Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  Cain held up a hand. They stopped. Jesse and his men held up behind them too. Gun butts shone dully in the red morning sun.

  Cain slipped on his leather work gloves, a finger at a time and then the palms and wrists. “Harry, you and I will go into the herd and prowl. Dale, you and Timberline make this your holding ground. It’s low here, where you can watch all around from any position.”

  Dale sat stiff on black Lonesome. He kept looking over his shoulder. “I still smell a mice, Cain, them following us like that.” “They won’t bother us. They may even have trailed along to help. Jesse has probably decided to let the tail go with the hide since we got him into such tight papers with the earl.”

  “But that Hunt is on a hoss too. And he couldn’t chouse a lice down the back of his finger even if his life depended on it.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Cain saw Jesse come riding up beside him. He decided to be the first to talk. He turned in his saddle; sat with half a leg over. “Jesse, I’ll have to say this for your Mitch. The son-of-a-gun can shape up a herd to a fare-thee- well. They’re all up but they’re all steady. And the calves have mothered up. Which’ll help.”

  Jesse cocked his head to one side, bold eyes hooded, watchful. “Just how many do you claim, Hammett?”

  “I’m missing about fifty mothers, some forty calves, five bulls. All Mark-of-Cains. With split ears.”

  Jesse nodded toward Harry and Timberline. “And them?” “Harry!” Cain called. “How many for you?”

  “Some two hundred steers, plain. Rocking Hill. With cropped ears.”

  “No mothers?”

  “Not one. Not even an uncle.”

  Again it was understood just what two hundred was meant.

  Cain said, “Them reps from Thorne’s and Barb’s outfits here yet?”

  “No,” Jesse said, grim.

  “Well, that’s too bad. But we can’t wait.”

  To keep out the dust, Cain fastened his black bandanna high over his nose. He touched Bucky lightly in the quick with a spur. Bucky moved forward into the herd. Harry followed.

  After a moment Jesse suddenly waved an arm in a circular motion. It was not the motion for the men to surround Cain and his boys, but to join the guard in holding the herd while Cain and Harry made their cut. Cain saw it and sighed in vast relief. Cain saw also that Jesse had placed two of his best men on quick horses between the great herd and the place where the cut was to be held.

  Cain and Harry prowled. In the turmoil of red dust and flying tails and mean glinting horns, it was sometimes easier to spot a split ear than a brand on the hip. Within moments Cain spotted a split-ear cow with its calf. He leaned over and next made out his brand: “ Ha,” he said. He nudged Bucky with a knee. At almost the same instant Bucky veered slightly; stepped along as if half-asleep; then suddenly darted and with a rush took the cow and calf out at breakneck speed. The two dodged this way, that way. But Bucky was quicker and stayed right on the heels of the snaky pair, once even laying his nose on the mother’s rump, as if to steer her in the right direction. Cain finally got the two halfway across and then Jesse’s two throw-back men took over and ran them to where Dale and Timberline were to hold the cut, some two hundred yards away.

  Twice Cain found three of Harry’s crop-eared Rocking Hill, and with luck shot them across to the cut. Another time he found two of his bulls fighting. He broke up the fight and before they knew what hit them they too were in the cut.

  Bucky never worked better. The buckskin had caught the urgent nature of the work from Cain’s voice and manner. Again and again, like an aroused collie, Bucky bit a steer or a cow on the back, or in the tail. Once Bucky nipped a calf in the leg, growling like a dog.

  Cain followed Bucky’s every move as if born part of the horse. Cain rode light, flowed with every turn of the neck and spine. Sometimes Bucky stopped so quick Cain had the feeling that if he had not foreseen it he would have turned through himself. It was a delight, a great joy, to work with a cow pony as expert as Bucky. Bucky was the best. Working with a horse as good as Bucky took all a man had. There was little room for thought about other things, such as lilies or ladies, petunias or cousins, or whatever. Working with a cow pony was full living. It was life brimming over. It was life lived down to the hilt, sometimes even with the hilt sunk in.

  The main herd began to surge some inside the circling ring of cowboys. Calves bawled for mothers; mothers lowed for calves. Bulls bellowed in outrage when chased from some favored heifer in heat. Steers roared. Dust puffed up like sudden rages in a smoking prairie fire. The ground quaked. Ponies became white with sweat; after a while turned slowly pink from the stiving red dust. From within the eyeball a man fancied he could see dragging pink clouds hanging from his eyelashes. The ponies puffed like ganted lizards. Buzzards floated high overhead, just outside the edge of the rising red cloud. It was driving dirty work for man and beast, for chaser as well as chased.

  Dust worked in under Cain’s bandanna. He coughed; coughed hoarsely; coughed until he seemed about to blow out his ears.

  Twice Cain saw a calf become separated from a Mark-of-Cain mother. Each time Cain shook down his rope and snaked a wriggling turning loop through the red air and caught the calf in a figure eight, catching the head in one end of the loop and then, as the loop turned over upon hitting, the forefeet in the other. He dragged both calves out of the herd and over to the cut. He saw Jesse rise in his stirrups as if to protest, but then also had the satisfaction of seeing the calves, upon being released, run for their mothers in the cut.

  Working like Turks, Cain and Harry finished by noon.

  Jesse came riding over, Mitch and Hunt to either side of him.

  Cain waved for his boys to stay put around the cut. He would handle the parley alone.

  Jesse scrutinized the cut carefully, examining the critters one by one. Finally Jesse said, “You satisfied now, Hammett?”

  “I am.” Bucky puffed under Cain. Bucky was plumb winded and had thrown up his tail.

  “I suppose you expect me to feed you chuck this noon too?”

  Cain took off a glove. His hand came out pale, as if from under an old bandage. The palm had deep rope bruises across it. The fingers tingled with a curious kind of buzzing sensation. Cain said, short, “We’ll get by.”

  “You know of course you won’t get away with this. Forcing my hand under Lord Peter’s nose.”

  “Jesse, all I can say is—dammit, leave my beef alone!”

  “I’ve already sent wires to all the regular stock markets with orders to impound all beef showing up with your brand on it. As well as Harry’s. Cheyenne, Chicago, Omaha, Denver, St. Paul. Everywhere. Also with orders to sell such beef at the best price and to bank the money for the Association.”

  “Backing us in a corner, are you?”

  “I am.” Jesse forced himself to smile. “Cain, why don’t you vent your brand and ride for me and the Derby again? I’ll never hold it agin you that you helped your brother Harry here today cut out cattle that really belonged to us.”

  Cain’s dark chin set down.

  “I’m giving you your last chance.”

  Cain looked up at the owling sun. “That money they’re banking for the Association… I suppose you’ll use part of it to pay his salary?” Cain pointed his quirt at Hunt.

  “Might.”

  Cain moved his prat around in its seat. He was soaked through to the crotch and his pants stuck to leather. “You know who Alias here really is, don’t you?”

  “I think so.”

  Cain whacked dust off his pants, then his shirt, then the bedroll behind him. He said slowly, “Little more than a tinhorn outlaw operating under the protection of a tin badge until he was run out of your state of Texas.”

  Hunt’s lips thinned back.

  Jesse looked from one to the other.

  Cain turned his back on both of them. He touched a spur to puffing Bucky and trotted off.

  When Cain got to where his brothers and Timberline w
ere holding the bawling bellowing cut, he yelled,“All right, boys, let’s get high behind.”

  Harry cried gaily, “It’s for the hills, ain’t it, Cain?”

  “You bet. For Hidden Country. Where they’ll never find them. At least not until this all blows over.”

  Cain

  It was late October. Cain and Harry were asleep in a one- room log cabin high in the hills, in Hidden Country where white clay overlay red earth, where white modes overlay Indian ways.

  Cain slept in the bunk behind the door; Harry in the bunk across the room. The fire in the red-stone hearth had long ago fallen to a gray-edged mound of amber coals. The cabin smelled of warmed-over pine pitch. A slow wind moaned low over the chimney opening above.

  Something awoke Cain. In the dark he could hear it rustling across the board floor. Cain raised off his blanket pillow to hear better. He was still on the alert for Jesse or one of his boys. They just might have got past Timberline the lookout and trailed them into Hidden Country.

  Finally he made out the princing of small feet and the brush of a tail across a floor board. He heard nibbling. That was enough for him. He reached across to his hat on the chair beside the bed and pulled a match from the hatband. With a strike along the board side of the bunk, he lit it, a spitting glow breaking into a blue flame surrounded by an orange halo. He looked around. There lay brother Harry sound asleep in his bunk, blond face in innocent repose like a baby’s, arms crossed over his chest as if laid out for a funeral. Cain raised in his blankets a bit more. And saw it. On the floor at the foot of his bunk burned two eyes set close together. Sachet kitten. Nibbling on his saddle-cinch strap. It took Cain a moment to understand the skunk had paid them a visit for the salt in the sweated portions of the leather. It’d probably come in through the breathing hole to the root cellar.

  He stared at the skunk. “Wal,” he thought, “ain’t much point in kickin’ a loaded polecat in the arse and out the door. It’ll probably leave in a minute if left alone.” Yet a half-chewed cinch strap wasn’t much good to a man either. Cain glanced back and up at the corner post of his bunk where he’d hung his .45 and cartridge belt.

  As if sensing Cain’s thoughts, and just as the match was about to go out, the skunk turned leisurely, even lazily, and on soft light pads princed for the door to the root cellar. The long white stripe down its back and along its tail showed like a streak of snow on ebony. Its bright black bead eyes winked at him. Then the lucifer was out.

  Cain settled back on his pillow. With a sigh of relief he nuzzled under gray horse blankets. It was good to know there were still a few hours’ sleep coming.

  He heard Harry stir; heard him mumble in his sleep. He heard the low wind outside moan in the chimney opening. The towering Stonies outside seemed to be moaning too, with a sound like a very low hum, as if barely moving wind were playing a vast comb.

  He recalled a story Harry had told at supper. A cowboy keeping lonely line camp came home one day to find a stranger eating at his table. The stranger, as was custom, had helped himself and had fixed up a good meal. The cowboy noticed a fresh batch of biscuits on the table. “See you had good luck with the sourdough,” the cowboy said. “I did,” the stranger said. The cowboy pointed to two identical jars on the shelf over the stove. Both had white powder in them. “Which a them two did you use?” “The one on the left,” the stranger said. “Good,” the cowboy said, “you’re all right then. That other’n’s got strychnine in it.”

  He slept.

  Dawn was breaking, when the heavy log door at the foot of his bunk suddenly shoved in with a loud screak and quick boot heels tapped on the floor.

  “Who’s there?” Cain called out.

  “Tramps,” a high voice said.

  Cain opened his eyes and looked directly into the black eyes of two guns. It was still somewhat dark inside the cabin and he couldn’t quite make out the two faces behind the guns.

  Across the cabin there was a rustle in Harry’s bed and then the thump of a body hitting the floor.

  Cain really woke then. Almost without thinking, he faked an elaborate yawn and asked as sleepily as he could manage, “What do you want, boys?”

  The same voice said,“Better give up, Hammett, we’ve got you this time.”

  The voice behind the other gun said, “So you thought it safe to play king-on-the-mountain up here, eh?”

  Again almost without thinking, all in one motion, Cain suddenly rolled to his right and left-handed snatched his .45 from the bunk post and fired. One of the bundled-up forms grunted and the gun nearest Cain let go, roaring and flaming, the flame singeing his mustache and the bullet tearing into the pillow under his head. The other gun let go then too, bellowing and blazing, the slug ripping through the center of the bunk where a moment before his body had lain, whacking into the floor beneath. The smell of burning powder and smoke filled the low cabin, sharp, acrid, like burnt sulphur.

  Before Cain could thumb the hammer of his gun again, the two forms, one of them still grunting, hit the log doorway together, crashing. They struggled, both trying to get out at the same time; at last managed it. Cain swung out of bed, and in shirt and socks was after them, firing as he went. By the time he got through the door, in the gray dawn, he saw only the tails of two coats vanishing around the corner of the cabin. He was about to take after them, when two men jumped from around the other corner of the cabin and let go at him, both guns bellowing and flaming. Somehow they missed him completely. He whirled and threw down on them, but they too ducked and ran. He jumped after them in his socks, hobbling as best he could across the iron- cold ground. Again he was disappointed to see only the tails of coats vanishing, this time into gray-green mahogany brush beside tumbled red boulders. He fired a parting shot after them. The echo of the shot bounced back and forth several times between the high red walls looming overhead.

  After a few seconds he thought he could make out the sound of galloping hooves in the distance. He remembered a trick of Gramp Hammett’s and quickly whipped out a silk handkerchief from his shirt pocket and spread it on the frozen ground. A kerchief put to the ground became a long ear and magnified all distant sounds. He knelt and put an ear to it. He listened closely. Yes. Horse hooves were beating the earth somewhere. The sound was diminishing; finally faded out altogether.

  Coming back, he was surprised to find a gleaming well-oiled Winchester rifle leaning against the side of the house near the steps. “I’ll be dogged.” He went over and picked it up. He snicked it open. Loaded. He turned it over in the gray light. There on the stock someone had carefully, even quite neatly, burned an initial: L.

  “L for Link. Or Lawton, his summer name. Either way, I’ll bet that’s who one of ’em was,” Cain said softly to himself. “I thought I sort a recognized that voice. The tall one. The sonofa.” He looked the gun over some more. “Wal, looks like I’m one gun ahead. The owner will never dare come around and claim this one. Not onless he wants to be arrested for attempted murder.” Cain shook it for heft. “Light and handy. Just my kind of gun. A jimdandy .38-56, 1886 carbine.”

  He was about to step inside when he spotted some blood on the doorsill. “Yessiree! I did nick one of ’em then. The one that grunted. The short one that sort a sounded like Mitch. That’ll make even better evidence in a tight.”

  Then, inside the cabin, after he had lighted a lantern, he saw something else that surprised him. There under the other bunk, eyes bleering out big and scared and moonstone gray, lay brother Harry. “Wal, I’ll be go-to-grass. Harry! I been wonderin’ what’d happened to ye all this time.” Cain remembered he’d heard someone fall to the floor when the strangers first popped into the cabin. “All right. You can get out from under. I’ve chased them off.”

  Harry crept out. He too was in shirt and socks. He was bacon pale.

  Cain laughed. “Harry! You look so white with fright a man could easy cut off your head at the neck and not shed a drop of blood.”

  Harry trembled. “Put out that lantern, you
fool!”

  “Oh, for godsakes, Harry, they’re all of ten miles from here by now. I heard them go ahorseback.”

  Harry ran three quick steps and grabbed up the lantern and shoved up the chimney level with a thumb and blew it out.

  “Wal, Harry, by golly now!”

  Cain

  A few days later, at cousin Rory’s, Cain sat tipped back on two legs of his chair. Rory sat across the table from him. They were having a midmorning cup of coffee together. Dale and the boy Joey and the herder were out tending sheep. Gram with her old leathers lay breathing in the lean-to, taking a nap. The fire in the hearth threw soothing warmth over the side of Cain’s face and body.

  Cain was telling Rory about the attack in the hills. “The way I figure it, they must’ve wanted to catch me alive. So they could hang me. Otherwise they’d’ve drilled me plumb center afore I woke up. They had the drop on me.”

  Face swollen red from pregnancy, Rory looked down at her black coffee. She stirred it. She said, dispirited, “Like they tried with your brother Harry.”

  “Yeh.”

  “Make an example of you.”

  Cain nodded.

  “Like they’ll probably try with Dale next, now that this Hunt- Link devil has come north.”

  Cain picked at the tablecloth with a blunt thumbnail.

  Rory tolled her head. “And here I always thought you Hammetts was men.” She sighed. The burden in her lap moved.

  Cain fired up. “You tell us what to do then, since you’re so sure.”