“I will,” he assured her, and thanked her again. He paid Clem for the oats and started out again after Preacher, feeling he had made some new friends, if nothing else came from the trip. He figured a half day’s ride to the Kansas border where, legally, he should turn around. But he had never stopped at the border before on several occasions when he was this close in pursuit of a felon, so he didn’t plan to stop this time, either.
* * *
He found himself still thinking about Louise Scully’s plight if something happened to Clem and the parallel it offered to Sophie’s life. A picture of Sophie in the apron he often saw her wear and the impish smile on her face formed in his mind as he guided Buster out of the trees along the riverbank. In the next instant, the picture vanished with the loud snap beside his ear as the bullet passed inches from his head. He didn’t need to hear the report of the rifle that followed to know that he had just missed being shot in the head and his actions were immediate and automatic. Leaning forward on Buster’s neck, he yanked the buckskin’s reins sharply to his left to send the horse charging back into the trees. A second shot screamed through the leaves over his head, but not before he gained the protection of the large cottonwoods. Seeing a thick bank of laurel bushes topping a high spot in the river bluff, he headed for it, seeking cover not only for himself, but for his horses. He was in luck, for the bluff was high enough to shield his two horses, and the bushes would give him cover to fire from. A shallow gully running between two of the bushes provided extra protection, but only from a head-on approach.
There had not been time to think about the source of the attack as his mind was occupied with protecting his horses and grabbing his rifle. Not until he had crawled up close to the bushes in a position to return fire did he pause to wonder if Preacher had suspected he was following him and had doubled back on him. At the moment, that was the only possibility he could think of. He was not certain from what direction the shots had come, but he guessed they were probably from a long ridge about one hundred yards from the trees beside the river. There was not much cover between the ridge and the trees, and had he been thinking of something other than Sophie Bennett, he might possibly have been alert to the fact that someone could be chasing him. But that was highly unlikely, unless Preacher had doubled back on him. And now, although his defensive position was good, he could no longer see the ridge because the trees blocked his view of it. No doubt there was some concern in Scully’s, since the shots could certainly be heard at the store. But there was little he could do for them before he found out from whom and where the attack was coming. It seemed obvious at any rate that the shooter was after him and not Scully. So there was nothing he could do now but sit tight and keep his eyes open.
* * *
“Damn it!” Jeb Cotton cursed. “I told you to wait till he rode outta them trees. Now we’re gonna have to root him outta wherever he run off to.”
“I wouldn’ta missed if he hadn’t turned his head,” Cecil complained.
“You think you’re so damn good with that rifle,” Emmett said. “What was you aimin’ at his head for, anyway? If you’d aimed at his chest, you mighta hit him. You shoulda waited like Pa told you.”
“Nobody asked you,” Cecil spat back, and their father had to step between them to keep them from going after one another.
Luther held his tongue while his brother-in-law scolded his sons, then he said, “It is a damn shame Cecil didn’t wait till he cleared the trees. Our business mighta been finished now and we could get on over to that cabin on the Cimarron.” He tugged at his whiskers thoughtfully and said, “We don’t know for sure that the feller on the horse is Will Tanner.”
“Who else could it be?” Jeb responded. “He’s ridin’ that big buckskin Cannon told us about.”
“I reckon,” Luther allowed. “You never can tell. If your boy had hit him, we could go see if we could find a badge on him. Now I reckon we’re gonna have to root him out to find out if he’s Tanner or not.” After riding like hell to catch up with the lawman, to finally spot him, only to have Cecil take a risky shot at him, was enough to try Luther’s patience. If they had waited just a few minutes, they might have been able to get a little closer and guarantee a sure shot. Then they could have gone on to that cabin on the Cimarron and started getting ready to spend the winter.
“If he don’t come outta there pretty soon, I’m goin’ in after him,” Emmett declared.
“Shut your mouth!” his father ordered. “Every time you open it, your damn ignorance spills outta your head. That’s just what that damn deputy hopes we’ll do. One at a time would make it real nice for him, wouldn’t it?” Talking more rationally now, he turned to Luther. “I’m thinkin’ we’re gonna have to split up and come down on him from both sides. Whaddya think?”
“That’s about all the choices we’ve got now,” Luther answered, still a little perturbed that it was so. “And we need to do it pretty quick, else he’s just liable to swim on down the river before we can cut him off.”
“That’s what I’m worried about, too. I wanna get him while we’ve got him holed up, so let’s get goin’ and get this business done. Me and my boys will cut over upstream near the store. You and your boys can come up from downstream. That all right with you?”
“Don’t make no difference to me,” Luther said. “Let’s get started.” He signaled to Liam and Ethan. “We’ll ride down to the end of this ridge and cut over to the river from there.” They nodded.
“Hey, Cecil,” Liam challenged. “I’ll bet you a dollar one of our shots is the one that gets him.”
“You got a bet,” Cecil replied, and swung his horse around to follow Emmett and his father along the ridge. They could just as well have been competing to see who was the first to shoot a deer or a rabbit. It earned him a strong reprimand from Jeb with a reminder that they were here to avenge the death of his younger brother and not playing a boy’s game.
* * *
Lying in the gully at the top of the sandy bluff, Will could only wait and listen for some sound that might tell him his assailant was moving into the trees, hoping to spot him or his horses. All was quiet until he heard Scully’s hound dogs barking about a hundred yards upstream near the store. His first thought was that he had attacked Scully, but he then decided differently. Maybe he’s figuring to flank me from upstream, Will thought. He would have been better off if he’d made his try from downstream. That way, he wouldn’t have set the dogs off. He was still thinking his stalker was Preacher McCoy. Then it struck him. Unless there’s more than one man and they’re coming at me from both sides. Preacher must have gotten some help. Right or wrong, he decided he’d better play it as if that was the case. He still had to consider that it wasn’t Preacher at all. Whoever it was, he couldn’t afford to get caught between them. The shallow gully he was lying in offered virtually no protection from either side.
As quickly as he could, he tried to think what his best chances were. If he tried to run for it, he would ride right into an ambush whether he rode upstream or down. And if he crossed over the river, there was nothing but open prairie on that side, making him an easy target well within rifle range for a long time. There was only one other option, and the more he thought about it, the more it seemed to be the best. There was still the risk that someone had remained in the trees in front of him to make sure he didn’t do what he was about to try. It still seemed his best bet, however, so he didn’t hesitate.
Moving fast, since he wasn’t sure how much time he had before his assailants would be close enough to see him, he scrambled back down the bluff, grabbed Buster’s reins, and led the two horses up the bluff, through the laurel and into the trees. He was banking heavily on an assumption by his attackers that he was still holed up behind the riverbank. As soon as he reached the cover of the cottonwoods, he expelled a breath in relief to have crossed the clearing without a shot being fired. Confident that his retreat from the gully had not been detected, he took his horses well back into the trees a
nd tied them where he hoped they would be out of the way of flying lead. With his horses as safe as he could get them, he made his way back to the edge of the trees across from the gully where he had originally lay in wait.
It wasn’t long before he caught his first glimpse of his assailants. Coming from upstream, they moved cautiously on foot, working their way slowly toward the gully near the top of the bank. He could see three figures, but not clearly enough to identify them. Then movement in the thick bushes downstream from the gully caught his attention, verifying his assumption that they had counted on pinning him down between them. There appeared to be three men coming up from that direction as well. Six men, he thought. Who the hell are they? He could see most of them now, well enough to identify them, but he could not remember ever having seen them before. It was fortunate that he had moved from the riverbank because the shallow gully had offered very little protection from an attack from either side. For whatever reason, they were intent upon killing him. That much was evident. It occurred to him that with his recently found wealth, Preacher could afford to hire a gang of men to kill anyone trailing him. That would depend upon Preacher being aware that he was being followed and Will couldn’t really believe that to be possible. It didn’t matter at the moment, for the task at hand was to keep from getting shot.
Judging by the way they carried their rifles, they appeared to be anxious to shoot. So he had escaped being the victim of a massacre when he abandoned that position. His next decision, however, would promise to be the more serious one. Should he open fire while he had sure targets? Having closed upon one another to find no target between them, they came up from their guarded stances to openly walk toward one another, evidently convinced that he had somehow fled. None of the men he saw was Preacher McCoy. He could reduce their number by two at least before they could scramble for cover. Even though they had tried to kill him, it was not an easy decision to open fire on someone without knowing who he was. There was also the possibility that they had mistaken him for someone else and weren’t after him at all. Damn it, he thought, pretty soon they’re going to split up and start searching for me. Maybe I should run while I’ve still half a chance. In the next few moments, his decision was made for him.
“Uh-oh,” he grunted under his breath, for three of the men turned, climbed up the bank, and headed toward him. They had evidently concluded that there was only one direction he could have gone without their seeing him. All they had to do was look at the tracks the horses left coming up out of that gully, he thought. He was still trying to decide what to do when they pushed through the laurel bushes between the cottonwoods and the river. There was no longer a decision to be made, he had to act while he still had a small advantage. Lying flat on his belly at the base of a large tree, he took aim, pausing a moment to consider his targets. There was one older man and two young ones, all three walking crouched with their weapons at the ready. They had not picked him out as yet. He steadied his aim on the older man’s chest. At this close range, he couldn’t miss. On second thought, he dropped the front sight of the Winchester to the man’s left leg and squeezed the trigger. Without hesitation, he rolled over to the other side of the tree, ejecting the spent shell as he did. Caught by surprise when their father dropped, the two younger men froze for an instant before frantically searching for the source of the shot. It was long enough to give Will the time to spin one of them around with a round in his shoulder. He immediately rolled back completely behind the tree and waited while a spattering of shots from the other three stalkers took chunks out of the tree trunk.
Keeping the tree squarely between himself and the rifle fire coming from the laurel bushes, Will backed away to another tree to position himself to shoot again. A hailstorm of bullets whipped the trees around him, causing him to hug the ground as flat as he could. When he could risk another peek from behind the second tree, he saw the two he had shot, with help from the third, struggling to get back under cover. He decided then to try to find out who they were, so he called out to them. “What do you want? Who are you? I could have taken kill shots, but I didn’t, so why are you shootin’ at me?”
Back below the bank by then, the first man Will shot yelled back, “You, you murderin’ son of a bitch! Deputy Will Tanner, that’s who we’re after! You shot my son in the back, murdered him in cold blood.”
It still had not occurred to him who the man was talking about, but at least they were talking now. “I don’t know who you’re talkin’ about,” Will yelled back. “What was your son’s name?”
“Billy Cotton,” the answer came back. “You shot him in the back when you had him handcuffed! My name’s Jebediah Cotton, and I’ve come to take your life for his’n.”
Billy Cotton, Will exclaimed to himself. Surprised, for he had not considered an attempt to retaliate for an act he didn’t commit. “Listen to what I’m sayin’, Mr. Cotton. There’s no need for any more bloodshed here today because I’m not the man who shot your son. I was bringin’ Billy back home when he was shot by a man named Alvin Greeley. And now, Greeley is dead, so there ain’t nobody else left to blame.”
“How do I know you ain’t lyin’ just to save your neck?” Jeb yelled back. With his leg throbbing now from the .44 slug in his thigh, he had lost much of his resolve, but he was unwilling to appear that way to the Treadwell men.
“’Cause I ain’t got no reason to lie. Ask anybody who was there after the shootin’. Billy was shot in the back by a rifle seventy-five yards away, while I was riding in front of him, leadin’ his horse. Now that’s the straight of it. It’s a damn shame I had to wing two of you just to stop you. I’m sorry for that, but I’ll shoot more of you if you don’t call your boys off and get the hell away from me. If you don’t, from now on I’ll aim to kill instead of just slowin’ you down. I guarantee you you’re gonna lose more of your men. So what’s it gonna be?”
Luther crawled over beside Jeb. All six of them were huddled up under the bank. “You gonna make it, partner?” Luther asked.
“Yeah, the bastard shot me in the leg, got Cecil in the shoulder, but I think he ain’t much worse off than I am. Whaddaya think? You think he’s tellin’ the straight of it about that other feller shootin’ Billy? He said Greeley done it. Greeley’s the name of that deputy that arrested your boys, Joe and Barney, and arrested Billy, too, just because he was havin’ a drink with ’em. Ain’t that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” Luther replied. “Greeley, that was his name. If this jasper’s tellin’ the truth, we ain’t got no real reason to kill him.”
“He’s a damn deputy,” Jeb said. “That’s reason enough to shoot him, ain’t it?”
“So far, we’re the only ones gettin’ shot,” Luther reminded them. “I got a feelin’ we’ve stirred up one helluva mean snake. Since you and Cecil ain’t wounded that bad, maybe we oughta turn this rattler loose and back away before somebody else gets shot.”
“He shot me and my boy!” Jeb responded angrily, lest Luther might think he was lacking in his resolve. “He’s got to pay for that.”
“I know how you feel, Jeb, but like he said, he didn’t go for no kill shots, even though we was comin’ after him. I got a feelin’ this jasper is a helluva shot and he’s give warnin’ that he ain’t gonna waste no more bullets on minor wounds.”
“I ain’t never run from no man,” Jeb informed him. “I know you ain’t, Jeb, but this ain’t exactly runnin’ scared. We just made the mistake of comin’ after the wrong man and it makes sense to let him be. Might be, we’re lucky there ain’t but two of us got hit and it’d be a smart idea to get the hell away from here while he’s give us the chance. I know for sure that if we make another try to get to him, he’s sure as hell gonna cut a couple more of us down, just like he said.” He paused to see if his argument was making any progress in persuading Jeb. “We’ve done got Cecil hit. We’ve got to make sure no more of the boys get shot.”
Jeb was halfway convinced that his brother-in-law was right about the bobcat
they had aroused. Rustling cattle was their business and they had never been involved in shoot-outs in the past. But it galled him more than a little for the six of them to cut and run from one man with a rifle. “I don’t know, Luther,” he hesitated, his leg throbbing with the .44 slug embedded in it. Emmett and his two cousins sat up under the bank, dumbfounded, listening to their fathers discussing their plight. Jeb looked at Cecil, who was pressing his bandana against the bullet hole in his shoulder. “I reckon you’re right,” he said to Luther. “We need to get on over to the Cimarron where we can take care of these wounds.” He shook his head, defeated. “You tell him. I can’t.”
“Tanner!” Luther shouted. “You win. We’re gonna back outta here and let you be. All right?” Then in an effort to save face, he yelled, “But if we find out that ain’t the truth what you said about Greeley shootin’ Billy Cotton, this ain’t over.”
“Fair enough,” Will’s response came back, startling all of them, for it came from only a few feet directly above them. No one of them had thought to keep an eye on the bushes on the rim of the bank over them, concerned more with the business of keeping their heads down. So no one was aware that the deputy had quietly moved from the trees to stand over them, his rifle aimed point blank in their midst. Emmett was the only one to react. He started to reach for his rifle. “I wouldn’t,” Will calmly warned him, and shifted the Winchester to aim directly at the young man. Emmett wisely took heed of the warning. “Which one of you is Billy Cotton’s father?”
Evil Never Sleeps Page 14