Ralph Compton Double-Cross Ranch

by Matthew P. Mayo

  “The lady is correct, Mr. Farraday,” said Duggins. “It is time you left us to get on with our work. Time is of the essence, as a smart man once said.”

  “Time is what a man makes of it, Duggins. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Ty nodded to Sue Ellen, touched his hat brim with a finger, then tugged Stub around, not once granting Duggins or any of his men the expected courtesy of a glance or a nod. Ty guessed she would be able to hang on—she was scrappy and these men needed something. He had to devise a plan. He felt sure she would have found some way to tell him had she been in mortal danger. Maybe she didn’t even know about her husband’s death?

  How long had she been tending to the band of killers and thieves? How long had Winstead been dead? And how far had they gone in abusing her good graces? They had killed her husband, after all, and with a shot to the back, too. He didn’t think they would treat her with any amount of respect. But there were too many of them for him to take on just yet. Getting himself shot would not help Sue Ellen one bit.

  Chapter 2

  He took the more traveled ranch road back to his place, in part to avoid trailing back toward the direction he’d found Winstead’s body. It would not do to have Duggins suspect he’d actually seen the body or that he might accidentally see it on his way home. Bad enough he’d been somewhat near the body when he’d been caught glassing the ranch.

  After a while he noticed the same two riders who’d been sent to escort him down out of the hills fogged his back trail all the way back to the Rocking T. It set Ty’s teeth tight, but he could do little more than glance their way now and again. He figured they didn’t take any pains to hide themselves, so why should he? Besides, there was not much he could do about it for the time being. He had to get back home and feed the stock.

  Ty reached a long, low cluster of well-tended ranch buildings, walked Stub past a barn, a smokehouse, a chicken coop, and a small eating hall and kitchen before coming to a stop in front of a small, tidy log ranch house. It had been the first structure he and Uncle Hob had built when they settled the land.

  He sat atop Stub for a moment, listening for signs of the two men’s horses, but they were far off, having turned back at the entrance to the Rocking T. He needed a bit of time to think, had to reason out his next move. From inside the house he heard a rangy voice draw closer to the door, accompanied by a clunking sound.

  “Well, look what finally decided to drag itself on in here. After being gone all day!”

  Ty felt his usual twinge of relief and comfort at the sight of his old “uncle,” Selkirk “Hob” Jones, ex-lawman and general crank, leaning in the open doorway. He had a monstrous wooden spoon gripped in his left hand and an equally odd-looking wooden knob balancing the other, lower corner of him. He was called “Hob,” short for “Hobble,” because his right leg, from the knee down, was less of a leg and more of a barely carved length of ash stove wood, somewhat rounded on the smooth-worn end.

  It was unsettling to most folks who met the old curmudgeon for the first time, but he had never cared what others thought of him in all the years Ty had known him—which had been much of Ty’s life. His father had met his end because of Marshal Jones, so Selkirk had taken it upon himself to make sure young Ty and his mother were taken care of. Ty reckoned he’d not have the Rocking T had it not been for Jones’s steady, if not quiet, presence in his life.

  He also knew that the old goat had been sweet on Ty’s mother, though whether the two of them ever did anything about it remained a mystery to Ty. Fine with him; he figured that such things were a man and a woman’s own business.

  He climbed down off Stub and looped the reins loosely around the rail by the steps. The horse canted a leg, stood hipshot, and appeared to settle in for a wait. Jones’s reedy voice, which hadn’t stopped since Ty rode up, continued yammering at him as he mounted the steps, pulled off his hat, and ran a hand through his thatch of sweat-curled hair.

  “. . . to think I been reduced to working on a dirt farm instead of doing what I was put on this green earth to do—chase women and outlaws, in that order!”

  Ty nodded to Uncle Hob and walked into the kitchen, the familiar clump ka-clump ka-clump sound of the old man following him, the voice ceaseless in its assault. Ty almost smiled for the first time that day.

  “And to top it all off, I’m still stuck nursemaiding a . . . a tall galoot like you!”

  That failed to elicit any response from Ty, who poured himself a cup of the thick-as-axle-grease coffee the old man kept bubbling on the back of the stove, day and night, for as long as Ty could remember. In fact, he’d never seen him empty grounds out of it, just add another handful of them, along with water, whenever the mood suited him.

  Hob rattled his wooden spoon on the top of the hot stove. “You wanna know what I been up to whilst you been gallivanting all over God’s biggest section-and-a-half?”

  Ty glanced up at him, didn’t change his expression, looked down at a plate of cold biscuits on the table. “Nope. But I reckon you’re about to tell me.”

  “And don’t you think you’re going to wrap one of them claws you call a hand around one of them biscuits, neither. ’Cause I didn’t spend all morning hunkered over that blasted stove so you could come on in here without a by-your-leave and muckle onto anything you have a mind to. . . .”

  Ty watched the aproned, one-legged old lawdog sputter and churn in an erratic half circle in the midst of the low-roofed ranch house’s open kitchen. He threatened the very air of the place with that favorite blackened wooden spoon in much the same way an Apache would wave a war lance at a camp of whites intruding on his sacred lands.

  “You about done, old man?”

  His question had the effect he’d hoped for—he loved riling Hob—much as he’d seen a full henhouse react when a fox appeared in their midst.

  “Who in the blazes are you calling old? I may be longer in the tooth than you, but that’s only because I was born a ways back. It don’t mean I’m old! Why, I had a mind to, I could whup you up one side of this raw knob of dirt you call a ranch and down the other. You got me?”

  Ty waited for the dust to settle. Finally a red-faced Hob looked at him.

  “Yep,” said Ty as he snapped up a pair of biscuits, and bolted from the room. He just made it through the front door when he felt a slight breeze by the side of his head and the wooden spoon whanged into the log wall beside him. It was accompanied with a fresh flurry of howled words, some of which he’d never heard before. Ty smiled and strode from the porch. He’d put the horse up, give himself time to figure out what to do about Sue Ellen.

  He was halfway to the stable, Stub stepping easy behind him, before Ty remembered to look to the long, low rise to the east. He wasn’t surprised by what he saw. In the afternoon’s waning light, two riders were skylined. As if they had seen him, they quickly drifted back down behind the ridgeline and out of sight. But Ty had seen them, and he knew for certain they’d been watching him closely. And anytime anyone watched Ty Farraday was too much watching. He was a free man who didn’t like the notion of being fettered by anyone or anything. He could only imagine what Sue Ellen was feeling.

  He moved in his long-legged, easy gait to the stable, finally remembering he had two of Hob’s tasty biscuits in his work-hardened hand. He munched one, and when he got Stub stalled, he fed bits of the other biscuit on the flat of his palm to the bold Morgan.

  “If ol’ Hob saw me feeding you this biscuit, he’d pitch another of his fits. But you and I both know he feeds you plenty when I’m not around, right boy?”

  The next half hour was spent in the barn, feeding a few straggly, bawling young stock and tending the half a dozen horses in the corral, two of which he’d only begun to break. Then he found himself uncharacteristically climbing the corral and staring at the snubbing post. He sat on the top rail as the sun continued its slow crawl downward to the Pacific Ocean, the cold
bulk of the Sierra Nevada range at his back, forming the terrain of his ranch, hard-earned land on the sometimes-verdant slopes of the foothills.

  And he fell to thinking about Sue Ellen and everything that had brought him to this point. He knew this was not productive, knew he should reveal all to Hob, maybe send the old lawdog to ride for the law himself, and bring back a posse of men. But something told him to hold off. That there was time. Just what did he know?

  Alton Winstead had been shot in the back, that much was certain. But who’s to say the law wouldn’t think Ty did that to the man? After all, it was well known in Ripley Flats that Ty held no kind thoughts for Winstead. Not that most folks could blame him, considering the way Winstead usurped the land he’d had his mind and heart set on. But the wealthy newcomer had endeared himself to one and all in town by donating substantial sums to the church, to the school, helping various business owners by offering little loans, and by chumming up to the old town marshal.

  None of that mattered a whit to Ty. Buying his coveted land out from under him would have been one thing, but turning the head of Ty’s longtime girl, Sue Ellen, and then marrying her. . . . Well, that was the roughest blow of all. Folks didn’t blame Winstead wholly for that, for as was said, it takes two to make a couple.

  After that, when most men would have sunk into a bottle and run their personal and business affairs into the ground, there was Ty Farraday, along with grouchy old Uncle Hob, doggedly working, day after day, month on month, year following year, to build up his meager spread into something more than it could ever hope to be. No one could fault the man for his efforts, but he never seemed to get to that next plateau, not for lack of trying. They all knew it was largely because he needed more cattle, more horses, and he couldn’t get those unless he had more land.

  And all that rangeland and grassland, which should have been his—would have been his—until it was sold out from under Ty’s nose, and on the very week he was fixing to make the final installment of the down payment. And that day he’d set aside to ask Sue Ellen to be his wife. But the irony was that all that fine land that Winstead bought had since lain fallow and unused.

  Well-intentioned people had gone out of their way to tell Ty just what they thought of the situation, that he should just eat a big slice of humble pie and ask Winstead to allow him to use that land. But Ty merely stared them down, one after another, his eyes narrowing and his jaw muscles working reflexively.

  Even old Hob had long since given up on his seething anger toward Winstead and had come around to dropping hints that Ty should make the rich man a plain old business deal and lease that land, build up a fine herd, then buy him out. Ty had merely stared the old man down until Hob, normally a tough nut to crack, had turned away with a groan and tended to his stew. Neither man spoke for a week afterward.

  But all of that water under the bridge hardly mattered any-more. Less so now that Winstead was murdered. And that one fact did not bode well for Ty Farraday.

  Before he knew what was happening, a rifle shot sliced the air, whistling by his ear with the intensity of a thousand angry bees. Ty pitched himself forward off the rail, landing on his face in the dust of the corral. He held there, face down, hands planted flat in the dirt, boot toes dug in, paused in the near-dark for a few heartbeats, assessing the situation. Was it a warning shot? Or intended as a killing shot? Either way, he had to tell Hob right away about his afternoon now, for the old man’s life could be in as much danger as his, merely by association with Ty.

  The shot had come in from the northeast, just where he’d expect such a shot to come from. He rolled over to the darker, shaded edge of the corral, a good six feet away, and gained his feet there in the shadows. With the corral to his back, he pulled his Colt Navy, eased the hammer back to the deadly position, and scanned the far side of the yard.

  Since it was too early for fall roundup, the only ones here were he and Uncle Hob. The men he regularly hired, mostly young, roving ranch hands from nearby spreads who hired out to make a bit of winter spending money and to keep up their cowboying skills, wouldn’t be there for a few weeks yet.

  As Ty cat-footed, low and hunched, around the perimeter of the corral, he heard another set of steps, slow and cautious, off to his right by the house. But the cursed loafing shed was between him and the house. He held up in the dark interior and listened. Presently he heard it again, an odd, uneven sound. Maybe the footfalls of someone unfamiliar with the layout of the place. Probably be those two he’d dealt with earlier. Maybe one of them had crept down close in order to ambush while the other shot from a distance?

  Then he heard a hissing whisper from the closest corner of the house. “Ty! Hey, boy! What was that shot all about?”

  Ty exhaled slowly in relief. Of course, with that uneven sound, it was Uncle Hob and his wooden leg. But now he had to warn the old man to keep well back out of any lingering light. “Hob!” he whispered. “Hob, it’s me, Ty. I’m fine. Keep back, get back in the house and stay low. I’m coming!”

  He listened for sign of the old man’s retreat. Hob might be a curmudgeon of the first order, but he was also an old warhorse who knew by instinct, honed in the heat of a hundred close-call battles, when a situation called for silent action and no argument. He listened to the soft retreating scuffing sounds, satisfied that Hob had reached the relative safety of the house; then Ty scuttled like a man-beetle around the far side of the loafing shed and beelined to the house himself. He had a feeling that whoever had shot had intended it as a warning. Otherwise he would probably be dead instead of worrying about such things.

  Chapter 3

  Cuthbert Henry Atwood, a man as ordinary in appearance as his name was odd and unlikely, wiped the fingers of his blood-pasted left hand on the shirt of the man he’d just shot. His sigh was a long, lingering thing that trailed out of him like steam from a worn relief valve. Not for the first time that day, nor the last, did he think of how very welcome a day away from his job might be. He didn’t dare let that line of thinking unspool, for it might lead to bigger, bolder thoughts, such as how would a week or a month away from Dane Creek feel? How about an entire year? How about never returning?

  He’d been in this sinkhole of crime for nigh on to two decades and it never got easier. In fact, in addition to the various gold and more recent copper strikes, since the cattle drives began to make the settlement a regular stop, his headaches as its sole full-time lawdog had only increased, to the point where he had had to hire a deputy. That man, Lemuel Cleveland, had been a local, lured to the job by promise of steady money. Not good or particularly safely earned money, but the paltry sum could at least be counted on to put food in his wife’s belly.

  Unfortunately, not but a few months into the position, Lemuel had become a widower when his wife had been found slit open like a market fish in an alleyway behind the Horizon Saloon one too-bright morning. Rumor had it she’d been selling off what her husband had always gotten for free, telling him her extra money came from taking in washing and sewing. What he didn’t know, she figured, wouldn’t hurt him. What she didn’t know was that it might not have killed him, but it sure did crush him. That had been the previous year.

  Since then, Marshal Atwood felt he’d been doing a pretty good job at building the man back up again, and Lem’s role as deputy had begun to earn him threads of self-confidence. Atwood’s own family—his young wife, a pretty Mexican girl, Maria, nearly twenty years his junior, as well as their young son, Henry Jr., nearly six years old—had been helpful, too, in bringing life back to the deputy. They often had him over for a warm meal of a night.

  But then Clewt Duggins and his boys had ridden in hard, ransacked the town on their way to somewhere else—north, he figured. And in their haste to have fun and then leave Dane Creek behind, they looted, pillaged, burned, and shot their way out of town.

  Unfortunately for Marshal Atwood, of the things they shot, in addition to a number of buildi
ngs, one piano, a series of nearly full spittoons, and two cur dogs, were a number of people, among them his sole sad deputy, Lem Cleveland. The rangy green lawman had been caught merely doing his job, trying to prevent the bloodthirsty south-of-the-border gang of drunken drifters from shooting, intentionally or otherwise, citizens of the hard-bitten little mining and cattle town. In the process, Cleveland had instead gotten shot himself. Gut shot, but not before one of the weasels shot him in the back, close-up by the looks of it, with a small-caliber piece, maybe a pepperbox.

  Poor Lem had taken a good many hours to die. The only saving grace to the drawn-out process had been that something in Henry Atwood’s mind finally became decided that he’d reached the end of his rope, so to speak. If he wanted to live to see his own boy become a man, he’d better get his family out of harm’s way, and that included quitting the lawdog line.

  “You don’t mind me saying so, looks to me like you could use a hand in this town, Marshal.”

  Atwood looked up from the face of the latest man he’d shot to see a bearded gent looking down at him, blocking out the sun. The marshal squinted up at the man’s face, at the wide-brimmed hat. “Do I know you?”

  “Not yet, but I have a feeling we’ll become fast friends.”

  “Oh? How’s that?” Atwood’s extra sense, that thing that warned him by the tightening of his scalp when he might be in danger, had now begun to tingle.

  The man laughed and extended a hand. “I’m US District Court Judge Sam Mulholland.”

  Marshal Atwood continued to eye him, so the man kept speaking. “Got my papers in my saddlebag.” It wasn’t a question, but an offer. Atwood softened and shook the still-proffered hand.