Harlan frowned. “How do you know what they do on the rock pile?”
Yancey shrugged and held the man’s gaze, letting Harlan think that he had done time in prison, too, at some stage in his past. “We’ve been down on our luck before,” Yancey said finally. “But you seem kind of—well, lost, Buck. Like this sort of life’s a bit too much for you. Just how long did you sweat it out?”
Harlan was silent for a long time, looking very tight-lipped and ugly, his eyes flicking from Yancey to Cato and back again. Finally, he murmured, “Fifteen years.”
“Fifteen years!” Cato echoed, looking startled. “Hell, man, you must’ve been just a kid when you went in!”
Harlan nodded. “Fifteen ... Just before the end of the war.”
Yancey nodded. “That explains the old gun and how you’re finding it hard to get along. Different kind of world to the one you knew when you went in, I’ll bet.”
“Sure is,” Harlan said. “Suppose you want to know all the details.”
Cato and Yancey shook their heads simultaneously and Yancey said, “That’s your business. But I can’t see you strugglin’ on the way you are. By all counts you walked right into Brody at Smoke Hill, raised hell in a saloon and got yourself beat-up over a whore. You’d be dead now if we hadn’t come into that diner when we did.”
“I know it!” Harlan snapped, obviously unhappy about being obligated to anyone. “Which reminds me, how come you busted in that way with guns in your hands? You sure don’t go in for apple pie and coffee like that every time, I’ll bet.”
“We don’t get rousted by a deputy at the door every time, either,” Cato told him easily. “We figured you might be a cowpoke gettin’ a hard time and we’re kind of just naturally against the law in those trail towns.” He winked. “Seen too many jailhouses and paid too many fines for kickin’ up a ruckus and seen them fines go into lawmen’s pockets.”
Harlan digested that and slowly nodded, accepting it.
“You didn’t have to follow through and get me out of town the way you did, lay out good cash for a horse for me,” he said.
“Suspicious cuss, ain’t he?” Cato asked Yancey.
“Look, Buck,” Yancey said, “we all had to get out of Smoke Hill pronto. We’d bought into your trouble and it would have been kind of stupid to leave you to get shot up after us stickin’ our necks out. Anyway, who’s to say you mightn’t be able to pay us back along the trail? Debts don’t have to always be squared-up with money.”
There was just sufficient hint in Yancey’s words to make the confused Harlan think that maybe he was saying they might pull something a little on the lawless side somewhere and that he could get square by helping them out. He wanted to be alone, but he didn’t know the country and he needed to learn a lot of things about this strange world he had found himself in. These two jaspers, he thought, seemed as if they could set him straight on a few things, so why not tag along with them for now, if that was what they wanted? Learn all he could, maybe get the answers to a few important questions he needed, and then cut out and to hell with them?
He said quietly, “All right. I guess I’ll tag along with you fellers if that’s the way you want it.”
“Not a matter of us wanting it,” Yancey told him. “It’s up to you, Buck. Offer’s there. You take it or leave it. Suit yourself.”
He turned his mount and Cato ranged alongside and they started heading out across the sea of grass in a northwesterly direction. They didn’t look back and Harlan frowned after them. Seemed like these hombres weren’t as soft as he had figured. He had to make his own decision whether he followed or not. Could it be that they didn’t have any axe to grind at all?
It was all too confusing to Buck Harlan and he swore softly to himself as he kicked his heels into his mount and sent the animal after the two undercover agents.
They came to a town on the edge of the wilderness called Fatback Creek. It was small enough not to have a law office but large enough to have holding pens for cattle a mile from the edge of town. It was surrounded by a lot of small ranches and it seemed that they pooled their herds and hired a trail driver to get them down to the railhead at Smoke Hill.
When Yancey, Cato and Buck Harlan rode in that noon, there was a lot of activity going on at the holding pens and there seemed to be more than the usual excitement of herding a bunch of steers from the open range. Yancey called out to a townsman who was hitching a black mare into a buggy near a horse trough.
“What’s all the commotion?”
The man did stop hitching-up while he answered. “Big bull run loco. Stuck a coupla fellers with his horns before someone could shoot him.” He climbed hurriedly into his buggy, flicked the reins and, as he drove off, he called to the trio, “Ride on out there. They’ll be sellin’ off the dead men’s things. Might pick yourself up somethin’ cheap!”
The buggy disappeared in a cloud of dust and Yancey shook his head slowly. “Code of the West,” he said with an edge of bitterness. “A man’s not even under the sod and they’re fighting over his belongings.”
Cato nodded but Harlan frowned, looking thoughtful. “Reckon I might be able to pick up a decent six-gun?” he asked.
The governor’s agents exchanged glances and then Cato shrugged. “Why not? I guess a feller who’s been pronged by a bull ain’t got any further use for one.”
“Only thing is ... I ain’t got any money,” Harlan said, but there was a silent plea in his eyes. They knew how badly he wanted a cartridge-firing pistol. He was always admiring Yancey’s and Cato’s.
“Guess we can stake you one more time,” Yancey said, deadpan, and they put their mounts forward and rode out in the drifting dust cloud raised by the buggy.
At the auction held at the pens, while the two dead cowpokes lay out back, their boss sold off their boots, handguns and cartridge belts, rifles and scabbards, saddles, horses, hats, pocket and hunting knives, a pair of whipcord trousers slightly spotted with fresh blood, neckerchiefs, but no shirts: both men had only possessed one shirt each and these had been pierced and bloodied by the horns of the berserk bull. Yancey and Cato bought Buck Harlan a Colt .45 with the short five-and-three-quarter inch barrel and a battered old Winchester ’66 that fired the heavy but sluggish .44 caliber cartridge. It had seen a lot of use and was one of the first repeating rifles to bear the name of Winchester. Previously, it had been called the Henry, and Harlan recalled having seen one way back in the Civil War days.
“Yeah,” Cato said. “They were just coming out then and a lot of soldiers bought and paid for ’em themselves. The army never accepted them as an official weapon though they used to hold fourteen shots in the old tubular magazine and had a brass frame and action ... They were good guns.”
“Why didn’t the army like ’em, then?” Harlan asked.
“Well, the Henry didn’t have any woodwork on it,” replied the gun expert, happy to be on his favorite subject. “I mean, it had a wooden butt, of course, but there was no wooden fore end and the tubular magazine was only thin metal and loaded from the front end. If it got dented ... and that was an easy thing to do at any time, let alone in battle—you just couldn’t feed cartridges down it and the gun was useless. That’s how come the fore-end was put on to protect the tube and it was made of stronger steel. The ’66 was the first to use a steel receiver, too, and there were some changes made to the mechanism so it was really an entirely new weapon and needed a new name. Oliver Winchester figured it was about time his name appeared on something more than the shirts he made, so it was called the Winchester ’66 and sold so well that he gave up makin’ shirts altogether and concentrated on firearms. Mighty rich man, Oliver Winchester. Made killin’ easy and grew rich on it.”
Harlan caressed the battered woodwork of the old saddle carbine and worked the lever, the smooth action, throwing out the cartridges through the top ejector. He set it down and pulled the Colt out of the holster rig, having to tug hard to free it from the leather.
“A little
oil and cut it back around the trigger guard and you’ll have that Colt practically jumpin’ into your hand,” Cato said.
Harlan examined the gun closely, feeling its weight and balance, spinning the cylinder, sighting down the short barrel. He handed it to Cato and the gunsmith gave it what seemed a cursory examination, then sighted at a small rock about thirty feet away and cocked the hammer. He fired and the gun jumped in his hand and dust spurted beside the rock. Cato grimaced.
“Pulls like a twenty-mule team,” he said. “Got too much powder in the cartridges and the foresight’s too high ... Trigger sear must be an inch deep and the hammer comes back like someone’s tied it to the cylinder.”
Harlan blinked. “It sure seemed okay to me.”
“After handling that old Navy Colt, I’ll bet it did,” Cato said. “I’ll work on it some and you’ll be able to shoot smooth and fast. Once you learn how to get it clear of leather in a hurry.”
“Fine with me,” Harlan said, excitement showing in his eyes as he took the Colt back from Cato.
“Ain’t a lot of call for an ordinary ranny to use his gun, Buck,” Yancey said slowly, probing gently. “I mean, chousing cattle and riding herd, sure, you get to fire it once in awhile. Might even have to shoot a few Injuns. But most times, the ordinary ranny don’t have to worry about his gun speed. That’s left to the gunfighters.”
“Yeah, but it’s handy to be able to get your gun out and workin’ in a hurry, ain’t it?” Harlan asked.
“Sure, have to agree with that. Uh, you figure you might have to do that?”
Harlan looked at Yancey soberly. “You never know.”
By his tone, Yancey knew he would get nothing more out of the man right now. He and Cato had tried to probe Harlan these past few days about his plans but he was close-mouthed about them, evading the questions altogether or giving some vague reply about just ‘drifting around for a spell.’ Governor Dukes wanted Harlan set on the ‘right road’ back to rehabilitation and Yancey and Cato figured training the ex-convict in the use of modern weapons was part and parcel of this, but they still didn’t know just what Buck Harlan had in mind to do with his life from now on. He had told them, in dribs and drabs, about the guerilla raid and his long years in prison, but all his talk had been of the past: he had avoided mentioning the future.
He had said once that he figured there was some sort of compensation coming to him from the State of Texas and he aimed to take every cent they offered and he reckoned it would ‘set him up for what he wanted to do,’ but just what that was he didn’t say ...
It bothered Yancey. It was all right riding herd on Harlan, tutoring him in the ways of the west as they were doing now, but Yancey liked to know where he was headed and Cato was already restless for the bright lights and the women of Austin. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Harlan had some sort of plan in mind.
And he felt that learning how to handle modern cartridge weapons was a part of it ...
Buck Harlan proved to be an eager and apt pupil once Cato had tuned the Colt and cut back the holster. He had adjusted the cartridge belt to Harlan’s lean waist, pierced the holster base and fed a strip of rawhide through the holes for tying around Harlan’s thigh. It was a single-loop holster that hung from a slit in the cartridge belt, a style becoming more and more popular with Westerners, and it hung just the right height on Harlan’s lean frame.
Cato had the gun working smoothly so that it required the minimum effort to cock hammer and drop it. He had filed the trigger sear, adjusted the cylinder pawl, and re-tempered the mainspring. He had thrown away the handful of cartridges that had been in the belt loops and replaced them with the brand that he and Yancey used and which were much more suitable for the Colt’s short barrel.
He filed down the foresight, blackened the bright metal with candle black and sanded the walnut butt so that it fitted Harlan’s hand better. Then Yancey took over and set up targets for Harlan to shoot at, first at twenty feet, then thirty feet, moving the range back ten feet at a time until he had reached seventy yards. That was about the limit of the pistol, but only when held firmly in both hands with the butt resting on a folded jacket in the prone position. It was only as a test of accuracy that he used this range and Harlan proved to be a good shot, hitting four targets out of six at that range consistently.
But for gunfighting work, the range usually came down to no more than thirty or forty feet and Yancey had Harlan practice shooting at targets at this range at first without any thought for speed. The main thing, he said, was to get used to the range first, hit what you aimed at. The speed would come later and was, in fact, a whole lot less important than most people figured in a gunfight. The man who got his Colt out first and working, didn’t always hit what he aimed at. While the other man, a shade slower, but keeping cool enough to take steady aim, could easily be the one to walk away from a gunfight.
Buck Harlan was impatient but Yancey kept him shooting at the targets until he could hit all of them consistently. Only then did he move on to the technique of getting the Colt out of leather fast.
For hours at a time he kept Harlan standing there, just lifting the gun out of the holster and dropping it back in with no thought of the speed of the motions. He warned him to get the feel of the gun coming out of leather, freely, automatically making small adjustments to his muscles so that the foresight cleared the edge of the holster without snagging, and his finger slid in the cutaway to curl around the trigger without fumbling. Cato had filed milling into the hammer spur so there was less chance of the hand slipping off as it was brought back to full cock and it was a matter of being able to do this not only smoothly, but in time with easing back the trigger so that it came right back, freeing the sear, at the very instant the hammer notched onto full cock. Then it was only a matter of lifting the thumb slightly so that the hammer dropped and fired the cartridge uppermost in the cylinder.
It took much practice and Harlan cursed Yancey plenty before the big man was satisfied and then concentrated on second-shaving movements so that the gun snapped into line, ready for firing with a minimum of effort. Once Harlan could manage this, Yancey loaded the gun and set him to firing at the closer targets. By the end of the second day at this, he was hitting his mark consistently and his face fairly beamed as he walked back into camp with Yancey to find Cato cooking the supper.
“I sure do owe you fellers plenty,” Harlan said as he squatted down, automatically taking out his Colt and beginning to take it apart for cleaning, as Cato had insisted he do each night during the training period.
“Well, at least you’ll be able to protect yourself if ever you get prodded into a gunfight,” Cato said.
Harlan nodded, sobering some. “Mebbe I’ll do the prodding now.”
Cato and Yancey froze momentarily, then snapped their eyes towards Harlan where he was expertly cleaning powder-fouling out of the mainspring assembly.
“How’s that again?” Yancey asked quietly.
Harlan blew powder free of the mainspring and glanced across at the two agents.
“I said mebbe I’ll do the proddin’ ... You know, call someone out and tell him to go for his gun.”
“Seems like you ain’t learned your lesson any too well,” Yancey told him soberly. “We didn’t teach you these things with a gun for you to go out hunting glory, Buck. That’s crazy. No future in it at all.”
“I ain’t interested in glory,” Harlan told them flatly. “It’s just that I got me some men to kill, that’s all ... Now that you fellers have showed me how to handle a gun real good, well I can go out and do it.”
Five – Vengeance Trail
He told them more about it around the campfire that night. Harlan was reluctant at first but Cato kept hinting in a way that became broader and broader until all the ex-convict could do was either refuse right out or begin his story.
He drained his mug of coffee, tossed the dregs into the fire and settled back to build a cigarette from the tobacco and papers Yancey silently
handed him.
“Well, I guess I kind of owe you fellers some sort of explanation, at that,” he began. He licked the paper then reached for a glowing twig and lit up. As he spoke, the smoke came out of his nostrils. “I already told you somethin’ about my brothers’ bunch of raiders ... Oh, sure, we got called outlaws and robbers and murderers and all that, but we Harlans can trace our kin way back to when Texas was part of Mexico. We’re proud folk and while we might’ve done some robbin’ here and there, it was mainly to keep ourselves goin’ ... The big robbery, that gold train, was only done when Nate figured the South had lost the war and there just weren’t no more reason for us to keep on fightin’ a losin’ battle.”
He paused to look at the others but both Yancey and Cato kept their faces blank and Harlan drew deeply on his cigarette before continuing.
“Anyways, we got that gold and we were hunted for months. We scattered, makin’ a pact, takin’ an oath if you want to know, to meet up a year from the time we broke up and then divvy-up the gold. If someone didn’t show, it was his bad luck. We all had to meet at a certain place on a certain day. No show, no gold ...” His face took on bitter lines. “Nate and Pete always were too trustful.”
“I guess one of the gang figured a year was just too long to wait, huh?” Yancey said. “Sneaked back and took the gold for himself?”
Harlan looked at him closely as he drew deeply on his cigarette again, seeming to get some comfort from the motion. He nodded slowly. “Kind of like that ... But he knew Nate and Pete would never rest till they caught up with anyone who double-crossed ’em, so he figured to play it safe. He turned us in to the Yankee Provisional Government ...”
He paused, obviously expecting Yancey and Cato to show some sort of reaction. They looked interested but that was all and he frowned, smoked a spell before continuing.
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