Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  “Hah! You did have a fight with Rory then.”

  Dale stared out across the red valley. Slowly his face grayed over. “Dencil is dead,” Dale said.

  They searched for miles around. Up dry coulees. Down wet draws. Along cross-canyons. All across the Crimson Wall country. Every tall tree became suspect. Still they couldn’t find Dencil.

  The third day out, around one o’clock, getting hungry, Cain suggested they ride up a draw where it cut high into the side of a hogback. A few chokecherry trees, now leafless, grew at the head of the draw and under them waved thick masses of rusty grass. The head of the draw would make a good place to stake out the horses, while they themselves could sit on the hogback above, eating and looking.

  While Dale scratched for dry wood in the draw, Cain took over the horses. He tied Lonesome and Bucky each to the end of a catch rope, slipped off their bridles and saddles, and let them roll in the dry grass and red dust. In examining their soaked saddle blankets, he found a wet hair-fringed spot on the underside of Lonesome’spadding. He smelled it. Pus. He went over and examined Lonesome and found a small sore in the black hair just over the spine. He felt around it carefully. There was no bump under the skin so it couldn’t be a grub in the hide. Nor did it look like a bite by Bucky. Cain spread Lonesome’s blanket over the top of a small wolfberry bush to let it air out in the sun. After thinking about the sore spot some more, Cain decided Dale had ridden with a loosely cinched saddle. Dale had been fooled by the way Lonesome always swelled up his belly the moment a saddle touched his back.

  Dale got a small fire started and soon had the coffee boiling and the bacon searing. Dale still had a few of Rory’s biscuits left over in his saddlebag, two each, and he set them out on a tin plate. Both Cain and Dale fell to wordlessly. There was only the occasional pop of a working jaw. The sun shone warm on them. There were no midges to swipe at. The mountains waited above them, serene, holding high and white.

  After wiping the pans and tin plates with a rag, and shaking the tin cups dry, Cain broke the silence. “It’s so danged peaceable around here, I got half a mind to help myself to some shut-eye.”

  Dale sat on his heels, glum, staring down at the red country below.

  “Lonesome’s sore back could stand the rest too. And his blanket could stand a dry.’’

  Dale’s lips moved. But there was no sound. He turned on his heels, still squatting, and looked across toward the blood-raw cliffs of Crimson Wall.

  “We can ride late tonight before camping. Be cooler for both hosses and us.”

  Dale let go then. He worked his mouth at Cain as if to cut him with his teeth. “It’s crazy, I tell ee. It’s wrong. All wrong.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything.” Dale waved a long hook-ended arm. “The weather, hot like this. The law, with Hunt part of it. Women, asking for revenge. Everything.” A high haunted look passed over Dale’s face. “Why, you dassent even laugh to yourself miles away from anybody any more.” Dale’s lips thinned back; his teeth worked.

  “Go on.”

  “And then there’s our sheriff we elected. Ned Sine. Why hain’t Ned arrested somebody for the murder of Queenie and Avery? Hah?”

  “Maybe Ned couldn’t find any witnesses or evidence so he could prosecute.”

  “Aw, hell, Cain, I’m afraid our Ned is in with Jesse and his boys by now. Bought over.”

  “Well, you know he did question everybody in the valley about it. And he pushed himself too, doin’ it.”

  “Cain, you know very well he ain’t man enough to do the job. Now don’t you?”

  “The trouble was, nobody would talk.”

  “That’s just it,” Dale cried. “Everybody’s too scared to talk. Cain, it’s gettin’ so people don’t even go to the law any more when they get in trouble. Like Clara. She came to you, not the sheriff.”

  “Soon as we find out what happened to Dencil, we’ll make it a point to notify the sheriff,” Cain said, grim.

  “But we should a done it in the first place, Cain, don’t you see? We should be helpin’ him find Dencil as part of a posse. Instead a doin’ it on our own.”

  “Wal, I guess you’re right at that.”

  “Cain, even if we do find Dencil, and then tell the sheriff about it, what can the sheriff do? Who can he arrest? Because they won’t be any witnesses this time either.”

  Cain fell silent.

  Dale nodded sadly. “Yeh, I can just see Ned Sine writing in his little book. ‘Dencil Jager came to his death by parties unknown to the jury.’ ”

  “Now, now, Dale.”

  “Cain, I’m getting out of this country. Whether Rory wants to go along or not.”

  “Where will you go to?”

  “Back to Siouxland. At least there they hang you legal.”

  “Dale, you got dyin’ on the brain.”

  Dale picked up a red stone and threw it into the bushes below. The fall of the stone startled both horses. Their heads came up with a jerk, ears pricking back and forth. When nothing further happened, they went back to cropping rusty grass.

  Dale said, “And always ridin’ that dummed black hoss ain’t helpin’ my luck either.”

  “By golly now, Dale, black or buckskin or bay, what’s the color of a hoss’s hair to do with luck? A good hoss is a good hoss.”

  “That ain’t what Harry says about a black hoss.”

  Cain looked at his brother’s suffering eyes. “Dale, why don’t you go off and end it all somewhere? If that’s your mind.”

  “Cain, I’ve often thought of doin’ just that. It would save Hunt Lawton from having to shoot me in the back. And Rory could then bother you about getting revenge for us Hammetts.”

  At that, Cain shut up.

  The gloomy talk with Dale chased sleep away. Looking around, Cain spotted behind them, some three hundred yards back, a small red butte sticking up out of the hump of the hogback. Without a word to Dale, he got up and slowly sauntered over to the foot of the red teat. It was some fifty feet high. He looked it up and down. He saw he could climb it without much trouble and get an even better view of the country.

  Puffing, sweating some, he made it up. He sat down, and rolled and lighted himself a cigarette. He took off his boots. He wiggled his toes and straightened out his tan cotton socks. He lazed back against a small red boulder. He let his eyes rove, taking in the grand sights. He narrowed his eyes up at the glinting white peaks to the west; let in the light again when looking down at the raw red wall to the east.

  An hour later, as he was finishing his third cigarette, his eyes caught movement far away and below, some three miles to the north and along the mountain stream where he and the boys had cut their cattle right out from under the noses of Jesse and his armed band of toughs. Cain tipped his hat down over his piercing eyes and made peepholes of his hands. Then he saw what it was: a couple of buzzards circling a cottonwood tree, the very tree under which they’d eaten of Hambone’s grub. Studying it some more, Cain thought he could make out still other buzzards flapping near the ground.

  “Old Hambone sure must have thrown out a mess of leftovers if they’re still scavenging that place,” he muttered to himself. “He probably had a mad on after that night and went out of his way to be extra careless with Lord Peter’s property. Cooks is an awful touchy kind of critter. An Almighty in human flesh if there ever was one. Not to forget Christ of course.”

  Cain looked up at the sun. “Hey, time is runnin’ out the bottom end. We better roll again.” Setting his heels deep in the soft dirt, with pink stones rolling down ahead of him, he stomped down the little red butte.

  He found his brother Dale still moping to himself, writing doodles in the ground, working at it almost harshly, as if in a fret just how to shape a last will and testament upon the very earth itself.

  “We best go, Dale,” Cain said. “We’re burning daylight.”

  “Yeh, guess we better.”

  Cain found Lonesome’s blanket dry. He broke off a handful of le
afless little twigs and gave the black horse a brushdown to get rid of the light powdery red dirt it had picked up while rolling with a wet hide. He also brushed off Bucky. When they saddled up, he made sure that this time Lonesome got his saddle on tight despite his ornery trick of puffing out his belly.

  They headed toward Hidden Country where brother Harry and Timberline lived. They rode along in silence.

  A half mile, and Cain abruptly reined in. “Hell’s fire and little fishes! How blind can a man get! Looking it right in the eye and still not see it.”

  “What?”Dale sat sagged forward in his saddle.

  “That was two months ago when we ate Hambone’s grub under that cottonwood. Them leftovers wouldn’t’ve lasted them buzzards that long. Dale, I think we’ve found him.”

  “Dencil?”

  “Dencil.”

  “Oh.”

  “Come on.” Cain turned Bucky around and touched him lightly with his spurs. Bucky gathered legs under him and took off as if shot from a chute. Dale followed at a slower pace.

  As Cain approached the cottonwood, the buzzards circling in the air above it climbed a rung higher, squawking, while those flopping on the ground scattered into the bushes upstream. Something was hanging under the tree, all right, and from the highest and fattest limb too. Bucky snorted at the terrible smell, so did Lonesome, and both refused to go in close. Both Cain and Dale finally had to climb down and tie the horses to a bush near the stream a good hundred yards away and down wind.

  Coming close, they saw the body clearly. It was Dencil Jager. Hung by the neck until dead. Head craned around sharply sideways. Ears missing. Eyes pecked out and nose sheared off by the buzzards. Shirt ripped off by the vultures. Body already badly decomposed. Green bottleflies buzzing around in clouds. Wide black mustache just beginning to slide off the face. Right leg separated from the body and fallen out of pant leg and on the ground, lower end still booted and upper end eaten away. Black dripping out of open hip socket from which it had fallen.

  Dale looked at it all for a couple of seconds, then ran for the stream, gushing gray as he went.

  Cain quick got up Clara Jager’s wagon and brought a big store box. He found it impossible to handle what was left of Dencil, so he placed the box directly under the body and cut the rope and let it fall in. He picked up the leg with a scoop and put that in the box too.

  Just before he closed the box, Cain noted a curious thing. The whole chest of the man, about eighteen inches square and including the vestigial teats, had been skinned away. He saw knife cuts, not the slashes of buzzards’ beaks, along the outer edges of the raw area. Also, the corners were square. Cain stared at the marks. He had trouble believing someone hated Dencil enough to want to make leather out of his hide.

  Then, sure that the vultures couldn’t further molest the body, Cain rode hard for the sheriff. As he rode, a few words from the Good Book came to mind: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my roaring? But I am a worm, and no man. I am poured out like water. All my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax. It is melted in the midst of my bowels. My strength is dried up like a potsherd. Thou hast brought me into the dust of death.”

  Dale

  Late in December, a cold snap came down from Canada and pushed the unusual warm weather out of the country. Dale, reading the signs, decided that before heavy winter set in he’d better make a last trip into Antelope for supplies. Early one morning, long before dawn, he hitched the matched bays onto the box wagon, put on his heavy winter coat with its beaver collar and cuffs, and headed north. He drove steady and got into town late that same night. The next morning, also very early, he bought two dozen sacks of grain for the horses, a dozen big boxes of groceries, and, because Christmas was only a few days away, several packages of toys for Joey and rattles for baby Cain. Dale also bought Rory a present, a potted pink begonia, something she could fuss with during the long white months ahead. He hoped the begonia would help her get over her mad. He was willing to forget that someone else might have fathered Joey if she would forget that he still hadn’t shot down Hunt. The wagon was mounding full.

  He finished making his last call in town right after the noon meal. It was still snappish out, despite the clear sun, and he decided a shot of rye would be just the thing before beginning the long ride home.

  A sight of mustached men were boiling around inside Butcherknife Bain’s saloon: new settlers just come in from the States trying to get acquainted the quick way, chuck-line riders from Montana looking for a winter nest, range bums from the Dakotas trying to sponge drinks. Looking them all over Dale couldn’t find a face he knew. Everyone was a stranger. The wool-hat people with their plows and kids were really moving into the valley at last.

  He drank alone, at the far end of the bar, near a door going off to a back room where men sometimes played poker. He listened to the roaring talk. It was easy to see that most had been drinking hard.

  “I tell ee,” one old bearded cowhand next to him orated, “middlin’ folk can’t survive in this country. You’ve got to be good at whatever you are. Good good or good bad. And you either get better at it, or you get worse—fast.”

  “The God religion is played out in this part of. the world,” another bearded puncher roared. “All that’s left around here is a man’s word and a steady hand.”

  “So there I sat, helljuice running out of my mouth with all the while a preacher sitting across the table from me taken’ it in.”

  “Well, a preacher can kiss my foot and go you-know-where. Anytime.”

  A big pot-bellied stove, red with heat, roared in the middle of the whisky mill. The air inside the saloon was full of strong odors: fumes of raw whisky, melting horse manure caught under boot heels, soft new sawdust, steaming acrid sweat in the armpits of old coats, tobacco quids squishing underfoot, body smells all the way from tar soap to nicotine. Tolerating it all on the sober side of the bar, a scowling smile holding up his mustache, was big bald Butcherknife Bain. As always he was wearing the usual striped white shirt and leather apron, and also as always he was pocketing money hand-over-fist into the voluminous folds of his baggy gray pants.

  Dale had a foot up on the brass rail. His elbow rested on the bar. He mulled over his troubles to himself. There was that dummed Hunt fellow still in the country. There was that Rory who still had not let him touch her. There was that confession of hers that Joey wasn’t his boy. There was Dencil’s terrible end. And there was that business as to who Joey’s father really was. Cain? Harry? Probably Cain, since Rory had never really got over him. That was probably why she’d named the second peckersnap after him. Dog-nab it, what a sad life it was. It made a man feel as lonesome as a lone stud on a butte. “Right now,” he muttered to himself, “right now, not having had a drink or a kiss for a couple of months, I kin say I never yet tasted bad rye or saw an ugly woman.”

  He had another drink. And drinking, began to wonder if beating Rory wasn’t the answer. Better yet, a licking over the knee, even if she was as strong as a bobcat. What in Goshen had got into the woman? Dale whacked the bottom of his glass on the bar. Blast that Cain anyway for having addled her heart in the first place. Yes, it was probably Cain who done it.

  Still another drink and Dale knew he could lick her even if she was two bobcats. He was a man. Y’u durn right. Her secret strength lay in that short-choked Hammett neck of hers. If a man could somehow get around that, say maybe get a scissorbill hold on her belly and get one of her arms crooked up around behind her back, high, maybe a man could get her to say uncle. Yeh, and maybe in the wrestling around she’d get worked up some and come around to seeing it his way. Yeh. It had happened before. A wrestle worked about the same way on a woman as a backrub.

  Butcherknife stopped for a word. “You dyin’ off here, Dale?”

  “Just mopin’ to myself a little.”

  “How’s she down your way?”

  “Boiling.”

  “Well,
it’s boiling all over the valley, let me tell you.”

  Dale looked at the crowd jammed tight against the bar and around the tables behind them. “I can see that.”

  “Well, Dale, you fellows figured out yet who red out Dencil?”

  “Got a pretty good idee.”

  “Who?”

  “Same ones as tried to kill Cain and Harry in their beds back in the hills,” Dale said. “Hunt and Mitch. And two others.”

  “Has Cain and Harry reported it to Sheriff Sine yet?”

  “Sure. But he’s too scared to move, even if we did elect him in. Says there ain’t enough evidence to make out a warrant for their arrest.”

  “Not even with that gun Cain found with the initial L on it?”

  “Oh, so you know about that there too?”

  Butcherknife was about to reply, when he caught sight of someone behind Dale. He winked, quick, at Dale.

  But Dale, studying the amber fluid in the bottom of his glass, missed the warning. Dale said, “Shooting people in the back, trying to kill people in their beds, ganging up on lone men and hanging them, scaring the wits out of women and children—I call that low coward’s work.”

  Again Butcherknife tried to warn him with a wink.

  And once more Dale missed the signal. He was in a sod-pawing mood for fair. “Why, not even the worst of the Red Sashers has ever stooped to that kind of stuff. When they want a man out of the way, they give him fair chance. They come at him from the front side and give him a chance at his chips. In self-defense. While this Link Keeler that now calls hisself Hunt Lawton, that snake-in-the-grass coward, he brags about shootin’ people in the back.”

  “Dale—”

  “Don’t tell me. He shot Gramp Hammett in the back. He dry-gulched our dads, Gordon and Raymond Hammett. Oh, that Hunt is a sly one all right, making hisself a peace officer and then as the law getting his revenge legal, the cowardly murdering walleyed bustard. I tell ye, Butcherknife, he’s as yellow as mustard without the bite.” Dale’s gaunt head shot forward off his long neck so sudden that some of his black hair escaped from under his hat and fell across his eyes. “I begged him to draw on me once. Last fall right there across the street in Fat Homer’s store.”