High Desert Read online

  “Is there a sawbones in town?” Morgan asked.

  “Doc Velie. Go fetch him, Rip.”

  Young Clancy didn’t move for a moment, sullen green eyes whipping from Peg to Morgan and back to Peg. He had been beaten; he had taken the girl’s contempt, and pride had been torn from him and trampled underfoot.

  “All right,” Clancy breathed. “Don’t figger I’m done with you, mister, and I’ve got an idea that when Pete gets up and finds out what you’ve done, Peg, he’ll take a blacksnake to you.”

  “I’ll kill him if he does,” the girl said flatly. “He’ll never beat me again.”

  “Big wind blowin’ off the lake,” Clancy jeered. “He’ll curry you down like he’s done before. Or maybe I’ll do it myself. You’ve had your fun playin’ with me and Buck Carrick. One of these days I’ll have some fun of my own.”

  Clancy stalked out, hit saddle, and went down the road at a hard run, cracking steel to his horse every jump.

  Morgan watched while Peg washed the crimson trickle from her father’s face and stopped the flow of blood with a bandage.

  “Sorry I had to shoot him,” Morgan murmured.

  “You’ve got no call to be sorry.” She rose and faced him. “I wouldn’t have been sorry if you’d shot him between the eyes.”

  “He’s your father?”

  “So he says. I’m not proud of my blood.”

  Morgan built a smoke, standing lax, back against the wall. This was the first opportunity he’d had to appraise the girl, and he took his time with his cigarette, head bent a little, eyes fixed on her.

  Peg Royce was tall, with dark eyes and cricket-black hair combed sleekly back from her forehead and tied with a bright red ribbon. She was eighteen or twenty, Morgan guessed, with a woman’s full-bodied roundness. She stood beside the couch, ramrod-straight, making her study him as coolly as he studied her. She came toward him then, moving in a graceful leggy stride.

  “You’re a fighting man,” she breathed. “I felt it last night, and I had proof just now. You’re worth any three men in the valley, but that isn’t enough. The company should have sent an army.”

  She stood close to him, head tilted, the fragrance of her hair a stirring sweetness in his nostrils, red lips invitingly close. He saw the pulse beat in her white throat. She set up a turbulence in him, speeded his heart until it was pounding with hammer-like beats in his chest.

  “I’ve done all right,” he said. “With your help.”

  “I won’t always be around,” she said with a shrug. “You’ll be fighting the whole Clancy outfit. Dad and the rest of the nesters will be taking pot shots at you. You won’t live the week out.”

  “I never gamble with anybody’s life but my own.” Morgan slid past her into the yard. “Keep your dad quiet till the doc gets here. Head wounds are pretty tricky.”

  “Nobody keeps Pete Royce quiet,” she said with sharp bitterness.

  “Why do you hate him?” asked Morgan.

  “Because of what he’s done, and what he will do. You’ll hate him before you’re done. You’re here to get him off company land, aren’t you?” She shook her head. “He won’t go, and he won’t pay for the land. Go in there and put a bullet through his head. You’ll never get him off any other way.”

  She stayed in the doorway, scowling against the sun. Looking at her, Morgan saw the lines of discontent that cut her forehead. Suddenly she put it away. She laughed, as gay and free a laugh as she had given Buck Carrick the night before.

  “You wouldn’t kill him when he couldn’t fight back, would you? You’re that kind of a fool. The trouble is Pete Royce and Arch Blazer and the Clancys don’t play by rules.”

  “You’re pretty as an angel,” he said in a puzzled voice, “and as tough as a boot heel.”

  “That’s me,” she said gaily, and came across the yard. “Nobody knows what I am. Maybe I don’t myself, but I know a little about the game that every woman has played since Eve had her fun. I’ll use a man to get what I want, and I’ll have a winner when the last hand’s dealt. A lot of the pious people like the Clancys say I’m bad, but I’m honest, and that’s more than you can say for them.”

  “Is it honest to play one man against another until one of them is dead because of you?”

  “Who’s dead?”

  “Buck Carrick might have been after you put Rip onto his trail last night.”

  “I didn’t do anything of the kind, Murdo Morgan. Don’t make me worse than I am.”

  “Then why did Rip come to the shack after Buck?”

  “I’d met Buck there before. Old man Carrick hates me. That’s why we meet at the shack. Rip probably saw me ride across the valley.”

  “How did you know my name, and that I’m a company man?”

  “The wind talks,” she said lightly, “and I understand it. I saw you watering your horse. That’s why I started talking to Rip about the company man. We don’t have many strangers here, so I made a good guess who you were.”

  “You wanted me to come in?”

  “Sure. I wanted to see a fight. You know. Get a man killed over me.”

  He had called it right. She was as tough as a boot heel. There was little shame or modesty about her. She would use a man to get what she wanted, exactly as she had said. Suddenly he was angry. There was no good reason for it except that he resented her coolly confident smile, her frank assurance that she could have him and use him exactly as she had used Rip Clancy and Buck Carrick.

  “Thanks for keeping Clancy off my back,” Morgan drawled.

  “Don’t thank me. I wanted you alive. Don’t forget I’m going to hold that winning hand on the last deal.”

  He stepped into saddle. He sat looking down at her, knowing he had no reason to stay, but not wanting to go.

  “Tell Royce I want to talk to him when he gets on his feet,” he said.

  “He’ll never talk to a company man. He’ll work it around so you’ll get killed and nobody will know he had a hand in it. But you’re too big a fool to ride out of the country. You’ll stay and you’ll come back here.” She stood with her feet wide-spread, red lips shaping a cool smile, a graceful seductive figure. “You’ll be back, but not to see him, and I’ll go on trying to keep you alive.”

  He turned his horse into the road. He didn’t look back, but he knew she was standing there, staring at him, and probably smiling. She would be a dangerous enemy. Or a friend who could never be fully trusted.

  Nature had endowed Peg Royce with all the weapons in the feminine arsenal and taught her their use. Morgan knew how to fight men like Jaggers Flint and Rip Clancy, how and when to push. He didn’t know how to fight Peg Royce.

  He tried to put her out of his mind, but she clung there tenaciously, disturbing him and whipping his pulse to a faster pace. Buck Carrick had said: Don’t ever see her. She’ll drag you through perdition. She’s poison. Now Morgan knew what Buck had meant, but the knowledge made no difference. She remained in his mind.

  When Morgan was out of sight, Peg turned back into the cabin. A grave soberness had come into her face. For a long time she stared down at Pete Royce, bitterness and frustration flooding her consciousness.

  “You’ve sold your soul to Ed Cole for a thousand dollars, Royce,” she whispered. “You’ll kill the best man who ever rode into the valley, but you can’t have my soul to take to the devil with you. Not for all your thousand dollars!”

  VI

  Leaving the Royce place the road was no more than two vague ruts cut through the sage. As Morgan followed it, a thousand memories crowded back into a mind already too full. He had not wanted to come here. This was one part of the valley he’d had no desire to see, but he had to talk to Jim Carrick.

  Morgan thought again of his boyhood, of his hound dog Tuck, the clean sound of axe on pine as his father and brothers had built the cabin, the first deer he ha
d ever shot, the long trip north with the herd from California and his father’s words: There’s room enough for us and the Clancys in this valley. Someday the settlers will come and we’ll help ’em when they do, but right now we’ll take what we can hold.

  But there hadn’t been room enough in the valley, and the Morgans hadn’t been able to hold a square foot. Morgan had never known what had started the fight, but it had been destined from the first. Broad Clancy and Josh Morgan had known each other years before, and the capacity for hatred was great in both of them. Clancy had won because he was the first in the valley and, with his greater wealth, he had been able to hire more men.

  The last fight. The motionless bloody bodies of Murdo Morgan’s brothers. The funeral. The hollow sound of clods on the pine coffins. His father’s gray, frozen face. Broad Clancy had been there. Morgan had never understood that. It hadn’t seemed right. Clancy or his men had killed his brothers, and then had come to see them buried.

  They had left that afternoon, Josh Morgan and Murdo, taking a pack horse and a few things Josh wanted as keepsakes, one of them a tintype of Murdo’s mother. Then that last look at the valley, the smoke plume rising from the burning cabins. Those were the things a man could never forget if he lived as long as the desert had been here.

  Nor could he forget his father’s words. There’s room for a thousand families down there where Broad Clancy runs his cattle. I’m goin’ to bring ’em and I’ll bust Clancy, which same ain’t important. Givin’ homes to hungry people is.

  But Josh Morgan had died too soon. This was another day and it was Murdo Morgan and not Josh who was here. Breaking Broad Clancy was less important to Murdo than it had been to Josh. Even saving the investment that Murdo had made seemed a minor thing. It was the thousand families that loomed big in his mind — giving homes to hungry people. Morgan had the power to do what his father had only dreamed about.

  The Carrick cabin had been built on the ashes of the bigger Morgan cabin. The row of poplars that Josh had planted had been little more than switches when Murdo had left. Now they were tall, slender trees, throwing a shade laced with golden sunlight across the yard.

  A huge fireplace centered the lodgepole pine cabin. The cabin winked brightly at Morgan from a thousand eyes as he rode up. When he was close, he saw that broken pieces of obsidian had been set among the other stones. Lilac bushes grew at the end of the cabin, their blossoms spreading a haunting fragrance in the air. It was a pleasant place, more pleasant than Morgan remembered. Emotions, long suppressed by the simplicity of his life, rose uninhibited.

  East of the house the rimrock made a twenty-foot cliff, and a short distance to the north a creek spilled over the edge in a crystal waterfall. Beyond the creek was the fence that Josh Morgan had built around the graves. It was as tight as Josh had left it, the headstones were still here, the grass green and trimmed.

  Two men were idling by the corral, a saddled horse standing behind them. They had been watching Morgan’s approach. The dark-bearded one raised a hand in greeting.

  “Light, stranger!” he called amiably.

  Morgan pulled up beside them and, stepping down, held out his hand. “I’m guessing you’re Jim Carrick.”

  “That’s a plumb good guess,” the bearded man boomed. He motioned to the slender man at his side. “My boy Tom.”

  “I’m Murdo Morgan.” He shook young Carrick’s hand and dropped it. It was damp, and withdrawing as the man himself was withdrawing.

  “Morgan!” Jim Carrick cried. “Say, you ain’t kin to them three we got buried over yonder, I don’t reckon?”

  “Brother,” Morgan said. “I was just a kid when it happened.”

  “You remember, don’t you?” Tom Carrick demanded eagerly. “You came back to fight ’em, didn’t you?”

  “No. What’s done is done. If it’s a fight, Broad Clancy will make it.”

  Disgust stirred Tom’s leathery face. “What kind of a man are you, totin’ your iron that-away and talkin’ like a pan of milk.” He spat a brown ribbon that slapped into the dust and stirred it briefly. “Blue-john milk at that.”

  “That’s enough, Tom,” Jim Carrick said sharply. “You don’t need to look for a fight all the time.”

  Young Carrick cursed bitterly. His was a barren, vindictive face. He wore a bushy mustache that was tobacco-stained, and his clothes were a cowman’s, not a nester’s. His bone-handled Colt was carried low and thonged down in the manner of a man who fights for pay. He was not a man to be found on a nester place, and Morgan, watching him closely, was puzzled by him.

  Tom ran the back of his hand along his mouth. “If I had three brothers salivated like them Morgan boys was and I came back after all this time, I wouldn’t look for a fight. I’d sure go out and make one.”

  Wheeling, he mounted and lined south along the rimrock.

  “Mighty proddy, Tom is,” Jim Carrick said worriedly. “He don’t take to bein’ pushed around by the Clancys, but I don’t see no way of livin’ on this range if you don’t stand for pushin’.”

  Jim Carrick was as big a man as Morgan, with brown eyes that were both friendly and honest, and dark hair holding no more gray than his bushy beard. He pulled a pipe from his pocket and dribbled tobacco into it, great hands trembling with the bottled-up emotion that was in him.

  “A man can stand so much pushing,” Morgan said. “No more.”

  “Yeah.” Carrick slid the tobacco pouch back into his pocket. “I heard old man Morgan died after Clancy ran him out of the valley, but didn’t know he had a kid.” He swung a big hand over the valley. “Enough graze here for two outfits. You’d have had a big spread if you could have held on. No sense of Clancy tryin’ to be both Providence and the devil. Bein’ the devil is enough for one man.

  “A cowman’s paradise,” Morgan murmured. “Mild winters, plenty of bunchgrass, and good summer graze plumb over to Harney County. Dad used to say that.”

  Carrick scratched a match on the top corral bar and held the flame to his pipe. “That’s right. I reckon Broad Clancy has made more money than he knows what to do with. Don’t cost much to raise his beef ’cause his grass is here for the takin’. The herd he hazes south to the railhead in Californy makes the cattle they raise down there look downright puny. Don’t get the diseases up here they do in warmer climates.”

  “Dad used to say something else,” said Morgan. “About cowmen pioneering the way into a new country, but the farmers always came later. He said in the long run a stockman couldn’t use a million acres to support maybe a hundred men while a thousand families could make a good living on the same amount of land.”

  “Your dad was sure right.” Carrick motioned toward the green strip that marked the creek. “You can raise mighty near anything here. Reckon it’d be a good fruit country, but that’s just crazy dreamin’. There’s a dozen of us nester families in the valley. We live where Clancy tells us and we live the way he tells or we’ve got trouble.”

  “That won’t go on forever,” Morgan said guardedly. “One of these days Clancy will stump his toe.”

  Carrick laughed sourly. “Looks to me like he’s walkin’ mighty good. I’m like Tom a little bit. I ain’t proddy, but we’ve got to fight or get out and quit callin’ ourselves men. I was hopin’ you aimed to throw some lead Clancy’s way.”

  “What are the nesters like?” asked Morgan. “The rest of ’em?”

  “Pete Royce is a double-crossin’ coyote who’d sell anything to anybody for an extra dollar. Arch Blazer is a barroom fighter and meaner’n Royce. Some of the rest are the same way, just hidin’, I reckon, thinkin’ the law won’t find ’em here. The others are like sheep, hatin’ Clancy but kowtowin’ to him all the same.”

  “By fall you’ll see a thousand families living here,” Morgan said. “Then Broad Clancy will sing a little low.”

  Carrick took his sweat-stained hat from his head and then w
iped it with a bandanna. “If it wasn’t so cussed hot, I’d laugh. What makes you think there’ll be a thousand families in the valley by fall?”

  “Because the Cascade and Paradise Land Company is selling acreage in the Middle West now. After the drought and grasshoppers those people have had, they’ll be of a mind to buy and try it out here.”

  “I’ll be hanged,” Carrick murmured. “So the land company is finally goin’ to do it. We’d heard the old bunch had sold out.... Pull your gear off your horse, Morgan, and I’ll rustle a drink.”

  Morgan off-saddled, turned his black into the corral, and swung toward the cabin. He had to have some help, and Carrick was a better man than he could rightfully expect to find. Usually men who stood for pushing were, as Carrick had hinted, men who were willing to accept Clancy’s rule in exchange for a place where they could live without fear of the law catching up with them.

  Jim Carrick would do.

  VII

  Carrick was waiting in the shade in front of the cabin, a whiskey bottle in his hand as Morgan came from the corral. The nester motioned toward a battered leather chair.

  “Sit and have a drink,” he invited. “I want to hear you talk. If the land company is what I think it is, you won’t get more’n one drink from me.”

  Morgan grinned as he took the bottle. “It’s a hard choice between Clancy and the land company, ain’t it?”

  “Plumb hard.” Carrick sat down with his back to a poplar tree. “There ain’t enough of us to fight Clancy. You can’t count on men like Royce and Blazer nohow, but the worst of it is that all of us, including Clancy, are just squattin’ here.”

  “If you made a deal with the company, you’d have a patent to your land,” Morgan suggested.

  Carrick reached for the bottle and took a long pull.

  “You’re talkin’ crazy, mister. In the first place, nobody like us could deal with the land company. Money’s all they want, and no matter what we’ve done to improve our places, we’ll get our rumps kicked. In the second place, this grant was given to a company that never done a thing to earn it. I know. I was supposed to be on the road when I came here, and it wasn’t nothin’ more’n a few stakes and five, six boulders rolled to one side. Road? Glory to Betsy, it wasn’t no road at all! Just another dirty land grab.”