The Red Sombrero Read Online Free PDF Page A

sweatband. “Good stunt, if you kin work it. Boost your stock in these parts handsome and make you a tidy profit besides.” He cocked his head, teeth clamped on chaw, and regarded Lewis Cordray across the paper-littered desk. “Only one thing wrong with it.”
    “What?” Cordray said.
    “The guy you’re doing business with.”
    “Sierra?”
    “Sierra.”
    “That buffoon!”
    Bennie’s lips spread away from his teeth in a grimace. “One thing you’re right about. Like you say, when his mozos don’t show up with them rifles he’ll damn well get riled enough to come snortin’ over here.”
    “Exactly what we want.”
    “You ain’t speakin’ for me. That hombre ain’t no guy to yell boo at!”
    “We can handle him.”
    It was plain Bennie did not share Cordray’s assurance. “Speakin’ frank,” he said, “I’d a heap rather play with a hydrophoby skunk. What if he brings his whole bunch down on us — you ever think about that?”
    Cordray smiled. His father had been hidalgo born, a stormy petrel who had brought peace into this wild country after killing off the Indios and hiring those of the local gunsmoke breed who had managed to survive his counter raids of retribution. The times had been unsettled and he had certainly made the most of them, grabbing for his own more than 80,000 acres of the best growing land in the region. His riders shot trespassers wherever encountered. In his day the elder Cordray had been the only law in all this region. By common repute his ranch had been a thieves’ paradise, an exchange for stolen cattle. His vaqueros had cheated and plundered until his had been the largest ranch north of the Mexican border. Even Bennie felt it would have been the crudest insult to compare a grand gentleman like Don Timoteo to the ordinary run of contemporary barons. When he’d finally passed to his reward he’d been the most respected rancher in ten counties. He could shoot or throw with either hand and his son, Don Luis, whom the old man had raised like a prince of the blood, was trying hard to walk in his footsteps, refusing to admit that times had undergone a change.
    The old gent had believed in the right of everything he did; the only side of any question he’d been able to see was his own and, to this extent, at least, Lewis Cordray was just like him. But there was a thing that undermined the son, that prodded him into gambles in which the odds were all against him. Don Luis was a half-breed, the son of a gringo woman the old man had known before he’d taken her to the priest. She had been, it was said, as wild and arrogant as Cordray, but the two bloods hadn’t mixed well and the fruit of their union chafed under the imagined stigma to the point where it warped all his thinking. He seemed always to be having to prove things, and some of those things were crazy — like this scheme he had evolved of capturing Sierra.
    Eyeing him uneasily, Bennie heard Lewis Cordray chuckle. He was not a particularly handsome man for he had too gaunt a face and a shape that was built like a fence post — a between-the-posts posts. He was invariably dressed in the height of fashion and at first glance might have been taken for a dude, a damn Yankee of some kind with more cash than sense. But when you looked at him more carefully you saw the hoods that crouched over his eyes and the bright intensity back of their twinkling and urbane good humor.
    With a voice as bland as cream Cordray sighed. “Tano wouldn’t have any reason to bring his pelados — his hairy ones — over here. He’s a man of impulse, which is what we are counting on. When the rifles are not forthcoming he’ll fly into a rage and demand an accounting, but it will not occur to his mind of a bull that what we are after is to make of him a present to the Federalistas. He’ll not fetch along more than three or four — ”
    “You don’t know what he’ll do,” Bennie growled.
    Cordray laughed. “Have you ever met him