That last surprised Fletcher. Where did the words come from? He had no intention of staying here—or did he?
“Hell, Prescott,” he pressed on, “you don’t even run cows up here.”
The big rancher’s face was set and hard, his voice level and expressionless.
“If you can show me, right now, a legal deed for the land you claim, I’ll pay you a dollar an acre. That’s one hundred and sixty dollars, more money than you’ve ever seen in one place in your life. I can’t say it any fairer than that. Hell, a saddle tramp like you could stay drunk for months on that kind of money.”
“No sale, Prescott,” Fletcher snapped. “Now get the hell off my property.”
“So be it,” Prescott said, unmoved. “You heard what I said, and I won’t repeat myself. If I find you here come sunup tomorrow, I’ll hang you.”
The young man with the yellow eyes urged his horse forward. Without taking his gaze from Fletcher, he said, “Hell, Mr. Prescott, let me have him. It will save you the time and trouble of stringing him up later.”
Prescott smiled. It looked like the grimace of a hungry wolf.
“Think you can shade him, Hig?”
Higgy Conroy grinned, showing small, badly spaced teeth. “That tramp ain’t never seen the day when I couldn’t shade him.”
Fletcher stood relaxed and ready. He knew the man called Hig would be fast. The question was, how fast? At least the answer to that might be revealed very soon.
“This here is gonna be on the square.”
Jeb Coons stepped from behind the corner of the cabin, the Henry in his hands. “I want Buck Fletcher to have a fair shake.”
A flicker of doubt crossed Hig’s eyes. “I didn’t know you was Buck Fletcher.”
Fletcher’s smile was thin. “Well, you know now.”
“Still want to take him, Hig?” Prescott asked dryly.
One of the cowhands, a tall, thin man with shifty eyes, slowly reached inside his leather coat. Fletcher smiled and said conversationally, “Mister, if you were to come up with a gun out of there, I would take it real hard.”
The man jerked his hand away like he’d been stung. “I was just reaching for a chaw.”
“Stunt your growth,” Fletcher said. “Better for your health you do without.”
Behind him, Fletcher heard Jeb’s thin cackle. Hig flushed with anger.
“I can still take him, Mr. Prescott,” he said. “You just say the word.”
Prescott shook his head. “Maybe you can shade him, Hig. Maybe you can’t. But right now isn’t the time to find out.”
“That’s true, Prescott,” Fletcher said grimly. “Because no matter how it goes between Hig and me, I’ll make sure you’re the first to die. Then it won’t matter to you one way or the other.”
If Prescott was intimidated, he didn’t show it. He turned his hard, flat eyes on Fletcher. “You can come work for me. I pay top wages.”
“For gun hands?” Fletcher asked. He nodded toward Hig. “Like that.”
“I protect what’s mine,” Prescott said angrily, “any way I can. I’ve already lost a couple of men, bushwhacked, shot out of the saddle.” He pointed a thick finger at Fletcher. “If just one more of my hands is murdered, there will be an all-out war between the PP Connected and Judith Tyrone’s Lazy R. I plan to win that war.”
Fletcher shook his head. “Then you’ll do it without my help, Prescott. I reckon you’re trying to run rough-shod over Judith Tyrone and force her out of the Territory, maybe because she’s young and a woman and an easy mark. But my gun isn’t for sale to you or anyone else. And my place isn’t either.”
Prescott nodded. “Then so be it. Clear off my land by tomorrow morning or hang. The choice is yours.”
The cabin door swung open, and Savannah stepped outside. Her hair hung over her shoulders, and she looked fresh and lovely this morning.
Prescott scowled. “That your woman, Fletcher?”
Fletcher studied the big man’s face, trying to see if there was the slightest hint of recognition in his eyes. There was none. Obviously, if Prescott didn’t know who Savannah was, he wasn’t the one who had ordered her murder.
“She’s a friend,” Fletcher said, deciding to play his cards close to his chest. “She’s visiting for a spell.” Then, to again test Prescott’s reaction, he added, spacing out the words, “Somebody tried to kill her a few days back. He didn’t succeed, but his bullet grazed her head, and she’s lost her memory.”
Prescott didn’t flinch, and Fletcher noticed no shadow of guilt in his eyes. The big man’s hard glare slid to Savannah. “Same thing applies to you as the rest of them. Woman or no, lost memory or no, if I find you here tomorrow, I’ll hang you alongside the rest.”
Without another word, Prescott swung his horse around and galloped away, his hands trailing after him like shadows.
But Higgy Conroy still sat his horse, glaring at Fletcher. There was a craziness in his rattlesnake eyes, and they were fevered with the urge to kill.
“You mind what Mr. Prescott told you. On your way out of the Territory, you can tell your boss Judith Tyrone that you and the rest of her hired guns don’t scare me,” he said. “Some day, Fletcher, you and me will meet again, and next time you won’t have an old man and a woman’s skirts to hide behind.”
“Two things, boy,” Fletcher said evenly. “The first is that I don’t work for Judith Tyrone. The second is, don’t make me draw. I’m way better than you are, and I’ll kill you.”
Hig spat. “You’re a damned liar, Fletcher. On both counts.”
Then he was gone, his paint pony a fast-receding splash of mottled black against the white of the snow.
“You made yourself a powerful-bad enemy in that boy,” Jeb said, stepping beside Fletcher and shaking his head as he watched Hig Conroy leave. “He killed a man in Deadwood just last week and another in Cheyenne a month afore that.”
Fletcher nodded. “He’s poison-mean, and now he’ll be on the prod.”
“He will that,” Jeb agreed. “If’n I was you, Buck, I’d sure start watching my back.”
Chapter 5
Prescott’s threatened attack did not come the next day or the day after. Both days, trusting Jeb and his rifle to guard the place while he was gone, Fletcher saddled the stud and rode in a wide arc around the cabin as far as Deadman Gulch to the east and Tetro Rock to the west. He saw no sign of Pike Prescott or his riders.
This was a long way from the PP Connected home range, and it seemed that Prescott was planning to lay claim to a lot of territory, much of it to the south and east, prime winter grazing where he could sustain his herds through the winter. The Lazy R would be bottled up with nowhere to graze its herd, and Judith Tyrone might be glad to sell after a winter of heavy losses, especially when the blue northers swept in from Canada, freezing the range. As a boy, Fletcher had seen twenty inches of snow fall on this country in as many hours and the temperature hit forty below.
He didn’t know Judith Tyrone, but if Prescott did as he planned, that young lady was in a heap of trouble.
On the second day, as he returned to the cabin on the Two-Bit, Fletcher shot a whitetail buck and packed it home, meat enough to last them for a week at least. Savannah’s wound had all but healed, and she busied herself with cleaning the cabin and cooking meals. Meantime, Fletcher and Jeb repaired the holes in the roof and did what they could to weatherproof the logs against the coming winter, filling in the chinks with a mixture of straw and mud from the creek banks.
Fletcher fixed up the barn roof, supporting it with poles from the aspen grove, and then began to add to the supply of kindling and logs for the stove.
Despite what he’d told Prescott, he still had no real plan to stay on here at the Two-Bit.
Yet at the back of his mind was always the thought that here might be a good spot to raise horses. If he could find some mares, he could cross them with his American stud. Big, powerful mounts that could shoulder through snowdrifts were always in deman
d on the northern ranges, unlike in dry, dusty Texas, where cow ponies were small, some of them barely making eight hundred pounds.
A man could make enough money to live by breeding horses, especially if he had a strong wife by his side. Maybe a woman like Savannah.
But Fletcher recognized all that as a pipe dream, and when it popped unbidden into his mind, he shook his head angrily and cursed himself for a fool.
Three more days passed without incident. Once a huge grizzly, grumpy and irritable as hibernation approached, growled around the cabin for the best part of a morning. The day after that, a small herd of whitetailed deer stepped warily to the creek for a drink.
But of Pike Prescott and his riders, there was no sign.
Savannah was now well enough to ride. At supper on the evening of the fifth day, she suggested that she borrow Jeb’s horse the next morning and ride into town.
“Town?” Fletcher asked. “You mean Buffalo City?”
“I guess,” she replied. “I have vague memories of a town... and a hotel. I just... I just can’t recall being there.”
“The only town around is Buffalo City,” Jeb said. “It’s located in a narrow valley midway between Boomer Gulch and Bear Butte. It ain’t much as towns go, but there are them who live there who say they expect it to go far and make its mark one day.”
“Maybe there’s somebody there who knows me,” Savannah suggested. Then, her eyes slanting to Fletcher, she added shyly, “Who knows, I might even have a husband.”
If Fletcher was upset by this observation, he didn’t let it show. “Maybe we can learn something at the Exchange Hotel,” he said. “You must have been staying somewhere around here, and I guess Buffalo City is as good a place as any to start.”
“We?”
“Yes, we. I’m coming with you.”
“Buck, you don’t have to. Really, you don’t.”
“I know I don’t. But I feel responsible for you. I’m the one who found you in the snow, remember?”
Savannah lightly rested her fingers on the back of Fletcher’s hand. “I was just teasing you. Really, I’m glad you’re coming with me, Buck,” she said. “You make me feel... safe.”
To his annoyance, Fletcher felt his face color. “Let’s turn in,” he said abruptly, rising from the table. “We’ll make an early start in the morning.”
Behind his back, he didn’t see Jeb’s knowing wink at Savannah or her shy answering smile.
Despite its pretensions, Buffalo City was a typical small cow town huddled within a narrow, muddy gulch. There were around two dozen false-fronted buildings and sod cabins on either side of a main street wide enough for two wagons to pass, and the boardwalks boasted oil lamps placed at intervals along their length.
As Fletcher and Savannah rode in, they passed a bank, three saloons, a general store, a restaurant, the Exchange Hotel and the sheriff’s office.
At the far end of town stood six white-painted gingerbread houses. Beyond those, close to where the gulch ended in a rugged V of soft sandstone rock, were the livery stable and corrals.
Fletcher noted that the town had grown some since he was a boy. Jeb had told him there was even talk of building a city hall and a church.
But Buffalo City was a town on the edge.
Since the Custer massacre on the Rosebud just three months before, the Indian threat had become very real. Now men were dying out on the range, and there was open talk of a range war.
Fletcher saw strain in the faces of the passersby, and even the saloons seemed strangely quiet. It was like Buffalo City was holding its breath—waiting for what was to happen next.
He and Savannah left their horses at the livery stable and walked along the muddy, crowded boardwalk to the hotel.
The desk clerk recognized Savannah immediately.
“Why, Miss Jones,” the man exclaimed, “I do declare, we were getting quite worried about you. The mayor was thinking of rounding up a search party.”
“You... you know me?” Savannah asked.
The desk clerk, a small man wearing wire glasses, his slicked-down black hair parted in the middle, looked puzzled. “Well, of course I do. You stayed here for three days. Indeed, your things are still in your room. Number 22, straight up the stairs and down the hall to your left.”
Savannah touched a hand to her head and swayed slightly. “I... I don’t remember anything. I... I...”
Fletcher put his strong arm around the girl’s waist and supported her. “The lady isn’t feeling too well,” he told the clerk.
“Oh that’s too bad, really it is. There is a doctor in town, you know, and quite a good one.”
Fletcher nodded. “Maybe later.” He turned his cold eyes on the clerk, and the man felt an involuntary shiver run down his spine. “Did Savannah—I mean, did Miss Jones tell you anything else?”
The clerk frowned in concentration. Then his face cleared, and he smiled. “Why, yes; yes, she did. Soon after she arrived on the stage from Rapid City, she told me she was from Back East and might be interested in investing in a ranch.
“ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘this is a real bad time, what with the terrible murders happening out on the range and all.’ But that didn’t faze her in the least, and she was quite insistent that she wanted to buy ranchland. Sometimes women take strange notions, you know. Oh dear me, yes. Now, you take my wife for example—”
“Did Miss Jones tell you anything else?” Fletcher asked again, interrupting.
The clerk shook his head. “No, not really. About a week ago, she rented a horse from the livery stable and rode out of town. As I said, we were all getting quite concerned about her.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Did you speak to old man Stamphill down to the livery stable? He’s a terrible gossip, you know.”
“He wasn’t there,” Fletcher said. He nodded toward the keys hanging on a board nailed to the wall. “Can we have the key to Miss Jones’ room?”
“Ah, well, there we have a wee problem,” the clerk said, spreading his hands wide. “It is hotel policy that gentlemen callers are not allowed in rooms occupied by single ladies.”
Fletcher’s suddenly icy eyes fastened on the clerk, and the man backed up a step and added hastily, “But of course, there are exceptions to every rule.”
Savannah and Fletcher went up to her room. A search of the place revealed only some clothes hanging in the wardrobe, a few personal items like face powder and a hairbrush, and a full box of .40 caliber shells.
“I don’t know who you really are, Savannah,” Fletcher said dryly, hefting the box in his hand. “But you were surely loaded for bear.”
The only physician in town was a man named Dr. Silas Hawthorne, and his office was Savannah and Fletcher’s next stop.
He looked to be pushing seventy, but Hawthorne seemed to know his business.
“Amnesia is quite common after any kind of head injury,” he told Savannah, after examining her wound. “It doesn’t require treatment, though I will give you a mild sedative to help you sleep.” The old man smiled. “Your memory should start to return within a few weeks, young lady.”
Savannah and Fletcher walked back to the hotel. Soon the gunfighter was standing in the middle of her room again, scowling as he looked around.
“We haven’t missed anything, have we?” he asked.
Savannah shook her head at him. “Not a thing. It looks like I didn’t have much to begin with.”
“I wonder...” Fletcher began.
He grabbed a chair and stepped onto it, looking at the top of the wardrobe.
“Anything?” Savannah asked.
“Nothing.”
Fletcher stepped down, but the chair skidded out from under him and hit hard against the thin wall between Savannah’s room and the one adjoining.
A few moments later, someone pounded at the door angrily and yelled, “What in tarnation is going on in there? Can’t you let a man sleep?”
“I know that voice.” Buck smiled. He opened the door and said t
o the small, thin man who stood there holding a long-barreled Colt in his right hand, “How are you doing, Doc?”
“Buck Fletcher,” Doc Holliday said, amazement pitching his voice an octave higher. “I might have known it was you making all that racket. What the hell are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question, Doc.”
Holliday stepped into the room, irritation plain on his face. “Hell, Buck, I was on my way to Deadwood when we had us an Indian scare. I reckon the stage driver saw a tom turkey in the brush and took it for a whole tribe of Sioux.” Doc shrugged his thin shoulders. “I remonstrated with the man, of course, and even entertained the idea of shooting him right off the box, but I thought better of it. The way things are with me and the law at the moment, I really can’t afford to be involved in another shooting scrape.”
“Some men need killing, Doc.” Fletcher gave another of his rare smiles. “I don’t recall you ever shooting a man who didn’t deserve it.”
Holliday smiled. “Thank you, Buck. You were always very understanding in matters like that.” He sighed, shaking his head. “Anyway, the upshot is that we detoured to this godforsaken burg, and the stage won’t be leaving until tomorrow morning. That tom turkey really scared these rubes to death.”
Holliday, his cadaverous face flushed around the cheekbones by the effects of his morning quart of whiskey, turned to Savannah and said, “Buck, aren’t you going to introduce me to this lovely young lady? Your wife, perhaps?”
Fletcher smiled. “Not my wife, just an orphan from the storm I adopted.”
He made the introductions. Holliday stuck his Colt in the waistband of his pants, bowed over Savannah’s hand and declared himself to be “Positively enchanted.”
“Where is Kate, Doc?” Fletcher asked after Holliday had straightened up.
“Ah, the fair Kate is still in that malodorous dung heap the Texans call Fort Griffin, a doss-house for herders and hide hunters perched on the ragged edge of nowhere. There she diligently plies her profession.” He turned to Savannah. “You understand, of course, that with a lady present, delicacy prevents me from saying exactly what that profession is.”
Ralph Compton Showdown At Two-Bit Creek Page 5