Bannerman the Enforcer 6

by Kirk Hamilton

  Speers was shaking badly now. “Listen, Burdin! I mean it. I’ve had a gutful and I aim to pull out! You ain’t any freedom fighter; you ain’t interested in makin’ Texas a better place for folks to live! You’re only interested in power and killin’ and makin’ folks do what you want. You’re a loco wolf, snappin’ and killin’ to no purpose, and I ain’t gonna ride with you no more! I’m headin’ for Mexico and my brother and to hell with you!” He raked his blazing eyes around at the others. “To hell with all of you!”

  He spun on his heel and stumbled away into the darkness, stifling a sob of fear at his own temerity.

  Burdin climbed to his feet, face taut and ugly. “Speers!” he bellowed, standing beside the fire, boots planted wide, right hand clawed near his gun butt. “Turn around, you yeller-bellied skunk!”

  But Speers knew he was close to death now and he ran towards the horses, dragging at his gun in a last desperate effort at putting up some sort of fight. Burdin’s gun was in his hand and he held it steady as he moved the barrel, following Speers’ running form, silhouetted against the stars. He fired and there was a cry of agony from the darkness. Burdin ran forward as the others jumped to their feet. Speers was rolling around on the ground, sobbing, and Burdin walked right up to him, staring down dispassionately. He bared his teeth in a tight grin.

  “You were right, kid,” he said quietly. “You ain’t gonna ride with me no more!”

  Then he triggered three times and the kid’s body jerked with the hammering lead. Burdin gave the body a light kick as he turned away and started to reload. Then he suddenly snapped his head up as he heard a horse racing away down the slope.

  “What the hell!” he shouted as the others came running up. “Who’s that?”

  “Mercer!” Steed yelled. “He’s makin’ a run for it!”

  Burdin was already running for his horse. “Mount up and get after him! I’ve been watchin’ him. He’s losin’ his nerve, too. Now get after him and stop him!”

  In a minute or so, the three men thundered out of the camp and raced their mounts down the slope after the fleeing Mercer, who they could see below, riding along the bank of the wide river, horse and rider standing out clearly against the silver sheen of the water.

  Burdin rode recklessly down the dark mountainside, raking his mount mercilessly with his spurs, using the rein ends to lash at its head and neck. He swore and cursed and his eyes glinted crazily with the lust to kill. He looked like some demon from hell itself as he hit the flats and hipped in the saddle to urge his men on.

  Tad Mercer heard the faint shouting of his pursuers, glanced over his shoulder and saw the three riders already starting along the riverbank. He swore and lashed at his horse. His flight had been a spur of the moment thing. When young Speers had been loco enough to start abusing Burdin, Mercer had figured that he could slip away while they were occupied with the kid. He knew it probably would be his only chance. Burdin didn’t like quitters and he couldn’t just tell the man he wanted to pull out. Burdin would have killed him on the spot. Like he would now, if he caught up with him.

  The riverbank twisted and turned and on this side it was open country, grassed, with only stunted brush. On the far bank there was heavier brush and trees. It would be the place to go; he would have a better chance there. Tad Mercer hauled on the reins viciously and yanked his horse’s head around so hard that the animal whinnied in protest. He used his spurs and it jumped down from the low bank into the water, stumbling and scrabbling for footing on the slippery pebbles. Mercer cursed and kicked frantically, knowing he was losing precious seconds.

  Guns hammered as the pursuers swept along the riverbank and, lead zipped into the water, but fell short. Mercer got the horse onto an even footing and the animal surged forward through the shallows, water spraying. He stood in the stirrups, looking ahead, seeing the broken light on the water as it surged downstream in a fast current. He swore. That meant it deepened into a channel and the horse would have to swim. He would be a much easier target for Burdin and the others while he was negotiating that section, but it was too late to turn back now.

  Already the water was deepening and he could feel its chill through the leather of his boots. Belly-deep, he thought. In a few seconds the horse would have to start swimming. He glanced behind and his heart sank. Burdin, Steed and Darren were reining down on the bank. They were making no effort to plunge in after him and he saw why. Already Burdin was quitting the saddle, pulling his Winchester from the scabbard. The man got behind his horse and laid the rifle across the saddle, using it as a rest. Darren and Steed began shooting from kneeling positions and, as the bullets splashed into the water near Mercer, the horse whickered and began to flounder, then started swimming.

  Mercer slipped from the saddle and into the cold water, clinging tightly to the reins and the saddlehorn, lying alongside the swimming horse, trying to use its body as shelter. Lead flicked into the river ahead and to one side. Then there was a thud and a shudder passed through the horse. The animal whinnied shrilly and tried to rear up. Its forehooves thrashed at the water, then it fell back with a tremendous splash, almost drowning Mercer. Its weight pulled him under and he fought in panic to free his hands from the reins. He clawed at the saddle and heaved himself to the surface, spluttering and gasping. A bullet kicked water into his face and he gulped down air and floundered around in the current, feeling it whipping him away downstream. Like many cowboys, he could not swim and he splashed frantically with his arms, his upper body showing plainly against the white water.

  He made a fine target and Burdin grinned, then started to laugh quietly as his foresight followed Mercer’s form down the river. The rifle rested firmly in his cupped hand on top of the saddle and he took his time drawing a bead, though Steed and Darren were shooting rapidly. Sam Burdin centered the foresight and squeezed off his shot.

  He lifted his head swiftly and saw Mercer’s upper body jerk as the bullet struck home. Burdin grinned wider and put up his rifle as Mercer’s body disappeared beneath the water. It surfaced a few yards further down the river, rolling lifelessly, arms flopping. Then it sank again and was carried around the bend, beyond which were rapids and a high waterfall. With that lead in him, Mercer just didn’t have a chance. His body would be pounded into the rocks by the millions of gallons of water pouring over the falls.

  Burdin mounted easily. “All right. Let’s go back and finish that venison. I’ve worked up an appetite now!”

  The trio turned away from the river and rode back towards the mountain. High up the slope, they could just make out the glow of the campfire.

  ~*~

  Governor Dukes looked at the rolled sheet of paper under Yancey’s arm as the big Enforcer cleared a space on the table.

  He then unrolled the paper, using his gun to hold one end flat and placing a heavy ledger on the other end. There were several rough pencil sketches on the paper and Dukes looked at him quizzically.

  “This sure looks like some layout, Yancey. Like a rifle range?”

  “Something like that, Governor. I’m planning on calling it ‘Ironsite’. It’s going to be the training ground for your new Enforcers.”

  “Hmm. Got the location already picked out?”

  Yancey smiled. “Yeah. Took Kate on a picnic a week or so back and we rode back from the river, near Piper’s Bend. Found a perfect area, where we can set up a fifteen hundred yard range, through juniper flats, which means no timber to clear, and with a natural backstop of a hogback rise. Ask Kate. She’ll tell you. Once she realized that I was spying out the land, instead of concentrating on her, she kind of let me know she wasn’t too happy about it. When I got out of the surrey to pace out the area, she drove off and left me. Took me four hours to walk back to town.”

  The governor chuckled. “Believe she did say something about ‘damn men not being able to forget their work long enough for a little romance!’ Know what she meant now. Want me to try to put things right?”

  “No, I’ll handle it.
Haven’t had time yet. Been too busy drawing up the plans. It’ll take in about a hundred-fifty, hundred-seventy acres, Governor. I’ve already checked and its state land, so it only needs your permission to go ahead and start building now.”

  “Well, sure, you can use the land, I’ll see to that. But what is all this stuff, Yance?” He gestured to the sketches. “Looks a bit more than a rifle range to me.”

  “Well, it is. It’s a training ground, like I said. Target shooting is only part of it. There’ll be obstacle courses and buildings where we can set up situations that an Enforcer might find himself in. I aim to have a system of ropes and pulleys so that man-sized targets can be made to pop up at unexpected times and test the reflexes and accuracy of the trainees. There’ll be rooftop stuff, too, as well as groundwork and I reckon we’ll need to set aside an area where we can practice some fancy horsemanship. Sometimes a little trick-riding can get a man out of a tight spot.”

  The governor was studying the drawings closely now. He seemed impressed but asked, cautiously, “How much do you think it’ll cost?”

  “Reckoned I’d better leave that to your financial experts, Governor. Shouldn’t be more than ten thousand, including the land rights, which I guess will have to be charged against the new unit.”

  Dukes nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. A whole new financial structure will have to be set up. Got to be able to show what happens to people’s money. But ten thousand might get me some opposition in the senate.”

  Yancey shrugged. “That’s only my guess. It could be less.”

  “Or more?”

  “That, too. But it’ll be worth it, Governor, and there’s no reason why the Rangers can’t use the training facility.”

  “True. Why ‘Ironsite’?”

  “Well, Johnny and I discussed the possibility of equipping the whole unit with the new telescopic sights that they use in Europe. There’s quite a lot around the West right now. Hunters use ’em more and more. But we decided against them.”

  “How come? They’d give you fellers quite an advantage in some situations, wouldn’t they?”

  “They would,” Yancey admitted, “but they’ve got more drawbacks than advantages in our job. For one thing, they wouldn’t take the jarring about in our saddlebags; the crosshairs would soon move out of alignment, maybe even snap. If they didn’t, they’d be thrown off so much from center that the whole thing would have to be sighted-in again before use. Not much good when you want to use them in a hurry. So, we’ve decided to standardize on the normal iron sights, but Johnny’s gonna work on the six-guns, replace the factory blades with screw-thread brass beads and fix a separate V-notch rear sight on the top strap, instead of the built-in groove that’s put in during the molding. He did it to my Peacemaker long ago and it sure has made a difference as regards accuracy.”

  “Well. I guess ‘Ironsite’ is a fair enough name, put that way. Done anything about choosing men?”

  Yancey nodded. “Contacted the Ranger Commissioner. He’s preparing a list of his top men. We’ll go through it and select a dozen or so, put ’em through some paces and whittle it down to four to complete the course.”

  The governor nodded and looked up at Yancey. “Good work, Yancey. I can see you’re really interested in this now.”

  The Enforcer smiled. “Now. Wasn’t too keen on the idea of training and sticking around Austin at first, but now we’ve gotten underway and I’ve worked out this training range, I feel pretty good about the whole deal. Leastways, I’m not restless like I was, wanting to get out of town and back to the action again. Must be getting old. I’m starting to enjoy the quieter life.”

  Dukes laughed. “Kate’ll be glad to hear it.”

  Yancey’s face straightened. “Yeah,” he said, a little heavily. He knew he had been neglecting the girl to concentrate on Ironsite. Well, maybe now the governor had more or less given it his approval, he would be able to spend a little more time with Kate.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Once construction began, he was required to supervise, make changes here, extend there, compromise somewhere else. It was a twenty-four hour a day job and as time wore on, Yancey began to figure that maybe a field assignment would be easier, even with the constant threat of death hanging over him.

  The high fences went up and the armed guards patrolled them. And, beyond, the place called Ironsite slowly began to take shape.

  In his newly outfitted gunshop, Johnny Cato was making his own contribution to the brand new Enforcer Unit, still in the making.

  The Colt six-guns and the Winchester rifles, ’76 models with the long twenty-six inch, octagonal barrels, had been purchased on Dukes’ authority soon after Cato had accepted the job. He stripped them all down and worked on the parts with a small jeweler’s file, shaving fine layers of metal here, deepening a notch there; or heating and retempering a spring, perhaps shortening it first, or changing a coil type for a leaf spring. He cast some new parts, drilled holes deeper, lengthened screws and locked them up for greater strength. He replaced the iron sights, changed the angle of the triggers, worked on the sears, adding a stronger hammer spring, fitted new and stronger firing pins. He did a little work on the cylinder pawls but left the cylinders and chambers essentially as they were.

  The rifles required some work on the trigger mechanisms, too, and the lever action feed needed tightening and smoothing out. They would work well enough for the average cowpoke who bought them, but for lawmen whose lives could well depend on the efficient functioning of the weapons, they had to be tuned much more finely. He replaced all the bullet-feed springs with stronger ones, adjusted the breech lock-up and took the sloppiness out of the internal bolt mechanism. The triggers had far too much pull and he lessened this to about two and a half pounds, a comfortable, safe, yet lightweight needed to activate the trigger. When he had finished, the cartridges fed smoothly through the tubular magazine and were lifted snugly into place in the breech.

  The Winchesters had a slightly different sound to ordinary factory models, too. This was due to the special loading of the cartridges. Cato made up his own fine-grained black-powder, laboriously wet-sieving the standard Curtis and Harvey product to give flat, oval flakes that, when dry, burned more efficiently than the coarse grains sold over the counter. It was a dangerous, lonely job and he worked in an underground magazine with thick, stone walls and heavy log and stone above-ground roof and entrance.

  He slightly enlarged the flash holes before fitting the percussion caps over the anvils. This made for more certain ignition and practically eliminated the risk of a misfire. He loaded each cartridge with twenty-eight grains of the new-type powder, a little less than normal. The lead projectiles, each molded by Cato and trimmed to symmetrical lines on a pedal-powered graphite wheel, weighed more than normal too, and were not thrown as far as a factory load. But they would travel out to fifteen hundred yards in a flatter trajectory.

  The rifle sights required some adjusting, but by the time he had finished, a total stranger could pick up one of those rifles and knock the eye out of a lizard at three hundred yards with a little careful sighting first.

  These weapons were for the use of the four men who would be chosen for the new unit. While the eliminations were taking place, the men would use normal Colts and Winchesters that had had just enough tuning to make them function efficiently and shoot straight. It was a simple enough matter to gauge a man’s firearms’ potential with such weapons.

  Putting the dozen men chosen from the ranks of the Rangers through their paces was a full-time job for Yancey. He started them on straight target-shooting and eliminated two men right off. They couldn’t hit a barn at twenty paces, though they were brave enough and would go in against all kinds of odds. But they were no good to the Enforcers if they couldn’t shoot straight. Disappointed, the men returned to the ranks of the Rangers and Yancey worked with the remaining ten.

  He put them through roping and riding, and they had to shape-up better than any cowboy who did this kind
of thing daily for a living. As most of the men had come from the range before joining the Rangers, they met Yancey’s stringent requirements. They could all read and write, so that they would be able to master the Enforcer codes when they had progressed that far. They were all able to use their fists in a rough-and-tumble and had had plenty of practice at this aspect of training.

  Yancey gave them a brief veterinary course so that, if necessary, they could diagnose and treat their mounts’ ailments when far from civilization. He built a series of huts and shacks to represent various types of buildings in which he tested their reactions to unexpected situations. A man would go in warily, gun out, stepping into an apparently empty room. Suddenly a crude painting of a man with a gun would appear at a window or in a doorway. He would have to decide in a split-second whether to shoot or not. Sometimes the painting was that of a bad hombre, but, at others, it was one of the ‘good’ fellows. It was up to the trainees to make their decision quickly. If they shot a ‘good’ fellow, they had to buy drinks for the other trainees at a saloon in town by way of punishment.

  Cato took over and taught them about weapons. He made them field-strip the Colts and rifles they had been using, then he would mix up the parts and give them less than five minutes to sort things out and get the guns back together and shooting. When they were reasonably proficient at this, he made them do it all over again, but this time in the dark.

  Yancey lit brush fires outside the windows of the bunkhouse in the early hours of the morning and timed the men to see how long it took for someone to wake up and become aware of the danger. One man, Cleve Shann, seemed to have a sixth sense for danger and was always the first to leap from his bunk to warn the others.