Bloody Trail

by Ford Fargo

  After a while, Blackfeather motioned for them to stop. He handed his reins to the sheriff and said, "I'll crawl up there and take a look, see just how close we are."

  Satterlee handed both sets of reins to McCain, took off his hat, and hung it on his saddlehorn.

  "You're comin' with me?" Blackfeather guessed.

  "That's right."

  The two men started up the rise in a crouch, then dropped to hands and knees and finally to their bellies as they crawled the last few feet. At the top, they peered through the grass and Satterlee saw the buildings of the Mallory ranch about three hundred yards away.

  As they watched, a man came out of the barn and strode toward the back door of the house.

  "That ain't Mallory," Blackfeather said quietly as the man went inside.

  "I know. Must be one of the outlaws. Think you can get down there and back without anybody seein' you?"

  "There's a chance, anyway."

  "If you can find out how many there are, and where they are, we'll have a better chance when we go in."

  Blackfeather nodded. "And if I have the chance to slit a throat here and there?"

  Satterlee grinned and said, "Hell, go ahead and kill all of ‘em if you can, I don't care. Although it might be a good idea to keep one of them alive until we can ask him some questions."

  "That was my intent back at the ambush, too, and it didn’t work out so good. But I'll do the best I can, Sheriff."

  "I know you will, Charley. I wish you luck along the way, too. If we hear a ruckus break out, we'll come a-runnin'."

  Blackfeather crawled over the top of the ridge and slithered through the tall grass. Within moments, Satterlee couldn't see him anymore. The grass swayed a little here and there, but with the breezes that swept across the prairie, that was common.

  Satterlee looked over his shoulder at McCain and nodded to let the man know that everything was all right so far. He had sensed a certain amount of tension between Blackfeather and McCain, especially when he'd picked McCain to come along with them on this foray. Maybe McCain didn't care for Indians or black folks—or both—and the Seminole knew that.

  It didn't matter to Satterlee how they got along back in town, as long as they were able to work together out here. So far, that hadn't been a problem.

  Time dragged. Satterlee looked up at the sun. It was getting on toward mid-afternoon now, and the Danby gang was getting farther away with each passing minute. Unless, of course, they were all holed up down there at the Mallory spread, which seemed unlikely to Satterlee.

  That thought had just crossed his mind when he spotted Charley Blackfeather at the rear corner of the barn. Blackfeather bent and slipped between the poles of the corral. He intended to sneak into the barn that way, Satterlee realized. He was impressed that Blackfeather had been able to get down there from up here without ever being visible along the way.

  Blackfeather hadn't been inside the barn for more than a minute or two when shots began to roar.

  Satterlee twisted around and barked at McCain, "Bring the horses!"

  McCain ran up the rise, leading the horses. When he reached the top, the two men swung into their saddles. Satterlee drew his gun and McCain did likewise. The sheriff kicked his mount into a run and thundered down the slope toward the buildings. McCain was close behind him.

  The man who had gone inside earlier came running out the back door of the house, saw the riders galloping toward him, and flung up his hand with a gun in it. Smoke and flame erupted from the barrel as he triggered several shots. The range was too great for a handgun, though, and Satterlee knew the man's bullets were falling short. He held his fire, and McCain followed his example.

  Charley Blackfeather burst out of the barn, twisting to fire back into the sod building. Blackfeather lost his footing in the hurried action and fell. A man who came out of the barn behind him stopped and drew a bead on him with a revolver.

  Derrick McCain suddenly surged past Satterlee as they neared the ranch buildings. The gun in the young man's hand blasted. His shot missed, but it came close enough to the head of the man who was about to fire at Blackfeather that it made him jerk as he squeezed the trigger. The slug kicked up dust several feet to Blackfeather's left.

  McCain was practically on top of the gunman by now. He kicked his feet free of the stirrups and dived out of the saddle, crashing into the man and driving him off his feet. Both of them sprawled in the dirt of the yard between the house and the barn.

  The man who had come out of the house turned to run, now, as Satterlee closed in on him. He twisted halfway around and flung a shot at Satterlee as he fled. Satterlee thrust his revolver out in front of him and fired.

  The bullet slammed into the running man's back and lifted him off his feet. Momentum carried him forward another yard or two before he landed face-first on the ground with his arms flung out on his sides. Satterlee covered the man as he reined in.

  Off to the side, McCain struggled with the man he had tackled. The man was bigger than McCain and was able to throw him off. He had dropped his gun, but as he rolled away from McCain he slapped his hand down on the butt and snatched up the weapon. He came up and pointed it toward McCain.

  Before he could fire, a grisly thud sounded. Charley Blackfeather's tomahawk had hit him in the back of the head, splitting his skull and driving into his brain. The dying man dropped his gun and pitched forward. After a few grotesque twitches, he lay still.

  Satterlee saw that from the corner of his eye as he approached the man he'd shot. That hombre hadn't budged since he fell, and Satterlee was pretty sure he was dead. From the looks of the bloodstain on the back of the man's shirt, Satterlee's bullet had blown right through his heart. It paid to be careful, though, so Satterlee kept his gun pointed at the fallen man until he was able to get a boot toe under his shoulder and roll him over.

  The man's eyes stared up sightlessly from a rough, unshaven face.

  "Is the other one dead, Charley?" Satterlee called without looking around.

  "Dead as he can be," Blackfeather replied.

  "Are there any more of ‘em?"

  "I don't—" Blackfeather began, but before he could finish the back door of the ranch house flew open again, and Ezra Mallory stumbled out.

  "Don't shoot!" Mallory cried as he came toward Satterlee, Blackfeather, and McCain. He held his empty hands out in front of him. "There's another one inside! He's got my wife! You've got to help her!"

  Satterlee lowered his gun and used his other hand to grab the arm of the panic-stricken rancher.

  "Where are they?" he asked.

  "Inside and to the right," Mallory said. "He—he's wounded, that's why they left him here, but he's still got a gun—"

  Satterlee shoved Mallory toward McCain, who had gotten to his feet and retrieved his gun.

  "Keep him here," Satterlee told McCain. The sheriff was growing tired of hysterical husbands and outlaws who hid behind women.

  They approached the house cautiously and eased their way inside. Satterlee stood still and listened. He heard some muffled sobs coming from an open door down a short hallway to the right, as Mallory had said. Satterlee silently motioned for Blackfeather to follow, and started along that corridor.

  A floorboard creaked under his feet. From inside the room, a man's strained voice called, "I hear you out there! Who's there, damn it? Parker? Drake?"

  "Your pards have gone over the Divide, mister," Satterlee replied. "You might as well surrender if you don't want to wind up just like them."

  A moment of tense silence went by. Then the man said, "You're a blasted lawman, aren't you? You were with that posse from Wolf Creek."

  "That's right. Sheriff G.W. Satterlee. If you surrender—"

  "Surrender, hell! So you can take me back and hang me?" A fit of coughing came from the man before he resumed, "Anyway, I won't live that long. So you just come on in here, Sheriff. I got me a hankerin' to kill one more damn star packer before I—before I die."

  "Shot in th
e lungs, aren't you?" Satterlee asked. "I can hear you wheezin' from out here, son. Why should I step in there and let you shoot me when I can just wait out here for you to die?"

  Satterlee figured he knew the answer, and sure enough, the outlaw said, "Because if you don't—I'll kill this woman!"

  A pained cry came from a female throat. Satterlee's jaw tightened at the sound.

  "Let her go," he urged. "Once she's out of there, maybe we can help you. You might not be hurt as bad as you think, and we've got a doctor with us."

  That last was a lie, of course. By now, Doc Munro ought to be well on his way back to Wolf Creek with the wounded men. But this low-life owlhoot wouldn't have any way of knowing that.

  "Forget it," the man said. "You come in here now, or I—I'll kill her, I swear it."

  "Hold on, hold on," Satterlee muttered. He looked back over his shoulder at Blackfeather and motioned for the Seminole to stay where he was. Blackfeather shook his head stubbornly, but Satterlee made a curt gesture to reinforce the order.

  "All right," he told the outlaw. "I'm comin' in."

  It was only about five steps to the door. Five long steps, Satterlee thought as he started in that direction. His heart slugged hard inside his chest. He had planned to serve as sheriff for a while, maybe two or three more terms if he could keep convincing the voters to elect him, then find himself some nice widow woman to marry and retire. Maybe buy a store or something. He'd spent too blasted long in jobs where, from time to time, he got shot at.

  Those plans might not work out. Be a shame if they didn't. But there was nothing he could do, now, except go ahead.

  From inside the room, the woman called, "Sheriff, I—I think he's dead!"

  Satterlee started to relax and step into the open doorway, then instinct warned him this might be a trick. The outlaw could have whispered to the woman what he wanted her to say, figuring it would make Satterlee drop his guard.

  Instead, Satterlee went around the edge of the door low and fast, and when a gun roared deafeningly, he wasn't surprised. The bullet flew over his head, through the door, and ripped a gouge in the wallpaper on the other side of the hall. Satterlee's eyes took in the scene instantly: the bed where the wounded outlaw lay, bloody bandages wrapped around his bare chest, the pale-faced, terrified woman who lay next to him with his left arm looped around her neck, choking her. The outlaw was fumbling at his gun, trying to cock it again after missing his first shot.

  With the woman right there, Satterlee didn't want to do any shooting of his own. Instead he leaped across the room and struck the wrist of the man's gun hand with the barrel of his gun. Bone snapped under the impact. The outlaw yelled in pain as his fingers went limp and the gun butt slid out of them.

  Satterlee put the muzzle of his gun against the man's forehead. He trembled a little from the urge to pull the trigger. Instead of doing that, he said, "Let the lady go—now!"

  The outlaw's arm fell away from the woman's neck. She lunged to her feet and ran from the room, crying hysterically, as the reaction hit her now that she was safe. The sheriff mentally heaved a sigh of relief, himself—he hadn’t failed the Mallorys like he did the Haskins family.

  Satterlee said, "Only reason I'm not blowin' your brains out right now, mister, is because I don't want to ruin that poor woman's sheets. I figure she's suffered enough just from bein' around you animals."

  The outlaw swallowed hard but looked up at Satterlee with defiance in his eyes. "Do it!" he urged. "I'm gonna die anyway!"

  "Damn right you are." Satterlee drew in a deep breath. "But not before you tell us where Jim Danby's hideout is."

  "You can go to—"

  A footstep sounded at the doorway behind Satterlee. "That you, Charley?" he asked.

  "Yeah, Sheriff," Blackfeather replied, stepping into the room.

  "You see my friend here?" Satterlee asked the outlaw. "He's half black, half Injun. That means there's nothin' he likes better than carvin' on a white man with a knife. Am I right, Charley?"

  Blackfeather just grunted in obvious agreement.

  "So you can talk, or I'll just walk out of here and leave you with him," Satterlee went on. "I'm bettin' he can find out what I want to know."

  Blackfeather stepped up beside Satterlee with his razor-sharp knife in his hand.

  Satterlee knew from the terror he saw in the outlaw's eyes that he was going to get the answers he wanted.

  * * *

  "First you make out that I'm simple-minded, and then you go around tellin' folks that I'm some sort of crazy savage," Blackfeather said with a faint smile as they rode away from the Mallory ranch. "I'm gonna start to think you don't like me, Sheriff."

  "There's nobody I'd rather have along with me on this hunt, Charley," Satterlee told him honestly. "Nobody at all."

  The wounded outlaw had died a short time after babbling out the general location of Danby's hideout down in Indian Territory—the Sans Bois Mountains, down in the Choctaw Nation. They got nothing more specific from him. He'd been badly hurt, slowly drowning in his own blood from the bullet he had taken during the raid on Wolf Creek. Mallory had explained that the whole gang had stopped to steal what money and supplies were on hand at the ranch, along with swapping a few of their horses. The wounded man hadn't been able to go on any farther, so Danby figured to leave him there to die. The other two, Parker and Drake, were good friends of his, so they'd offered to stay behind and bury him when he was gone, then catch up to the rest of the gang.

  They wouldn't be doing any catching up now. Instead, Mallory would be burying all three of them, although Satterlee told him it would be all right to drag the carcasses well away from the house and leave them for the scavengers. Whichever the rancher decided to do, Satterlee didn't care.

  Now, the posse was reunited and moving fast, following the tracks of the remaining outlaws. The odds weren't even yet, but they were closer. Unless there were more members of the gang waiting at the hideout, which was entirely possible, Satterlee reminded himself.

  Now that they had a pretty good idea of the general area Danby was bound for, Satterlee was willing to risk riding part of the night. He called a short halt at dusk to let horses and men rest and eat a skimpy supper. When the moon rose and spilled its silvery light across the prairie, they pushed on.

  That was the way it continued all night, until finally everyone was too weary to keep going. They rested for several hours then, and took up the chase again early the next morning, as soon as there was enough gray light in the sky for them to see where they were going.

  "The tracks are fresher," Charley Blackfeather said after the sun was up. "We made up a little ground on ‘em."

  "That's good," Satterlee said, but a sinking feeling had begun to grow stronger inside him. He had a decision coming up, and he didn't like it.

  At mid-morning, the posse came to a broad, shallow river lined with grassy, sandy banks. Satterlee reined in, rested his hands on the saddlehorn, and leaned forward to ease weary muscles. There was no easing what was in his mind, though.

  "That's the Cimarron, isn't it, Charley?"

  "Yeah," Blackfeather said. "You know what that means, Sheriff."

  It wasn't really a question, but Satterlee said, "Yeah, I do. We crossed over into Indian Territory a while back. I'm out of my jurisdiction now, and that means we ain’t legal anymore. I’m entitled to lead a posse through other Kansas counties in pursuit of criminals, but not into the Nations."

  "Legal or not," Billy Below said, "we ain't turnin' back, are we, Sheriff?"

  "We know where their hideout is now," Rob Gallagher added. "At least, we have a pretty good idea."

  "I don't have any choice," Satterlee said, a harsh note of anger and frustration entering his voice. "I'm sworn to uphold the law. I can't go any farther. This is a matter for somebody else now."

  "The Indian police don't have any authority over white men," Blackfeather pointed out. "The only ones who do in Indian Territory are the deputy U.S. marshals who work out of
Fort Smith, and that's a long way from here."

  "I can get word to them," Satterlee said. "Let them know where Danby's holed up."

  "By that time, they may not be there anymore," McCain argued.

  "What you’re sayin' is true," Satterlee said, "but it doesn’t change anything. We're goin' back."

  "No," Blackfeather said quietly. "I don't think we are."

  Satterlee looked around at the other men. All five of them wore grim, determined expressions, even the normally happy-go-lucky Billy Below.

  "I can't let you—" Satterlee began.

  "You can't stop us," Sweeney interrupted. "You said it yourself, Sheriff. You don't have any jurisdiction here."

  Satterlee's mouth twisted bitterly. They were right. He couldn't stop them from continuing to pursue the outlaws.

  And it was eating at his guts that he couldn't join them.

  "All right," he said. "But if you go on, you'll be renegades, too, in the eyes of the law."

  Blackfeather shrugged. "I reckon we'll risk it." He lifted his reins and turned his horse. "So long, Sheriff."

  "You could wish us luck if you wanted to, Sheriff," Gallagher said.

  Satterlee just sat his horse in stolid silence as the others fell in behind Blackfeather and headed south.

  Then he whispered, "Good luck," and turned his own horse back to the north. He rode in that direction, shoulders slumped.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The posse—some of them far too citified to Spike’s way of thinking—had surprised him, and proven their mettle when they came up against some of the raiders. There’d already been plenty of blood spilled, and many would have turned tail, but these fellas had all hung on and seemed to still have their teeth sharp.

  Since entering the Indian territories they’d ridden hard, covering thirty miles or more while the big scout, Blackfeather, had tracked, sometimes at a lope. They’d traded off dragging two pack mules, each loaded with hard tack, jerky, bacon, dried beans, and extra ammunition. Kansas grass as far as the eye could see had become ravines flanked with red oak, post oak, white cedar, and shortleaf and loblolly pine, with occasional thickets of dogwood lining those cuts hiding creeks. Even with the country getting thicker, but still hard-surfaced, Blackfeather could conjure up more sign while mounted than most men with their nose to the ground. It had been a hell of a lot of miles to cover, considering the rain hadn’t blessed the country for a good long time, and the ground was hard as the hubs of hell. But they’d finally staked out the stock and rolled out blankets under some post and red oaks near a trickle of muddy water, downed some jerky and hardtack, and were now watching the moon do a slow climb to the east, each in their own thoughts.