Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  That instant Lonesome let out a nose-clearing blast. He shied; reared; and then, head held sideways cleverly so his hooves wouldn’t tromp on the dragging reins, began to run. Animal, still tied to Lonesome’s tail, ran with him.

  “Whoa!” Cain called.

  But it wasn’t enough. Lonesome, then Animal, broke into a gallop across the dusty yard, heading down creek and for home on the Shaken Grass. The dead bighorn flopped live on Animal’s back.

  Cain ran forward a few steps, heels stumping, spurs chinking on the rough ground. He shot his head out, almost unseating his hat, and sent his voice out powerfully, letting the animal in himself get into it, trying to make the animal in himself stronger than the animal in Lonesome and the pack mule, commanding, thrilling it. “Whoa, Lonesome! Whoa, Animal! Whoa!”

  Lonesome ran on, head still held sideways, reins trailing just out of reach of his throwing hooves, Animal following.

  Cain ran forward a few more steps. He bent over from the hips, head far forward, veins and tendons ridging white through the dark skin of his neck, strike in the set of his whole body. “Whoa, Lonesome! Whoa, Animal! You wild wall-eyed bustards, whoa!” His shout echoed roaring off the log buildings and the low walls of the little red draw. “Whoa!ll”

  The last time did it. Lonesome slowly stopped, Animal with him, with his head still turned to one side, looking back at Cain.

  Cain stalked toward the horse and mule, stiffly, slowly, boot heels tumping, spurs chinking, moving full of violent silence, almost bursting in his clothes, eyes furious with white force.

  Lonesome stood until caught by the reins. With some difficulty Cain restrained an impulse to punish the two. He led them back to the cabin and tied them to the wheel of a buckboard standing near.

  Going back to where Dencil stood, Cain let out some, and he said, apologetically, “That’s his one fault. Lonesome still shies at snakes. You probably remember he once got hit while still a colt. Looks like he’ll never get over it.” Cain looked at a small hairless patch quite visible on Lonesome’s left white sock.

  Dencil let down too. “I remember,” he said. “You’d just bought him from me.”

  Lonesome continued to be snorty. Head lowering, then rising, he pointed his ears at the still-writhing snake.

  “Wait,” Dencil said. “Guess we better get that dummed dead snake out of sight.” With a stick Dencil picked up the long rope of flesh and tossed it into the privy behind the log cabin. “There,” he said, “now maybe your hoss won’t be so snuffy.”

  “He’ll be all right now,” Cain said. He went over and stroked the arch of Lonesome’s long black neck. He petted him over the rippling muscles of his shoulders. “Won’t you, boy?”

  Dencil came over and petted Lonesome too. “Never saw the beat of that. You making him stop running like that. With a running mule tied to him too. I’ve done some strong things with horses that was a mystery too. But never the beat of that.”

  Cain held still. He didn’t want to go into why it was he could control animals, why he could make his will their will. He knew it was somehow linked with his hot temper, the terrible temper he was supposed to have inherited from Gramp Hammett. He knew the less he thought about such things the better he was able to keep a tight rein on himself.

  “Why, Cain, you even scared the devil out of me. If you’d ordered me to, I’d have flown straight up in the air like an auger-bird.” Dencil stroked his mustache. “What I wouldn’t give to have a little of that to shut up that woman of mine.”

  Cain bit his lip.

  Dencil sighed. “It’s funny about me. I can raise me horseflesh good enough to win every blue ribbon ever invented. But as for flesh of my own, I get me nothing but egg yolks.”

  “Maybe you got married too late, Dencil. Both of you.”

  “Then by golly, Cain, you better hurry. You’re going on forty yourself, ain’t you?”

  Cain laughed. “No, just thirty, thanks be.”

  Dencil smiled.“Well, anyway, comin’ back to that hoss, how did you make him stop like that?” Dencil tipped back his hat and scratched at a pink line made by a tight sweatband.

  Cain held still.

  “Like I say, by golly, I sure wish I had me some of that. I’d sure take the buck out of somebody I know. That’s for sure.”

  Cain said, “That reminds me. What was all the squabbling about when I rode up?”

  “Oh. That.”

  “Yeh, that.”

  Dencil’s round face fell into a sad study. “Jesse and his boys was by.”

  “Hah.”

  “Yeh. They told me I better pull stakes, quick-like. They gave me two weeks.”

  “And the horses?”

  “Said they’d take care of them. Shoot ’em down like they once did the buffler.”

  “Give any reason besides the usual?” Cain’s left hand went automatically down to the butt of his gun.

  “Said my horses tore up the land too much. Especially along the creeks. Said they were worse on the land than even your brother Dale’s sheep. Well, I guess at that it does take more grass to keep a horse than it does a cow.”

  Cain bit on his mustache. Too bad, but it was true. Horses running in droves were hard on grazing land. Loose herds of horses couldn’t help but be playful at times. Their milling around tore up even the toughest of sods. And when they ran at high speed, in stampedes, their sharp hooves cut the green skin of the land so deep it often took a whole summer to heal over. Horses also tore up the grass when they nibbled at it. They tore off the grass, while cows cut it off.

  Tears popped into the corners of Dencil’s gray eyes. “Sure hate to give this ranch up, Cain. If I was alone, maybe I’d try and stand up to Jesse. Show some sand. Even without a gun I’d try it. But when your own woman undercuts you, and you got kids that can get hurt, why, you’ve got to give it another think.” Dencil blinked his eyes. “And I just yesterday twisted me out a new bunch of horses. So well broke this time I could guarantee ’em even to a Boston schoolmarm.”

  Cain stood on one leg, silent. His eyes roved over the yard. He observed how neat Dencil kept everything. No litter around the log cabin. None around the barn. The corrals built in neat lines and circles. No litter around the hand-dug well. The privy set well back in the sagebrush. A walking-plow, a wagon, a carriage lined up in a neat row against the fence. Yes, Dencil kept his yard every bit as neat as Clara kept her house.

  Dencil scuffed the ground with his boot. “Well, if I go, it won’t be to no livery stable, like the little woman wants, that I kin tell you. It’s horses out here, in the open red air where they kin run with their manes flying like God wanted ’em to, or it’s no horses atall. No stinkin’ tangletails in the stalls for me.”

  Cain saw movement in the near window of the log cabin. It was Clara gesturing at him from behind the green panes. He could just make out her face over a red geranium. He caught the meaning of the gestures instantly. She was encouraging him to tell Dencil they should move out. Cain resented the gestures and turned his back on her.

  “Cain, blast it, why should Jesse hate hosses so? Why, hosses of all animals is the wisest next to man. Why, hosses teach even men lessons sometimes. I once seen where a hoss took his ears and pointed out trouble ahead, a broken plank in a bridge, where the man was too dumb to see it. In daylight. I once seen where a good cow pony pointed out the right cow when the puncher himself was cuttin’ out the wrong one. And many a time I’ve seen a hoss take a greenhorn kid and in a week make a pretty good puncher of him.”

  “I know.” Cain stroked Lonesome’s high black rump. “Lonesome spotted some trouble for me just this morning.”

  Dencil sniffed up his nose, loud, the sniff so strong it sucked up a few bristles of his mustache.“Course, as usual, Jesse also accused me of rustlin’ hosses. Me, rustle hosses? My God, why should I rustle hosses? No one else here ‘bouts is raisin’ hosses. So whose hosses could I be rustling but my own? My God.”

  “You better get a gun, Dencil.”


  Dencil stood a moment, bowlegs so wide apart the hole between them seemed wider than the width of his hips. “No, blast it, Cain, that I can’t.”

  Cain said nothing. He was anxious to be on his way. He wanted to be at Rory’s early enough so she could prepare part of the young bighorn for supper.

  Dencil caught the hesitation. His face clouded over. “Well, all this ain’t none of your consarn, Cain.” He scuffed the ground. “And say, Cain, I’m sorry I can’t very well ask you to step down an’ stay for supper. Later maybe, when the old lady’s settled her feathers.”

  “That’s all right, Dencil. I know how such things are.” Cain smiled. “That’s maybe one reason I’m still free.” He stepped up and forked himself across Lonesome. “Besides, I had me a big breakfast this morning. Mountain fries. And I want to save room for some more bighorn tonight.”

  “Should taste good. You must’ve had a good shot.”

  “I did. At an angle. Up. With just the corner of his head showing.” Cain patted the cherry-wood butt of his Winchester.“Say! Maybe you’d like a piece. Sure you would.” Cain stepped down off Lonesome again and went over to Animal and dug out a couple of steaks and a small roast. “Here. And good eating.”

  “Aw, well, now, Cain.”

  “Take it. Everybody likes a treat. Bighorn meat is mighty good pickin’s.”

  “Well, thanks, Cain. Much abliged.” Dencil looked down at the red flesh in his hands. “The missus will like this.”

  “Don’t mention it.” Once more Cain stepped across Lonesome. He looked down at Dencil. “Well, I wouldn’t let Jesse scare me too much, Dencil. It looks like we’re gonna have to hold us a meeting with the rest of the boys pretty soon now. You see, I ran into Jesse today too. And where I was once pretty much agin playin’ along with brother Harry and his Red Sash boys, now I don’t know but what I’m for it. If it comes to choosin’ between English millions and American hellions, well, you know where I stand.”

  Dencil nodded.

  “Well, so long. Hold hard.” Cain touched his knees to Lonesome’s shoulders and they were off at a trot, Animal following. Cain let Lonesome pick the trail toward home on the Shaken Grass.

  Cain

  The sun was hot on his back. He could feel his toes squirming in dampness inside his boots. Even through his glove he could feel heat in the saddle horn. Under him Lonesome began to give off fumes of acrid stink. Wind from their going brushed over his face but sweat still ran down into his mustache.

  He examined the horizon ahead, slowly, carefully, using the curled-up point of his hatbrim as something to go by. He studied all the sharp rims and crags in the silhouette of Crimson Wall ahead, looking far to either side. There were no long riders peering out over the hills so far as he could see. Jesse and his boys were maybe done looking for the day.

  The sky was completely clear, a very light blue overhead, as if there were no air at all. There was no wind; only heat waves. Red dust puffed up lazily under the horse and mule, and followed after a few feet, and then subsided.

  They rode into the red maw of the Shaken Grass canyon, pink dust on hat and shirt, pink light on mustache and mane. Shod hooves rang loud on the rocky trail. Echoes snapped back from the walls. Beside them the brook ran swiftly. The brook ran red as if with spilled Indian blood, sudsing pink over shallow stony fords, streaming bloody in the deeper channels. Red sandstone and molten scarlet scoria glinted in the beaches along the turns. Bluestem grew tall in the low sloughs. Higher up, on the first low bench, grew light green greasewood and wolfberry, and wild rosebush and rough buckbrush and spike cactus. Still higher up the sides, growing in red dirt caught in tiny pockets of rock, clung sagebrush, low, squat, like ruffled nesting hens.

  Near the top of the canyon walls, to either side, huge slabs of red sandstone and harder red rock, hollowed out from under by wind and frost, hung threatening over him. His eye naturally followed the possible line of fall. He saw where older slabs of rock had already broken off and now lay shattered in strewn rubble below. His eye followed the flow of the rubble all the way down to the edge of the stream. He recalled the sight of pebbles slowly rolling along in the stream just under his nose back where he’d taken a drink in the Red Fork. First wind and frost broke it off; then water washed it downhill. Night and day, while he was awake and while he was asleep, endlessly, the unraveling of the land never let up. Given enough time, the Big Stonies, the peaks and the cliffs and the footslopes, even the canyon he now rode in, would all someday wash down the Shaken Grass into the Bitterness, and then down the Yellowstone, and then down the Missouri, and finally down into the Gulf, all of it drawing after itself until there would be nothing left but sea washing and washing over the whole round earth. It was enough to make a man shiver and think on God, think even on the Devil, for that matter. What was he? Who was Cain Hammett? What was his horse? Who was Lonesome? Or the dead buck flopping loosely behind on Animal? And much less the sound and the echo of their going down the canyon of the Shaken Grass?

  They stopped for a sip of cool red water. This time he was high on the stream; the horse and mule low. They drank together, their swallows clicking in unison. They sighed together. And went on.

  He thought he spotted gray movement in the silver sage. Timber wolf. With an easy smooth pull he got the Winchester out of its scabbard. Lonesome felt his knee; slowed to a stop. Man and horse and mule waited. Man looked with his eyes; horse and mule pointed with their ears.

  But the gray spot didn’t move. And after a while Cain saw that it was but a dying clump of greasewood. It took that long for eyes to make it out. All three of them had been fooled. Too bad. He’d felt like shooting.

  He was about to start up again, when he caught, in the corner of his eye, the fleeting image of a man hanging by the neck from a cottonwood limb. He blinked; jerked erect. It took him a good full minute to make out that it was some kind of mangled mirage coming across the barren ground to the southeast. The dancing mirage gave him the shivers; he sweat cold.

  Looking backward along the trail, where it wound back through the narrow canyon, he was struck again by all the color of it: the grass beside the creek so green it made a man’s mouth water in sympathy for how a horse felt looking at it, and the sides of the red canyon walls specked with silver sage, and the far footslopes beyond on the Big Stonies a light green where mahogany brush thrived and then a deep green where the ponderosa pine grew in groves, and then out of all that, rising more sharply, above the timberline, the purple slopes of the Big Stonies themselves, gradually shading up into pure dazzling white points. He thought it prettier than a picture, and paradise itself.

  He rode on, gun over his shoulder, pricking down the canyon. The Shaken Grass kept breaking through successive upthrusts of land, of red sandstone, of gray shale, of volcanic ash, of gray loess. Going down the bed of the brook was like riding into the successive jaws of half-buried saurians.

  The canyon widened; became a narrow plain. Along the shallows the bark of willows gleamed red through silver leaves. Rabbit brush flared yellow over the low banks. The coneflower had just begun to shed its purple petals.

  Near a turn a dozen small cottonwood saplings were down, all lying one way, cut by beaver. Further on a beaver dam blocked the stream, backing up a considerable pond. Cain had often looked at the dam and had in mind to run an irrigation ditch from it to make a small garden lower down and near his cabin. A thrush, then a flicker, then a flight of song sparrows winged over the pond. Tiny cottonwood with heavy varnished leaves grew along the margin of the pond.

  He took a short cut over a low rise, climbing onto a gray slope. Immediately the scene changed. Away from the brook, the land lay cork dry. Rain had fallen on it in early spring, and its surface still lay cracked and open, white fissures cutting through the ocher soil. The rain had encouraged some grass to grow, and it now stood burnt, crumbling to powder at the least touch. The knolls were coarse with stones, varicolored, some specked with black dead moss. Even the prick
lepear cactus lay limp, its spears brittle red-brown. The huge red-ant hills, with cleared spaces around them, looked deserted. Dozens of clattering crickets, making a racket like rattlers as they whirred straight up out of the sagebrush, glinted in the sun. Yet, despite all the drouth, certain little yellow flowers, very tiny, no larger than pinheads, grew bravely in the drouth cracks.

  He came over a low lip of land and below lay his little spread, his bachelor home beside the Shaken Grass: his three-room cabin, built of shiny cottonwood logs, caulked with clay and roofed over with soapmud; his barn built of rough lumber bought in Antelope; his corral made of slim cottonwood saplings. And beyond the ranch buildings, to the south and east, lay his beloved meadow. It all lay cupped within a bowl, where the Shaken Grass made a turn to the north while the low bench made a curve to the south. Cutting across the west tip of it ran the Casper road, coming down off the bench, slipping past the barn, and then crossing the river on the new log bridge on its way to Antelope in the north. Lonely horsemen and men driving buckboards often stopped to water their horses on the golden sand bar under the bridge.

  The place had once been a line camp, or “boar’s nest,” for the Derby outfit, where cowboys wintered to keep the stream chopped open for drifting cattle and otherwise kept an eye out for calves lost in storm. That Cain had got hold of it was a great piece of luck. Before selling out to Lord Peter, Jesse Jacklin had tried to corral all the choice meadows along the Shaken Grass for himself by having his loyal cowboys homestead claims, with the understanding that he would buy them out when the claims had been proved up. But the cowboy assigned this spot had reneged on the deal, and instead had sold it to Cain. The errant cowboy was known as Timberline, a huge bald-headed giant of a man, now a member of ornery brother Harry’s Red Sash gang.

  It was the meadow that had caught Cain’s eye in the first place. The meadow was about the size and shape of a park, and every bit as level, and so rich and moist that grass sometimes grew an inch in a day, drouth or no drouth. A man could close-pasture his pet horse overnight there and know it’d be fat and saucy no matter how hard it’d been ridden the day before. And when it wasn’t grazed, the meadow spilled over with flowers all the summer long: sourdock, windflower, evening star, beardtongue, dandelion. On occasion Cain fenced off half the meadow and let it grow long, and then he got hay so aromatic he could smell it all the way back to Crimson Wall when the wind was right.