Scarlet Sunset, Silver Nights Page 5

  “He’s probably laboring under the illusion that pride is a substitute for character.”

  “If it’s Mr. Morgan you’re talking to yourself about,” Belva said, turning her attention from the pot she was scrubbing, “I doubt he has illusions of any kind.”

  “But he does have pride.”

  “I imagine it’d be more exact if you called it a sense of honor. I bet he’s chock full of that. Men like him usually are.”

  “What do you mean men like him?”

  “I don’t know. To tell the truth, I’ve never seen anyone like him, not really like him. Your Pa is the closest one I can think of.”

  The thought that Slade could resemble her father in any way shocked Pamela. She loved her father deeply and considered him perfect. But no sooner did she reject the notion than she realized her father would have behaved exactly as Slade did.

  Pamela didn’t know what to make of that.

  “Well, for all his sense of honor, he doesn’t have much ambition.” That wasn’t like her father. He had more ambition than any man in Arizona. “You’d think he would want to do something with his life besides wander about the desert taking any job he can find just to stay alive.”

  “I don’t know what he’s doing, but he’s not just wandering about. As much as you may dislike to admit it, that man is going somewhere. What’s more, I’ll bet a lot of people know where he’s been.”

  Pamela didn’t like to admit it, but she thought Belva was probably right. She couldn’t imagine anybody ignoring Slade, not even for a few hours.

  “You got to make allowances for Pamela,” Gaddy was saying to Slade as they walked to the bunkhouse. “She used to be a great go until her Ma sent her to school back East. She could ride better than a boy, but now she insists upon riding sideways. She learned that back East, too. I never saw such a crazy thing in my life. I can’t figure out why she doesn’t fall off.”

  “It’s no concern of mine how she rides,” Slade said, wondering why Gaddy felt it necessary to explain Pamela to him.

  “Thought it might explain some of her feeling about guns and fighting. Her mother felt the same way. Wonderful woman, Aunt Mary, in some ways, but you never saw a more closed-minded female. You couldn’t tell her anything. She flat refused to listen. Don’t know how Uncle Josh put up with it.”

  “I doubt Pamela would appreciate your telling me any of this,” Slade said, hoping to stem the flow of confidences. “She doesn’t look like the kind of girl to make excuses for what she does.”

  “She’d sooner run you off the place than explain,” Gaddy said with his ready chuckle, “but she’s got a lot of common sense. She won’t like it when you disagree with her, but if you can show her your way’s best, she’ll let you do it.”

  They were approaching a thick-walled, adobe bunkhouse, in its own way as big as the ranch house. “Looks like you carry a right big crew,” Slade remarked.

  Inside it looked much like any other bunkhouse. Big, plain, and offering few comforts. The rough, narrow beds were double bunks made of thin mattresses on frames nailed directly to walls covered with layers of pages taken from catalogs. Wish books to pass the empty hours. An oil lantern hung from a rafter, and several chairs sat gathered loosely around a large pot-bellied stove in the center of the room. Pegs on the wall provided a resting place for winter coats and rain slickers, but everything else had to be kept in the cowboy’s bedroll under his bunk.

  “We used to, but not now. Uncle Josh had a time holding on to this land when he first got here. In fact, if he hadn’t found this canyon, he might have been wiped out a couple of times. But things have been pretty easy the last ten years, and he just let the numbers drop off. But now we got trouble again.”

  “I didn’t see any signs on the way in,” Slade remarked. “Things seem pretty quiet around here.”

  “That’s the only reason Uncle Josh went off and left Pamela alone. Mind you, Dave tried to talk him out of it, but Uncle Josh is sure nothing is going to happen until the fall roundup. There’s men trying to muscle in on his land,” Gaddy explained. “This valley carries no more than half our herds. The rest are on the desert this side of the river. Uncle Josh ain’t greedy, and he never tried to run too many cattle on the land. It’s stayed good all these years.”

  “So what’s the trouble now?”

  “Several new ranchers have brought herds in the last couple of years. They’ve overgrazed until they’ve just about ruined the rest of the range. Now they’re pressing Uncle Josh from all sides, the old ones and the newcomers. Our boys spend all their time just keeping strays on the other side of the river. But we can’t do it much longer without more men.”

  “The ones Pamela’s father plans to hire in Santa Fe?”

  “Yeah, but he’d better get back soon.”

  “What about this place?” Slade asked.

  “There’s no threat to the valley. A single rider could get in over the mountains, but the only way to bring a herd in is the way you came in. Uncle Josh says it won’t come to a fight, not after he has the extra hands. Things aren’t like they were twenty years ago. People can’t just come in and take a man’s land.”

  “What’s the point in telling me about your troubles?” Slade asked. “I’ll be gone in a few days.”

  “How? You can’t buy a horse.”

  “I have money.”

  “But Pamela said …”

  “Your cousin has a tendency to jump to conclusions. I can pay for what I want. Now unless there’s something else I need to know, I’ll turn in. I’m bushed.”

  “I’ve half a mind to ride out and see what happened to Dave.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to stay here?” Slade asked casually. He didn’t want anybody to know where he was, and if Gaddy went to find Dave, he was bound to tell him about their guest. If anybody came to the ranch to check on him, they might recognize him.

  “Why?”

  “To protect your cousin. You don’t know anything about me. I could be meaning to rob the place. Pamela had enough silver on the table for me to live on for years.”

  “It’d take a wagon to carry away all the silver in that house,” Gaddy said. “Besides, Pamela would shoot you if she caught you stealing anything of hers.”

  “Without a gun?”

  “Cousin Pamela may try to be like her Ma, but there’s a lot of her Pa in her too. She can shoot better then any woman in Arizona. Until she went off to Baltimore, you never saw her outside the house without her rifle.”

  That disclosure surprised Slade so much he almost forgot the real problem. A contradiction always intrigued him, and Pamela White seemed to be bristling with them.

  “It would be the gentlemanly thing for you to stay. Besides, if your cousin is all that good with a rifle, you might have to protect me.”

  Gaddy laughed. “Oh, all right. Dave probably wouldn’t want me around anyway.”

  Slade thought the boy looked disappointed at not going to the camp. At the same time, he seemed a little relieved. Slade wondered why. He seemed like a nice enough kid. Maybe he had a secret. Why not? Everybody else seemed to have one.

  “You really riding out in a day or two?” Gaddy asked after the lights were out.

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I sorta thought you might want to stay, at least for a while.”

  “Why?”

  “This is a good place. A man might as well work here as in California.”

  “I’m not looking to settle down just yet.”

  Then why did he leave Texas? True, he hadn’t met Pamela then and maybe his dreams hadn’t crystallized with their present painful clarity, but didn’t he want to find some place he could settle, whether it be here, California, or Montana?

  “You’ll have to stop someday,” Gaddy said. “Why not here?”

  “I don’t think your cousin approves of me,” Slade answered.

  “Maybe not, but there’s big trouble brewing,” Gaddy said with unexpected seri
ousness. “You wouldn’t cut out in the middle of a fight, would you?”

  “Don’t make me into somebody I’m not,” Slade said. “I’m not a man to run, but I don’t see trouble here. And even if there were, it’s not my fight. Nobody’s asked me to jump in.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  Slade smiled. Surprising how the dark could change a teenager busting his britches to become a man into a kid looking for something to hold on to. He wondered if he had ever been like that.

  “I don’t imagine Mr. White is going to allow a fifteen-year-old boy to do his hiring.”

  “I’m sixteen,” Gaddy said indignantly, “and Pamela’s already offered to let you work to pay for your horse. I’m just asking you to stay on, that’s all.”

  “You’d better talk it over with your cousin before you start inviting desert bums to take up permanent residence in her bunkhouse. I get the feeling she might object.”

  “Not in your case. She likes you.”

  “She just feels sorry for me.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Gaddy insisted. “I don’t mean to talk against Pamela, she’s a good one for all her persnickety ways, but I never saw her give the time of day to a stranger, particularly one who looks as down on his luck as you. Her Ma taught her to have some pretty fancy notions about the kind of people she takes up with.”

  He was tempted to stay. Even without the trouble, they could use an extra hand. But there were other reasons. Lines of tension seemed to run between him and Pamela. Lord, how that woman could get his blood boiling with just a look.

  If he did stay, it wouldn’t be because he expected anything to come of it; this might be a better place to hide than California. From here he could always take the outlaw trail north to Montana. It would make it even harder for the sheriff to find him.

  But Slade didn’t want to do that. He had never been an outlaw, he had never had anything to do with them, and he didn’t see any reason to let the law push him into doing something he didn’t want to do. Not if every marshall in Texas was on his trail.

  Maybe he should talk to Gaddy about buying one of the horses. It would be better if he left without seeing Pamela again. He hadn’t expected to ever again be so vulnerable to a woman, especially not one so far above him. He could just imagine what Josh White would think if he came back from Santa Fe to find a dust-covered cowboy making eyes at his daughter. He might find an immediate use for those gunslingers Pamela was afraid he had hired.

  Slade decided it would be a good idea if he left while he could still choose the time and manner.

  Chapter 4

  Slade woke with a start. A sixth sense warned him of danger. Gaddy’s slow breathing fell heavily into the silence, but through the open window he could make out the whisper of clothes against rough leaves. Somebody was outside. People frequently moved around at all hours on a ranch this size, but Slade had never been one to turn his back on unexplained noises. Not when something didn’t feel right.

  It took him less than a minute to pull on his clothes and slip his feet into Pamela’s moccasins. Instinctively he buckled on his guns before tiptoeing to the door. A full moon flooded the canyon with a silvery light. Anybody out there wouldn’t find it easy to hide.

  The bunkhouse and a barn with an adjoining corral had been built about a hundred yards from the house in the shadow of a ridge which rose more than two hundred feet into the air. The sandy stream bed, littered with stones and overgrown on both sides by mesquite and an occasional cottonwood, twisted its way through the jumble of brush and boulders between the barn and the ridge.

  Pausing at the door, Slade closed his eyes and listened again. He hoped he would hear the regular plop-plop of a horse’s hooves on the hard-packed yard or the steady shuffle of a man walking openly toward the bunkhouse. Instead he heard the stealthy whisper of a man’s clothes as they rubbed against the brush and the occasional clink of shod hoof on stone.

  Someone didn’t want his presence known.

  Slade reminded himself that checking on night visitors was none of his business, that he was a stranger here, but his instincts told him anyone coming up the creek was an enemy. But he had to be careful. He didn’t know any of the men who worked for Josh White, and he doubted Pamela would forgive him for shooting one of her hands, even by mistake.

  Being careful to keep in the shadows, Slade slipped out the door and around the corner of the bunkhouse. No sound of heels on stone or cloth against wood betrayed his presence. The whispers were loud enough for him to hear them now. There were two of them, and they were coming toward him. He felt an unexpected sigh of relief. Whoever they were, they weren’t headed for the house. At least Pamela was safe.

  Slade absentmindedly let his hand rest on the handle of his gun.

  You said you wanted to get away from guns, he told himself, yet you reach for one at the first sign of trouble. Slade felt beads of perspiration break out on his forehead. In order to be free of guns, he had to learn to take care of trouble without them. And he wouldn’t learn by reaching for his gun before he even knew who, or what, was out there.

  Slade shivered. He wore no shirt, and without the warmth of the sun, the night was cold. He dropped to a crouch and moved toward the sounds. He could hear them clearly now. They were bringing their horses through the brush toward the barn. He couldn’t understand their words, but he knew they weren’t Bar Double-B hands coming in from the night camp. They were here to cause trouble, and they needed their horses to make a quick getaway.

  Once again Slade’s hand found the handle of his gun. He had promised Pamela not to wear them at the ranch. What would she do if he broke his promise the first night?

  He cursed silently. Did he intend to subordinate principle, the ambitions of a lifetime, to an insane hope Pamela White would think kindly of him? If he did, he was an utter fool who deserved to be shot to ribbons. Every instinct told him those men were dangerous, that they would kill him if they got the chance, that only a madman would leave himself defenseless because of a woman.

  But he did it anyway.

  Consciously he forced himself to remove his hand from his gun. Having decided to depend on his brain, Slade knew he couldn’t wait for the intruders to make the first move. He had to surprise them before they were ready; he had to draw them out of the brush.

  “You boys coming in,”—Slade spoke as casually as he could—“or you going to play in the creek all night?”

  The moment Slade opened his mouth, two things happened. First, a point of fire pierced the night and one of the men threw a lighted torch at the hay-filled barn. It fell short. In the same instant, a gun flashed, an explosion shattered the silence, and a searing pain burned Slade’s left arm.

  He had been shot.

  In the split second that followed, Slade drew his own gun and fired three shots, the first directly on center and the others a little to either side of the flash. He heard the soft thud of a bullet encountering flesh followed by a startled whiny and a furious curse. He had hit his target. But before he could congratulate himself on his success, a second torch was lighted and sent arching through the air toward the barn.

  Slade’s next two shots shattered the torch in mid air and showered sparks in all directions. Three bullets crashed into the log wall of the bunkhouse right behind him. Seconds later he heard the sound of pounding hooves as the arsonists galloped away.

  There’s water in the trough between the barn and the corral,” Gaddy called out as he raced across the yard to the barn. “I hope to God it’s full.” His skinny body clothed only in his long underwear, Gaddy resembled a strange, gangly ghostly figure, but the hungry flames left no time for dressing. Slade’s shots had prevented the torch from reaching the barn, but the shower of sparks had ignited the dry hay. If the flames took hold, they’d lose the barn.

  His injured feet and shoulder forgotten, Slade ran after Gaddy. Behind them, lights came on in the ranch house. Soon they would have help.

  The flames raced over the l
oose hay and straw scattered about the barn, but they hadn’t reached the baled hay stacked in the loft yet. The fire would have to eat through the timbers before it could climb that high.

  “Wet down the hay,” Slade called to Gaddy. “I’ll go after the flames.” Almost unbearable pain shot through Slade’s shoulder when he picked up the bucket, but he gritted his teeth, filled the bucket with water, and threw it on the burning straw. The injury cut his strength and spoiled his aim, but he went back for a second bucket.

  He and Gaddy worked as rapidly as they could, but they would have lost the battle if Pamela hadn’t arrived quickly.

  “Get on the pump!” he shouted. “The water’s low in the trough.” Could she pump water as fast as they used it up?

  They worked without talking, concentrating on their tasks, conserving their energy, each aware of what they faced. Slade was sure no one thought of the screaming horses that threatened to break down the corral fence or the escaped arsonists. Nothing mattered except the fire.

  When the last tongue of flame had been doused, Slade stole a look at Pamela. She wore a lace-trimmed bathrobe over her nightgown and a pair of pink slippers on her feet. Her hair fell over her shoulders almost concealing a face flushed from excitement and exertion. She looked as perfectly turned out as she had at dinner that evening. My God, he thought to himself. She doesn’t even get mussed when she puts out fires!

  She was incredibly beautiful, but something about her perfection chilled the desire even as Slade felt it surge through his loins. It was almost as though she wasn’t entirely human. In the pale white glow of the moonlight she looked unreal, like a huge beautiful doll.

  Slade shivered.

  “What happened?” Belva asked, hurrying up. The Bag-shots’ cabin lay further up the valley along the stream bed. Because her size slowed her down, she had arrived too late to be of any help. “I heard enough gunshots to cripple half of Arizona. Then I saw the barn on fire.”

  “Somebody was coming up the creek,” Slade explained. “It woke me up.”