Slaughter Read online

  “Pay attention,” Frank began. “I’m going to tell you what really happened here.”

  Quickly, he went over the same theory he had laid out for Linderman and the Salida del Sol ranch hands. Magnusson’s bushy red eyebrows drew down in a puzzled frown as he listened.

  “Wait a minute,” he said when Frank was finished. He turned his head and called, “Rattigan! Come out here!”

  The driller emerged from behind the shed with a nervous look on his oil-smeared face. At least Frank thought the man looked nervous; it was hard to tell for sure with all those dark smudges.

  “What do you want, Mr. Magnusson?” Rattigan asked as he came forward.

  “Did you see the men who were shooting at you from the ridge?”

  “We sure did,” Rattigan insisted. “We saw them jumping around from tree to tree and rock to rock up there while they were getting into position to massacre us.”

  Frank said, “No, before that, when you heard the first shots. Did you look up there and see anybody then?”

  Rattigan glared at him. “No, we were too busy runnin’ for cover. But we saw plenty of powder smoke from the top of the ridge. At least I did. I can’t speak for all the other fellas.”

  Frank gave Magnusson a meaningful look. “You see, your men can’t say for sure that it was Linderman and his pards shooting at them until after the fighting started.”

  “You really expect me to believe that somebody else was responsible for this bloodshed? That they tricked my men and the cowboys into shooting at each other?”

  “That’s exactly what I believe,” Frank said with a firm nod.

  Linderman spoke up. “You’ve got to admit, it could’ve happened the way Morgan says, Magnusson. I figured it was a loco idea at first, too, but now that I’ve thought about it, I reckon maybe he’s right.”

  “I don’t know,” Magnusson said. “Who’d have a reason to do such a thing?”

  “Now, that’s what I haven’t figured out just yet,” Frank admitted. “But I’m going to.”

  Stubbornly, Magnusson shook his head. “I’ve got to have more proof than you’ve come up with so far, Morgan.”

  “Then give me a chance to get it,” Frank responded without hesitation. “Keep this truce going for the time being while I look into the situation.”

  “I never agreed to any damn truce,” Magnusson muttered.

  “Neither did I,” Linderman said. “But I’m willin’ to tell my boys to steer clear of your rigs for now, Magnusson, if you’ll promise not to cause any trouble for us.”

  “We haven’t been,” Magnusson snapped. “We just want to be left alone to drill for oil.”

  “To stink up the air and ruin the land for our cattle, you mean.”

  Frank held up his hands to forestall any renewal of the old argument that wasn’t going to be settled today. He said, “How about it? Truce?”

  For a long moment, neither of the other men said anything. Then Magnusson growled, “All right, damn it. Truce.”

  Linderman nodded. “Sure. I’ll go along with that. You got to remember one thing, though, Morgan.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t speak for the señora. She may tell Magnusson to take his truce and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”

  “It’s not my truce,” Magnusson said. “It’s Morgan’s.”

  “I don’t care whose truce it is,” Frank said, “as long as the two sides aren’t shooting at each other.”

  Tension was still thick in the air as Frank and Linderman started back up the slope toward the top of the ridge. The drillers started slowly coming out from behind the sheds and the derricks, and some of the cowboys emerged from the trees, still holding their rifles in a threatening manner.

  Frank had explained to Magnusson that he had to return to the top of the ridge to get Goldy and Dog. Also, he wanted to check and see if Linderman’s men had found any sign of the riders he suspected of starting the battle.

  Even if they hadn’t, he intended to have a look for himself. Maybe he would see something that the others had missed.

  Jeff came out of the trees to meet Frank and Linderman. The young cowboy wore a puzzled frown, which seemed to be his most common expression.

  “Hey, Pete,” Jeff said, “you’d better come have a look at this.”

  “What is it?” Linderman asked.

  “Well . . . ” Jeff glanced at Frank. “I hate to say it, but I think maybe Morgan was right.”

  Linderman grunted in surprise. “About there bein’ another bunch of riders?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Jeff led the two of them along the ridge for about twenty yards, then paused and waved a hand toward the ground. “Take a gander at those prints.”

  Linderman hunkered on his heels to study the faint hoof marks on the ground. After a moment he said grudgingly, “They look pretty fresh.”

  “And none of our horses were this far up the slope,” Jeff said.

  Linderman shook his head. “Just because another rider passed along here sometime today doesn’t mean that Morgan’s right.”

  One of the other cowboys stepped forward and held out his hand. Sunlight reflected off something that lay on his work-roughened palm.

  “What about this, Pete?”

  Linderman straightened and took the object from the man. Frank could tell now that it was a used shell from a rifle cartridge. When he saw the frown that creased Linderman’s forehead as the foreman turned the shell over in his fingers, Frank asked, “Mind if I have a look?”

  Linderman tossed it to him. Frank caught the shell. There was nothing unusual about it except . . .

  “Thirty-thirty, isn’t it?” Frank said.

  “Yeah.” Linderman grimaced. “And all of our Winchesters are forty-four-forties.”

  “You’re saying that it didn’t come from one of your rifles.”

  “I reckon not.” Linderman took his hat off, ran his fingers through his hair in annoyance, then clapped the battered Stetson back on. “But damn it, how could they plan on gettin’ away with a thing like that? Didn’t they know we’d figure it out sooner or later?”

  “Do you think you really would have?” Frank asked. “Would you have looked for hoofprints or shells from a different-caliber rifle?” He waved a hand toward the drilling rigs on the other side of the road. “Or would you and the drillers have just kept shooting at each other until one side or the other was wiped out?”

  “It would’ve been them,” one of the punchers muttered. “We had ’em pinned down good an’ proper.”

  “That’s right,” Frank said. “And you would have killed them thinking that you were settling the score for Ed Matthews, when all you really would’ve been doing was the dirty work for whoever keeps stirring up all this trouble.”

  Linderman gave him a challenging stare. “Are you sayin’ that none of what’s been goin’ on here in the valley was the doin’ of those damn drillers?”

  Frank shook his head and said, “I can’t make that claim, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And I’d bet a hat that Magnusson and his men didn’t have anything to do with the attack on Salida del Sol last night.”

  “Well, what the hell do we do now?” Jeff wanted to know.

  “If it was me,” Frank said dryly, “I’d try to round up those horses that stampeded off a while ago. Otherwise, you boys are going to have a long, uncomfortable walk back to the bunkhouse.”

  That brought muttered agreement from some of the men. Like all cowboys everywhere, they didn’t believe in walking anywhere that they could ride, no matter how close it was . . . and the ranch headquarters wasn’t all that close.

  “What about you?” Linderman asked. “What are you gonna do, Morgan?”

  “I thought I’d see if I can follow the sign that the real bushwhackers left behind. They’ve got to be holed up somewhere here in the valley.”

  “They had to do something with all those cows they’ve rustled, too,” Linderman pointed out. “We’ve tried to follow the
trail before but always lost it up in the San Gabriels. You reckon you’ll have better luck than we did?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank said. “But I intend to try.”

  Chapter 24

  Linderman and the other Salida del Sol punchers went to find their horses. Frank didn’t have to do that, because a whistle brought Goldy up the slope to him.

  He swung up into the saddle and rode along the ridge with Dog trailing behind him. Eyes that were still keen despite the years spotted several more hoofprints, and as the trail led down the slope, Frank found even more sign.

  Looked like fourteen or fifteen men, he estimated. A good-sized group. Whoever was out to raise hell in the valley had plenty of gunmen at his disposal.

  That worried Frank. Things seemed to be escalating. Last night, the attack on the barn at Salida del Sol. Today, the attempt to trick the cowboys and the drillers into waging open war on each other.

  Whoever was behind this must be getting impatient, Frank decided. Whether or not that had anything to do with his own arrival in the area, he couldn’t say, but he thought it was possible.

  Somebody wanted the conflict between the oilmen and the cattlemen to explode into a bloody war before Frank had a chance to stop it.

  Those thoughts led his mind down some intriguing paths, but he had more to do than just mull over everything that had happened. He had a trail to follow, too.

  “Might as well earn your keep, Dog,” he said to the big cur. “See if you can pick up the scent of those horses we’re following.”

  Dog ranged ahead, nose to the ground. Frank had confidence in his own tracking ability, but Dog, with his extremely sensitive nose, was better.

  The trail led down the western slope of the ridge and then paralleled it for more than a mile before the rugged, wooded height came to an end. At that point, the riders had turned and headed northeast, cutting across the valley toward the San Gabriel Mountains on the far side.

  He was on Jorge Sandoval’s range now, Frank recalled from the description Stafford had given him of the way the ranches were laid out in the valley. If Sandoval’s plan had worked out and Dolores had agreed to the merger of their two ranches once she inherited Salida del Sol, then they would have controlled by far the largest amount of range in these parts.

  Would Sandoval go so far as to try to ruin his own sister’s ranch so that he could gobble it up? Frank couldn’t answer that question. He didn’t know the man well enough to say one way or the other what he was capable of.

  But it was an intriguing thought, he told himself. When he got a chance to talk to Stafford again, he would suggest to the lawyer that he do some digging into Jorge Sandoval’s background and financial situation.

  Of course, there were other ranchers in the valley who might have designs on Salida del Sol, too. Edwin Northam had no close ties with any of the other cattlemen. In fact, he seemed to go out of his way to distance himself from them. He might not hesitate to try to get his hands on Dolores’s ranch, by fair means or foul.

  Nor could Frank forget that other oilmen had wells in the valley. Victor Magnusson wasn’t the only wildcatter in the San Fernando, just the only one Frank had run into so far. He was never out of sight of at least one derrick as he rode across the valley, and usually he could see six or seven at a time as well as hear the racket that went with them. Magnusson could be telling the truth, and it could still be one of the oilmen behind the trouble.

  All the questions might be answered if Frank could track the bushwhackers to their hideout. He was convinced that the gunmen were also the ones who had carried out the rustling. He just needed to get his hands on one of the varmints and make him talk.

  Dog still had the scent, but he lost it when they came to a creek. Frank sighed as he watched the big cur loping back and forth along the opposite bank.

  The men they were following weren’t greenhorns. Just in case someone was following them, they had ridden one way or the other along the shallow creek to throw off any pursuit. Frank’s only option was to choose a direction and hope that Dog could pick up the scent again.

  And if the bushwhackers had doubled back, then even that might not do any good.

  He was glad he had brought a couple of biscuits from the hotel dining room and slipped them into his saddlebags. This looked like it might be a long day, and he wouldn’t be getting back to town for lunch.

  Frank’s prediction proved to be accurate. He and Goldy and Dog spent several hours riding up and down the creek, checking both sides in both directions for any sign left by the men they were after. It was well after noon before Dog suddenly put his nose to the ground and loped off toward the San Gabriels once again.

  Frank heaved a sigh of relief and dug out one of the biscuits to snack on as he turned Goldy and followed his big, wolflike trail partner.

  Once Dog had the scent again, he headed straight as an arrow toward the mountains. The bushwhackers must have thought that their jog through the creek had thrown off any pursuit, so they didn’t waste time veering back and forth.

  Frank was convinced that they were bound for their hideout, and with Dog on the trail, he had a feeling that he’d be able to find it.

  By late afternoon, they were in the foothills of the San Gabriels, which were heavily wooded. The town of Pasadena was several miles to the east, Frank recalled, but over here the mountains were still wild and only lightly populated.

  Not a bad place for a gang of rustlers and bushwhackers to hole up, in other words.

  Frank scanned the sky over the foothills for smoke from a campfire or stove, but didn’t see any. “Slow down, Dog,” he called to the big cur. “We don’t want to ride right into the middle of that bunch without any warning.”

  Dog slowed down, but the glance he cast over his shoulder told Frank that he didn’t like it. Once he was on the trail of varmints—either four-footed or human—Dog wasn’t one to hold back.

  They had long since left the old wagon road that cut across the San Fernando Valley, the trace that had been established by Remi Nadeau decades earlier. Frank began noticing signs that animals had been driven through here, though. A visible path had been beaten down by their hooves.

  Those rustled cattle, he thought. His pulse quickened at this indication he was on the right trail.

  The path led over a saddle in a long ridge, and then curved into a steep-sided canyon about a hundred yards wide. Frank reined Goldy to a halt just outside the canyon. Instinct told him that his quarry wasn’t too far away.

  “Stay here,” he told Dog in a quiet voice as he dismounted. “I’m going ahead on foot.”

  He led Goldy into a clump of trees and looped the reins around a sapling so that it would be easy enough for the stallion to pull free if necessary. Then he pulled his Winchester from the saddle boot and started into the canyon.

  Frank took it slow and careful, using every bit of cover he could find as he made his way through the canyon. It narrowed down to about fifty yards across.

  If this was the entrance to the gang’s hideout, they were bound to have guards posted somewhere, keeping an eye on the place. Frank didn’t want them to spot him.

  He froze as a faint smell of tobacco smoke drifted to his nose. A moment later he heard a tiny clatter, like a pebble bouncing down a slope.

  There was a sentry somewhere above and ahead of him, he realized. The man was smoking a quirly and moving around enough to have dislodged a rock. That was pretty careless of him, but Frank figured the guard wasn’t really expecting trouble. The outlaws were probably confident that no one knew where their hideout was.

  Frank knew, though. The trail had led here from the site of the battle between the cowboys and the drillers, a battle that had been provoked by the men who were hiding out in this canyon.

  The stolen cattle might be somewhere up ahead, too. Their presence would be the last bit of evidence he needed to make the law take action. And once the outlaws were in custody, he had no doubt some of them would implicate whoever wa
s behind this scheme to keep trouble stirred up in the valley.

  Of course, the rustlers could have already disposed of the cows they had run off, selling them to some unscrupulous cattle buyer who didn’t care what brands had been burned into their hides. That would complicate matters, but Frank still felt like he was on the verge of exposing the plotters.

  He needed to get closer, though, to make sure of what the lawmen would find in the canyon when he led them back here.

  Frank stayed where he was, motionless and silent, until he heard the guard shifting around again. The man coughed. A match rasped on stone as he lit another quirly.

  A faint smile touched Frank’s grim mouth. The hombre might as well be shouting out loud to announce his presence. He was behind some rocks on a ledge, in a place where he could see anyone who came through the canyon.

  Except someone who hugged the stone wall below him and could move quietly enough not to be heard.

  Frank looked long and hard at the other side of the canyon to make sure no sentries were posted over there. There wasn’t a good place for a guard to hide, he decided. The canyon wall was too steep and sheer. And as confident, even arrogant, as this gang seemed to be, they probably thought one sentry was enough.

  Placing his booted feet carefully, Frank slipped along the rocky wall. He kept the Winchester in his right hand, well away from the rocks so that its barrel wouldn’t bump against them and make a racket.

  He had a bad moment when the butt of the sentry’s cigarette fell right in front of his face to land at his feet. It took iron nerves for Frank not to react to the unexpected event, other than coming to a sudden stop. He knew the guard had just tossed the quirly off the ledge without thinking about where it would land. It didn’t mean the man knew he was down here.

  Good thing the cigarette butt with its glowing coal hadn’t hit him on the back of the neck and gone down his shirt collar, he thought with a grin. That might have been harder not to react to.

  He started off again, taking another careful step, then another and another. Soon the guard was behind him and he could move a little faster, although he was still careful to make as little noise as possible.