Lawless Breed

by Ralph Hayes

  In the fall: ‘You’re wearing that beautiful gun too damn high! Too much elbow action. You trying to do acrobatics, or draw a gun?’

  And so it went. Fall came and a light winter. One spring day, Allison came to him and said, ‘Let’s see your draw.’

  ‘Maybe it’s too soon to show anything.’

  ‘Come on, I seen you practising. Show me what you got.’

  They faced each other for a draw-down. ‘Now I’m one of them low-lifes that’s about to kill you,’ Allison told him. They were out at the corral and the foreman Bedford was watching them at a distance. ‘So let’s see what you can do about it. The surest way to be legal about it,’ Allison added, ‘is to let me make the first move.’

  Sumner nodded.

  ‘You’re a dirty yellow coward that shot three men down in cold blood,’ Allison growled out.

  ‘Prove it,’ Sumner challenged him.

  Allison began a draw that had beaten other men from Texas to Missouri, his gun coming into his hand like lightning magic.

  When the Colt was just leveling itself at Sumner’s belly, Allison saw that Sumner’s six-shooter was already aimed at his heart. He had barely seen it happen.

  Allison’s eyes widened in shock. He had never been beaten before.

  ‘Good Jesus! How did you do that?’

  Sumner smiled in satisfaction. He twirled the Colt backwards twice and let it nestle back into its well-oiled holster. ‘You shouldn’t be surprised. It’s what you taught me.’

  Over at the corral fence, Bedford had turned and was telling a ranch hand what he had seen. Allison had re-holstered too, and now walked over to Sumner. ‘I never taught you that, boy! I never saw a draw like that. You’re a by-God natural!’

  ‘It was a lucky draw,’ Sumner said. ‘Next time you’ll beat me.’

  ‘Like hell I will. You’ve arrived, Sumner.’ His face became pensive.

  ‘I reckon that means you won’t be with me much longer.’

  Sumner sighed. ‘I’ll never forget this time with you, Clay.’

  Allison grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘Well, let’s not get all sad-faced about it. How much longer will you stay with us?’

  ‘Till the end of the month,’ Sumner said. ‘Till I get my pay.’

  ‘That ain’t hardly a week,’ Allison said to himself. He was shaking his head. ‘Well, tell you what. Why don’t we ride into Las Animas tonight. Just you and me. And celebrate what’s happened here. We’ll make it a night to remember.’

  ‘That suits me right down to the ground.’ Sumner smiled.

  It was just a half hour’s ride into town. They arrived at the Last Chance Saloon just as darkness fell and there was already a small crowd inside. The saloon was sophisticated for the size of the town. There was a long mahogany bar, and a large painting of a reclining nude on the wall behind it. Shelves of bottles contained every kind of whiskey, rum, or any other sort of hard drink available at the time. Faro tables at the rear were already busy with customers, and a Wurlitzer piano sat closed up in a corner. A sign on the back wall announced free eggs with every beer or ale.

  Allison walked in ahead of Sumner, and a couple of tables of drinkers near the door went quiet when they saw him. Most men in the area hoped Allison was in a good mood when he came to drink. At a table in the centre of the room, a tough-looking man with a three day beard took particular notice of Allison. His name was Curly Quentin and he was wanted for robbery and murder in three states. Allison spotted him too, but ignored his presence. He had never thought it his duty to concern himself about any outlaws who might ride through his area. He had committed too many unlawful acts himself.

  Allison and Sumner ordered Planter’s Rye and it was brought to them by a skinny waiter who sneaked a long look at Allison. Allison toasted Sumner’s future with their first drink, and then said, ‘Frankly, boy, I wish you wasn’t headed in the direction you picked.’

  Sumner’s handsome face was grave. ‘I don’t have any choice, Clay.’

  ‘You know you’re not ready yet, don’t you? Them Territory deputies are mostly notorious gunslingers themselves. And I’ve heard about Pritchard. He’s dangerous.’

  ‘I know all that,’ Sumner assured him. ‘I intend to take my time with this.’

  Suddenly there was a loud yell from the centre table. ‘Hey, Allison! You still wading in cow pucky for fun?’ It was Quentin. The other two men at his table, a couple of grubby drifters, laughed softly. The rest of the room slowly quieted down.

  Allison looked over at him. ‘Are you still robbing women and babies for their cookie jar cash, Quentin?’ he replied in a hard voice.

  Sumner frowned. ‘Is that Curly Quentin?’

  Allison nodded. ‘He’s got the idea he’s the fastest gun in five states,’ he said drily. ‘He’s a self-made legend, you might say. But he’s worth avoiding.’

  Quentin swigged an ale. ‘Say, Allison! Word has it you took in a damn back-shooter. Some yellow-belly called Sumner. Is that him there with you?’

  The whole room had gone deadly silent now. A man at a front table got up and quietly left the saloon.

  Allison sighed. ‘Don’t pay him no mind,’ he told Sumner. ‘I’ll handle it. If I have to.’

  Sumner shook his head. ‘No. I don’t want that.’

  Quentin yelled again, ‘That sure looks like the kind of milkweed that would bushwhack an unsuspecting victim! Don’t you agree, boys?’

  At a far table, a fork clinked on glass and sounded like a small cannon firing in the room.

  Sumner set his shot glass down. ‘You’re in no danger, Quentin. You’re facing me.’ Slowly and deliberately.

  Over at the other table, Quentin’s face went straight-lined, looking even uglier. Allison turned to Sumner. ‘Sumner. That’s Curly Quentin. You ain’t ready yet, boy.’

  But Quentin was rising menacingly from his chair now. He stepped away from his table. Several men in the line of fire moved away, scraping their chairs in their haste.

  ‘Are you saying you want to try me, yellow streak?’

  Sumner had had enough. He rose and moved carefully away from his chair. Allison watching somberly but silently. Sumner looked as calm as if he were target practising.

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. Unless, of course, you’d care to disown those rude remarks you just made.’

  Quentin’s face turned crimson. Then, without warning, he drew.

  But by the time his gun had cleared leather, Sumner’s Colt appeared in his hand as if it had already been there. Its quick thunder exploded into the room as Quentin’s shot roared out a split second later, the two weapons making the rafters shake. Quentin’s hot lead tore at Sumner’s shirt under his left arm, and Sumner’s had already burst Quentin’s heart like a paper bag and busted two posterior ribs as it exited his thick frame.

  Quentin went flying backwards, arms flailing. His gun went off again, and bottles were smashed on the shelf near the bartender and sticky liquid sprayed onto his chest and face. Quentin crashed past two tables, taking them and chairs with him, splintering wood and spilling drinks as he hit the floor with a loud thud. Eyes staring unseeing at the tin ceiling, in the rictus of death. His left leg drummed the floor for a moment and he was lifeless.

  The acrid odour of gun smoke hung in the air as Sumner casually twirled the Peacemaker over twice and into its oiled resting place.

  ‘Holy Christ!’ From the sticky bartender. Eyes wide.

  ‘Did you see that?’ In a hushed voice, from a far corner.

  Sumner sat back down, picked up his shot glass and swigged its contents. ‘Now. What were we saying?’ In the same calm, modulated voice.

  Allison let a smile cross his broad face. ‘Well. Look what we done out there.’

  Now the noise was returning to the room, with men talking fast and excitedly. The bartender and his waiter were bending over Quentin’s corpse in preparation to taking it to a back room.

  ‘You know who you are now?’ Allison was saying to Sumner.r />
  Sumner was assessing his feelings about what had just happened. He found that he was unmoved. He regarded Allison now curiously.

  ‘You’ll always be the man that killed Curly Quentin,’ Allison said quietly.

  Sumner shrugged. ‘He started to get under my skin.’

  Allison shook his head slowly. ‘It’s clear as sheet lightning under thunderheads. You ain’t no ranch hand no more. You got talent, boy.’

  Sumner looked sober. ‘It’s not something I wanted.’

  The bartender appeared suddenly beside their table, wiping at his face with a bar cloth. ‘Well, Sumner. You not only did this town a big favor just now. You just earned yourself $1,000.’

  Sumner turned to him, frowning. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘He means there’s a bounty on that ugly boy’s head,’ Allison explained. ‘You just made yourself some traveling cash, boy.’

  Sumner was trying to digest that. ‘I don’t want money for killing a man,’ he said quietly.

  ‘You better take it,’ the bartender quipped. ‘It’s just waiting there to be paid to the right man.’ Then he was gone.

  Allison swigged the remainder of his drink. ‘You’d be a fool to let it lie, boy. This is your chance to grab yourself a real grub-stake. For what you got ahead of you eventually.’

  Sumner met his look. The idea was completely alien to him. ‘I’ll be around a few more days. I’ll give it some thought.’

  Before they left town that evening, Allison persuaded him to stop at the local sheriff’s office and put in his claim, just in case. A few days later, Sumner was packed up on his black stallion, and saying goodbye to Allison. The foreman Bedford was a different man toward him, offering him a sheepskin coat and treating Sumner like a celebrity.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ Allison asked him.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Sumner told him. ‘I have to check up on Pritchard and Guthrie. Whether they’re still at Fort Sill. I can’t plan beyond that.’

  ‘I wish I could talk you out of this,’ Allison told him. ‘I run into Pritchard once. He’d make Curly Quentin look like a raw greenhorn. And that partner of his is slick as oiled leather.’

  ‘I don’t have a choice in this,’ Sumner said quietly. ‘This is more important to me than my life.’

  Allison nodded reluctantly. ‘I’ve had that feeling. Well, you stop by here when it’s over, you hear?’

  Sumner smiled at him. ‘I will,’ he told him. Then he was gone.

  It was later that same day that Sumner stopped at the sheriff’s office in Las Animas and was paid out $1,000 in coin and paper by a scowling lawman.

  ‘We don’t cotton much to bounty hunters hereabouts,’ was his remark when Sumner was paid. ‘We’d like to see you move on, Sumner.’

  Sumner gave him an acid look. ‘I’m not a bounty hunter, Sheriff. I didn’t kill Curly Quentin for money. But if I had, I wouldn’t be apologizing to any lawman that sat around and watched Quentin tear up their towns without lifting a finger to stop him.’

  Sumner left the sheriff looking after him with a worried look on his face, and walked down to the local bank and deposited most of the cash in a new account. As he left the bank, he realized that he was now a man of property, and that was a new feeling for him. He went into a dry goods store and came back out with different clothing. Dark trousers and jacket. Blue shirt and black cravat at the neck. It was all done on a rather subconscious level, but he was dressed now for a dark purpose. The ranch hand Sumner, which had never really existed as a permanent entity, was gone forever. With the black, flat-top Stetson and the black stallion, he looked like a man you might want to avoid, if you saw him ride past.

  After the clothing change, he found a hardware store and purchased a deadly Hotchkiss repeating rifle which ended up in his saddle scabbard, and also a Derringer-type Harrington Pocket Pistol in a cut-down holster that fit nicely on his gun-belt at the small of his back. When he boarded the stallion again out on the street he felt he was physically ready now for the mission that lay ahead.

  He felt, for the first time in his life, dangerous.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The bustling town of Fort Griffin was on Sumner’s route south before he crossed over into Indian Territory, and he reached it in the late afternoon of his first day out of Las Animas. He had been there as a boy, at a time when he was still looking for the men who murdered his aunt, and a storekeeper named Hawley had befriended him then and had tried to dissuade him from going after the outlaws. Sumner decided to look him up now again, because Hawley had connections in the Territory.

  Sumner stopped at a small hotel called the Lone Star and was given a room by a bespectacled clerk who looked him over suspiciously. With his mount ensconced in a nearby hostelry, he then walked down to a general store where he hoped to find Hawley. The streets were busy with traffic and Sumner recalled that Fort Griffin had been, at one time, the site of an annual rendezvous where mountain men, hunters and trappers, and Indians from five or six tribes met to buy, sell and trade furs, hides, equipment and guns. Now there was just a remnant of all that in mid-summer. But the town sat on a cattle trail and had prospered well.

  When Sumner walked into the general store, Hawley was behind a long counter that displayed clothing and household goods. Hawley recognized Sumner immediately.

  ‘Well, I’ll be a puffed-up horny toad! Look what we have here!’

  There were no customers in the place. Hawley came around the counter and reached out and pumped Sumner’s hand vigorously, looking him over openly. ‘Good God! You look all growed up! And different!’

  ‘Pleasured to see you again, Mr Hawley.’ Sumner smiled at him.

  Hawley was grinning. He was a middle-aged fellow with a round, pleasant face and a pot belly. ‘I see you come up in the world since I seen you last.’ Looking at Sumner’s new attire.

  ‘Not very far,’ Sumner told him. ‘You look just the same after eight or nine years.’

  Hawley gave him a sly grin. ‘I see you learned diplomacy, too.’ He leaned against the counter. ‘Word come to me that you ignored my advice, back there.’ Sumner nodded. ‘It had to be done. And I paid my dues.’

  ‘You look bigger. More mature.’

  Sumner sighed heavily, looking down.

  ‘I feel more mature,’ he admitted. ‘Look. Do you have time for a brief sit down, Mr Hawley?’

  ‘Hell, yes. You like a cup of Brazilian coffee?’

  ‘If you have it.’

  Hawley went and hung a ‘Closed’ sign on the front door, and then led Sumner to a back room where there were cooking facilities. In moments, they were sitting at a kitchen table with their coffee before them. Sumner stirred his cup pensively.

  ‘What have you been doing with yourself, boy?’ Hawley finally asked him.

  ‘Oh, I’ve been doing some ranching,’ Sumner said evasively.

  ‘You don’t look like no ranch hand.’ Hawley grinned at him. Then his face turned somber. ‘The word is that somebody named Sumner just shot and killed one of the worst hombres seen in these parts in quite a spell. The rumor is that this Sumner is blinding fast with a gun and can shoot the eye out of a jack of spades across a crowded room in the dark.’

  Sumner shook his head. ‘That Sumner must be some kind of phenomenon,’ he responded with a wry grin.

  Hawley sipped at his coffee. ‘I give you the wrong advice back there when you was here before,’ he said slowly. ‘You had every right. And you never should have been punished for it.’

  ‘That means a lot to me,’ Sumner told him. ‘Listen. I have a similar situation going on right now. And maybe you can help me. As I recall, you have some connections over in the Territory.’

  ‘I got some acquaintances over that way.’

  ‘You know anybody over at Fort Sill?’

  ‘Not really. But I hear news from there pretty regular.’

  ‘What about the federal judge over there? You hear anything about him or his deputies?’


  Hawley’s eyebrows shot upward. ‘Oh. Didn’t you know? Judge Gabriel got in big trouble with his bosses back in Washington, and he was removed from office. Just last week.’

  Sumner narrowed his blue eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘I got it from a reliable source. He was called the hanging judge, as you may know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘A real bastard. Did you have trouble with him?’

  Sumner looked across the room, and remembered. ‘His deputies beat my friend to death. And Gabriel let it happen. He had sentenced Corey to hang. But he didn’t make it to the gallows.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Hawley mumbled.

  ‘What happened to the deputies that did his dirty work? Called Guthrie and Pritchard?’

  Hawley grunted out a laugh. ‘They’re in worse trouble than Gabriel, I hear. They raped and damn near killed a local girl of the streets just before Gabriel was fired. Their boss, the US District Marshal, came to arrest them but they had run off somewhere. They think to Mexico.’

  Sumner looked away. ‘Sonofabitch.’

  Hawley narrowed his eyes, too. ‘What did you have in mind, boy?’

  Sumner met his look with a rock-steady one. ‘Payback,’ he grated out.

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Gabriel is probably back East in disgrace,’ Sumner said pensively. ‘Letting that half-man live out his life now as a pariah is punishment enough.’

  ‘But the deputies?’

  Sumner looked over at him. ‘I hoped I’d find them in Fort Sill. But I will find them, Mr Hawley. If I have to chase them to China. I told them they’d pay for Corey’s death. And I meant it.’

  ‘You won’t know where to start,’ Hawley argued. ‘They could be in Mexico City. Or Venezuela.’

  Sumner shook his head. ‘I don’t see them as taking to exotic places. If they’re in Mexico, it won’t be for long. I’ll start at Fort Sill. Try to get some information there. Maybe there’s someone who knew them.’

  Hawley sat back on his chair and sipped at his coffee. ‘I know you must be good. Because Curly Quentin was good. But I’ve heard things about this Pritchard, Sumner. If he finds out you’re after him, he’ll try to come up on you some black night and back-shoot you. And he’ll want to make it slow for you when he kills you. And if there is a drawdown, he’s deadly with a gun.’