Longhorn Country

by Tyler Hatch

  ‘Good, then I’ll leave you to check the mounts and the cattle pens.’

  As Blaine moved away, Alamo said, ‘Hey! You better be careful, you almost smiled then!’

  But neither man was smiling a couple of hours later when the cattle they had gathered and penned-up in a gulch came bawling and snorting and horn-swinging through the camp in all-out stampede.

  Above the noise and the thunder, both Alamo and Blaine heard the rap of gun shots, driving the killer herd on.

  CHAPTER 6

  LONG VENGEANCE

  They grabbed their horses, dragging them by sheer force up the slope as the first of the steers came bawling and slobbering into the camp area. Blaine had snatched his rifle and his six gun was thrust into his belt. Alamo had his Colt but had fumbled his rifle and lost it in the hurry to get his mount out of the way of the thundering herd.

  Blaine swung aboard the sorrel, wrenching aside as sharp-tipped horns raked down the mount’s hide. It whinnied and reared and lunged aside, bleeding but not, apparently, seriously hurt.

  Blaine swung the rifle across his body and down, firing into the lunging, mindless steer, the bullet smashing in behind the ear. The bovine animal went down as if something had cut the legs from under it, the big red-and-white blotched body somersaulting, hoofs flailing in a final throe. Blaine’s horse swung aside and he spun the rifle around the trigger guard, fired into a second beast, saw dust spurt from its back. It staggered but didn’t go down. Alamo’s six gun was banging and as Blaine fought his mount around – it wanted only to escape this writhing crush of horned devil-beasts – he glimpsed a rider on the slope above. Just a dark shape, but the man was throwing down at the trail boss with his rifle.

  The half-breed gripped the writhing sorrel hard, feeling the muscles ridging and snaking under his thighs. It was a wild seat from which to draw a bead, but Blaine remembered in time he no longer had a right eye, switched the rifle butt to his left shoulder, sighted and triggered, levered and triggered again.

  He thought he hit the man’s horse rather than the killer himself, saw the animal go down head first and then the shadowed body sailing through the air. The man hit some brush and it was thick enough and springy enough to throw him on to the slope. Dazed, but still holding his rifle and some yards above the stampeding stream, he spread his boots and drew another bead on Alamo who was sitting astride his quivering mount, trying to reload with fumbling fingers.

  Blaine rowelled savagely, letting the sorrel know who was in charge here, and it stopped an upslope lunge, speared forward in the direction Blaine wanted it to go. The killer must have heard it snorting coming in, or maybe the drum of shod hoofs on the hard ground, for he began to swing around, rifle lifting to meet the new threat. He was a tad slow and the sorrel smashed into him and drove him down to the slope. He lost the rifle, rolled violently but came up to one knee, Colt in his right hand, left chopping across, ready to fan the hammer.

  Blaine’s bullet took him between the eyes, snapping his head back as if he had run into an unseen tree branch. The man’s feet left the ground and the horse struck him again, stumbling.

  As the breed brought the mount around, steadying it, he coughed in the choking dust, saw the tail end of the herd coming over the rise. Two more riders were shooting into the sky, spotted him and Alamo, and changed their aim. The two Broken Wheel men emptied their guns and one man slid sideways and almost fell out of the saddle, but regained balance at the last moment and dropped back into the darkness.

  The other man could be heard galloping away fast.

  Alamo skidded his mount up alongside Blaine, panting. ‘They weren’t Injuns!

  Blaine said nothing, spurred the sorrel over the rise where the other two killers had disappeared, but there was nothing to see. He rode on, crouching low, thumbing fresh loads into his rifle. Then up ahead an orange dagger stabbed the darkness and he felt the air-whip of a slug passing his face. He dropped his spare shells and the rifle, too, lunged for it and spilled from the saddle. By the time he had stopped rolling and the horse had come to a halt some yards away, the killers were gone.

  Alamo rode up. ‘Sons of bitches! They wanted us bad! Or you, leastways. They didn’t have to stop and try to nail you when they had such a good lead. This was personal!’

  Breathing hard, Blaine dusted himself down, went to the quivering sorrel and examined the horn wound as well he could. It was deep enough to hurt and bleed, but shallow enough not to require any urgent treatment.

  ‘Camp’s a damn mess,’ Alamo allowed but didn’t expect a reply: he had learned that Blaine wasn’t a man to either state the obvious or acknowledge a man who did. ‘Well, there goes three days work and the cows’ll be scattered to hell and gone by mornin’.’

  ‘I got one of ’em – up the slope yonder.’

  They walked their horses across to where the dead man lay, face shattered by the bullet, body mangled by the sorrel’s hoofs. Blaine figured the others were long gone and struck a vesta but cupped a hand around the flame.

  ‘Know him?’

  Alamo craned forward, studying the dead man. ‘Hard to tell – looks kinda familiar, though. I think it’s Candy Starke. Worked a season for Broken Wheel while you were away. Got caught goin’ through the other men’s warbags…. After the crew got through with him, they tied him to a mule and turned him loose up at the far end of Fool’s Canyon. Ain’t heard of nor seen him since.’

  ‘Then he’d have no love for Broken Wheel?’

  ‘Not Candy – but, somethin’ else – he was a friend of Hardesty and Rendell.’

  Blaine nodded slowly. ‘We might’s well turn in again – Can’t do anything about the steers tonight and we’ll need daylight to study the tracks.’

  The herd was scattered far and wide, some of the mavericks, now they had calmed down after the panic of stampede, searching out their old haunts, deep in the most inaccessible scrub.

  ‘This’s gonna put us behind,’ Alamo opined, face grim. ‘We’ll have to call up a couple of extra hands to help with the round-up. That won’t make Morgan happy!’

  ‘Can you get along without me?’

  Alamo’s eyebrows were arching in surprise before he had turned completely around. ‘Where you goin’?’

  ‘Took a look at the tracks on the rise – where I winged one before he got away and his pard took that potshot at me. I reckon Hardesty and Rendell are still forking the same broncs they rode before they beat on me.’

  Alamo frowned. ‘You can remember those tracks?’

  ‘Sure – Clem’s black always threw its right forefoot slightly out to one side, making the track lopsided – Clint had the little grey with the dainty hoofs, making a mark almost like a large deer instead of a hoss.’

  Alamo Ames scratched his head. ‘You’ve got a deal of Indian blood workin’ in you, all right, Blaine! But I guess you could be right – Curly saw ’em at the water tanks along the railroad a few weeks back and sure enough, they were still forkin’ the same broncs they had when they rode for Broken Wheel.’

  Blaine was already mounted. ‘I’ll see if I can catch up with them.’

  ‘Wait! They’ll be long gone by now and we need to get them steers penned again! They gotta go in with the main herd and there ain’t a lot of time to spare before we start headin’ ’em-up and movin’ out to railhead….’

  ‘I’ll be back as quick as I can.’

  ‘Dammit, Blaine! I’m s’posed to be in charge here!’

  ‘You are, Alamo – You are. You’re the trail boss.’

  ‘Well, then why the hell is it when I tell you I want you to do somethin, you do what you want?’

  Blaine was already swinging the sorrel away. ‘Must’ve hit my head when I fell last night – can’t hardly hear … Adios, Alamo.’

  Ames started to yell, whipping off his hat and throwing it on the ground, but he didn’t persevere as Blaine rode upslope towards the ridge. What was the use?

  Blaine’s vengeance had been a long time comi
ng – and he might as well get it over and done with before the trail drive started.

  It never occurred to Alamo for a moment that Blaine might not return from his vengeance trail.

  The trail was easy to follow: after all, the fugitives had been intent only on escape, and in the dark at that.

  Still, Blaine rode with his fully-loaded rifle out, butt resting on his left thigh, swinging his head from side to side. Having only one eye was more of a handicap than just not being able to see with binocular vision. Swinging the head from one side to the other so as to cover all country brought on a vague dizziness, simply with the motion. It wasn’t enough to make him want to grip the saddle harder, but it did feel as if he wasn’t quite in full control of his body.

  After he cleared the ridge and picked his way down into a wide canyon with a stream flowing across the sandy floor, the tracks were a little more difficult to find. But he saw the blood spots and the piece of bloody rag where the wounded man had tried to give his injury some attention. Or, maybe even his pard had done it for him, though Blaine, knowing both men, figured this was unlikely. In the world of Hardesty and Rendell, it was Number One first, last and always….

  He had no plan, simply aiming to track these men down now he had started. He had been content to wait a while longer for it was already six months since they had beat him up and taken his eye. But making that move against him and Alamo last night – well, that was a declaration of war as far as Blaine was concerned.

  This time he would end it – and he aimed to ride away the victor.

  He trailed the men coldly and relentlessly, clear through the canyon and into some draws where they had doubled-back and swung off at a southern tangent, trying to cover their tracks all the way. But though he had been only four years old when Morgan had taken him from the Comanche, he had already had a basic knowledge of tracking small animals. During his months of recovery just recently, Running Bird had shown him how to follow man tracks, and the poor covering-up methods that white men used. He had shown Blaine something of an Indian’s way of covering tracks and Blaine was astounded: no wonder Alamo and his men had found nothing at the riverbank when Running Bird and Long Head had whisked him away with his injuries.

  But although he soon uncovered the trail Hardesty and Rendell had tried to hide, he didn’t realise how close behind the men he was. Likely the injured man had slowed them down and he wondered at this, having expected the unharmed one would have ridden on and left the other to his fate. He knew now it was Rendell who was wounded, having found, half-buried, a torn, blood-stained neckerchief that he recognized: it was heavily soiled with sweat and dirt and he recalled Clint Rendell had worn that same neckerchief for weeks at a time before rinsing it perfunctorily in a creek’s murky water. Besides, the man’s horse had left meandering tracks as if the rider wasn’t in full control of the reins.

  But he was closer than he knew.

  The rifles blasted from the high rocks. One bullet geysered gravel a yard in front of the swerving sorrel. The other tugged at his buckskin shirt where it hung in a loose fold across his chest.

  Naturally, they had blind-sided him, shooting from his right.

  Blaine was going out of the saddle, kicking boots free of the stirrups, holding his rifle high as he tipped his body to the left. He kicked the horse with a boot as he fell and it whickered, lurched, then ran off, instinctively hunting cover in the lower clump of boulders.

  Blaine rolled swiftly towards a line of broken rocks, hearing the dull rifle shots as his body crunched across the gravel, his boots scrabbling wildly, seeking purchase so as to thrust him into shelter. Before he made it, two bullets flung rock chips against his hat and he ducked his head instinctively, squirmed in and sprawled as flat as possible.

  Breathing hard, dust biting at his nostrils, he turned his face with his good eye uppermost, searching for the gunsmoke. It hung in a pall in the still air. If he had been pursuing his quarry in open country the breeze would have whipped it away or shredded it. This way, the grey-white powdersmoke cloud pinpointed the bushwhackers’ hiding place.

  He slid the rifle from under his body, snugged the butt into his left shoulder and sighted just below the smoke, seeing now the gap between the big rocks up there.

  His finger tightened on the trigger as he laid his sights on that gap – then he slacked-off, moved the barrel several inches and lower. He fired three fast shots into rocks that were six feet below and three feet to the side of the killers’ hiding place. That would give them confidence and maybe make them careless – thinking he didn’t know yet where they were.

  He fired several more shots, well away from the actual gap where Hardesty and Rendell were. As he reloaded from his bullet belt, they raked his shelter and he heard someone laugh.

  ‘We got you pinned, Blaine!’ That was Hardesty.

  Blaine didn’t make any reply, shifted his aim, but made it a little closer this time. They would still figure he was shooting blind. The sons of bitches were half-right! But they were about to pay for that!

  He waited a few minutes and sure enough he saw the movement up there, Hardesty still over-confident. There was the smear of the man’s shadow at first and then the dull colour of a sweaty checked shirt, the glint of the rifle barrel.

  Blaine’s Winchester snapped to his shoulder and blazed two fast shots. There was a startled scream, the clatter of a falling weapon as it tumbled down into the rocks below. Hardesty had fallen back, or been blown back out of the gap. There was no answering shot from Rendell: maybe he was too badly hurt to put up much of a fight.

  Whatever the reason, it was all over now.

  Blaine jumped up, ran left, then zigzagged in close under the high boulders where anyone above would have to half-stand and crane outwards, exposing their upper body, to see a man below. Swivelling his head for handholds, Blaine climbed swiftly, fell twice but with minimum noise. There was one shot from above but he heard the bullet ricochet from his previous hiding place: they hadn’t seen him leave it and start moving up towards them. Might only be Rendell alive by now. He wasn’t sure where he had shot Hardesty.

  But he soon found out, when he hauled himself up and over a rock that looked like a decapitated boiled egg, found footing on the broken, slightly tilted surface, and swung his rifle around to cover the two men sprawled amongst the rocks below.

  Rendell had been hit in the thigh, it seemed, one leg held stiff and straight, bloody rags roughly tied over the wound. Clem Hardesty was lying in a half-sitting position, blood pouring from a bullet gouge across his face, and more blood pumping out of a chest wound.

  Both men raised pain-filled and now fear-glazed eyes as Blaine cocked his rifle.

  ‘Time to pay the fiddler, boys.’

  The Winchester blasted and Rendell jarred and screamed as a bullet smashed his good knee and left him huddled and whimpering against his rock.

  The Winchester crashed again and Hardesty jerked and cried out as a bullet shattered his right hip.

  Blaine climbed down carefully and stood over the sobbing, bloody men. He set his rifle on a rock at his head level, picked up the men’s guns and tossed them away to clatter amongst the boulders.

  Then he squatted between the two wounded, terrified killers, looking from one to the other as he drew his hunting blade from its fringed sheath.

  ‘Who’s first?’ he asked grimly.

  CHAPTER 7

  IN OLD MONTERREY

  Morgan O’Day stepped out on to the porch, watching the scene down by the corrals. He sucked on a new cherrywood pipe and would be glad when the bowl had burned-in to his satisfaction.

  Through the cloud of aromatic smoke he puffed, he saw Alamo talking animatedly with Lucas who had happened to be down at the corrals, tallying the remuda so the wrangler could decide which mounts would go with the trail herd.

  Morgan had noticed from his office that Lucas seemed agitated and he had known Alamo long enough to recognize rising anger in the trail boss by the set of his body.
O’Day spat and called for Lucas and Alamo to come up to the porch.

  ‘Trouble?’ he asked as Alamo Ames stomped into the shade followed more slowly by Lucas, who looked deep in thought, carrying his ever-present notepads. ‘Some high-riders busted the mavericks last night, stampeded ’em through the camp – Blaine’s gone after ’em so I need a couple men to help me roundup the steers.’

  ‘Blaine oughta had more sense,’ Lucas snapped, quick to put another black mark against the breed.

  Alamo said quietly, ‘It was Hardesty and Rendell.’

  ‘Now there’s a pair,’ allowed Morgan, his face tight. ‘You shoulda stopped Blaine – I oughta send someone after him.’ It was just talk and he knew the others knew it: Blaine would do as he pleased, specially with a sighting of the men who had almost killed him. ‘But we’ve just had word that the meat-packing houses won’t send their agents down to our railhead from now on.’

  Lucas snapped his head up. ‘Damn! I knew it!They were hinting at it last time, sayin’ it was too far to come, just for our longhorns. They don’t think much of ’em.’

  ‘Longhorn beef’s good enough for the Army,’ bristled Morgan. ‘But, it’s the distance and our railhead only bein’ on a spur-track: facilities are pretty rough. The new railhead at San Antone’s opened, links directly with the big tracks to the Gulf Coast. They’ll meet us there from now on.’

  ‘They want us to drive to San Antone!’ asked Lucas, outraged. ‘Hell’s teeth, that’s gonna cost a pretty penny….’

  ‘Which will be reflected in our asking price.’

  ‘Sure – but will they pay our price?’

  ‘Reckon so – we’ll take bigger herds, drive just once a year. It’ll work out in the end.’

  Alamo shrugged. ‘Ten thousand or thirty thousand won’t make no difference to me long as I have enough men.’