By the Horns

by Ralph Compton

  Carmody sighed and took another step. “Put down your derringer. The worst they’ll do is run you out of town.”

  “I wasn’t cheating!” Lacker cried shrilly. “And I will not let my reputation be tarnished! I make my living by selling things, madam. Who will buy from me if word gets around I am shiftless?” He gestured angrily at the pile in the center of the table. “All I want is what is rightfully mine, and I will leave this dust-ridden speck of nothing to the flies and the lizards.”

  A cold laugh came from the far corner of the room. “I want to thank you, drummer,” Luke Deal said.

  “Thank me for what?” Lacker nervously licked his thick lips and swiped a sleeve across his neck.

  “Whiskey Flats has been mighty borin’ of late. I’ve been wonderin’ what I could do to liven things up.” Luke leaned on his elbows and sneered. “Then you come along and provide all the entertainment I could want.”

  Owen straightened in his chair. “This doesn’t concern you.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Lon agreed. “We’re the ones he cheated, not you.”

  Luke Deal paid them no mind. Addressing himself to everyone else present, he asked, “Are we goin’ to let this drummer get away with makin’ fools of us? Let him ride out so he can brag to everyone he meets how he pulled one over on the sheep in Whiskey Flats?”

  “I would never,” Lacker said.

  “If we let him ride out,” Luke Deal continued, “it won’t be long before we’re the laughingstock of Texas.”

  “We can’t have that,” said a man at another table.

  “No, sir,” chimed in one at the bar. “Whiskey Flats might be a flyspeck but it’s our flyspeck.”

  “I say we hang him,” Grutt gleefully suggested.

  Another silence fell. An unsettling silence, nearly every face a mirror of a rising collective thirst for vengeance. Their expressions caused William Lacker to take a step back and blurt, “Now all of you just hold on. I haven’t done anything worth being hung.”

  Carmody was only a few yards from the table, and took yet another slow step. “Not yet you haven’t,” she said. “Give your derringer to Owen and we’ll see to it you get out of town alive.”

  Owen nodded. “It’s me you’ve been wavin’ it at so I have the right to decide what to do with you.”

  The drummer wavered. He looked at Owen and he looked at Carmody, then he glanced across the saloon at the three hard cases who were eyeing him as wolves might eye prey. He shook his head and said, “No. I don’t trust any of you. I’ll keep my derringer, take my money, and go.”

  Luke Deal stood up.

  “Don’t you try anything!” Lacker cried. “I’m warning you.”

  “You’re a gamblin’ man, I take it?” Luke asked. “What do you want to bet you’ll miss and I won’t?”

  “Luke, don’t,” Owen said.

  “What’s the matter? No stomach for what needs doin’?” Luke Deal laughed. “The rest of us aren’t as squeamish. Are we, boys?”

  Lacker aimed the derringer at him. “Enough of that! You are not helping matters by inciting everyone.”

  “Please, Luke,” Carmody said, “leave this to me and no one need be hurt.”

  “You miss the point, darlin’,” Luke Deal responded. “You should know me well enough by now to know I like hurtin’ things.”

  “Me, too,” Grutt said, rising.

  Panic brought a mew of terror from Lacker’s throat. “Sit back down, both of you! Or so help me, I’ll squeeze this trigger.”

  “I’m tremblin’ in my boots,” Luke Deal mocked him.

  Carmody turned to the drummer. “For the last time. Before it’s too late, hand me your gun and everything will be fine. You’ll see.”

  For a few seconds it appeared Lacker would do as she wanted. He took a half step toward her and started to lower the derringer but then jerked it up again and pointed it at her. “No! You’re trying to trick me! You’re on their side. You want to disarm me so they can string me up!”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I saw you standing over at that table,” Lacker said, motioning toward Deal, Grutt, and Bronk. “I saw you with your hand on that longhair’s shoulder.”

  The very air seemed charged with tension. Alfred Pitney did not know what to do or say. He had never been in a situation like this. He had never imagined a situation like this. He sat still but his heart was hammering and his palms were damp.

  By now Carmody was only a few feet from Lacker. She held out a hand, palm up. “Give it to me,” she softly requested. “I won’t let any harm come to you. I give you my word.”

  “The word of a saloon trollop?” Lacker laughed, a laugh tainted by creeping hysteria.

  “Please.” Carmody took another step.

  “Stop where you are!” the drummer cried, backing away. “I mean it! I won’t let you or anyone else disarm me!” He backed around the other side of the table and turned toward the front of the saloon. “On second thought,” he said to Owen, “you can keep the money. All I want now is to leave unmolested.”

  Luke Deal overheard. “How far do you reckon you’ll get?”

  “For the last time, keep out of this!” Owen said.

  Lacker edged toward the door. “I am leaving and I will shoot anyone who tries to stop me.”

  Owen spread his arms wide and smiled. “No one will. Walk out nice and easy and head for your room and stay there until the stage comes.” He started to rise.

  They all heard the click of the derringer’s hammer being thumbed back. “Stay where you are! No one is to move until I am out that door!”

  “You can’t stop all of us,” Grutt said. “You only have two shots in that hide-out of yours.”

  “Mr. Lacker doesn’t want to shoot anyone,” Carmody said. “Do you, Mr. Lacker?”

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “Tell you what.” Carmody came around the table. “Why don’t I escort you to the door? No one will try to stop you with me by your side. They won’t risk shootin’ a woman.”

  “Stop!”

  “It’s all right.” Carmody did not halt. “I don’t want anyone harmed. That includes you.”

  “Please stop,” Lacker begged.

  “Take my arm, Mr. Lacker. You have nothin’ to be afraid of. We will walk out together.” As casually as if she were about to go on a Sunday stroll, Carmody offered her elbow while saying sweetly, “Here. Take it. I won’t bite you.”

  The derringer went off.

  Shock seized every man present.

  Lacker, stunned, gaped in horror and bleated, “No! I didn’t mean to do that! Honest I didn’t!”

  Looking down at her bosom, at the hole between the swell of her breasts, Carmody swayed. “Oh my. What have you done, Mr. Lacker? What have you done?” Blood began oozing from the hole and she clutched at the table for support. “Owen?”

  The foreman came out of his chair as if launched from a catapult. He did not run around the table to her side; he scrambled over it, scattering chips and cards and coins and bills. Springing between Slim and Cleveland, he caught her as she started to fall. “Carmody! Dear God! No!”

  Others stirred, shaking off their shock to glare at the drummer, and four or five began to rise.

  “Stay where you are!” William Lacker ordered. “I will shoot the first man who tries to stop me!” Frantic, he backpedaled, swinging the derringer from side to side to discourage anyone from being overbold. He reached the door and pushed it open without looking behind him. “Don’t come after me! You hear?” Whirling, he bolted out of there like a buck bolting from a pack of wolves.

  A mass rush ensued. With shouts of “After the bastard!” and “He has to pay!” and “String him up!” nearly every last person, from the bartender to the townsmen to Luke Deal and his leather slappers, raced out. The Bar 40 punchers remained, up out of their chairs, watching, aghast, as Owen gently lowered Carmody to the floor and cradled her head in his lap. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

/>   Carmody’s eyes were open, her face only inches from his bent form. Yet she said, “Owen? Dearest? Is that you?”

  “Can’t you see me?”

  “Everything went dark all of a sudden. Where did the light go?” Carmody’s right hand weakly rose.

  Owen clutched it and pressed his lips to her fingers. “Oh God.”

  “I can’t believe he shot me,” Carmody said. “All I wanted to do was help.” She coughed, and a drop of blood trickled over her bottom lip.

  Pitney could scarcely credit what he was witnessing. “Shouldn’t we send for a physician?”

  “There isn’t one,” Lon said. “The nearest sawbones is over to Laredo. It would take a week to fetch him.”

  “But there must be something we can do!”

  Owen’s entire frame shook as he kissed Carmody on the cheek. “I’m sorry. So very sorry.”

  “For what?” Carmody’s voice was faint. They had to strain to hear. She tried to sit up but could barely move. “I’m dyin’, aren’t I? That silly man has gone and killed me.”

  “Is there anything we can get you?” Lon asked.

  “Why isn’t there any pain? I don’t feel a thing. It’s like my body isn’t here. How can that be?” Carmody coughed again and more blood welled from her mouth.

  “Someone get a cloth and water,” Owen urged, and Slim and Cleveland both ran past the bar. “We’ll make you as comfortable as we can,” he said in her ear.

  “Is Luke here?”

  “No,” Owen replied. “He lit out after the drummer with most everybody else.”

  “I only hooked up with him to spite you.”

  “I know.”

  “It broke my heart, you takin’ after the schoolmarm like you did, after all we shared.” Carmody closed her eyes. Her breathing was shallow. “I always figured you would propose.”

  Owen did not say anything.

  “Silly of me, huh? Thinkin’ a decent man like you would want me for his wife? Me, the town tart.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” Owen begged. “You’re as fine a woman as any other.”

  “As fine as your schoolmarm?” Carmody asked, but there was no spite in her tone, only a weary resignation. “She’s a good woman. She’ll make you a fine wife one day. Raise a passel of kids and have a ranch of your own, like you always wanted.”

  “Please,” Owen said.

  Carmody opened her eyes and gazed anxiously about. “Are you still here? Where did you get to?”

  “I haven’t gone anywhere.” Owen squeezed her hand.

  “Do you hear that?”

  “What?” Owen asked, but she did not answer. “There’s a lot of yellin’ outside. Is that what you hear?” He lightly touched his lips to her temple. “I blame myself. I should never have tried to teach that drummer a lesson. It wasn’t mine to do.”

  “Pard?” Lon said.

  “I was foolin’ about. But I forgot an important fact of life. Even rabbits will turn when they are at bay.” Owen ran a finger across her hair. “I’m sorry, Carmody. So, so sorry.”

  Lon gripped his friend’s shoulder. “Pard? You can stop beatin’ yourself. She can’t hear you.”

  Owen looked up, then down at the still figure of the woman in red. A groan escaped him, torn from the depths of his being. “She deserved better than this.”

  Cleveland and Slim came barreling out of the back, Cleveland with a couple of towels, Slim with a pan filled to the brim with water. They stopped as if they had slammed into an invisible wall.

  “Aw, hell,” Slim said.

  Owen tenderly laid Carmody down, and beckoned. “Give me a hand. We can’t leave her on the floor.”

  “Where, then?” Lon asked.

  “The bar.”

  Pitney sprang to help. He slid his hands under the dove’s left leg and lifted when the others did.

  Owen arranged her dress and folded her hands on her bosom. “One of you go see if the parson is at the church.”

  Before any of the cowboys could move, the front door opened and the bartender hollered, “The drummer has disappeared! We’re going door-to-door but so far we can’t find the bastard!”

  “Thanks, Farrel,” Lon said. “We’ll be right out.”

  “Not me,” Owen said. “I’m stayin’.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want in on it? Seein’ him dangle will ease some of the sorrow.”

  “I’m stayin’.”

  Lon crooked a finger at Slim and Cleveland and they made for the door. Midway Lon stopped and glanced back. “What are you waitin’ for, English? Or don’t folks have manners where you come from?”

  “Oh.” Alfred Pitney sheepishly hurried after them.

  Twilight shrouded Whiskey Flats. A few stars sparkled high above. After the smoky, stuffy saloon, the brisk breeze from the northwest was welcome. The town had transformed into a beehive of activity. The men were scouring every building. Distraught women stood in small groups, discussing the calamity. A few mothers clasped small children to them as if afraid the drummer would shoot the children next.

  “I never suspected there were so many,” Pitney said.

  “How can he have vanished?” Cleveland asked no one in particular. “He has to be hidin’ somewhere unless he grabbed a horse and lit a shuck when no one was lookin’.” Luke Deal and four other men came hastening by, and Cleveland called out, “Are any horses missin’?”

  “Not that we know of,” a townsman responded.

  The next moment a commotion erupted at the livery. Shouts and curses mixed with the thud of blows, and someone bawled, “We found him! He was hidin’ in the hayloft!”

  All the inhabitants of Whiskey Flats—every last man, woman, and child—streamed to the wide double doors, then fell back to make room as four huskies brought William Lacker out. The drummer was nearly beside himself. He struggled mightily, twisting and kicking, but the four men held firm.

  “Murderer!” a woman shrieked.

  “Why did you do it?” From Toothless.

  One of the men holding the drummer scanned the crowd. “What should we do with him? Hold him for the federal marshal?”

  Luke Deal cupped a hand to his mouth. “To the cottonwoods! To the hangin’ tree!”

  The suggestion became a refrain as a score of throats echoed it: “To the hanging tree! To the hanging tree! To the hanging tree!”

  “Nooooooooooooo!” William Lacker wailed as he was bodily propelled toward a strip of woodland fringing a creek that bordered Whiskey Flats to the south. “You can’t do this!”

  His plaintive plea was drowned out by the cacophony of incensed voices calling for him to pay the ultimate penalty for his misdeed. Raising a strident din to the brightening stars, the crowd flowed in a body to a high cottonwood that stood by itself in the center of a clearing. That the tree had seen use before was attested to by deep scrape marks on a thick limb about twenty feet off the ground.

  Alfred Pitney plucked at Lon’s sleeve. “They can’t be doing what I think they are doing! They can’t hang a man in cold blood! It’s barbaric!”

  Lon had to yell to be heard above the uproar. “We have no law so we make our own. He’s only gettin’ what he deserves.”

  “But it’s wrong!” Pitney exclaimed, appalled. “Morally and ethically and legally wrong!”

  “Towns and settlements do it all the time,” Lon said. “Vigilante justice, the newspapers call it. The right of the people to protect themselves.”

  “But Lacker can’t harm anyone else! He should be held for trial. His fate should be decided by a judge. My God, man! Hasn’t anyone in Texas ever heard of the rule of law?”

  A cheer rocked the clearing.

  A buttermilk horse had been brought, and a rope produced. Lacker’s wrists were bound behind his back and he was roughly thrown onto the saddle. He fought but they held him fast as a man on another horse slipped a noose over his head.

  The man on the other horse was Luke Deal. “Try holdin’ your breath. You might last a few secon
ds longer.”

  “For pity’s sake, don’t!” Alfred Pitney pleaded but he was the lone dissenter in a sea of retribution. He attempted to force his way through the press but there were too many.

  “Any last words?” Luke Deal asked.

  “As God is my witness—” Lacker started to speak.

  “On second thought, you don’t deserve any.” Suddenly Luke Deal yipped and took off his hat and slapped it hard against the buttermilk, and the horse broke into a trot.

  A cheer went up.

  Lacker gurgled and whined and flailed his legs, his face reddening, his neck bent at an angle by the knot. To the delight of the crowd, his frenzied thrashing soon ended and he hung as limp as an empty potato sack, his face purple, the tip of his tongue protruding from between his thick lips, his wide, lifeless eyes fixed on the heavens.

  5

  Longhorn Country

  The Bar 40 was considered one of the most efficiently run ranches in all of Texas, which was saying a lot. As solicitor and financial manager for the Bristol-London Consortium, Alfred Pitney had acquired all the information he could on the ranch and its owner before the BLC committed to the purchase.

  James Bartholomew was a man of impeccable honesty, and a tireless worker. He had started the ranch when he was forty, and for his brand combined the first three letters of his last name with his age.

  Prior to that, Bartholomew had worked at several jobs, including a stint in the Union Army during the conflict that nearly tore the United States asunder. After his discharge, he hired on as a puncher on a ranch known as the Flying T. The Flying T’s owner, a Miles Cavendish, took a liking to the forthright young man and was grooming Bartholomew to be his foreman when fate threw an even better opportunity in Bartholomew’s lap.

  His mother had died when he was young. His father had grown too attached to the bottle, and never amounted to much. But an uncle made a lot of money in shipping, and when the uncle died, he left part of that money for his favorite nephew. Enough to enable James Bartholomew to realize a dream he had long held of having a ranch of his own.

  Bartholomew bought all the land he could. It being Texas, and land being cheap, his spread was roughly the size of Rhode Island. He had a ranch house built, and a stable and corral, and a bunkhouse for the punchers he soon hired, and all the outbuildings a typical ranch needed, and when he was done, he had very little money left to buy cattle. But that was all right, since he had no intention to buy any. Not when there were untold thousands of wild cattle available for the taking.