitable gates this late
afternoon who seemed untouched by its gayety. His eyes, screwed into
the perpetual squint of the true desert breed, viewed Standing
Rock’s activities with apparent unconcern. It was an old story to
him. He knew the desert’s little ways!
His coming caused no comment. And this, despite the fact that his
clothes were of an almost forgotten cut, popular in the days when
Dodge City reaped its harvest from the great northward trek of the
longhorns.
The Big Trek is a thing of the past; the trail itself lost,
forgotten. Dodge City has long since settled down to most proper
respectability. And those hard-fisted, quick-shooting men who
squandered their wealth and lives, there, along the way from Santa
Fe, have departed to that limbo from which none return.
But a practiced eye would have said that the man who rode into
Standing Rock this day was of that crew. His face was a fighting
face, withal he was on in years, gray hair closely snugged to his
head. In other days he had been a rugged man; but there was a
sadness upon him now, a wistfulness in the eyes, that softened his
boldly chiseled features.
That he moved unnoticed is proof again that our one cosmopolitan
zone has ever been the great West. Spurs, bridle, saddlebags, reata,
even the big, high-stepping stallion which he rode were foreign to
northern Nevada. That they were Spanish or Mexican—the difference is
slight in the West—no one cared a hoot. The desert is wide. Men have
a habit of coming long distances, and from strange places. And
best—far best of all—a man’s business was his own business!
The two trunk lines paralleled each other in passing through the
town. In the short half mile between them, Standing Rock took form;
half finished, half painted—a one-street town of one story buildings
making a brave show with their Cripple Creek fronts.
Hard by the Espee tracks this monotonously regular sky line was
broken. For there, wonder of wonders, stood a two-story brick
structure—a hotel!—the pride of Ruby Valley; the Marble Palace; J.
Scanlon and V. Escondido, proprietors.
Steer and wool money had financed it, hence Vincenzo. He was a
petulant Basque, and although in the storied past he and his people
had sprung from stock as Celtic as his partner’s, he—Vincenzo—was in
a fair way of being erased by the versatile Scanlon. In quite the
same fashion their institution had lost its chilling and undeserved
title—unless the marble-topped bar were justification—and was
called, in easy familiarity, the Palace.
The profits of this establishment were restricted solely to the
first floor, for, save at times like this, or when some unfortunate
commercial traveler missed No. 19 going west, no one ever thought of
staying there the night. But, oh, the profits of that lower
floor!—bar and keno, roulette and poker of a flexibility well
calculated to satisfy the whim of the most jaded customer.
Having stabled his horse and placed his saddle, saddlebags and bed
roll on a convenient peg, the stranger made for the door of this
hostelry. It was a few minutes after five. The Diamond-Bar waddies
were having their turn at the shipping pens. An hour later they
would be making merry. Now, though, the street was deserted. The
wool platform was directly in back of the hotel. The spur of track
leading to it managed to squeeze past the hotel by the narrowest of
margins.
Four loaded cars stood on the siding. By six o’clock another would
be filled. A freight engine would shunt them upon the main line that
evening, and start them on their long ride to Boston.
For another week this would go on. At least twenty heavy freighters,
piled high with baled wool still reeking of the creosote dip, stood
in the space about the platform waiting to be unloaded. More would
come. Twenty-mule teams dragging three, and even four, wagons
chained together would snake in the smelling fleece.
Standing Rock should have been a place of ample elbow room, but
here, in man’s peculiar way, was its greatest activity jammed in a
space so crowded that the stranger stopped to watch the Basque boys
as they fought the big bales with their long, steel wool hooks.
His interest in the work on the platform caught the attention of a
man who sat in the Palace bar, feet on the window sill, chair tilted
back in comfort. This man had been sitting there some time, busy
with strings of figures on the pages of a small leather-covered
memorandum book. This occupation had absorbed his entire attention
for many minutes; but as he stared at the stranger standing beside
the track the little book fell from his fingers. Almost with one
motion his feet came down from the sill and the chair to its four
legs. His face was white when he straightened from snatching for the
little book.
He darted another glance at the stranger, as if doubting his senses.
He had made no mistake! His hand trembled as he pushed the chair out
of his path.
“It’s him,” he muttered. “Traynor!”
A belated sense of caution caused him to sweep the room with his
eyes to see if any one had observed his ill-concealed alarm. A sigh
of relief forced itself to his lips as he saw that Escondido, the
Basque proprietor, was his only companion. Vin was hunched over the
bar, his head resting in his arms, sound asleep.
A rear door led to the wool platform. The man tiptoed to it quickly,
and without a backward glance passed outside. A second later the
stranger was shaking Vin back to consciousness.
“I want a room, _muchacho_” he said with some impatience.
Vin blinked his eyes. “No room, _señor_. Theese hotel is feel up.
Plenty men in town.”
“I’m not stayin’ all night. It’s goin’ to rain. I’ll go on after the
stormin’s done. You let me have one of the boys’ rooms. They won’t
be turnin’ in till late. I’m dead tired.”
“Sure, Mike! I guess we feex leetla theeng like that. You take the
end room. I call you nine o’clock.”
The Basque turned to fish out from a pile of soiled papers a
dilapidated book which served the place as a register.
“You put your name in theese book, _señor_.”
He held it toward the man, pencil in his free hand. The stranger’s
eyes held Vin’s as he took the book and pencil; but instead of
writing as requested, he closed the book and put the pencil on top
of it, after which he placed them with extravagant care on the
polished bar.
Vin started to protest, but the man’s squinting, smiling gray eyes
made him pause. Damn these gringoes when they smile!
“No,” the stranger was saying. “_Niente, señor._ I’ve just clean
fergot how to write. You understand?”
“_Sí, sí._” Escondido was not lying. He understood the _eyes_. It
was sufficient. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders and a grin: “Me,
I pretty dam’ well ferget how to read somethings, too.”
“_Señor_, you are a man of wisdom.”
A few minutes later, having removed his boots and draped his gun
belt and hat over a convenient chair, the man was asleep. Neither
the noise from the platform nor the heavy smell of creosote drifting
in through the open window disturbed him. He had been in the saddle
twelve hours that day.
The freshening wind and the gathering clouds to the north bore
unmistakable promise of approaching storm. This would have caused
him no concern. He had foreseen it and molded his plans to its whim.
A conversation going on in a cabin across the tracks would have been
of infinitely more interest. He was the subject of that talk; one of
the two thus engaged being the man who had stolen out of the Palace
bar.
“I tell you it’s him,” he repeated doggedly from time to time.
“Ain’t no ghosts scarin’ me thataway. It’s Crosbie Traynor.”
“And him dead these twenty years?”
“I thought he was dead. Men left on the Painted Desert without water
and no food don’t come back. He’s done it, though! It’s him. Still
wearin’ one of my old hats—the one with that Moqui horsehair band.
You remember—had a gold snake luck piece snapped on to the band. I
tell you he looks like the livin’ spit of the way he did that night
down on the Little Colorado.”
His companion said nothing, but the sweat of fear had broken on his
forehead. Crosbie Traynor’s return to the land of living men was as
ominous as those black clouds gathering to the north. Death walked
in the air.
The little schemes, the plotting, the treachery of twenty years now
crumbled to ruins! Not for a second was it to be supposed that
Traynor had come to Standing Rock by accident. The man’s country lay
far to the south, hundreds of miles. Yes, it was his way to ferret
them out, to hang on, drifting from town to town until he tracked
them down.
“Damn you for a bungling fool!” cursed the brooding one. The man
from the hotel sank lower into his chair, spineless, impotent in the
face of that ghost-man’s visit. He raised his hands to shield his
eyes from his companion’s wrath as the other went on:
“A bungling, white-livered fool! That’s what you are! Now we’ll be
lucky if our necks don’t get stretched.”
“What you goin’ to do?”
“Do?” The man got to his feet and shook his fist in his visitor’s
face. “I’m going to do what you tried to do. I’m going to get
Traynor before he gets me. Is that plain enough for you?”
“You—you goin’ to kill him?”
“Oh, bah!” the other hurled back with fine contempt. “That scares
you, huh? Where’ll you be if he ever gets wind of you? That makes
you shiver, eh? Well, you get this idea under your hat and let it
stick there—you’re taking orders from me. ‘Cross’ Traynor is going
to be erased!”