The dawn was long in coming, but slowly the sky began to lighten in the east; it was going to be another blue-sky day. He never tired of the vastness of a big sky over the rolling hills, no matter if the hills were covered with snow or grass. To Cormac, the sight was always tremendous.
Horse apples on the trail had called his attention to the tracks of another horse that had passed through earlier, and now they were joined by a third following the same route. The moonlight was reflecting from a thin coating of ice in the bottom of the tracks, indicating that the sun had melted the blown-in surface snow and it had refrozen. He figured the other riders to be about a day in front of him.
His stomach had been doing its bear-in-the-woods imitation for some time and was becoming more insistent, and the countryside had been changing, with the hills becoming larger with more trees. A little ahead and off to the side ran a stream with a thick grove of birch trees, looking like a good place to grab a bite and bed down a while.
He had been up for more than twenty-four hours, eight of which had been spent in the saddle. He had killed three men, alienated the only people who meant anything to him, and given away the family homestead. That seemed like more than enough for one day. A little food and sleep was sounding almighty good.
Judging by the tracks, yet another rider coming from the south had joined the others. The area was beginning to get downright crowded. Cormac had only ridden about twenty-five miles and already there were four people in the neighborhood. What would anyone be doing riding in this weather if it wasn’t necessary? The other riders had also veered off toward these trees. Well, there was nothing unusual about that. Most good campsites were frequented frequently, or should it be frequently frequented? What would his mother think about using those two like words together? Likely, it was some kind of a double-grammar somethin’ or ’nother.
The stand of birch was fair in size and too thick to see into. Cormac pulled off his heavy mittens, flexed his fingers a few times to limber them up, and unbuttoned his sheepskin coat. He worked the action of his pistol to make sure it hadn’t frozen and there was a cartridge in the chamber of his rifle before laying it across the saddle in front of him. He believed the other riders to be at least a day ahead of him but had no wish to find out by surprise that he had been mistaken.
Wary of trouble and riding loose in the saddle, Cormac Lynch watched Lop Ear’s ears as they followed the tracks into the grove. If the horses smelled company, their ears would perk up to listen for accompanying sounds. The tracks led him to a campsite with a ring of fire-blackened stones below a forked branch propped up to hang the handle of a bucket to heat water or a coffee pot. His bet was on the coffee pot, but it may have been wishful thinking. A cup of horseshoe coffee was sounding pretty darn good.
His pa used to tell him, “The way to make a good cup of coffee is to throw a handful of coffee into some water and boil it a good while, and then throw in a horseshoe. If the horseshoe sinks, add more coffee, and boil it longer.”
He missed his pa, he surely did. His mother and Becky, too. John Lynch had loved to make up poems with which to tease Cormac’s mother and also loved to make up stories. A poem came to mind that his pa had made up while petting one of the cats that hung around during milking, waiting to get sprayed in the face with a stream of fresh, warm milk.
Without slowing his petting, he had just come out with it:Poor little tittin tat
Sittin on the titten toe
Hit him with the bitty bat
Dod damn it.
Cormac hadn’t known what it meant, doubted his pa had, but it was fun to listen to. His pa had been a man worth remembering. He wasn’t book-read, but his brain was mighty quick.
Cormac was careful to not mess up the signs until he had a chance to study them. According to the droppings, trash, cigarette butts, and the like, two people had waited here for two days. One was a heavy man of medium height with well-worn boot heels making deep tracks, and the other, a man not much on wide but his mother had done a good job for him on tall, walking with large strides. His boots did not sink deeply into the snow, and according to the yellow letters in the snowdrift, his initials were C.S. Cormac could still think of no good reason for this many people to be out in this kind of cold.
Recent travelers had spoken of rustlers becoming more prevalent as more folks moved west. There would always be people too lazy to work, living off the efforts of others. He felt sure the riders he was following were up to no good, and rustling was the only thing that fit. Well and good. It didn’t affect him, wasn’t anything for him to worry about. It was someone else’s problem. Just keep him out of it. He had seen all he wanted of bad guys.
His pa always told him, “Take care of your horse first.” He removed the saddle and gear from the horses, and then, with a cut-off shovel brought along for just such a purpose, broke the ice from the stream and cleared an area of snow down to the brown frozen grass underneath for the horses to eat. After they had time to roll and drink, he slipped hackamores on them with ropes long enough to let them graze, gave them a quick brushing, and checked their shoes for stones. A small stone lodged in a shoe could cripple a horse and lay it up for days, if not weeks.
That chore finished, he built a double-handful-sized fire and had two large cups of coffee to wash down some thick-sliced bacon along with some biscuits Lainey had made. Mrs. Schwartz had taught her well, although Cormac liked to tease her that she couldn’t cook. He rubbed the back of his head while he remembered the previous Christmas. She and Mrs. Schwartz had split up kitchen duties and Lainey’s job was to cook the goose Mr. Schwartz had shot the day before.
“Loooks like we both ready to put on the feed bag,” he remembered Mr. Schwartz saying when the two of them had sat down at the table while the women were still setting it. “Which you like betta? The white meat or dark meat.”
Knowing Lainey had just left the kitchen area and would be walking behind him close enough to hear, Cormac had answered, “It don’t much matter. If Lainey’s cookin’ it, it’s all gonna be dark meat.”
She had made his ears ring with a smack to the back of his head. But both women could cook up a storm, and he was going to miss that. He was not looking forward to living off his own cooking. He had woefully little experience in that department, and he would miss picking on Lainey.
Using his slicker as a ground cloth, Cormac spread his bedroll and crawled in. Lop Ear would sound the alarm if they had visitors. The ground was icy cold and hard beneath him. His pa had taught him how to deal with that, but he did not want to spend time building a wide fire, letting it burn down, and then scraping it away to the warm earth on which to put his bedroll. He was tired enough that he didn’t think the cold was going to bother him much. It didn’t.
Using his saddle for a pillow, he pulled the blanket over his head, allowing his warm breath to act as a heater, and was asleep immediately, only to wake right up again thinking he had forgotten something. Actually it was two somethings. After getting Lop Ear’s bridle and stuffing it into the front of his coat to warm the steel bit for the morning, he pulled his gun, and with it in hand, let the lights go out again.
It was the latter part of dusk when Lop Ear snorted Cormac awake. He came out of his bedroll in a hurry. It scared him to realize he had slept so sound and heard nothing all day. His pa had taught him to sleep light on the trail.
Some brush popped. The light was poor, but he could just make out a horse coming through the trees. He drew back behind four trees growing closely together, his gun still in his hand. The horse turned out to be a large deer. The winter had been very cold with an overabundance of snow, forcing animals to range far from their home territories for food. His camp was downwind from the deer, and the deer had not yet caught their scent.
Some fresh meat to begin his trip would be good. He cocked the pistol inside his heavy coat to muffle the sound and braced his arm against the tree, aiming for where the deer’s head was going to be.
The unsuspe
cting deer moseyed out of the heavy brush into the clearing to stop there, standing dead still, suddenly suspicious, with its head held high, smelling the breeze. It was a beautiful eight-point buck, bigger than Cormac had expected, and his gun-sight was pointing dead center at the white blaze on its forehead. All that was necessary was to let the hammer fall. The deer was magnificent.
Cormac stepped out from behind the trees. “Go on, big boy,” he said. “Be on your way.” Before the words were out of his mouth, the deer was gone. His muscles were like tightly coiled springs suddenly released. His first leap was every bit as magnificent as he. Cormac listened to it crashing through the brush. He really didn’t need meat as badly as he thought.
He rode through the night. Although the moon came up less full than the night before, there was still plenty of light with which to see well. They startled a few night creatures out scavenging for supper, and a couple of beavers waddling toward a stream scurried for cover, scolding him as he passed for disturbing them.
The sun came up right on time, its warm rays more than welcome. The saying, “It’s always darkest before the dawn,” could also be said as, “It’s always coldest before the dawn.” He decided riding at night is only fun for a short time. He would have to get through the day with a couple of catnaps so he would sleep when night came. Cormac stopped for breakfast and coffee—lots of coffee—in a hilltop grove of trees. Sitting on the sunny side of one of the trees after finishing his breakfast, leaning back and enjoying the sun with no particular place to go and no particular time to get there, Cormac let himself drift off to sleep.
Lop Ear woke him with a soft whinny. If they were going to be traveling companions, they were going to have to have a talk about Lop Ear waking him up all the time. Checking the position of the sun, he realized that sleeping so long had killed the morning and scared the heck out of noon. He finished off the coffee cold, left some bread for the camp-robbing jays, and they got on their way. He guided Lop Ear into the arroyo at the bottom of the hill and followed it all the way around the next hill before finding a way out. Skirting a rock outcropping, they topped out into a campsite with a small herd of cattle being held by three riders. A fourth rider was throwing a loop around a calf. Resting in the fire was an instrument Cormac had heard described as being used by rustlers to change brands. It was called a running iron. He could see at a glance that these men were changing a double P-Bar brand to a double R-Bar.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” he told Lop Ear and Horse. “I don’t care what they’re doin’, but the least they could do is keep an eye open for travelers. How dumb can they be?” He started the big gray back into the arroyo.
“Hold it right there!” A man in a sheepskin coat almost identical to his own stepped out of some thick bushes next to the camp, holding up his pants with one hand and covering Cormac with a gun in his other. Nope, not too bright, doing what he had obviously been doing not twenty-five feet from where they would be eating.
“We’ll just see who’s dumb here. You sit right still and just maybe I won’t shoot you. And that’s a big maybe.” He was long getting along in years, as was the pistol in his hand, but the steady manner in which he held that pistol spoke of more than a casual relationship.
“Look,” Cormac said, “I really don’t give a hoot what’s going on here. I’m not interested in other people’s problems. I’m just traveling through. I have no idea who the Double P-Bar belongs to, and I don’t care to. I have no interest in you or your friends or those cattle. So I’ll just go on my way, and you can keep right on doin’ what you’re doin’.”
Cormac nudged his heels into Lop Ear, and the horse obliged by stepping forward.
“If your horse takes another step, he’ll be missing a rider.”
The tone in the man’s voice suggested Cormac would do well to pay it attention. They stopped.
“Hey, boys!” the gunman yelled out, and the other three came on the run to rein in beside him. “He just rode up out of the arroyo while I was doing my business in the bushes. One of you boys keep him covered while I fasten my britches.”
“Damnit, Willard,” said a cowboy in a black ten-gallon hat. “Use your head for something besides a hat rack, will ya? I told you not to do that so close to camp. I don’t want to smell that while I’m eating.”
To Cormac, he said, “What are you doin’ here, boy?”
“Mostly wishin’ I was someplace else,” Cormac answered. “I was just trying to explain to your friend that I’m just passin’ through. I couldn’t care less what you fellows are doing. I don’t know anybody around here—don’t care to. Now, if you’ll just holster that hog leg, I’ll slip back into that arroyo and move on outta here, and you fellows can finish up what you’re doin’.”
“I’m afraid it’s not that simple, young friend,” Black Hat answered. “You stumbled in here, and now you’ve seen us. We’ll have to deal with that.”
A long, tall drink of water with a beard to match said, “You’re goin’ to have to kill him, Luke. We can’t be leavin’ no witnesses behind us.”
The last rustler to join the group was about Cormac’s age.
“I didn’t agree to any killin’,” he said, angrily. “You said we was just gonna run off a few cattle. You said nobody was gonna get hurt. He already told us he ain’t gonna tell anybody. Let’s just let him go. We can finish the brandin’ and go on our way.”
Black Hat had already made up his mind. “We can’t trust him. He’ll say anything now just to get away from here, but once he’s away it’ll be a different story.”
Cormac’s pa had told him about Indians who controlled their horses through signals with their heels, and he had spent a good deal of time training Lop Ear to do the same. He would pull his reins to the left and nudge his right flank with his heel. Lop Ear eventually got the idea and would let himself be guided in this manner. With a nudge on his right side, he stepped left. A nudge on his left moved him to the right.
Cormac nudged the horse’s left side, and he obliged by stepping right, bumping into Horse, who had come up to stand beside them. “Whoa, Lop Ear,” Cormac said, making a show of pulling up on the reins he was holding in his left hand while his right was reaching under the canvas flap covering the pack that Horse was carrying and coming out with the scattergun. He neck-reined Lop Ear to the left and swung the scattergun around, cocking both barrels in the same motion.
If it hadn’t been such a serious moment, Cormac would have laughed at the looks on their faces when those double barrels came around at them, but the trick was chancy and anything could happen. He was ready.
“Now, you fellows just take it easy. I would hate to have this thing go off accidentally. If you all will just lay your guns down carefully, I’ll just point ole Lop Ear out of here and we’ll part company.”
“Well, that’s not likely gonna happen,” said Black Hat. “There’s four of usn’s and only one of you, and you’re just a pipsqueak kid.”
“Well,” Cormac mimicked him, “that may very well be, and I can certainly see where you might be inclined to think that way, but it would be a mistake on your part. You see, I believe I’m holdin’ the difference right here. It’s a ten-gauge loaded with double-ought buck and don’t care a whit how old I am. If I pull these triggers, it’ll take two of you, maybe even three of you, right out of them there saddles. In addition to that, there is a pistol here that I can get into action as quick as I did this scattergun. I just might get all of you.”
Cormac paused to let them chew on that before going on. “Now, this is your game,” he said slowly and clearly. “If you shoot me, this scattergun is goin’ to go off, but you all just call it as you see it. If you want, you fellows just go ahead and cut loose, and I’ll do the same; when we’re done, we’ll count score.”
Well, they were not what one would call happy rustlers. Truth be told, they were looking kinda down in the mouth, but there was Black Hat, still considering it—he made the wrong decision. The wrinkles around his ey
es shifted, and Cormac started taking up the tension on the triggers.
“Wait!” cried the young one, who had wanted to let Cormac leave in the first place. He was on one of the middle horses and sure to get hit if Cormac fired. “Just wait a damn minute! That’s the kid I was telling you about. I was in River City when he killed three men attacking a girl, and I heard the sheriff say he had blown the heads plumb off four men who had killed his family. The Sheriff also said he did it with one shot from a ten-gauge shotgun, and unless I miss my guess, it’s that one right there he’s got pointed at us right now.”
Black Hat paled, and the wrinkles around his eyes changed again.
“Okay, friend.” His voice was strained, and Cormac noticed he had dropped the “young” from the title. “You made a believer out of me. Now, how do we get out of this?”
Cormac let them wait a long minute without speaking. Gray Beard, who had an end position, started edging his horse to the side.
Keeping his gun leveled where it was, Cormac nodded at him and told Black Hat, “That horse movin’ makes me a bit nervous. If he takes one more step, ole Betsy here is going to start talking to y’all, and I doubt you’ll care much for the conversation.”
“For God’s sake, Fuller, sit still! Those scatter barrels are pointed right beside my face!” Black Hat exclaimed, without turning his head.
Then Cormac told them, “I know I’m not going to shoot you, unless you make me. If I wanted to do that, it woulda already been done. However, I’m not so sure of y’all. So if you fellows will just drop your guns on the snow, get off your horses, and stand over by the fire with your hands in the air, I’ll be able to watch you as I ride away, and that’s just what I’ll do.”
The young one spoke up again, “Let’s do it, Blackie. He don’t look to me like the type who would shoot an unarmed man. Besides, if we shoot him, that there gun of his is gonna go off, and I don’t want to be anywhere in the same territory in front of it when it does.”
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