by Shorty Gunn
‘I wouldn’t exactly call it a hotel. What we’ve got is a cot house. For two bits you can rent a cot for the night. That’s about it,’ the barman answered.
‘Is it on this street?’
‘No, it’s behind Somerset’s Dry Goods store, across the alley in back. You can’t miss it once you get near. The smell will tell you when you’re close. If you want to put that shotgun away you can buy a drink for all the free information I gave you.’
‘I’m not drinking. I want to know if three riders came through here today.’
‘Like I said, I don’t keep track of strangers. And Harley here is only interested in another bottle of Old Stump Blower, so it’s a waste of time asking him about anything. Ain’t that right, Harley?’
Graves gazed at Dickson through a foggy, whiskey grin, waving his hand toward the front door. ‘Three . . . men . . . they rode up . . . in the woods. I seen ’em.’
The barman smiled, shaking his head, glancing at Dickson. ‘Listen Mister, Harley don’t even know his own name when he’s loaded like this. Don’t pay him any mind. He just wants someone new to talk to, that’s all.’
Dickson ignored the remark, stepping closer, putting a hand on the old man’s shoulder for emphasis. ‘Can you show me where they went?’
A dopey smile came over Harley’s face, slowly nodding yes. Dickson grabbed him by the back of his belt, keeping him upright, crossing the room out the front door. Graves blinked, trying to focus his eyes. Lifting an arm he pointed toward a grove of trees at the far end of town. ‘They . . . went in . . . there. Jus’ like I . . . said.’
Dickson steered the old drunk to a bench outside the bar, sitting him down. ‘You stay right here. Thanks for the information.’
‘Did . . . I . . . do good?’
‘You just might have.’ He slipped a silver dollar in Harley’s pocket.
Ike woke squinting into a thin streak of grey sky that was dawn. He rolled over, seeing Emmett still asleep a few feet away. Raising up on one elbow he saw Virgil, head down, sound asleep. Leaping to his feet, he began furiously slapping Virgil repeatedly across his face using his hat.
‘You son of a—’
‘Stop, Ike . . . I only fell asleep for a few minutes!’ Virgil covered up with both hands, trying to ward off the strikes.
‘I told you to stand your time in case someone was trailing us and you fall flat on your face, you damn fool!’
Emmett sat up to the sudden yelling as Ike continued cussing Virgil out. Rubbing the sleep out of his eyes he got to his feet trying to get Ike to stop. Doing so, his eyes focused down the street in town. He blinked, shaking his head, taking a longer look this time. A rider was coming down the street pulling a pack horse. He leaned forward, taking a longer look this time to be certain his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. Reaching over, he grabbed Ike by the shoulder.
‘You better take a look at this. Look down there on the street. That could be trouble coming.’
Ike stopped berating Virgil long enough to follow Emmett’s gaze. He squinted, shading his eyes with one hand, studying the approaching horseman. The tall man wore dark clothes and a wide-brimmed hat. He knew that figure. He’d seen him before the night they tried to kill Ben Dickson. It sent a sudden shock wave through him.
‘Git your rifles. That has to be Dickson, for sure. Let ’em git closer to be sure we kill him this time!’
The three scrambled for long guns, returning where they had a clear view of the street, as Ike whispered orders. ‘Not yet. Let ’em keep on comin’. Be steady before you pull that trigger. I’ll say when.’
Dickson rode slowly forward, eyes searching the distant tree line Harley had pointed out. If no one else believed the old drunk, he did. He reined his horse to a stop halfway there for a better look.
‘He’s stoppin’ Ike.’ Virgil’s voice was tinged with fear. ‘We better shoot now!’
Before Ike could stop him, Virgil’s rifle barked the first shot, forcing him and Emmett to quickly open up, too. Bullets tore into Dickson’s horse, the big animal rearing up, screaming in pain, tossing Dickson to the ground as rifle fire continued and the horse crashed to the ground, struggling in its dying throes. Dickson crawled up behind the animal for protection, yanking his shotgun out of its scabbard, as bullets thudded into the street around him sending up sudden geysers of dirt. He pulled his Colt, firing fast back at the flashes coming from the dark timber pocket.
‘Let’s get out of here!’ Virgil yelled, getting to his feet.
‘No, keep on firing. We gotta kill him right here!’ Ike yelled back.
‘Not me. I’m riding!’ Virgil ran for the horses picketed behind them as Ike tried to stop him.
‘Come back here you coward!’ he screamed, but Virgil was already up in the saddle kicking his horse away.
‘Let’s ride too.’ Emmett’s voice mirrored his brother’s, rising to his feet. ‘We missed our chance. Let’s not stay and let Dickson get any closer!’
Dickson saw the fleeting image of running horses behind a screen of timber, followed by fading hoof beats. He rose to his feet surveying his dead horse, running a hand over its warm body. It gave him another reason to even the score with the Goss brothers. The big animal had never failed him. It took a hail of their bullets to do so now. With the shooting ended, a handful of men exited the all-night bars, coming out on to the street wondering what all the sudden gunfire was about. Even Harley Graves, with the bartender steering him, came up the street. Dickson turned as the old man pushed through the circle of excited people.
‘You saved my neck, old timer. If it wasn’t for your warning, I’d be laying in the street right now instead of my horse. I owe you for that one.’
Harley flashed his slow motion grin, shaking a finger at the tall man. ‘I toldja so. I seen ’em, just like I said.’
‘That you did.’ Dickson nodded, turning to look at the other men around him with a request. ‘Can I get some help getting my horse off the street? I need a couple of horses and ropes. I’ll have to get my packer too. He ran off down the street.’
‘What are you going to do now, stranger?’ one man asked.
‘I’m going to saddle up the packer and go after the men who just tried to kill me. They’ll leave a trail a schoolboy could follow. I’ve been out of school a long time, but I still know how it’s done.’
The Goss brothers rode like the devil himself was after them. Maybe Ben Dickson was exactly that. If Virgil was spooked before the shootout in town, he was more frantic now that it had failed and Dickson was still alive, coming after them. He continually surged his horse ahead of Ike, riding like a wild man, forcing the animal through thickets of dog hair timber, snapping off limbs and branches that could suddenly impale a man like a spear. Ike and Emmett kicked after him trying to slow him down until Ike finally found an opening where he could ride up alongside him, pulling his horse to a sudden stop.
‘What are you tryin’ to do, kill us? You get hold of yourself before I have to pull you out of that saddle and beat some sense into you. We’re leavin’ a back trail a blind man can follow. I’m takin’ the lead and you stay behind me. If you don’t I’ll shoot your horse and put you afoot. You can face Dickson on your own. You understand me?’
Virgil’s eyes bulged with fear. His mouth hung half open. Swallowing hard, he tried to get words out. ‘He’s coming and nothing is going to stop him. Not you, me or Emmett. That’s twice we couldn’t kill him. He ain’t no normal man. Our only chance is to get as far away as we can, as fast as we can. That’s all I’m trying to do.’
‘Listen to me, you idiot. That’s exactly what he wants you to think. He bleeds just like any other man. All we gotta do is get a bullet in him. He wants you to run wild so it’s easy to follow us. Are you so dumb you can’t see that? What we gotta do is think smart and move careful. That’s what we’re going to do and that means you, too. Settle down and start using your head before you get us all killed!’
The brothers rode steadily downhill for the ne
xt six days until thick timber ridges and high peaks began fading away behind them. The country ahead was lower, more open, changing rapidly. When they broke out of the last timber and reined to a halt, the scene that met their eyes stunned all three to silence. As far as the eye could see the land was a jumbled mass of wildly eroded buttes, canyons and treeless flats, grey and foreboding. Ike took in a deep breath before speaking.
‘I ain’t never seen any country looked like this. I guess Paw knew what he was talking about. Even a rattlesnake would starve to death out there. It must be the badlands.’
‘Then how are we supposed to make it?’ Emmett’s worried whisper questioned.
‘I ain’t sure right now. But if Dickson is still coming on he’ll have to face this too. And we got a better chance of killing him out there than back in the mountains.’
The brothers rode cautiously out into the grotesquely twisted land, staying on narrow trails with pebbly bottoms. Ike turned in the saddle looking back to see if the horses were leaving hoof prints on the hard-packed ground. They were barely visible. One brief rain would easily wash them away. In the myriad twists and turns it took to stay in the bottoms, it grew more difficult as the day wore on to know which way they were actually riding. The sun was a steel grey disk behind cloudy skies with enough light for them to guess they were moving east, farther out into the badlands. Four more days of winding in and out of crumbling canyons found the brothers entering an unusual series of low, flat-topped mesas situated in a semi-circle. Ike pulled to a halt studying the strange formations, instantly realizing its potential as a perfect spot for ambushing Dickson. A leering smile began creasing his whiskered face, as his brothers rode up on both sides of him.
‘You see what I see?’ Ike asked, looking from Virgil to Emmett.
‘Ah, what?’ Emmett questioned, swivelling his head.
‘Open your eyes, both of you. This is the perfect place to wait for Dickson. When he comes riding in here we can take him with rifles from three different angles. He’ll be a dead man for sure, not like back in Peralta.’
‘What if he don’t come this way, then what?’ Virgil’s voice was tight as a fiddle string.
‘He’ll come. If you two paid any attention to what’s going on around you instead of acting like scared rabbits, you’d know it ain’t rained.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Emmett asked.
‘He can follow our tracks, that’s what. He’ll be here all right. And this time when we’re done he’ll stay dead. We’re done runnin’. Now it’s time for killin’!’
The three spent the rest of that day exploring the half circle of low buttes, pockets and narrow ravines fronting the trail leading in. Ike chose to set up camp in a shallow cave that could not be seen from the trail, picketing the horses out of sight. After unloading what few supplies they had left, all three dug shallow pits big enough to lay in with a berm on one edge to rest rifles over. The three spots, in the form of a ‘U’, were only thirty feet apart end to end. Ike reasoned all three could reach their position quickly out of sight. The narrow trail they expected Dickson to ride in on was barely one hundred yards away.
The brothers had a heated discussion on whether or not they should stand a night watch. Ike said he wasn’t for it because he didn’t believe even Dickson could track them in the dark over hard ground. Emmett wasn’t so sure. He argued the tall man might keep riding at least during part of the night to gain ground on them, just like he did reaching Fool’s Gold. Virgil, nervous as always, volunteered to stand the first watch and not take any chances. Ike was quick to remind him how he fell asleep back in town, nearly letting Dickson catch all of them sleeping.
‘This is different,’ Virgil countered. ‘I won’t do that again no matter what. I promise I won’t. I want to kill him just as bad as you two do and ride back home where we belong, instead of hiding out in this godforsaken land. This place ain’t fit for no human being to be in. There’s no game or much of anything else.’
Ike and Emmett stared back at their brother. Both were thinking exactly the same thing without saying so out loud. Neither trusted him, no matter how much he tried to make them believe him. Both would have been stunned to know Ben Dickson was doing exactly what their brother just said. When he pulled to a stop getting his first look at the badlands, Dickson knew tracking the Goss brothers had suddenly changed, and not for the better. There would be no more easy tracking over soft ground through broken brush and tall willow thickets. These bare, treeless buttes, crumbling cliffs and the stark grey landscape made following the three harder and much more dangerous. In this kind of broken land the brothers could be hiding anyplace, watching and waiting to ambush him. Dickson leaned back in the saddle as his mind wrestled with the new circumstances. He also considered that his original timetable of collecting his blood money from Rolo Mackenzie and Edward Chambers had changed too. He urged his horse down toward the first narrow canyon ahead where tracks said the trio had also entered. As canyon walls rose around him he leaned lower in the saddle, barely able to make out the faintest hoof prints etched in flinty ground leading away. It was enough to follow, at least for now. That’s all that mattered.
The man hunter knew something else even more important learned from tracking other men that had run for weeks and long distances. Almost always they slowed down after five or six days, thinking they’d outridden a prison sentence or a hangman’s noose.
The Goss brothers would be no different. They came from a close-knit family that stuck together and acted together on whatever they did. Here in the badlands they were far from home without their domineering father telling them what to do and when to do it. They were in strangely twisted country they’d never seen before and that was another big disadvantage for them. It would make them prone to crucial mistakes, arguing with each other about where to go, when to stop, and what to do next. Every day Dickson didn’t show up could give them false hope he’d either given up and turned back, or got lost himself in this jigsaw puzzle land. As more days followed they might even decide it was safe to start back for home. All these possibilities worked in Dickson’s favour and he well knew it. His decision was to ride well into the night, at least for the next three or four days. That way he could close distance on the brothers as they slept.
An October Hunter’s Moon lit the ground casting ghostly shadows around Dickson as he sat easy in the saddle, letting his horse set its own pace. There was no rush or reason to move faster. He’d gained valuable ground all that week and the slow pace allowed him time to search ahead each night for the faint glow of a dying camp fire. The full moon in a velvet black sky stood out like a bright beacon. Sometime after midnight Dickson pulled a pocket watch from his vest, lifting it closer. Moon glow lit its white enamelled face outlining black numbers. 1:47. He decided to stop for the night and bed down for a few hours, saddling up again at first light.
Dawn, when it came, blew in on a bitter wind forcing Virgil to roll over, shivering under his thin wool blanket. He struggled to his feet, wrapping the blanket over his shoulders, pulling his beat up hat down around his ears.
‘Ike, we’re out of water for coffee.’ He tried rousing his brother, still down.’Forget coffee. We ain’t got that much left anyway. What we need is water. Our bags are nearly empty. Go back to that mud hole we saw ridin’ in and fill up all three water bags. Emmett and I will try to git a fire goin’ to warm up. We’re gonna need more wood too, but there ain’t much around here. If you find some, grab it up.’
Virgil stared back wide-eyed. The last thing he wanted to do was leave camp alone. The fear that Dickson might show up was more than he could take. The thought of it haunted him constantly. ‘I . . . can’t go back. One of you will have to ride with me.’
‘What’ya mean you can’t? Dickson might have already gave up and turned back by now. It’s been weeks since we seen him. Even if he didn’t he’d still be miles away. Get a grip on yourself and get going. There ain’t no ghosts out here ’cept the ones
in your head!’
Virgil grudgingly saddled his horse, looping the three water bags over the saddle horn. He swung up holding a rifle in one hand. Looking back he saw Ike and Emmett still wrapped in blankets. Anger rose in him, being forced out alone. The moment his horse reached stony flats down from camp, he felt the knot in his stomach beginning to grow. For the entire mile ride to water, his head constantly swivelled side to side, searching as dawn began brightening the land around him.
The water hole was little more than a muddy crease bubbling to the surface. Virgil slid the rifle back in its scabbard. Getting down he lifted the water bags free, kneeling to dip the first bag into the shallow, silted pool. The slow gurgle as it tried to fill immediately frustrated him. He wanted to get the job done and get back to the safety of camp fast. Minutes ticked by agonizingly slowly until the first canvas bag bulged full. Capping it he pushed the second one in, glancing back over his shoulder to be sure he was alone. Nothing stirred. No bird sang. The land around him seemed dead as the waning moon.
Finishing the second bag he plunged a third into the water, watching bubbles slowly burping to the surface as it filled. Finally finished he got to his feet, twisting the cap on, turning toward his horse. When he looked up he suddenly saw the dark figure of Ben Dickson, standing like a ghost thirty feet away, staring at him with a shotgun levelled in his hands. Virgil’s eyes bulged in wild fear. His mouth fell open unable to yell and his breath came in short gasps as his body became paralyzed.
‘Drop the water bags, and unbuckle your gun belt, left handed. Don’t make me kill you right here,’ Dickson ordered in an even voice. ‘They’ll be a hangman waiting for you and your brothers back in Peralta. Where are they?’
Virgil still clung to the water bag, unable to unclench his hands. His arms slowly fell to his sides until he was able to drop the heavy bag at his feet with a soggy thud. He swallowed hard, trying to find his voice as his mind raced. How had Dickson suddenly appeared from out of nowhere without a sound? His confusion matched his fear.