The Black Hills

by William W. Johnstone

  Hunter smiled. The old man still had his gravel. That was a good sign. “I’ll show you in a minute, you old catamount. Do you think you can walk or do I have to carry you?”

  “I’ll walk, by God!”

  Angus tossed the skins and blankets off of him, and Hunter took his arm, helping him stand. When Hunter had the old man on the ground, Annabelle said, “I’ll grab a few things and be right behind you.”

  “Grab Shep’s Henry—will you, Anna?” Hunter would no longer be far from a long gun, and he thought it fitting that he’d appropriated Shep’s handsome repeater, which he would use to avenge not only Shep but Tye as well.

  “Got it,” Anna said, reaching into the driver’s boot for the rifle housed in Shep’s leather scabbard and tucked beneath the seat.

  Hunter took the bulk of his father’s weight against his own right side as he helped the old man up the slope, tracing a wending path through the columnar pines. The wind made a near-steady rushing sound in the highest branches, though the air was still down here on the forest floor. It was quiet except for a squirrel giving the intruders holy hell from a near aspen branch, and for the bellows-like sawing of Angus’s old lungs.

  “Christ, Pa.” Hunter couldn’t help scolding the old man. “That pipe of yours and your consarned coffin nails are going to be the death of you yet!”

  “You don’t have a quirley on you, do you, son?” Angus quipped, wheezing. “I could sure use one.” He coughed a raking laugh. Hunter glanced over his shoulder at Anna, who chuckled. Hunter shook his head.

  At last they moved up out of the trees. Before them was a steep wall of limestone gouged here and there by the various erosions of time. The deepest gouge was a low, egg-shaped cave at the base of the formation and up a steep bank flanking several scattered, wagon-size boulders.

  “That’s your new home, Pa,” Hunter said, nodding at the cavern. “For now.”

  “What the hell?”

  “Home sweet home.”

  “Hellkatoot!”

  “Come on.”

  Hunter had to nearly carry the old man up the steep, gravelly incline beyond the boulder and onto the crumbling shelf of dirt and gravel fronting the cave. While the old man leaned back against the mountain wall, loudly raking air in and out of his lungs, Hunter investigated the cave, having to doff his hat and duck his head to compensate for the low ceiling, which at its highest wasn’t much over six feet.

  Hunter knew the cave was often occupied, for he’d smelled gamey, wild smells and scat in here on several occasions when he’d visited the cavern on hunting trips and had needed a handy place to spend the night or to build a coffee fire. However, the presence of a wildcat or bear or a family of wolves had made it none too handy a time or two in the past, and Hunter had quickly lit a shuck.

  No animals appeared to have made the cave home lately. There were a few deer and rabbit bones tufted with bits of remaining fur near the back, but they appeared several months old to Hunter’s practiced eye. The cave, being roughly ten feet wide by twenty feet deep, would provide adequate cover for Angus and Annabelle while Hunter was off doing what needed to be done.

  Hunter stepped back out of the cave as Annabelle came up carrying a buffalo robe over one arm, two canteens slung over her neck, and Hunter’s Henry in her right hand. She ducked her head to peer into the cave, then gave a Hunter an ironic look.

  “Just like the Morris House in Philadelphia.”

  “What’s the Morris House?” he asked.

  “Never mind.”

  They got Angus settled inside the cave. He was badly worn out from the climb and didn’t say much except, “How in hell did you know about this place, boy?”

  “You’d know about it, too, if you ever left the ranch yard.”

  “How can I leave the ranch yard, you ungrateful pup?” Angus retorted. “I got beer to brew!” He rolled his eyes around. “Say, I hope you thought to bring a jug of ale.”

  “Bet on it,” Annabelle said. She’d laid out some spruce and pine boughs for a bed, and she was tucking the buffalo robe and blankets over the needles. “I brought whiskey and ale.”

  Angus furled a brow at Hunter. “Tell me again how come you ain’t married her by now?”

  “I been holdin’ back because I was worried you might steal her away from me.”

  “I still might.” Angus winked at Annabelle.

  She winked back at him.

  Hunter placed his hand over his father’s forehead. “How you feelin’, you old reprobate? You pullin’ a fever, are ya?”

  “Hell, it’s a hot day.”

  Hunter glanced at Annabelle kneeling beside him.

  “How do you feel?” she asked Angus.

  “Fine as frog hair split four ways.”

  “Go easy on the whiskey,” she told him. “And no smoking.”

  “Shee-it. Purty as Christmas mornin’, but this one’s a harpy too!”

  Annabelle laughed.

  Hunter stared grimly down at him. “You heard the nurse, Pa,” he said gently, worriedly.

  “Don’t sass me, boy!”

  Hunter was about to respond, but Angus snaked his lone hand out from under the buffalo robe and wrapped it around Hunter’s forearm, cutting him off. “Don’t worry, boy—I won’t die until those who killed Shep and Tye are kicked out with a cold shovel.”

  His fingers, surprisingly strong, dug into Hunter’s arm, and his eyes blazed with fiery passion.

  * * *

  Hunter and Annabelle spent a good portion of the afternoon outfitting the cave with supplies they carried up from the wagon. They unhitched the mule and unsaddled their horses, and tied all three animals to a picket line strung between trees not far from the cave, close enough that the horses and Titus would alert them of possible interlopers if Bobby Lee, who was off hunting rabbits, did not.

  Hunter doubted that anyone would find them way out here in the high and rocky, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He doubted any other white man knew of the cave, but a good tracker could follow the wagon’s tracks from the ranch.

  He was sure that men from town would soon pay the 4-Box-B headquarters a visit. Maybe as early as tonight but by tomorrow night for sure. Not finding anyone in the yard, they might follow the wagon, but if they arrived late enough there wouldn’t be enough light with which to pick it up. Hunter was always aware of the moon, a habit he’d gotten into during the war when he was customarily sent out on night raids or reconnaissance missions, and knew there would only be a late sickle moon this evening.

  He built a fire just inside the cave, with a ring of flame-blackened rocks he’d arranged a couple of years ago and in which old ashes remained. He mounted an iron spider over the leaping flames, and Annabelle set a coffeepot on it. While the water in the pot gurgled and ticked, she made fatback sandwiches with cheddar cheese on crusty wheat bread.

  Meanwhile, Angus snored in the cave behind her and Hunter, waking occasionally to take a painkilling pull on the bottle Anna had set close beside him. Down the steep decline from the cave, the horses quietly grazed. The sun shone on the face of the mountain in which the cave had been carved, but the forest below the cave was in deep, foggy green shadow.

  From his vantage by the fire, Hunter sat and, sipping a cup of the hot black coffee and eating one of Annabelle’s sandwiches, stared out over the forest and beyond the next ridge. He couldn’t see the 4-Box-B headquarters from here, because it sat too low in the valley beyond that next ridge, but he thought that if the buildings were burned at night, which they likely would be when the men from town came and found the place abandoned, he would see the glow.

  That’s when he would make his first move.

  He felt Anna’s eyes on him before he turned to see her staring at him, her own untouched sandwich in one hand, a steaming cup of coffee in her other hand. Her eyes were soft and touched with fear.

  “What is it, honey?” Hunter asked her.

  “What . . . what are you going to do, Hunter? How are you going to
fight all those men . . . alone?”

  Hunter opened his mouth to speak but she cut him abruptly off with, “No. Let’s not talk about it.” She turned to gaze down the slope into the cool, dark, quiet forest. “Let’s just sit here . . . enjoy the time we have.”

  * * *

  They did just that.

  Between the necessary chores of tending the stock and seeing to Angus’s needs, they sat together by the fire, sipping coffee, not saying much but just being together, appreciating every second.

  Hunter cleaned and loaded the LeMat and Shep’s Henry rifle. He sharpened his bowie knife. He cleaned Tyrell’s Winchester saddle-ring carbine and left it leaning against the cave wall for Anna, in case she should need it. Hunter cleaned Angus’s Livermore twelve-gauge shotgun, his Yellowboy rifle, and his old cap-and-ball pistols, as well, loading them all and setting the four weapons near where the old man lay on his bed of buffalo robes and spruce branches.

  Angus gave a dip of his chin in acknowledgment, then asked for a cup of ale.

  That night, Hunter kept the fire very low. He wouldn’t have built one for himself and Anna, but Angus needed to be kept warm, for nights in the Hills grew chilly. Anna leaned back against Hunter, between his raised knees, as he stared out over the dark forest toward the ranch, waiting.

  Bobby Lee lay nearby, curled nose to tail in sleep, yipping softly in rabbit-rending dreams.

  The glow Hunter expected did not come that night.

  But the second night, just after he’d poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and had returned the pot to the spider, Annabelle gave a soft, low gasp.

  Hunter jerked his head to her. She stared out over the forest, her mouth slowly widening.

  He followed her gaze to the southwest. A stone dropped in his belly. A light shone there—a soft, orange glow pulsating above the hollow in which the 4-Box-B lay.

  Hunter slowly set his cup down beside the fire. His hand shook, causing some of the coffee to slop over the sides of the cup.

  “That’s it, then,” he said, and turned to Anna. “You stay here with Pa. You stay here until I come for you.” He looked at the coyote eyeing him expectantly, ears pricked. “You, too, Bobby Lee. You’re of more use here than you would be with me, against a whole passel of men with guns.”

  Bobby Lee mewled softly in protest.

  Annabelle repressed a sob but her eyes were shiny in the firelight as she gazed at her lover. “When will you be back?”

  Hunter gathered his weapons and his saddle. “I’ll be back as soon as I know I won’t lead them here.”

  He looked over his shoulder as he moved farther and farther down the slope and away from the fire’s dim glow.

  “But I will come back to you, Anna. I reckon I can’t make any promises. I been through this before. But I sure am going to try!”

  Then he was gone.

  Soon, hoof thuds sounded in the forest below the cave. They dwindled quickly, and then there was just the starry sky pressing down low.

  Anna sat back on her heels and lost the fight to hold her tears at bay.

  Bobby Lee chortled longingly.

  CHAPTER 26

  Sitting in a wicker rocking chair on the front veranda of his sprawling ranch house, Graham Ludlow took a deep drag from his stogie and blew the smoke out into the night beyond the veranda rail.

  The rancher had come out here to get away from the screaming and yelling issuing from his son Cass’s room upstairs. But now that the doctor, Norton Dahl, was here, changing Cass’s bandages and adding salve to the burn, the screaming had followed Ludlow out here to his sanctuary.

  Ludlow was a tough man, but he couldn’t take the screaming. Not that the screams made him squeamish. What bothered Ludlow was that a man shouldn’t carry on that way. Hell, he’d been around ranch hands who’d been gored by bulls in unmentionable places or been thrown from horses into prickly pear thickets and even into barbed wire, half their skin peeled off, and they’d done little more than curse a few times through gritted teeth.

  Ludlow had once known a man who’d lost a thumb to a lariat. It had taken several hands to restrain that man, to keep him from merely wrapping up his bloody hand, climbing back into his saddle, and getting back to work.

  As another shrill scream vaulted out from the lodge’s second story, Ludlow winced, shook his head, and took another drag from the stogie.

  He supposed this would make its way around the Hills, as well as everything else that had happened—his daughter and the Grayback, his daughter burning down the barn, burning down her brother, and now, to top it all off, Cass’s screaming like a girl with a frog down her dress.

  Ludlow wanted to know what he’d done to deserve this patch of bad luck. All he’d ever done was try to make an honest living and give his children comfortable lives. For his troubles, his daughter turned out to be a trollop, her brother a nancy boy. Or worse—if what Annabelle had accused Cass of doing to her was true.

  That turn of thought further soured Ludlow’s mood.

  He found himself welcoming the distraction of hooves thumping in the darkness west of the ranch, growing gradually louder in the otherwise quiet night. A rider was approaching.

  Frowning curiously, Ludlow rose from his chair, took another drag from the stogie, then, exhaling smoke through his wide nostrils, moved down the veranda steps to follow the path down the slope toward the yard. He was nearly to where the yard leveled at the two iron hitchrails standing near a stock trough in which dark water reflected the lights of the bunkhouse on the yard’s other side, when the rider appeared—a silhouetted figure checking his mount down to a trot as he entered the yard, shadowy dust curling up behind the horse’s arched tail.

  The metallic rasp of a rifle being cocked reached Ludlow’s ears, and he saw a slender, hatted figure separate from the shadow of the burned barn rubble that still came to smoldering life now and then.

  “Who is it? Who’s there? Name yourself!” barked the picket.

  The rider stopped several yards away from the sentinel Ludlow had been in the habit of posting nightly ever since the Sioux trouble. The Sioux themselves might have had their horns filed down by the U.S. Army, but the Hills were stitched with desperadoes not above robbing remote ranch headquarters or assassinating rich and powerful men who’d stepped on the toes of others of their own ilk. A man like Ludlow, with lots of money and various sundry business dealings, some not so popular, had to have eyes in the back of his head.

  Also, there were the friends and family of the men he’d hanged on his range . . .

  “It’s George Andrews from town,” said the rider as the horse rippled its withers and shook its head. “I got a message for Mr. Ludlow.”

  “It’s all right, Lowry,” Ludlow said, stopping at the bottom of the slope and resting his left hand on the hitchrack.

  Lowry turned toward the rancher, pinched his hat brim, let his Winchester’s hammer click benignly down, then turned and continued making his rounds along the headquarters’ perimeter.

  George Andrews, an odd-job man from Tigerville, booted his calico mare over to the hitchrack, near where the doctor’s shabby single-seated buggy sat behind a beefy zebra dun. Andrews drew back on the mare’s reins and said, “Evenin’, Mr. Ludlow.”

  “What’s the message, George?”

  “You said you wanted me to let you know when the Chaney boys rode out to the 4-Box-B.”

  “That’s right.”

  “They rode out about an hour ago, Mr. Ludlow. They got liquored up after they laid their pa to rest, an’ then they asked for volunteers to ride out to the Buchanon ranch. There’s a whole bunch of’em signed up. Boy, you get the liquor flowin’, an’ everybody’s a pistoleer!”

  Ludlow himself had attended Max Chaney’s funeral, of course. It wouldn’t have looked right if he hadn’t, though he had to admit being a little worried lightning would strike him there on Cemetery Hill, especially when purple thunderclouds rolled in from the north. He thought he’d done a pretty fair job of
impersonating a genuine mourner, however, and he’d managed to get down off of Cemetery Hill before the rain had started.

  He hadn’t talked to either of the Chaney boys—Billy or Pee-Wee—about their plans regarding the Buchanons. He knew they would get around to calling on the Buchanon ranch sooner or later. There was no way either of Chaney’s sons would let their father’s and brother’s murders go unavenged . . . of course they didn’t realize who had actually killed Max Chaney.

  No one except Ludlow himself knew that, but he also knew that Doc Dahl had his suspicions. Anyway, Chaney would likely have died from that nasty head wound if Ludlow could have kept his temper on a leash. Well, he hadn’t, and that was that.

  Over and done with. Water under the bridge.

  As the fog of his distracting thoughts cleared, Ludlow saw George Andrews staring incredulously up at the big house standing back against the hills behind it with most of its windows lit. Another of Cass’s shrill screams caromed across the ranch yard from the young man’s second-story bedroom. Ludlow had closed the window earlier, not wanting the hired hands to be privy to his son’s inelegant caterwauling, but the sawbones must have opened it to let out the stench of rotting flesh.

  “Ohhh, Jesus, help meee!” Cass shrieked in a high-pitched, girlish voice, sobbing. “Please, Doc, you gotta give me somethin’ stronger to kill the pain! It hurts so god-awful baaaddd! ”

  More wailing.

  “Jesus, Mr. Ludlow,” said Andrews, staring up at the house. “Is . . . is that Cass? Jeepers, he sounds like he’s in a powerful bad way!”

  “Yes, yes,” Ludlow said, “I couldn’t have put it better myself, George. Cass is in a powerful bad way.”

  “Is it true what they say?”

  “Is what true and who’s sayin’ it?”

  Andrews was a heavyset man, none too bright and with a penchant for the bottle, when he had the money, most of which he earned running errands for men like Ludlow and swamping out whorehouses and saloons when he wasn’t butchering Mrs. Bjornson’s pigs. He flushed now as he turned to the rancher, realizing he’d made a mistake by shooting his mouth off.