Kane started to back away. “I haven’t committed any crimes in town,” he said as he held up his left hand but kept the right close to the butt of his gun. “You don’t have any right to arrest me.”
“I know the sheriff’s lookin’ for you,” Harlan said as he stood there silhouetted in the doorway, his hand curved into a claw just above the Colt on his hip. “The marshal and me like to cooperate with our fellow lawmen. I’ll just take your gun and march you over to the sheriff’s office. He can lock you up in that nice new jail o’ his.”
“I’m not going to jail.” Kane’s voice trembled slightly, but it was from anger, not fear.
“You did time before, I hear. Served a stretch for rustlin’. You’ll go away for a lot longer this time. I don’t know how bad those Slash D cowboys are hurt, either. If one of ’em was to die, then you’d swing for murder, Kane.”
“No! We didn’t shoot anybody, I tell you!”
“You gonna drop your gun and put your hands up . . . or am I gonna have to drop you?” Harlan’s voice was an evil purr as he asked the question. Kane knew the deputy wanted him to fight. Harlan was just looking for an excuse to kill him.
Harlan might do it, too. He was fast on the draw. But Kane was no slouch, and he knew it. He might beat Harlan in a fair fight.
But even though he was convinced he was in the right, if he gunned down a lawman he would be on the run for the rest of his life. It probably wouldn’t be a very long life, either. Every lawman in the state would be on the lookout for him, even the Texas Rangers. Maybe if he surrendered, he would at least have a chance to tell his side of the story....
“Damn it, I told you to drop that gun and elevate!” Harlan growled. He wasn’t going to wait any longer. His hand stabbed toward the gun on his hip.
Instinct kicked in and made Kane grab for his own gun. As his fingers closed around the grips, he saw that he had seriously underestimated the deputy’s speed, even though he had heard stories about Harlan being a fast gun. Harlan’s Colt was already out of the holster and the barrel was tipping up even as Kane began to haul his own iron out of leather. Kane’s eyes widened as he saw flame bloom from the muzzle of the deputy’s gun.
What felt like a huge fist smashed him in the chest. He rocked back a step under the impact. But he kept trying to complete his draw. The problem was that his Colt suddenly seemed to weigh a ton. He got it out of the holster and struggled to lift it, but as he did, Harlan’s gun roared again and another bullet struck him. Kane stumbled backward again but stayed on his feet somehow. A small part of his stunned brain was still functioning, and it tried to warn him that the smart thing to do would be to drop his gun and go ahead and fall down. Otherwise, Harlan was just going to keep blazing away at him.
But a white-hot rage that refused to surrender filled Kane and gave him the strength to try one final time to get a shot off. He let out an incoherent yell as he brought the gun up.
Harlan shot him again, and this time as the lead crashed into him, Kane went down and out.
He never heard the chuckle of sheer satisfaction that came from Skeet Harlan’s throat.
17
Doc Yantis was a small man with bushy gray eyebrows over deep-set brown eyes. He reminded Frank Morgan a little of a horned owl. He wasn’t Brown County’s only sawbones, but he was the best at his profession and the one that folks relied on. He never complained about being called out in the middle of the night, either.
When the doctor came out of the room where Dave Osmond had been taken, he had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up, and was carrying his medical bag. He looked around and asked, “Where’s the other patient?”
“Sitting in the kitchen with his leg propped up,” Earl Duggan replied. “How’s Dave?”
“I’m reasonably confident that he’ll be all right. He lost a lot of blood and the bullet nicked the collarbone, but it missed his lungs. That’s the main thing I was worried about. He’s going to be flat on his back for a good long spell, though, while he recovers.”
“That’s not a problem,” Duggan said. “He can take as long as he needs. That Chinaman of mine will look after him.”
Doc Yantis nodded. “Wing’s a good man and quite intelligent, despite the fact that you persist in acting as if he’s nothing but a coolie, Earl. I’ll have a talk with him about what needs to be done for Dave.”
“I’m obliged, Doc.”
“Now, let me have a look at Pitch.” The sawbones bustled out of the room.
Once Yantis was gone, Frank said to Duggan, “I’d better go take care of my horse and dog and then settle in at the bunkhouse. I guess there’ll be at least one empty bunk, since Osmond is staying in here.”
“There’s more than that,” Duggan told him. “I don’t have a full crew right now. Fall roundup’s not for a couple of weeks yet. I’ll take on more hands then.”
Frank nodded and started out of the parlor, but Duggan stopped him.
“Morgan . . . Don’t you want to know more about what’s going on around here? I’m not sure you know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“I know there’s trouble between the big ranchers on one side and the small ranchers and farmers on the other.” Frank waited to see what else Duggan would say.
“That’s right. Why don’t you sit down? I’ve got some good cigars. . . .”
Frank smiled. “That sounds fine.”
When the two men were settled down in armchairs in front of the fireplace—where the fire that had been burning earlier in the night had gone down to embers—Duggan lit their cigars with a lucifer and then blew out a cloud of smoke in a tired sigh.
“Five years ago Brown County was all free range,” he began. “Me and Calhoun, Wilcox, the Coggin brothers, Park, Brooks Lee, Baugh, and all the other cattlemen in the county worked together. We had a couple of roundups every year, one over on Blanket Creek in the eastern part of the county and the other along Jim Ned Creek to the west. Every outfit was repped and the reps kept track of the gather for their brand.”
Frank nodded. “Sounds like common practice to me.”
“It was, and it worked just fine as long as there were only ten or a dozen ranches in the county. But then new fellas started moving in, and before you know it, everywhere you looked there was some little greasy-sack outfit calling itself a ranch. They didn’t have any land and damn few cattle, but they wanted to think that they were just as good as me and the others who had been here twenty years.” Duggan put his cigar in his mouth and his teeth clenched on it. Around it he said, “Us who fought the Comanch’ and the fever and spilled our blood and put our loved ones in the ground . . .”
For a moment he couldn’t bring himself to go on, and Frank sat quietly, waiting for the rancher to bring under control the emotions and the memories that threatened to overwhelm him. Finally, Duggan took the cigar out of his mouth and continued. “Even some of the hands who rode for me and the others quit and decided to start spreads of their own.”
“You can’t blame a man for being ambitious,” Frank said.
“You can when he wants to latch his ambitions onto somebody else’s coattails,” Duggan snapped. He waved the hand holding the cigar. “Anyway, it wasn’t just them. It was the farmers, too, especially in the eastern half of the county. Any piece of halfway decent ground that didn’t have a so-called ranch on it had some sodbuster trailin’ along behind a mule and a plow. Those of us who’d been here for a while looked around and saw that we were going to have to do something; otherwise, we’d be crowded out.”
“So you got legal title to the range you’d been grazing all these years and bought some barbed wire,” Frank said.
“Damn right we did,” Duggan barked defiantly. “Those pissants thought the county would stay free range, so they could run their cows wherever they pleased. They found out different, let me tell you.”
“And when they found out, they didn’t like it,” Frank guessed.
“Not even a little bit. Hell, they acted lik
e they had a right to our grass, like it was our duty to feed their cows . . . some of which same had probably been rustled from the big outfits to start with!”
“But you don’t know that.”
Duggan shrugged. “I’ll admit there hasn’t been a lot of rustling, at least not that anybody can prove. I’ve lost stock and so have the other fellas, but not enough to cause a problem. What causes the problem is the way those bastards cut our fences and run their cows on our range.”
“I was talking to Ed MacDonald on the way out here,” Frank said. “From what he told me, an hombre like Al Rawlings is in a bad spot. He’s not a free-range man, right? He owns his spread fair and square, it’s just not very big?”
“That’s right,” Duggan admitted grudgingly. “Rawlings has got clear title to his range. Only because he beat me to it, though.”
“Yes, but he bought the land. Now he can’t use it, though, because he’s closed in on all sides by fences.”
“That’s not our lookout,” Duggan said stubbornly. “It’s Rawlings’ problem and nobody else’s.”
Frank puffed on the cigar for a moment as he thought about everything Duggan had said. He could tell that the cattleman was in no mood to budge in his beliefs. The way Duggan saw it, he and the other big ranchers were the ones being wronged, and they were doing what they could to protect their interests. And, Frank had to admit, it was certainly legal for a man to string fences around his own range. But it was just as legal for smaller ranchers like Rawlings to try to establish their spreads and compete with Duggan and the others. Frank could see right and wrong on both sides of the argument.
“Who’s Chris Kane?” he asked, recalling the name that MacDonald had spoken just before all hell broke loose along the fence line.
Duggan snorted in disgust. “Kane’s one of those ambitious cowboys I was talking about. He used to ride for Slash D. I gave him a job, even though he was a jailbird.”
“What did he do time for?”
“Rustling. Two-bit stuff, over around Hico and Hamilton. He was honest enough to tell me about it when he asked me for a job, I’ll give him that.”
“You hired him even though he’s a convicted rustler?” Frank asked.
“I believe in giving a man a second chance if I think he deserves it,” Duggan declared. “Kane said he’d gone straight and just wanted some honest work. I gave it to him.”
“Did he make a good hand?”
Duggan grimaced and hesitated a second before saying, “Yeah, he made a good hand. I don’t have any complaints about the work he did while he was riding for me. But then he decided that he wanted a place of his own. Him and another fella who worked for me named Bramlett drew their time and went in as partners. They put down some money on a little spread up on Blanket Creek. I didn’t begrudge ’em that . . . but then they had to go and throw in with Rawlings and the rest of that fence-cuttin’ bunch.”
“When did the fence-cutting start?”
“A couple of years ago, but only on a small scale at first. The law knew who was responsible and brought them up on charges, but the grand jury wouldn’t bring in an indictment.”
Frank nodded in understanding. Frontier jurisprudence was sometimes a pretty haphazard process.
“That just made them think they could get away with even more,” Duggan continued. “Ever since it’s been getting worse and worse. Shots have been fired on both sides. I don’t reckon it’s ever going to stop until—”
He halted abruptly. Frank finished the thought for him. “Until the big outfits get together and wipe out the smaller ones. Isn’t that what you meant?”
Duggan clenched his left hand into a fist and thumped it on his knee. “A man’s got a right to defend what’s his! Cutting our fences is bad enough, but when they start bushwhacking our men, like they did tonight—”
“Those shots didn’t come from the men who were fixing to cut the fence,” Frank pointed out.
“You know they had to be some of the same bunch, though. It was a trap, damn it! They meant for somebody to see them and try to stop them. A bunch of the polecats were hidden in the trees along the creek just waiting for you.”
A frown creased Frank’s forehead. That theory seemed a little farfetched to him. If Ed MacDonald hadn’t happened to be in just the right place at just the right time to see the flare of the match as one of the men lit a cigarette, the riders from the Slash D would have passed on by without ever knowing what was going on.
Of course, the gunmen in the trees could have been standing guard, just in case someone came along and interrupted the fence cutters. The only other possible explanation was that the bushwhackers had followed Frank and his companions from Brownwood . . . and for the life of him, he couldn’t see how that made any sense.
Duggan leaned back in his chair. Lines of strain creased his rugged face. “Well, now that you know the situation, do you still want to sign on, Morgan? You may say you’re not hiring out your gun, but there’s a mighty good chance there’ll be more shooting before it’s all over.”
Frank smiled faintly. “You’re not saying that the possibility of some shooting worries me, are you?”
“Hell, no! I know you’ve been in more corpse-and-cartridge sessions than I can count. But I know you’re a strong-willed hombre, too. Is it going to bother you if you have to shoot at Rawlings and the rest of that bunch?”
“I’ve already swapped lead with Rawlings once tonight, remember?”
Duggan grunted. “Yeah, that’s true.”
“I’ve got this informal rule,” Frank said. “If anybody shoots at me, I shoot back.”
“But not always to kill.”
“Not always,” Frank admitted. “Just usually.”
Duggan came to his feet and stuck out his hand. “All right then. If you want a job on the Slash D, you’re hired.”
Frank shook hands with the rancher. That sealed the deal. In the West, a man’s word was his bond, and a handshake was more binding than any legal document back East could ever be.
“Guess I’d better get out to the bunkhouse now.”
Duggan managed a grin. “Those boys are going to be mighty excited to have the famous Frank Morgan living right there in the bunkhouse with them. They’re liable to pester you with a bunch of questions. I hear tell you’ve killed a thousand men, not counting Injuns.”
“If all the stories they tell about me were true,” Frank said, “there wouldn’t be anybody left alive west of the Mississippi. I’d have already shot them all by now.”
Duggan gave a real laugh at that, the first one Frank had heard from the man. “Try not to disappoint ’em too much with the truth,” he said. “Folks need their heroes, even cowboys.”
18
Beaumont sat beside the bunk and listened to Will Bramlett’s hoarse, ragged breathing. Bramlett was unconscious. He hadn’t come around while Beaumont was cleaning the wound in his belly and bandaging it as best he could.
His efforts weren’t going to do any good, Beaumont knew. The bullet was still inside Bramlett, and there was no telling how much damage it had done to the man’s guts. Bramlett was probably bleeding inside, and there wasn’t a damned thing Beaumont could do about that.
The young Ranger slid his watch from his pocket and opened it. Nearly three o’clock in the morning. Kane should have been back from Brownwood by now if he had found Doc Yantis without any trouble. The fact that he hadn’t returned meant that he hadn’t found the doctor . . . or else he had run into some other problem.
Like being arrested and thrown in jail for fence-cutting.
Beaumont wished that Kane and Bramlett hadn’t taken it into their heads to go cut Earl Duggan’s fence tonight. He had been working his way into their confidence, and he figured that before much longer he would have been fully accepted into the circle of small ranchers and farmers opposed to Duggan and the other rich cattlemen. Then he could have tried to persuade them that fence-cutting and bushwhacking weren’t going to work. They needed to
take their disputes to court and try to settle them there, rather than with wire-cutters and six-guns. Hell, the West was supposed to be civilized now, wasn’t it?
Beaumont shook his head at that thought. Civilization had its place, but pioneers like Duggan didn’t put much stock in it. There hadn’t been any law and order in this part of Texas when they first came here. The only justice was what they brought with them and enforced with fist and knife and gun.
As for men like Kane and Bramlett and Al Rawlings, they were full of ambition and the hunger for something better that could be found in all men. They might keep it in check under normal conditions, but when they felt threatened, all bets were off.
Beaumont rubbed his eyes tiredly. If he couldn’t convince the small ranchers and farmers not to resort to violence, at least he could find out their plans, hopefully in time to tip off the authorities and prevent any real outbreaks of bloodshed. That sort of underhandedness went against the grain for Beaumont, but his job was to stop the war in Brown County any way he could.
The problem was that in the time he had known them, he had come to like and admire Kane and Bramlett. Al Rawlings was a hothead, but deep down he wasn’t too bad. That redheaded sister of his was a worse hellion than Al.
Beaumont sighed and wished Victoria was here. She wouldn’t tell him what to do—she wouldn’t think of interfering with his work—but she would listen to what he had to say and help him think through everything. She was mighty good at that. Just talking things out with her allowed him to see them much more clearly.
For example, she had talked him out of going after Frank Morgan and trying to kill him . . . which probably wouldn’t have accomplished anything except getting his own fool self shot. Beaumont could handle a gun as well as or better than most men, but he was no match for the Drifter.
No match for the man who had been his friend . . .
“It’s not his fault,” Victoria had said. “He didn’t make that man come after him.”
“But he did,” Beaumont had insisted. “He did it just by being Frank Morgan.”
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