Valley of the Gun (9781101607480)

by Cotton, Ralph W.

  “He needn’t worry about me,” said Burns. “I can find better-looking gals for under a half dollar any day of the week—not have to worry about giving them room and board either.”

  “Yeah, but you’re not trying to squirt out a bunch of kids to take over the world,” said Burns. “That takes stronger women than you can find for half a dollar. Right, Frank?”

  Bannis only shrugged and looked away, not wanting to talk about it.

  “Anyway, it’s Dad’s brethren he’d better worry about,” said Liles. “They’d fall in love with a she-goat if they thought the Lord wanted them to start raising a herd for him.”

  “What do you say, Frank?” Burns asked. “You know more about these men than we do.”

  “I say I’m gone . . . I’m not going to sit here and talk religion with you two heathens on an empty stomach,” Bannis chided. “Not when I could be eating my weight in chili peppers and beans.” He turned his horse and nudged it away along the rocky trail.

  “Damn, so could I,” said Kerr, getting excited at the prospect of a hot meal. He looked around at his tired horse, then looked up at Liles. “Can I swap you horses until I get my belly full? I’ll bring you something back if I can.”

  “Jesus, Morton,” said Liles. He looked at the sweaty, worn-out horse standing behind Kerr, “you’re awfully hard on horses.” But he still swung down and handed Kerr the reins to his horse, taking the reins to Kerr’s animal in exchange. “Don’t wear him out,” he said.

  “Obliged, Liles,” said Kerr. He hurriedly pulled himself up into the saddle atop Liles’ strong-looking bay. “I’ll treat him like he’s my own.” He turned the bay and hurried on to catch up with Bannis.

  “Damn, I hope not,” Liles called out, watching him ride away.

  —

  Three hundred yards along the winding trail, Frank Bannis slowed his horse and looked back when he heard Morton Kerr galloping toward him.

  “Dang it, Frank,” said the older outlaw, “didn’t you hear me say I was hungry too?”

  Frank nudged his horse forward again, this time with Kerr settling the bay and riding along beside him.

  “I heard you,” he said, looking straight ahead. “I knew you’d catch up if you wanted to. I told all of you, I didn’t want to talk religion on an empty stomach.”

  “Hmmph,” said Kerr, “long as I’ve known you, I’ve never seen you talking religion, period, empty stomach or not.”

  “You call that a bad trait?” Bannis said without looking around at him.

  “No, sir, I call it a good trait,” said Kerr. “But I’m curious why it is.”

  “Religion doesn’t interest me,” Bannis said, trying to let it go. “Anyways, we’re outlaws. We ought to be talking about poker, or whores, something that makes sense,” he added with a wry, tight grin.

  “Come to think of it,” said Kerr, “I never hear you talk much about whores or poker either.”

  “You know what they say, Morton,” said Bannis. “A man who spends all his time talking about women and poker is a man who’s most likely not getting much of the two.”

  “That’s a damn lie,” said Kerr, as if taking offense. “I get plenty of both—used to anyway. There’s no harm in talking about it. Is there?”

  “About whores and poker, no, I guess not,” said Bannis. “But about religion, I don’t know. What business have two hard cases like us got talking about God and the hereafter? We’re never going to see either one.”

  Kerr only stared straight ahead without answering. Within a small valley coming into sight around a turn in the trail, they saw two big Conestoga-style wagons sitting back away from a large cook fire.

  “It don’t hurt to talk about it, though,” said Kerr. “It’s like politics. There’s nothing more a man can do than spin your opinion.” He paused, then looked Bannis up and down and said, “I figure you’d know lots about religion, being brought up by a bunch just like Orwick and his disciples.”

  Bannis stopped his horse, turned sideways in his saddle and stared at him.

  “I was brought up by a good God-fearing Mormon family,” he said. “My folks can’t help that I turned out to be the way I am.”

  “Whoa, I meant nothing by it,” Kerr said, raising a hand chest high. He stopped too; he withered a little under Bannis’ stare, but managed to shrug and say, “All’s I meant was it’s the same religion as Orwick and his bunch, ain’t it?”

  “Hell no,” said Bannis, “not even close.”

  He settled a little, let out a breath and turned back to the trail. “The Mormon Saints are a real religion.” He gave his horse a tap of his heels. “This religion of Dad’s is just something he thought up on his own—something that suits his own purpose.”

  “Some say all religions are the same thing,” said Kerr, “that somebody had to sit down and figure every one of them up to begin with.”

  “You’re a tough old nut, Morton,” Bannis said. He gave a short chuckle and added, “I can’t say you’re wrong, but I don’t think you’re right either. My point was, I didn’t want to talk about religion, but here we are doing it anyway.”

  “So Dad’s religion and yours are not so different after all?” he probed.

  “I have no religion, and I don’t believe in God,” Bannis said firmly.

  “I mean the way you were raised,” Kerr said. “It’s no different, when you think about it.”

  “It’s a lot different,” Bannis said. “My people were decent folks. They never held with bank robbing, or killing, or any of the things Dad and his bunch does.”

  “They lit out to Mexico the same way Dad’s doing,” Kerr threw in.

  “Not for stealing and killing,” said Bannis. “They had to come here because they were being denied their rights to practice their beliefs.”

  “Couldn’t Dad say the same thing?” Kerr said. “He happens to believe in stealing to support his beliefs. But if he truly believes it’s a mandate from God, why ain’t it?” He gave a crooked grin.

  “If we keep talking, I’m going to have to crack you in the head, ain’t I, Morton?” Bannis said, only half joking.

  Kerr let out a little laugh and the two rode on, seeing a tall older woman in a long gingham dress stand, looking toward them from beside the fire.

  “There’s Isabelle Orwick,” said Bannis. “Reminds me so much of my own ma. . . .” He had to let his words trail. Then he said, “I have to say, if I had met a woman like her years back, I might have taken to religion and been a whole different man.” He paused, then added, “Leastwise, I would have had something I might’ve thanked God for.”

  “Yeah, but you said you don’t believe in God,” Kerr pointed out.

  “I don’t,” Bannis countered. “I’m just saying . . .”

  He booted his horse up into a gallop and didn’t stop or look around at Kerr as they both rode past a rifleman standing guard at the edge of the camp. Recognizing them, the guard waved them past and continued looking out in the direction of the high trail above the narrow valley.

  When the two stopped and stepped down from their horses, Bannis took off his hat and walked to the fire. He smiled at Isabelle Orwick, as he always did, as she stepped forward with two tin pans in her hand for him and Kerr. But unlike other times, she did not return his smile. Instead, she ducked her face away from him and spoke over her shoulder.

  “You two help yourselves,” she said. “We only have beans and chopped pork, but we have plenty of that.”

  “Whoa, hold on, ma’am,” said Bannis, recognizing that something was wrong and she was trying to hide it from him. He stepped around in front of her and said, “Look at me.” When she did so reluctantly, he lifted her chin with his fingertips and saw her black, swollen eye.

  Angrily he growled under his breath, “Dad, you rotten son of a—”
r />   “No, Frank, wait. It wasn’t Dad,” Isabelle said, cutting him off. The expression on Frank’s face suggested that he might fly into a murderous rage, something Isabelle had never seen in him before. Just the sight of it frightened her. “You have to understand that some things have changed here—”

  “Who did this to you?” he growled, gripping her arm tight.

  “Brother Phillip,” she gasped, “but please let me explain. He had a right to do this.”

  But Bannis was having none of it.

  “No son of a bitch has a right to do this—”

  A voice cut him off again.

  “See here, Bannis. Take your hands off her!” said Brother Phillip Kendrick, who had just stepped around the corner of the wagon, a long-stemmed pipe cradled in his hand. He stepped in close. “What the blazes is wrong with you anyway?”

  Morton Kerr saw Kendrick make the mistake of putting his hand on Bannis to give him a shove. But it wouldn’t have mattered, Kerr decided, seeing Bannis’ Colt streak from his holster almost instinctively and make a vicious swipe across the unsuspecting man’s jaw.

  Phillip Kendrick’s smoking pipe flew from his hand and soared into the wagon through its open tailgate.

  “No, stop!” Isabelle pleaded with Frank Bannis, but Bannis was past reasoning. Even as the dazed churchman staggered backward from the blow, Bannis grabbed the front of his coat and struck him again, this time a backhanded blow that knocked out any consciousness still struggling to stay awake in Kendrick’s addled brain. Yet the second blow didn’t sate the outlaw’s fury. He struck again, and again. Blood flew; teeth followed.

  “Holy God, Frank, you’re killing him,” shouted Morton Kerr, seeing one deadly blow after another slash across Kendrick’s face.

  But Bannis didn’t stop. When Kerr tried to grab him from behind, Bannis forcefully shook him off and continued the fatal beating. As Kerr landed on the ground, he saw Isabelle picking up a heavy iron skillet.

  Uh-oh. . . . He watched wide-eyed as the woman hurried in behind Bannis, drew the big skillet back and swung it full, at arm’s length. Kerr winced at the sight, and at the long, vibrating sound of the skillet ringing against the back of Bannis’ head.

  Kendrick fell from Bannis’ grip and hit the ground like a bundle of rags. Bannis fell right atop him.

  “Quick, get him out of here!” said Isabelle to Kerr, letting the skillet fall from her hand. She nodded toward the riflemen running from across the camp, having witnessed the merciless pistol-whipping. “Dad will kill him for doing this to one of his disciples.”

  She and Kerr began dragging Bannis toward his horse.

  “And take him where?” Kerr asked as they started shoving Bannis up into his saddle.

  “To Gun Valley,” Isabelle said. “Hide him there. I’ll bring you supplies when I can get away.”

  Kerr gave her a questioning look.

  “This was my fault,” she said, speaking quickly. “I should have told him right off. I’m Brother Phillips’ wife now. He had a right to hit me. Dad unbound me and his older wives and bound us to his brethren.”

  “Wait,” said Kerr. “Where will I hide him? This whole bunch is headed for Valley of the Gun.”

  “Go across the valley,” she said, “to the old dugouts there.” She raised Bannis’ leg and pushed it over the saddle.

  “I know where that’s at,” Kerr said. As he spoke he gave a hard shove and watched Bannis roll onto the saddle and slump forward onto the horse’s neck.

  “Hurry,” she said. “I’ll try to slow them down as much as I can.”

  Kerr glanced at the running rifleman and said, “Liles is going to have a conniption, me taking off with his horse.”

  “I’ll explain it to him. Now go,” Isabelle said, shoving him toward his horse.

  Mounted, Kerr led Bannis, riding away at a hard gallop. The knocked-out gunman was lying limp, but managing to stay in his saddle. At the edge of valley, Kerr rode behind a stand of rocks, circled and gazed back toward the camp.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said, staring up in awe as flames and black smoke billowed upward from the burning wagon. “Frank Bannis, you are one lucky hombre. He gave a dark chuckle, watching the riflemen give up their chase and turn to fight the raging fire.

  Chapter 12

  The Ranger and Mattie Rourke stood atop a cliff looking out past a lower hill line where black smoke drifted along an evening breeze. A few feet behind them lay a set of fresh hoofprints headed down the trail.

  “A campfire maybe?” Mattie asked, sounding doubtful. “It is coming from about where the Munny Caves are.”

  “No,” said the Ranger, “I wouldn’t think it’s a campfire. Not if Dad’s people are trying to keep from being seen.”

  “The posse from Goble?” she asked.

  “Could be,” Sam replied. He looked all around, toward hills off to their left. “Ragland knows this terrain. The four of them could have made some good time if they didn’t run into any of Dad’s men along the other trail.” He considered it. “We haven’t heard any shooting.”

  “Dad’s people don’t make mistakes like this,” she said, gesturing toward the smoke.

  Sam nodded, watching the long drift of smoke curl and roll off across the evening sky.

  “One thing’s for sure,” he said. “If we see it, so does Dee Ragland. If the posse’s not already headed there, it soon will be.”

  The two made their way back to their horses.

  Stepping back into their saddles, they turned their horses to the trail, following the fresh set of tracks left by the last of Dad’s Redemption Riders to come down the trail toward Munny Caves.

  An hour later they slowed their horses to a halt and sat at the bottom of the steep hill trail. Looking out, they gazed across a new stretch of trail winding atop a connected string of natural stone bridgework and barren ridge. Two-thirds of the way across a deep rocky gorge, the trail turned back upward onto a hillside covered with boulders and scrub timber.

  “On the other side of these hills is Munny Caves,” Mattie said. She looked at Sam. “From here there are lookout spots that can see every move we make down here.”

  Sam studied the hill line for a moment.

  “This is a dangerous stretch,” he commented. “I can see why Dad would pick Munny Caves as a hiding place.”

  “For Dad it has always been a resting place,” Mattie said. “It’s a good place to lie low for a few days and find out who is on their trail.”

  “And stop them right here,” Sam said. “Or at least find out just how serious the lawmen were. This trail is an ambush waiting to happen.”

  “Few ever even try to make it past here,” Mattie said quietly. She paused, then added, “We can go around, but it’ll take a good five or six hours longer.”

  Still following the trail with his eyes, gauging the distances, Sam realized that while they could be seen from here by any guards atop the ridgeline and lookout cliffs along the hillside, they would remain out of rifle range until they had almost reached the safety and cover of the rocky hillside. He estimated no more than two hundred yards that they would have to ride in the open, in danger of rifle fire. From that point on the trail would then wind into rock cover and stay there until it reached the hilltop.

  “We both see the risk. I say we need to go on across,” he said quietly. “If they want to know how serious I am, here it is.”

  Mattie smiled tightly, her rifle propped up on her thigh the same as the Ranger’s.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” she said. “We’ve both come too far to start giving up ground.”

  Sam nodded in agreement.

  “Keep a few feet between us when we get out in the open,” he said. He pointed to a spot in the near distance where a blackened, lightning-scorched pine stood at the edge of the
trail and added, “When you reach the dead tree, put your horse up into a gallop and get on into the rocks as fast as you can.”

  She gave him a questioning look, but then she gazed along the hilltop in the distance.

  “Gun range . . . ,” she said.

  Sam just looked at her.

  She smiled.

  “Don’t look so surprised, Ranger,” she said, nudging her horse forward. “I’ve done a good job figuring things out for myself for quite some time now.”

  “I have no doubt of that, ma’am,” the Ranger replied, nudging his copper dun along beside her.

  As the two rode forward at a walk, Sam continued to study the slim, exposed trail lying ahead of them. Starting ten yards out, nothing stood on either side of them but an almost sheer drop of over four hundred feet down hard and jagged stone.

  Here goes, he told himself.

  With one hand holding the reins loosely, he gave the dun its head, knowing it was now time to relinquish control and rely on the animal’s surefootedness and instincts for survival to ensure his own. In his other hand he held his Winchester cocked and ready. Stepping the dun out onto the narrow open trail, he heard the click of Mattie’s horse’s hooves fall back a few feet farther behind him, just as he’d asked her to do.

  They rode the horses at a safe and steady walk, tensely yet without incident, for the next twenty minutes, feeling an updraft of coolness from below between gusting passes of a hot sun-dried wind. On the jagged hillside facing them, the Ranger knew that rifle sights closely monitored their every step. Yet the eyes behind those gun sights knew as well as he and the woman, as the distance grew shorter between them and the dead standing pine, so did their chances of making it across the gorge alive.

  “Get ready,” Sam said over his shoulder as they neared the scorched, broken tree.

  Almost as soon as he and the woman collected their horses beneath them and batted their boots to their sides, the first bullet thumped into the trail in front of them. Sam and Mattie put their horses into a hard gallop as the sound of the delayed blast caught up with its bullet. The two horses raced past the spot where the bullet had fallen short by fifteen feet. The Ranger hoped he and Mattie would both be moving targets by the time the rifleman got sighted and ready to fire again.