The Popular Magazine/Volume 87/Number 1/A Man's Weak Points

AST Texas is a great pine wilderness, interspersed with clearings and old choppings. Where trails and roads lead through this there is exposed a thin, gray layer of humus and red, brick-red clay. Where streams wash down the valleys, the caving banks are red. The very rivers flow in bright red hues, with green reflections amid royal-purple shadows when the days are clear, the sunshine crystalline.

And it was to this country that Captain Jeff Rusk of the Rangers was called to investigate some killings in the Rio Muerto Basin. Captain Rusk had heard about the east Texas country. He had been down in the nearly tropical jungles of the lower Rio Grande, and he was a mesquite-country cowboy in origin, so he knew something about thick and middling open-country work.

The governor, state attorney, and President Rufus J. Dickwer of the Pine Belts Products, Inc., talked to the Ranger as man to man. The situation in the Rio Muerto Basin was very serious. Dickwer stated the proposition rather briefly, but to the point.

“Captain,” he said, “we've been clearing up our cutovers down the valley and on the adjacent levels. The land is rich. Cotton, grapes, corn, sorgum, sweet potatoes, watermelons and other fruits, vegetables—everything'll grow there. Cattle and hogs feed themselves, and if you salt-lick them, they come in any time. It's just naturally a garden, a pasture, a farm—and good standing forest. Unfortunately, difficulties do occur there. You understand how that is. Independent, high-spirited, naturally sensitive men are reluctant in the face of insult or opposition, to leave the matter to officials and courts. I'm frank to say that I myself hesitated a long time before coming here to Austin to ask for outside interference. But lately conditions have pretty much outgrown the influence of the respectable element.

“About three years ago my brother, Culby Dickwer, had trouble with a foreman in our upper mill. The fellow was a hard man—had to be, understand, to manage the sawyer and yard crew. His name was Basco—Dubious Basco. He picked up an ax and showed his violent streak. Of course, Culby just had to shoot him, but he did it easy in the left shoulder, disabling him. Basco had been drinking. Afterward he came around and apologized, and as soon as he healed he went to work again, perfectly friendly. But Dubious had a brother by the name of Kirby. Kirby never was reconciled; at the same time, as long as Dubious was satisfied, Kirby minded his own business. One night Culby was riding down the trace from the upper mill when somebody opened on him from one side, but shot over, missing him. Then one day, Kirby was impudent to me, and I killed him.

“Since then, you know, a man's life hasn't been safe. Culby was killed, finally, a year ago last winter, the time of the rains. Our timekeeper, at the upper mill, had trouble with one of the yard hands who cut him all to pieces. Now perhaps that was just an ordinary killing, understand. At the same time, maybe it wasn't. I just don't know. Anyhow, now it's as much as a man's life is worth to go along any of those roads and traces around the upper mill. Besides Culby, three of our men have been bushwhacked, murdered. Several have been wounded, and many reputable citizens have been shot at—I don't know if by mistake or not. Two were killed, and I feel quite sure the expectation was to get me, on at least one of these occasions. I'd stopped to cut a watermelon with a lady friend, about half a mile back, and heard the shooting. And I found the victim, a Mr. Darling, a good farmer, and peaceable.

“Now, that's just a general account. Course, I'm prejudiced. At the same time, I want to be fair. You see,” he sighed, “never knowing when somebody's going to unload a double-barreled shotgun with buckshot into your back, or when somebody's going to draw on you and shoot you down with a.45, unexpectedly, gets on your nerves. You get jumpy. I thought that if a Ranger'd go up there and investigate, we could somehow pacify whoever or whatever's wrong. I don't accuse anybody; I don't blame any one in particular. But, you see, I just don't know what else to do. There's been other killings, besides. I'm just remarking on things relating to me—us, personally.”

Captain Rusk glanced around at the other listeners. His chief in command nodded. The matter seemed to be of Ranger importance. Nothing had been said about the local sheriff and deputies, but apparently the situation was beyond local control.

“Course,” Rush said, as a man of few words, “I'll go look over the country.”

An hour later he loaded his saddle and war bag on a baggage car, to take passage with an open mind and lively curiosity into the pine belt. He obtained a good, acclimated horse at Duel, the tap-line fork leading into the domain of the Pine Belts Products, Inc., and for the first time headed out on the red-rut roadway in the shadow of an east Texas pine-timber canopy. It was raining a heavy drizzle. There was little wind. His eyes were accustomed to the bright, gemlike flashes of the sunlit deserts: out in the Davis Mountains and Guadaloupes. Under those spreading green branches, the drip falling noisily, now and then a wandering zephyr shook showers of falling streaks all around him. The native horse was a single-footer in the squashy red mud—lifting one foot at a time with methodical reaching ahead, the sounds those of splash and suck.

“Good thing I brought my oilskin,” Rusk grumbled.

But presently he ceased his profane commentaries as the “Rangers' warning came.

Rusk had been for twenty years in the service. Hate of outlawry—cattle thieves had killed his father—made a policeman of an unusually high-minded, sensitive-spirited man. Good schooling had trained a keen, practical brain. When he had crossed the railroad-clearing ribbon of farms and entered the forest a quickening of his perceptions surpassed the ordinary metes and bounds of sight, sound, touch, smell and the taste of the pine in the air. A sixth, inexplicable sensation, of which great and successful Rangers know—but generally refuse to admit, let alone discuss—came like a chilly breath through the dense timber stand, affecting him like raw wisps of creeping fog.

Time had been, in the impulsive agnosticism of youth, when he would have dismissed his mystic emotion. Now he pulled out under a specially thick tree-top, to one side of the roadway, and stopped his horse. Within five minutes another horseman came plowing along, a hunchback with a ghastly yellow, grimacing face, his bulging brown eyes staring sharply ahead from under a loppy, wide-brimmed black hat. In his teeth he held a message or note of some kind. Rusk had watched too many trailers, been too often a tracker himself, not to recognize the cripple's anxiety. Falling in behind the fellow, Rusk slipped along after him, much easier in his thoughts than when he did not know what his sixth sense was agitated about. He reckoned that this time his ears had detected sounds too light for his normal aural sense to recognize.

Five miles farther on the hunchback darted straight ahead to where the roadway made a right bend—a short cut, Rusk guessed, following. The Ranger noted that the man could not read the age of tracks in the muck of his own terrain. Shimmering reflections from the sky made all the prints of horse, cattle, hog and human look alike. But the upstanding mud, the cloudiness of the water, the freshness or the rain-wash, all indicated how many minutes, hours, even days, old the tracks were. In half an hour the Ranger could read pine-belt sign. He tracked the dark, fresh tracks of the hunchback's horse straight through the thick timber and saved himself a six-mile circuit around a steep-banked wash gully by going only a mile. He heard the hunchback's horse galloping in the roadway ahead. Rusk drove swiftly, too, but only for about three miles.

Here and there were turn-outs, roads to off-side clearings in the forests. He passed through two forty or fifty-acre abandoned openings, where shacks were sagging into swift decay among uprising growths of weeds, shrubs and young, scrawny pines. He heard a drove of hogs snuffling along, but did not see them. When he pulled out again to think things over, he found himself suddenly looking over a steaming herd of branded cattle. The animals were dwarfed and gaunt, big-eyed, long-horned, with wide nostrils and sunken cheeks—strange, deerlike and runty, in contrast to the curly rumps, the big white faces, the tall, red, bred-up pedigrees of the open or mesquite ranges, The wild fire in the purple eyes gave the timber-belt cows a demented look, as they uneasily spread their fore hoofs apart, swaying from side to side, circling their tails around. That look of maniacal and suspicious cunning was known to Rusk—in humans. He did not ride in the roadway any more. Instead, he kept along thirty yards or so to one side, just in sight of the pale streak of light which marked the highway course.

When he came to a little clearing, he rode around in the edge of the woods. When he reached a deep, ugly-looking bayou, he did not cross the bridge but swam his horse across, out of sight around the bend. Word had gone ahead that a stranger was coming. Possibly it had been recognized that at last a Ranger had arrived. People all over Texas knew that if there was enough mussing and fussing, trouble and misery, presently would come a Ranger, who was unafraid, who would be friendly, who would ask questions, who would be persistent—who would learn the truth. The basin of the Rio Muerto must by this time be in an expectant mood.

Captain Rusk presently arrived on the edge of a new chopping. Here a forest had been cut away, leaving stumps. Across the opening the road led to the north, into a valley nearly a mile wide, down which flowed the Muerto River, coiling and eddying along. A sawmill was on a bench, with a well-stocked lumber yard around the end of the tap-line rails. On the slope up from the mill were long piles of pine logs. The wilderness silences were broken by the shrieking of saws and the rumbling tumult of heavy machinery. Some scores of shacks and cabins, several well-built cottages and the company commissary were huddled in groups amid the stumps. This was the upper mill, sure enough.

The horse that the hunchback had ridden was in front of one of the bungalows. Almost immediately, while the Ranger gazed on the gray, wet scene, the crippled rider came out, bobbed up into the saddle like a monkey and rode trotting along the roadway, heading back toward Duel, the railroad village. As he passed by the fellow was grinning a fantastic, death's-head kind of smile. As he reached the edge of the clearing, another man left the bungalow and ran at a trot up a path across the chopping toward the woods. This fellow was a gaunt, small-headed, long-bodied woodsman. He had an arm in a sling, but when he reached the edge of the clearing, he jerked the arm out of the cloth which held it, impatiently, and hurried in and out along the roadway, keeping just within the edge of the pine trees.

Rusk naturally wondered what he was going to do, so he followed after in the manner of a Ranger whose curiosity is aroused. He saw the fellow circle around into the tops of a windfall, where several treetops had fallen in a clump. In this heap he sat down on one of the logs and leveled his double-barreled shotgun in a fork which had been made by tying two limbs of pine together. His back was toward Duel, and the gun was aimed along the road toward the upper mill settlement. A horseman would thus present his back to those evil tubes of death.

“You son of a gun!” Rusk said in his throat. “You wa'n't even going to let me get to town, was you, Dubious Basco?”

Long after his wound had fully healed, Basco had continued to pretend his arm was still crippled. As superintendent of the upper mill, he had kept things running with excellent judgment—had been too good a man to remove from his job. Cunningly, he had engaged spies to keep him informed. He had never been able to kill President Rufus J. Dickwer, but he or his fellow conspirators—if any—had been making inroads on the particular favorites of Dickwer and had killed his brother, of course. It just hadn't come right, yet, to kill the president of the company. Of course, if Rangers were allowed in that country, there was no telling what those persistent, relentless scoundrels would do. Better scotch the first one, right away!

Rusk worked in close. He, too, chose a comfortable seat. To his delight, Basco was talking to himself, telling in a sibilant, audible, distinct whispering about killing Culby Dickwer and nagging one of the boys into picking a row with the timekeeper. Then he talked about two or three other killings—what a good job he and Truller had made of one fellow whom they had thought was a spy and traitor. Presently he took out a sheet of paper, the message the hunchback had delivered. Rusk was close enough to read:

Some one was coming along the roadway and Basco dropped the paper. With a long stick he had picked up, Rusk speared the paper, while Basco was eagerly peering to see who was coming. The bushwhacker grunted angrily. It was just an old darky on a gray mule plodding by, moaning and wailing a song of religion and misery. Then Basco felt for the message again. He began to look around.

Thus his glance came in contact with the red-clay-stained boots of the other man. With dropped jaw and bulging, pitiless cat eyes of greenish pink, Basco jerked up his head like a startled panther, and froze in amazed fury at the look of imperturbable interest in the Ranger's eyes.

He was bad, that treacherous killer. From surprise he changed to shrewd, calculating estimate of chances. Rusk watched him gather and shift, change and decide. Bold, perhaps insane—no one would ever be sure—Basco edged and made slow, almost invisible turns and moves. He was caught; the pen at Huntsville waited for him; years of imprisonment loomed before him, if not hanging itself. On his left side, butt forward, was a big .45 Colt. His hand went for it like the open jaws of a cottonmouth snake, pale on the inside, fretted brown over the back—almost invisible in the dusky gloom.

It was close—Basco was fast-trained, but Rusk beat him. The killer-from-behind could, if cornered, also face a good man. But he died right there. The Ranger then went into the upper mill and telephoned to the proper officials. They all rode out on the following day, examined the scene and took notes of the evidence, heard Captain Rusk's account, and accepted it without reserve. He was absolved of murder on the ground of having obviously done his exact duty.

President Dickwer could hardly find terms sufficient to praise the efficiency, certitude, and promptness with which the case had been taken up, investigated and closed.

“At the same time, you know,” Mr. Dickwer sighed, “I was sorry to lose that man. Of course, under the circumstances, he just had to be killed. I never did really trust him absolutely, myself. He wasn't the kind you could. Still, he's going to be mighty hard to replace—yes, sir. To tell the truth, I don't know where I'm going to find any one able to keep logs rolling, saws turning and cut lumber moving like Dubious Basco—that's a fact. Did you ever notice, cap'n, that you always find even good workers have their weak points?”