“Just remember,” Bo said. “You’re a famous fighting marshal. You don’t have any reason to be scared of these hombres. They ought to be scared of you.”
Reilly nodded and looked a little more resolute. As long as he had a role to play, he was more confident.
The stocky, gray-bearded man who seemed to be leading the charge hauled back on his reins with one hand and lifted the other in a signal for his companions to stop. As the horses slowed, dust swirled around them for a moment. As it cleared away, Bo could see that the men were all hopping mad.
“What the hell do you think you’re doin’?” the gray-bearded man shouted, his voice fairly shaking with rage. “You’re lettin’ that damned rustler get away!”
Bo glanced over his shoulder. The buckskin-clad rider had slowed. Well out of handgun range now, he brought his mount to a stop before the poor, exhausted horse collapsed.
“He doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere right now,” Bo said. “How do you know he’s a rustler? Did you catch him with a running iron, or driving off some of your stock?”
“He was skulkin’ around on Rocking B range, lookin’ over our herd!” the leader of the group said. “Mr. Bascomb’s been losin’ stock right and left, and anybody who ain’t got no business here is suspect! For that matter, who the hell are you?”
Bo looked at Reilly, who was hanging back a little. Reilly urged his horse forward, so that the badge pinned to his coat was more visible.
“This is John Henry Braddock, the new marshal of Whiskey Flats,” Bo announced. “We’re his deputies.”
That took the men by surprise. They were all rugged-looking hombres in range clothes, but even though they had been blazing away at the fleeing rider, it was clear to Bo’s experienced eye that they were cowhands, not hired gunmen. Faced with confronting a representative of the law, they were suddenly a little nervous.
“Marshal?” blustered the gray-bearded man. “I heard somethin’ about a new marshal comin’ to town.”
“Whiskey Flats is close by then?”
The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “About five miles on down this trail.” He glared past them. “What about that thievin’ son of a bitch? I’ll bet he works for that damned North!”
“Well, it’s pretty obvious that he doesn’t have any cows in his pockets,” Bo said dryly, “so I don’t think he’s done any rustling today. We’ll question him and find out what he’s doing on Rocking B range. I reckon this Mr. Bascomb you mentioned is the owner?”
“That’s right. Chet Bascomb. As fine a man as you’ll find in these parts…not like that no-good polecat Steve North.”
Bo let that pass. Not being familiar with the situation or the folks involved, he wasn’t going to waste time getting involved in an argument about the relative merits of either Chet Bascomb or Steve North, who was evidently a rival cattleman.
Instead, he said, “You hombres can go on back about your business. We’ll take care of this matter from here.”
The gray-bearded man frowned. “Mr. Bascomb ain’t gonna like it. Around here we stomp our own snakes. We don’t depend on no lawdogs to do it.”
“Things are different now,” Bo said, his voice and his gaze firm. “You can start spreading the word, friend. Law and order have come to these parts.”
Graybeard grumbled some more, but then he turned his horse and profanely told the men with him to get back to work. They rode off, casting a few hostile glares back over their shoulders as they did so.
“I thought for sure they were going to start shooting again,” Reilly said.
Bo shook his head. “Not cowboys like that. They may be pretty rough around the edges, but they’re generally law-abiding. They respected that badge you’re wearing, Jake.”
“People really do that?” Reilly sounded like he couldn’t quite grasp that concept.
“Honest ones do,” Scratch said. “I don’t reckon you’d know.”
Reilly grinned as they turned their horses toward the buckskin-clad rider. “Honesty’s like beauty, boys,” he said. “It’s only skin-deep. Put enough temptation in anybody’s way, and they’ll forget all about being honest fast enough.”
Bo didn’t agree with that, and he hoped that in time Reilly would come to realize that it wasn’t true, too. For now, though, he wanted to find out more about what was going on around Whiskey Flats, and the “rustler” seemed as good a place as any to start.
As they rode toward the man, Scratch said, “From the sound o’ what that varmint with the beard was sayin’, there’s a range war brewin’ in these parts, too, Bo, to go along with the other trouble the mayor o’ Whiskey Flats told Braddock about in that letter.”
Bo nodded. “Yeah, I’d say you’re right. Get a couple of fellas who fancy themselves cattle barons locking horns and you can have a real problem on your hands.”
“But not me, right?” Reilly said. “I mean, I’m the town marshal. I don’t have anything to do with what happens outside of the settlement.”
“According to the letter of the law, you’re probably right. But a good lawman will poke his nose into anything that has an effect on what goes on in his town, and if a range war breaks out this close to Whiskey Flats, it’s bound to spill over into the settlement, too.”
Reilly grimaced. “I think you’re taking this whole marshal business too seriously. I’m not really John Henry Braddock.”
“But you’ve got to act like him for a while,” Bo said. “Otherwise, people won’t believe what we want them to believe. From what I’ve heard about Braddock, he wouldn’t allow a shooting war to break out so close to any town where he was the marshal.”
Reilly sighed and shook his head. “All right, all right. We’ll get to the bottom of the rustling. Or try anyway.”
Bo nodded and said, “I think that would be best.”
They had almost reached the rider who had been fleeing from the Rocking B hands. His shoulders slumped and his head hung low, just like his horse’s. Both of them were clearly exhausted.
Even so, Reilly and the Texans were taken slightly by surprise when the buckskin-clad figure suddenly swayed in the saddle for a moment and then pitched loosely to the ground to lie there motionless.
“Good Lord!” Scratch exclaimed. “Maybe he was hit after all!”
Bo was already moving, swinging down from the saddle and hurrying forward. He knelt at the side of the senseless figure, grasped his shoulders, and rolled him onto his back. As Bo lifted the man’s head, the battered old hat fell off.
Long, red, luxuriously thick hair spilled out. Bo found himself staring down into the unconscious, unmistakably female face of a young woman…. and an undeniably beautiful one at that.
CHAPTER 8
“Son of a gun!” Reilly exclaimed. “That’s a girl!”
“And a mighty pretty one, too,” Scratch said. “Is she hurt, Bo?”
“I don’t see any blood on her clothes,” Bo replied. “Don’t think she stopped a slug, but I can’t be sure yet…”
Reilly had dismounted by now. He hurried over, knelt on the redhead’s other side, and said, “Let me see if her heart’s beating,” as he slipped a hand inside the buckskin shirt.
Bo started to tell him that it wasn’t proper for him to be feeling around in that area on a woman he wasn’t married to, but before he could say anything to Reilly, the redhead’s eyes snapped open. She gasped, and one small but evidently hard fist shot up and smacked cleanly into Reilly’s jaw. Reilly yelped in surprise and pain and went over backward.
Scratch guffawed. “That’s showin’ him, little missy!” he called.
The young woman jerked free from Bo, who wasn’t really trying to hold her. She rolled over, came up agilely on one knee, and emptied the holster on her hip in a smooth, swift draw. The nickel-plated .38 revolver in her hand swung back and forth as she covered Bo, Scratch, and Reilly at the same time.
“What happened?” she demanded. “Who are you men?”
“It appears that
you fainted, ma’am,” Bo told her. “As for us, that fella you punched is Marshal John Henry Braddock, and we’re his deputies, Bo Creel and Scratch Morton.”
“Marshal?” she said as she glared at Reilly. “What’s a marshal doing pawing me like that?”
Reilly sat on the ground a few feet away. He glared back at her as he lifted a hand, grasped his jaw, and moved it back and forth to see if it still worked right. Then he said, “I was trying to make sure you weren’t hurt. Excuse me for wanting to help you!”
“It felt to me like you were helping yourself,” she snapped. “You can see that I’m all right. And I don’t faint!” she added vehemently.
“Suit yourself, ma’am,” Bo told her. “When you toppled off that horse, we were worried that you’d been hit by one of those slugs flying around you.”
She turned her head to gaze back along the trail. “What happened to Bill Cavalier and the rest of those Rocking B hands?”
“They weren’t happy about it, but they decided to leave it to the marshal to question you about some suspicious behavior.”
The redhead snorted. “Suspicious behavior, my hind foot! That bunch is so trigger-happy they were ready to shoot at anybody they ran into, even somebody like me they should have recognized. Idiots must’ve seen me a dozen times or more in town!”
“I reckon they just didn’t get a good look at you,” Bo said.
“No, they started blazing away as soon as they came in sight, without even waiting to find out who I was. And then they were too blinded by their own powder smoke to recognize me, I reckon.”
“I take it you’re saying that you’re not a rustler?”
“Do I look like a rustler to you?” the redhead demanded, unknowingly echoing what Reilly had said the night before about looking like a lawman.
“Well, ma’am,” Bo said mildly, “I reckon rustlers can come in all sizes and, uh, shapes.” He continued trying to be a gentleman and averted his eyes from the enticingly rounded breasts that poked out the front of the buckskin shirt.
“I’m not a rustler,” she said. She got to her feet, and while she didn’t pouch the iron she held, she lowered it to her side so that it wasn’t pointing at the Texans and Reilly anymore. “As a matter of fact, I was taking a look around to see if I could find anything that would put me on the trail of whoever’s been stealing Rocking B stock. Chet Bascomb blames Steven North, of course, but I don’t believe North is behind the widelooping.”
“North being the other big rancher around here,” Bo guessed.
The young woman nodded. “That’s right.”
“And North and Bascomb don’t get along.”
She shook her head. “Never have. Probably never will.”
She paused. “You ask questions like a lawman, all right.” She looked at Reilly, who had gotten to his feet and taken off his hat. He slapped it against his clothes to get some of the dust off of them. “You didn’t say anything in your letters about bringing any deputies with you, Marshal.”
“Well, a, uh, lawman’s got to have good help,” Reilly said. “Somebody he can trust to watch his back whenever there’s trouble.” He frowned. “How do you know about the letters?”
“I keep up pretty good with what goes on in the settlement,” she said with a defiant thrust of her chin. “My grandfather founded it nearly forty years ago. My name’s Rawhide Abbott.”
“Rawhide? What sort of name is that for a girl?”
“It’s mine, all right?” she snapped. The gun in her hand started to come up. “You got a problem with it?”
Reilly held up both hands, palms out in surrender. “No, no, no problems at all, Miss Abbott.”
She gave an unladylike snort. “I didn’t think so.” Finally, she holstered the gun, picked up her hat, and tucked her hair under it, snugging the hat in place with the chin strap. “Let me get my horse, and I’ll ride on into town with you fellas.”
“I can get him for you—” Reilly began.
“I’ve got him! No offense, Marshal, but I don’t need no fancy-pants tin star to fetch a horse for me.”
Reilly shrugged and stood back while she got her own horse. Then he and Bo mounted up as well, and along with Scratch, they started down the trail toward Whiskey Flats.
“You said your grandfather founded the town, Miss Abbott,” Bo said. “Can you tell us about it?”
“Well, first of all, you can forget that stuffy Miss Abbott business,” she said. “I’m Rawhide, and don’t you forget it.”
Reilly said, “I don’t think you’d let us do that.”
She glared at him for a second, but otherwise didn’t dignify his comment with a response. To Bo and Scratch, she said, “Grandpap was a trader. He brought wagon trains of supplies up and down the Santa Fe Trail, back in the days when all this part of the country still belonged to Mexico. You two look old enough to remember that time.”
Scratch grinned. “We sure are, ma’am. We’re Texans, born and bred, and fought in the war to free our land from General Santy Anny.”
Rawhide went on. “One time when Grandpap was coming through these parts, he found himself a pretty spot with good water and decided that he wanted to stay, instead of traipsin’ up and down that long, hard trail all the time. He started a trading post, and a little settlement grew up around it. After the Mexican War in ’48, when this became American territory, the settlement grew even faster.”
She told the story as if she had heard it many times. Bo supposed that she had, since it was part of her family history.
“How’d the place get a name like Whiskey Flats?” Reilly asked.
“Well, it had always been called Abbottville, after my grandpap and my pa, who took over the trading post and turned it into a general store and built a lot of the other businesses in town. But when the community leaders got together and petitioned the government for a post office by that name, they were turned down. Seems that there’s already a town called Abbottville in New Mexico Territory, somewhere down along the border. Nobody up here knew that. Some of the rowdy element in town had always called it Whiskey Flats, because it has the only saloons in these parts. Somebody—and nobody was ever willing to take the blame—sent the name to the folks in Washington as a joke, and they accepted it. The post office was officially named Whiskey Flats, and so was the town. My pa raised hell with the government, but it didn’t do any good.”
“It never does,” Scratch commented dryly.
“So we were stuck with the name,” Rawhide went on. “It always bothered Pa, right up until the day he passed away a couple of years ago.”
“What about your grandfather?” Bo asked.
The young woman waved a hand. “Oh, it never bothered Grandpap. He’d always been sort of a hellraiser, even after he settled down and started the settlement. He thought it was funny. To tell you the truth, Mr. Creel, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if he was the one who sent the Whiskey Flats name to Washington. Having a town named after him would’ve been a mite too stuffy for him anyway.”
“That explains the town’s name,” Reilly said. “How’d you come to be called Rawhide?”
Her temper flared again. “What the hell business is it of yours?”
“None at all, I guess. I’m just curious. You’re the first girl I’ve ever met who wore buckskins and packed a shooting iron, too.”
“Then maybe you been hangin’ around with the wrong sort of girls,” she shot back at him. She sneered as she looked up him and down. “I’ll bet your taste in women runs more toward painted-up saloon floozies in spangled dresses.”
That was pretty perceptive of her, Bo thought. She had Reilly’s personality pegged, even though she seemed to have accepted his pose as Marshal John Henry Braddock.
“You’re just as touchy as all get-out, aren’t you?” Reilly said. “A fella can’t even talk to you without getting his head bitten off.”
“I don’t ever bite off more than I can chew. Best you remember that, Marshal.”
That
seemed to settle the question, but when they had ridden on for a while longer, she said, “My grandpap tagged the Rawhide handle on me. He did most of the raising where I was concerned. My ma died when I was a baby, and my pa was always too busy with the store and all his other responsibilities around town to spend much time with me. I reckon Grandpap was more suited for grandsons than granddaughters, because he taught me how to ride and hunt and fish and whittle and cuss. Pa didn’t know what to do with a little hellion like I turned out to be, so after a while he just gave up, I reckon. He knew I wasn’t ever gonna be no lady.”
Scratch said, “It looked like you can handle that Colt pretty good. Your grandpa must’ve been a fair hand with a gun.” He frowned. “Wait a minute. Abbott…your grandpa wasn’t Hawk Abbott, was he?”
Rawhide nodded. “That’s right. Did you know him?”
Scratch shook his head and said, “No, but we heard tell of him, didn’t we, Bo?”
“Hawk Abbott was one of the old-time mountain men,” Bo said with a nod. “Trapped all over the Rockies with that fella called Preacher and his friends. I remember hearing rumors that he retired from trapping and went to hauling freight. I reckon they were true.”
“Hawk Abbott was one tough hombre,” Scratch said. He grinned. “I can see now where you get your, uh, salty nature, ma’am. No offense.”
Rawhide returned the grin. “None taken. Bein’ compared to Grandpap is a compliment as far as I’m concerned.”
“Has he passed on, too?” Bo asked.
“Yeah, a couple of years before my pa died. A fever got him.” Rawhide squared her shoulders and lifted her chin. “I’m the last of the Abbotts, at least in these parts.”
“What about the general store and the other businesses your father was involved in?”
“The store’s still operating. Pa left half of it to me and half to the fella who’d been helpin’ him to run it for years. He keeps it going and gives me my share of the profits. Same with the newspaper Pa started. The editor he hired runs it and owns half of it now. Pa had already sold all his interests in other businesses before he passed away. He hung on to the store and paper so I’d be taken care of when he was gone.” Rawhide smiled sadly and shook her head. “Pa didn’t know what to make of me, but he loved me, I reckon.”
Sidewinders#2 Massacre At Whiskey Flats Page 6