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saddle partners, hey?
Sure, Gar. Johnny did not look again at Lacey. He looked into the once
bleak blue eyes of Mullins. I ride better with a partner. You got that stuff
for the ranch?
Yeah.
Then if you ll pick up my horse in the
willows, yonder, I ll say good-bye to Mary. We d best be getting back. Uncle
Tom ll be worried.
Gar Mullins chuckled, walking across the street, arm in arm with Johnny.
Well, he needn t be, Gar said. He needn t be.
In Victorio s Country
The four riders, hard-bitten men bred to the desert and the gun, pushed
steadily southward. Red Clanahan, a monstrous big man with a wide-jawed
bulldog face and a thick neck descending into massive shoulders, held the
lead. Behind him, usually in single file but occasionally bunching, trailed
the others.
It was hot and still. The desert of southern Arizona s Apache country was
rarely pleasant in the summer, and this day was no exception. Bronco Smith,
who trailed just behind Red, mopped his lean face with a handkerchief and
cursed fluently, if monotonously.
He had his nickname from the original meaning of the term wild and unruly and
the Smith was a mere convenience, in respect to the custom that insists a man
have two names. The Dutchman defied the rule by having none at all, or if he
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had once owned a name, it was probably recorded only upon some forgotten
reward poster lining the bottom of some remote sheriff s desk drawer. To the
southwestern desert country he was simply and sufficiently, the Dutchman.
As for Yaqui Joe, he was called just that, or was referred to as the
breed and everyone knew without question who was indicated. He was a
wide-faced man with a square jaw, stolid and silent, a man of varied frontier
skills, but destined to follow always where another led. A man who had known
much hardship and no kindness, but whose commanding virtue was loyalty.
Smith was a lean whip of a man with slightly graying hair, stooped shoulders,
and spidery legs. Dried and parched by desert winds, he was as tough as
cowhide and iron. It was said that he had shot his way out of more places than
most men had ever walked into, and he would have followed no man s leadership
but that of Big Red Clanahan.
The Dutchman was a distinct contrast to the lean frame of Smith, for he was
fat, and not in the stomach alone, but all over his square, thick-boned body.
Yet the blue eyes that stared from his round cheeks were sleepy, wise, and
wary.
There were those who said that Yaqui Joe s father had been an Irishman, but
his name was taken from his mother in the mountains of Sonora. He had been an
outlaw by nature and choice from the time he could crawl, and he was minus a
finger on his left hand, and had a notch in the top of his ear. The bullet
that had so narrowly missed his skull had been fired by a man who never missed
again. He was buried in a hasty grave somewhere in the Mogollons.
Of them all, Joe was the only one who might have been considered a true
outlaw. All had grown up in a land and time when the line was hard to draw.
Big Red had never examined his place in society. He did not look upon himself
as a thief or as a criminal, and would have been indignant to the point of
shooting had anybody suggested he was either of these. However, the fact was
that Big Red had long since strayed over the border that divides the merely
careless from the actually criminal. Like many another westerner he had
branded unbranded cattle on the range, as in the years following the War
Between the States the cattle were there for the first comer who possessed a
rope and a hot iron.
It was a business that kept him reasonably well supplied with poker and
whiskey money, but when all available cattle wore brands, it seemed to him the
difference in branded and unbranded cattle was largely a matter of time. All
the cattle had been mavericks after the war, and if a herd wore a brand it
simply meant the cattleman had reached them before he did. Big Red accepted
this as a mere detail, and a situation that could be speedily rectified with a
cinch ring, and in this he was not alone.
If the cattleman who preceded him objected with lead, Clanahan accepted this
as an occupational hazard.
However, from rustling cattle to taking the money itself was a short step,
and halved the time consumed in branding and selling the cattle. Somewhere
along this trail Big Red crossed, all unwittingly at the time, the shadow line
that divides the merely careless from the actually dishonest, and at about the
time he crossed this line, Big Red separated from the man who had ridden
beside him for five long, hard frontier years.
The young hardcase who had punched cows and ridden the trail herds to Kansas
at his side was equally big and equally Irish, and his name was Bill Gleason.
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When Clanahan took to the outlaw trail, Gleason turned to the law. Neither
took the direction he followed with any intent. It was simply that Clanahan
failed to draw a line that Gleason drew, and that Gleason, being a skillful
man on a trail, and a fast hand with a gun, became the sheriff of the country
that held his home town of Cholla.
The trail of Big Red swung as wide as his loop, and he covered a lot of
country. Being the man he was, he soon won to the top of his profession, if
such it might be called. And this brought about a situation.
Cholla had a bank. As there were several big ranchers in the area, and two
well-paying gold mines, the bank was solvent, extremely so. It was fairly,
rumor said, bulging with gold. This situation naturally attracted attention.
Along the border that divides Mexico from Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas was
an ambitious and overly bloodthirsty young outlaw known as Ramon Zappe. Cholla
and its bank intrigued him, and as his success had been striking and even
brilliant, he rode down upon the town of Cholla with confidence and seven
riders.
Dismounting in front of the bank, four of the men went inside, one of them
being Zappe himself. The other four, with rifles ready, waited for the town to
react, but nothing happened. Zappe held this as due to his own reputation, and
strutted accordingly.
The bank money was passed over by silent and efficient tellers, the bandits
remounted, and in leisurely fashion began to depart. And then something
happened that was not included in their plans. It was something that created
an impression wherever bad men were wont to gather.
From behind a stone wall on the edge of town came a withering blast of fire,
and in the space of no more than fifty yards, five of the bandits died. Two
more were hung to a convenient cottonwood on the edge of town. Only one man,
mounted upon an exceptionally fast horse, escaped.
Along the dim trails this was put down to chance,
but one man dissented, and that man was Big Red
Clanahan, for Big Red had not forgotten the
hard-bitten young rider who had accompanied him
upon so many long trails, and who had stood beside him
to cow a Dodge City saloon full of
gunfighters. Big Red remembered Bill
Gleason, and smiled.
Twice in succeeding months the same thing happened, and they were attended by
only one difference. On those two occasions not one man survived.
Cholla was distinctly a place to stay away from.
Big Red was intrigued and tantalized. Although he would have been puzzled by
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the term, Big Red was in his own way an artist. He was also a tactician, and a
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