High Wild Desert

by Ralph Cotton

  Fenderson stared in shock as Singleton tumbled forward, dressing screen and all, and landed facedown, dead on the floor.

  “Well?” Sam said, turning the smoking Colt toward the armed businessman.

  “What?” Fenderson managed to say.

  Sam gestured his Colt toward the rifle in Fenderson’s hands.

  “Oh, this?” He tossed the rifle forward onto the floor as if it had suddenly turned too hot to hold. He tried what he considered to be a winning smile, even though it looked worried and tense. “I’m afraid things have gotten way out of hand between us, Ranger Sam—I hope I may call you Sam?”

  The Ranger didn’t reply.

  “It got out of hand when you placed a bounty on my head,” Sam said.

  “It’s true, I did do that,” he said matter-of-factly. “But you’re going to find that impossible to prove in a court of law.”

  “I hadn’t considered that,” the Ranger said.

  “Well, you should, you know,” Fenderson said. As he spoke, he walked around his desk and stood facing the Ranger now from ten feet away. “May I?” he said, gesturing toward his tall leather chair. Sam backed away and stepped around the desk, giving the man back the security and confidence of his lofty perch. “Because, as you may know, it is not easy to prove a man as powerful as myself guilty,” he continued, sitting down in his chair and leaning back a little. “It takes a lot of—”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Sam said, stopping him. “I meant I hadn’t considered proving anything in court.” He stared intently at him. “I thought we’d settle here. Today. Out of court.”

  “I see, then,” said Fenderson, getting it, his face turning grim. “No judge, no trial, no jury. Just you taking the law into your own hands?”

  “There you have it,” Sam said. He wasn’t going to justify himself to this man who had tried to kill him.

  “And that doesn’t bother you in the slightest?” Fenderson said, looking for an opening, a way to wedge logic and reasoning into the matter—a matter that he himself had created based on neither logic nor reasoning.

  “Most days it would. But today it doesn’t,” Sam said.

  “I see,” Fenderson said, slumping, letting both of his hands fall below the desk into his lap, letting the Ranger see no threat in him going for the engraved Colt. “Then you’ve decided I must die simply because I sought to avenge your shooting my nephew, and in doing so, dishonoring my family name?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Sam said firmly.

  Fenderson sighed and said, “So, then, there is no rational way to end this to both of our satisfaction? Say . . . a large cash settlement perhaps? Instead of rewarding someone for killing you, I reward you, for staying alive?”

  “No . . . ,” Sam said. “Being alive is its own reward.” He noted the lavish engraved Colt, lying so close, yet so far away now that Fenderson had dropped his hands beneath the big, polished desk. “The only way to end this is to end this.” He lowered his big Colt to his side.

  Seeing a recognizable look come upon Fenderson’s face, he instinctively ducked away to the side. As he did so, he heard shots explode under the large desk, saw bullet holes appear in the desktop, kicking up splinters.

  “Damn it all!” Fenderson shouted, realizing his trap hadn’t worked. He jerked his right hand from under his desk and swung a smoking Colt Thunderer up at the Ranger.

  But the Ranger’s big Colt bucked once in his hand. Fenderson rocked back in his leather chair and spun a full circle. When he stopped turning and rocking back and forth, facing toward the Ranger, he wore a shocked look on his dead face and a bullet hole through his heart. A large circle of blood gathered around the gaping wound. Sam heard him make a gurgling sound, and watched him fall forward with a loud thump on the bullet-riddled desk.

  Rewards . . . Sam shook his head.

  Walking back around the desk, leaving the way he’d come in, he raised a leg and slipped out the window. As he touched ground outside, he looked around and was surprised to see a one-horse buggy sitting beside Black Pot, who stood waiting, his reins hanging to the ground. Inside the buggy sat Adele and Lang.

  “Ranger!” said Lang with relief, lowering the rifle he held in his hands.

  “Yes, Cisco,” the Ranger said. He walked over to the stallion, picked up his reins and laid them over his saddle. “Were you expecting someone else?”

  Lang slumped in the driver’s seat.

  “I don’t know what I was expecting,” Lang said. He passed the rifle over to Adele, who uncocked it for him and put it away.

  “I thought you were getting those wounds taken care of,” Sam said, noting all of the bloody bullet nicks on Lang’s body, bandanas tied around his limbs here and there, a patch of blood on his side.

  “I didn’t know what you’d find out here,” Lang said. “I followed you from behind Number Five.” He paused, not saying whether or not he’d seen the Ranger let Oldham Coyle ride away. “I thought I’d come out, see this thing through with you.” He gestured at the bullet nicks and cuts on the Ranger. “Besides, it looks like you could use some patching up yourself.”

  “I’ll get it,” Sam said. “We’ll ride back together.”

  “Good,” said Lang. “I don’t like being around Clow Dankett alone. I think he’s crazy.”

  “Crazy enough to be sheriff?” Sam asked, stepping up into his saddle. “Because that’s what I’m going to recommend to the town, soon as he’s able.”

  Lang seemed to consider it, then said, “Yeah, he’s crazy enough for that.” Adele had sat beside him quietly, but as they turned the rig and Sam turned his stallion, she and Lang looked at each other cautiously.

  “Ranger, Harvey doesn’t want me to say this, but I’d like to say it anyway . . . ,” she said, as if asking permission.

  “Speak your piece, ma’am.” Sam smiled slightly to himself and nodded, staring ahead toward New Delmar.

  “We—that is I,” Adele said, “am wondering. Considering what Harvey did, helping you, might you mention something about it to the judge . . . maybe see if it would get him a lighter sentence?”

  “Adele,” Lang said quietly. “I didn’t do what I did to get myself a break. I did it because it was right.”

  “Why don’t you keep quiet, Cisco Lang?” the Ranger said over his shoulder. “The woman’s trying to help you here.”

  Lang fell silent. So did Adele for a moment. But only for a moment.

  “Well, would you, Ranger?” she ventured. “Talk to the judge, that is?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “Does this mean no more holding the horses during robberies while your thieving pards rob places?”

  “Yes, it does,” said Lang. “Besides, I’m through with that life any way it goes. No more thieving pards for me. I’ve made some promises to Adele, and to myself. I intend to keep them.”

  After another pause, Adele said to Sam, “So, would you, then?”

  “No,” Sam said. “I’m not going to talk to a judge about it, take a chance on him saying no.” They rode on for a long second, the Ranger feeling the dark cloud of disappointment set in upon them. “Today, I appear to be judge and jury. So I’m setting you free, Harvey Cisco Lang,” he said officiously.

  Another silence set in.

  “You mean . . . ?” Lang said, his words trailing.

  “You’re free, Cisco,” Sam said, still staring ahead. “That’s as clear as I can make it. Get yourself patched up and get on out of here.”

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” Adele said tearfully as the realization set in.

  “I better never hear you’ve broken another law,” Sam warned.

  “You won’t hear it,” Lang said shakily. Seeing Sam turn and give him a look, he added quickly, “I mean, I won’t break the law, I swear it.”

  “Good,” said the Ranger. “Now, why don’t you two ride on ahe
ad, tell Deputy Dankett I’m on my way? Get the doctor to fix you up.”

  “Are you all right, Ranger?” Lang asked.

  “I’m all right,” Sam said. “Get on out of here.”

  As the buggy rolled away, Sam veered Black Pot to the side out of the dust and patted the stallion’s damp withers.

  “Did we do right?” he said, as if the big stallion might offer an opinion. Then he straightened in the saddle and rode Black Pot forward at a walk, looking side to side, at an artist’s pallet of sandy colors streaking across distant hill lines, broken ledges and high-rising hoodoos, the land a-dance in wild desert sunlight.

  “Yes, I believe you’re right,” he said quietly to the stallion, as if having asked for such sage and silent equestrian advice, he was now obliged to accept it. Black Pot twitched his ears at the sound of the Ranger’s voice and lifted his muzzle toward things unseen. And the two rode on.

  Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack is back!

  Don’t miss a page of action from America’s

  most exciting Western author, Ralph Cotton.

  RED MOON

  Available from Signet in July 2013.

  Badlands, Arizona Territory

  Young Ranger Samuel Burrack lay atop a mammoth boulder overlooking a stretch of spiny hills skirting the Mexican border northwest of the Nogales badlands outpost. A storm was hard blowing. Through the lens of an outstretched telescope he studied three watery figures while raindrops crawled sidelong across the circling lens. To his right lightning twisted and curled in a gunmetal mist on the distant curve of the earth.

  “Tormenta mala de viento—ciclón!” an old stable hostler had warned him two days earlier when the sky over Nogales had taken on a pallid yellow-gray and the hot desert wind began sucking southward like some terrible demon drawing in its breath. “Here is the stillness before the terrible storm,” the man had warned in stiff English, raising a crooked cautioning finger. “The longer the stillness, the more terrible the storm,” he’d added, lowering his voice as if such information was privy only between himself and the Ranger.

  Sam had simply nodded in reply. Storm or no storm, he had a job to do. Weather was just a factor to acknowledge, but not a factor to concede to.

  He’d thought of the old man when the stillness lingered throughout that day and part of the next as he’d pushed on. He’d kept watch on the sky for what good it did him—watched it gather and loom until at last a roiling blackness rose up from the bowels of the earth and robbed the morning of its light, falling upon the earth as if in vengeance.

  “Good prediction, hombre,” Sam reminded himself with no real surprise, reflecting on the old hostler’s conversation from two days ago.

  Before leaving town he had said, “Gracias,” to the old man for his warning as he unrolled his brown rain slicker and put it on. With his big Colt resting on his hip, protected beneath the slicker, he’d tied down his bedroll atop his saddlebags and stepped up into the roan’s saddle, spreading the tails of his long rain slicker down the horse’s sides. He’d reminded the hostler that bad weather did not stop bad men, and the old Mexican had shrugged his thin shoulders either in sympathy or resignation and stood watching as the Ranger turned to ride away.

  “Go with God . . . ,” the old man had whispered in Spanish, seeing the Ranger’s headstrong surplus roan balk and sidle and shuffle on its hooves.

  “Always . . . ,” the Ranger had replied, tipping a gloved hand as he’d gathered the unruly roan beneath himself and chucked the animal forward. The roan snorted and grumbled in protest, but did the Ranger’s bidding all the same. And so their journey had gone.

  Bad men and lawmen . . . Sam thought now in retrospect, holding a tight focus on the three faces beneath their wet wind-bent hat brims. They tugged and tightened their drenched hats down against a hard blow of wind, the loose tails of their rain slickers wagging and flapping wildly, like the tongues of a gaggle of lunatics. He might say that at times like this neither lawman nor outlaw had sense enough to get in out of the rain. But that wasn’t being fair to his own profession—his brothers in arms.

  Lawmen endured bad weather because their work required it.

  Outlaws, murderers and rogues of the kind he pursued played out their hands fast and loose, with no regard for weather or anything else. He suspected that deep down the lawless realized the broad possibility of each day being their last, and he understood their thinking. It gave lawmen like himself little choice but to follow the lead set forth by their miscreant prey, no matter the climate, no matter the trail.

  And that’s the whole of it . . .

  He drew a closer focus and moved from face to face on the subjects in the small round frame of the wet lens. He could see their lips moving. An arm pointed off toward the trail, rising and falling out of sight across a sandy stretch of squat cactus and scarce patches of spindly wild grass standing cowed beneath the gray blowing deluge. The arm belonged to the group’s leader, Wilson Orez, and had Sam not known it already, he would have deduced it, seeing how these other two appeared to listen to the man, nodding in agreement, checking the wet rifles in their hands while Orez raised a wadded bandanna and mopped blow-in rain from the side of his neck, his beard stubble.

  Wilson Orez . . .

  From what the Ranger had learned of the man, Orez was tough, smart and fearless—a former cavalry scout, desert seasoned, a man trained to keeping a cool head while sudden death lurked all around him. Sam ran down a mental list he’d compiled on him. Wilson Orez was part Scots-Irish, part White Mountain Apache. His skill with a rifle was unsurpassed. He was both fast and accurate with a handgun—an expert with a knife. He had faced the feared Apache warrior, TaChima from the Compa clan, brother to the dreaded Apache leader, Juan Compa.

  You know your history when it comes to killing, Sam reminded himself grimly.

  In a straight up knife fight, toe to toe, mano a mano, Orez had killed TaChima graveyard dead. Sam considered it, finding it noteworthy how these sorts of facts sprang so readily to his mind.

  Part of the job, he decided, dismissing the matter, going on with his thoughts.

  TaChima had earned the alternate calling of Red Sleeve, a title originated years earlier by the famed Mimbreño Apache leader, Mangas Coloradas.

  Being a Red Sleeve Warrior put TaChima at a high position of respect among all the Chihenne warriors in the Animas Mountain range. TaChima had not been a man to take lightly, Sam acknowledged. Yet, according to the story generated among Captain Edmond Shirland’s California Volunteers, Wilson Orez tracked TaChima into the heart of Apacheria, the People’s stronghold.

  Standing alone, naked save for a loincloth and a knife in hand, Wilson Orez had cast a challenge of honor for the sake of blood vengeance—a matter of powerful medicine among the killer elite of the Apacheria alliance. Thereupon he had calmly, methodically gutted and all but quartered the dreaded bladesman as if he were some sacrificial steer.

  And that’s the man you’re after today. . . .

  But he’s older now, Sam thought in reply. He lowered the lens from his eye in the heavily blowing rain and thought about it as he wiped a wet gloved hand across his face. At the end of this storm there wouldn’t be a hoofprint left to follow between here and the border. He raised the telescope back to his eye and honed down onto the three figures. Thunder split the sky high above the low-hanging blackness.

  Stay close, he told himself. Whatever moves these men made, he’d have to be prepared to make them with them. No matter the climate, no matter the trail . . . , he repeated to himself. Stay close and at the same time try to keep a man as trail-savvy as Orez from knowing he was there. Lightning glittered as he looked closely back and forth at the faces of the other two men. There was something at work between these two—something secretive. He could see it in their eyes. Were he in any way a friend or associate of Wilson Orez, he would have to warn him to watch out for t
hese two. But that was none of his concern.

  Another thing: Forget Wilson Orez’s reputation, he reminded himself. Having too much respect for a bad man’s reputation was as dangerous as having too little. Either would get you killed. Besides, if there was one thing he learned quick out here, it was that a man’s reputation was almost always larger, more powerful than the man. Leastwise, enough so that the prowess of the man lived on long after the man himself had gone to dust.

  But not Wilson Orez, a voice cautioned inside his head.

  Stop it, the same voice rebuked. His hands tightened around the lens.

  As he grappled with his thoughts, he saw Orez step into view, blocking the face of one of the men. No sooner had Orez stepped into sight than he stepped back out. When the Ranger saw the other man’s face again, he saw a red line of gushing blood spewing from the man’s sliced open throat.

  Whoa . . . ! He hadn’t expected that.

  Sam tensed, watching through the circling lens as the man’s wet gloved hands clamped up over his throat, attempting to stay the flow of arterial blood. But the reflex didn’t help. The dark blood jetted from between his gripping fingers as he staggered forward into the mud and blowing rain. His wet hat came loose and flew from his head in a spiraling spray of water.

  Sam watched; the surprise of the brutal act was gone now, yet the intensity of it held him captivated until he swung the lens onto Orez to see what was coming next.

  Gray rain blew howling across the land between the Ranger’s lens and the grizzly scene of silent carnage. Wilson Orez had moved fast. By the time the sheet of rain had blown on and the Ranger had Orez back in focus, he saw the other man had bowed forward at the waist. Orez gave a hard sidelong jerk on the handle of his big knife, and Sam saw the blade slip out of the man’s abdomen where Orez had just then buried it to the hilt. At the man’s side, a big Remington revolver fell from his wet hand into the mud at his feet. The man sank to his knees, then flopped forward, face-first with a muddy splash.