Ralph Compton Double-Cross Ranch

by Matthew P. Mayo

  And that didn’t take long in coming. Clewt Duggins swatted at his face, now bleeding from a deep slash and several smaller cuts just under the eye and along his temple, all welling red blood down the length of his pocked cheek. The hot coffee had an equally raw effect, leaving puffy splotches on his face and neck.

  He lunged for her, his stiff leg barely slowing his efforts. But Sue Ellen was already on the move. She pivoted from her crouch and ran, barefooted, into the dining room, her one thought to get something substantial between herself and the madman, now looking almost comic as he stiff-legged toward her.

  “You cur!” he shrieked, his now-homely face a mask of blood, reddened welting skin, and wet gray-black hair. He didn’t slow as he approached the long dining table that just the night before he had dined at and on which still sat the leftovers. Fat congealed on the plate where the rest of the chicken and potatoes sat.

  The room was darker than the sitting room, the curtains having been drawn.

  Duggins swung left and right with abandon, thrashing his arms and sending the fancy, press-back chairs clattering, scudding across the floor and knocking into other pieces of furniture, pieces Alton would have been sickened to see treated in such a rough way.

  A pretty milk-glass oil lamp with green-and-rose-colored flowers painted on its globe tottered, then toppled to the floor. Shards of glass sprayed and skittered, and the stink of lamp oil filled the stagnant air in the room.

  “What did you expect?” screamed Sue Ellen. “That I’d just forgive you for murdering my husband? Isn’t that what you and those other foul animals have done?” Sue Ellen trembled from the opposite side of the table, spitting the words at him. She could have ranted all day, but he was on the move. He did not circle the table as she thought he might, but bent low and began shoving the heavy table her way. He intended to trap her in the corner!

  She groaned and pushed back against the table. And the vicious, howling man actually began laughing at her efforts. It only made her angrier. And in the midst of this struggle, from outside, Sue Ellen heard popping noises from far off, then shouts from men in the yard, close by the house, as if they had been just outside, listening to the struggles taking place inside.

  Even Duggins turned his head toward the front of the house, sneering at the intrusion, his white teeth set tight together beneath his sopping, bloodied mustache.

  “What? What is it?” he shouted, but none of his men responded.

  Sue Ellen made a quick and rash decision then, whether to be trapped in the corner or run toward the far end of the kitchen while she still had a gap between the shoved table and the sideboard. She took the chance and dashed forward.

  But Duggins was faster than she thought he might be, and less distracted by the sounds outside than she hoped. He caught her by the waist with one rugged arm and she kicked and flailed even as he lifted her from the floor and slammed her backward on the table. Her head hit hard and she felt a blackness like a veil lower over her. No, no, no! Sue Ellen begged herself not to give in to this. The room spun as she forced her eyes wide.

  But he was too heavy, leaning over her, forcing her arms flat to the tabletop. And then she heard another voice even as she looked up, trying to focus, seeing only Duggins’s leering, teeth-clenched face.

  “Boss? Boss! You got to come quick!” The voice was one of his men, the tall, thin one who didn’t say much, just looked askance at everyone, as if he were confused all the time. And now he was looking at Duggins with a very confused look. “Boss, what happened to your face?”

  That seemed to snap Clewt from his reverie of rage. He looked to his side at the tall, thin cowboy, spittle dribbling from his mouth, and growled. Then he released one of Sue Ellen’s wrists and delivered a quick snapping backhand to the tall cowboy’s face.

  “When I want you to interrupt me, I will tell you so. Now get out of here.”

  The tall cowboy held a hand to his face, confusion and hurt that would look much more suitable on the face of a child warring on his brow. He backed away, saying, “Sorry, boss, but . . . you . . . you should come on out here. We got ourselves something you need to see.” With that, the tall cowboy turned on his heel and legged it out of the room, glancing back once as if to make sure the man who’d just smacked him hadn’t followed too closely.

  The interruption had served to give Sue Ellen time to somewhat recover from the knock to the head she’d taken. It also apparently gave Duggins pause. He made no effort to grab Sue Ellen’s wrist again, but stared at the spot where his underling had stood. Presently he snorted and shoved Sue Ellen’s other arm away from him, pushed off and away from the table.

  “You are lucky I have a situation that requires my attention. Elsewise, we would be having an entirely different discussion right now. You understand me, woman?” He pointed a meaty finger at her face, glared at her a moment longer, said, “But this changes everything.” Then he ambled from the room. Soon she heard the front door slam.

  Sue Ellen struggled to sit up, ended up sliding off the end of the table. Hurry up, she told herself. This might be your only chance to be alone in the house long enough to figure out some way of besting them. She fought dizziness and a rising sick feeling spiraling upward from her gut, filling her windpipe, her throat. She dropped to her knees, holding the sides of her head as if it might crack like an egg, convinced at any second she was going to vomit.

  She held that position for a few moments, aware that every second she spent not moving forward, trying to escape, was a wasted second of effort, a tiny gift to the evil men who had descended on her quiet, ordered world and blasted it apart. And that thought made her angry, angry enough to rise to her feet, steadying herself with the edge of the table. From outside she heard more shouts, from the front of the house. What was happening out there?

  Chapter 10

  “What was so important out here that you are shooting the morning sky full of holes?” Clewt held a dish towel to his bleeding, throbbing face. That vile woman would pay for this attack, and dearly. But for now he would tend to these buffoons. Teach them all a lesson first.

  “There, boss. You see? A man’s coming in—looks to be Barn Cat. I bet he has some good news for us, eh?”

  “That’s what you brought me out here for? That’s what you’re out here wasting bullets for?”

  “No, we were answering his shots, letting them know we are still here, see?” The man shrugged, eyebrows knitted together.

  “Still here? Where else would we be, you moron!” He turned to a man in a dusty, dented bowler. “I expect better from you, Paddy. Next time, rein in these fools.”

  The man in the bowler sighed and shrugged, but said nothing.

  Clewt turned back to looking toward the incoming rider. But he’d seen the rheumy-eyed look on Paddy, his segundo. Man was reliable when he wasn’t drinking. Problem was, he was always drinking.

  This had better be good, Clewt thought, or I will begin gutting these fools like fish even sooner than I had planned to. He visored his eyes with a hand and watched as the rider drew closer. Perhaps he would bring good news; perhaps he had killed that nosy neighbor rancher. But why was there only one? He’d sent two men. “It does look like Barn Cat. If that’s the case, then where’s Paco? Oh, I can’t tell from this distance who that is. Is that one horse or two?”

  Clewt bet with himself that one of those fools had got himself killed. But he needed money first, in order to bet it. And the only place he could get money was here, with whatever was left of the treasure that Winstead had squirreled away, buried deep somewhere on this cursed ranch of his.

  A ranch? Of all the foolish things Winstead could have spent money on, he up and buys a ranch. If it were me, thought Clewt, I would have kept on riding, taken all that money and hit the trail hard, stopping long enough to drink and whore and gamble, leaving a trail of winnings or losings all over the place. Maybe I would have bought
a fancy train car or two to haul me and my wealth around the country. He smiled at his momentary mental folly. Of course he could still do with a train car. He just needed to find Winstead’s stolen loot.

  As if reading his mind, Paddy said, “Boss? That neighbor rancher. You don’t think he found Delbert’s body yesterday, do you?”

  Clewt turned with a sigh and regarded Paddy again, verified the man was somewhat drunk, could smell the booze on his breath. This was the man who was, sadly, his second in command. Not a bad sort, and even clever at times when sober. But drunk, he was not the sharpest knife in the kitchen. Still, Paddy had been with him through it all, the only one of the boys left from the old days, and so, the only logical choice for a shotgun rider.

  But the Irishman had a bad habit of talking too much once he was in his cups, and as an Irishman, that happened frequently. Paddy’s drunken chatter had forced Clewt to slice the throat of that pretty young whore in that flophouse in Reno. The dumb Irishman had blathered about them and their coming fortunes to her, and Clewt had felt bad about having to kill her off.

  She was anything but dim, and she hadn’t been in the trade all that long, not long enough to have become a diseased thing like the other women in the place, old crones all. But she had been told things she shouldn’t know. He could tell, could see the glint of greed in her eyes. Would she play him for it? Blackmail him with what she hoped would be leverage enough to gain her a cut of the fortune? Ha. Easier to kill her and be done with it. Sadly, he didn’t think her death had taught Paddy one bit of a lesson.

  Be that as it may, Clewt knew he would do to them all eventually what he’d done to the greedy young whore, just as soon as he didn’t need them anymore. And that day would come soon, very soon. He could feel it.

  “It was a shame we had to kill ol’ Delbert, or Alton Winstead, or whatever else he called himself, eh, boss?” Paddy said this as he, too, shaded his eyes and looked toward the approaching rider. “Might be we could have gotten that information out of him some other way.”

  Clewt felt his teeth grit together tight, despite the throbbing pain in his newly cut cheek. “Don’t you think,” he said in a barely controlled hiss of a whisper so that the other morons clustered about the yard would not hear, “I would have avoided that if I could have? From now on, Paddy, you keep your mouth shut about that, you hear me?”

  The Irishman looked at his boss and nodded. He knew what the boss was capable of, had seen it plenty of times. That stag-handled slicing tool of his, one of the meanest Bowies he’d ever seen, always gleamed with a fresh sharpening. For a one-legged, scar-faced, old-looking fella, Paddy had to admit the boss sure could put the scare into a man. And now he was turning that same killer look on him—the very man whom he’d shared a cell with for ten years. Paddy nodded again. “Yeah, boss. I meant nothing by it. I will keep so quiet you’ll have to—”

  “Paddy?”

  “Yeah, boss?”

  “You’re talking again. A whole lot. And after I told you how it grates on my worn nerves, too.”

  “Yes, bo—”

  Clewt jerked his hand up between their faces, a long scarred finger of warning standing like a lone, wind-stripped fencepost poised between them. “Shut up, Paddy.”

  Paddy swallowed hard and nodded, his yellowed, bloodshot eyes shifting back toward the rider, certain now that it was Barn Cat, and with no sign of Paco. Which likely meant that the two men had gotten into a skirmish with the nosy rancher and Paco didn’t make it. The boss was not going to like this.

  Clewt knew Paddy was right. So help him, he hated to admit it, but Winstead hadn’t given up the location of his secret treasure as easily as Clewt had expected he would, hoped he would. Delbert had even withstood the pain he’d inflicted, the beating and little nicking slices all over his body. How could a man stand up to that and still grit his teeth, even smiling around gritted teeth? It mystified Clewt.

  Finally, and though Clewt had known it was the dead wrong thing to do, even as he did it, he had hit the worthless, no-talking, cheating, son-of-a-scoundrel on the head with a rock. Only meant it to coldcock him. But it had worked almost too well. Winstead had wobbled, spun on him, his eyes glazing, blood streaming into one from somewhere inside the man’s head. And still Winstead had smiled at him. “I’ll tell you . . .” he’d said.

  Clewt had leaned in close, also smiling himself, put his ear closer to the wobbling Winstead’s face, and said, “Good, good, you tell me and we’ll lay off you. You have my word.”

  “I’ll tell you . . . nothing.” Winstead straightened then and smiled, blood drooling out one side of his mouth, his left eye completely red, as if someone had poured blood straight on it. Still smiling, he turned from Clewt, showed him his back, and he made a dignified if feeble effort at lifting a foot and walking away.

  Clewt had been holding Winstead’s pepperbox, that same old thing Winstead had pulled on him when they’d met in the cantina over a decade before in Chihuahua. Only this time the weapon was in working order and loaded. And had been in a fancy leather holster worn high on the side of Winstead’s now-fat belly.

  Clewt could not contain his rage. He bit together so hard that his head shivered and his vision blurred. All those years, all that jail time chipping big rocks into smaller rocks, wearing chains and humiliating rags in the vicious heat of the rank Mexican desert. All that to finally find the man who did it to them, who was solely responsible for the most hellish time of their lives, and he smiles and turns his back on them?

  “No! You turn your double-crossing hide around, Winstead!”

  Alton Winstead laughed, a wet sound that ended in a sudden coughing fit as he stumbled slowly forward, still upright, but now bringing up gouts of bloody phlegm.

  “Turn around and face me!” Clewt strangled out the words, his seething rage shaking him to his core, the pepperbox quivering but gripped firmly in his hand.

  The reply was another wet laugh from the man whose back was but five feet before him.

  The pepperbox snapped and popped in his hand as it spit one, two, three, four bullets, like tiny, angry lead bees, straight into Alton Winstead’s back, close enough that the black wool of his jacket smoked and bubbled. Blood welled outward from the freshly savaged fabric and the men who stood before Winstead saw on his face quick, wide-eyed surprise, then an even wider smile and slow nod, as if he had been waiting for it, as if he had expected nothing less than that outcome.

  The group stood silent for long moments as they all watched Winstead, dead and not yet knowing it, weave in place, one leg slightly forward, as if he were in midstep. Then, as if time had been slowed somehow, the portly man with the fresh haircut and fine boiled wool suit and green cloth vest and gold pocket watch gagged, still smiling, and pitched forward. Right there on the top of a pretty knoll on his own ranchland in the western foothills of the northern Sierra Nevada of California.

  • • •

  All these little facts bubbled through Alton Winstead’s frantic dying mind as he withered like a pinched-out candle flame, far-off, surrounded by beauty, but closer in, surrounded by men the likes of whom he had hoped never to see again, but secretly guessed he would one day. And he had known the inevitable outcome. Had predicted in his mind that it would likely end just as it had.

  Did he feel remorse for leaving a pretty wife? Yes, yes, indeed. She was a good, good person. Did he feel bad for not telling her about the rest of the fortune? Maybe, maybe he’d decide that in the hereafter. Ha. That was a laugh. If there was something like heaven, then Winstead knew where he was headed, and it wasn’t filled with people in robes playing celestial harps.

  No, all in all he had few regrets. Except maybe for not killing these fools when he’d had the chance eleven years before. And now it was all too late. He hoped they didn’t hurt Sue Ellen. Hoped they would somehow leave her be to enjoy the ranch, the land, maybe even resume a life with Ty Farrad
ay. But he knew as he pitched facedown onto the gritty hilltop soil that Sue Ellen would not give in to them, these men would not leave her be, they would upend every single stone on the ranch looking for that fortune, and none of them would ever find a thing. And that is what left him with a smile stretched wide on his face as he died, hearing the seething shouts of anger from just behind him, unfurling from Clewt Duggins’s revenge-addled body. Never, never, never. . . .

  • • •

  “Boss! What in blue blazes did you do?”

  Clewt blinked himself out of the daze he found himself in, the little pistol still smoking from the snout of its barrels. “I . . .” He narrowed his eyes and spun on the man, Paddy, who’d uttered that reproachful question. Then he raised the little pistol. “You know well what I’ve just done. And you’d be wise to keep in mind that I will do the same to any of you fools should you dare to question me again. You hear me?”

  To a man they all nodded. A few murmured, “Yeah, boss.”

  “Now I know what you all are worried about. You think that because this worthless corpse here”—he toed his stiff leg against Winstead’s flopped, unresponsive ample midsection—“is now in the land of the dead that he can’t tell us where he hid our fortune. Well you couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “How’s that, boss?”

  Clewt smiled. “I’m so glad you asked, Rufus.” He turned a kindly smile on the man. “You did notice that the man had a wife, right?”

  Rufus grinned and blushed, stared at his too-big boots, scuffed at the dirt as if he were complimented on the playground of the local school by a pretty marm. “Yes, sir, I reckon so.”