by Ralph Cotton
Inside the house Callie Mosely heard her son calling out to her as she ran down off the porch with the rifle in her hands, a blanket thrown over her head. Before she’d reached the path leading down toward the creek, she saw Dillard and the hound run into sight through the falling rain. “Dillard, up here!” she called out, looking past him along the trail for any sign of someone chasing him.
“Mother!” the young boy shouted loudly, running even faster at the sight of her coming toward him, the hound running on ahead of him now, barking loudly. “Hurry, Mother! He killed them all! He killed them all! I saw the whole thing from across the creek!”
“Good heavens, Dillard!” said Callie Mosely, stooping, catching her son into her arms as if he might otherwise race straight past her. “Didn’t I tell you to get home before the storm? What on earth are you talking about?”
“A gunfight, Mother!” Dillard gasped, ignoring her question. “A real, honest-to-God gunfight!” His heart pounded wildly in his chest. “There’s dead men lying everywhere! Hurry! Come see!”
“A gunfight?” Callie had heard the gunshots through the coming storm only moments ago and had wiped flour from her hands on a towel and taken her husband’s rifle down from above the hearth. “Who? Where?” she asked, keeping one hand on her son’s wet shoulder to settle him down as she stood and once again gazed warily along the path behind him. At her feet the dripping hound barked loudly, caught up in the excitement. “Quiet, Tic!” she demanded, slapping a hand at the hound’s rump.
“At the creek, Mother!” Dillard said, gulping hard to get his words and mind settled enough to make sense. “Some of Falon’s wolf hunters shot it out with another man on the creekbank!”
“They killed some poor traveler?” Callie asked.
“No, ma’am!” said Dillard. “He shot all four of them…killed two of them, and the other two hightailed it away!”
Hiking her dress, she started down the path with the rifle raised in both hands. “Now, Dillard, I’m sure you’re mistaken!”
“No, ma’am!” Dillard exclaimed, rushing a bit ahead of his mother, the hound circling him, barking loudly. “He shot them, all four! You’ll see! Hurry! He’s bleeding something awful!”
“You mean”—Callie hesitated in her tracks for a moment—“you mean he is still alive?”
Dillard ran back, grabbed her hand and pulled her forward. “Hurry, Mother, please! I think he is! I heard him groan! He spoke to me!”
Spoke to him…? Callie wanted to stall for a second, yet she hurried on at her son’s insistence, saying in a chastising tone of voice, “Dillard James Mosely, did you get close to Frank Falon’s men?”
“No, Mother! I didn’t!” he said, pulling her along. But as she began to once again hasten her steps, he said, “I did get close to the stranger though, just for a minute! Just long enough to make sure he’s alive! That was all right, wasn’t it?” He hurried her along through the pelting rain, his small damp hand gripping hers.
“Dillard Mosely!” she said without answering him as they splashed along the path, “whatever am I going to do with you?”
Chapter 2
“Wait, please!” Kirby Falon had pleaded with Willie Singer, watching him disappear out of the creek, up along the bracken and overgrowth toward the north trail. Lightning glittered, followed by a hard clap of thunder.
“Go to hell, Kirby!” Willie Singer said to himself, not even looking back at the wounded man. Kirby Falon limped along trying to catch up to him on foot. As far as Willie Singer was concerned he didn’t owe Kirby a thing, even if Kirby was Frank Falon’s brother. Kirby should never have allowed himself to get felled from his horse that way. Willie Singer kicked his horse into a run along the wet slippery trail and didn’t dare slow it to a halt until he was well over a mile from the spot where he had left the others lying dead or wounded.
When Singer finally did stop, it was not to allow Kirby Falon to catch up to him, but rather to attend to the wound in his upper right shoulder. Yet, as he stepped down in the splashing mud and stripped a wet bandanna from around his neck and pressed it to the wound in his shoulder, he heard the sound of hoofbeats coming along the trail behind him and cursed under his breath. In the melee he had lost his pistol, the only firearm he carried. Wiping a hand across his wet face, he looked around wildly and found a heavy five-foot-long length of downfall spruce lying on the ground. He snatched it up with his good hand, hurried into the cover of brush along the trail, and waited with it drawn back one-handed, ready for action, as the hoofbeats grew louder and closer.
Now…! Singer shouted to himself, stepping out into the trail. He unleashed a long, hard swing at just the right second and felt the large tree limb connect solidly with the rider’s chest. The force of the one-handed blow lifted the rider from his saddle and seemed to hold him suspended in air for a second, just long enough for Singer to see his mistake. “Oh my God!” he shouted, catching the stunned look on Kirby Falon’s face before Kirby spilled onto the wet, hard ground, his head striking the rounded top of a sunken boulder.
The hapless young man didn’t know what had hit him when he awakened slowly a few minutes later, his ribs feeling crushed, his breathing short and painful in his throbbing chest. “Who…who did this to me?” he asked in a shallow, groggy voice. One hand went to his ribs, his other to the egg-sized bump on the side of his head The world above him rolled back and forth as if he were lying on the deck of a floundering ship. As he blinked and concentrated on focusing his eyes on Willie Singer, he saw the pistol hanging loosely in Willie’s hand. “What sumbitch did this to me?” he asked, his mind becoming clearer but the pain in his chest and his head causing him to wince with each word.
“You—you don’t know?” Willie asked. The pistol in his hand lowered an inch, the tip of the barrel moving slightly away from Kirby.
“No, I don’t,” Kirby groaned, wincing as his hand felt around on the throbbing knot.
Willie Singer stared at him in contemplation for a moment, then replied warily, “Kirby, you mean you don’t you remember anything at all about what happened to us back there?”
As Kirby’s mind cleared a bit more, he recognized that it was his own pistol hanging in Singer’s hand. He swallowed hard and said, “I almost didn’t know who you are, let alone what happened to us.”
Willie Singer had given as much thought as he could to the situation. “Damn it, Kirby,” he said, “you don’t remember me riding in and saving you from that crazy sumbitch who ambushed us?”
“Us? Who’s us?” Kirby asked, reaching a hand up for Willie to help him to his feet.
“Us is you and me, and Dick and Elmer,” said Willie, pulling Kirby to his feet and watching him stagger in place for a moment. “Are you going to be all right, Kirby? You’re paler than a plucked goose!”
“I’m coming around some,” said Kirby, struggling to maintain his balance, grabbing Willie’s shoulder for support. “Tell me everything that’s happened. Maybe it’ll help me remember.” Pain shot through his chest, causing him to suddenly bow forward and grasp his ribs.
“Jesus, Kirby!” said Willie Singer. “Let’s get you settled down and look at you first.” Looping an arm over Kirby’s bowed back, Willie led him off alongside the trail into the shelter of some tall rocks. Keeping a cautious eye on the trail, Willie held a canteen for Kirby while the other man sipped, groaned and finally managed to let the pain in his head and chest settle down a little.
Eyeing the pistol shoved down in Willie Singer’s holster, Kirby nodded at it and asked, “Ain’t that my gun, Willie?”
“Why, yes, it is!” said Willie. “I’m glad to hear you recognize it. Looks like you’ve got some memory left after all. Has anything else come back to you?” He studied Kirby’s eyes for any other sign of recognition, but he saw none.
Kirby sighed. “No, I can’t remember a damn thing once we rode down off the hillside into the creek. I remember seeing a deer and her fawn, and that’s about as much as I can recollect.�
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“Then you don’t recall Dick and Elmer and you getting bested by some stranger on the creekbank?”
“Hunh?” Kirby looked puzzled. “Bested? All three of us, by one man?” He shook his head. “Hell no! I don’t recall nothing like that.” He gave Singer a suspicious stare. “Where were you while all this happened?”
“Where was I?” Singer said with indignation, making his story up as he went. “I’ll tell you where I was. I was racing in there like a dart to save your hide, once I heard the shooting and saw what was going on! That’s where I was.”
Kirby gave a troubled frown, taxing his memory hard for any trace of what had happened. Noting the wound in Singer’s shoulder, he nodded at it and said, “I reckon he got you too, huh?”
“Not as bad as he did the rest of yas,” Singer said. “I killed him. I put two bullets in his chest, left him staring up in the rain.” He eyed Kirby, judging how much if any of the story Kirby believed. “I don’t mean to hold it over you, but lucky for you I came back from attending my personal bodily functions when I did. If I had been a minute later you’d be dead, along with Dick and Elmer.”
Kirby appeared to consider things and he winced and once again probed the knot on his head with his fingertips. Finally he nodded again at his pistol in Singer’s holster. “Where’s your own gun, Willie?”
Willie gave him a curious look, then said, “It’s bothering you that I’m wearing your gun, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Kirby admitted.
“This is the thanks I get after saving your life,” Singer said, shaking his lowered head slowly. “The truth is, when you smacked into that low tree limb, you caused both of our horses to go down in the mud. I lost my pistol. Seeing the shape you was in, I took your gun…to protect us both, you might say.”
“Protect us from who?” said Kirby. “I thought you killed the stranger?” He gave Singer a dubious look.
“Damn it,” said Singer, realizing he had slipped up in his story, “I did kill him! But for all I knew there could have been more than just him. I couldn’t take no chance!”
“Oh.” Kirby dismissed the matter for a moment, thinking things over, then saying, “Frank is going to be madder than hell, one man doing us this much damage. We’ve lost all our pelts and everything.”
“I know he’s going to have a fit, Kirby,” Singer said quietly. “That’s why I think it’s in both of our best interests to make sure we’re careful telling him how this happened. I’ve got no problem since I did kill the man and save you…but your brother might get harsh with you for you and the others letting yourselves get bested that way.”
“Quit saying that word, bested!” Kirby snapped. “I don’t like the sound of it! I can’t even recall any of it. I don’t know what the hell happened!”
“Then you best take my word on things and go along with me on it,” said Singer. “I don’t want your brother, Frank, blaming me for things. If you’re smart, you don’t either!”
“All right,” said Kirby relenting, seeing the wisdom in Singer’s words, “tell me everything that happened. Don’t make me out to look like a fool.”
“No, hell no, Kirby,” said Singer. “Is that what you’re worried about? If it is, you can forget it. You did the best you could, given the situation.” He sank down onto a wet rock beside Kirby, with rain running freely from the brim of his hat. Overhead, thunder roared as the storm moved slowly across the sky. “Let me tell you everything just like it happened, and see if will help you get your memory back some.”
For a day and a half Frank Falon had paced back and forth on the porch of the trade shack, the sour musty smell of damp wolf pelts hanging heavy in the air. During the night the storm had moved off across the plains, leaving the grasslands sodden and the single trail across it thick with mud. The wet ground out front of the trade shack lay strewn with empty whiskey bottles, broken glass and the shattered remnants of a card table Frank had upended over the porch rail in a fit of rage the night before. Cards and poker chips lay in the mud.
“Where the hell could they be, Tomblin?” Frank demanded of the man sitting in a wooden chair sipping coffee. “This waiting is making me crazy.” His hand fell idly to the long-barreled Starr revolver holstered on his hip. He tapped his fingers on the gun butt and gazed out across the valley lands.
Ace Tomblin gave him a sidelong look and said in a flat tone, “They laid up out of the rain somewhere if they’ve got any sense.” He sipped his coffee and added, “Why don’t you settle down for a spell? All this blowing up ain’t bringing them here any faster.”
“Settle down, you say?” Frank gave a sweep of his arm taking in the surrounding piles of wolf hides and the pile of putrid bloated animal carcasses lying only a few yards from the shack. “How can anybody settle down in a mud hole like this?” He stared hard and cold at one of the trade shack attendants whose job it was to count and inspect the wolf pelts and pay the bounty on them. The payment was made in script that had to be then taken to Reverend Malcom Jessup’s bank to be redeemed for cash. The old man stood over a large black caldron stirring a long stick around in a greasy boiling froth. Beside the caldron another old man stood ankle deep in mud, a bloody skinning knife in one hand, the hind leg of a wolf carcass in his other. “Look at these contemptible sons of a bitch,” Frank murmured to Tomblin. “How much lower can a man sink than that?”
“They ain’t complaining,” Ace Tomblin said, knowing what would come next, having heard this conversation too many times to count. He eyed Frank Falon closely and added, “Sometimes a man is wise to see what he has and be satisfied with it.”
But not seeming to hear Tomblin, Falon continued with what had become his litany. “How much different are we than these sorry, miserable wolf-boiling wretches? We’re settling for crumbs off of Father Jessup’s table just like them, ain’t we?”
Tomblin sighed to himself and said flatly the same thing he’d said before at this point, “Frank, Jessup ain’t our boss like he is to these men. He’s just providing us what you call an agreement for services. Since when has he kept us from coming and going as we please?” Seeing Falon turn his gaze to him, Ace Tomblin answered himself, saying, “Never, that’s when. I think we’ve got a good setup here, and we ought to be careful not to mess it up.”
“Good setup, my ass!” Falon said, but first dropping his hand from his pistol butt, realizing that Ace Tomblin was not one of the men he could buffalo anytime he chose to. “We pay big for any services we provide Jessup…and pardon me if I don’t call him Father! He gets his part of every dollar we squeeze out of these ragged settlers coming through here.” He made a face of contempt and said, “Gatekeepers!” Then he spit as if attempting to get a bitter taste from his mouth. “That sounds no better than wolf boilers to me. I’m sick of it!” His voice had grown louder as he spoke.
“Easy, Frank. These fellows like to carry news back to Fath— I mean, Jessup,” Ace Tomblin said, correcting himself. He gave a signal with his eyes, drawing Falon’s attention to the wolf skinner who had looked up from his grizzly task and stared toward them.
Seeing the old man’s eyes on him didn’t cause Frank Falon to quiet down; instead he turned to them at their caldron and said, “What are you staring at, you gut-plucking turd! Yeah, you heard me right! I said I’m sick of this place and the people in it! Run and tell that to Father Jessup. See if he’ll shake you down a handful of crumbs for it! You sorry, gut-sucking—”
“Frank! Come on, damn it!” Tomblin said, cutting him off. “These men ain’t worth getting all this fired up over!” His voice lowered a notch and he added, “But make no mistake. Everything you just said will get back to Jessup before the week is out.”
Frank snatched his Starr from its holster, cocking it. “Not if I kill these miserable bastards first!” he shouted. In the muddy yard the station attendants saw his gun barrel sweep back and forth over them and began trying to flee through the thick sucking mud. One man lost a boot to the deep mire, anoth
er slipped in his haste and turned a complete backward flip. The sight turned Frank’s rage into laughter.
“Jesus, Frank!” said Tomblin, also seeing the comical sight as he rose up with his coffee cup in his hand. “You’ll cause them to break their fool necks!”
“Good enough for them!” Frank let out a peal of laughter and began firing shots into the mud close to the fleeing men. One man slipped and slid under one of the hiding mules, sending the animal into a braying, kicking frenzy.
“Yiii-hiii!” Frank shouted, still firing, not really trying to hit anyone, but not really caring much if he did. “It’s about damn time we found some sport in this place!”
“Hold up, Frank,” said Ace Tomblin, suddenly turning serious again, “we’ve got two riders coming!”
“Yeah…?” Frank became more serious himself, turning his gaze out along the trail to the two tiny dots on the horizon. “Where’s Lewis? He’s supposed to be keeping watch.” No sooner had Frank spoken than a rifle shot sounded from amid a rocky hillside two hundred yards out.
“There he is, Frank,” said Tomblin, gesturing toward the sound of the rifle shot. “He’s doing his job.”
“Right…” said Falon, reaching out his palm to Ace Tomblin as Tomblin stepped up close beside him. Tomblin had picked up the pair of binoculars from beside his chair; he put them in Falon’s hand and continued to sip his coffee, squinting toward the two distant riders. In the mud the two attendants took advantage of the lull in gunfire and helped each other up out of the mud and to the shelter of a rickety shack. One grabbed the hysterical mule and settled it long enough for the man beneath it to crawl out and run crouched and slipping across the ground.