TROUBLESOME.

RANGE.

A Western Story.

by PETER DAWSON.

Peace Terms.

We'll give you a week. If you aren't out by that time, we'll run you out. We'll fire the building and dynamite your safe. And that's a promise!"

"There'll be a federal marshal in."

"Let him come. We've taken care of marshals before."

"You'll lose men."

"So will you."

The two men stared at each other over the length of the table, ma.s.sive old Yace Bonnyman, belligerent as always and as always convinced he was right, and Fred Vanover, manager for the Middle Arizona Cattle Company, quiet under the strain and hostility of these past twenty minutes. It was to Vanover's credit that he hadn't lost his temper for he was alone here in this smoke-fogged room against Bonnyman and these other four Mesa Grande ranchers. Alone except for his outnumbered crew somewhere below on the street, and John Thornd.y.k.e, Middle Arizona's counselor, who had arrived late that afternoon by train from Phoenix.

Vanover now let his glance stray from Bonnyman's rugged face to that of the lawyer. Thornd.y.k.e wasn't enjoying this. His eyes were squinted against the lamp glare and smoke, and his face was paler than usual. He was scared, badly, not having liked Vanover's insistence that the two of them should meet the ranchers alone, without enough of their own men present to balance the odds. Vanover could see that Thornd.y.k.e wasn't going to be much help.

"We're willing to make certain concessions," he now said quietly.

"Concessions be hanged!" rumbled Bonnyman's uncompromising voice. "You close up shop or we run you out."

"Gentlemen, gentlemen." Thornd.y.k.e straightened in his chair, a.s.suming what dignity was left him after hearing Middle Arizona so mercilessly raked over the coals these last few minutes. He gave Vanover a quick yet avoiding look, and went on: "I'm prepared to make you an offer, one I trust will meet with your approval."

"We're through with lawyers' tricks!"

Clark Dunne, in the chair alongside Bonnyman, reached out and put a hand on the older man's arm. "Let's hear what they have to say, Yace." He nodded to Thornd.y.k.e. "Go ahead."

The lawyer cleared his throat, and seemed to put starch in his voice, for when he spoke again his tones were firmer. "As I understand it, your objections concern the land company."

"Cattle company, land company, it's one and the same." Clark Dunne antic.i.p.ated a new outburst from Bonnyman. "That's our prime worry. Another's the sticky loop your crew's been swingin'. Still another's your hirin' gun hands. Two can play that game, and, if you keep it up, we . . ."

"Stick to the point, Dunne," Vanover cut in, and now his look was angry. "I admit letting Harper hire a few men who know how to shoot. You've forced me into it. No use arguin' this rustling business because we think it's you, not us, that's doing it."

"How about Middle Arizona trying to grab the basin lease, trying to crowd us off our best summer range?"

"That was a tactical error," Vanover admitted, smiling thinly. "I had my orders from the main office, which were to bid on the lease when it was posted. So far as we could discover, no offer was ever made to lease it. It looked like a good proposition, so we made our offer and it was accepted."

"And we ran you out," stated Bonnyman.

"You had good grounds. I was never under the impression that we could make it stick. Others were. I was instructed to try, and failed. But to get back to the land company."

Dunne nodded. "I was going to say that you'd never have had even a toehold here if . . ."

"If it hadn't been for that worthless whelp of mine," Bonnyman put in bitterly.

Clark lifted a hand for silence. "Joe didn't know what he was doing, Yace," he said calmly. "We'll skip that. Thornd.y.k.e, your outfit got its start here through a piece of luck, through buying Joe Bonnyman's brand, in case you hadn't heard of it. There's no tellin' why Joe sold. But he did and Middle Arizona got its start. They couldn't get any more range by straight buyin', so they set up this land company that we all know is really a loan bank. They cut interest rates and loaned most of us money before we were wise to 'em. Well, they don't get to make their killin'. No court in this county is ever goin' to issue your outfit foreclosure papers. As Yace says, you're through. Close down the Land Office peaceful, or we run you out!"

"That suits us precisely, gentlemen," the lawyer agreed. "I'm authorized to do exactly that. But . . ."

"No buts," growled Bonnyman. "You cut it off clean."

"Let me tell 'em," Vanover said. He caught Thornd.y.k.e's relieved nod and went on: "This land company's been making money. It's no secret. And it's no secret why it was set up originally. We hoped to foreclose on several outfits and throw them in with the spread we bought from young Bonnyman and start a big operation here. But that's done with. We don't aim to increase the death rate for a few dollars' profit. On the other hand, the town needs another bank besides that branch of the Tucson National. Why not keep the Acme office open?"

Ed Merrill, across the table from Thornd.y.k.e, said explosively: "Why in thunder do we sit here lettin' ourselves be tied in knots by a bunch of fancy words?"

"Then here are some plain ones," Vanover drawled, feeling the intense hostility of them all. "We keep the Land Office open, and Middle Arizona will turn over its operation to any man you name."

He settled back in his chair, leisurely concentrating on his cigar, enjoying the awed silence that held even Yace Bonnyman speechless. His last few words had contained as much surprise as though he had brought out a sleeve gun after promising, as the rest had, not to come into this room armed. For the first time in nearly two years, Fred Vanover was feeling a let-down, with the weight of trouble he'd never wanted being lifted from his shoulders. Here, finally, was what looked like the end to the threat of a range war.

Clark Dunne was the first of the opposition to find words. "What's the catch?" he asked tonelessly.

"There is none. We're willing to do exactly as I said. It's no go on our opening up a big outfit in this country, so we take what we can get. Name the man you want to put in as head of Acme . . . to draw salary as president and to manage policy . . . and he can begin work tomorrow. Correct, Thornd.y.k.e?"

"Precisely."

"What about Harper?" Merrill asked, and the name of Vanover's immediate subordinate, now acting as foreman of Middle Arizona's ranch, brought set frowns to the faces of the others. "Does he stay on?"

Vanover shrugged. "I take orders from above. They may think he's still needed here. We'll have to prove to them he isn't before they order me to send him out."

"You'd better get that proof mighty quick," Merrill stated. "Otherwise, he's liable to meet with an accident."

"I'll keep Harper in hand," said Vanover.

Yace Bonnyman lifted a clenched fist, started to hit the table with it, didn't, and laid it out flat before him. It was obvious he'd been about to counter Vanover's decision, then thought better of it. His voice, when he spoke, was like a file being slowly run over a spool of barbed wire.

"Vanover, you work for a pack o' wolves, but I have no reason to doubt your personal word. Do I have it that this is straight, that you won't double-cross us?"

"I swear it, Bonnyman."

The old rancher got up out of his chair. He looked at his friends and neighbors, the men who had come here to make his fight with him, Ed Merrill of Brush, Charley Staples of the Singletree, Slim Workman of the Yoke, and finally Clark Dunne. "If there's no objection," he said, "Clark gets the job."

The others nodded instant agreement, knowing what Yace was thinking. Clark was deeply involved with Acme by a loan. His outfit, built on a shoestring in the beginning, and only lately counted as one of the bigger brands, could stand a little financial bolstering. It was a tribute to Dunne himself, rather than to any facility at handling money matters, that these men chose him to represent them now. They liked him and wanted to see him get ahead. It was as simple as that.

Clark was flattered but uneasy under this suggested responsibility. "What do I know about finances?" he protested. "About . . . ?" "You can learn," Bonnyman put in curtly. "Besides, all we want is someone to play watchdog."

"I'm supposed to be s.h.i.+ppin' next week." Clark thought of another excuse. "What with pullin' the boys off the job to come in here tonight, I'm set back at least three days."

"We're all in the same boat," Slim Workman solemnly reminded him. "If this thing sticks, it's worth losin' two weeks of our gather. I'll send over a couple men to help out and your bunch'll be glad you ain't around. Well, what about it?"

Clark's glance went from one man to the next, as though his objections had been intended only to give him time to make sure they wanted him. And now this serious expression eased before a relieved smile.

"Sure I'll take it," he said. "Be glad to, and much obliged. Do anything to help end this ruckus. And it is ended, Vanover?"

"As far as we're concerned," Vanover replied.

"Good, then that's settled." Workman took a turnip-size watch from his pocket, his gaunt face mock sober as he looked at it. "Train time, Yace," he announced.

The others had a hard time keeping their faces straight as Bonnyman heaved a gusty sigh and rose from his chair. He reached for his Stetson hanging on the chair back. "Yeah," he said dryly, pretending not to notice their concentrated regard. "And I wish it wasn't. Want to come along, Clark?"

They all knew what he referred to. On his way out, Clark Dunne looked back from the door and gave them a wink, his sun-darkened face turned handsome under a broad smile. He and Bonnyman paused a moment on the landing of the covered stairway outside, sorting through the belts and holstered weapons piled on a caboose chair there. Yace selected his short-barreled .45 and thrust it into the holster at his left armpit, and Clark cinched a .38's heavy sh.e.l.l belt at his waist. While they stood there, they heard a mutter of subdued laughter in the room, and Workman called down to someone on the street.

When they reached the walk below, Clark fell into step alongside the older man. "Better spill some of the sand out of your craw, Yace." he advised. "After all, you sent for him."

"I know, I know." There was disgust in Bonnyman's tone. He glanced around and caught the familiar, pleasant cast of Clark's face and sighed explosively in irritation, but he added nothing to his self-indictment.

Clark was looking along the street. Evidently Workman had pa.s.sed the word down, for the crews were on the way out. Close to thirty men had ridden in here tonight from the roundup chuck wagons in the hills above the mesa, primed for a shoot-out with Middle Arizona's outnumbered but tough outfit. Now, as they spilled from the saloons and the hotel and pool hall, and climbed onto their ponies, their shouts and rough laughter echoed along the wide street.

These men had been solemn and quiet on the way in; now, their long tension gone, they were like a bunch of kids unexpectedly released from the threat of having to stay after school. Clark saw Ed Merrill's Brush crew leave the Mile High hitch rack in a bunch, their ponies at a hard run before they hit the street's upper dogleg that marked that boundary of the business district. Someone down by the blacksmith shop set up a strident call-"Yoke, where's Yoke?"-and was answered by a shout from a cl.u.s.ter of riders milling in the dust before the pool hall: "Here, and come a-jumpin', Tex!"

"There's Blaze." Clark was looking across the street at a figure momentarily silhouetted in the Mile High's door. "Want me to call him over?"

"He'll be there," was Bonnyman's gruff answer, and from then on Clark let the silence hold, watching idly as Blaze Coyle, the Anchor foreman, spoke briefly to his men across there, and then turned down the walk the way Clark and Bonnyman were headed.

He's like an old range bull with spreadin' toes and sore horns, Clark was thinking of Yace as he matched the oldster's long stride. Plenty salty yet, but not so sure of himself as he used to be, otherwise he wouldn't have called Joe down here. The trouble was over now, and Clark was more engrossed in seeing how Yace was going to handle this immediate problem than in thinking back on how effectively Yace's bull-headedness had tightened the screws on Vanover and Thornd.y.k.e tonight.

It gave Clark a strange satisfaction in finding the old man humble at the prospect of this meeting with a son he'd driven out five years ago. Clark was fond of Joe Bonnyman, always had been, as fond of him as Joe's father was intolerant and unforgiving. He wondered if old Yace really hated his son. He didn't know.

Blaze Coyle was waiting at the head of the cinder lane that led to the station. Spa.r.s.e-worded always, he caught the dogged look on his boss's face and fell in alongside Clark without a word. This red-headed cowpuncher knew the old man's moods and eccentricities as he knew the gaits and weaknesses of Anchor's ponies. Now, he sensed, was no time to try to get anything out of Yace, much as he wanted to know what had been decided at the meeting.

They crossed the loading area flanking the freight platform, and rounded the end of the building to step into the margin of light shed by the lantern at the waiting-room door, two overly tall men and one short one, old Bonnyman broad and ma.s.sive in his tallness, Clark Dunne lithe and his stride effortless, Blaze spare and bowlegged, and looking as if walking didn't agree with him, which it didn't.

Down the siding the compressor on a helper locomotive that would boost the local over the pa.s.s was singing a rhythmic pant. There was the smell of coal gas on the chill breeze slanting in off the flats. Ghostly and indistinct on the southern horizon was a dark shadow looking like a towering range of mountains.

"Rain tomorrow," Blaze opined, knowing that shadow to be a storm cloud.

"Snow, more than likely. Is the gate shut on that upper tank?" Yace asked, his tone querulous.

"You ought to know. You rode up yesterday yourself to close it."

It was significant that Yace accepted his foreman's testy reply without protest. No other man of his vast acquaintance would have dared speak up to him in that manner. Fifteen years with Anchor had taken away Blaze's awe of both the outfit and its owner. That span of time had likewise increased Yace's respect for the abilities of his segundo, increased them to the point where he tolerated in the man certain tyrannies closely resembling his own. Most times he was amused by Blaze's acid comments; occasionally he'd intentionally prod the redhead into outbursts. He seldom stopped to reason that Blaze was only thirty-five, that his banty-rooster manner was at times plain insubordination.

Tonight Yace was too preoccupied with the coming meeting to take exception to Blaze's manner, even though he was irritated by it. He sensed that there were going to be some uncomfortable moments presently, and hoped he'd be up to them. The distant whistle of the train, the faint rail-borne rumble of its rolling trucks, made him want to leave this place and avoid facing his boy. He thought of Joe as just that, a boy, even though last month he'd penciled a circle around a date on the calendar and come to the startled realization that his son was somewhere celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday. Had he soberly considered this, let the idea of Joe's adulthood take firm root in his mind, he would have been better prepared for this reunion. As it was, he was confused and truculent, blaming not himself, but Joe, for the disturbing feeling that things were bound to go wrong when they faced each other.

An Unwelcome Prodigal.

Joe Bonnyman's mood was the exact opposite of his father's as he scanned the night through the coach window and saw the lights of Lodgepole crawling up out of the darkness. It was good to be home again, to have put behind once and for all the feeling of being a pariah, of not being wanted. The last two years in an obscure bunkhouse high in the Tetons of Wyoming, working with a close-mouthed crew and an owner who had a peculiar liking for beef with a.s.sorted brands, heightened his sense of release. Few men up north had known Joe's real name. The law might not even remember that a lean, tow-headed man with an Arizona drawl had one night shot a crooked gambler in a saloon in Casper. All the same, Joe Bonnyman was glad to be back. He'd come perilously close to becoming a part of a life that was tawdry and predatory, to joining the pack he'd traveled with those two years in an existence that made a man a near animal, trusting chiefly in his ability to survive.

His father's letter curtly summoning him back to Lodgepole, "to help smoke out a nest of two-legged rattlers," had lifted from his shoulders the weight of the past five troubled years. He sensed with relief that everything must be all right with the old man, that Yace had forgiven the past and was taking him in again; there could be no other explanation for Yace's suddenly ending half a decade's silence. Joe had ridden out the day the letter arrived and sent a wire ahead half an hour before he boarded the train south.

He was up out of his seat, reaching for war bag and sacked saddle, as the coach rattled past the stock pens at the lower edge of town. Out on the platform with the conductor, the schooled impa.s.siveness of Joe's lean, weather-burned face relaxed into a smile as he recognized familiar landmarks through the darkness- Sam Thrall's picket fence and wood shed, Oscar Nelson's two-story brick house with the storm porch at the back, the lighted rear windows of old Sally Baker's house.

"Some dump, eh," the conductor asked pleasantly enough as he shouldered past Joe, and climbed down to the swaying bottom step with his lantern.

"What's wrong with it?" Joe's tone held an edge of belligerence surprisingly like the elder Bonnyman's. He didn't stop to label the reason for that defensive answer, but it was backed by a deep-rooted pride in all he'd once called home.

The conductor shrugged and Joe forgot him as the cinder ramp unwound past the corner of the coach. He saw his father and Blaze and Clark standing under the ramp lantern, and wanted to yell, then thought better of it. Better go easy, was the way he crowded back the impulse. The old man probably thought he was still a little wild.

Joe tossed his saddle aground over the conductor's head while the train was still rolling; his swing down off the steps was one smooth uninterrupted motion, not awkward even for the weight of the heavy war bag. He saw Clark Dunne break into a trot toward him, away from his father and Blaze, and he let go the war bag and stood waiting, the flat planes of his face breaking under a wide grin. He was a medium-tall man whose profile gave him the look of having a light build, but whose full-front outline was made wide and blocky by an inordinately broad span of shoulder. The warm light in his dark-brown eyes made him almost handsome as he watched the approach of his friend.

Clark stopped abruptly two paces away, and both his smile and Joe's faded before mock seriousness in the beginning of a ritual Joe hadn't remembered until now. Suddenly they reached out and clasped hands in a quick stab, both applying instant pressure to their grips. Joe spread his feet widely and dropped his right shoulder a little as his upper arm muscles helped tighten the tendon of his fingers. He saw Clark's handsome face take on a flush, then a grimace of pain. Clark grunted, made a last, wringing effort to tighten his hold, and at the same time loosen Joe's. Then he was gasping a quick: "Lay off, dog-gone it! Enough!"

He jerked his hand free and they were both laughing, each rubbing a numbed hand to bring back the circulation. "Man, you've got your growth," Clark said. He sensed the approach of the other two and stooped to pick up Joe's war bag, adding a low-voiced warning: "He's primed for bear. Go easy."

Some of the warmth and friendliness left Joe's eyes, touching them with a surface brightness. It was the look many men over the past five years would have called his natural one, wary, close to distrustful.

Yace Bonnyman caught that look and found some satisfaction in it. He didn't offer to shake hands, but stood a moment regarding this son, who lacked half a head of matching him in height and some fifty pounds of meeting his weight.

"h.e.l.lo, Yace," Joe said, and waited.

The old man let the silence run on another moment without replying, his glance carefully measuring his son. All at once he saw something that deepened his frown. It was an indentation midway the length of Joe's right pant leg, and Yace knew at once that the mark had been left there by the constant grip of a holster thong. It was what he was looking for, a flaw in the hard surface of this stranger who looked like his son, but whose bearing was disconcertingly c.o.c.ksure, into which he could insert the sharp edge of his unreasoning scorn.

"Still the same h.e.l.lion you were when you drifted out," he said flatly.

Joe's expression softened, became half a smile. He doesn't want to eat his crow all in one piece, he was thinking, and drawled: "Must be the bloodlines, Yace."

The quickly gathering fury on his father's face told him how much in error he'd been in judging Yace's remark as the blunt preliminary to a peace offering. The old man had been deadly serious. There was nothing to do but stand there and witness the almost visible snapping of the tightly drawn thread of his temper.

Blaze saw what was building and put in: "Somethin' to that. You'll have to admit it, boss."

Yace seemed not to have heard. Yet at the last moment, he did curb the impulse to lift his fists and maul this flesh and blood of his. It was because, at this moment, Joe's alarmed expression reminded him of Caroline's. He had buried his wife seven years ago, and the one sore spot in his conscience was the memory of how overbearing he had been with her at times. Her eyes had been dark, too, and the look he now saw in his son's, half fearful, half defiant, was a grim reminder of a part of the past he would have liked to live over and mend. So deeply was he shaken by this reminder of his one weakness, so nerve-shattering was the stemming of the flood of fury in him, that his shoulders sagged, and the breath escaped his lungs in an audible groan. He was abruptly aware of having to make a decision; he mustn't let them know how uncertain he was. But in trying to get a hold on himself he became even more confused. Blaze, knowing him better than the others, was shocked at the sight of the man aging before his eyes.

At length, Yace settled on the only line of action that occurred to him. Reaching into his pocket, he brought out his wallet and removed some bills. He held them out to Joe.

"Here's a hundred," he said. "Take it and get out. Go back where you came from."

When Joe made no move to take the money, Yace dropped it. Abruptly he turned from them and went out across the wide ramp. As he trudged out of sight around the station's far corner, Clark Dunne whistled softly.

"What came over him so sudden?" he breathed.