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  Rash’s voice, pregnant with irony and sarcasm, interrupted sharply: “Say, Buck, remember we got a couple of prisoners here who got three thousand dollars of stage company money.”

  Buck vaguely heard. He was lost in the fabulous mystery of the level, warm eyes on the couch beside him. His answer was offhand and indifferent. “Your dinero, Colonel. They haven’t had time to spend it, so I reckon they got it hid out somewhere. Prompt ’em a little, Rash. They’ll tell you where it’s stashed away.”

  He turned back to Cynthia and only vaguely heard a gasp as Rash’s gun barrel was rammed heartlessly into a man’s ribs. “Cyn, let’s you an’ me go out an’ harness the buggy horse. We’ll have to drive into Colfax an’ get you acquainted with Tess. That’s my sister. You’ll like her.”

  Cynthia got up slowly, her eyes still holding the glance of Buck. She was breathing a little irregularly when she smiled. “I’d love to, Buck.”

  Rash’s protesting, angry grumble came to them as they passed through the doorway side-by-side. “Listen, gol dang it, don’t forget to drive back up to the house an’ get our freight here.” He pointed vindictively at the two sullen prisoners bound to their chairs. “They gotta go, too, y’know.”

  Buck nodded absently and Cynthia smiled up into his eyes as they disappeared into the shadows outside. Colonel Rash turned in monumental disgust to the notorious Dave James. “Did ya ever see anythin’ as sickenin’ as two people in love? Damn! Fairly turns my stomach.”

  James lowered his bushy eyebrows in sympathetic understanding. “Ain’t it nauseatin’? I’m sort o’ glad I’ll be in jail where I won’t have to look at all the mush they’ll be droolin’ over.”

  Cash Todd nodded agreeably. “Yeah. ’Specially since a man gets fed real food, like chili beans in jail, an’ Buck’ll be gettin’ them indigestible things like smashed potatoes an’ pie an’ the like.”

  From down by the barn came floating back to the men in the cabin a musical laugh that rode the dingy night like a fresh blessing. Each man looked at the others, and then all three sagged sourly and shook their heads in funereal unison.

  Taos Man

  Chapter One

  Down off the ledge of rusty, red rocks he came, leaning back a little in the saddle, his smoky gray eyes on the steep trail and his generous, full mouth pulled back a little against his teeth. The bay horse was head down, snorting softly as though he, too, was uneasy over the treacherous, serrated bony ribs that led down into the Santa Ynez Valley below.

  Coke Bright was his name. It was a name that hadn’t been heard in the Santa Ynez Valley for close to seven years. There were still some Brights in the valley, though, one family of them. Coke’s uncle, aunt, and Cousin Jack. They were all that was left of the old stock that had come in with a long rifle and powerful back below narrowed, hard eyes, back in the early days. Time and the tide of progress had weakened the strain, robbed it of the durability and blind courage that had driven it there in the first place.

  Now Coke Bright was back and somewhere, dimly in the back of people’s minds, the name was musically familiar. Still, memory failing, they shrugged. Another drifter, one more hungry rider passing through Santa Ynez, staying long enough to cadge a few drinks, some meals, a little cowpunching, and a few silver dollars, then he’d drift on, too, like all of the breed—always broke, restless, quiet, and efficient. All members of a peculiar, wandering tribe of men who were constantly riding on, out of the valley and into the setting sun of their destinies, never returning.

  Coke put up his horse at Martin’s Livery Barn. He stood aimlessly outside in the early dusk of the warm summer night and listened to the noises coming from the emigrant camp next to the livery stable. In the shadows were some huge, gaunt outlines of Conestogas. There was a smell of frying meat, sort of greasily appetizing. Nostalgia swept over the lean rider and he half hesitatingly turned toward the drab, colorless emigrants. At their fires he would find hospitality and could lose himself in the monotony of their dull conversations. Anyway, he wouldn’t be lonely.

  He walked among the people with their rough, homespun clothing and thick, heavy, clodhopper boots. The women were tanned with the scars of the land they had crossed, an immense, primitive land of friendliness and harshness. Kids were playing, but all the while their big, puzzled eyes watched the elders surreptitiously, showing the doubt and wonder that went on inside their heads. Coke bumped into a big, rheumy-eyed man with a rich chestnut beard. He’d been watching a girl step down from one of the high wagons.

  He stepped back quickly and smiled apologetically. “I’m sorry, pardner, wasn’t watchin’ where I was goin’.”

  For just a second a fire of irritation burned high on each of the big man’s cheeks beneath his baleful eyes, then it vanished. He looked at Coke’s heavily silvered spurs, his sagging, worn, and ominous .45, at his careless, half-Mexican, half-Indian clothing of loose-fitting, fringed buckskin shirt worn outside a heavy pair of California pants. His eyes swept back upward to the cowboy’s face. “You a native hereabouts?”

  “No. Just a traveler.”

  It didn’t satisfy the big man. Coke was obviously what he meant, whether he could put it into words or not. He frowned and shook his head. “What I mean is, you’re a Westerner, ain’t ya?”

  Coke nodded slightly. There was a slow crescendo of loping horses, en masse, borne on the warm evening air and the sound of men calling to one another. Coke heard the words plainly as the riders thundered past the livery barn. “I know damned well he come this away. Hell, we follered his sign plumb over the summit an’ even found where he slithered down them danged red cliffs. Gawd, a man’s gotta be desperate to cross over up there.” There was a snatch of an answer and the dusty, sweaty posse men swept past. “Yeah. You’d damned well be desperate too if you’d….” They were gone and the ribbon of their hoarse voices was muffled by the other noises of the town.

  Coke hadn’t been listening to the big emigrant and he knew from the man’s face that he’d been asked a question. “How was that, stranger? All them horses a-goin’ by drowned you out.”

  “I said come over to my wagon an’ we’ll eat. I wanna ast some questions about the country ahead.”

  Coke sighed slightly and nodded. “I’ll foller ya.” The big man’s name was Hause, Karl Hause. He was from Indiana. He had a good wagon and plenty of animals to pull it, plus several head of critters that were herded with the communal flock. His wife was a raspy-voiced woman with a tremendous bosom and a jutting, indomitable jaw. She tossed a long, wavy lock of graying black hair out of her face as she poked at the smoking little cooking fire. She nodded brusquely when her husband introduced Coke. “Set.”

  Coke sat, cross-legged, and eased his gun thoughtfully around in front where it lay against his belt buckle. The movement was unconscious and went unnoticed by all the family. All of them, that is, except the girl who had just come around the end of the huge Conestoga wagon, a wooden water bucket on her arm. She had seen Coke unconsciously place his gun where it was instantly available and stopped in her tracks. Fidelity Hause had the rich, golden coloring of youth with a suntan. Her figure was clean-limbed, full, and firm; the violet blue eyes that were pinned on the buckskin-shirted stranger at the cooking fire were deep-set, wide, and altogether beautiful. She tossed her taffy hair and went up to the fire where her mother pointed out a spot near the cooking fire for the water bucket.

  Coke moved a little, so the powerful reek of Hause’s charred, stubby pipe wouldn’t get in his eyes. He didn’t smoke and couldn’t understand how anyone else could—especially when the thing smelled as foul as Hause’s pipe. He watched the emigrant’s eyes and saw no sign of undue moisture. He was lost in a maze of fascination at watching the heavy, grayish clouds of smoke roll freely from the man’s mouth and nose as he talked.

  “We come on from Taos. You know where that is?” “I reckon. I was born there.”

  Hause’s ugly, rheumy, mud-colored eyes widened a little. “That so? Well, now, I
hear men from Taos are ring-tailed hellers. They’s a feller named Carson lives over there. Some sort of scout or somethin’. He told me….”

  Coke was smiling. He knew Kit Carson’s uncontrollable love of scaring the daylights out of emigrants. “Carson was more’n likely spoofin’ ya. He gets a big kick out of that.”

  “That so? Well, in that case it’s a laugh on me.” He removed the vile pipe from his mouth and spat a resounding stream against a massive iron-tired wagon wheel. “Now, then, young man, tell me how far’s it from this here Santa Ynez to the next water?”

  “About forty miles. If you’re headin’ west on the Oregon Trail, your next campsite’ll be Chacón Springs.” He smoothed off the churned-up ground with the palm of his hand and laboriously drew a crude map of the country ahead. Karl Hause was bent over, absorbed in the sketch, when some sixth sense made Coke raise his head quickly. Hause’s daughter had come up and was looking at the dust drawing.

  Karl Hause looked up quickly, annoyed at the interruption. He saw the stranger looking at his daughter and reluctantly took the pipe out of his mouth. “This here is my daughter. Fidelity, this here is…is….”

  “Coke Bright, ma’am.” Coke was on his feet and conscious of the grease stains on his clothing and the dust on his boots. He smiled and removed his flat-brimmed hat. Fidelity saw that his hair was a sort of brownish-blond color. She nodded slightly, un-smilingly; she remembered the gun and looked pointedly at it. Coke reddened. He knew what she meant; he had heard it before from emigrants. Native Westerners were inherent killers. They were crude, reckless, and unscrupulous, like the land they lived in. She felt his hungry eyes on her and started to turn away.

  Coke broke the awkward silence. “It’s a big country, ma’am. It don’t pay to go around unprepared.” She knew what he meant and her eyes flickered over the sagging gun in its shiny holster for the quickest part of a second before she answered.

  “Yes. I can see that. Also, I understand that guns are awfully handy for robbing stages and travelers, too.”

  Coke was stunned, and watched her walk back by the cooking fire with a startled look on his face. Robbing stages and travelers. There was some kind of an inner warning ringing somewhere in the back of his mind. He was still standing erect when he became aware of Karl Hause’s voice lifted in a garrulous, plaintive sort of appeal.

  “Set down, Bright. Women’re always bein’ nasty ’bout somethin’ or th’ other. Now, then, if we take this here trail to Chacón Springs, startin’ at sunup, you reckon we’d git there by aft’noon, allowin’ fer no breakdowns?”

  “Don’t see why not.” Coke’s frowning features were on the dust sketch, but in his mind’s eye was a thoroughly wonderful, tall, lithesome figure of a woman walking away from him toward the cooking fire. He made a sudden decision and looked up at Karl Hause, who was methodically knocking out his pipe dottle against a small rock. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll ride with you as far as the Springs an’ show you the trail from there to the Buckthorn, the next town, which isn’t a town at all. It’s a tradin’ post for the Navajos and southern Apaches.”

  Hause accepted the big tin plate from his sturdy, tightlipped wife without looking up. He was plainly embarrassed. “Now, then, look here. Hell, man, you don’t have to go to all that there bother. We’ll….”

  Mrs. Hause cut him off by shoving another steaming plate past him, so that he had to lean back, toward Coke Bright.

  “Thanks, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Hause was turning away when the frontiersman spoke. She hesitated, surprised, then threw him a quick, suspicious, but not ungrateful nod. Being thanked for anything, since leaving Indiana, was an unheard-of, unsuspected luxury.

  Coke turned back to Hause. “I’ll go over to the livery barn an’ fetch my sleepin’ gear an’ camp outside your wagon.” He ate in silence and the hot, thick beef gravy was foreign to his digestive tract, which had become accustomed to wolfing down cold venison and tacos or piki fixed over a bed of hot stones with, if his luck was good, a baked prairie chicken.

  Chapter Two

  Santa Ynez traded one kind of noise for another as darkness set in. The feverish, anxious commerce of the daytime gave way with the passing of the sunlight to a more raucous, lingering sort of bedlam. The saloons were running full tilt and the banging of off-tune musical instruments was audible over the squeals of painted ladies and rough cowmen mixed in with a sprinkling of the younger emigrants.

  Coke was half asleep in the watery moonlight, the scented night air washing over him like a benediction, when a heavily shod boot came abruptly up against his ribs. He grunted and his eyes flipped open. “Easy there, pardner, this ain’t no rag pile… it’s a man sleepin’.”

  For a moment there was no answer and Coke looked up at the hulk of the young emigrant who towered over him. He expected to hear a mumbled apology and was mildly surprised when the stranger stooped down roughly, seized the foot of his blankets, and straightened up with a quick savage jerk. Coke spilled out onto the ground, rolled once, and was on his stockinged feet. There was just a second’s hesitation, while the arrogant face before him was wreathed in a sardonic smile.

  Coke Bright wasn’t a tall man, nor was he especially heavily set, but he had that lithe, supple force that far outweighed either sturdiness or bulk. He minced up close and his balled up fists, white and blurred in the faint half light of the summer night, struck out venomously. The big man swore thickly, spat, and waded in. Coke side-stepped the rush, caught a brief smell of liquor and horse sweat, and fired his right fist with his shoulder down behind it. The blow caught the big emigrant flat-footed. It sounded like the crack of a drover’s whip when it connected, just aft of the stranger’s ear. The emigrant sagged, took two weak steps, and went down across Coke’s bedding like a pole-axed steer.

  Coke didn’t hear anyone coming up until he heard a bull bass behind him. He spun, crouched. Karl Hause came up, carrying a swinging lantern that threw off a wavering, yellowish light. “What’s going on out here?”

  Coke shrugged. “Damned if I know. Some clod-hopper dumped me out of my blankets.” He jutted his chin Indian fashion toward the relaxed man on the ground. “That’s the varmint over there.”

  Hause went over, knelt down, and rolled the man. He grunted in surprise. “Hell, you’ve gone an’ knocked Abner Larson plumb cold.” There was dis-belief in Hause’s voice. “What’d you use? A club?” His eyes ran quickly over the silhouette of Coke’s lean figure as the frontiersman opened his mouth to answer.

  Another voice broke in. A soft, bitter voice with a heavy tinge of sarcasm in it. “No, Mister Bright wouldn’t use a club, Father, he’d use his gun.”

  Coke didn’t have to look behind him to know who said it, but he looked anyway. Fidelity Hause, her mass of taffy hair a faint, golden halo in the weak moonlight, stood with bitter eyes watching her father bringing Abner Larson around. She ignored Coke.

  “Who’s this here Larson, anyway?”

  Fidelity Hause’s big, violet eyes swept up to him with a flash of scorn. “He’s an honest man…an emigrant, Mister Bright. He’s what you Westerners call a clodhopper, and he’s my fiancé.”

  Coke groaned inwardly and looked back at Larson, who was sitting weakly where he had fallen, rubbing an exploratory hand gingerly over the back of his head. He studied the big man’s face and wondered what a handsome girl like Fidelity could see in the massive, coarse, harsh features of Larson.

  Karl Hause got stiffly to his feet, picked up the lantern, and stood in indecision for a moment before he spoke. “We got to be out o’ here with the first light o’ day. Let’s all get to bed.”

  It made sense, but wasn’t particularly appropriate. Larson got slowly to his feet and pointed thick fingers at Coke. “Who in hell’s that?”

  Before Hause could answer, Coke took a quick step forward. “Watch your talk, clodhopper. There’s a lady standin’ here.”

  Ab Larson made a rumbling sound deep in his chest and leaned a little forward.
Karl Hause stepped between the two men. “Now then, cut that out. Fidelity, you get back in the wagon.” The swish of her clothing told Coke that the girl was obeying her father. He didn’t dare take his eyes off the menacing emigrant, but he could picture the scornful glare the girl tossed at him as she left, and he writhed inwardly.

  Karl Hause turned back to the two men and his face was wreathed in a dark frown that made his mud-colored eyes appear malevolent. “Look-a-here, you two, this thing was a mistake. Ab, you hadn’t ought to fall over a man, then get hard about it.” Larson didn’t answer but his glowering look was sufficient.

  Hause faced Coke. “Bright, you’re too quick with your hands. We don’t want no trouble,” he spat exasperatedly. “There’s more than enough grief as it is.” He cleared his throat self-consciously and walked toward the wagon. “Now, then, boys, let’s get some sleep.”

  Larson glared at Coke for a full five seconds, then spat in contempt, turned abruptly, and stalked off into the darkness. Coke lay awake for a long time, just in case Larson should come back. When he finally fell asleep, he imagined he could hear the swish of Fidelity’s dress as she climbed back into the wagon.

  There were six wagons in the emigrant train. They squeaked and groaned and tilted over the rough ruts of the prairie as they ambled ponderously out of Santa Ynez Valley. Coke was riding beside Karl Hause. Neither man said anything; their eyes were fixed on the twin ribbons, faint but unmistakable, that stretched like long, erratic snakes across the bosom of the raw land. Twin streaks that heralded the tide of empire. They spanned a huge, somnolent continent, and the massive, grinding wheels that rolled over them crushed out the life of the tiny, frail wildflowers that dared to bloom in the highway of progress. The morning was soft and gentle with a clear, azure sky and the faint, elusive scent of sage and sunshine spread like a blanket over the still cool prairie.