Slim took off his hat. “Sure, old man. But you wouldn’t begrudge a fellow a chance to wet his whistle at your pump over there, would you?”
“Yes, I would,” Pike said, taking a step out onto the porch and raising his shotgun to his shoulder.
From his vantage point partially behind the slim rider, Wolf saw the small .22 caliber, seven-shot Smith & Wesson revolver Slim had stashed in the crown of his flat-crowned Stetson. As the man reached in for it, Wolf lifted his Winchester, sighted and fired.
The Smith & Wesson exploded from Slim’s hand, carrying one of Slim’s fingers with it and ripping a large hole in the crown of the man’s hat. He let out a yell, grabbed for his reins with his good hand, and wheeled his horse around to face Wolf’s Winchester. The three other horsemen spun their mounts also, their Colts out now, their blued barrels gleaming dully in the bright sun.
Another shot came from the other side as Ben shot a Colt from a puncher’s suddenly bloodied hand. At the same time Pike let one of his barrels go, aiming not too high over the four riders’ heads. Some of the buckshot spread far enough to catch a few of them in the neck and face. In total confusion they turned their mounts to face Pike again and found him standing there with his shotgun leveled, waiting to touch off the second barrel.
“Looks like you galoots are surrounded,” Pike said, grinning happily.
“Drop your guns and raise your hands,” barked Wolf from the barn window. “All of you!”
The four did as they were bid. Wolf left the window and moved quickly out of the barn. Ben left his vantage point at the same time. He had been hidden in deep grass behind a cottonwood.
“We’ve been thinking,” Wolf told them.
“That’s right,” said Pike, still grinning happily as he stepped off the porch to join Wolf and Ben. Pike glanced at the boy. “You want to tell them, Ben?”
The boy’s face remained hard as he spoke up. “You sons of bitches have been deviling us—so we’re going to teach you a lesson. Get down off your horses. Pronto!”
All four of the men were bloodied. Slim was nursing a hand that contained one less finger than he had when he rode into the yard, another had a shattered hand where Ben’s slug had caught him, and all of them were bleeding about the neck and face from buckshot. They were a sorry lot of cowboys as they dismounted and huddled unhappily in front of their mounts.
“We’ve been losing a lot of cattle lately,” Pike said. “So we’re going to take your mounts and send you back to the Snake Bar on foot.”
“You gotta let us fix ourselves up first!” bleated the fellow with the damaged hand. He was a fat cowpuncher with small, close-set eyes. Earlier he had been the one enjoying Pike’s supposed discomfiture the most. “We’ll bleed to death!”
“Fine,” said Wolf quietly. “That’s just about what we had in mind for you coyotes. One more thing, take off your boots.”
A look of pure dismay passed over all four faces. Wolf smiled grimly. A cowboy’s boots were custom made usually, costing more often than not fifty dollars a pair—two months’ wages at least. Along with a man’s saddle and hat, his boots were his most prized possession.
“Now listen here,” cried Slim. “Ain’t you fellers done enough?”
“Not nearly,” said Ben coldly. “You’re still alive, ain’t you? That sure as hell don’t please me none. Now get those boots off!”
Without further argument the four punchers struggled out of their boots, then stood there in front of their mounts. Without their boots on, they seemed a bit short, somewhat more vulnerable.
“Hold them there,” said Ben. “My horse is already saddled.”
A moment later Ben, a Colt belted to his narrow boy’s waist and his Winchester across the pommel, trotted his horse out of the barn. Grimly he rode up to the men.
“Okay, you fellows. I’ll give you a start. We’ll go the long way back to the Snake Bar—through the pass. Start walking!”
The four men looked as if they were about to protest once more, but when they saw the murderous gleam in the boy’s eyes, they gave up and—cursing bitterly—they started to trudge out of the yard, Ben keeping his horse a good ten feet behind them.
“You be careful now,” Pike called to Ben.
The boy didn’t bother to answer as he kept his eyes on the four unhappy men.
Pike looked at Wolf, pleasure mixed with concern in the old man’s eyes. “I’m worried about that boy, Wolf. Real worried. He’s hard now—bitter.”
“Does anyone have a better right?”
Pike nodded wearily. “You got a point, I guess. But I think maybe I got some help on the way.”
“That so?”
“My daughter, Betsy—widowed these past two years. She’s been living alone in St. Louis. I sent for her not long ago. She’s due on the noon stage tomorrow in Willow Bend.”
“You think she’ll gentle the boy some, do you?”
Pike grinned. “Not only the boy. Me too. And the house needs a woman’s hand—needs it real bad.”
Wolf nodded. The old man was right, of course. He had noticed it himself the moment he stepped into the cabin. But they had problems at the Double B that ran a little deeper than that. It would take more than a woman’s hand to gentle Blackmann and his boys, especially if Blackmann was the man Wolf knew him to be.
Earlier, before the four riders had reached the yard, Pike and Wolf had decided that after they bushwhacked the riders Pike should check the cattle grazing on the west rim while Wolf took back the Snake Bar horses so no charges of horse-stealing could be brought. It wasn’t the horses they were after—it was the loss of face.
Wolf mounted up soon after the boy disappeared from sight in the deep grass and started out for the Snake Bar spread, leading the four saddled horses behind him. Pike had given him careful directions. Wolf was to ride the length of Snake Valley, following Snake Creek; then at a large cedar brake he was to cut south over some low hills to the Snake Bar ranch.
Wolf had insisted on making the trip himself without explaining to Pike why he wanted to visit John Blackmann and the Snake Bar. It was more than curiosity. It had something to do with a promise he had made somebody—a promise he had vowed to keep.
Two
Big John Blackmann was a religious man. He allowed no false gods before him. He feared the Great God Jehovah—as he feared Satan. What bothered him at the moment was the suspicion that his Lord was using him as He had once used Job.
Like Job, he had prospered mightily. Into this land of milk and honey he had come almost twenty years before. Besting the Indians and the winters one by one, he had triumphed and prospered. But now the little people were swarming into his land. If they were not staking claims to parts of his open range, they were shipping in barbed wire and fencing off vast tracts, isolating his herds, disrupting his business. If Job had boils; Big John Blackmann had barbed wire.
Dressed all in black, including his Stetson, with the only white showing his starched collar, Blackmann was sitting on the verandah of his ranch house in a high-backed mahogany chair, a gaunt man with a bushy white mustache, his two eyes slivers of blue ice as he peered into the bright sunlight about him. From where he sat he could see once again how carefully he had laid out his corrals and outbuildings. Behind him he could feel the weight of the house. It towered over him, dominating him as it was meant to dominate all those who rode in and saw what he had wrought in the midst of a wilderness.
He had built it in the style of a Spanish hacienda. Its surface was white-painted stucco over adobe, the building itself deliberately massive, with a broad verandah and spacious wings on both sides, roofed with red tile. It was an unusually solid house for this northern climate, but it was meant to be the start of a dynasty.
And that part of his dream also was becoming an affliction. His son was not strong. The boy found excuses for the enemies of Snake Bar. He was filled with silly concerns. He did not understand what had to be done to wrest a living from this land. This was a tough co
untry—despite its present benign aspect—and it needed tough men to survive in it.
Still, there was much in his son that he loved. He thought then of the boy’s mother and something sharp and ugly twisted inside of him. Could all that have been the work of Satan, he wondered almost desperately.
He was about to pick up his Bible and continue his reading when a horse clattered in the main gate and brought its rider to a sliding halt in front of the ranch house. Blackmann got out of his chair and waited while his foreman dismounted and hurried up onto the porch.
“What is it, Clint?” Blackmann demanded. “It must be pretty damned important to make you lather a horse like that.”
“It is.”
“Well, then?”
“Mark Donnelly and his whole damn brood—they’ve left Willow Bend! They left in a wagon loaded with all their earthly belongings.” He grinned ironically. “That is, all they were able to rescue from that terrible fire last week. The word is they’re on their way to California.”
Blackmann sat back down and looked almost fondly at his foreman. Clint Lassiter had been with Blackmann from the beginning. He was a red-faced, bluff man with few niceties—as subtle as a meat-ax in most things. Nor did Blackmann kid himself: Clint was as loyal as it served his own best interests to be.
Another affliction, Blackmann thought grimly.
But this was good news, good news indeed! “I’ll be riding in to Willow Bend tomorrow, Clint, for a visit to the land office.” He allowed himself a smile. “This means clear land all the way to the Sweet Water.”
“All it leaves is those damn Hansons.”
“They won’t be lasting much longer.” Blackmann looked closely at his foreman. “Who did you send over today?”
“Slim and three others.”
“Which others?”
Lassiter gave Blackmann their names.
Blackmann nodded. “That should do it. That old man and his kid won’t be able to hold out much longer. It was too bad about the boy’s parents, but there’s nothing we can do about that now.” As Blackmann spoke, he fingered the Bible nervously.
Lassiter noticed the action and smiled grimly. “You got anything in the Good Book that covers that business, John?”
“It’s there, damn you, Lassiter,” Blackmann said. “It’s there. Them that lives by the sword dies by the sword. That boy’s father came after one of my men with a gun. You know that as well as I do.”
“That’s right, John. Just about every crime in the book is in that one too.”
“Your blasphemy is a stench in the nostrils of a just God, Lassiter—and mine as well.”
Lassiter shook his head admiringly. “You sure do have a way with words, Blackmann. Yes, you do.”
Blackmann looked at his foreman with an almost virulent dislike. Yes, the man was an affliction. But one that had to be borne stoically, until God in His wisdom saw fit to smite the heathen. And that time would come. Of that Blackmann had no doubt.
“There’s something else,” Lassiter said.
“Out with it.”
“The kid.”
“What’s he done now?”
“He got into a brawl last night at Fat Sal’s. Sal had to call the sheriff.”
“Dundee? My God! What did the kid do to him?”
“He was too far gone in his cups to do anything, but Dundee sweated off a couple of pounds at least at the thought. Anyway, the kid’s in jail right now, cooling it off.”
Blackmann shook his head admiringly, his eyes alight at the mention of the kid’s latest exploit. It reminded him of his own reckless youth—before he found the Good Book. Wild oats, that’s all it was. Just wild oats. It was too bad his son didn’t have the kid’s toughness. But maybe Josh would learn. That was one reason why he kept the kid on—that along with the fact that he could count on the kid when he could count on no one else—not even Lassiter.
“You go back to town, Lassiter,” Blackmann said, “and tell Slick to let the kid out as soon as he’s got his cobwebs cleared. Then send the kid straight back to the Snake Bar. Any damages to Sal’s place I’ll make good, long as she don’t pile it on.”
“You want me to go right now?”
“You got anything better to do?”
“I’m hungry. Haven’t eaten since this morning. Besides, Blackmann, I’m your foreman. You can send someone else.”
“Not to Slick Dundee I can’t. Go see Cookie. Then get back on your horse. I don’t want the kid to think we ain’t standing by him.”
Lassiter was about to say something, but evidently thought better of it when he caught the glint in Blackmann’s eyes. He swung his massive frame around savagely and strode angrily off the porch in the direction of the cook shack.
Blackmann watched the man’s angry departure with a deep, almost sensuous satisfaction. Lassiter and he were doomed to spend the rest of their journey through this life in the same confining traces. They both knew enough to hang the other. It meant for a grim partnership and it was at times like this that the relationship had its compensations. It wasn’t that he hated Lassiter. It was more terrible than that. He just understood the man perfectly—and Lassiter, he knew, understood him with the same withering clarity.
Blackmann was about to return to his Bible for the second time when he caught sight of the rider emerging from the grove of giant old cottonwoods that fronted the creek watering the west pasture. He stood up to get a better view of the rider and saw that the fellow was leading four horses, each one fully saddled. The man rode tall in the saddle and was wearing a black Stetson, a red shirt with a black vest. The black he rode was a handsome animal and it was obvious the rider’s horsemanship was equal to the horse.
When the rider got closer Blackmann noticed an odd tilt to the fellow’s broad shoulders and a ravaged face that startled him with its ugliness. He wore a black eye patch over his right eye and had a sunken cleft of a scar running from the eye all the way back to the ear, giving that side of his face a crooked, stove-in appearance.
Blackmann reached out and clanged the triangle. The Snake Bar had a visitor.
Joshua left the blacksmith’s shop on the run. As he rounded the corner of the house, he saw Lassiter hurrying toward his father as well. The foreman was coming from the direction of the cook shack, still chewing on a mouthful.
“What is it, Pa?” Joshua asked as he mounted the porch steps.
“We got ourselves a visitor,” his father said, pointing to the approaching rider.
Joshua and Lassiter both turned to see him. Joshua found the stranger’s face to be exceedingly ugly in a powerful, not unpleasant way and was immediately intrigued by the fact that he was leading four riderless, but fully-saddled horses.
“Looks like he’s just returning some horses, Pa,” Joshua said.
“That’s right,” said Lassiter. “And those look like Snake Bar horses. What I’d like to know is where the hell he got them.”
A few more cowhands had hurried from the bunkhouses and the livery and now they gathered in front of the verandah to watch as the strange rider led the four horses in through the main gate. He rode toward them across the yard, his lean ugliness more striking to Joshua the closer he rode.
The rider pulled up in front of them and dropped the reins to the four horses and smiled coldly at Joshua’s father. “Name’s Caulder,” he said. “Wolf Caulder. You don’t know me, Blackmann—but I guess I know you.” He spoke as if this fact gave him no pleasure at all. “Anyway I’m bringing back some horseflesh that belongs to the Snake Bar.”
“Where the hell did you get them, mister?” Lassiter wanted to know.
“Four Snake Bar riders left them off at the Double B,” Caulder replied coolly. “They’ll be along to claim them soon enough. Should get in here before nightfall—though it looks like they’ll miss supper. They’re walking. One more thing. If they want their boots, they’ll find them in the saddle bags.”
Joshua was unable to make sense of this—until he saw the qui
ck look that passed between Lassiter and his father. Then he realized at once what had happened. His father had sent those four men to the Double B to roust the old man and the boy. Joshua didn’t like that. He knew he was supposed to think it was a fine idea. But he still did not like it. There had to be a better way than that to get rid of the Hansons.
Then he looked back up at this arrogant and exceedingly ugly horseman and found himself smiling. “I don’t imagine those fellows were any too anxious to walk back to the Snake Bar, Caulder. Hope you went easy on them. They were just hurrahing is all.”
“Maybe so, young man,” Caulder replied. “But if they—or any other Snake Bar rider—comes to Double B for that purpose again, he’ll return draped over his saddle. That’s a promise.” Caulder looked away from Joshua and back to Joshua’s father, his one eye appearing to bore into his father’s very soul; it was a glance that revealed an unaccountably fierce, smoldering hatred. “That promise goes for you too, Blackmann. Keep your dogs to home, or I’ll hold you personally responsible.”
Then he smiled, a grim, crooked smile that sent a chill down Joshua’s back. Who was this man? Had Pike Hanson hired himself a gunslinger?
Joshua took a step forward. “Mister,” he said, “when you threaten my father, you threaten every man here. You’d best ride on out of here and keep right on going.”
Josh felt his father’s hand on his shoulder as the man stepped up beside Joshua and straightened to his full six feet, staring back at Caulder with a bleak ferocity. “You heard my son, Caulder. He spoke the truth. So now I’m going to issue you a warning. Ride onto Snake Bar land one more time and it’ll be your last.”
The man who called himself Wolf Caulder nodded curtly to Joshua’s father, then turned his head and looked down with sudden concern at Joshua. “You’re Blackmann’s son?” he asked.
Taken by surprise, Joshua nodded.
“Then you’d be Josh—if I’m not mistaken.”
Joshua frowned. “That’s my name. Yes. So what about it?”
Caulder’s face softened. He seemed to take a deep breath. “Nothing, Josh.” He pulled his black around. “Nothing at all.”
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