"Right now there's a man in this valley who is tryin' to take the liberty an' freedom of some men away from 'em. When a man starts that, and when there isn't any law to help, you got to fight. I've killed men, Jackie, an' it ain't a good thing, no way. But I never killed a man unless he deserved killin' an' unless he forced me to a corner where it was me or him.
"This here country is big enough for all, but some men get greedy for money or power, an' when they do the little men have to fight to keep what they got. Your pappy died in a war for freedom just as much as if he was killed on a battlefield somewheres.
"Whenever a brave man dies for what he believes, he wins more'n he loses. Maybe not for him, but for men like him that want to live honest an' true."
The trail narrowed and grew rougher, and Trent felt a quick excitement within him, as he always did when he rode up to this windy plateau. They went up through the tall pines toward the knifelike ridges that crested the divide, and when they finally reached the plateau he reined in, as he always did when he reached that spot.
Off over the vast distance that was Cedar Valley lay the blue haze that deepened to purple against the far-distant mountains. Here the air was fresh and clear, crisp with the crispness of the high peaks and the sense of limitless distance.
Skirting the rim, Trent led on and finally came to the second place he loved, a place he not only loved but which was a challenge to all that was in him. For here the divide, with its sky scraping ridges, was truly a divide. It drew a ragged, mountainous line between the lush beauty of Cedar Valley and the awful waste of the scarred and tortured Smoky Desert.
Always, there seemed a haze of dust or smoke hanging in the sky over Smoky Desert, and what lay below it, no man could say, for no known trail led down the steel canyon to the waste below. An Indian had once told him his fathers knew of a trail to the bottom, but no living man knew it, and no man seemed to care, nobody but Trent, drawn by his own loneliness to the vaster loneliness below.
Far away were ragged red mountains, red, black, and broken like the jagged stumps of broken teeth gnawing at the sky. It was, he believed, the far edge of what was actually an enormous crater, greater than any other of its kind on earth.
"Someday," he told his companions, "I'm goin' down there. It looks like the mouth of hell itself, but I'm goin' down."
Parson Hatfield and his four tall sons were all in sight when the three rode up to the cabin. All were carrying their long Kentucky rifles.
"Alight, Trent," Parson drawled, widening his gash of a mouth into a smile. "We was expectin' most anybody else. Been some ructions down to the valley."
"Yeah." Trent swung down. "They killed Dick Moffitt. These are his kids, Parson. I figgered maybe you could make a place for em.
"You thought right, son. The good Lord takes care of his own, but we have to help. There's always room for another beneath the roof of a Hatfield."
Quincy Hatfield, oldest of the lean, rawboned Kentucky boys, joined them. "Howdy," he said. "Did Pap tell you all about Leathers?"
"Leathers?" Trent frowned in quick apprehension. "What about him?"
"He ain't a-goin' to sell anything to us no more." The tall young man spat and shifted his rifle to the hollow of his arm. "That makes the closest store over at Blazer, an' that's three days across the mountains."
Trent shrugged, frowning. "Aims to freeze us out or kill us off." He glanced at Parson speculatively. "What are you plannin'?"
Hatfield shook his head. "Nothin' so far. We sort of figgered we might get together with the rest of the nesters an' try to figger out somethin'. I had Jake ride down to get O'Hara, Smithers, an' young Bartram. We got to have us a confab."
Parson Hatfield rubbed his long, grizzled jaw and stared at Trent. His gray eyes were inquisitive, sly. "Y'know, Trent, I always had me an idea you was some shakes of a battler yourself. Maybe if you'd wear some guns you'd make some of them gunslick hombres of Hale's back down cold."
Trent smiled. "Why, Parson, I reckon you guess wrong. Me, I'm a peace-lovin' hombre. I like the hills, an' all I ask is to be let alone."
"An' if they don't let alone?" Parson stared at him shrewdly, chewing his tobacco slowly and watching Trent with his keen gray eyes.
"If they don't let me alone? An' if they start killin' my friends?" Trent turned to look at Hatfield. "Why, parson, I reckon I'd take my guns down from that peg. I reckon I'd fight."
Hatfield nodded. "That's all I wanted to know, Trent. I ain't spent my life a-feudin' without knowin' a fightin' man when I see one. O'Hara an' young Bartram will fight. Smithers, too, but he don't stack up like no fightin' man. My young'uns, they cut their teeth on a rifle stock, so I reckon when the fightin' begins I'll be bloodin' the two young'uns like I did the two older back in Kentucky."
Trent kicked his toe into the dust. "Don't you reckon we better get the womenfolks off to Blazer? There ain't many of us, Parson, an'
Hale must have fifty riders. We better get them out while the gettin' is good."
"Hale's got more'n fifty riders, but the women'll stay, Trent. Ma, she ain't for goin'. You ain't got no woman of your own, Trent, so I don't reckon you know how unpossible ornery they can be, but Ma, she'd be fit to be tied if it was said she was goin' to go to Blazer while we had us a scrap.
"Ma loaded rifles for me in Kentucky when she was a gal, an' she loaded 'em for me cross- in' the plains, an' she done her share of shootin'.
"Trent, I'd rather face all them Haleses than Ma if we tried to send her away. She always says her place is with her menfolks, an' there she'll stay. I reckon Quince's wife feels the same, an' so does Jesse's woman."
Trent nodded. "Parson, we got us an argument when the rest of them get here. They've got to leave their places an' come up here. Together, we could make a pretty stiff fight of it. Scattered, they'd cut us down one by one."
He swung into the saddle. "I'm goin' down to Cedar. I'm goin' to see Leathers."
Without waiting for a reply, Trent swung the buckskin away and loped down the trail. He knew very well he was taking a chance. The killing had started. Dick Moffitt was down. They had burned his place, and within no time at all, the Hale riders would be carrying fire and blood through the high hills, wiping out the nesters. If he could but see King Bill, there might be a chance.
Watching him go, Parson Hatfield shook his head doubtfully and then turned to his eldest. "Quince, you rope yourself a horse, boy, an' you an' Jesse follow him into Cedar. He may get hisself into trouble."
A few minutes later the two tall, loose-limbed mountain men started down the trail on their flea-bitten mustangs. They were solemn, dry young men who chewed tobacco and talked slowly, but they had grown up in the hard school of the Kentucky mountains, and they had come west across the plains.
Chapter III
A Tough Job Ahead
Unknowing, Trent rode rapidly. He knew what he had to do, yet even as he rode, his thoughts were on the Hatfields. He liked them. Hardworking, honest, opinionated, they were fierce to resent any intrusion on their personal liberty, their women's honor, or their pride.
They were the kind of men to ride the river with. It was such men who had been the backbone of America, the fence-corner soldier, the man who carried his rifle in the hollow of his arm, but the kind of men who knew that fighting was not a complicated business but simply a matter of killing and keeping from being killed.
They were men of the blood of Dan Boone, Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, the Green Mountain Boys, Dan Freeman, and those who whipped the cream of the British regulars at Concord, Bunker Hill, and New Orleans.
They knew nothing of Prussian methods of close-order drill. They did nothing by the numbers. Many of them had flat feet and many had few teeth. But they fought from cover and they made every shot count-and they lived while the enemy died.
The Hale Ranch was a tremendous power, and they had many riders, and they were men hired for their ability with guns as well as with ropes and cattle. King Bill Hale, wise as he was, was gr
own confident, and he did not know the caliber of such men as the Hatfields. The numbers Hale had might lead to victory, but not until many men had died.
O'Hara? The big Irishman was blunt and hard. He was not the shrewd fighter the Hatfields were, but he was courageous, and he knew not the meaning of retreat.
Himself? Trent's eyes narrowed. He had no illusions about himself. As much as he avoided trouble, he knew that within him there was something that held a fierce resentment for abuse of power, for tyranny. There was something in him that loved battle, too. He could not dodge the fact. He would avoid trouble, but when it came he would go into it with a fierce love of battle for battle's sake.
Someday, he knew, he would ride back to the cattle in the high meadows, back to the cabin in the pines, and he would take down his guns and buckle them on, and then Kilkenny would ride again.
The trail skirted deep canyons and led down toward the flat bottomland of the valley. King Bill, he knew, was learning what he should have known long ago, that the flatlands, while rich, became hot and dry in the summer weather, while the high meadows remained green and lush, and there cattle could graze and grow fat. And King Bill was moving to take back what he had missed so long ago.
Had the man been less blinded by his own power and strength, he would have hesitated over the Hatfields. One and all, they were fighting men.
Riding into Cedar Bluff would be dangerous now. Changes were coming to the West, and Trent had hoped to leave his reputation in Texas. He could see the old days of violence were nearing an end. Billy the Kid had been killed by Pat Garrett. King Fisher and Ben Thompson were heard of much less; one and all, the gunmen were beginning to taper off. Names that had once been mighty in the West were already drifting into legend.
As for himself, few men could describe him. He had come and gone like a shadow, and where he was now, no man could say, and only one woman.
King Bill even owned the law in Cedar. He had called an election to choose a sheriff and a judge. Yet there had been no fairness in that election. It was true that no unfair practices had been tolerated, but the few nesters and small ranchers had no chance against the fifty-odd riders from the Hale Ranch and the townspeople who needed the Hale business or who worked for him.
Trent had voted himself. He had voted for O'Hara. There had been scarcely a dozen votes for O'Hara. One of those votes had been that of Jim Hale, King Bill's oldest son. Another, he knew, had been the one person in Cedar whom he had studiously avoided, the half-Spanish, half-Irish girl, Nita Riordan.
Trent had avoided Nita Riordan because the beautiful girl from the Texas Mexican border was the one person who knew him for what he was-who knew him as Kilkenny, the gun- fighter.
Whenever Trent thought of the trouble in Cedar he thought less of King Bill but more of Cub Hale. The older man was huge and powerful physically, but he was not a killer. It was true that he was responsible for deaths, but they were of men whom he believed to be his enemies or to be trespassing on his land. But Cub Hale was a killer.
Two days after Trent had first come to Cedar Bluff he had seen Cub Hale kill a man. It was a drunken miner, a burly, quarrelsome fellow who could have done with a pistol barrel alongside the head, but needed nothing more. Yet Cub Hale had shot him down, ruthlessly, heedlessly.
Then there had been the case of Jack Lindsay, a known gunman, and Cub had killed him in a fair, standup fight, with an even break all around. Lindsay's gun had barely cleared its holster when the first of three shots hit him. Trent had walked over to the man's body to see for himself. You could have put a playing card over those three holes. That was shooting.
There had been other stories of which Trent had only heard. Cub had caught two rustlers, red-handed, and killed them both. He had killed a Mexican sheepherder in Magdalena. He had killed a gunfighter in Fort Sumner, and gut shot another one near Socorro, leaving him to die slowly on the desert.
And besides Cub, there were Dunn and Ravitz. Both were graduates of the Lincoln County War. Both had been in Trail City and had left California just ahead of a posse. Both were familiar names among the dark brotherhood who lived by the gun. They were strictly cash-and-carry warriors, men whose guns were for hire.
"Buck," Trent told his horse thoughtfully, "if war starts in the Cedar hills, there'll be a power of killin'. I got to see King Bill. I got to talk reason into him."
Cedar Bluff could have been any cow town. Two things set it off from the others. One was the stone stage station, which also contained the main office of the Hale Ranch; the other was the huge and sprawling Crystal Palace, belonging to Nita Riordan.
Trent loped the yellow horse down the dusty street and swung down in front of Leathers' General Store. He walked into the cool interior. The place smelled of leather and dry goods. At the rear, where they dispensed food and other supplies, he halted.
Bert Leathers looked up from his customer as Trent walked in, and Trent saw his face change. Leathers wet his lips and kept his eyes away from Trent. At the same time, Trent heard a slight movement, and glancing casually around, he saw a heavyset cowhand wearing a tied-down gun lounging against a rack of saddles. The fellow took his cigarette from his lips and stared at Trent from shrewd, calculating eyes.
"Need a few things, Leathers," Trent said casually. "Got a list here."
The man Leathers was serving stepped aside. He was a townsman, and he looked worried.
"Sorry, Trent," Leathers said abruptly, "I can't help you. All you nesters have been ordered off the Hale range. I can't sell you anything."
"Lickin' Hale's boots, are you?" Trent asked quietly. "I heard you were, Leathers, but doubted it. I figgered a man with nerve enough to come west an' set up for himself would be his own man."
"I am my own man!" Leathers snapped, his pride stung. "I just don't want your business!"
"I'll remember that, Leathers," Trent said quietly. "When all this is over, I'll remember that. You're forgettin' something. This is America, an' here the people always win. Maybe not at first, but they always win in the end. When this is over, if the people win, you'd better leave-understand?"
Leathers looked up, his face white and yet angry. He looked uncertain.
"You all better grab yourself some air," a cool voice suggested.
Trent turned, and he saw the gunhand standing with his thumbs in his belt, grinning at him. "Better slide, Trent. What the man says is true. King Bill's takin' over. I'm here to see Leathers doesn't have no trouble with nesters."
"All right," Trent said quietly, "I'm a quiet man myself. I expect that rightly I should take the gun away from you an' shove it down your throat. But Leathers is probably gunshy, an' there might be some shootin', so I'll take a walk."
"My name's Dan Cooper," the gunhand suggested mildly. "Any time you really get on the prod about shovin' this gun down my throat, look me up."
Trent smiled. "I'll do that, Cooper, an' if you stay with King Bill I'm afraid you're going to have a heavy diet of lead. He's cuttin' a wide swath."
"Uh-huh." Cooper was cheerful and tough. "But he's got a blade that cuts 'em off short."
"Ever see the Hatfields shoot?" Trent suggested. "Take a tip, old son, an' when those long Kentucky rifles open up, you be somewhere else."
Dan Cooper nodded sagely. "You got somethin' there, pardner. You really have. That Parson's got him a cold eye."
Trent turned and started for the street, but Cooper's voice halted him. The gunhand had followed him to the door.
"Say," Cooper's voice was curious. "Was you ever in Dodge?"
Trent smiled. "Maybe. Maybe I was. You think that one over, Cooper."
He looked at the gunhand thoughtfully. "I like you," he said bluntly, "so I'm givin' you a tip. Get on your horse an' ride. King Bill's got the men, but he ain't goin' to win. Ride, because I always hate to kill a good man."
Trent turned and walked down the street. Behind him, he could feel Dan Cooper's eyes on his back.
The gunman was scowling. "Now who the he
ll?" he muttered. "That hombre's salty, plumb salty."
Three more attempts to buy supplies proved to Trent he was frozen out in Cedar Bluff. Worried now, he started back to his horse. The nesters could not buy in Cedar Bluff, and that meant their only supplies must come by the long wagon trip across country from Blazer. Trent felt grave doubts that Hale would let the wagons proceed unmolested, and their little party was so small they could not spare men to guard the wagons on the three-day trek over desert and mountains.
"Trent!" He turned slowly and found himself facing Price Dixon, a dealer from the Crystal Palace. "Nita wants to see you. Asked me to find you and ask if you'd come to see her."
For a long moment, Trent hesitated. Then he shrugged. "All right," he said, "but it won't do any good to have her seen with me. We nesters aren't looked upon with much favor these days."
Dixon nodded, sober faced. "Looks like a shootout. I'm afraid you boys are on the short end of it."
"Maybe."
Dixon glanced at him out of the corner of his eyes. "Don't you wear a gun? They'll kill you someday."
"Without a gun you don't have many fights."
"It wouldn't stop Cub Hale. When he decides to shoot, he does. He won't care whether you are packin' a gun or not."
"No. It wouldn't matter to him."
Price Dixon studied him thoughtfully. "Who are you, Trent?" he asked softly.
"I'm Trent, a nester. Who else?"
"That's what I'm wondering. I'm dry behind the ears. I've been dealing cards in the West ever since the war between the states. I've seen men who packed guns, and I know the breed. You're not Wes Hardin, and you're not Hickok, and you're not one of the Earps. You never drink much, so you can't be Thompson. Whoever you are, you've packed a gun."
"Don't lose any sleep over it."
Dixon shrugged. "I won't. I'm not taking sides in this fight or any other. If I guess, I won't say. You're a friend of Nita's, and that's enough for me. Besides, Jaime Brigo likes you." He glanced at Trent. "What do you think of him?"
the Rider Of Ruby Hills (1986) Page 26