The Law at Randado Read online

  Danaher asked him how many Apaches, but Booth didn’t know. When he fired the horses started to move, just like that, like a signal, and they didn’t see even one, though they fired at the horses because you know how the bastards cling to the off side of a mount and make you think there’re no riders while all the time they’re ridin’ the hell out.

  He told that the other advance man was watching the place and they’d better shake their tails up there if they were going to have ’Pache for dinner.

  Danaher let Booth go first, then told the others to follow and he swore if a man made a sound he’d break him in two. But their excitement was up again and they did make sounds in the loose shale and brushing through mesquite and all Danaher could do was swear to himself.

  The other advance rider was not in sight, but they found the dead Apache right away. Booth said damned if he oughtn’t to lift the greasy scalp…show his wife he was really out here…but Danaher told him to keep away. Frye came up to him then. He watched Frye kneel over the dead Apache and heard him say something about the Apache being only a boy. Not over fourteen.

  Well, that was too bad. Danaher had live Apaches to think about. He directed his men to the clearing where the horses had been and when they got there the other advance man who had been with Booth was coming out of the brush on the other side. He was running and pointing behind him.

  “John, they’re runnin’ like blue hell down a draw!”

  “How many?”

  “Not a mile ahead! John, we got ’em runnin’ for the open!”

  “How many!”

  The man reached them and he stopped, breathing heavily. “I didn’t see ’em…I heard ’em! This draw’s full of scrub pine—must slant down two miles before she opens up. Way off over the trees you can see open country where the draw comes out. And all the time I could hear the red sons beatin’ down through the trees!”

  “But you didn’t see them come out,” Danaher said.

  “Settin’ there was time wasted. I came back to get you.”

  Danaher swung up over his saddle and went through the brush at a gallop. The others followed. They topped the knoll that formed the beginning of the draw, listening and hearing nothing, but seeing off in the distance, below and off beyond the slanting brown-green smooth-appearing tops of the scrub pines, the dust trail. Dust that was rising thinly to nothing and pinpoint dots inching into the wide open flat glare of the distance. Booth said, “We’re going to have us a late supper, but damn’ if it won’t be worth it.”

  Danaher was ready and he turned in the saddle to make sure that his men were. This is what they had come for and by God they’d run the Apaches till they caught them. His men were ready, sitting their mounts eagerly. All of them except the boy, Kirby Frye.

  He was standing in front of his horse, holding the reins close to the bit rings and gazing up at the wild brush and rocks that followed a looming jog back off to the left of them.

  Danaher asked, “You coming?”

  Frye’s gaze swung to Danaher. “I don’t know about chasing after that dust.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It doesn’t seem right they’d be running for open country.”

  One of the men said, “John, we got to move!”

  Danaher scowled. “Hold on!” And to Frye, “Make some sense.”

  “I never heard of an Apache getting himself caught out on flat land. They mostly camp high, even if it’s a dry camp, and always if somebody’s on their sign.”

  Danaher said, “But if we surprised them they didn’t have a choice but to streak for the best opening.”

  Frye shook his head. “I never heard of a Chiricahua raiding party being even approached without their knowing about it.”

  “That ’Pache over yonder,” Booth sneered, “sure’n hell opened a surprise package when he stuck his head out the bushes.” Booth’s eyes held on Frye. “Who says you know so goddamn much about ’Paches? That stuff last night about no fire—”

  “The one you got was a boy,” Frye interrupted. “He hadn’t yet learned the finer points.”

  Booth glanced at the rider next to him. “He’s a goddamn Indin lover. Chief No-Fire.” He looked back to Frye. “Chief No-Fire-In-His-Pants. Let me ask you a question, Chief. Are you tellin’ us this ’cause you’re an Indin lover or ’cause you’re too goddamn scared to go down that draw?”

  Danaher almost interrupted, but he glanced at Frye and suddenly checked himself. The boy hadn’t moved, hadn’t flickered his eyes from Booth’s face. Booth was almost broadside to him, the Remington rolling, block across his lap, and pointed just off from Frye, and the boy still held his reins short, but his right hand was at his side now, thumb almost touching the hickory butt of his Colt.

  Frye said, “Mister, were you asking a question, or telling me a fact?” Booth had been leaning over the saddle horn, but now he straightened slowly and the barrel of the Remington edged a wavering inch toward Frye.

  “Take it any way you want,” Booth said.

  “If it wasn’t a question,” Frye said, “then you better start doin’ something with that Remington.”

  “Hold on!” Danaher broke in. He had been intrigued by the boy’s calmness, by the way Frye stared back at a rifle barrel almost on him and dumped the play back into the other man’s lap; but it had to end. And Danaher was the man to end it.

  “Time’s wasting.” He glared at Frye. “Get it out, quick. Why don’t you think it’s them? Even though you can see their dust.”

  “We make dust just like they do,” Frye said. “I’ll judge they sent a man back to look us over sometime yesterday afternoon.”

  “Go on.”

  “They decided we were getting too close, so the thing to do was throw us off. It was either keeping their skins or the horses. Their skins got the vote and the horses were elected to side-track us. That’s what you see down there, the Hatch and the Hodges Stage horses they took from Galluro.”

  Danaher said, “And you think the braves are up here in the rocks somewhere.”

  Frye nodded.

  “That boy getting shot,” Danaher said. “Was that part of the side-tracking?”

  A few of his men laughed, Booth one of them.

  “That’s the way they learn,” Frye said. “They either graduate or get dropped out of school suddenly.”

  “What else?” Danaher said.

  “The rest is guess.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “There were three boys and one warrior, the instructor you might say. Probably this run on Galluro was the first raid they’ve taken part in. They were to just take care of the horses and get them back home somehow. Now there weren’t enough for an ambush and we were too close to be outrun, so they had only one thing left to do. Throw us off and get the hell home.”

  “You admit that’s a guess,” Danaher said.

  “Most of it. I wasn’t there when they talked it over.”

  Danaher shook his head. “That dust over there is something we can see. Maybe they’re only horses as you say, but it’s something there and you don’t have to guess to know it.”

  Frye nodded. “Yes sir. You coming back this way?”

  Danaher looked at him. “You mean you’re going to stay here?”

  “They come back for their dead when they can.”

  “That’s presupposing quite a bit.”

  Frye shrugged. “When you come back I’ll ride on to Tucson with you.”

  Danaher hesitated. There were words he could use to cut a fresh know-it-all kid down to manageable size. Words almost in his mouth. But he hesitated. The way the boy said it wasn’t cheeky or show-off; it was perhaps just the words themselves, if you took them alone. So he hesitated because he was unsure and later on he was glad that he did.

  He took his men down the draw, down through the scrub pine to the plain and pointed them into the distance, ran them until mounts and men were salt- and sweat-caked, halted them for the sake of the horses not the men, moved them again
, gaining on the dust cloud, now making out pinpoint dots again, drawing closer, closer, until finally—there it was.

  He drew up his posse and sat heavily, silently watching the riderless Hatch and Hodges Line stage horses streak into the distance again.

  And all the way back to the draw, in the approaching dusk, he was silent. He was not angry because he had made a mistake. He did not expect to be right all the time. This was even a justifiable miscalculation for that matter. A bird in the hand always and any way you looked at it being worth more than the two in the bush. Well, maybe not always. He was thinking of Kirby Frye and the matter-of-fact way he had read the situation. No, the one in the hand isn’t always the best. Not if somebody tells you the bush is right under your nose and all you have to do is stick your hand in.

  Reaching the top of the draw Danaher was thinking: But he better not say, “I told you so.”

  Moving into the clearing he expected to see Frye get up and watch them ride in. Wasn’t that him lying over there? It was in his mind and at the same moment Booth, swinging down next to him, answered the question.

  “That’s the ’Pache I shot!”

  The Apache boy had been left in the brush, but now, strangely, he was near the edge of the clearing. And still Frye was not in sight.

  “John, there’s a note on him.”

  “What?”

  “Right on his chest, a rock weightin’ it down!” Booth looked at it, even though he couldn’t read, before handing it to Danaher.

  It was a yellow sheet of paper that had been folded twice but was now open and the side he looked at was a receipt form with the information that thirty-three cavalry remounts had been delivered and—

  Danaher turned the paper between his fingers. Frye’s message was on the other side, written in pencil.

  Don’t move the dead one. 35 paces off his right shoulder in the brush is a wounded Cherry-cow. Gutshot. Don’t give him water. Will see you by dark.

  And the last line: Horses run like hell without saddles, don’t they?

  One thought struck Danaher at that moment. It had been building in him since meeting Frye, evolving slowly as Frye, step by step, advanced in Danaher’s estimation; first, seeing him talking to the Coyotero tracker; then last night, he was the one who had suggested no fire; then the way he stood up to Booth’s nervous Remington with ice water in his eyes and a voice like he was asking the time of day; and the fact that he had read this Apache scheme like words on a printed page.

  He’d make one hell of a fine deputy, was Danaher’s thought. And he realized now that perhaps he had been thinking it, or half wishing it, all the time.

  The note clinched it in Danaher’s mind. He carries a pencil! Maybe he can’t spell Chiricahua, but by God “Cherry-cow” was close enough and all the rest of the words were right.

  He was still thinking about this when Kirby Frye returned. He came out of the brush and was next to Danaher before the sheriff realized he was there.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “After the other two.”

  So he was right, Danaher thought. Four altogether. “You get them?”

  “One. The other disappeared.”

  In the almost dark Danaher studied him. “Probably the older brave.”

  “I never got close enough to tell.”

  “Why’d they come back?”

  “To pick up the dead one. They thought we’d all gone.”

  “Well, three dead out of four isn’t bad.”

  Frye looked at Danaher anxiously. “The one I hit in the belly’s dead?”

  “Booth finished him.” Danaher asked then, “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t create him,” Frye answered. “I don’t see where I had a right to uncreate him.”

  “What about the other one? You killed him.”

  “Not when he was lying on the ground gutshot.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  Frye hesitated. “Mr. Danaher, don’t you see a difference?”

  He did, but he wasn’t going to stand in a mesquite thicket all night discussing Apache-country ethics, so he said, “Maybe we’ll talk about it over a beer sometime.”

  And he was thinking: No question of it now. He’s my man.

  After they reached Tucson he asked Frye if he’d mind stopping by the jail. Danaher relaxed a little and smiled to himself when Frye said yes sir, he’d be happy to. Might even buy the boy a drink, he decided, after they had something to eat.

  And later, after tacos and a glass of beer, now sitting in the jail office, Danaher with his back to the roll-top, Frye appearing comfortable slouched in a Douglas chair, both smoking cigarettes—

  “I’d like to ask you a few things,” Danaher began.

  “Go ahead.”

  “There’s a reason.”

  Frye shrugged. “I figured there was.”

  “Well…you said you were from Randado.”

  “Originally.”

  “How long ago?”

  Frye looked at the beamed ceiling, then at Danaher. “I was born there. My dad was a mining man then and felt he ought to work the Huachucas. So we lived in Randado while he prospected.”

  “And how long did you stay?”

  “I left the first time when I was fourteen.”

  “For where?”

  “With a trail herd.”

  “Old man Sundeen’s?”

  Frye nodded. “Yes sir. That was before Willcox became a pickup point for the railroad. We drove them all the way to Ellsworth.”

  “I imagine you learned a few things on Douglas Street,” Danaher said seriously.

  Frye grinned. “A few things.”

  “And then what?”

  “The next year we drove part of the herd to McDowell and the rest over to San Carlos and Old Val sold them all as government beef for the reservation.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I didn’t go back with them that trip, but stayed on at San Carlos and worked for the agent a while.”

  “And that’s where you learned about Apaches.”

  “I learned some.”

  “I guess you did.”

  “That same year my folks moved up to Prescott and my dad started a freight line with what he’d scratched out of the Huachucas.”

  “He sounds like the one prospector in a thousand,” Danaher observed, “with some sense.”

  “All he wanted was enough to start a business with,” Frye explained.

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Well, my dad was always good for his word.”

  “You favor him?”

  “I don’t know…they always said I favored my mother. She was from right here in Tucson. One of the Kirby girls…her dad was a lawyer, W. F. Kirby?”

  “I’ve only been here for a few years,” Danaher said. “What did you do, work for your dad?”

  “Yes sir. I drove one of his freight wagons.”

  “Did you help him keep books?”

  “Some.”

  “Your mother saw that coming when she taught you to read and write.”

  Frye looked at him surprised. “How’d you know that?”

  “You don’t talk like you came out of the hills, but you haven’t had time to go to school. Which did you get tired of first,” he said then, “the freight wagon or the ledger?”

  “You sure know a lot about me.”

  “You left, didn’t you?”

  “Yes sir. I went to work for a man supplying remounts to the cavalry.”

  “How long did you do that?”

  “For him, a couple of years.”

  “Then you went in business for yourself.”

  He frowned, the frown changing to a grin as Frye shook his head. “I don’t know why I’m doing any talking.”

  “Did you work alone?”

  “I had two Coyotero boys.”

  “And they taught you a little more.”

  “A lot more.”

  “Where’d you sell?”

 
“Huachuca mostly. I’d just sold a string of bang-tails there when Davis said he was going to Galluro and asked did we want to come along.”

  “Was that tracker of his one of your boys?”

  “Dandy Jim? No, he works just for the Fifth Cavalry. My boys quit on the trip before that one, so I took on a partner.”

  “The one who was with you at Galluro.”

  “Yes sir. But he didn’t like to work much. I was glad when he said no about going with you; that gave me a chance to break our partnership. It was just on a trial.”

  Danaher was silent. Finally he said, “Then you haven’t been back to Randado in about ten years.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You remember Old Val Sundeen.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And his boy?”

  “I remember him. He was about six years older than me then.”

  “Phil.”

  “That’s right, Phil.”

  “Did you get along with him?”

  “Well—”

  “Not too good, uh?”

  “Not too.”

  “Phil’s running the spread now. Old Val’s got something eating at his insides and he hardly gets out of bed.”

  Frye said, “That’s too bad,” frowning.

  “You remember R.D. Tindal?”

  “I remember Mr. Tindal. He had a girl, Milmary.”

  “He still does. You remember Beaudry?”

  “The name’s familiar.”

  “What about Harold Mendez?”

  Frye shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Harold’s deputy at Randado, but he’s quitting.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you want his job?”

  “What does it pay?”

  Danaher had expected him to hesitate. He stared at Frye slouched comfortably in the chair returning his gaze calmly. “Seventy-five a month,” Danaher answered, “plus a dollar for each drunk and disorderly arrest. You get something else if you have to collect taxes. I suppose it’s less than you might make trading horses, but it’s steadier. Do you want the job?”