He grabbed his Colt before his eyes were all the way open, sat bolt upright, and swung the muzzle straight into the face of the intruder.
He checked himself just in time. It was a dog. A dog was staring at him, its mouth open in a grin and its tongue lolling. A dog with blue eyes, which he had mistaken for wolf yellow.
The dog just sat there, looking at him. Panting softly, expelling faint clouds of vapor, it appeared to be smiling at him—maybe laughing at an old man for being so dad-blamed jumpy.
Monahan slowly lowered his pistol.
The dog barked softy, just once, pushing out only enough air with the utterance to flutter its lips.
“Funny,” Monahan muttered. “You’re a real card. Go home.” He put his gun away.
The dog continued to look at him.
“Well, now that you woke me up, I gotta piss,” he stated crankily, and then wondered why the hell he was talking to a dog when he didn’t much like talking to people.
He stood up slowly, checking the trees ringing the old beaver meadow in which he’d made camp, and found nothing out of the ordinary. At least, there was no sign of those hounds-on-a-scent, the Baylor boys, and that was a blessing.
The morning air in the mountains was still cold and crisp, which was hard on the bones of a man who had a lot more miles behind him than in front of him. Seemed like it took forever to get his liver-spotted old body awake anymore, since it didn’t wake all at one time. Aside from the general soreness he attributed to too many years of sleeping on hard ground, there were his old wounds.
His left shoulder woke first with a sharp, quick stab fading to a dull, lingering ache, where he’d taken two Mescalero arrows about fifteen or sixteen years back. A man would have thought there was a tiny little bull’s-eye painted on his shirt, those arrows were so dang close together.
At least, that was what the doc had said when he was digging them out.
The way Monahan figured it, that sawbones had dug out about half his shoulder joint while he was in there. Least, it had felt like that was what he was doing. The son of a gun had enjoyed it, too!
Monahan’s shoulder had never worked all that good again, but at least it was on his left side. He would have been out of work and down to sweeping saloons and emptying spittoons if it had been on his right.
His legs woke next. His right thigh complained with throbs in the places where he’d broken it, once by sailing ass-over-teakettle off a raw bronc, and once by falling down a ravine when he was out after strays.
Last to wake up was his head. Too many insults had left him with a permanent throb and ache. Sometimes it robbed him of his memory, other times, just part of it. But either way, it hurt worse in the mornings.
As he walked toward the trees, Monahan gave thought to his left hip. He’d never turned in the voucher from Marshal Tobin, although he still carried it in his hip pocket on the side that still ached from Jason Baylor’s bullet. He figured it’d be bad luck—in more ways than one—to mess with bounty money. He’d been right, too. He’d worked all over the west since then, and hadn’t heard a blessed word about the Baylor boys since the shooting.
Until six months past, leastwise. It had come to him that Dev and Alf Baylor were looking for him. Fortunately, he heard they were looking in Utah. But recently, he’d got word they were headed south into Arizona. He’d quit his job soon after and moved on, taking his cramps and his throbs and his soreness and his old hurts with him.
And so, on that crisp mountain morning while the dog watched, he took inventory of his aches and pains, and waited for them to stop their hollering.
At least half the time his left foot woke up numb, and he hadn’t a clue why, although stomping on it for two or three minutes seemed to bring it around. And his neck always had a crick in it, from the time he took a bad fall off a bronc up in Wyoming.
He managed to hobble off a few feet and relieve himself, buttoned up, and had another look around at the trees, just in case. Another look at the dog revealed it hadn’t moved more than an inch.
If that.
Monahan knew dogs like that one. He’d seen them, here and there, on cattle spreads. Well, on a few sheep operations, too, but sheep weren’t something he liked to think about, at least not before he’d had his coffee. Old Billy Toomey at the B-Bar-T had a pair, an odd-eyed red merle and a brown-eyed black and tan, and he used them to work cows up from the range.
“Stand up,” he said to the dog.
It yawned and lay down, stretching itself beside the fire.
“Well-trained, ain’t you?”
Sighing happily—or perhaps with exhaustion—the dog closed its eyes.
The dog was a male, and bobtailed. Probably born that way, if it was what he thought it was. Its coat was longish and rough and as wild-colored as a jar full of jawbreakers. Even in the thin, early light, he could tell that much. The color was called merle: a bluish gray broken with patches of black, like somebody had slopped watery bleach over a black dog. Additionally, it had white feet and a white chest. Bright coppery markings covered its lower legs and muzzle, and a thumb-print sized smudge of copper hung over each eye.
He’d heard dogs like this called Spanish shepherds or Australian shepherds, or California or Arizona shepherds, or Whatever-State-or-Territory-They-Happened-to-Be-In shepherds. The folks calling them by any one of those names got awful touchy if somebody happened to call them by the wrong place.
He played it safe, and stuck with calling them plain old cow dogs. Of course, the Indians didn’t call them that. They called them ghost dogs, the ones that had blue eyes, anyhow. Folks said as how Indians steered clear of those who had even one.
It struck him that this particular dog must belong to somebody. It looked like somebody had been feeding it regular, anyhow. He should have thought of it before.
“Where’s your people?” Monahan asked, stomping his left foot on the ground rhythmically. The feeling was starting to come back. “Ain’t you got no people?”
The dog opened his eyes and yawned, then went back to panting softly.
“Seems queer, you out here by your lonesome,” he muttered, and his eyes flicked once again to the trees. Nothing. He was getting as spooky as an old woman.
Slowly, he walked through the tall, dewy, meadow grass toward a pine at the edge of the clearing, pausing to pat the neck of his hobbled bay gelding, General Grant. “Good mornin’ to you, old son,” he said softly. The horse looked up from his grazing just long enough to snort softly.
At the pine, Monahan untied his rope from the trunk and lowered his chuck bag, which he’d stashed up the tree in case of bears. He made his way back to the fire—and the cow dog—and slowly eased himself down again in his place across from the fire.
He added a few twigs to the embers and gave them a stir. “Ain’t heard no folks . . . You run off from somebody?”
The dog sat up again and just looked at him.
In no time, Monahan had bacon sizzling in one skillet and biscuits baking in another.
The dog drooled steadily, watching his every move, but it didn’t offer to snatch any from the pan.
“You got decent table manners, anyhow,” Monahan muttered, and started the coffee.
When the biscuits were done, he broke one in two, the long way, and as the steam and that good smell rose on the cool morning air, he poked a piece of bacon inside it and made ready to pop it in his mouth.
Softy, the dog whined.
“Wait your turn.” Monahan inched the biscuit closer to his mouth.
The dog’s gaze followed that biscuit like a man’s eyes, when he’s fresh off a long trail, will watch a pretty woman.
“Oh, hell,” Monahan grumbled, and tossed the little sandwich arcing over the fire. The dog caught it in his mouth, chewed twice, then swallowed. He licked his chops and stared again at Monahan.
“Don’t try to fool me,” Monahan said sternly. “I know how you dogs are. Even if you’d just ate a whole steer, you’d still be beggin’
for cake.”
The dog stared at him expectantly across the fire, a string of the ever-present drool slowly dripping from one corner of its mouth.
Monahan fixed a second biscuit, then averted his eyes and ate it himself . . . and damned if he didn’t feel guilty!
“I just got enough for two more, dog.” He looked at its face more closely. The light had come up enough that he could see faint grizzle on the dog’s muzzle. It was old, or at least middle-aged . . . kind of like him. He figured it had to belong to somebody.
“They’re little!” he said in his defense for wanting to eat both sandwiches when the dog lifted a paw and whined. “What do you weigh, anyhow? Can’t be more ’n fifty, sixty pound. I’m three times bigger ’n you!”
He fixed a third biscuit with bacon and ate it, at which point the dog sat straight up on his haunches and waved his front paws in the air. Monahan heaved a sigh, fixed the last one, and tossed it to the dog, who caught it in midair.
“Happy now?”
Two chews and a gulp and the biscuit was gone. Its front feet on the ground again, the dog looked at him expectantly.
“Ain’t no more.” Monahan poured himself a cup of coffee.
The dog whined softly in anticipation and shifted its weight from one front foot to the other.
“That’s all there is,” Monahan said more firmly.
The dog whined again, a high-pitched sound winding down three or four octaves to a low, rumbling groan.
Monahan shook his head. “I ain’t never heard anything so pitiful! Dang it, anyhow! If I feed you full, will you go on home and let an old man be?”
Ever since his old yellow dog Two-Bits died, Monahan hadn’t had the urge to own another. Two-Bits had got something terrible wrong with his hindquarters. First it was just a little limping now and then, but over time the poor critter howled every time he so much as stood up or took a step.
One morning, Two-Bits couldn’t get up at all, anymore. Monahan had to shoot him to put the poor thing out of his misery. A whole decade later, he still felt awful bad about it. He couldn’t remember what he’d been calling himself then, or what state or territory they’d been in, but he still dreamed about it sometimes. Those brown eyes had stared up at him right until the end, full of trust and terrible pain. He didn’t want to go through that again. “Will you leave?” he asked the blue dog again.
The dog huffed quietly and waited.
“Hell’s bells!” Monahan muttered, and dug into his grub sack for more biscuit-makings and bacon.
After he’d fried up and fed the dog nearly a pound of bacon and a full pan of biscuits—good ones, whose dough had been rising all night beside the fire—and the dog showed no signs of decreasing hunger, Monahan finally threw up his hands.
“You’re a bottomless pit, that’s what you are, dog. I believe you’d like me to fry up General Grant and serve him on cornbread! Well, I ain’t gonna waste no more vittles on you.”
He drank his final cup of coffee and dumped the last of the pot on the fire, then walked down to the stream cutting through the center of the meadow. He rubbed the skillets clean with cold, clear water and a handful of weeds, packed up his cooking things, and moved on to General Grant, who’d been grazing quietly. In the clear light of full morning, he brushed down, then tacked up the horse, and made ready to leave.
The dog had followed him from the ashy remains of the dead fire to the creek and back. He stood a short distance away, watching as Monahan worked.
“You can just go on home, now,” Monahan said as he gave General Grant’s cinch strap a final tug and let down the stirrup. The dog’s rump wiggled. “This here kitchen’s closed. Me and General Grant, we got business down Phoenix way.”
Actually, the “business” was north of Phoenix at Tom Sykes’s ranch, where he hoped to find work through the summer. Monahan had been employed for the past year up near Flagstaff at the Rocking J, but when old man Jensen had up and died, his good-for-nothing son sold off all the cattle directly after spring roundup, put the land up for sale, and headed for San Francisco right about the same time that Monahan had heard about the Baylor brothers heading south.
However, none of that was worth saying to the bobtailed, biscuit- and bacon-eating cow dog.
“I’m askin’ you again, dog. You leavin’?”
The dog studied him, cocking its head. Its blue eyes were more startling now that the sky was fully light.
Monahan stepped up on General Grant. “Suit yourself, then.” He gave the horse a nudge with his knees, and General Grant moved out at a slow jog, across the meadow and into the trees.
The dog followed.
PINNACLE BOOKS are published by
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 2013 William W. Johnstone
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
Following the death of William W. Johnstone, the Johnstone family is working with a carefully selected writer to organize and complete Mr. Johnstone’s outlines and many unfinished manuscripts to create additional novels in all of his series like The Last Gunfighter, Mountain Man, and Eagles, among others. This novel was inspired by Mr. Johnstone’s superb storytelling.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3115-3
Notes
1
Today, Sherwood is a genuine ghost town in Iron County, Texas. It served as the county seat until 1939, when it was supplanted by neighboring Mertzon.
2
See the book Snake River Slaughter.
Matt Jensen, The Last Mountain Man The Eyes of Texas Page 26