The Tall Men (The Classic Film Collection) Read online

  “Otherwise?” suggested Ben soberly.

  “Otherwise, you’ll start spending it the way it is and those new hundreds will hang along your backtrail like buzzards over a sick calf.”

  “And—?”

  “You’ve heard of the Pinkertons?”

  Ben had. His short nod conveyed the fact to Stark.

  “In my time among the road agents,” continued the Virginia City freighter pointedly, “I’ve had some small use for them now and again.”

  “So—?”

  “They will be up to you,” said Nathan Stark flatly, “before you’ve gotten shut of the first thousand.”

  It was no idle threat.

  Ben knew it.

  The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the one bunch a man in his business did well not to deal with. Local sheriffs and even U.S. marshals could be bought off, or dodged, and in any event seldom stirred themselves after a man unless he was posted with a fat enough price. He and Clint were new and not yet known. There wasn’t a single flybill out on them, at least that they’d heard of, let alone a posted reward.

  But the Pinkertons were something else again.

  They had run the Union Army’s Secret Service during the War between the States. Ben knew more than a little something about that from his fourteen months as a Union prisoner. They were a real, organized outfit. Once any customer of theirs put them on a man’s trail, they never quit. Just as clearly as he was sitting there on his bay stud waiting for Ben’s answer, Nathan Stark meant to put them after him and Clint.

  “You’re making it tough,” he said at last. “We may have to ’leave you here’ yet.”

  “You may rest assured, my friend, that I’m not intending to be ’left.’ I’m not trying to make it tough, but tempting.”

  “Run them tracks another turn of the trail,” said Ben.

  “You’re a Texan,” nodded Stark. “And a cowman.”

  “You’ve been peekin’,” interrupted Clint accusingly.

  “So?” said Ben, ignoring his brother.

  “So,” said Stark, compounding the fraternal slight, “you know cattle, and all there is to know about cattle.”

  “Go on.”

  “What were steers selling at when you left Texas?”

  “They wasn’t sellin’.”

  “Suppose somebody was buying?”

  “Three, four dollars a head. All you want and buyer’s pick and choice. What you gittin’ at, Mr. Stark? You ain’t makin’ sense no more.”

  “The hosses are blowed.” Clint was no longer affable nor easy. “We’re movin’.”

  He ticked his mare with his Petmakers spurs, jumping her out of her head-down drowse. Ben clucked to his gelding, reined him around. “Let’s go, Mr. Stark.”

  “Hold up, both of you!”

  Stark jumped it at them, his excitement so real a man couldn’t miss it. Sensing it, Ben checked the black.

  “Boys,” Stark swept on, shoving his last stack into the narrow opening of Ben’s hesitation. “I’m making more sense than you’ve ever listened to in your lives. Get this—”

  “Make it quick,” snapped Clint. “And simple. Me and my frosted butt are gittin’ quick-sick of both of you.”

  “Fortunately, my simple-minded friend,” said Stark acidly, “I can make it short enough to span even your mental gap. In Texas we buy three thousand cows for ten thousand dollars, in Montana we sell them for ninety thousand dollars.”

  “I got a even better idee,” drawled Clint, loose grin returning with the thought, “In South Carolina we buy soft coal fer two bits a sack, and sell it to the Eskimos fer two dollars. Leggo my laig, mister, ’fore I jam my boot in yer mouth.”

  Ben had not even heard Clint’s curdled reply. His held breath eased out now behind his slow realization of Stark’s historic proposal. “Good Gawd Amighty,” he murmured to the Virginia City man. “You fairly mean to drive a herd from Fort Worth to Virginia City!”

  “I did mean to.”

  “It’s your ’crazy scheme’ we hear about in the Black Nugget. The one you wouldn’t tell nobody.” Ben’s mind was already lost in the one world he knew and loved. The sagebrush, saddle leather, horse sweat, cow chip world of the Texas longhorn.

  “It was.” Stark left it short, sensing the excitement he had aroused in the southerner.

  “Man,” breathed Ben softly, “it could be done!”

  “But by Gawd it ain’t goin’ to be!” barked Clint, knowing his older brother and knowing where his mind went the minute anybody wrote “cow” on the blackboard. “Goddamit, now—”

  “Ease off,” said Ben, his imagination caught up with a vision too big for Clint’s. “How’d you see it workin’, Mr. Stark?”

  Quickly then, voice low, tense words drumming the darkness, Nathan Stark filled in his dream.

  He told them of the Gallatin Valley, a stretch of grass bellydeep to the tallest longhorn ever calved. He told them of its cuts and draws and sheltered creek bottoms, and of a secret they held which no white man before him had learned—cattle could winter through on the open range in Montana.

  He had suspected it from the beginning, had this past winter turned loose eighty head of worn-out workstock in a gamble against his hunch.

  Those yoke-galled bulls had gone into the valley in September, thin and slatribbed and ready to drop. There had been blizzards in December and January, blizzards no stock could go through without stormsheds and hay corrals to hold them out of the wind and free of the snow. Ten days ago, with spring peeking over the Big Horns, he had ridden out to the Gallatin expecting to find a frozen ox every four miles from one end of its watershed to the other. Instead he had found the whole bunch, not a head missing and all grass-fat as open heifers in August, safe in a cross timbered creek draw!

  He told them, then, of his planning of how it would work and what he would need. First, money. Lots of it. Then men. Many men. Texas men, who knew cattle and could take them where the devil himself, no matter he had hoofs and horns, wouldn’t dare go. And one man, especially. The man who had already ridden the trail between the Alamo and Alder Gulch. The man who not only knew the way and knew cattle—but knew men.

  The Texas cowboys could handle the herd.

  But who would handle the Texas cowboys?

  Clearly, there was one man alone who could do that and live to laugh about it.

  Another Texan.

  Then, quietly, Nathan Stark played his buried ace.

  For this last man, this hoped for, all important trailboss, he, Stark, had planned an equal partnership in the Gallatin Valley ranch. Fifty-fifty on every head that came through to Montana alive, and on every calf that was dropped in the Gallatin from then on until the tally book was closed!

  When he had finished, he sat his horse in silence, staring at Ben ahead of the final pause and nod.

  “That man, my friend,” he said slowly, “was going to be you.”

  Ben did not answer. His thoughts, tunneled up into the whirlwind maw of Nathan Stark’s imagination, were far from Montana. His eyes looked down upon the distant, twinkling lights of Virginia City and saw them not. His face burned to the keening bite of the high country’s winter nightwind and failed to feel its sting. His ear listened to its lonely, freezing cry and heard instead the bawl of the lead steer smelling water from afar. His nostrils tightened to the shrink of the frost in its bitter breath and smelled in its place only the sweet dust and pungent manure of the southern bedding grounds in spring.

  Ben Allison was already in Fort Worth, gathering his men and grading his cattle.

  Not so the towering Clint.

  The younger brother shouldered his sorrel into Ben’s black.

  “I know what you’re thinkin’, bud,” he said evenly. “Count me out. It’s plumb crazy. First off, it cain’t be did. Next off, we’ve nothin’ but this bastard’s word that he won’t turn us in the minute he gits the chance. Last off, the money’s ourn, he ain’t offerin’ us nothin’. Not a damn solitary thing,
” he let the words drop like cold water on a flat rock, “savin’ a certain dose of hemp fever served up atop a kicked-out whiskey barrel.”

  “That, for sure,” nodded Ben. “Against the long odds of bein’ suthin’ we ain’t had no other chance to be—nor ain’t likely to git no other chance to be.”

  “Sech as honest men, I suppose!” rasped Clint sarcastically.

  “Sech as honest men,” said Ben simply.

  Clint’s snort of angry derision got stuck halfway out. And stayed there as Nathan Stark calmly spread his full hand.

  “I am offering you, each of you,” he stressed softly, “one third of the chips in a game that could make the biggest raise any man ever played a royal flush to. More money, and honest money, than you could whore-up in six lifetimes. Against that,” he concluded deliberately, “you are gambling a few thousand dollars in your pocket, the spending of which, ten-to-one, will wind you up in some state’s prison for the rest of your useless life.”

  The prospect had been purposely put in terms Clint understood. And so well put as to slow even his wild mind. But that mind, once slowed, was still as devious and quick as Ben’s was straight forward and slow. It slashed now, like a wolf, at what appeared the vulnerable hock tendon of Stark’s offer.

  “And what’s to keep us,” he sneered, “that is, providin’ we would admire to be honest men like my weakminded partner, here, suggests, from simply usin’ yer money to run our own herd up from Texas?”

  “Two things,” said Stark quietly. “Me and the Sioux Nation.”

  “Well, now,” drawled Clint, beginning in his perverse way to enjoy the debate, “you don’t bother me none whatsoever. But what’s this here about the Sioux Nation?”

  “You’ve got to cross it to get to the Gallatin.”

  “So, we cross it.”

  “Not quite. The Army’s got it closed to through civilian travel. There’s one trail across it and that’s the Bozeman Road. Nobody gets up the Bozeman without a military permit and troop escort.”

  “Fair enough,” shrugged Clint. “We git a military permit and troop escort.”

  “Precisely the point, my thickheaded friend. You don’t.”

  “It’s a deal. We don’t. Where’s that leave you?”

  “I do,” said Nathan Stark.

  “Talk don’t sell no higher in Montana than it does in Texas, Mr. Stark.” It was Ben, plodding back into the conversation. “How do we know you do?”

  “You said you would listen to a man as long as he made sense. Listen to this—both ears.

  “I’ve been freighting for the Union Army since Fort Sumter. The whole five years of that time from Leavenworth to Virginia City up the Bozeman. I can get anything I want cleared beyond Fort Laramie. And two troops of cavalry to see that it stays cleared.”

  It was enough of a mouthful to make even Clint chew a minute before he spit it out. While he was chewing, Ben swallowed.

  “It’s a long way to Texas,” he nodded half aloud, “and only ten minutes to Montana.”

  “Meaning what? asked Clint, holding up on his mouthful.

  “Meaning,” Nathan Stark answered swiftly for Ben, “that you can be back in the Black Nugget before midnight. And with more money in your poke than twenty men could squander before the spring thaw.”

  Clint looked uncertainly at Ben.

  “We gamble his word against our piece of a threesplit chance to make suthin’ of ourse’ves,” said the latter quietly. Then, still more quietly and laying it finally in front of Clint to raise or call. “It’s dealer’s choice, hermano, with Stark’s joker stacked and wild.”

  “I pass,” said Clint, his voice for the one, rare moment as straight as Ben’s. But the inevitable, tailswitch grin could not be kept out of it.

  “You’re still shuckin’ ’em, Sam. What do we do?”

  Ben looked a long time into the valley below. He hunched the thin fray of his Confederate collar against the building cold in the icy whoop of the wind across the divide. He hefted the moneybelt, not looking at it, nor at Clint, nor at anything. At last he pushed his black up to Stark’s Kentucky studhorse, peered, narrow-eyed, for a long three seconds into the expressionless face of its rider.

  “We gamble,” he said, and handed the moneybelt to Nathan Stark.

  Chapter Five

  The three riders topped the divide. The horses of the first two, beginning to know the place, slowed their gaits. Their sole reward for the foresight was a twitch of the reins, a soft, southern “Hee-yahh, there. Git along, hoss—”

  The knowing mounts responded, moving quickly across the exposed spine of the ridge, as glad perhaps as their riders to be out of the whipcrack of the north wind. The third rider followed them. None of the three looked back. Their figures, bolt upright and big and black, loomed for an instant against the four o’clock skyline, then were swiftly gone.

  Thus, on the morning of February 29, 1866, Nathan Stark turned his back on Montana.

  Accompanying him were the two Texans remembered by Virginia City only and even then but vaguely, as “Sam Allen” and “Tom Pickett.”

  It was an ill-assorted trio, scarcely suited by varying natures to travel together, yet destined by history to share a three-thousand mile journey which has no parallel in frontier memory. And to share the perils of that unmapped hegira under the terms of a contract still without peer or counterpart in all the peculiar records of western financial understandings.

  In the day and place it was not uncommon to settle matters involving thousands, even millions of dollars with a few words and a firm handshake. The language was simple, the men who used it even simpler. They understood one another. There was no room among them for a man whose word was not the easy equal of his bond, no time among their number for the long talker or the Philadelphia lawyer.

  Still and all, the agreement between Nathan Stark and his two Texas confederates was unique.

  In the saddlebags of the Virginia Citian’s bay stallion reposed $10,000 in Yankee currency. Behind him, in the green-doored vault of Esau Lazarus’s Black Nugget strong-house, was deposited the remaining $30,000 of the Texan’s original loot. The name on the deposit slip was Nathan Stark’s, and his alone. In the worn jeans of the two cowboys riding ahead of him jingled not a nickel more than jingled there the night of their arrival above Alder Gulch. Yet the Texans were satisfied, the one by personal conviction, the other by fraternal persuasion, that they were equal partners in a corporate if crazy scheme to flood the Gallatin Valley with bawling, longhorn gold. Neither for a minute questioned the legality of their two-thirds claim to the waiting fortune, and only the latter withheld total judgment on the given word of their Virginia City associate.

  Unique, indeed, was this western “gentleman’s agreement.” There had not been even the standard handshake to confirm it!

  As has been said, Ben and Clint Allison, the former by slowness, the latter by indifference, were simple men. Just how simple, they had at the moment of their departure from Virginia City no way of knowing. A single fact remained, rock-certain. They had picked the one man in Montana best suited by dangerous combination of brains and ambition to show them.

  He had stolen the first pot with his bold raise atop the stage road divide the night of the robbery. He had won the second by convincing his cowboy fellow gamblers that the bulk of their capital must be left behind in his own name, since to bank it with Lazarus under any other would have been certain to arouse curiosity and, ultimately, suspicion of the newcomers. The third and final pot now lay ahead. It would necessarily be a long time in the playing. The cards must be held close, the checks and raises made with the utmost, indirect caution.

  As he rode south behind the two men from Lampasas and points west, Nathan Stark had no more doubt of his ability to rake in the last pot than he had shown in taking the first. Simple men had no business drawing cards at his table.

  He began the cutthroat process of proving it, at the noon coffee halt.

  They had ridden
the morning away in silence and slowness, the bitterness of the weather and the force of the prairie-scouring wind saving all talk for the shelter of the noonhalt. Now, resting in the windbreak of a thickly willowed creek-bottom, the scalding coffee working inside them, the driftwood warmth of the fire, outside them, even the tactiturn Ben was ready to pass the time of afternoon.

  Sensing the moment, Stark eased into it.

  “Boys,” he announced casually, “we’ve got it half made. Only fourteen hundred and eighty-five miles more and we’re in business.”

  It was the first time Ben had seen him smile, or heard him speak in other than dead-straight terms. Somehow, to the big Texan’s mind, it all at once made him one of them. It took a Westerner to refer to fifteen measly miles, out of fifteen freezing hundred, as half the job already done. And to put back of it a good, dry grin at the same time.

  “Well, now, Mr. Stark, I allow you’ve paced it about right. Leastways, we’re on our way.”

  “And far enough on it,” smiled the other, “to drop that ’mister.’ I reckon it’s time we knew some first names. Real ones, for the best results, I’d say. Mine’s Nathan—”

  It wasn’t a statement, it was a question. Ben knew it.

  “You a’ready know ours,” he said.

  “Do I—?” The smile was still at work, Ben noticed, but maybe straining a little to stay there. Clint didn’t miss the effort, either.

  “That a question, mister?” he asked flatly.

  “Sort it to suit yourselves,” shrugged Stark, still slow and friendly. “We’ll be calling each other something or other from now till fall. It’s a long time to listen to a name you’re not used to hearing.”

  The two Texas riders looked at him a long time, the dying driftwood popping three times before Ben at last nodded. “Mine’s Ben Allison,” he said quietly. “He’s Clint. We’re brothers.”

  Clint’s eyes narrowed. He broke his glance from Ben, shifted it to Stark. “Yeah,” he breathed softly, “brothers.” Then, acidly. “I allow you kin tell which is the big brother. The one with the big mouth.”