the Burning Hills (1956) Read Free

young man was no longer smiling. He took the last drop from his glass and stepped back from the bar. "Depends on how much country a man needs."
    Jordan waited the explanation, his eyes missing nothing in the room. The men at the table were alert and listening.
    "Six thousand miles out there," the man said, "or six feet here."
    The harshness of the trail had drawn him fine. He turned from the bar, a big tough lonely man suddenly showing all the danger that was in him. The young man took a step back, suddenly wary.
    "I already bought chips," Jordan said. "They dealt the hand."
    He turned from the bar and went through the door and then he saw the big old man coming up the street on the steeldust. Trace had gentled that steeldust himself. He had taken time with the horse. Next to the big red horse he rode, it had been the best of the lot.
    The old man had a shock of white hair. His eyes were fierce and commanding. When he stepped down from the saddle there was something of the thing in his manner.
    Trace Jordan stepped down from the walk and started across the street toward the old man, a tall man with an easy woodsman's walk and the knowledge that he was heading right into trouble. Down the street a man stopped ... another appeared in the entrance to the store.
    The brand on the steeldust had been worked over and an excellent job. The JH had been turned into an SB.
    The old man looked across the saddle at him,a strong old man with fierce unrelenting eyes. "What's the matter? Lookin' for something?"
    Remembering Johnny lying in the dried mud beside the water-hole, Trace told him: "I'm looking for the man who stole that horse from me. He's mine. I caught him. I broke him. I branded him JH --"
    Quick temper flared in the hard old eyes. "You callin' me a horse thief?" He stepped around the horse to face Jordan. He was wearing a tied-down gun.
    "I'm only saying that's my horse you're riding. He's a stolen horse."
    "You're a dirty liar!"
    When the old man's hand dropped to his gun, Trace Jordan shot him through the stomach.
    Jordan looked over the smoking gun at two bystanders. "Walk out there and lift that saddle skirt, both of you." When they started walking he said, "If there isn't a four-inch white scar under the saddle skirt, find a bar." The scar was there ...
    "No matter," one of the men told him, "maybe this is your horse but that old man was no thief. You'd better ride before they hang you."
    There was an instant then when Trace Jordan looked down into the dying man's eyes. "That was my horse," he repeated. "My partner was murdered when he was stolen."
    All time seemed to stop while the old man struggled to speak but blood frothed at his lips and he died. But of one thing Jordan was sure. The old man had believed him.
    From up the street a yell, "He's downed Bob Sutton! He's shot Bob!" And the doors vomited men into the street. Trace Jordan hit the leather running and took the big red horse out of town at a dead run. Behind him guns talked but no bullet hit him.
    And now he was here, high on a sunlit mesa, dying in the saddle. There was nothing to see but distance, nothing but an infinity of far blue hills and nameless mysterious canyons. The mustang stopped suddenly, head up. Jordan turned painfully, searching all around, and in all that vast emptiness there was no living thing to be seen but a solitary buzzard. Heat waves shimmered the outlines of the junipers but nowhere was there movement, nor any sign of life ... and then he saw the tracks.
    The tracks of a pack rat in the dust and the tracks of a deer.
    They led to the cliff edge and disappeared there. Why did that seem important? His mind fumbled at the puzzle but the mustang tugged impatiently at the bit and Jordan gave the horse his head. The mountain-bred horse swung at once to the cliff-edge and, reaching it, stopped.
    Below him was an eyebrow of trail that clung to the cliff face. To this trail led the tracks. Jordan tried to focus his thoughts on the trail. The