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Show L. USELESS . a y:., "-''-V cowboys t V f-ALAN Le MAY v NU. suv.u -W !...:'., iM;, i ;.l CIIAI'I 'Kit I Melody Jones and his side-rider, George Fury, had not expected to wind up in I'ayneville. They had meant to ride to Hot Creek, down near the Mexican border; but some miscalculation in crossing the Red Cloud plains had Rot them into a wrong pass through the Wolf Ears, causing a miss of nearly one hundred hun-dred dusty miles. Consequently, as they rounded the shoulder of some mountain it later turned out to be Big Bone Ledge they were rocked in their saddles by the sight of a sizable town immediately imme-diately below. It stood out clearly In the hot bright light, a straggling disorder upon vast ragged plains. Its roofs of grey weathered shakes shone like metal In the hard smash of the sun. Old George Fury looked surprised. The town was big enough to hold several hundred people, and It gave George a creepy sense of Insecurity to see It appear out of nowhere. He put his hand over his eyes and rubbed them a little, but when he looked again it was still there, shimmering shim-mering dustily In the sun. Melody didn't look any special way. At twenty-two he was lanky and relaxed, and looked four years younger than his age. He was very seldom surprised, for he never expected any one particular thing, but took unexplained events as they came. "I should judge she's a cow town," Melody said. "I can tell by the corrals." cor-rals." George Fury snorted. Corrals or not, the town could not possibly have been anything else. "You plumb astound me," he said. Melody shrugged. "Them things is easy for me." George Fury knew himself to be over fifty years old, but had quit counting, not liking to think about this. He was spare and rope-necked, with a mustache something like a dead mouse, and glmlety eyes, sun-faded sun-faded to an indiscriminate eye-color. One shoulder was higher than the other, and he sat crookedly In his saddle, limping as he rode. "It beats me how she come here," George Fury said, staring at the town. "I mind one night I rode into Salice," Melody said, "and it was right where I thunk it was, and all, only some way I come into it from ,the east, instead of from the west. Feller don't live that can Agger them things through." Melody could not carry a tune, so of course liked to sing, but he did , not get his name from this. His real name was Melvin, and this had got changed, to Melody at Javelina, Tex-s. Tex-s. whprp th T?in Grande draws the wandering border with Mexico. The Mexican people could not pronounce Melvin, seemingly; by the time they were through batting it around it was nearer Melody than anything else. Jones did not object; the north-trail north-trail cowboys could not pronounce Javelina, either. They called it Musk Hog. George Fury snorted again, and pushed his shaggy pony down the twist of the trail toward the town which he did not yet know was Payneville. Payneville was a crossing town. A wagon route west from Diamond Forks to California crossed the river here, and trail herds of cattle, pushing push-ing north to the railroad, forded the same shallows. The river was the Poisonberry, hell-dry in summer and a howling flood In the spring. An early trader had named it the Strawberry, Straw-berry, because he wished he had some, but later wagoners watched their Conestogas tumble end over end in the spring rise, and changed the name. Nobody ever sang any songs about moonlight on the silvery Poisonberry, rolling on, ever on, to Syrup Creek. Up on Payneville's Boot Hill there Is still a sandstone slab marking the grave of this town's founder, and carved upon it, perhaps by an enemy, en-emy, are his alleged last words: "Thank God I am a Payne . . ." As they drew closer, riding between be-tween the bones of vanished buffalo, Payneville looked dustier, and more ramshackle. They entered the town through a drift of ruined huts, stared at by mestizo children; and turned at a slow plod into Court Street. Melody was riding more watchfully now, made alert, in spite of himself, by George Fury's nervousness. He consciously stiffened his face. Melody Jones had a secret ambition to earn the title of "Unsmiling Jones," and command immediate respect wherever he appeared. Whenever he rode into a new cow camp he remembered this for an hour or two, and preserved as rigid an expression as he could. George Fury glanced sideways at him. "What in hell's the matter with you? You got your snoozle snubbed up like you was going to bawl." Melody modified his expression somewhat, as well as he could. Melody had originally started out from Two Lance, Montana, at fourteen four-teen or fifteen, on the occasion of his father being rolled on by a cow in Montana's rustlers' war; but the wandering cow-trails he had followed fol-lowed had been pretty shy of people. Nearly everything he knew about people he had learned from horses and cows, and that was his trouble. Every mortal soul was a personal uncertainty; unaccustomed eyes bothered him like flies. George Fury was looking for the first saloon, and to see what the scat houses looked like, but Melody's eyes took in all details equally, whether they had any meaning or not. He estimated the amount of jerky hanging up in a Mexican outdoor beanery, and his cattle-counting eye told him there were forty-seven strips about a yard long. He saw a camp-robber jay steal some frijoles from a sleeping Mexican. Just beyond be-yond the beanery stood the first bar, which was beginning to moult its silver-gray clapboards the oldest building in town. But the builder had misjudged the future center of town, and now found himself at the foot of the street; so that this was naturally natural-ly called the First Chance on one side of its sign, and Last Chance on the other. George Fury, who sometimes took four days to pass a given saloon, would not get any farther, just yet. "I should judge she's a cow town." He turned his pony to the hitch rail and swung down rustily; and Melody Mel-ody Jones was freeing himself from the saddle, on which he seemed to have melted and stuck, when a girl came on to the street. Melody didn't see where she came from; as he looked up she was there. He couldn't see her face, because she was walking away from him, down the unmended boardwalk, but he forgot George Fury, and lost interest in-terest in the First Chance Bar. Melody Mel-ody hadn't seen a white girl in nearly near-ly seven months. "Now what?" George grunted. "Huh?" A casual wind - devil kicked a twirl of dust into Melody's face; he dug at his eyes with buckskin buck-skin knuckles, and sat there like a fool. "Froze to thet hull?" "Who, me?" Melody sounded vague and senseless. "Well, I I I feel kind of like a can tomaters." "You look something like a can tomaters," George criticized. "Never you mind," Melody said. "I'm going on down to the store." George Fury looked at Melody queerly, and started to say something. some-thing. He knew that Melody had no money in his pants; all they had between be-tween them was a few dollars George had managed to keep hold of. It was in his mind to holler after Melody, and give him a buck. But he smothered this idea, and went into the First Chance, rolling creakily on his run-over high heels. Melody pushed his dopy pony on up the street, through the soft dust. He was following the girl along with an innocent detachment that would have killed George Fury. He was like a dog who goes walking with a stranger, never looking directly at his companion, never getting near, but drawing a sort of undemanding comfort from the vague association of time and place. Besides watching the girl, he saw that the boards of the Occidental's sign were splitting in the sun, and that an Apache Indian, asleep full length on the walk before the Grand Eastern Hotel, was drawing flies. The few shaggy ponies along the hitch-rails were saddled with center-fire center-fire and three-quarter rigs, hung with rawhide reatas, so he knew he was among the daily-men again. This touched him with a faint contempt con-tempt a cowman commonly feels for any way of riding but his own. Melody was a double-rig, tie-fat man. The girl went into the Lost Dutchman Dutch-man Saloon. The wind went out of Melody, so 'definitely that his pony took advantage advan-tage of him and stopped.. Melody sat where he was for a moment or two before he started it again. "Got a right to get thirsty, ain't she?" he explained her to himself. "Why in hell shouldn't she get thirsty? Nuts." He angled across the dust to the General Store, and tossed his reins loose across the rack. The pony's name was Harry Henshaw, according accord-ing to Melody, and he had been with Melody long enough to learn that he had better stand, lest a worse thing happen next. Harry Henshaw toed in a little on the nigh side, and didn't look like much; and because of this he was the only pony, out of the scores Melody had owned, that nobody no-body had bothered to get away from Melody. As Melody went up the steps to the store's broad gallery he was wary and watchful again. Two men, a big one an a little one, loafed on the gallery, just outside the door. Both wore low-strapped forty-fives, the same as Melody himself, except that Melody's was in the thigh pocket pock-et of his ragged shot-gun chaps. They wore the easy clothes of cowmen, cow-men, but that did not necessarily prove what they were. Melody stiffened his face. The shorter man met his eyes briefly, an 'impersonal, cool flick of pinched pupils. pu-pils. The other didn't look at him at all, so Melody was able to study him better a man long-geared but compact, with an expressionless face of deep-carved jack pine. His eyes were awake but lazy, like the flat side of a knife. While Melody looked at him, the man's eyes changed, then the whole face. The eyes sharpened to a quick focus, not on Melody, but across the street; and it was as if the sleepy knife had turned point first and sung past Melody's ear. Melody turned slowly on his high heel, feet apart to clear his long-shanked long-shanked spur, and followed the man's eyes. It was like Melody thought. The girl had come out of the Lost Dutchman. Not thirsty after aft-er all. Looking for somebody. The man by the door was whistling whis-tling through his teeth, a stanza of "Chizzum Trail." It might have been the part about the night stampede, stam-pede, or the- last of the Old Two-Bars; Two-Bars; but Melody knew better. Unhurriedly, Un-hurriedly, but with no trace of thought at all. Melody took two long, strolling steps, and knocked the stranger down. He used the heel of his right hand, without closing his fist; he had understood un-derstood that wallop for a long time. The heel of a hand, swung full-arm, packs nearly the same weight as a fist; but afterward, you get credit for downing your man with a slap of the open hand. A good thing to have said of you, especially if the other man wasn't looking, as now. The stranger's hat flew off, and his head spun sideways, slamming against the board front idth a boom that shook the store. Inside the wall some tinware fell down, quicker to fall than the man who was struck. After the tinware's first crash some more of it fell more slowly, so that the occasional clatter of a pie tin ot a bread pan kept sounding at irregular irregu-lar intervals for some time. The man himself half buckled al the knees, his face a blank amazement. amaze-ment. He slid sideways against the wall, and came down sitting on his hat. Melody stood watching the feUow shake his head and feel out tin workings of his jaw, and Melody haJ never been worse dumbfounded in his life. The astonishment of the man he had hit was nothing, alongside along-side his own. Melody was estimating estimat-ing now the exact distance, in thou, sandths of a second, between th stranger's hand, slackly palm up on the floor of the gallery, and th black butt of the stranger's gun, already al-ready half out of its leather by its own weight. It was no better than three inches away, or possibly thre and a half. The hand didn't loot like a cowman's hand much more like a bunch of bananas, really, but that is just the kind that knows iti business, very often. Melody waj beginning to sweat a little now. Up from the wooden face th stranger's eyes were looking at Melody Mel-ody like a couple of cactus buds. Melody stooped and got a grip on the gun arm with both hands, his head canted to bounce off a possibla crusher from the stranger's left. Ths arm was tense and ridged, made ol wagon tires, or something. Melody pretended to help the other up, hall hauling him to his feet, but keeping him off balance; and he began to talk as fast as he could, which was a kind of a loping drawl. "Well, now," Melody said, "that's sure too bad. How come that? Your foot slip, you reckon?" He hoped afterward that he had sounded gruff and hard, but he remembered pretty clearly that he had stumbled along in a sort of a thin bleat. "v BE CONTINUED) |