Tanglewood Desperadoes

by Paul Lederer

  ‘I know that,’ Cousins said with anger. He had brooded on it day and night for a long while – ever since Dam Sumner had been driven off his land and outlawed. ‘What do you intend to do about it? What can you do!’

  ‘We have it in mind to offer Sumner amnesty in return for giving us the location of the outlaw camp. Dan is only a kid; we want Trace Dawson and Curt Wagner before they can make more trouble than they already have,’ the marshal said.

  ‘Who knows what they have in mind to try next?’ Ross pitched in.

  Gentry Cousins only stared at the men for a long minute. Slowly he asked, ‘You expect Dan Sumner to accept that bargain?’

  ‘We expect you – and Kate – to talk him into it,’ Ross said, speaking only a part of the truth. They had other cards to play, but Gentry did not need to know this.

  ‘It won’t work,’ Gentry said heavily. He did not believe it would, and that therefore meant that his hopes for retrieving himself from this situation were faint. He was stone broke and alone without even a daughter to comfort him. ‘What would you want me to do?’ he asked finally.

  ‘Just let the marshal and Jake roost here for awhile,’ Ross said, trying for an encouraging smile. ‘I won’t be here; I wouldn’t be much help. Besides, I’ve got a bank to run.’

  When Dan and Kate had approached the house of her father, Dan Sumner carefully searched the yard and the oak grove with his eyes, looking for unfamiliar horses, for patches of color where none belonged, for the glint of sunlight off metal. He saw nothing suspicious; still he had deep forebodings about this. He understood Kate’s need to reassure her father, but still this smelled like trouble. For her he would do it, however, though he might regret it later.

  ‘What are we waiting for,’ Kate Cousins asked after another minute.

  ‘Nothing, I suppose,’ Dan answered with a heavy sigh, and they started their horses toward the house.

  Reaching it, they flipped the reins of their ponies over the hitch rail and started up the steps to the porch, Dan’s eyes still flickering from point to point. There was a stillness in the air. No birds sang, no dog came to meet them. Something was wrong; he knew it in his bones, but they had come too far to turn around now even if Kate were willing. And she was not; there was an eagerness in her eyes as she crossed the threshold – the thrill of being home again. It lasted until Dan crossed the sill and felt a pair of bearish arms thrown around him, his revolver slipped from his holster.

  Across the room he saw the sudden fear in Kate’s eyes, saw a worried Gentry Cousins standing near the grandfather clock, saw Kaylin Standish, pistol in his hands, smiling nastily.

  ‘Let him go, Jake,’ the marshal said. ‘We’ve got his teeth. He won’t be trying anything.’

  ‘What’s all of this?’ Dan asked although he knew.

  ‘You’re under arrest, Sumner. For bank robbery and anything else I can think of.’

  Gentry looked betrayed. He had one arm around Kate’s slender shoulders. ‘That wasn’t the bargain!’ he complained.

  ‘What bargain?’ Kaylin Standish said coldly.

  ‘Father, did you—?’ Kate asked.

  ‘This is not what I agreed to!’ Gentry complained.

  ‘The law doesn’t make bargains,’ Standish said coldly. To one side Jake Fromm watched, rifle in hand, his beady little eyes glittering.

  ‘What do you want?’ Dan asked, knowing that mere was a game being played here. Otherwise he would already be on his way to the Lordsberg jail.

  ‘Tell us how to find your camp in the Tanglewood,’ Standish said. ‘Take us there and I’ll do what I can to get you a softer sentence. Otherwise you’ll spend twenty or twenty-five years in the Denver prison. That’s a long time, kid. I want Trace and Curt Wagner, and you’re the one who can help me get them.’

  ‘I won’t do that!’ Dan said heatedly. ‘I never would.’

  ‘You might as well say good-bye to Kate now, then. You’ll never see her again.’

  ‘Dan!’ Kate shouted, twisting away from her father’s arm. ‘I can’t go on if—’

  ‘What about you, Kate?’ the marshal asked. ‘You know where the camp is, too. Storm Ross has said he’ll return your father’s saloon if one of you helps us find the Tanglewood camp. And if you refuse, you’ll never see Dan again except in prison garb. A very old man in prison garb. What do you say? It’s not your life I’m talking about, but the lives of the two men in this room that you care about. What do you say, Kate?’

  Kate’s eyes went from Dan’s to her father’s which remained miserably staring at the floor. She looked toward Dan again and raised both of her hands toward the ceiling.

  ‘What am I supposed to do, Dan! I can’t let you both down.’ She nodded her head slowly. ‘All right, Marshal—’

  ‘Kate!’ Dan shouted.

  ‘All right, Marshal,’ Kate said in a small voice, I’ll guide you out to the Tanglewood camp.’

  ‘Jake,’ Kaylin Standish instructed his deputy, ‘round up the Clinch Mountain boys. It’s time for them show us what they’re made of.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Laredo didn’t like the way things were shaping up. What he needed was time – in a few weeks, perhaps a few days, the illegal chicanery of Blakely and Ross could probably be proven in court. Without further pay the Clinch Mountain boys would probably drift away toward more profitable ventures and the Wakapee Valley men could move back on to their land and start afresh. But things seem to have reached the boiling point.

  As he passed through Lordsberg he saw the Clinch Mountain boys saddling their horses, preparing to ride. None of them had a bottle of whiskey in hand, none seemed to be lingering in the saloons. They were ready to go to work.

  He did not know what had happened, but after what Ross had told him of their plan – Ross’s and Marshal Standish’s – he could make a good guess. His conviction grew stronger as he passed the marshal’s office and spotted Kate Cousins’s little blue roan hitched there. Somehow they had convinced her to turn traitor, probably by arresting Dan Sumner. Kate’s generous impulse to ride to her father’s house had been used to their advantage, and probably would turn the Tanglewood into a killing field.

  Laredo rode on, just a little faster. The sun was already lowering its head behind the imposing heights of the Rocky Mountains. There weren’t many hours of daylight left. That meant that the Clinch Mountain boys would be on the move soon. Laredo had little time.

  His official obligations had already been fulfilled. The suspect liens, contracts and deeds had been delivered to Tucson, the stolen money returned to the bank; still he felt a moral obligation to assist the wronged Tanglewood desperadoes. His superiors at the Bank Examiner’s office would think no less of him if he returned now. He had done his duty. But Laredo would think less of himself, and that mattered more.

  As he rode, he considered that Dusty, too, would think less of him. Dusty, his little red-headed wife, always asked him to recount his travels. Often they would sit at the table in their small Crater, Arizona, cottage and she would lean forward, watching him eagerly, and sometimes with horror as Laredo told her what he had been through this time. She would pour them coffee and serve shoo-fly pie which only Southerners knew how to make. Dusty was from the south – of Ireland. From a town named Kilkeel. No, she would not like him to end his saga that way, although she had begged him many times to give up this line of work. Dusty had quite a bit of inherited money and tried to convince him that he didn’t need to go out and risk life and limb; she had seen her man shot up and beaten before, but after he was healed, she didn’t bother trying to convince him to give it up, trade in his saddle for a front porch rocking chair.

  Laredo rode on, thinking all of these things – and many others concerning Dusty.

  All the time the sun continued to fade slowly behind the high mountains and the shadows to grow longer. Laredo had already made his decision to help out the Tanglewood crowd if he could. He only wondered how much of a lead he had on Marshal Standish
and the Clinch Mountain boys.

  Laredo wove his way along the complicated trail he had followed out of the Tanglewood. Once an irate bobcat appeared in a tree beside the road, baring its fangs, hissing displeasure at his intrusion. He rounded the last bend in the trail and entered the camp, but they were gone. Nothing remained but a few burned twigs in the cold fire ring.

  He pondered. It must have been because they knew of Dan Sumner’s last risky ride into Lordsberg. They had been right to move on. The question was, how was Laredo to find them now? He had things to tell them, matters to discuss.

  Night was settling. He listened but heard only silence, looked around but saw nothing moving. They had withdrawn into the depths of the Tanglewood. Neither friend nor foe was going to locate them easily now. There was still enough light to see by although purple dusk was settling rapidly, the land cooling quickly. There was no obvious trail leading away in the opposite direction. He could be seen – if anyone was looking his way. Laredo decided to chance it, even knowing that Trace Dawson, especially, did not trust him. He drew his revolver and fired a shot into the air.

  No one called out; perhaps they did not wish to be found by him again.

  Then, high up on a shadowed mountain ridge, Laredo picked out a brief flickering fire, like a match wavering in the wind – which, as it turned out, was exactly what it had been, and he started his reluctant horse in that direction. They bucked through the wildly tangled brush every bit as rough if not rougher than that of the Texas big thicket country where Laredo had once as a young man made his living working longhorn steers from the confusion of the thorny thickets. That was the country where the wearing of chaps and tapaderos was mandatory, and Laredo reflected that he could make good use of their protection now from the blackthorn and mesquite, the nopal cactus which seemed to flourish everywhere.

  He eventually found, thought he had found, the foot of a trail leading up toward the evening-shadowed ridge where he had seen the glimmer of light earlier. His arms were thorn-cut, his pant legs studded with cactus spines. There was no point in turning back now, and so he started the faithful buckskin up the narrow, dangerous trail, mentally apologizing to the horse.

  The trail wound in and out, at times coming quite near to the edge of a precipice falling away into the darkness. There was a swarm of bats whipping past his head now, off on their night hunt for insects to devour. Laredo swung his hat at them. He had no fondness for the tiny flying creatures. Once, on the trail near Albuquerque, he had been forced to take shelter from the weather in a bat cave where the leathery-winged things fluttered all night and their distinctive guano stink filled his nostrils and touched his throat as he tried to sleep. They were filthy little things.

  Finally Laredo crested out the trail and company was there to meet him. Trace Dawson and Curt Wagner approached him. He found himself on a long bench cut into the side of the hill where a craggy nearby cave with an arched opening was still flooded with emerging bats.

  ‘Nice neighborhood,’ Laredo said, swinging down heavily from his exhausted horse. The other two didn’t seem to share his disgust toward bats. Curt shrugged and answered, ‘There wasn’t a lot of choice.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Laredo replied.

  ‘What did you come back for?’ Trace demanded. The man’s temper was getting shorter as the days passed. Then Laredo let his eyes stray and he thought he saw the reason behind it. Ruby stood to one side, deep in shadows, her hair loose around her shoulders. The man was deeply concerned for her, Laredo guessed. He had every right to be.

  ‘They’re coming,’ Laredo told them. ‘The Clinch Mountain boys are riding this way.’

  ‘Tonight?’ Curt said with disbelief. He glanced at the sundown skies. ‘At this time of day?’

  ‘I think they worked out this would be a good time to come down at you as you settled in for the night. They know where the old camp is.’

  ‘How could they?’ Trace asked in bewilderment.

  ‘If you’ll let me talk, I’ll try to explain things,’ Laredo said.

  And he did, telling them about the trap laid for Dan Sumner in Lordsberg.

  ‘That wouldn’t be enough to make Dan turn yellow,’ Trace said with certainty.

  ‘No, but I think they brought enough pressure on Kate Cousins to make her reveal all she knows.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ Curt asked Laredo.

  ‘I was going to say that you should just cut Cole Lockhart loose,’ Laredo said, nodding toward the two prisoners who sat together leaning against the wall of the bluff, their hands as well as their feet now bound.

  ‘Why him?’ asked Prince Blakely, who had been listening.

  ‘Because, Blakely, there will be no more money forthcoming from Ross. Even if Ross didn’t take my warning seriously, within a few days all of the bank’s funds will be frozen until the books can be gone over thoroughly. With no more pay, the Clinch Mountain boys will eventually just fade away. They’re only here now, I suspect, to rescue Cole.

  ‘Of course,’ Laredo went on. ‘The risk is too great now. Cole knows where your new camp is situated. You can’t let him go, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Then what can we do?’ Trace asked.

  ‘Fort up, boys, you’re in for a fight.’

  At the last moment Dan had relented. He refused to let Kate Cousins ride off in the company of the rough Clinch Mountain boys, and he agreed after a struggle with his jumbled emotions to lead the gang of killers to the camp of the Tanglewood Desperadoes. It was him or Kate, and that was no choice. They had left him none.

  The burly man, the one he had heard called Leo, rode beside him so closely that their horses frequently bumped shoulders as the sun died in the west and the high mountains blushed purple in the dusk light. The Tanglewood, below them, was black as a pit.

  ‘Down there?’ Dan heard one of the other riders exclaim, observing the close, thorny growth in the wild country beyond the trail. No one answered the astonished man. The others were determined, grim-faced. They were rugged men, accustomed to a rugged way of life.

  Marshal Standish who had come along, accompanied by his deputies, Jake and Marvin, not willing to miss out on the glory, was silent for the most part. Now, as they started down the winding trail, he asked Dan Sumner, ‘Are you sure this is the way?’

  ‘It always has been,’ Dan answered. His voice was brittle. There was an edge to it; he had been forced into doing something he had sworn that he would never do. He was now a traitor as well. No better than Johnny Johnson, worse in fact – Johnny had taken their money, but Dan was about to give his brothers-in-arms over to these killers.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ Leo groused after another half-mile.

  Neither did Dan, and as they rounded the last bend in the trail and emerged where the camp had been, he saw why.

  ‘They’ve pulled up stakes,’ he said to the dozen or so hard men around him. There was nothing there but a few charred sticks in the fire ring and many horse tracks to indicate that this had been the camp of the Tanglewood outlaws.

  ‘Why would they do that?’ Marshal Standish demanded as their heads were surrounded by hungry mosquitoes and other flying pests.

  ‘Well, I guess they didn’t trust me to keep a secret,’ Dan said. And they had been right not to.

  ‘Where would they go?’ Leo asked, swatting at the insects, looking around the tangled vastness.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Dan said honestly.

  ‘We can pick up their trail,’ Jake said hopefully, but no one gave that suggestion much credence. Through the network of brush at this hour of the day, the idea seemed ridiculous.

  ‘We’d be riding blind into their gunsights,’ Leo said. ‘We can’t see them, but I’ll bet they have a spot where they can see us coming.’

  ‘They have to have headed for high ground,’ Marshal Standish concluded and his eyes lifted to the bench along the face of the hills, his vision drawn there by the clouds of bats now issuing forth from the cavern in huge swarms, seeking
their evening meal. ‘They’re up there,’ he said confidently, pointing toward the ledge. ‘I would be.’

  ‘What do you think, Leo?’ one of the Clinch Mountain boys asked.

  ‘I think he’s right,’ Leo said. ‘The question is, how do we get up there, and how do we attack them? They’re bound to see twenty mounted men crashing through the brush.’

  ‘Cole is up there with them, unless they’ve killed him. We’ve got to make a try. I can’t tell you how many times Cole Lockhart has pulled me out of tight scrapes,’ said another of the gang.

  ‘How many men are up there?’ Leo wanted to know, looking from Dan to Kaylin Standish.

  ‘Well. There’s Trace Dawson and Curt Wagner, of course,’ Standish answered, scratching at his cheek where he had been bitten by a mosquito. ‘Probably this – what’s his name, Dan? The stranger?’

  ‘Laredo, he calls himself.’

  ‘And I’ve heard there might be as many as twenty more.’

  ‘But you’ve never seen them?’

  ‘No,’ Standish admitted.

  ‘I think that there’s only two or three men up there,’ Leo concluded, looking toward the overhang where the bats continued to swarm. ‘The rest was pure bluff.’

  ‘What do you want to do, Leo?’ a Clinch Mountain man asked as the sky settled to a darker purple.

  ‘Get up there and cut Cole loose. He’s done as much for me as he has for any of you. Let’s find a trail, boys, and if we can’t find one, we’ll make one!’

  ‘They’re coming, Trace,’ Curt Wagner said, nudging Dawson from a half-doze.

  ‘Of course they are,’ Cole Lockhart said. ‘I know my men – they wouldn’t desert me. If you had any sense you’d just set me free now. I can call them off.’