Read Ebook: The riddle of the rangeland by Parkhill Forbes

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Ebook has 535 lines and 24026 words, and 11 pages

Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark.

THE RIDDLE OF THE RANGELAND

The modern West still keeps many of the old-time thrills, as you who read this captivating novelette of the Wyoming mountains will discover. Mr. Parkhill himself lives in the West; "The Ken-Caryl Case" and other stories have already won him fame as an excellent writing-man.

Sheriff Lafe Ogden, long-barreled blue revolver in his hand, knocked lightly on the rough pine door of the Red Rock ranger station. Then he stepped back softly and pressed himself close to the log-and-plaster wall beside his deputy, Seth Markey, and young Otis Carr.

There was no answer from within. The Sheriff raised his shaggy brows, pursed his lips and whistled softly. With a jerk of his head in the direction of the others, he stepped forward again. Suddenly he flung the door wide.

"Good God!" The exclamation burst from his lips, and checked the sudden advance of the two pushing forward on his heels.

"It's Joe Fyffe himself!" He nodded toward the crumpled figure which lay face downward on the floor.

"Dead?" asked Otis Carr in a strange, strained voice as he squeezed his huge bulk through the door. He wondered why he had experienced no great shock at the gruesome discovery. For Joe Fyffe, forest ranger, silent, odd and retiring, had been his friend.

The Sheriff dropped to one knee. He placed a hand on the ranger's wrist.

"Been dead quite a spell," he announced without looking up.

"Blood shows that," the deputy volunteered.

"Looky here how it's dried round the edges, on the floor underneath his arms there. Two, three hours, I reckon."

Otis Carr bent awkwardly over the huddled body.

"Shot, I s'pose," he speculated, his tanned face, somehow attractive despite its homeliness, showing a trace of awe and concern. Most of his life had been spent in the cattle country east of Jackson's Hole; yet the acts of violence which it had been his lot to witness had failed to render him callous in the presence of death.

Sheriff Ogden turned the ranger's stiffening body on one side.

"That's where he bled from," he said shortly, pointing with the muzzle of his revolver to a tiny, stained hole in the ranger's shirt, under the right shoulder. "But that's what done the work," he added, indicating a similar hole in the back, just above the ranger's belt.

"It's a cinch it wasn't any accident," Otis drawled, glancing curiously about the interior of the ranger cabin. "I tell you, somebody plugged him."

"I don't see any gun," observed the Sheriff, rising, stepping over the body and walking to the door of the only other room.

"He couldn't 'a' had a chance. Nasty job, this!"

Otis followed him to the room which served as a sleeping chamber and office. Ogden removed a rifle from two wooden pegs in the log wall above the desk, examined it carefully, and shook his head. His scrutiny of a holstered revolver which swung by a cartridge belt from a nail in the wall was likewise barren of results.

"Neither one's been fired," he asserted, frowning and turning to the maps and papers on the rude pine desk. "He never had a chance to shoot back. You knew him pretty well, didn't you, Otis? D'you know whether he had any other guns?"

Otis shook his head.

"Don't think he did," he replied uneasily, casting his eye about the room. "He hardly ever packed the revolver. Sometimes he carried the rifle in his saddle scabbard, but it was on the chance of seeing a cat or something, and not for protection from--well, you know. He never seemed to worry about the threats of the boys that the Gov'ment couldn't send in any damned ranger to collect grazing-fees for using the open range."

The Sheriff turned from the desk to a workbench containing a shallow tank, wooden racks and a row of bottles.

"I know," he remarked gravely. "But between you and me, it aint like any of the boys to shoot him down like this. What's this junk?"

"Dark-room equipment," Otis answered, fingering a developing tray. "Joe was a nut on wild-animal photography, you know. Got some of the best animal pictures I've ever seen. Did his own finishing here at night. See that blanket rolled up over the window? He'd let that down, and have a first-class dark-room."

"That's right," the Sheriff affirmed. "I remember now. He was the feller that bragged he was the only man that ever got a close-up picture of a wild mountain sheep, wasn't he?"

"I wouldn't say he bragged about it. But it was something worth boasting about, anyway."

Sheriff Ogden, his barren search of the office and bedroom completed, led the way back to the room where the body lay.

"Lucky we run into you, Otis," he remarked as he began a hurried search of its interior. "When I seen you ridin' down the Buffalo Forks road, I says to Seth, here: 'There's Otis Carr, who knows Joe Fyffe right well--maybe better'n anyone else in these parts. We'll ask him to go along.'

"We didn't know what had happened, then. Just knew somethin' funny was pulled off here at the ranger station. Forest supervisor in Jackson called me before daylight, an' said he'd just got a flash on his phone, an' that some one was callin' for help. Operator told him the call was from Red Rock ranger station.

"He'd 'a' come along, only for a wrenched leg. Between you and me, he's a pretty decent feller, that supervisor, even if he is tryin' to collect grazin'-fees for the Gov'ment. I says to Seth here: 'Lucky thing these here ranger stations is connected with telephones for fire-calls. Man could have an accident an' lay there for a week if it wasn't for that wire.' I had a hunch it might be somethin' more than an accident, 'count of hearin' more or less how the boys been shootin' off their mouths. You been over the hill to Dubois, I s'pose?"

Otis, who had stepped to the pine table to retrieve the telephone, which was hanging close to the floor, turned quickly after restoring the instrument to its accustomed place and shot an odd, questioning glance at the Sheriff, who was stooping over the stove. Then he peered uncertainly at the deputy, who was kneeling by the outer door.

"N-o-o," he drawled, turning back to the table, nervous fingers clumsily fingering the telephone. "Guess the old man told you them rustlers been busy again, working over some of the Footstool calves. Jess Bledsoe says they been bothering around some of the Flying A stock, too. Well, I rode over to the cabin of Gus Bernat, the French trapper, last night, figuring I might get a line on the fellow who's so free with the running-iron. Had a hunch he might be working the range down below Two-Gwo-Tee pass, but I couldn't see a thing--"

Deputy Seth Markey, seemingly impatient that the others should waste their time on such casual remarks with the mystery of the Fyffe killing confronting them, arose with an exclamation.

"Looky here, boss," he cried to the Sheriff, directing his attention to two tiny brown spots near the doorsill. "See them blood-drops? That means Fyffe was outside when he was shot, and run in here afterward. Let's take a look outside the cabin."

Ogden abandoned his examination of the stove, and the pair of worn, hobnailed Canadian pack boots hanging from the log ceiling above it by their leather laces, and joined his deputy at the door.

"Sure 'nough," he observed as he led the way outside the cabin, carefully scrutinizing the ground about the doorway. "Here's another. We'll just back-track this trail, an' see what we can find."

With difficulty they followed the thin trail of blood over the coarse gravel surface and pine-needle carpet of the pasture which surrounded the ranger cabin. It led through the open gate in the barbed-wire fence which inclosed the pasture. They lost it in the near-by creek bottom. In vain did they circle the spot where the last bloodstain appeared.

Some fifty yards away they came upon the cold ashes of a tiny wood fire. Sheriff Ogden pressed his hand among the charred fragments.

"From the feel of her, she might be a week old," he announced sagely. "The ashes aint flaky, but black, showin' that the fire didn't burn out, but was doused with water from the crick."

"But why," asked Otis curiously, "would anyone want to build a fire so near the ranger station? I tell you it couldn't be to cook a meal, because anyone could have dropped in and eaten with Fyffe."

"Maybe the ranger built it hisself," suggested the Sheriff. "What few tracks show in this coarse gravel is cow-tracks, and that don't tell us nothin'. Can't see any signs of a fight here. Let's go back to the cabin."

"He must have run in here after he was shot," speculated Otis upon reentering the shack, "and grabbed for the phone. Like as not he yelled for help once or twice, and then dropped to the floor. Or maybe he knocked the phone off the table, and the supervisor heard him calling for help after he lay on the floor."

"He knocked that camera off the table too," the deputy volunteered. "I found it on the floor while you two was in the other room, and put it back on the table."

"What's this?" asked Otis, stooping and retrieving a stub of a pencil from the floor a few feet from the body. "I wonder if this means anything?"

The Sheriff glanced at it and grunted.

"Probably dropped out of his pocket when he fell. Or maybe he knocked it off the table with the phone and the camera."

The deputy suddenly dropped to his knees beside the body.

"Looky here!" he cried, eagerness and excitement showing in his face as he looked up at them. He was pointing with a tanned and stubby finger at a straggling and meaningless black line upon the floor planking. One end trailed out to nothingness near where Otis had found the pencil. The other end of the line was covered with the splotch of blood. "Maybe he wrote somethin' before he died!"

Sheriff Ogden seized a dish towel from a nail behind the stove. He moistened it with a dipperful of water from the bucket in the corner. Then he too dropped to his knees by Fyffe's body and commenced to scrub at the bloodstained floor. Otis bent eagerly over his shoulder.

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