Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  Lonesome whickered, and a buckskin at the feedrack near the barn raised its head, its tail shooting straight out, its black mane tossing up, its nostrils flaring. It was Bucky, Cain’s favorite cow pony. Bucky still showed he’d once run wild.

  Cain was quick to spot his small herd of cattle up on a rise across the Shaken Grass. Good. At least Jesse had not run them off. Cain next spotted his string of horses on the far side of the meadow under the shade of a few tall cottonwoods fringing the stream. But, in spotting them, he noted a strange horse among them, saddle still on.

  Cain snapped to in his saddle. Now that was a curious one. Runaway? Somebody hurt back in the hills? The stray had a familiar look.

  It was when he came around the side of his log cabin on the bare yard that he found out whose horse it was. A huge cottonwood towered between the cabin and the barn, a good seventy-footer with a four-foot trunk of rough ocher bark, very hale, with leaves so green the time could have been the month of May instead of August. More than twenty feet up, on the south side of the tree, a fat limb grew at right angles to the main bole, and then, further out, it turned straight up to join the main bush of the tree. The limb went up like an arm crooked sharply at the elbow. And from this limb, near the elbow bend, and still in the shade of the tree, hung the body of a cowboy. By the neck. A cottonwood blossom. A huge knot bulked out behind the ear and the face was black with blood. A sash of brilliant red silk fit snug around the waist just above salmon-colored trousers.

  “Hell’s fire and little fishes! That mirage wasn’t mangled after all. It did come true over the hills.”

  In one motion Cain slid off Lonesome and whirled on high heels, looking to all sides, left hand slipping out of its glove and dropping to the butt of his gun. A trap? He searched the fringe of trees at the end of the meadow, the bushes along the stream, the silver sage on the bench. But all he heard was the creak of the rope as the body turned a little by itself.

  Sure no one was around, he rolled up a log and stood on it. Just as he got out his skinning knife, a last convulsive kick shook the body and the dangling legs did a jig. “Great grandad!” Quickly he cut down the body, holding it against his chest to keep it from hitting the ground too hard. He laid it out. Only then did he see that the gorged black face belonged to his ornery brother Harry. Harry actually had a blond face, with silver beard and hair, but choked with blood he’d looked like someone else.

  “Man alive, if this ain’t Billy Hell!”

  Cain slid open the greased slipknot. A blue welt bulged out behind the ear where the knot had dug in. A rope burn lay red across Harry’s throat.

  Then Cain saw an odd thing. Fingernail scratches showed red all across the throat just above the rope burn. Picking up one of Harry’s hands, Cain spotted bits of skin and blood under the nails. Hah. Harry’s neck hadn’t snapped on the drop after all, and he’d somehow managed to free his hands. Cain recalled that for all his light body, Harry had a tremendous neck. When Harry got mad it ridged up thick with muscle and tendon like his own. Cain felt of Harry, found the face and neck still warm. So that was why the body could still do a strangulation jig at the end of the rope. “Hell’s fire,” Cain said softly.

  Cain ripped Harry’s pink shirt out of the tight red sash, tore it open, and held his ear to Harry’s chest. Harry’s heart was still beating. Slow, like the slow puff puff of a nearly stopped train.

  Cain quick straddled his brother’s chest and began to slap his face, both cheeks. He worked his arms. He lifted him up bodily and bounced him on the ground. “Harry! Harry, old boy!” He slapped.“Come around now, boy!” He worked his arms. Bounced him. “Harry, come around now, waddy boy. It ain’t your time to go yet.”

  He heard chinking hooves behind him, and looking up he saw Lonesome coming back from the stream, trailing his reins, Animal following. Cain swore. Blast that snake at Dencil’s. Have to break Lonesome all over again to stand ground-hitched.

  Lonesome dripped water on his back. The drops reminded Cain of something. He spotted Harry’s big felt hat nearby, and quick went over and picked it up, and bowlegged stiffly down to the Shaken Grass and got a hatful of red water. He sloshed it over Harry, over his face, down his neck.

  That did it. Harry’s chest shuddered; heaved a great sigh. It took a few short dip breaths; at last took hold on its own.

  “That’s the boy. Come out of it now.”

  Harry breathed, still unconscious.

  Cain kept looking around at the premises, alert to the least sound. A breeze came up out of the north and passed through the upper reaches of the cottonwood. The tip leaves chiddered softly, sounding like the gentle threshing of beaded Indian dresses. Behind him the Shaken Grass purled over the golden sand bar. He saw a vulture winging in. What? How could a turkey buzzard, miles off, get wind of a man just hung and not yet cold? It couldn’t be the stink. So how did they know? Cain swore to himself.

  Cain sat holding Harry’s head in his lap. He watched black blood slowly wash out of Harry’s face. He waited until the point of Harry’s thumblike nose became red again. Then he shook him. “Harry, old boy.”

  Blond eyelids fluttered open. Moonstone eyes, still glazed over with death, looked out at the world. “Where am I?”

  Cain allowed himself a curving smile. It moved his mustache. “Where else but in hell, lad, for such as you?”

  Harry rolled his head to one side; rolled it the other way. He seemed to have trouble understanding that his head and body were still connected. His eye fell on Lonesome dripping water on Cain’s back; then on the mule Animal. He tried to focus on the burden Animal carried. “A moose. Where’d you get it?”

  “A moose? Man, that’s fresh bighorn.”

  “Guess I’m still bad off.” Harry licked his lips. “I’ll take some whisky.”

  “Gosh, boy, for once now I wish I had me some bravemaker too.”

  Harry continued to lie with eyes like a half-dead rabbit. “My head. Ohh. Feels as big as a salt barrel. And my neck feels like I been in a fight with a wildcat.” Again Harry’s eye fell on Lonesome. “Ah,” he groaned, “I knew it was bad luck to ride you, you black hoodoo you.”

  “Oh, now, Harry, there’s nothing to that now.”

  “Dencil bred him and Dencil’s doomed. I rode him and I just about was doomed.”

  “What about me? I ride him all the time.”

  “With you it’s different. You and that black horse are two of a kind and cancel each other out.”

  “Come now.”

  “You’re both black devils.”

  “How about a drink of water? A good drink of cold mountain water beats all.”

  “D’rather drink vinegar. That at least has some bite.”

  Cain got another hatful of cool pink water anyway, and holding up Harry’s head helped him drink some of it.

  Harry licked his lips. He sighed, deep. “Well. Looks like I’m going to run another season after all.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “It’s hard to believe I’m still here.”

  Cain helped him sit against the log. Gradually the sun struck in under the cottonwood. A purplish pallor came and went around Harry’s eyes.

  “Still got a hunger for a sour, Cain. Pickle or lemon. You sure you ain’t got something with bite around?”

  “Not a speck.”

  “How about a brain tablet then?”

  “Say, a cigarette would taste good about now.” Cain got out makings and deftly rolled two cigarettes, licking them lightly, and struck a match for both.

  “Almost as good as a sour, Cain. Almost.”

  “That’s what I say.”

  Harry rolled his head from side to side. Stare as he might, the haze in his eyes would not clear off. “When I first heard you, Cain, I thought it was the cook in hell trying to get me up for breakfast. Thought I’d made the big jump at last.”

  “Them damned strangling sons-of-bitches.”

  Harry winced. “I was just cutting across here when Jesse and
two men I never saw before caught up with me.”

  “What was the reason they gave this time?”

  “Said I’d milked one of my cows over one of Lord Peter’s calves. So my cow would recognize it and mother it.”

  “Did you?”

  For the first time a smile worked at the corners of Harry’s lips. “I did.”

  Cain glanced down at the red sash circling Harry’s waist.“Still a darn fool, I see.”

  Harry smiled distantly.

  “Like waving a red flag at a bull, you jackass.”

  Harry still smiled.

  “Harry, you’re my brother and all, but, hell’s fire, you’ve got to cut loose from that bunch a thieves. Or, darn you, you don’t need to come around me no more.”

  Harry continued to smile to himself.

  “Why do you do it, Harry?”

  One of Harry’s dulled-over eyes winked, slowly. “Once a wild one always a wild one.”

  “I say to hell with that. Even if Gramp said it. Harry, why can’t you do like Dale and me? File on a homestead along the Shaken Grass and get yourself a small spread going? Play it honest? God knows we small stockmen got enough against us without adding outright thievery.”

  “Just a wild one, Cain.”

  “Harry, I’ve made my mind up about one thing. Even if you are my brother, I ain’t going to let you use me as a fence no more to sell your stolen beef to the stockyards.”

  “Hey, now.” Harry came to life all at once.

  “Dam right. And I ain’t going to sell your butchered beef to the railroad crews no more either. Them hides I got to show as coming from meat I’m supposed to have butchered is so old now they’re stiffer’n tepee skins. From now on, any meat I sell to the railroads is going to be from my own stock. Not Lord Peter’s by way of you and Timberline and your boys.”

  “Cain, ain’t you gonna help your dear brother make that one big haul? That one big one?”

  “No! I got a strong hankerin’ to clean up all around.”

  “Oh, come now, Cain.”

  “No.”

  “Tell you, Cain, if you do help me, you’ll be shed of me for good.”

  “Harry, you’re a dam fool twice over.”

  “If you do, it’s off to California for me, to lay on the warm sand with my legs apart in the little waves. Tell you, Cain, I’ve looked at the back end of a cow all my life and I’m mighty tired of it. I need a change of scenery. Just let me make that one big haul and then you and Dale and Rory will be shed of me.” Harry smiled to himself wanly.“And you can be darn sure I’ll leave without kissin’ the marshal good-bye.”

  “Harry, that’s Saturday mush, and you know it.”

  Harry tried to sit up on his own; still couldn’t quite make it. Cain said quickly, “Hurt you somewhere?” Again he took Harry’s head in his lap. He fanned his ashen face with his hat.

  Harry looked up at the top of the cottonwood. A flush came into his cheeks. “Cain, ain’t that a black buzzard sittin’ up there?”

  “Yeh. Does he bother you?”

  “He’s sitting there waitin’ for me to die.”

  “He does bother you. In that case …” Cain drew his gun and fired straight up. He missed the buzzard, but he did clip the twig it sat on. The buzzard fell a ways, then righted itself, and with an angry squawk was off.

  Harry tried sitting up again; at last made it.

  “Take it easy now. No hurry.”

  Harry looked around, blear-eyed. “Say! My hoss, Star. It just come to me now. They run off with him?”

  “No. He’s yonder with my string.”

  “That bay devil. When here I’ve trained him to stand hitched to a rattler’s tail, if need be.”

  “He probably didn’t like the sound of the creaking rope.”

  Harry grunted.

  Cain couldn’t help but smile to himself when he thought about his younger brother Harry. What a crazy one he was. Always into trouble of some kind. Had been ever since boyhood.

  Cain remembered the time Harry had invented the game of pull-the-gooseneck at a family picnic over to brother Dale’s. Under just such a cottonwood as the one above them. It was on a spring day right after a roundup and he’d been crocked to the brim with whisky. He’d taken cousin Rory’s only gander, against her furious protests, had greased its neck with fatback and hung it by the legs, head down, from an armlike limb. Then he made a bet he’d be the first to snap off its neck riding by it on the dead run on Star. All the boys joined in the fun, even Dale, to Rory’s even more furious disgust, and it took no less than fifty runs at it, before Harry, making his sixth try, finally caught the gander’s head, popped eyes and gulking orange bill and all, between forefinger and thumb and snapped it off. Riding back, Harry had held it up triumphantly for Rory to take. What Rory had to say to him hadn’t been fit for a cat to hear.

  Cain got up. “I better help you into the cabin. Till your water runs clear.” He helped Harry to his feet. Arm close around his brother’s waist, gruff yet affectionate, he half-carried him into the cabin, up over the two-step log stoop and beneath the horseshoe over the doorway, across the puncheon board floor into his own sleeping quarters on the west side. Smells of damp wood and old woolen bedclothes and earth hung heavy in the low-roofed room. Cain helped him onto the bunk. The four log posts groaned as he stretched Harry out on the hide spring. Cain folded up a thick gray blanket and placed it under Harry’s blond head.

  “Now you take it easy for a spell.” Cain pushed back a dusty curtain and light came in through a little square window. The light was barely strong enough to make a gun over the door glint dully. A thin film of dust lay over a trunk and over a stack of magazines and books piled on a pine shelf over the bunk.

  Harry said, “What’re you going to do with that moose, Dale?”

  Cain studied him. Harry’s mind still wasn’t tracking quite right. Cain shoved Harry down by the shoulders. “Now you lay still for a bit.”

  Cain went out and got up Harry’s bay, Star, and hitched him to a pole near the door. He untied Animal from Lonesome’s tail, removed the burdens and packsaddle from his back, and turned him loose in the meadow. Next he loosened the cinches to Lonesome’s saddle and led him beside Star. The two geldings nosed each other in friendly fashion; presently stood tail-to-head switching flies off each other.

  That done, Cain shot the loop of the rope out of the cottonwood tree; coiled up what was left of it and hung it on Harry’s saddle. Cain thought it a low-down mean trick to hang a man with his own rope.

  Cain also thought it a miracle that he’d found Harry alive. If it hadn’t been for that Hammett neck of his… man! Cain recalled that Gramp had once escaped a hanging too. It was an unjust hanging, because the real culprit was found later on, but it was a hanging just the same. Gramp Mayberry Hammett used to show his grandsons just how he’d kept his neck from snapping when the vigilantes rode the buckboard out from under him. He’d open his shirt and tense up his thick neck muscles and set his chin down hard. With one exception, the thick Hammett neck had been passed on to the grandchildren, Cain, Harry, and Rose-mary, by way of Gordon and Raymond Hammett. The one exception was grandson Dale. He’d come up with a gander neck.

  The Hammett strain seemed to work down somewhat like the Hereford strain in cattle. Once the Hereford blood got into a man’s stock, it gradually pushed out the Shorthorn, even the Longhorn. The stock became baldface, with turn-up horns, and had short legs, and that everlasting stocky neck. In trying to account for Dale’s long neck, Gramp had finally decided it had come down through Mother Priscilla. Her father, Gramp Hoak, resembled a long-legged Frisian Holstein.

  Cain remembered that Gramp had been very much against next of kin mating, humans or cattle. Cousins marrying, Gramp said, only made the bad points worse. Gramp said it often made for raving idiots in human stock, six-legged monsters in cattle. Said it was an abomination to nature, one of the unforgivable sins.

  “Take us Hammetts,” Gramp orated. “We’ve go
t us a outlaw streak in our blood. A wild one. And, if I may say so, a beast in us that’s wilder than a wild mustang bull. So you young uns be sure to water the Hammett blood down some by marrying strangers. Don’t any of you three boys think of marrying cousin Rory, or you’ll really whelp you a batch of wild outlaws. Mark my words. I’ve bred cattle and read Shakespeare, and I know.”

  Gramp had apparently been in part right about cousins marrying. Anybody could see with but half an eye that Joey, brother Dale’s and cousin Rory’s boy, had both the thick neck and the wild outlaw streak in him.

  Gramp was well known for his old-boar opinions, mostly because he wasn’t afraid to talk about them. Another of his ornery notions had to do with firstborn sons. Among other things, Gramp once told Dad Gordon over a glass of rye: “Course, Gordon, if you want to know the truth, and you want yourself a good obedient wife, you should really drown the firstborn son. I know you won’t do it, and that’s fine, because the boy Cain looks like a tough un, a real Hammett, but there it is anyway. I’ve bred cattle and read Shakespeare, and that’s what I’ve come to see.”

  It was this notion about firstborn boys, as much as anything else, that had helped sour Harry some on life. As the middle boy, Harry had mixed feelings about his two brothers—Cain because he had the rights of the firstborn and Dale because he had the petting privileges of the youngest. And Harry was especially touchy about anything that had to do with Cain.

  Harry once asked Gram, “Wasn’t Gramp teasing Dad Gordon a little when he talked like that about drowning Cain?”

  Gram’s answer was emphatic. “No indeedy not. Mabry meant every word of it. I know. I can tell you. Euu.”

  Harry didn’t dare mention it at the time, but there actually had been another male in the family, a baby boy who, had he lived, would have been their uncle. Dad Gordon actually was not the oldest boy. Just what had happened to their uncle in babyhood no one knew. Gram would never tell. And while Harry could never quite get himself to believe that Gramp could actually have drowned their baby uncle, or even consider having Cain drowned, Harry did think it mighty strange that the rest of the middle generation, their father Gordon Hammett and Rosemary’s father Raymond Hammett, had drowned in a Missouri River flood in Siouxland.