Borden
Chantry II (cont.)
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Nobody came
here except to hunt for strays . . .
Hyatt was a man who preferred to foreclose on mortgages, not loan
money. And nobody wanted to loan money on land, there was too much
of it. He was riding toward the buzzards, still some distance away.
His eyes cast for tracks. Nothing fresh. He would have been surprised
had he seen any for this was empty country. Nobody came here except
to hunt for strays at round-up time when they brought everything
in. And last night's rain would have wiped out signs of recent movement.
 He
saw tracks of unshod horses. That would be the wild bunch who roamed
his own range. There were a dozen to sixteen in the bunch led by
a gray stallion with black tail and mane. They knew each other,
he and that stallion.
Five years ago he had come upon him suddenly in the Mesa de Mayo
country. The stallion had stopped, facing him, nostrils flared,
ready to fight or run.
"Go on!" he said tolerantly. "Get out of here before I put a rope
on you!"
With an angry snort the stallion had turned and herded his mares
back up the canyon.
Now he drew up and let his horse suck water from a shallow pool
caught in a hollow of a rock they were passing.
He glanced again at the buzzards. He was closer now, and there
were four or five of them. Something was dead down there, or something
about to die. Whatever it was must be down in Sheep Canyon, in its
lower reaches where it started to flatten out.
When he topped the next rise he could see it, something resembling
of heap of discarded clothing, but he knew it was a man.
Or something that had been a man but was no longer. Death had been
here and the man was gone, only the shell remained.
Nothing had been at it yet. The buzzard is a wary bird, and from
long experience they know some creatures die very hard, indeed,
and some will fight until the last breath.
Borden Chantry sat his saddle and studied the situation. The worst
thing he could do would be to charge down there and mess up any
tracks that had been left. If any.
 The
body lay sprawled on bare sand among patches of grass and clumps
of brush. He had been a short, stout man wearing a store-bought
suit and a town man's shoes, incongruous in this wild and lonely
place. A carpet-bag lay open beside the body. Somebody had gone
through it and through the dead man's pockets.
There was no horse, nor were there tracks of one. He had not expected
one. Borden Chantry had been walking his roan closer and now he
drew up again to study the body and the position in which it lay.
A glance told him most of what he needed to know. The body had
been lying there all night because there had been a brief shower,
a hard-driven pelting shower that indented the hard-packed sand.
A pool of water a few inches in diameter lay partly under the dead
man's head.
Shot through the head. He could see the bullet-hole clearly enough.
Borden Chantry dismounted and squatted beside the body. The pockets
had been gone through, yet had they taken everything?
How did the man come to be here, of all places? It was only a short
distance from his now empty ranch-house, a short distance, he reflected,
by western standards, but several miles, actually.
This was an area where no one came, not even he himself and nobody
lived closer. A year might pass with no more than one or two riders
even passing within several miles of this area. So how did this
man, a stranger, come to be here?
Where was he coming from? And where was he going?
Back there was an area known locally as the Black Hills, and all
that was wild country except for the stage station.
Had the man left the stage? If so, why? Was somebody pursuing him?
Beside the body was a stick, lying loose on the sand. That stick
did not belong where it lay, and it was too short for the man to
have used it as a cane or a staff to assist his walking. A stick
lying among sage-brush or cacti acquires a fine silting of dust
and the sand beneath it acquires an indentation where the stick
has been lying. None of this was present, and yet one end of the
stick had sand in among the slivers of the broken end.
Half-concealed by the body was a hole in the sand into which the
end of the stick might have fitted.
 "Well,
I'll be damned!" he said aloud. "I'll be double- damned!"
He looked again at the position of the body and the way the stick
was lying.
"Somebody," he said aloud, "brought the body here, propped it
up in a sitting position with that stick and then shot into the
head."
Now, why in the devil - - ! He sighted from the body's position
toward the bank of the arroyo, some sixty yards away. Leaving his
horse ground-hitched, he walked toward the bank, climbed it, and
looked around. It needed several minutes before he found anything,
and it wasn't much. Somebody had knelt on the ground, leaving a
very slight knee-print and a somewhat deeper toe-print.
It was here a man had kneeled to take his shot into the body that
lay below. Why anybody would go to such trouble he could not guess,
but that was for tomorrow, today he was concerned only with this.
He looked around for something to use in measuring, but no stick
was available and the yucca leaves were not long enough. Taking
off his belt he measured the distance from the knee print to the
toe-print, then marked the edge of his belt and put it back in place.
This was none of his business as he was only the town marshal whose
jurisdiction ended with the town limits. He would have to call the
sheriff or the Deputy United States Marshal on this one.
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