by Rusty Davis
“I did not send Gordon Crowley to tell you to do any such thing. The man will be fired the next time he sets foot on Double J land!” Jones looked at Carrick. The big man seemed overly large in the confines of the store, which was packed with goods. “Buy what you will, Carrick. Put it on my bill, Godfrey!” He then turned to his wife. “I must see Easy Thompson. These cowhands are getting out of hand.” The door slammed behind him.
“You still have your ability to make people angry merely by walking into a room,” Lucinda Jones chuckled, shaking her head at him as one would at a naughty child that had done something both bad and amusing. Her posture relaxed after her husband stomped his way out. “The rest of us all grew up. You don’t act any differently than ever. You didn’t have to say that to Jackson. You like making trouble!” She moved closer. Godfrey fled to some back room where, Carrick guessed, he could hear but not be seen to eavesdrop on Jones’s wife. Her eyes studied Carrick from bedraggled head to toe. “What did keep you so long? Didn’t you know what happened back here? With your family? Or were you so occupied back East that you didn’t care about us?”
Lucinda Callahan had, through the odd chance of being born with a beautiful face in a world of common ones, been accorded special status all her life. Between the influence of her parents, who knew that marriageable girls were few in the rugged wilds of the West, and her own keenly developed sense of her own worth that manifested itself in a flirtatious manner with every male she met, she managed to have about all the boys after her at some point or other while she kept enough distance that she could preserve her options for the best chance. Carrick, who was neither physically impressive, rich, nor temperamentally suited to play the games girls played with suitors, had mostly watched from a distance in his final months at home after the brief spell of affection he was sure he had felt for her had run its course like a fever he had been happy to shake.
World-wise and world-weary, he could sense the act in her now. He thought of how much more enjoyable it was to have Rebecca Lewis point a gun at him than hear the phony talk of a woman who had grown up to be every bit as beautiful as her childhood promised, but without real warmth animating her features. He wondered what, beyond beauty, Jones saw in her.
“Life goes sideways on us sometimes, Luce. I better go. I’m sure old Godfrey there won’t want interruptions while waitin’ on his best customer. I’ll come back later and grab what I needed.”
“I heard about your visit the other day, Rory. You should really get to know Jackson. He is a great man who will make this range something better than anyone ever dreamed possible. I am sure he could give you a job. You were a carpenter for your old ranch, weren’t you? You made the coffins around here, as I recall. You used to carve things, too. The ranch could use someone else who has some skills. Most of the cowboys can only handle guns. I can speak to Jackson for you if you want to. Maybe once we take over that old place you lived in, you could live there again without those annoying Lewis women.”
“No thanks, Luce. I like it where I am. Haven’t been a carpenter in years. And I wouldn’t make too many plans for the old Bar C house. Don’t rightly think anyone else ’ceptin’ Reb Lewis and her aunt are gonna live there for a long, long time to come. I’ll see you some other time, Luce.”
“Good day, Rory.” She moved her hand out an inch or two in front of her at waist level. If she was a man, Carrick knew he’d be expected to shake it. Maybe she moved it so he could kiss it? Hang it all! He stuck his hat back on and fled, the sound of the bell over the door laughing at his discomfort.
He had been silently cursing every fool decision he had made that brought him back to Wyoming as he walked down the streets of Lincoln Springs. He all but ran over a man in an Eastern suit who was stepping down from the wooden duck-boards outside the hotel.
The man roughly shoved Carrick away. Two men materialized behind the man in the suit to back his play.
“No offense, gents,” said Carrick, knowing the last thing he needed was a fight on this trip to town. “Range business makes a man powerful puzzled.”
“Watch where you walk the next time, cowhand,” said the man in the suit. Carrick tried to place what kind of man he could be. Some kind of tough; big burly men with weatherworn faces and rough hands didn’t look like businessmen when they put on a silly suit. He was trying to think who the man could be as he walked—a little more carefully—down the street. One sign made him stop: ROY DANIELS SADDLES. There could not be two of them.
“Howdy, Roy.”
The old man looked him over. Roy Daniels had once been as straight as a pine. Now he was bent. His white hair was ragged, and his face had sagged into the despair of age. Carrick recalled that Daniels had never had children. He did not seem impressed with Carrick, giving him a glance before turning back to the piece of leather in his hands. “I am too old for games,” he replied. “Names are a nuisance to me. Tell me yours and we can get on with our business. If you are new to Double J, you need to tell Easy what you want and he will let you know if I can do it and when.”
“Rory Carrick.”
If Carrick had hoped for a smile, he was disappointed. A grimace of distaste flashed across the old man’s face. “I thought you were dead. Your family died. The Royal Family.” This last was said with heavy sarcasm.
“Roy, as I recall you were friends with my family.”
“Your family had a big ranch, Carrick. You were customers, nothing more. Your uncle, Joshua, he thought he was important. Thought the range revolved around him. You were nothing more than a stupid kid. What would you know? You were the one who was always on the range or out with that crazy uncle of yours or your wild friends. You and that Ramsay boy once stole my horse and left him tied to a tree. You were twelve. I remember that and that half-breed friend of yours. I suppose you two had something in common, didn’t you?” Daniels sneered. “Bar C is long gone and we’re doing fine without it. At least we were until you came back to stir up trouble. Oh, I have heard all about you. I suppose you started this war to get your land back? Too late. Jackson Jones will be taking over that range soon, or that jackal Oliver.”
“Didn’t start a war, Roy. Tried to stop somebody from pushing too far. Not lettin’ the Lewis ladies get stampeded out of their home.”
“Noble talk from a Carrick, but you are like them all. You can’t fool me. You want to own what your family used to own. I don’t know how that woman sharped your uncle out of the land when he died but more power to her. Joshua Carrick never talked as big and wide as Jackson Jones, but he knew how to throw his weight around. Now, are you here to discuss the past or buy a saddle? I won’t be making too many more of them so if you want one made, better ask now. If you do, I want the cash up front. The way you’re going, you’re likely to get shot before you need a new one.”
Carrick said a curt good-bye and left. More questions! He’d never considered whether, in its day, Bar C had pushed people the way Double J pushed now. Was this the law of the range—that one outfit grew big at the expense of all the rest, and then died away to be followed by another and then another, each pushing everyone else aside like a bully in a saloon? Nobody ever said anything, but why would they tell him anyhow? He recalled the way his uncle had whatever connections it took to get him into the 1st Nebraska at a time when every boy and man was scrambling to get in and become a hero. Maybe there was truth in there. Or maybe Roy Daniels was a bitter old man. He was so lost in trying to look at the past with the eyes of the present he almost knocked over the sheriff.
Dan Hill did not look glad to see him. Then again, the last time he ran into Hill he had killed two men. Lawmen didn’t like that sort of thing. It always seemed a town that had one or two men killed ended up being one that had more men killed on a regular basis as the would-be gunslingers came to show how fast they were. Carrick wasn’t that fast; just fast enough.
“Carrick.” They exchanged hat tips. “Staying long?”
“Nope. Got to get some new clothes. Women
think I look like a tramp.”
“Women notice things like that, Carrick. Won’t say that I disagree. Go on. Don’t want you here any longer than necessary. Don’t want some Double J cowboy thinking they have to kill you to even the score.”
“Can’t do much right now in the way of shopping, Sheriff, not meaning to be contrary.”
Hill inhaled and shook his head. “Carrick, you were born to be contrary. Why in the name of common sense can’t you simply walk over to Godfrey’s and buy a pair of trousers and a shirt and whatever else you need and then get out of my town before anyone knows you were here? Do I need to escort you there?”
“Lucinda Jones is in there now, Sheriff.”
Even Hill’s dour visage could not restrain a smile. “I can see where that might make two customers a crowd in that place, Carrick. I suppose you might have a point there. I bet old Godfrey is more than occupied and is like to be that way a while. Maybe you might want to see Chuck at the barber shop. Sure them women won’t mind if you don’t look like a mountain man and you can even get a bath, if you care for that kind of thing.”
Carrick was loath to end a rare moment of camaraderie with anyone. There had been few of them. But he touched the hair hanging down and rubbed his hand through the beard that was last shaved in the spring some time. He figured the sheriff was right. Mostly. “Never understood, Sheriff.”
“Understood what?”
“When you’re a kid, there’s always a woman tellin’ you to come in out of the rain and stay dry. You get to be a man, you always got to get all soaking wet for ’em. Fine mystery if you ask me.”
Hill was smiling again. “You find the answer, Carrick, you share it. Now maybe I’ll go sit outside Chuck’s shop in case any Double J boys want to make themselves pretty. Chuck hates blood in his bath water.”
With Dan Hill trailing, Carrick walked off to the barber, chuckling.
Carrick’s welcome at the Lewis ranch consisted of Jessie Lewis proclaiming that she no longer felt like she was harboring a fugitive, once she was assured there were no gunfights or other hostilities. Reb looked more than she spoke. He felt odd to have her study him that way, not realizing the complete nature of the transformation that came from shaving off his beard and cutting several inches of hair. He mentioned Lucinda Jones. Whatever Reb growled made her Aunt Jess smile impishly before telling the girl to mind her manners.
She was less than pleased about Jones ordering the purchases to be on his bill, despite Reb’s claim that the man owed them at least that.
“I’m not taking charity,” Jess grumbled.
“You aren’t, auntie,” Reb replied. “Carrick is. Let him worry about it. We have enough to worry over.”
Jess let it go. For the moment. “Mr. Carrick, I hope you found something against the rain, because from the looks of the sky, we’re going to have a good one.” Carrick recalled the storms of his childhood; Eastern weather seemed mild in comparison, pale and tame. Instead of the sensible reaction, he found himself looking forward to seeing the thick black clouds swoop down on the hills, bands of rain obliterate the landscape from time to time, and when it was done and the world was mud where there had been dirt, it would paradoxically be the cleanest air a man could breathe aside from the day after a blizzard.
Morning brought the east wind that presaged a storm, and low dark clouds that were soon obscuring the distant mountains. Carrick rode to the southern pasture to be with Randy; cattle were always worse in storms than horses. Spook one, spook them all. “I am not having what may be my last decent herd run off to be breakfast for somebody else,” Jessie gritted. She and Reb would ride the northern slice of their lands to be sure that their horses didn’t range so far they never came back.
It was a day without daybreak; the night’s black simply changed to a deep gray as the storm’s heavy clouds of looming destruction grew thicker and lower in a sky that grew heavy with tension. On the ground, everything from rabbits to wolves moved into places of relative safety, for survival told them to do so. Birds nestled near the trunks of thick trees, and the omnipresent hawks left the skies for some less dangerous perch.
Randy and Carrick had the last of the coffee; strong enough to last until whenever there would be time for a next meal.
Carrick asked Randy a question that was nagging at the back of his mind.
“No,” Randy answered at last. “Bar C was a huge outfit for its day, especially on paper, but your uncle never had the iron in him that Jones does. He would get angry over people squatting on the range and ride out to threaten them, but by the time he was through he would hire them for his crew or let them stay a season before moving on. He liked to be important, of course. We all do. But he was a good man, Carrick. Daniels is one of those sour men who always wish men who succeed would stumble and fall so they are down at his level. I am sure there were things that happened when we were kids that we never fully understood, but as a half-breed kid who was almost a part of the family, I can’t say anything bad about him.”
Carrick still wondered. Randy was a friend. Friends tell you what you want to hear, he thought. Maybe they also tell you what you ought to believe.
His thoughts were broken by the shattering crack of an oak’s limb tumbling down a few feet from where they stood. There would be time for thinking later. Now, as the storm lowered its fury on the Wyoming landscape, it was time to survive.
For a moment, Carrick thought he was back on the battlefield. Ball lightning struck the ground, leaving the smell of sulfur behind. Beast whinnied and shied as the eruptions sent dirt flying ten feet in the air and scattered sparks around. The cattle milled about. There were only about forty of them, but with only he and Randy to control them, any stampede could get beyond control in a second.
A shot of lightning like the blast of a canister erupted in front of him. One steer plowed into another, and the milling mass moved faster and faster, the outside animals swirling around those in the center. Then a bolt struck a dead tree, toppling sparking pieces of wood everywhere and sending the maddened herd into a frenzy.
They had each taken one side. Now, as the rain swept down and pounded on the cattle, he could not see Randy at all. The cattle were moving too fast. He needed to find his friend.
Randy had been shrilly yipping at the cattle to keep them in some type of compact group as long as he could. Sooner or later the storm would spook them, but the longer he held out, the less likely he would be to lose a steer. The shower of sparks was his undoing. As he turned to look, his hold on the reins loosened, his horse turned with him, and he was now facing against the tide of steers. He jerked the horse’s head to the left, but the animal, now as frightened as the steers, bucked unexpectedly. Randy was barely hanging on. The dilemma was clear: hang on the horse and hope they moved out of the way, or let go and take his chances with the steers.
He leaped. The horse galloped off behind a curtain of rain and into a flash of lightning that hurt Randy’s eyes when he tried to follow which way the frightened animal had run. No time to look more. There were fifteen yards between him and nearest steer. A tree was ten feet away; if he could make it he could take shelter behind it or try to climb.
The steer was moving faster than he was. The animal was going to run straight over him in an instant.
Gunfire echoed in his ears. The charging animal staggered. A hand grabbed Randy by his shoulder and hauled him up into the air.
“Hang on!” It was a command Carrick did not need to give. Randy grabbed his friend’s jacket and hung on, swinging a leg over the saddle until he was riding double on the saddle behind Carrick.
Randy felt the horse jerk to a halt. They were near the rail fence. “Get up a tree; get behind the fence,” Carrick yelled. “Beast can’t carry us both for what I got to do!” Randy, with Carrick’s rifle, jumped down and Carrick took off into the driving rain. The downpour screened his friend from view as Randy waited, the sounds of lightning crackling, thunder booming, and panicked steers sounding to
him what he imagined would be the chaos of Judgment Day.
There they were! Coming toward him. They’d lost one steer today. The women could not afford to lose more. He fired the rifle into the air several times. The animals turned away from the sharp reports and stampeded back the way they had come. For a moment, Randy breathed in relief. Then a new wave of driving rain assaulted the plains. The sounds of panicked animals began to crescendo again. But the storm was losing its punch. The rain fell, but not as hard. Flashes lit the sky, but forks of yellow no longer split the blackness. He could hear the world around him over the sounds of the thunder. The herd, winded from its panic, was tiring. They came to the barrier of the fence, and all but pushed against it, then moved along, some running but some—at last—walking.
Carrick, riding on the outside edge of the herd, sent them in endless circles around the pasture land. He waved his hat to Randy as he rode by. They were both grinning like fools. It wasn’t over, not yet, but the worst of the storm had tested them, and they had survived.
Jackson Jones was always up before dawn; today, the energy in the air brought him outdoors long before the black night could give way to the deep gray of day. He could feel the size of the storm in the air. The power of Wyoming’s storms fascinated him while also prompting him to be vigilant. One storm could send livestock all over. He knew any Double J stock that drifted to Lazy F range would never be seen on his ranch again. Bar C was less of a threat, but with Carrick around, anything was possible.
The cattle he raised were off to the north end of the valley, hemmed in from running too wild because of the topography of the land. Wooded broken sections would funnel any stampede back down the valley. The horses grazed out in the wider flat lands. They might spook. Those horses could not be lost. In addition to selling horses good enough for cavalry mounts, he was now raising blood stock that would be sold at auction to men like him—men who only wanted the best in everything because they worked for it and deserved it. Those prize horses were not going to end up in the wild lands to the west.