Border Fever by Bill Pronzini & Jeffrey Wallmann

Author:Bill Pronzini & Jeffrey Wallmann [Pronzini, Bill & Wallmann, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Action & Adventure
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2013-04-14T21:00:00+00:00

Less than two hours later, M’Candliss walked his horse up a long rise flanked on either side by heavy thorn and brush. When he topped the rise he dismounted and dropped the reins. He stood motionless for several seconds, studying the valley floor below and what it contained.

Gillette’s Bar-G ranch was at the near end—a large rambling house shaded by paloverde trees, a scatter of outbuildings, a corral and hay barn, a silo, and the big gallows-like windlasses of a pair of wells. All the outbuildings were dark including the bunkhouse. But lantern light showed behind some of the windows in the main house. The men who had poisoned the Miles pond and shot Eckinshaw were either in there, or they had already finished patching up the one who’d been wounded and had turned in at the bunkhouse.

On foot M’Candliss made his way down the brushy slope, careful not to break a branch or set a loose, stone rolling. At the bottom were clumps of mesquite and a couple of paloverde, then a whitewashed fence and the ranch yard beyond. Standing in the shadows, he took a long look around at the buildings. Nothing stirred anywhere that he could see.

He moved ahead to the fence, climbed through, and then made his way across the yard, using the trees and one of the wells to cover his approach. When he reached the side wall of the ranch house he eased along to the nearest of the lighted windows and edged his head around to peer inside.

The room was opulent; luxury in a wilderness of cactus and sand. There were horsehair-stuffed chairs, each upholstered in a different color, and a heavy roll-top desk with silver handles and accessories. Hanging in the middle of the ceiling was a lighted candelabra with an old rose base and crystal drops, and long bands of twisted metal rather than the usual chains. The wallpaper, a rarity itself in this barren land, was bright with pink nosegays, and there were fine paintings on the wall of men on horseback, and hounds, and other mounted men in the process of jumping fences.

At first glance M’Candliss saw all of those and nothing more; the room seemed empty of habitation. But on a second, closer look, he realized that there was someone lying on a leather couch on the far side of the room. The couch was positioned so that its back was toward the window and it faced a cold fireplace; only the man’s head was visible to M’Candliss, turned in profile. A silver-maned head, with just enough of the bearded features discernible for M’Candliss to recognize who it was.

Clement Holmes.

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