Collection 1986 - Dutchman's Flat (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  “Strahan, is it? Even if you get by me you'll never get past him. No need to tell you where he is. He'll find you when you least expect it.”

  Deliberately, Overlin turned his eyes away from McQueen, reaching for his glass with his left hand. “Whiskey! Gimme some whiskey!”

  “Where is he, Overlin? Where's Strahan?”

  The men were ready, McQueen knew. Inside of him, Overlin was poised for the kill. McQueen wanted to startled him, to throw him off balance, to wreck his poise. He took a half step closer, “Tell me, you drunken lobo! Tell me!”

  As he spoke he struck swiftly with his left hand and slapped Overlin across his mouth!

  It was a powerful slap and it shocked Overlin. Not since he was a child had anybody dared to strike him, and it shook him as nothing else could have. He uttered a cry of choking rage and went for his gun.

  Men dove for cover, falling over splintering chairs, fighting to get out of range or out the door.

  McQueen had already stepped back quickly, drawn his gun, and then stepped off to the left as he fired, forcing Overlin to turn toward him. McQueen's first bullet struck an instant before Overlin could fire, and the impact knocked Overlin against the bar, his shot going off into the floor as McQueen fired again.

  Overlin faced around, his shirt bloody, one eye gone, and his gun blazed again. McQueen felt himself stagger, shaken as if by a blow, yet without any realization of where the blow had come from.

  He fired again, and not aware of how many shots he had fired, he drew his left-hand gun and pulled a border shift, tossing the guns from hand to hand to have a fully loaded gun in his right.

  Across the room behind him, another brief drama played itself out. Ren Oliver had been watching and thought he saw his chance. Under cover of the action, all attention centered on McQueen and Overlin, he would kill McQueen. His sleeve gun dropped into his hand and cut down on McQueen, but the instant the flash of blue steel appeared in his hand two guns centered on him and fired: Sartain was at the front door and Sheriff Foster on his left rear. Struck by a triangle of lead, Oliver lunged to his feet, one hand going to his stomach. In amazement, he stared at his bloody hand and his shattered body. Then he screamed.

  In that scream was all the coward's fear of the death he had brought to so many others, In shocked amazement he stared from Foster to Sartain, both holding guns ready for another shot if need be. Then his legs wilted and he fell, one hand clutching at the falling deck of cards, his blood staining them. He fell, and the table tipped, cascading chips and cards over him and into the sawdust around him.

  At the bar, Overlin stood, indomitable spirit still blazing from his remaining eye. “You—! You—!”

  As he started to fall, his big hand caught at the bar's rounded edge and he stared at McQueen, trying to speak. Then the fingers gave way and he fell, striking the brass rail and rolling away.

  Ward McQueen turned as if from a bad dream, seeing Kim at the door and Sheriff Foster, gun in hand, inside the rear door.

  Running feet pounded the boardwalk, and the door slammed open. Guns lifted, expectantly.

  It was Baldy Jackson, his face white, torn with emotion. “Ward! Heaven help me! I've killed a woman! I've killed Sharon Clarity!”

  The scattered spectators were suddenly a mob. “What?” They started for him.

  “Hold it!” McQueen's gun came up. “Hear him out!”

  Ward McQueen was thumbing shells into his gun. “All right, Baldy. Show us.”

  “Before my Maker, Ward, I figured her for somebody sneakin' to get a shot at me! I seen the gun, plain as day, an' I fired!”

  Muttering and angry, the crowd followed. Baldy led the way to an alley behind the store, where they stopped. There lay a still figure in a riding habit. For an instant Ward looked down at that still, strangely attractive face. Then he bent swiftly, and as several cried out in protest he seized Sharon Clarity's red gold hair and jerked!

  It came free in his hand, and the head flopped back on the earth, the close-cropped head of a man!

  Ward stooped, griped the neckline, and ripped it away. With the padding removed, all could see the chest of a man, lean, muscular and hairy.

  “Not Sharon Clarity,” he said, “but Strahan.”

  Kim Sartain wheeled and walked swiftly away, McQueen following. As they reached the Emporium, Bud Fox appeared.

  “Nobody left here but that girl. She was in there a long time. The old man started out but we warned him back. He's inside.”

  Ward McQueen led the way, with Sheriff Foster behind him, then Sartain, Jackson, Fox, and Jones.

  Silas Hutch sat at his battered rolltop desk. His lean jaws seemed leaner than ever. He peered at them from eyes that were mean and cruel. “Well? What's this mean? Bargin' in like this?”

  “You're under arrest, Hutch, for ordering the killing of Jimmy McCracken and Neal Webb.”

  Hutch chuckled. “Me? Under arrest? You got a lot to learn, boy. The law here answers to me. I say who is to be arrested and who is prosecuted.

  “You got no proof of anything! You got no evidence! You're talkin' up the wind, sonny!”

  Baldy Jackson pushed forward. “Ward, this here's the one I told you about! This is the first time I've had a good look at him! He's Shorty Strahan, the mean one! He's an uncle, maybe, of that one out there who made such a fine-lookin' woman!”

  “Hutch, you had your killings done for you. All but one. You killed Chalk Warneke.”

  He turned to Foster. “Figure it out for yourself, Sheriff. Remember the position Chalk was in, remember the crowd, and Warneke on a horse. There's only one place that shot could come from—that window! And only one man who could have fired it, him!”

  Silas Hutch shrank back in his chair. When Foster reached for him, he cringed. “Don't let them hang me!” he pleaded.

  “You take it from here, Foster,” McQueen said. “We can measure the angle of that bullet and you've got Bemis. He can testify as to the connection between Neal Webb and Hutch as well as that with Chalk. He knows all about it.”

  Ward McQueen turned toward the door. He was tired, very tired, and all he wanted was rest. Besides, his hip bone was bothering him. He had been aware of it for some time, but only now was it really hurting. He looked down, remembering something hitting him during the battle with Overlin.

  His gun belt was somewhat torn and two cartridges dented. A bullet had evidently struck and glanced off, ruining two perfectly good cartridges and giving him a bad bruise on the hip bone.

  “Kim,” he said, “let's get back to the ranch.”

  Author's Note

  MCQUEEN OF THE TUMBLING K

  A WORKING COWBOY seldom wore a coat. It impeded the free action of his shoulders in roping as well as in many other activities, so he settled for a vest, usually worn open. The vest pockets carried his tobacco sack and such odds and ends as he believed necessary. Later, when there were pockets in shirts, the tobacco sack was relegated to a breast pocket with the paper tag hanging out, easy to the hand.

  Shirts in the earlier days were without pockets and without collars. When a man “dressed up” he wore a starched collar or one made of celluloid. Although the latter was easy to clean it had to be kept from contact with heat, particularly from cigars, cigarettes, or even warm ashes. A celluloid collar had a way of vanishing in a burst of flame, often followed by everything in the vicinity.

  The bandanna, worn loosely about the neck, usually with the full part hanging in front, was not worn for decoration. It was probably the most useful item a cowboy wore. Over a hundred possible uses have been found. Usually it was pulled up to cover the nose and mouth when riding “drag” in the dust behind a moving herd of cattle or horses. It could be used as a bandage, a sling for a broken arm, to strain water for drinking, to protect the back of the neck from sun, and so on.

  Bandannas were nearly always red. This was not a matter of choice, as other colors were not to be found. Later, blue bandannas with polkadots were made and sold largely
to railroad men for whom blue seemed a uniform color. Occasionally, of course, a cowboy would wear a silk neckerchief, which might be of any color.

  Shirt collars, whether starched or celluloid, were attached to the shirt by collar buttons, one behind and one in front. Collar buttons were one of the most refractory, obstinate, and just downright ornery objects a human ever had to deal with and probably were the cause of more profanity than anything man invented until the arrival of the Model-T Ford. Invariably, in the course of a man's struggle with a collar button it would slip from his fingers and roll into the most inaccessible place in the room. It was never possible to simply stoop down and pick up a collar button. One always had to get down on one's knees and reach under whatever piece of furniture was nearby and feel around for the missing object. It has been reliably reported that even ministers of the gospel used unseemly language on such occasions.

  At first cowboys, as was the case with any working man, wore whatever old clothing they possessed. Pieces of uniforms from the Civil War were often seen, and especially the overcoats, in both gray and blue. These were warm, highly efficient garments and their presence on the frontier was obvious for at least forty years after the war's end. They were superseded in many cases by the buffalo coat. One of these was still around the house when I was a youngster, and nothing warmer ever existed, or heavier, I might add.

  As cowboying became a trade it developed a costume of its own, and if easterners thought it picturesque it was not intentionally so. Cowboy clothing was designed for the job it had to do, chosen strictly for efficiency. Many of the horses cowboys rode in the beginning were only half broken, so the cowboy wanted a boot with a pointed toe that would slip easily into a stirrup, and a high heel so it would not slip too far.

  Chaps were invented for riders in brush country where thorns or broken branches might rip the clothes from a man aboard a horse following a steer into thick brush. Riders in other parts of the country adopted the chaps as protective of clothing as well as of the legs themselves. The woolly chaps, rarely seen these days, were worn in Wyoming or Montana. These were often made of cowhide with the hair left on or of sheepskin or goatskin. When King Fisher was leading his boys down near Uvalde, in Texas, he held up a circus and killed the tiger to make himself a pair of tiger-skin chaps. But the King liked colorful clothes, and none of the movie cowboys could touch him in that respect.

  As a matter of fact, many cowboys liked colorful clothes but could rarely afford them. They went to work wearing the most efficient garments they could acquire. Another type of garment rarely seen anymore was the leather cuff. They were often seen in movies of the silent era when there were more working cowboys around.

  The most important items to a cowboy were his hat, his boots, and his saddle. The first well-made cowboy hats to become known by a brand name were the Stetsons, a name which soon became synonymous with “hat.” Any hat might be called a Stetson, just as any pistol might be called a Colt, regardless of its manufacturer's name. In the same way many westerners referred to any rifle as a Winchester.

  MCQUEEN OF THE

  TUMBLING K

  WARD MCQUEEN REINED in the strawberry roan and squinted his eyes against the sun. Salty sweat made his eyes smart, and he dabbed at them with the end of a bandanna. Kim Sartain was hazing a couple of rambunctious steers back into line. Bud Fox was walking his horse up the slope to where Ward waited, watching the drive.

  Fox drew up alongside him and said, “Ward, d'you remember that old brindle ladino with the scarred hide? This here is his range but we haven't seen hide nor hair of him.”

  “That's one old mossyhorn I won't forget in a hurry. He's probably hiding back in one of the canyons. Have you cleaned them out yet?”

  “Uh-huh, we surely have. Baldy an' me both worked 'em, and no sign of him. Makes a body mighty curious.”

  “Yeah, I suppose you've got a point. It ain't like him to be away from the action. He'd surely be down there makin' trouble.” He paused, suddenly thoughtful. “Missed any other stock since I've been gone?”

  Fox shrugged. “If there's any missin' it can't be but a few head, but you can bet if that old crowbait is gone some others went with him. He ramrods a good-sized herd all by himself.”

  Baldy Jackson joined them on the slope. He jerked his head to indicate a nearby canyon mouth, “Seen some mighty queer tracks over yonder,” he said, “like a man afoot.”

  “We'll go have a look,” McQueen said. “A man afoot in this country? It isn't likely.”

  He started the roan across the narrow valley, with Baldy and Bud following.

  The canyon was narrow and high walled. Parts of it were choked with brush and fallen rock, with only the winding watercourse to offer a trail. In the spreading fan of sand where the wash emptied into the valley, Baldy drew up.

  Ward looked down at the tracks Baldy indicated. “Yes, they do look odd,” said Ward. “Fixed him some homemade footgear. Wonder if that's his blood or some critter?” Leading the roan he followed the tracks up the dry streambed.

  After a few minutes, he halted. “He's been hurt. Look at the tracks headed this way. Fairly long, steady stride. I'd guess he's a tall man. But see here? Goin' back the steps are shorter an' he's staggerin'. He stopped twice in twenty yards, each time to lean against something.”

  “Reckon we'd better follow him?” Baldy looked at the jumble of boulders and crowded brush. “If he doesn't aim to be ketched he could make us a powerful lot of trouble.”

  “We'll follow him anyway. Baldy, you go back an' help the boys. Tell Kim an' Tennessee where we're at. Bud will stay with me. Maybe we can track him down, an' he should be grateful. It looks like he's hurt bad.”

  They moved along cautiously for another hundred yards. Bud Fox stopped, mopping his face. “He doesn't figure on bein' followed. He's makin' a try at losin' his trail. Even tried to wipe out a spot of blood.”

  Ward McQueen paused and looked up the watercourse with keen, probing eyes. There was something wrong about all this. He had been riding this range for months now and believed he knew it well, yet he remembered no such man as this must be, and had seen no such tracks. Obviously the man was injured. Just as obviously he was trying, even in his weakened condition, to obliterate his trail. That meant that he expected to be followed and that those who followed were enemies.

  Pausing to study the terrain he ran over in his mind the possibilities from among those whom he knew. Who might the injured man be? And who did he fear?

  They moved on, working out the trail in the close, hot air of the canyon. The tracks split suddenly and disappeared on a wide ledge of stone where the canyon divided into two.

  “We're stuck,” Fox said, “he won't leave tracks with those makeshift shoes of his, and there's nowhere he can go up the canyons.”

  The right-hand branch ended in a steep, rocky slide, impossible to climb without hours of struggle, and the left branch ended against the sheer face of a cliff against whose base lay a heaped-up pile of boulders and rocky debris.

  “He may have doubled back or hidden in the brush,” Fox added.

  Ward shrugged. “Let's go back. He doesn't want to be found, but hurt like he is he's apt to die out here without care.”

  Deliberately, he had spoken loudly. Turning their mounts they rode back down the canyon to rejoin the herd.

  Ruth Kermitt was waiting on the steps when they left the grassy bottom and rode up to the bunkhouse. With her was a slender, narrow-faced man in a black frock coat. As Ward drew up, the man's all-encompassing glance took him in, then slid away.

  “Ward, this is Jim Yount. He's buying cattle and wants to look at the herd you just brought in.”

  “Howdy,” Ward said, agreeably. He glanced at Yount's horse and then at the tied-down gun.

  Two more men sat on the steps of the bunkhouse, a big man in a checkered shirt and a slim redhead with a rifle across his knees.

  “We're looking to buy five hundred to a thousand head,” Yount commented. “We
heard you had good stock.”

  “Beef?”

  “No, breeding stock, mostly. We're stockin' a ranch. I'm locatin' the other side of Newton's place.”

  Ward commented, “We have some cattle. Or rather, Miss Kermitt has. I'm just the foreman.”

  “Oh?” Yount looked around at Ruth with a quick, flashing smile. “Miss, is it? Or are you a widow?”

  “Miss. My brother and I came here together, but he was killed.”

  “Hard for a young woman to run a ranch alone, isn't it?” His smile was sympathetic.

  “Miss Kermitt does very well,” Ward replied coolly, “and she isn't exactly alone.”

  “Oh?” Yount glanced at McQueen, one eyebrow lifted. “No,” he said after a minute, “I don't expect you could say she was alone as long as she had cattle on the place, and cowhands.”

  Ruth got up quickly, not liking the look on Ward's face. “Mr. Yount? Wouldn't you like some coffee? Then we can talk business.”

  When they had gone inside Ward McQueen turned on his heel and walked to the bunkhouse, leading his horse. He was mad an he didn't care who knew it. The thin-faced redhead looked at him as he drew near.

  “What's the matter, friend? Somebody steal your girl?”

  Ward McQueen halted and turned slowly. Baldy Jackson got up quickly and moved out of line. The move put him at the corner of the bunkhouse, leaving Yount's riders at the apex of a triangle of which McQueen and himself formed the two corners.

  “Miss Kermitt,” McQueen's tone was cold, “is my boss. She is also a lady. Don't get any funny notions.”

  The redhead chuckled. “Yeah, and our boss is a ladies' man! He knows how to handle 'em.” Deliberately, he turned his back on Baldy. “Ever been foreman on a place like this, Dodson. Maybe you or me will have a new job.”

  Ward walked into the bunkhouse. Bud Fox was loitering beside the window. He, too, had been watching the pair.

  “Don't seem the friendly type,” Bud commented, pouring warm water into the tin washbasin. “Almost like they wanted trouble!”