The Smoking Iron by Brett Halliday Page A

long and eight miles in width at the widest part. There’s a little over sixty sections in all. The whole flat used to be the river bed, dad said, thousands of years ago. Then the river cut the course it now follows. There are more than three hundred springs, all together, and they never dry up. It stays green like this all summer, and it’ll support a thousand head with plenty of winter feed without cutting and stacking.”
    Dusty’s silence was the finest tribute he could pay to her brief description of the K T ranch. It was the kind of spot cattlemen in the arid west dreamt about after imbibing too heavily on Saturday night.
    â€œIt’s only about half grazed now,” Katie said in a low voice. “There were about eight hundred head on the ranch when dad died. And the rustlers pick out the best of my stuff every time they make a raid.”
    â€œIt ain’t surprisin’ you got rustlers,” Dusty muttered. “Eighteen miles of river bank on one side. All they got to do is push across an’ cut out whatever they want. Funny thing to me is that yore daddy ever kep’ any stock long enough to get ’em to market.”
    â€œBut it isn’t that bad at all,” Katie explained. “The river all along here has a quicksand bottom. There are only three fords in the whole eighteen miles where a man can ride across without bogging down. We’ve got it all fenced, of course, to keep the stock out.”
    â€œOnly three fords?” Dusty’s eyes lighted. “Three men could guard them easy enough.”
    â€œI don’t know,” Katie responded hopelessly. “I had men guarding the fords. The rustling went right on. Yet we know there are no other places the river can be forded.”
    Directly ahead of the buckboard, rising magically out of the grassy flat, was a large group of trees. Cotton-woods, poplars and weeping willows.
    â€œThat’s the home place,” Katie told him, nodding toward the seeming mirage. “The main spring is there. Dad built the house himself, more than thirty years ago. He homesteaded that section and leased the rest of it, and he’d been buying it up steadily since then. He paid out the last section two years before he died.”
    The team was straining against the bits now, eager to finish the journey to the tree-shaded and quiet spot that was home.
    Dusty let them out into a fast trot, his eyes narrowed as he took in the long rambling building of rough limestone blocks in the shade of giant cottonwoods at the upper end of the oasis, the huge pond surrounded by weeping willows and the double line of straight poplars leading down to the sheds and corrals a couple of hundred yards distant from the main house.
    A few white leghorn chickens scratched idly in the yard, and a Jersey milk cow munched her cud in a wire corral and watched them drive up. There was no other sign of life about the place. Over it brooded an atmosphere of melancholy and desertion that was somehow evil in essence. It was planned and built for peace and serenity, for the heartwarming quietude that comes with security and freedom from care and want. But this was different. It seemed to be peopled with ghosts, and the chill that struck Dusty Morgan’s heart was colder than could be occasioned by the mere shade of trees overhead as he pulled the buckboard up in the yard.
    He looked at Katie and saw that she had become subdued and listless. He cramped the wheel for her and she stepped down, saying quietly, “I’ll go in the house and tell Juana to start some dinner. I think you’ll find Miguel around the barn. They’re the only ones left. Come up to the house after you’ve unharnessed and I’ll see about furnishing you a horse so you can ride on.”
    She turned away from the buckboard and went slowly toward the stone ranch house. Dusty had to bite his lip to keep from crying out and telling her he had no intention of riding