MURDER IN THE CHAPARRAL
To Jack Roberts, engaged at the Delmonico restaurant in the serious
business of demolishing a steak smothered in onions, came Pedro Menendez
with a strange story of a man lying dead in the rim-rock, a bullet-hole
in the back of his head.
The Mexican _vaquero_ came to his news haltingly. He enveloped it in
mystery. There was a dead man lying at the foot of Battle Butte, out in
the rim-rock country, and there was this wound in the back of his head.
That was all. Pedro became vague at once as to detail. He took refuge in
shrugs and a poor memory when the Ranger pressed him in regard to the
source of his information.
Roberts knew the ways of the Mexicans. They would tell what they wanted
to tell and no more. He accepted the news given him and for the moment
did not push his questions home.
For twenty-four hours the Ranger had been in the saddle, and he was
expecting to turn in for a round-the-clock sleep. But Pedro's tale
changed his mind. Captain Ellison was at Austin, Lieutenant Hawley at
Tascosa. Regretfully Roberts gave up his overdue rest and ordered
another cup of strong coffee. Soon he was in the saddle again with a
fresh horse under him.
The Panhandle was at its best. Winter snows and spring rains had set it
blooming. The cacti were a glory of white, yellow, purple, pink, and
scarlet blossoms. The white, lilylike flowers of the Spanish bayonet
flaunted themselves everywhere. Meadowlarks chirruped gayly and
prairie-hens fluttered across the path in front of the rider.
Battle Butte had received its name from an old tradition of an Indian
fight. Here a party of braves had made a last stand against an
overwhelming force of an enemy tribe. It was a flat mesa rising sharply
as a sort of bastion from the rim-rock. The erosions of centuries had
given it an appearance very like a fort.
Jack skirted the base of the butte. At the edge of a clump of prickly
pear he found the evidence of grim tragedy which the circling buzzards
had already warned him to expect. He moved toward it very carefully, in
order not to obliterate any footprints. The body lay face down in a
huddled heap, one hand with outstretched finger reaching forth like a
sign-post. A bullet-hole in the back of the head showed how the man had
come to his death. He had been shot from behind.
The Ranger turned the body and recognized it as that of Rutherford
Wadley. The face was crushed and one of the arms broken. It was an easy
guess that the murder had been done on the butte above and the body
flung down.
Jack, on all fours, began to quarter over the ground like a bloodhound
seeking a trail. Every sense in him seemed to quicken to the hunt. His
alert eyes narrowed in concentration. His fingertips, as he crept
forward, touched the sand soft as velvet. His body was tense as a coiled
spring. No cougar stalking its prey could have been more lithely wary.
For the Ranger had found a faint boot-track, and with amazing pains he
was following this delible record of guilt. Some one had come here and
looked at the dead body. Why? To make sure that the victim was quite
dead? To identify the victim? Roberts did not know why, but he meant to
find out.
The footprint was alone. Apparently none led to it or led from it. On
that one impressionable spot alone had been written the signature of a
man's presence.
But "Tex" Roberts was not an old plainsman for nothing. He knew that if
he were patient enough he would find other marks of betrayal.
He found a second track--a third, and from them determined a course to
follow. It brought him to a stretch of soft ground at the edge of a
wash. The footprints here were sharp and distinct. They led up an arroyo
to the bluff above.
The Ranger knelt dose to the most distinct print and studied it for a
long time. All its details and peculiarities were recorded in his mind.
The broken sole, the worn heel, the beveled edge of the toe-cap--all
these fastened themselves in his memory. With a tape-line he measured
minutely the length of the whole foot, of the sole and of the heel.
These he jotted down in his notebook, together with cross-sections of
width. He duplicated this process with the best print he could find of
the left foot.
His investigation led him next to the summit of the bluff. A little
stain of blood on a rock showed him where Wadley had probably been
standing when he was shot. The murder might have been done by treachery
on the part of one of his companions. If so, probably the bullet had
been fired from a revolver. In that case the man who did it would have
made sure by standing close behind his victim. This would have left
powder-marks, and there had been none around the wound. The chances were
that the shooting had been done from ambush, and if this was a true
guess, it was a fair deduction that the assassin had hidden behind the
point of rocks just back of the bluff. For he could reach that point by
following the rim-rock without being seen by his victim.
Roberts next studied the ground just back of the point of rocks. The
soil here was of disintegrated granite, so that there were no
footprints to betray anybody who might have been hidden there. But Jack
picked up something that was in its way as decisive as what he had been
seeking. It was a cartridge that had been ejected from a '73[1] rifle.
The harmless bit of metal in his hand was the receptacle from which
death had flashed across the open toward Ford Wadley.
At the foot of the rim-rock the Ranger found signs where horses had been
left. He could not at first make sure whether there were three or four.
From that spot he back-tracked for miles along the edge of the rim-rock
till he came to the night-camp where Wadley had met the outlaws. This,
too, he studied for a long time.
He had learned a good deal, but he did not know why Ford Wadley had been
shot. The young fellow had not been in Texas more than six or eight
months, and he could not have made many enemies. If he had nothing about
him worth stealing--and in West Texas men were not in the habit of
carrying valuables--the object could not have been robbery.
He rode back to Battle Butte and carried to town with him the body of
the murdered man. There he heard two bits of news, either of which might
serve as a cause for the murder: Young Wadley had quarreled with Tony
Alviro at a dance and grossly insulted him; Arthur Ridley had been
robbed of six thousand dollars by masked men while on his way to
Tascosa.
Ranger Roberts decided that he would like to have a talk with Tony.
[Footnote 1: The '73 rifle was not a seventy-three-caliber weapon, but
was named from the year it was got out. Its cartridges could be used for
a forty-four revolver.]