Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  Queenie finally had enough. “Jesse, if this is your idea of a shortcut to Cheyenne, you can stop.”

  “Blast it, if that ain’t just what we will do. Hold up, Mitch, this is far enough.”

  They stopped on a narrow ledge. There was just enough room for the bays and the democrat to pass along the dugway. Above them on the left climbed the south wall of the canyon, straight up, overhanging them, red, tipping, with gray-green mahogany brush sticking out of an occasional crevice. Below them, on the right, some twenty feet down, ran Rust Creek. The mountain stream gurgled like the sound of someone faintly choking. A single tree, a sturdy mountain ash, grew at the edge of the ledge, rising some twenty feet above them. The sun had begun to fall and in the shadow of the south wall the wind seemed a bit more cold and bitter. Teeth chattered. Jesse was jumpy from both the cold and the tension. High and far to the west rode the pure white blunt icicle peaks of the Big Stonies. The Old Man and the Throne were just barely in view.

  Jesse looked up and around and down. He gestured with his gun. “Get out.”

  “Jesse—” Queenie began.

  “Get down.” Jesse prodded them both with the barrel of his gun.

  Slowly they rolled to their knees; then rose to their feet. They were stiff from the jolting ride. They shivered. They looked around at the sky and then down below at the canyon. A wonder turned in their eyes. Their eyes seemed to say: “Is this it? Is this the place?”

  They climbed down slowly. Queenie winced once when her moccasined foot touched on sharp rock.

  Jesse climbed down with them. “All right, you mullygrubs. Here’s what we’ll do. If you’ll promise to leave the country, and stay out, we’ll let you loose. But if you don’t, so help me God, I’ll have you drowned in that stream there like you was rats in a sack.”

  Queenie glanced down at the thin but noisy stream. She shivered. Then she laughed, short. “Why, Jesse, there ain’t enough water in there to give me a decent bath even if you was to dam it up for a week.”

  Jesse boiled over. He realized he’d been a jackass to mention the water at all. He should have set himself to kill them in the first place. Then they would have caught from the tone of his voice that he wasn’t bluffing. Jesse said, “Climb down there and we’ll see if there’s enough water or not. We might just want to hold your heads under until you’ve drowned. Like a calf in a bucket of milk.”

  Avery looked up. “You got a warrant for our arrest, Jacklin?”

  “Oh, I got warrants for you two all right, which I’ll serve on you, hot, from this muzzle, if you don’t get down on your knees by that stream.”

  Queenie said, “Jesse, be careful how you joke us.”

  Avery shivered from the cold. “You can’t start your lead pump any too soon to suit me, Jacklin.”

  Jesse shook his head like a baffled bull. Tarnation, they sure were the cool ones, wasn’t they?

  Mitch couldn’t stand the palaver any more. Again taking out his .45 he said, “Shall I cut the dirty buzzards in two, Jesse?”

  For the first time Avery showed a trace of fear. The thin lids to his bulb eyes flickered some; his head sank a little. Queenie still wore a pinched smile, though she too showed that Mitch’s move had given her check. She looked back at the boys on horseback.

  “Stalker,” she said, appealingly, “Stalker, you ain’t going to be a party to my murder, are you? I know I was sometimes cold to you, but I sometimes wasn’t feeling overgood.”

  Stalker couldn’t hold up to her. Neither could Spade or Ringbone.

  “Boys, I’m surprised at ye. After all the favors I’ve done for you too.”

  Stalker said, “Aw, now, boss, hain’t this gone far enough? They ain’t really hurting anyone in the valley.”

  Ringbone said, “Yeh, boss. What’s a few measly calves for fun? And as for the homesteads … I see Queenie and Avery ain’t got any kids or kin to pass it on to.”

  Jesse reared back. His red face blackened. “This brigazee has gone far enough. Stalker, Spade, toss down your ropes.”

  Stalker and Spade said nothing. Neither moved.

  Queenie’s warm smile came back. “Jesse, you really wouldn’t joke us now, would you?”

  “Boys, get them ropes down here. Pronto!”

  Two coils of rope whirled down into the democrat.

  “Mitch, keep holding down on them while I set the knots.”

  Mitch held down on them. Jesse built a noose for each of them and then with thirteen wrap-arounds built the knots. He kicked around under the seat and dug up a pail of grease. He grabbed a handful of it for each noose and slicked the rope up and down. “This should slip like a heel in fresh prairie mustard.” Jesse dropped one of the nooses around Avery’s neck. Avery stood very still. He quit shivering from the cold. Avery’s fat goiter kept the noose from fitting snug. Jesse got it up as tight as he could under Avery’s chin. He threw the other noose over Queenie’s neck. Her smile once more went back to being pinched. Yet she helped him by holding out her head some. Then Jesse threw the ends of the two ropes high up over a limb in the mountain ash and tied them to the base of the tree. The ropes hung with some slack in them, with the crude knots lying on the shoulder blades of the two. Both Avery and Queenie could breathe with ease, could even take a step or two.

  A gun boomed on the canyon wall opposite. Everybody jumped. Jesse swore. “I’ll bet it’s that thievin’ Harry Hammett!” Jesse saw a bright spot move on the opposite wall, behind a red boulder. Jesse raised his carbine to his shoulder and sighted carefully and fired. Mitch fired then too. Stalker, Spade, and Ringbone held. They looked on. Bullets whistled back across the canyon, the canyon quickly filling with loud echoes. The echoes jangled together; then boomed up and out. After a moment the bright spot behind the boulder moved; rose; became a man; and then became Harry leaping around a corner out of sight.

  Queenie smiled. “I knew my Red Sash boys would come to the rescue.”

  Jesse got desperate. “Durn you, Queenie, Avery, play the game.

  If you’ll just promise to leave the country, and stay out, I’ll let you loose.”

  Even with the rope snug around her neck, Queenie laughed him bold in the face. “I know you now, Jesse. You really don’t dare.”

  Avery asked quiet, “Have you got a warrant for our arrest, Jacklin?”

  Jesse stomped around, black, almost beside himself. This wasn’t going right atall. “Queenie, if you don’t promise to leave the country, balls of fire, I’ll just have to kill you. I hate to do it but I must.”

  Again Queenie laughed bold. “I know you, Jesse.” She toddled her bosom at him. There wasn’t the least trace of fear in her eyes or in her face.

  It was finally too much for Mitch. He let go of the lines and jumped down to the ground. In a single leaning motion, with his sloping shoulders hunched high, he gave first Queenie a shove, then Avery.

  Both lost their balance; twisted half-around. Then, with faces suddenly drawn taut in surprise, eyes shuttering wide, mouths sucking air, they fell backwards off the ledge; and down. The ropes snapped tight; two cries were suddenly choked off; two separate neck-popping sounds followed as of a giant cracking his knuckles.

  “Holy suffering Jehoshaphat!” Jesse exclaimed.

  The two bodies momentumed back and forth, slowly, above the gurgling stream. Both heads hung crooked, as if both Queenie and Avery were craning around to get a good look at something that could only be seen with the head bent to one side. Queenie’s light green eyes and Avery’s dark bulbous eyes slowly closed, dulled over sleepily.

  “Holy snakes, Mitch, now you’ve gone and done it!” Jesse cried out. “You goddam fool you—that wasn’t in the plan atall!”

  Stalker and Spade and Ringbone cried out too. “Goddam!” All three dropped hands to their guns. But they didn’t quite draw.

  Mitch laughed, shrill. “Last time I saw Queenie she complained about how she’d got off on the wrong foot in life.’’ Mitch laughed some more. “Haw. Look at her now.
She ain’t got no footing atall.”

  That very moment both of Queenie’s moccasins slipped off her small feet and fell into the flowing water below. The moccasins floated down the tossing stream like toy canoes, unmanned, whirling around and around.

  Cain

  The last week in November and the first week in December were strangely hot. Warm winds soughed up from the south; mellow Chinooks poured over the low passes to the west. One afternoon it actually became eighty-one in the shade. For ten straight nights the temperature stayed above fifty. Ice in the stock tank melted. Frost came out of the ground. Snow on the lower slopes of the Big Stonies vanished. In a few places, on sandy knolls above the Shaken Grass, Cain even saw a few purple pasques show hairy dwarf flowers.

  “Dummed funny weather,” Cain muttered as he chopped wood for the winter ahead, “things’ve been upside down all year.”

  Around eleven one morning, while trying in vain to split the braided strands of a particularly tough cottonwood log, he heard a wagon come rattling down from Crimson Wall. He smacked the ax partway into the log and ran for his belt and gun on a nearby stump. Hurriedly he buckled it on. Then, looking around, he was startled to see that it was switchtail Clara Jager driving a pair of blacks. The blacks were lathered with sweat.

  Something was up. Instead of the usual look of outrage pulling her face all out of shape, she now looked calm. Too calm. With his sleeve Cain wiped sweat from his hewn walnut face and walked toward her.

  Clara hauled back on the lines with thin pale hands. “Hooa!” She pulled so hard she raised herself off the spring seat. “Hooa!” The blacks were going so fast they had trouble stopping.

  Cain reached out a hand, slow, gradual, and caught the nearest black by the bit. “Whoa!” he commanded. They set down on all eight legs. With a clatter of chains the doubletree rose partway up over their rears. They stopped.

  Cain stepped around the nearest black and tipped his hat. “Why, Clara, what can the matter be?”

  Clara sat indrawn like a stunned mouse. Her skimmilk eyes whirled white, once; then hid behind red lids. Her rashy face was pale.

  Cain gave her a steady calming look. “What’s wrong up your way?”

  Clara took a brown envelope out of the front of her dress and handed it to him. “Look in it,” she said.Again her milk-blue eyes whirled once, furtively.

  Cain took the brown package wonderingly. He saw her name and address written on the outside. He felt a lump inside.He glanced up at her again, in greatest delicacy, as if to say he didn’t like reading other people’s mail. But she nodded, once, for him to look anyway. So he did. At first he thought it but a dried halfpear. But then he saw the hole in the middle and felt the gristle and knew it for what it was. A human ear.

  “Dencil’s,” he said, low, deadly quiet.

  A convulsion almost exploded out of her face. She fought it back. She managed to nod, once.

  Cain put the ear back in the brown package and returned it to her. “When did you get that?”

  Clara tried to talk; couldn’t; grimly held onto the lines.

  Cain rolled down the sleeves of his black shirt. “Better try tellin’ me about it, Clara.”

  Her teeth chattered. “And he ain’t back yit.”

  Cain pitied her. That she still should expect him back. “Where’d he go, Clara?”

  With a single hunching motion, Clara scootched herself forward on the spring seat. “Some men come for him a week ago.”

  “What!” Cain’s smoke-blue eyes widened some. His legs set apart automatically. “Some men? Who?”

  “I don’t know. They come at dark. Just as we set down to supper.”

  Cain’s head slowly thrust forward. Blood began to pulse with a clicking sound in his ears. “You didn’t see them?”

  “No.” She swallowed. The swallow loosened her tongue. “There was a knock. Dencil went to answer it. I heard him talk in the dark with someone outside. There was three men but I heard only one talk. Then Dencil come back and said he had to go with them men. I said, ’What fer?’ He said, ‘They got a warrant for my arrest.’ I said, ‘What fer?’ He said, ‘It’s all right, Clara. It’s just a mistake of some kind. I think I better go along and get it straightened out before it gets worse.’ I said, ’What fer, Dencil?’ He said, ‘Well, they claim I rustled some hosses from the Derby outfit.’ I said, ’What? When just last week the earl himself drove up and bought a pair of trotters?’ He said, ‘That’s just it, Clara. That’s why I think it’s just a mistake. I’ll be back soon. Just you finish supper and put the kids to bed.’ ”

  Cain’s stub body slowly knotted up all over. “Then what?”

  “He ain’t back yit.“

  “That was a week ago, you say?”

  “A week.”

  New sweat gathered on his heavy brow. He wiped it off on his other sleeve.

  Clara said, “I warned him. The first time they come I told him he should quit horses. I warned him. I told him he should take that job at the livery stable.”

  “Clara-”

  “But oh no. Not Dencil. He knew better. He always knew better.

  He had to be a big-time—”

  “Clara-”

  “—rancher. A big auger. Well, now he’s murdered. Like I warned him.“

  “Now, Clara-”

  “Murdered.” She sat small, indrawn, quivering as if she had the knotted ague. “Murdered.”

  “Where’d you leave the little tykes?”

  “Home. I locked them all up in the bedroom. With the new dog we got.”

  “Good.” Cain hitched up his pants. His left hand settled around the blue butt of his .45, lightly, experimentally. “Clara, I want you to listen close now. I want you to turn right around and go back to your tykes.”

  “But Dencil—”

  Cain held up a hand. “Wait. Wait. Meantime I got a hoss up in the corral. I’ll go rustle up some help and we’ll go hunt him up. And, Clara, look. If there is any righting to be done, we’ll do it. It ain’t much comfort to ye mabbe to say that, but at least it’s somethin’ to take with you.” Cain looked down at the ground; slowly shook his head. “I can’t see Jesse orderin’ this one though. Jesse knew Dencil was honest. As honest as the day was long.”

  “Dencil is dead,” Clara said.

  Once again Cain and Dale rode up the canyon of the Shaken Grass, this time just the two of them, Cain on Bucky the dun horse and Dale on Lonesome the black horse. They rode through where the Shaken Grass parted the Crimson Wall; trotted across a low swell of red land; racked past Dencil Jager’s ranch buildings. Clara had beat them home. Cain saw her in the single window and waved to her. Her wagon stood in the middle of the dry yard, empty and horseless, tongue down and doubletree hanging, all of it waiting, once again slowly weathering into gray.

  Behind the stable they found a few tracks, three horses coming, four going. The tracks were old, almost erased in places, erased not so much by wind or rain, or even distending and contracting frost, as by slow relentless myriad diffusion, particle by particle. They found the tracks more by guess than by sight.

  Cain climbed down and knelt beside one of the clearer tracks.

  “Odd shoe work.”

  Dale hadn’t much to say. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “Wal, ’tain’t a Derby shoe. Jesse’s blacksmith makes his caulks three-cornered. And ’tain’t Governor Barb’s outfit neither. Nor Senator Thorne’s.”

  Dale grunted. He leaned his arms on the pommel of his saddle.

  “Looks more like the caulks Timberline makes.”

  “Naw.”

  “That’s a fact. Except it’s a little too pointed. Too much like a spear point. Instead’ve a blunt round point with a kind of a mouse tit on the end of it to keep it sharp.”

  “How can you tell so close after two weeks?”

  “That’s just it. If these caulk holes showed less point after two weeks I’d agree. But they don’t.”

  Dale grunted.

  Ca
in searched around for more sign. Finally, when he couldn’t find any, he climbed into his saddle again. He glanced across at his brother. ”Say, what are you mumpish about?”

  Dale made a face. His fish mouth drew back at the corners, showing teeth tips.

  “Personal, I’d be riding on clouds if I had me two colt boys.” Dale ganted a breath.

  “You got a hard for me again, Dale?”

  “No.”

  “Wal, what are you mumpish about then? Forgettin’ Dencil for the minute, that is.”

  “Oh, I guess maybe it’s just that I got me a headache built for a hoss this morning.”

  “Drinking?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  Dale hauled back head and shoulder. He swallowed loudly.

  “Oh, I guess it’s just that I’m tired of this country at last.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “Cain, a man never answers a knock on his door any more with-out he has to have a gun in hand. If that’s God’s country, I’ll eat it.”

  Cain cocked his head at his brother. “You still afraid that Alias Hunt fellow will get you?”

  “Cain, I say it’s come to a terrible time when men we’ve known all our lives can ride up to our door and grab us and hang us from the nearest tree without fear of the law. We can elect as sheriff all the Ned Sines we want to, but it don’t seem to do us much good.”

  “Hah. You’ve had another fight with Rosemary.”

  Dale’s eyes wouldn’t hold up to his. “Oh, it ain’t that.” As if to rid himself of a mask he’d been wearing too long, Dale bruised a hard hand down over his face, starting at his brow and ending at his chin. “Cain, I say hell has come to earth when men known to us all can hang a woman and never stand trial for it. Yeh, and her husband with her.”

  “Now, Dale. Steady there.”

  “When men known to us ever since we was kids can change their name and get in behind the law and take potshots at us. Rory is right, we shouldn’t wait. We should kill such on sight and not wait until we have to shoot in self-defense.”