by E. R. Slade
“I don’t know. But judging by what’s happened so far I’d say it would be smart to keep a good watch.”
“You’re trying not to scare me, aren’t you? You said before you think we’re all going to have to fight them sooner or later.”
“It’s hard to say for sure at this point.”
‘“Don’t worry about me, Mr. Maxwell. I’ll be all right. Something happened once ... that’s all.”
He waited but she did not elaborate.
“I appreciate your standing up for me,” he said. He wanted to say it even more strongly, but no words he thought of were the ones he was looking for.
“I shouldn’t have been so hard on Papa,” she said. “I have no right.” They had reached the barn door and she stopped, looked up at the stars, off across the creek at the dim hulk of not-quite-visible mountains in the distance. “I remember them arguing about coming West. Mama wanted to stay home, but Papa was determined to get some land of his own and a chance to do better than just work in a factory for somebody else all his life.”
He sensed she had more to say and stayed quiet, looking with her across the creek into the mysteries of the darkness, smelling the land, thinking of all the nights he’d spent watching over cattle and planning the future.
“But now we’re here, I think it’s Mama who would lose the most if we had to leave. It cost her so much to come. Before we left we sold a lot of furniture that Mama really cared about, and I remember going into the living room one day when most of it was gone and she was sitting in a chair crying.”
Buck had no idea what to say.
“I shouldn’t be bothering you with all this,” she said. “Just as though you had nothing else to do with your time besides listen to me talk. Let me hold the lantern for you.”
“I like to hear you talk,” he said. Again there were things he wanted to say he had no words for.
He started rigging his horse.
“Mr. Maxwell?”
He glanced at her.
“Papa is right about Snake Ed.”
He didn’t want to upset the magic moment with her so didn’t respond.
“Please don’t fight him.”
“I doubt I’ll have a choice,” he said reluctantly.
“But you can at least avoid provoking a fight, can’t you?”
“That depends.”
“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business. Good night, Mr. Maxwell.”
Chapter Ten
All the way to town he wanted to go back and reassure Mary Ellen. Yet, what could he tell her? There was nothing he could do to eliminate the potential danger to them.
She wanted him to avoid provoking a fight, but they—and every other settler with them—had already provoked this fight themselves, simply by coming here. No amount of ducking into alleys trying to avoid Snake Ed was going to solve anything now. The choice was clear: stay and fight, or leave.
Clear, but obviously hard for her to face. What could he do to make it easier for her?
He couldn’t, that was all.
And she wanted none of him as long as he held the choice in front of her. “It’s none of my business,” she’d said.
“Good night, Mr. Maxwell,” meant “Goodbye, Mr. Maxwell.”
Those words repeated themselves in his head, stinging like whiskey on a wound every time.
~*~
In the livery, Buck gave his horse a rundown, clean water, some hay and oats. Then he went to Wyoming Hardware, got a lantern going and stepped out to do his nightly rounds.
Just past the corner of the building he came to a sudden halt. The machinery lot was empty.
The perpetrators had not made the slightest effort to cover their tracks. In fact it looked like they wanted him to be able to follow since the trail was plain enough even by a moon past its last quarter.
He stood a moment, a muscle working in his jaw. Then he went inside and loaded the Winchester. He saddled his horse without a word to the sleepy attendant and rode with the Winchester in hand instead of in the saddle scabbard.
They had hauled the stuff across the creek and on west toward the mountains. About a mile out of town they had found a steep rise with a little canyon cutting into it. They’d shoved everything over the edge in a tangled jumble of bent and broken metal.
A blood vessel enlarging in his neck, Buck rode down to look more closely. Hardly anything had escaped at least some bent or broken parts. Over a thousand dollars worth of equipment had been either destroyed or put in need of a lot of repair.
There was nobody around. Buck jabbed the Winchester into its scabbard savagely.
In the dark it wasn’t practical to track them beyond this point. He tried, but had to give it up and go back to town.
There was Olinger’s office. Dark, naturally. There was the Bucket of Blood. Likeliest place to find him.
Buck rode past, looking into the lantern-lit interior. Didn’t see Olinger, or Snake Ed either. No Texans.
The hell with Olinger.
~*~
At the crack of dawn Buck was back in the livery barn, so grim-faced the old liveryman asked who he was planning to kill.
When Buck didn’t respond, the liveryman muttered, “Wish I could be cheerful as you this early in the mornin’.”
Buck rode deliberately past the Bucket of Blood. He thought: You want to step out, Snake? Go right ahead.
Of course, he didn’t. Couldn’t have. The saloon hadn’t even opened yet.
There were only some early-morning teamsters on the street, hats pulled down against the cold, also a few cowhands riding with their hands in their pockets, letting their ponies pick the easiest way along. The breath of men and animals drifted on the still air.
When Buck, barehanded and hard-faced, kicked his mount into a canter in the frost-crusted mud, he drew wary glances.
In daylight the trail of the four wagons around the north end of town and then due east was easy to follow. He rode at a good clip. A few miles out onto open range he found the wagons standing abandoned in a group, empty.
Big farm wagons, in various conditions. He rode around them, then shifted his hat, feeling the sun warm on his face.
“Stole,” he said after a moment’s thought. “Farmers would have took them home.”
Tracks led over the next low rise. A motley assortment of mules and horses grazed the next bottoms, harnesses still on.
“Real cattlemen wouldn’t treat horses that way,” he muttered. He spent half an hour pulling off harnesses and bridles.
From here just six sets of tracks continued east, and a short distance on one set peeled off and headed for town.
“Snake Ed,” Buck said, and spat.
He squinted toward town, debating, then trailed the five horsemen who had continued east.
The tracks led through the hills to their eastern slopes and straight into the dooryard of the Lazy L ranch.
Buck stopped to lift his hat and run a sleeve across his brow—the sun was well up by this time.
Sprawling ranch house, several small outbuildings, a barn under construction, bunkhouse. Corral with the tracks going right through the gate.
Nobody came out to greet him.
Buck settled on the bunkhouse and strode for the door, yanked it open—left-handed to keep his gun hand free.
Halfway down, near the stove, five fancy-booted card players sat around a table. Nobody else in sight.
They appeared to ignore his entrance—though they must have heard him. He strode to within ten feet of the card game before a man across the table glanced up, raised an eyebrow.
“Company, boys,” he said in a smooth, lazy, Texas drawl.
Sardonic faces turned to the visitor.
“Where’s the ramrod?” Buck’s tone was hard but even.
“Who wants to know?” inquired the man across the table, amusement tugging at one corner of his mouth.
“Buck Maxwell.”
Amusement got the better of the tug of war and the man grinned c
rookedly. “Well, now, Mr. Maxwell, what would you be wantin’ him for?”
Buck grinned back without smiling. “If I felt like talking that over with you, I’d be doing it by now.”
“Why, ain’t you a tetchy bastard,” the man said.
“I took Calpet for more of a man than to hide behind hired guns,” Buck said, raising his voice just enough so that if Calpet was in the building somewhere he’d hear it.
The ploy worked. Calpet stepped through a door at the far end of the bunkhouse, stood with his hands on his hips.
“Who the hell ...? Why if it ain’t the granger lovin’ storekeeper from High Plains. I ain’t got no business with you. Git outa here.” He spat.
Buck stepped around the table of card players, but didn’t put his back to them.
“Not yet. There’s more than a thousand dollars worth of my farm machinery in a canyon over west of town.”
“That so. Good goddamn place for it.”
“Ain’t going to happen again.”
“Won’t if no more machinery arrives. It does, though, it won’t be just the machinery gits dumped. You know what I’m tellin’ you?”
“Try it and I’ll kill the lot of you.”
Buck saw a skinning knife hanging on a nail, pulled it out of its sheath, mad enough to ignore the clatter of pistol hammers going back, and used it to stick a piece of paper to a bunk post.
“That’s my bill, Calpet. One thousand, two hundred forty dollars and twenty-nine cents. It’s payable in ten days. In money or blood.”
~*~
Buck didn’t give his horse a break until he was out of the hills, he was so full of rage. Finally he realized what he was asking of the animal and slowed down.
“No call for that,” he apologized aloud.
He reached town by midmorning and fussed over his horse considerably to make up for his thoughtlessness. Then he went along to the store, thinking that people must wonder at his hours.
He found the front door boarded over, with a notice signed by the county sheriff to the effect that the store was closed pending a sale in satisfaction of a lien of the Church Building Committee, and trespassers would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Chapter Eleven
Buck went around back, saw the rear door was also boarded over. In the wagon shed—which had no door—he found a hammer and a length of scrap iron. Five minutes later he was in his quarters.
He lit a fire in the stove and put on the coffeepot. Sitting tipped back in his chair, loaded Winchester across his knees, he thought he’d have his coffee and then clean the boards off the front door, wait to see who’d show up to get his nose shot off.
First there’d be the sheriff. If he was no better liked than Snake Ed, as Parker claimed, nobody’d miss him much. Maybe there’d be a deputy or two to follow up, but if they were owned by the hard-nosed faction of the cattle interests it would be a satisfaction to plant them.
Then there’d be Snake Ed and the Texans, or maybe Calpet.
Well, that battle was coming sooner or later anyway.
As for the Church Committee, they’d had their chance.
He tipped down the last of his coffee, got to his feet. Winchester in hand, he started out the back, picking up the hammer and pry bar on the way.
But he halted at the door, looking at what he had in his hands, hearing Mary Ellen saying, couldn’t he at least avoid provoking a fight?
“Them bastards is provoking me,” he said aloud, vehemently.
But somehow he felt ashamed.
There were all those settlers who had given money for a church. Good men like Allen Parker. Even if there was nothing but idiots on the Committee, the money was still as hard earned as his own.
“It’s their own fault,” he said.
But they were only homesteaders and farmers, not gunfighters. It was asking a lot to expect them to go up against the power of the big cattle interests.
“But that ain’t my business,” he muttered.
Just what Mary Ellen had said. And he was more clearly wrong than she had been. She didn’t need him, but he needed customers.
He went back and sat down, fingered his Winchester.
Suppose he took that Committee out to show them the smashed machinery?
“They wouldn’t even go look,” he said.
He could try, couldn’t he?
He knew it was the right thing to do, and that he would do it, but it took him an hour to actually lay aside the Winchester and start for Hastings’.
~*~
Hastings seemed nervous.
“What can I do for you?” he asked warily.
“You know about the machinery?”
“I noticed it was gone.” Hastings paused. “I’ve been asked to tell you that the Committee holds you responsible for the whereabouts of that equipment.” He swallowed.
“That was vigilance committee work. Ain’t only your committee’s been busy hereabouts lately.”
“Vigilance committee. What vigilance committee?”
“Some say that’s what they call themselves. Snake Ed and five hired Texas gunhands. They hove the machinery into a little canyon west of town about a mile. Maybe they got some out-of-work cowhands from saloons to do the heavy work for them. You come with me, I’ll show you.”
“I think I know the men you mean,” Hastings said thoughtfully. “How do you know they did it?”
“Tracked them to the Lazy L.” He told what had happened there.
Hastings got up, furrows deepening on his brow.
“Show me,” he said.
~*~
When he was shown he swore—startling coming from him.
“We can’t stand for this,” he said.
“I won’t, if it’s still my store,” Buck said. “If it’s yours you’d better be ready to shoot back. I don’t think Calpet was making an idle threat.”
Hastings grew a little pale, studying Buck’s impassive expression. “I think we’ve got to have another meeting right away. I don’t know if the others realize what we’ve taken on.”
Buck smiled a bit grimly. “I’m sure they don’t,” he said.
“This is a hell of mess, Mr. Maxwell.”
“Yep. There’s wagons and horses over east on the range. Somebody must be missing them.”
“I’ll spread the word. Mr. Maxwell, if you will promise to apologize for making that threat I will try to convince the Committee to accept your offer to repay in five years.”
“All right.”
~*~
When they returned to town a large but not fat man wearing a tin star pushed off an awning pole and stepped in front of Buck, gun drawn.
“Hello, Sheriff,” Hastings said, nervously, but the sheriff ignored him.
“You Buck Maxwell?” he asked in an official tone.
“That’s right,” said Buck, facing the man squarely, looking him in the eye.
“You’re under arrest.”
The veins in Buck’s neck bulged. “What for?”
“Breaking and entering.”
“If you mean the store, I went inside because that’s where I live.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Hastings said, worried. “It’ll only complicate things. Thank you, Sheriff, but I’ll deal with Mr. Maxwell.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ to do with it,” the sheriff said shortly. “Hands up, Maxwell.”
Buck’s right fist flashed like lightning, connected with the sheriff’s jaw. The gun went off, but Buck wasn’t in the way by that time, and as the sheriff staggered backwards, Buck kicked the pistol free with such force that it sailed forty feet down the board sidewalk, while the sheriff landed in the mud.
“Now,” Buck said, his own Colt in hand, standing over the somewhat dazed sheriff. “You get on your horse and ride out of here. Don’t come back unless you want a gun battle.”
The sheriff was sitting up, feeling of his chin, the surprised look turning dark. He slowly got up, picked his hat out
of the mud, and eyed Buck malevolently.
But he didn’t say a word. He looked around for his gun, saw it, and glanced at Buck. Buck nodded and the sheriff went and got the .38, picking it up carefully. He had to knock the mud out of his holster before he could put the weapon away.
Buck kept him covered until he’d mounted a big bay horse and started south out of town.
When the sheriff was seventy-five yards down the street, Buck holstered his Colt.
“Sheriff!” he yelled.
He waited until the man looked around, then drew and fired.
The sheriff’s muddy hat lifted, fell into the street.
When the sheriff drew, Buck shot the gun out of his hand.
Buck holstered his .45 once more, stood with his hands on his hips until the sheriff had once again retrieved his hat and gun from the mud and remounted.
Buck let him leave town without further interference.
Hastings was white as a fish belly.
“Sorry,” Buck said. “Just not in the mood to be arrested.”
“I ... I ... Mr. Maxwell, that was astonishing. I can’t believe you got away with that. Sheriff Markham had his gun aimed right at you.”
“Lucky, I guess,” Buck said, knowing it wasn’t entirely luck. He’d done something similar on a couple of other occasions.
“That was amazing shooting, but why did you do it?”
“Want him to think twice before he comes back.”
“He’ll just bring help.”
“Maybe.”
“When he does come he’ll try to kill you, not arrest you.”
“Wouldn’t expect nothing else.”
“You aren’t worried about that?”
“I got plenty to worry about besides him. Like getting my store back. And,” he added, “getting back your church money.”
Hastings looked at him with new interest. “How do you mean that, Mr. Maxwell?”
“I mean, Hastings, that I am going to see to it you have money to build a church, one way or another, sooner or later.”
“I believe you’re a better man than I took you for.”
~*~
Hastings managed to get the Committee together shortly after noon, again in his office. Gabriel Tole was annoyed.
“What the devil’s the meaning of this, Hastings?” he demanded, without even waiting for the meeting to be called to order. “We’ve voted twice. Ain’t it plain we don’t want to do it? Or is he offering to buy the store back with Stock Growers’ Association money? The answer is no, as far as I’m concerned.”