“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I shot my nephew—Isabelle’s son. I shot her son, and her grandson,” she said. She shook her head. “Vengeance has betrayed and misused me, Ranger.”
“Vengeance betrays and misuses us all, Mattie,” Sam said quietly. He stuck the Smith & Wesson down into his waist.
“How will I ever tell poor Isabelle?” she said.
Sam took a breath and looked at Orwick’s body lying on the stone floor.
“You didn’t kill her grandson. Jumpe did,” Sam said. He nodded toward Orwick’s body. “As for this one, was it your bullet or mine that killed him? Who can say?” He paused. “Some folks who wouldn’t tell her about this at all,” he said.
“I—I don’t know that I can be one of those folks,” Mattie replied. She stared at Orwick’s body. “Would it be wrong not to tell her I shot him, Ranger?” she said.
“I’m not the one to ask, Mattie,” Sam said. “That’s something you’ll have to settle with someone who knows more than I do.”
“You mean God,” she said.
Sam didn’t reply. Instead, he turned toward the tunnel. But before taking a step, he saw another flickering torch moving fast toward them. He stepped back and pulled Mattie around behind him.
Suddenly, in the tunnel opening, Brother Caylin stood tall and broad-shouldered, a thick club in his right hand, a burning torch in his left.
“There you are,” he growled at the Ranger, stepping forward. A thick white bandage covered the left side of his face. The spoon handle still stuck out from his eye socket. A circle of blood on the white bandage surrounded the protruding spoon. “Before they remove this from my eye, Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack, I’m going to beat you to death as bad as I can! Then I’ll be able to lie down and let them do what they need to do.”
A club . . .
Sam stood still, staring at him, the rifle leveled at him waist high.
“I’m holding a rifle aimed at you,” Sam said, wondering if maybe the big man didn’t see it.
“I know it. I’ve got one good eye, still enough to see how to properly bash your brains out,” he said, moving closer a step at a time.
All right. . . .
Without raising the cocked rifle, Sam squeezed the trigger. The bullet hammered the big man in the chest, sliced through and out his back in a red mist of blood. The big man grunted, staggered, but righted himself and kept walking. Sam fired again. The second bullet hit him two inches below the first. More blood misted behind him. He kept coming, staggering more, but with the club and torch still raised chest high.
That does it. . . .
Sam raised the rifle to his shoulder and took aim. This time when he pulled the trigger, the bullet hit Brother Caylin in the center of his forehead. He tumbled backward and fell dead on the floor.
Sam stepped forward and looked down at him; a cloud of rifle smoke gathered overhead on the cave ceiling. Out of habit, he toed the thick club away from the man’s hand.
Bare hands . . . then a knife . . . Now a club, Sam reflected. He shook his head and looked at Mattie.
“Did this man not own a firearm?” he said quietly.
“I don’t know,” Mattie said. “There’s so many people here I never knew, never seen before.”
Sam shook his head again. He considered some of the people he’d encountered, Brother Caylin, Brother Shelby, Elder Barcinder, Isabelle . . . and Ezekiel Orwick himself.
“I have to say, Mattie, these people are the strangest folks I’ve ever come across. What makes them all act this way?” he asked.
Mattie stood silent for a moment, until he turned and looked at her questioningly.
“What way?” she asked.
Seeing she was serious, Sam said, “Never mind.” He picked up the burning torch Caylin had dropped, and the two walked into the long tunnel back the way they came. On the way past Orwick’s desk, Sam picked up the canvas bag, checked it and saw the pile of stolen bank money inside. With the bag in his free hand, they walked on.
—
Outside the large house, at the bottom of the stone pathway in the center of the compound, Sheriff DeShay and Arlis Fletcher sat atop their horses, their rifles covering the few remaining churchmen who had not vanished when they rode in. The churchmen sat bunched together on the ground, their rifles and shotguns in a pile off to the side. DeShay and Fletcher kept watchful eyes moving around the wide valley and up toward Orwick’s house on the rocky hillside.
Behind DeShay, Lightning Wade Hornady lay draped over his horse’s back, a long, thick string of black blood hanging from a gaping hole in his head, bobbing slowly toward the ground. A skinny cat sat licking at the black puddle of blood in the dirt.
“Here they come now,” Fletcher said, seeing the Ranger and Mattie Rourke walking down the path, looking back and forth, appearing surprised to see no fighting going on, just the sheriff and his posse man watching over the churchmen as if they were a small herd of sheep.
DeShay raised his free hand to let Sam know everything was all right.
“I see you got the bank’s money,” he called out.
“Looks like I’ve got it all,” Sam said, “some of the payroll money too.”
“That’s welcome news,” DeShay said. As Sam and Mattie stepped down the last few feet of hillside, DeShay turned his horse quarterwise to the Ranger.
“Can you believe this?” he said. “We rode right in here without a shot fired. A lot of them cut out at the sight of Hornady’s brains dripping out of his head. But mostly the rest just carried their guns over and gave them up. Said they didn’t know what Dad wanted them to do, so they weren’t going to do a damned thing.”
“Pardon me, Sheriff,” a churchman said from the ground, his hands chest high. “Nobody used that word when you arrived.”
“Oh? What word?” DeShay asked.
“You know,” the man said. “D-a-m-n-e-d,” he spelled out.
Sam and DeShay just gave each other a bemused look.
Fletcher slumped in his saddle, shook his lowered head and said in disgust, “I don’t know—is there any difference in saying than there is in spelling? Don’t it both mean the same thing?”
“Easy, Arlis,” said DeShay. “It’s these folks’ religion. They’ve got the right to it.”
“Yeah,” said Fletcher, “pay me no mind. I’m still sick from unripe mescal.”
Sam and Mattie looked at Fletcher.
“It’s true. He’s got the worst mescal sickness I’ve ever seen,” the sheriff said. “He’s puked up stuff would kill a lizard.”
Sam turned and looked at Wade Hornady’s body.
“How’d he get here? What happened to him?” he asked, eyeing the torn duster hanging down from the dead man’s shoulders, the brimless hat hanging by its string.
“He came following us at a full run,” DeShay said. “We set a rope line between a pine and a cactus. What a jolt he took.”
Sam winced.
“But that’s not what killed him,” said DeShay. He gave a nod toward Fletcher. “Arlis, my new deputy here, couldn’t stand him commenting on his mescal sickness, even though, I have to say, Lightning was more than sympathetic, having drunk the old Mexican’s brew himself, to the same result.”
“Tell on me, why don’t you, Sheriff?” Fletcher said with a half-angry scowl.
“The Ranger don’t care,” DeShay said. “You’re my deputy now.”
Fletcher stared at Hornady’s body and said, “He just wouldn’t shut up about it, on and on . . . how sick it made him, how sorry he felt for me, yak, yak, yak. When a man’s sick on mescal he don’t want to hear all that. I either had to kill him or kill myself. So there he is.”
DeShay eyed the Ranger, seeing how he would take Fletcher’s act. “He had it coming, Ranger,�
� he put in quietly.
Without reply, Sam gave an understanding nod and looked at one of the churchmen on the ground.
“Where’re our guns and horses?” he asked.
“In the common barn,” the man said.
Sam looked at Mattie and said, “Let’s get mounted and head back to Whiskey Bend. Your sister’s waiting there for you. I’ve got money to deliver. It’s time we call an end to all this.”
Mattie smiled as they turned toward the common barn.
“Amen to that,” she said as they walked away.
* * *
Don’t miss a page of action from America’s most exciting Western author, Ralph Cotton.
Read on for a special preview of the next Ranger Burrack adventure,
HIGH WILD DESERT
Available from Signet in April 2013.
* * *
Painted Desert, Badlands Territory
Arizona Territory Ranger Sam Burrack stepped down from his saddle on the dusty street of Humbly and reined his bear-paw Appaloosa Black Pot to an iron hitch rail. Beside his dust-streaked stallion, he reined up a spindly-legged roan gelding carrying the body of Ernest Trulock tied down across its back. Next to the roan, he tied a black-mane bay. Its rider, Harvey “Cisco” Lang, stepped down and took an awkward stance, his hands cuffed in front of him, a third cuff at the end of a two-foot chain holding him fastened to his saddle horn.
“This is a hell of a rig you’ve invented here, Ranger,” Lang said, shaking the chain to his cuffs. “Are you expecting to make any money on it?”
“I didn’t invent it,” Sam replied. “It came from a blacksmith at the ranger outpost.” Dismissing the matter, he said, “Where will I find Rastatler?”
Lang shrugged and looked all around the half-abandoned high-desert town.”Beats me.” Then he said, “What that blacksmith don’t know won’t hurt him, I don’t reckon. Like as not, you could claim these cuffs as as your own invention, and by the time news of it got back to him, you’d be a rich man.”
The Ranger looked back and forth warily along the dusty street. Along the hill line stretching north to south beyond town, he saw no rise of trail dust, no sign of anybody fleeing.
“That wouldn’t be honest,” he replied.
“Honest . . . ? You got me there,” said Lang, a slight smile showing through his dust-caked black stubble. “Of course, if you’re that particular, you could always give him a little something to settle him up. See what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I hear you, Cisco,” Sam said quietly, his eyes pulling back into Humbly, scanning the rooflines, the doorways, the alleys. Lang hadn’t said three words all morning. Now that they were in Humbly, where Lang had assured him Sheldon Rastatler would be hiding out, the outlaw couldn’t seem to shut himself up.
The Ranger drew his Winchester from its saddle boot and wiped dust off its butt. He stepped in front of Lang, unlocked the cuff from the saddle horn, pulled Lang over and fastened the third cuff to the iron hitch rail.
“Hell, Ranger,” said Lang, “you didn’t have to do that. We’ve been getting along well. I’m not going anywhere. Don’t you trust me?”
Sam just looked at him.
“What I mean is,” Lang said, “I’m not going to try anything foolish. I’ve learned my lesson. All I want to do is get my time done at Yuma and get myself started in a new life. I’m what you’d call a changed man—rehabilitated, if you will. Far as I’m concerned, my days of outlawry and untoward shenanigans are over, and I’m—”
His words of contrition stopped short as a voice called out from farther down the empty street. “Ranger, it’s me, Sheldon Rastatler,” a man in weathered trail clothes and a riding duster said from beneath the wide brim of a tall-crowned Stetson hat. “I know you’re dogging me. I won’t have it.” As he spoke, he stepped sideways slowly until he stood in the middle of the street.
“Shoot him, Shell! Kill him!” Lang shouted. “Get me freed up here, pard!”
“You brought him here, Cisco, you rotten cur,” the outlaw shouted out in reply. “I ought to kill you first.”
“I had no choice, Shell,” Lang shouted. “He beat me, pistol-whipped me, threatened to kill me, kill my horse!”
The Ranger poked Lang a sharp blow to the ribs with the tip of his Winchester.
“Shut up, Lang,” Sam said. “I can’t even hear what the man’s trying to say.”
Lang grunted and fell silent, his cuffed hands clutching his pained ribs.
“Poke him again, Ranger,” said Rastatler from fifty feet away, his duster pulled back behind a big holstered Remington on his right side. “Shoot the fool in the head, for all I care.”
“You don’t mean that, Sheldon,” Lang called out in a strained voice. “We’ve been pals too many years.”
“Oh, I mean it,” said Rastatler. “Fact is, I always figured you’d jackpot me and Ole Trulock. I so much as told him so. ‘Watch Cisco Lang like a hawk—don’t turn your back on him,’ I always said. He wouldn’t listen. Now look at him.” He gave a nod toward the dust-covered body sprawled across the horse at the spindly-legged roan.
“I didn’t get him killed, Sheldon,” said Lang. “It was his own stupidity that caused him to look around just because someone called out his name. What kind of fool looks around like that?”
As the two outlaws argued, Sam had stepped sidelong away from the horses and moved out to the middle of the street, his Winchester cocked and in his hands.
“It makes no difference to me,” said Rastatler. “Soon as this lawdog’s lying dead on the ground, look for me to come over there and gut you with my spurs for siccing him on me, knowing my name’s high up on his wanted list.” He looked away from Lang, back to the Ranger.
“Let me make it clear before we start,” the Ranger said. “Your name’s not on my list at all. I came after the three of you because I was nearby when you robbed the mercantile in Farm Town Settlement.”
“Not on the list?” said Rastatler. He sounded disappointed, taken aback.
“No,” said the Ranger.
“Then why’d you kill Trulock?” Rastatler asked.
“He threw down on me,” said the Ranger in a firm tone. “The same way you’re about to do.”
“And we never were on your list?” Rastatler said, seeming to have a hard time dealing with the matter. Being on the Ranger’s list had become a dark and short-lived honor to many of the thieves, killers, lowlifes and swindlers in the four-corners area of the territory badlands.
“I once rode with the Painted Gang,” Rastatler said, as if that fact might boost his suddenly deflated image.
“Good for you,” said the Ranger. “But so has every other gunman who’s wandered in this Painted Desert. Yuma Prison is full of the Painted Gang. Some have learned to live like civilized human beings, under their circumstances.”
“Yeah?” said Rastatler. “How about old Byron Tappet? Is he still wilder than a three-eyed—”
“My point is,” Sam said, cutting his conversation short, “you can give yourself up, like your pard here.”
“This rotten bucket of slop is no pard of mine, Ranger,” said Rastatler.
At the hitch rail, Lang gave a flat smile and waved his cuffed hands.
“I’m saying you don’t have to die here in Humbly,” Sam said, trying to get him to forgo his anger at Lang and focus on the matter at hand.
“I’ll go to hell before I give myself up,” said Rastatler. “I ain’t spending my life breaking rocks beside that son of a—” He grabbed the butt of the Remington and started to swing the gun up into play.
A shot from the Ranger’s Winchester hit him dead center, lifted him backward off the ground and turned him up in a complete backflip like some acrobatic performer. The outlaw hit the ground face-first and trembled for a second. Then his life s
eemed to drain down out of him into the arid dirt.
The Ranger walked forward, keeping an eye on the roofline, levering a fresh round into the rifle chamber.
“If I was you, I’d shoot him again,” Lang called out from his spot at the hitch rail. “But that’s just me, Ranger: conscientious to a fault—a trait you might consider mentioning to the prison board, on my behalf.”
I don’t know how I’m going to put up with this one all the way to Yuma, Sam thought, walking a few steps along the street of the dusty near-abandoned town. He stopped when he saw a fresh familiar set of boot prints appear out of an alleyway and circle around to the front door of a small saloon. Fresh because the wind and passing sage brush had not yet swept away the distinct edges of the soles. Familiar because he’d seen this stride pattern in a clearing along his trail only the day before.
Whoever wore these boots had a slight pigeon-toed gait—bowlegged no doubt, he told himself, knowing that to usually be the case. Rifle ready, he stepped onto a dusty boardwalk. Making no attempt to quiet his footsteps on the rough planks, he walked straight and steadily toward a pair of weathered batwing doors. But instead of walking inside, he quickly turned, pressed his back to the wall beside the doors, reached out and shoved them open with his rifle barrel.
From the saloon’s dark interior, three pistol shots roared; bullets tore through the doors in a spray of splinters. Following the sound and the flash of fire, the Ranger swung around to his left, took quick aim above the hard swinging door and fired at the figure standing crouched in front of the bar.
The bullet hit its target and hurled the gunman backward against the bar. His pistol roared again, but this time only in reflex, his finger squeezing the trigger as he melted straight down to the floor and fell face forward.
“Jesus, Ranger!” Lang shouted from down the street at the hitch rail. “Are you going to kill everybody?”
Without answering, Sam gave him a hard stare and levered another round into his Winchester.
Only one set of boot prints . . . , he told himself, but for all he knew, someone could have come in through the rear door.
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