Six Days to Sundown

by Paul Lederer

  ‘No! I just know what people say, Casey. I know that Joe Duggan and Mike Barrow believed in him enough to ante up two hundred dollars to hire him.’

  ‘I see,’ Casey said quietly. His mind was going in a dozen different directions now. Two hundred dollars. And what would Gervase McCoy be willing to offer the Cheyenne gunman to switch sides if he were apprised of the situation? Much more, Casey suspected. And why was it that Duggan and Barrow alone had expended the money to hire the gunman and not the entire wagon train?

  And just where was the known killer now?

  ‘You talk like you do know Deveraux,’ Garrett Strong said, after another half-mile had passed and they had come close to the verge of the forest. The moon was heaving itself above the vast bulk of the Rockies now. The moon shadows were long beneath their ponies, the land deep in darkness in the gullies.

  ‘I know Deveraux,’ Casey Storm answered. ‘Though that’s not what he called himself in Cheyenne. One supposes he has a long, long list of aliases. It keeps the law puzzled. When I met him, he was calling himself Tad Chaney—’

  ‘Wait a minute, Casey. Are you positive this is the same man?’

  ‘I can’t be until I see his face.’

  Ahead now, gleaming dully in the night they could see three or four camp-fires burning. They could not be absolutely sure that these were in the Shadow Riders’ camp, but the odds were good. There were few people traversing this sparsely populated land. They continued on.

  ‘How did you come to know this Chaney – or Deveraux, if that’s who it is?’ Garrett wondered.

  ‘How? He shot me down in the night, Garrett.’ Unconsciously, Casey touched the front of his chest where Deveraux’s bullet had exited just below his collarbone, inches from his heart.

  ‘In a fair fight?’ the kid asked.

  ‘Everyone said so.’

  ‘Do you mind if I ask what it was over, Casey?’

  ‘Just a woman,’ Casey said without bitterness. ‘Isn’t there always a woman involved?’

  ‘He got you from behind, didn’t he?’ Garrett asked. Casey nodded.

  ‘He did. I was turning toward him at his call. He got off his shot first. No matter – facing him down in broad daylight would have brought the same result. Deveraux – Tad Chaney – is very, very good with a handgun.’

  ‘Did you go back to brace him?’ Gaffed asked, apparently excited by the tale. ‘When you healed up, I mean?’

  ‘No, I did not,’ Casey said tolerantly. ‘The lady had proved she wasn’t worth fighting over. I wasn’t going to die for her faded honor, or for my own.’

  ‘Oh,’ Garrett Strong said, as if he were disappointed in his new-found hero and had expected a different ending to the story. ‘You just rode out of Cheyenne.’

  ‘I just rode out, and here you find me,’ Casey said quietly. ‘Let’s rein up a minute and decide what we mean to do to spook this gang.’

  Swinging down from their horses, they crouched together, holding the reins to their horses. By the light of the rising moon, Casey could see that Garrett’s face was strained, his eyes indecisive. ‘You can still go back,’ Casey said gently.

  ‘No.’ Garrett’s voice was weak, but his tone was firm. ‘I won’t leave you now. Besides, what’s the point in it anyway? Should we wait around for another night like last night and let them shoot us in our beds? It’s better to take the fight to them – as you say, to show them that we have some teeth.’

  That was what Casey had said and he meant it. The truth was that he, himself, would have preferred to just keep riding away from these people and their problems. But he had made a promise to an old man and his big-eyed daughter.

  Casey was tall and narrow, well built under his shirt, but he wasn’t the kind of man whose appearance cleared out a bar room when he entered. He had been in his share of fist fights, won some and lost a few. It had been proved to him that he was not a gunman in any real sense. What he was was dogged. When someone had first applied that word to him, Casey had frowned, not knowing if he should take offense or not. The man had explained his meaning.

  ‘What I mean, Casey, is that once you take a notion to do something, you wade in, latch on and see it through to the bitter end. Even when it’s not in your best interests! There’s just no quit in you, Casey Storm.’

  And he wasn’t about to quit now.

  FIVE

  ‘My father was a Kansas Raider,’ Garrett Strong was saying in a low voice as the two sat hunched down, watching the firelight from the camp-fires of McCoy’s men. Casey nodded. The tales of Bloody Kansas were known far and wide. ‘It’s why I’m alone now,’ the blond kid went on. ‘They hanged him.’

  ‘Sorry,’ was all Casey could think to say.

  ‘Doesn’t matter now – I barely remember him. He might have deserved it for all I know. But I do remember as a little squirt sitting around the hearth, listening to some of his stories. At that age, it all sounds exciting whether they’re embellished tales or not.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘What I’m working around to, Casey, is that one of those stories concerned the time Dad and only six other men cut off from Quantrill’s main force came upon about two hundred regular Union Army soldiers camped not far out of Lawrence. They were far too few to take on the army, but knew they had to delay them until Quantrill’s group had re-formed. Dad and the others decided to strike anyway, in guerilla fashion, hoping to slow the army down.’

  ‘What’d they do?’ Casey asked, now interested.

  ‘True or not – I learned later to take my father’s story with a grain of salt – they bundled together clumps of brush, soaked them in coal oil and charged the Union camp drawing the burning faggots behind them. Six wagons caught fire, the horses stampeded and the soldiers were caught too much by surprise to do much but wing a few wild shots after them. It sure slowed that unit down, what with chasing down their ponies and all.’ Garrett paused.

  ‘What do you think, Casey?’

  ‘I think it’s better than anything I had in mind,’ Casey admitted. ‘Whether it will work or not is a different story. If it does,’ he grinned as he rose to his feet, ‘you’ll have a tale to tell your own son some day.’

  They lacked the ingredients that the Kansas raiders had had – coal oil most importantly – but by scavenging among the pines they were able to find plenty of fallen twigs. The entire day had been bright and comparatively warm and these were dry despite the previous night’s snow. Additionally, there were stacks of dry pine-needles beneath the scattered trees where the snow had never fallen. They made for excellent tinder.

  ‘This seemed like a good idea at the time,’ Garrett Strong said uneasily, as they used their lassos to tie loops around the bundles of wood.

  ‘Might be, might not be,’ Casey said as he finished a knot and tied the free end of his lariat in a slipknot around Checkers’s saddle pommel. ‘It’s no time to start second-guessing yourself, Garrett. Can’t back away for fear of failing. We try. If it doesn’t work, it will hardly be the first battle plan to fail.

  ‘Where’s your long gun?’ Casey asked, noticing the empty scabbard on Garrett’s saddle gear.

  ‘Sold my Winchester to buy my passage West,’ the kid said, shame-faced.

  ‘They charged you, did they? That figures, I suppose. Here!’ He handed the younger man Jason Landis’s .50 caliber buffalo gun and a handful of loose cartridges. ‘You might need it. I’ve got my Henry repeater.’

  ‘What now?’ Garrett asked, as he swung into the saddle of his bay horse. ‘When do we strike fire to the wood?’

  ‘Let’s get a little closer. Say fifty yards from their camp.’

  ‘As soon as they see the flames, they’ll start shooting,’ Garrett Strong said.

  Casey answered grittily, ‘As soon as they open fire, we start shooting.’

  Casey was not too crazy about the plan himself, but there was a certain sort of logic to it. Men rolled up peacefully in their beds after a long day’s ride, horses tethered n
ear at hand, bellies full, warm fires to comfort them set upon by an unknown number of vandals stampeding through their camp, fire flaming in their wake. Bedding set afire, horses driven off in panic, guns unleashed in their direction in the dead of night. The chuck wagon – for there must be one on a drive this long – blazing, foodstuffs and whatever other belongings were stored there, destroyed.

  Yes, that would give them pause for thought.

  And make them mad as hell.

  No matter – the McCoy riders were already determined to gun down the settlers to prevent them from ever reaching Sundown. The lives of women and children, they had proved, meant nothing to them either. Let them be mad, good and mad.

  Now as Casey and Garrett Strong neared the camp – so closely that they could hear someone saying something in a boisterous voice – Earl? – they swung down and struck fire to the light kindling, watching the flames catch and flare up brightly. No one in the camp of the Shadow Riders seemed to have noticed the twin blazes as Casey and Garrett Strong remounted. Casey glanced at the uneasy blond youth and nodded. Now was the time to find out how much of Garrett’s father’s tale had been exaggerated.

  The raid could have lasted no longer than thirty seconds.

  The Shadow Riders had apparently taken no notice as Garrett and Casey Storm struck fire to their faggots. Perhaps they mistook them for other, distant camp-fires. More likely they were all asleep or nearly so, Morpheus assisted by the addition of hard liquor. When Casey hit the camp, towing his bonfire behind him, he encountered no gunfire. Checkers leaped over two men rolled up in their beds, avoiding them with his hoofs as is the breed’s natural instinct. Someone raised an angry challenge, but Casey didn’t look away. Horses tossed their heads, broke their tethers and stampeded across the plains in fright.

  There was a chuck wagon or supply wagon directly in his path and he swung Checkers into a circle around it, tying a loose knot around the canvas-covered wagon with his lariat. The bundle of fire he dragged behind him followed the revolution and sent up angry golden sparks and tongues of red flame which streaked up the side of the wagon. A man leaped from the covered wagon’s shelter, yelling incoherently as the canvas caught fire. Without water available to fight the fire, McCoy’s men would be able to do nothing but stand and watch their supplies burn.

  Now a few of the Shadow Riders had climbed groggily to their feet and begun firing. But they had only moon-silhouetted figures to aim at, and their firing was sporadic and misdirected. Casey heard a man yowl with pain as one of his own comrade’s bullets tagged him in the night-tangled mêlée.

  Casey could not see Garrett in the darkness. He untied the slipknot of his lariat, let it fall free and drew his own revolver, sending enough shots back through the darkened camp to send the raiders scattering. Then he spurred Checkers on, racing away from the fire-streaked nightmare.

  By chance, as life’s most important elements always seem to intrude on a man’s well-planned life, a rifle bullet surely fired by luck and not by a skilled marksman, caught Casey low in his back.

  The bullet ripped through muscle and ticked off a bone, laying a searing seam, hotter than a branding iron across his body just above the waist. Casey gripped his saddle horn with fearful strength and rode on across the dark Montana plains with desperate urgency. Behind him the Shadow Riders would have recovered their composure, angrily begun to gather what ponies they could, and have taken a vow to track down the men who had done them injury.

  Casey rode on, reeling in the saddle. His course was indefinite and meandering. He did not wish to lead his trackers back toward the wagon train. Let the hornets’ nest he had swatted have its vengeance directed only at him. He, after all, had no wife or child, was not trying to carve out a new life in the West. He was only a lonesome drifter, going nowhere, the world would not remember or even note his passing.

  The pain in Casey’s side increased with each mile he rode. Somewhere near midnight – judging by the stars and the moon – it became intolerable. Bright flashes of color sparked in his skull. Nausea heaved against his belly. There were brief episodes of blackness when he had to struggle to remind himself where he was, to cling to the pommel and hold on for dear life.

  Then, finally, there came a sea of darkness against which he had no defense, and all of the world spun away into a deep void as he tumbled from the saddle to lie against the cold earth, unable to move or have any hope of fighting off the Shadow Riders when they came. Casey closed his eyes and found that he could not open them again. That, too, was all right. It was peaceful in the grave.

  It was snowing again. Casey could see the snow falling when he opened his eyes, but he could not feel it. Instead, improbably, he was warm. Moving his fingers he discovered that a bearskin robe had been thrown over him, and that light from a low-burning fire was flickering across the smoky room he found himself in. How could this be?

  He tried to sit up, failed as a surge of pain shot through his side once more, lay back and stared at the ceiling of what he now recognized as a small cave. How had he gotten here? His hand automatically dropped to his holster, found the comfortable walnut grip of his Colt revolver. They had not disarmed him then, whoever they were.

  ‘He opened his eyes,’ Casey heard an unfamiliar voice say. ‘Bring him some of that sycamore bark tea, Mary. You might twinkle it with a little whiskey.’

  ‘Ya, so,’ a second voice answered, this one that of a woman.

  Casey managed to lift his head enough to see the man standing near him. An old time plainsman by his dress, wearing buckskins and a curious round raccoon-skin hat with two feathers from a red-tailed hawk thrust into it. Across the cave, crouched near the fire was a woman, neither young nor old, neither stout nor thin, dressed like the Sioux woman she was. Her face was pleasant, bland.

  ‘I think you’ll make it,’ was the first thing the hatchet-nosed plainsman said, as he crouched beside Casey Storm. ‘My wife here swabbed out your wound with boiling water and tied on a poultice of moss and mistletoe berries. Best medicine in the world! Moss clots; mistletoe heals.’

  ‘I thank you,’ Casey managed to say through feverish lips.

  ‘No need to. A man does what he can to help another out here. Thank you,’ the old-timer said, as his Indian wife came to the bed with a cup of pinkish sycamore-bark tea laced with raw whiskey which the plainsman gave to Casey to sip.

  Beyond the mouth of the cave snow still fell, puzzling Casey. The skies had been clear when he was wounded. ‘What day is it?’ he enquired weakly, drinking another mouthful of the laced herbal tea.

  ‘Not much need of a calendar out here, but I’d say it’s Tuesday by dead reckoning,’ the plainsman said. ‘Why?’

  Three days to Sundown.

  ‘I seem to have lost a few days,’ Casey answered.

  ‘Yes. You were out cold for two days and nights. We were wondering at first if you were going to make it, but your fever suddenly broke this morning. You’ll make it with a little rest and nourishment.’

  ‘How did I get here? Can you tell me your names? What happened?’

  ‘I’m Deacon Lowe,’ the older man said, ‘to take the easiest question first, and this is my wife, Mary. Not the name she was born with, but I doubt you could pronounce her Indian name. We happened to be out and about scavenging for what we could find – herbs and such, small game to live on. Come nightfall we came across the camp of the McCoy men and backed away.’

  ‘You know McCoy?’ Casey asked.

  ‘All too well,’ Deacon Lowe said, glancing at his wife.

  ‘Ya, one man I kee with shover him,’ Mary said angrily.

  ‘What did she say?’ Casey asked Deacon Lowe, his head still fuzzy.

  ‘Well, son, you understand how it is out here.’ Deacon sighed. ‘Whites don’t like me married to Mary here, Indians don’t like her being married to me. As a result, we’ve kind of separated ourselves from the rest of the world.…’

  A brief, rapid interchange between husband and wife in a co
mbination of French, English and Mandan that Casey could not follow ensued. He looked expectantly at Deacon when they had finished.

  ‘She wants me to tell the story so that you’ll understand why she did what she did. You see, we decided to settle down after our vagabond years – roaming is the way of her people. It was my way as well. We started a little farm. No title to the land, no boundaries. Neither Mary nor I were raised in a society where these things were issues. That is, a man and his woman are settled on a piece of land, it belongs to them – move on and find your own.’

  ‘McCoy wanted it for himself,’ Casey guessed.

  Deacon nodded soberly. ‘Why, I don’t know, but he did.’ The plainsman went on, ‘I was out trying to stock up our meat larder for the winter, hoping to bring in a few elk when McCoy decided to send one of his gunnies out to our little place to try to intimidate Mary … and worse.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Casey said, now growing drowsy from the lack of blood combined with the swallows of frontier whiskey.

  ‘As I said,’ Deacon continued, ‘an Indian woman out here is not considered a proper match for a white man in marriage, but as for the rest … they’re generally considered fair game.’ Deacon wiped a hint of moisture from his eye. ‘I was away hunting, and Mary was working in our little garden when the horseman approached her. He tried to scare her off, and then attacked her, and then.…’

  ‘I kee him with a shover!’ Mary said, clenching her hands. Casey began to understand.

  ‘Do you have any idea what damage the business end of a round-point shovel can do when it’s thrust into a man’s belly?’ Deacon asked softly. ‘From then on we’ve been on the run from McCoy’s men. So when we saw someone racing through McCoy’s camp like demons from Hades we could only cheer you on. When we saw that you were hit, we naturally brought you here to patch you up if we could.’

  ‘How about my friend?’ Casey asked weakly, his eyes closing again.

  ‘We didn’t see another man. If he didn’t make it out unscathed, then I guess you could say he gave up his life for a good cause.’