Smoke of the .45. Harry Sinclair Drago

      There was that in the air on the range which said the year’s work was over.... The world was waiting. But in the little towns plumped down beside the shining rails of the Espee and the Western Pacific, all was activity and bustle. The steer shipping was on and the held-over wool clip was going aboard the cars. It was the harvest time of the mountain desert—the pay day of the range.

      Pockets were well lined. There had been famine—days on end of hard work, of no spending. Now was the time of plenty, of satisfied appetites. Winnemucca, Golconda, Elko, Halleck, Standing Rock, in the heart of Ruby Valley—they were all alike—boisterous, turbulent, prosperous; save that Standing Rock, newer than its sister towns, was more boisterous, more continuously turbulent, and less concerned with its future prosperity.

      And yet there was one who entered its hospitable gates this late afternoon who seemed untouched by its gayety. His eyes, screwed into the perpetual squint of the true desert breed, viewed Standing Rock’s activities with apparent unconcern. It was an old story to him. He knew the desert’s little ways!

      His coming caused no comment. And this, despite the fact that his clothes were of an almost forgotten cut, popular in the days when Dodge City reaped its harvest from the great northward trek of the longhorns.

      The Big Trek is a thing of the past; the trail itself lost, forgotten. Dodge City has long since settled down to most proper respectability. And those hard-fisted, quick-shooting men who squandered their wealth and lives, there, along the way from Santa Fe, have departed to that limbo from which none return.

      But a practiced eye would have said that the man who rode into Standing Rock this day was of that crew. His face was a fighting face, withal he was on in years, gray hair closely snugged to his head. In other days he had been a rugged man; but there was a sadness upon him now, a wistfulness in the eyes, that softened his boldly chiseled features.

      That he moved unnoticed is proof again that our one cosmopolitan zone has ever been the great West. Spurs, bridle, saddlebags, reata, even the big, high-stepping stallion which he rode were foreign to northern Nevada. That they were Spanish or Mexican—the difference is slight in the West—no one cared a hoot. The desert is wide. Men have a habit of coming long distances, and from strange places. And best—far best of all—a man’s business was his own business!

      The two trunk lines paralleled each other in passing through the town. In the short half mile between them, Standing Rock took form; half finished, half painted—a one-street town of one story buildings making a brave show with their Cripple Creek fronts.

      Hard by the Espee tracks this monotonously regular sky line was broken. For there, wonder of wonders, stood a two-story brick structure—a hotel!—the pride of Ruby Valley; the Marble Palace; J. Scanlon and V. Escondido, proprietors.

      Steer and wool money had financed it, hence Vincenzo. He was a petulant Basque, and although in the storied past he and his people had sprung from stock as Celtic as his partner’s, he—Vincenzo—was in a fair way of being erased by the versatile Scanlon. In quite the same fashion their institution had lost its chilling and undeserved title—unless the marble-topped bar were justification—and was called, in easy familiarity, the Palace.

      The profits of this establishment were restricted solely to the first floor, for, save at times like this, or when some unfortunate commercial traveler missed No. 19 going west, no one ever thought of staying there the night. But, oh, the profits of that lower floor!—bar and keno, roulette and poker of a flexibility well calculated to satisfy the whim of the most jaded customer.

      Having stabled his horse and placed his saddle, saddlebags and bed roll on a convenient peg, the stranger made for the door of this hostelry. It was a few minutes after five. The Diamond-Bar waddies were having their turn at the shipping pens. An hour later they would be making merry. Now, though, the street was deserted. The wool platform was directly in back of the hotel. The spur of track leading to it managed to squeeze past the hotel by the narrowest of margins.

      Four loaded cars stood on the siding. By six o’clock another would be filled. A freight engine would shunt them upon the main line that evening, and start them on their long ride to Boston.

      For another week this would go on. At least twenty heavy freighters, piled high with baled wool still reeking of the creosote dip, stood in the space about the platform waiting to be unloaded. More would come. Twenty-mule teams dragging three, and even four, wagons chained together would snake in the smelling fleece.

      Standing Rock should have been a place of ample elbow room, but here, in man’s peculiar way, was its greatest activity jammed in a space so crowded that the stranger stopped to watch the Basque boys as they fought the big bales with their long, steel wool hooks.

      His interest in the work on the platform caught the attention of a man who sat in the Palace bar, feet on the window sill, chair tilted back in comfort. This man had been sitting there some time, busy with strings of figures on the pages of a small leather-covered memorandum book. This occupation had absorbed his entire attention for many minutes; but as he stared at the stranger standing beside the track the little book fell from his fingers. Almost with one motion his feet came down from the sill and the chair to its four legs. His face was white when he straightened from snatching for the little book.

      He darted another glance at the stranger, as if doubting his senses. He had made no mistake! His hand trembled as he pushed the chair out of his path.

      “It’s him,” he muttered. “Traynor!”

      A belated sense of caution caused him to sweep the room with his eyes to see if any one had observed his ill-concealed alarm. A sigh of relief forced itself to his lips as he saw that Escondido, the Basque proprietor, was his only companion. Vin was hunched over the bar, his head resting in his arms, sound asleep.

      A rear door led to the wool platform. The man tiptoed to it quickly, and without a backward glance passed outside. A second later the stranger was shaking Vin back to consciousness.

      “I want a room, muchacho” he said with some impatience.

      Vin blinked his eyes. “No room, señor. Theese hotel is feel up. Plenty men in town.”

      “I’m not stayin’ all night. It’s goin’ to rain. I’ll go on after the stormin’s done. You let me have one of the boys’ rooms. They won’t be turnin’ in till late. I’m dead tired.”

      “Sure, Mike! I guess we feex leetla theeng like that. You take the end room. I call you nine o’clock.”

      The Basque turned to fish out from a pile of soiled papers a dilapidated book which served the place as a register.

      “You put your name in theese book, señor.”

      He held it toward the man, pencil in his free hand. The stranger’s eyes held Vin’s as he took the book and pencil; but instead of writing as requested, he closed the book and put the pencil on top of it, after which he placed them with extravagant care on the polished bar.

      Vin started to protest, but the man’s squinting, smiling gray eyes made him pause. Damn these gringoes when they smile!

      “No,” the stranger was saying. “Niente, señor. I’ve just clean fergot how to write. You understand?”

      “Sí, sí.” Escondido was not lying. He understood the eyes. It was sufficient. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders and a grin: “Me, I pretty dam’ well ferget how to read somethings, too.”

      “Señor, you are a man of wisdom.”

      A few minutes later, having removed his boots and draped his gun belt and hat over a convenient chair, the man was asleep. Neither the noise from the platform nor the heavy smell of creosote drifting in through the open window disturbed him. He had been in the saddle twelve hours that day.

      The freshening wind and the gathering clouds to the north bore unmistakable promise of approaching storm. This would have caused him no concern. He had foreseen it and molded his plans to its whim. A conversation going on in a cabin across the tracks