E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action

by E. Hoffmann Price

  Swift could not shoot. Laura blocked his line of fire. He stood there, gun in hand and nothing to do with it. But this was only for a moment.

  Sally, coming up with a shotgun she had snatched from the wagon, had the muzzle trained on Swift, and without menacing anyone else. “Drop your gun, Kirby,” she said in a quiet, deadly voice. “Get your redhead away, or she can have you in two pieces.”

  Swift obeyed. Sally’s voice had made him turn ash grey. He let the weapon fall, not even daring keep it long enough to holster it. He took Laura by the shoulders, and stuttered, “It’s all right, you let go of him, it’s all right.”

  Barlow yelled, “Stop that—Stop him! Damn it, let go of me! Stop him!”

  Laura still clawed and kicked until he broke away. Blind with fury, he blazed away at Lathrop, who had taken advantage of the fracas to mount up and ride. The fugitive, un-hit, swerved between teams of restive oxen. Barlow had to lower his gun.

  He lost time catching Alezan. When he was in the saddle to make a race of it, Parker snatched the reins.

  “We need you here, Pete! I can’t have you riding off and plunging into an ambush.”

  “That brute he’s riding is fast,” Barlow grumbled. “Too far off already to do anything with a rifle.” He dismounted, and returned Swift’s look of surly defiance. “You’re right, Mr. Parker. I’d better stay here and make it clear what your segundo has been doing.

  “You, Swift! You listen and if you let out one word till I’m through, I’ll shoot you in your tracks, no matter if you’re not heeled! You don’t deserve a white man’s chance; so I’m keeping your gun. You made it up with Lathrop to have me jailed for stealing Alezan. I ended by getting her from a crew of thieves in the hills yonder, right where you and Lathrop aimed to lead us.

  “He didn’t dare ride her into camp because he knew she’d be recognized! He came here figuring he was sure he’d killed me, a long piece back. Now have you got something to say before you get a taste of what you aimed to give me?”

  “I didn’t know,” Swift, began gropingly. “‘I didn’t believe Lathrop had bushwhacked you after you left Kearneyville.”

  Somehow, the man was convincing; but Barlow tore into him, pressing the accusation: “When Lathrop and the prospectors ‘accidentally’ tangled with this company, you knew him for a coyote who’d connive to have a man jailed—have me jailed, so you could have Sally all to yourself. You took the word of a skunk like that and gulped the gold rush story.”

  “I’ve got a stake in this company,” Swift protested. “Do you suppose I’d knowingly risk my own money, animals, everything?”

  Parker looked at those who had gathered round. “I don’t think he would, Pete. I think he’s guilty of no more than poor judgment in dealing with a man he knew was low enough to try to jail an innocent man. We’ll vote on it tonight.”

  “Vote on what?” Swift demanded, voice cracking with apprehension.

  “Electing another segundo. You’re through with show off tricks, shining up to all the women folks, and making the young fellows imitate you and back your every play. We are backtracking right now. The by-laws say we organized to settle at Red Fork, and to Red Fork is where we are going.”

  Parker paused. He saw that for the first time, he was actually leader, instead of captain in name only. But his justifiable satisfaction hardly outlasted the deep breath which expanded his chest. One of the sodbusters shouted, “Maybe we’re bound for Red Fork, but we’ll get to hell first! Look yonder, riding out of the pass. They knowed we’d not be crazy enough to go further, so they’re coming to get us.”

  Barlow looked and saw the riders on the skyline. He wondered whether it was insensate wrath that made them strike at once, or whether it was fear that the emigrants would send for help, or in one way or another survive to tell what had happened, and who had menaced them. As he looked, he wondered also at the peculiar blinding flash which winked from the heights of a further ridge. But getting the wagons into a circle, with the animals inside, was far more important than speculating as to the enemy’s motives, or what caused the queer flickering so far away.

  Most of the riders proved to be Apaches. They wore the levis issued by the Indian agent of the reservation they had quit; they had their heads bound, turbanwise, with red calico. Judging from the whine and spat of bullets they poured into the wagon train as they rode in a circle about it, they had plenty of ammunition. But there were white renegades, worse than any Indian, in the howling pack.

  The sodbusters had firearms enough: shotguns and rifles; powder and ball and caps, and cartridges for the breech loaders and the few repeaters in the train, but by no means enough for a siege such as this promised to be. They had come fixed for pot hunting, and not for battle. Even though they had reckoned on the possibility of trouble, none had had any idea of how much powder could be burned in a short time.

  Barlow, crouching behind a wagon wheel, picked a renegade, and leveled his Winchester. He taught that one the advantage of riding Indian style, protected by his horse. But that one effective shot set the emigrants off on a wild burst firing. Barlow quit squinting through the dust for a glimpse of Jed Lathrop and got up to find Parker.

  “Make ’em quit wasting powder,” he demanded. “They’re doing nothing but keep the varmints away till we’re out of ammunition.”

  A .60 caliber buffalo gun bellowed. The emigrants howled in triumph, seeing man and beast drilled with a single slug; the animal had been knocked stem winding, lifted and flung. Barlow raced over to the marksman. “Hold it a spell! You’ve got every pot-head in the crowd trying to do the same with buckshot and bird-shot. Let ’em get close, and then hose ’em!”

  The emigrants’ fire tapered off. Those who lost their heads and let a good target tempt them, or those who were plainly defiant, served their purpose. Barlow said to Parker, “Might as well let them be. If we all quit shooting, those devils’d think we aimed to do the very thing we are going to do—let ’em have it from close range. Now with a dribble of shots, it looks like we’re hard up for powder.”

  They busied themselves with the wounded. Women were tearing up sheets for bandages. A child went out beyond the barricade of wagons, enjoying all the fun. A man shouted, and would have gone out to get the little fellow, had not Barlow laid him out with a well planted fist.

  “We need that man for fighting,” he told those who cried out against him.

  A woman did run out. She was riddled by bullets. The child came back, slugs kicking up dust about him. He was unharmed.

  “Pete,” the captain began, hoarsely, “you can’t—

  “We’re fighting a war. She’s done for anyway.”

  The circle of riders suddenly closed in. Lead spatted through wagon tops. Lead thumped into wagon beds, and zinged from bolts and hubs. Animals in the center of the barricade were hit. Horses fought their hobbles.

  “Hold it!” Barlow shouted. “Hold it till buckshot will count!”

  Sally, bedraggled and grimy and scratched by flying splinters, came up beside him with a cap and ball Colt and a double barreled derringer. “I’ll hand you these when you need them,” she said.

  And she went with him to crouch behind sandbags he had filled. The emigrant volley was ragged, yet a dozen riders were knocked out. The charge broke. Bullets drove the enemy off until Parker made the sodbusters quit firing.

  During the confusion, and with dust rising high, Barlow darted from cover and scooped the wounded woman from the ground. He walked back with her. She lived long enough for a word with her husband, who had recovered from Barlow’s blow.

  “Now you’re fit to fight,” Barlow told the man, “and you have plenty to fight about.”

  Then Kirby Swift came up. “Pete,” he said, grinning painfully, as he wiped blood from his face, “you called me a grandstand player. Look at you.”

  “Saved a man for when we needed him.”r />
  “I’m beating you with a better play.” He turned to Parker, who had just come up. “Horace, if we run them off once more like we just did, there’s a chance for a man to ride out through all the dust and get away without being noticed—they’ll be too confused for a second or two to notice who’s who. A man with a fast horse could get word to the army patrols. Give me Alezan. Better than having those devils get her.”

  Parker eyed Barlow questioningly.

  Barlow answered, slowly, “Kirby’s entitled to this chance. Providing our folks don’t misunderstand and think he’s joining the enemy. That’d make them throw up the sponge.”

  Kirby Swift’s face whitened beneath the dust. “I earned that one. They might think I was going to tell Jed Lathrop we can’t hold much longer. But if they didn’t believe I meant well, they’d’ve settled me before now, wouldn’t they?”

  “Get ready to ride,” Parker told him. And when Swift left to saddle Alezan, Parker said, “Pete, did you have to pour it on him that way?”

  “The dig might help him get through.” He looked at the sun, all red through dust. “Maybe he’d better wait till dusk.”

  “If they know a man got through,” Parker objected, “they’ll start worrying and might pull out. Indians don’t usually close in by night.”

  “That’s right, “Barlow admitted. “Though you can’t tell what they’ll do with white renegades working with them.”

  Parker went to talk to Swift.

  Before Barlow could learn the decision the captain and Swift had made, the enemy was closing in again. Again, the defenders held their fire: but the Apaches had a surprise. They were not yet close enough to get the deadly raking that awaited them when they wheeled; and those among them armed with bows loosed a flight of blazing arrows.

  The flaming shafts dotted the wagon sides and covers. Wind whipped the dry wood and dry canvas to fierce burning.

  Covered by musketry, Barlow and others tore and slashed at the wagon covers, while, some fought the blaze with water soaked gunny sacks. Parker was busy trying to keep this one and that from wasting water on wagons ignited beyond saving.

  Gusts of smoke rose high, and then, wind driven, flattened out to blanket the earth, and hide whatever the enemy might next do.

  The sodbusters manhandled two wagons which were too well ablaze to be saved. This kept the fire from spreading to those which had been put out. Then came a wild yell, and a whip crack.

  Kirby Swift, stampeding some twenty oxen, followed them through the gap. Crazed by excitement, they raced for the enemy, who was closing in again, this time through a wall of smoke. As he rode, Swift threw away his bullwhip and went on with a pistol in each hand. The stampede crashed headlong into the ranks of the converging Apaches. Swift followed through.

  Buckshot and pistol ball broke the charge. The next rush, however, would settle things; Smoke and dust covered the field. There was no telling what had happened to Swift, but Barlow said to Sally, as they shared a dipper of water, “He could have got through; Pass the word along that he did get through! All we have to do is keep holding till help gets here! Tell ’em!”

  He gave her a squeeze and then a shove, and turned to encourage those who looked as though they knew themselves good as done for. He caught a sodbuster and his woman crouching in the shelter of two water barrels. They had an old revolver. The way they looked at it and each other made Barlow step up, snatch the weapon, and slap them with the flat of his hand.

  “Stand up and fight till you can’t be taken alive! What do you mean, you fools, fixing to waste cartridges on each other? Kill those devils out there instead!”

  The two stared at him, half defiant, half ashamed. Then the haggard woman’s face changed. “We’re good as dead already!” she cried, hysterically; “Hear the trumpets and music! You hear it, Asa?”

  Barlow’s thought was, “He couldn’t have found help so soon.” Then he caught the thin, far off sound, and yanked the woman to her feet. “Angels, my eye! That’s a cavalry trumpet sounding off!”

  Either the wind shifted, or else the troop had come up out an arroyo that had choked the sound, for in a moment the call swelled, loud and fierce. There would be a charge—but not by renegades and Apaches.

  The sodbusters heard, and shouted crazily. They helped speed the departing enemy. Barlow, resting a long barreled .45-90 on a sack of grain, unseated riders as far as he could hit them.

  There was far off firing; but a squad of troopers led by a corporal came toward the wagons to take charge until the main party had done its work.

  “Hell, no,” the noncom answered in reply to Barlow’s question, “we didn’t get any messenger. The skipper’ll tell you, maybe, when he comes in. It was funny business. What outfit were you in?”

  And answering that question led to other things which kept them busy until the corporal cocked his head and remarked, “Sounding recall. Show’s over. Hey, where you going?”

  “Someone I hope got knocked over. Renegade by the name of Lathrop. I’m going out to make sure.”

  “No, you’re not! The skipper sent us to see no ‘dead’ Injuns came to life and raised sand whilst he was chasing those that ran out. You stay put.”

  “OK, corporal. But there’s something else I want to find out.”

  “It’ll keep. Another scalp you’re hankering for?”

  “I did, right up till a little while ago. Now I feel different about that jigger.”

  When he had told about Kirby Swift, the noncom shrugged. “One man couldn’t’ve got this whole outfit off the track if the captain’d been worth a second hand chew of tobacco. It’s everyone’s fault, not just the showoff’s—well—what’s that?”

  A pushcart was coming up out of a swale. A longish bundle was lashed over the tarpaulin. “That’s Epstein,” Barlow said. “And for once, he didn’t get around to fixing things.”

  But Barlow was wrong. Epstein’s odd cargo was Kirby Swift, and his two emptied Colts. Far behind him, a familiar horse loomed up: Alezan, apparently none of the worse. Epstein called, “Pete, it gives something back there I didn’t take the scalp from. It belongs to Swift.”

  “Jed Lathrop?”

  Epstein nodded. “He had a pistol, and from that far, you wouldn’t be pulling a pistol for using against these wagons. They shot each other up, Lathrop and Swift. What happened?”

  “All of a sudden, Swift ran hog wild. Whether he meant to ride for help, or just had a hunch he’d get square with the skunk that led him into trouble, nobody’ll ever know.”

  And then, when the cavalry troop came to the wagons, Barlow got the answer to the remaining riddle. Epstein dug into his cart and produced four small, framed mirrors. “Some of my bargains,” he said. “From a high spot I could see far off with the spy glasses. So with the mirrors I made signals. Like the army heliograph. General Crook used to use them, and I bet the captain here caught the flashes and read my bad spelling.”

  Later, when the dead had been buried and the camp set in order, Sally came from one of the wagons and joined Barlow and Epstein. Her eyes were gleaming, and tears still trickled down her cheeks.

  As she clung to Barlow’s arm, she said, “I’ve been with Laura Frazer. She’s all broken up about Kirby. Poor thing, she was playing up to you just to make him jealous. Anyway—thinking of how she and Kirby have been parted forever—”

  Words choked in her throat. Barlow carried on, saying, “What Sally means is, she doesn’t want to wait another day or hour. With all your handiness with scriptures, you don’t happen to be a rabbi? That’d make it legal.”

  Epstein sighed regretfully. “Look at me, do I have a beard? I ain’t even a justice of the peace.” He pounced for his cart, and as he rummaged, he said over his shoulder, “But I got a nice ring, brand new, solid gold, just the right size—I give you a bargain and it ain’t far to Red Fork and preachers.”

&n
bsp; DESERT JUDGMENT

  Originally published in Six-Gun Western, Oct. 1950.

  The pushcart parked in the lot opposite the Jefferson House, the only hotel in Poplar Junction, was crammed with every sort of gear for making good the slogan: Epstein Will Fix It, in big letters on both sides.

  At the moment, Saul Epstein was plying his razor at the horse trough. Finished, he crossed over to the Antler Bar, to see what news he could pick up about a boom in Panamint.

  The first person he ran into was Ben Hurley. He was blowing the froth off his beer and his angular face bore no sign of the beating he had taken when a run had cleaned him out of his Silver Bend National Bank. No one could have suspected that he had just sold every acre of land and every steer to pay off his depositors.

  “Yep! I’m makin’ a new start,” Hurley was saying.

  “Aim to drive freight clear across the Amargosa to Panamint. It can be done, and save that long haul from here to Frisco, then over the Mojave Desert.” Epstein sidled up, a glass in his hand. “Prosit Ben! I’m doing some freighting to Panamint by the Nevada backdoor myself!” Hurley turned, surprised. “Saul! Where in hell did you come from?”

  “When’s your first haul, Ben?”

  “Any day now. Mostly provisions. What me and Wiley, here, don’t eat we’ll sell.”

  “Got room to haul some freight for me?”

  “Plenty—and that makes you my first bona-fide customer.” He turned to the weather-beaten man at his elbow. “OK, Wiley—the jugheads are at the stable and the provisions at Hoskins’ General Store. Get them stowed.”

  Epstein chuckled. “Just to make it interesting, I’ll race you to Panamint.”

  “That’s a bet.” Wagging his hand at Epstein, Hurley walked out. But once alone his fierce animation quit him. His thoughts went back to the day after the bank failure, when he had faced Emily Crawford.

  On his advice, she had bought into the bank. Like other stockholders, she had been forced to make good. Everyone had been flattened except Lucky Ballard, who a month before had sold his shares to invest in a cattle outfit in Arizona. That was the rub—competitors in all things, Hurley and Ballard had been courting Emily.