Revenge Riders

by Alex Frew

  He expected only one of his men to be there, perhaps, since that was the usual way, but all three of them were there when he arrived: Alonzo Clay, Frank Flynn, and Logan Holt.

  They were dressed pretty much alike in the blue canvas jeans that had become so popular lately, with waistcoats under their jackets. All three of them were sitting with their hats on, with various bits and pieces of equipment at their sides as they sat around an open fire in front of the bunkhouse, drinking steaming mugs of coffee.

  ‘Hi, boss,’ said Frank in his easy manner as Hawk appeared. ‘Having a long lie in today?’ He was being humorous, of course – no man worked longer hours in the business than his boss.

  ‘My wife, my Mary, just died,’ said Hawk. Six simple words, but they were enough.

  The three men in front of him got to their feet and fell over themselves saying how sorry they were. They had all been expecting this news for some time, but even an expected death, when it happens, can cause surprise due to the circumstances. ‘Finish your coffee,’ said Hawk, ‘and help me bury her.’

  With the four working together the actual burial did not take that long. There was a spot at the back of the ranch that had long been reserved as a burial site. A lone yew tree with spreading branches and a gnarled trunk was the custodian of the area, which was surrounded by a low stone wall that Hawk’s father had constructed with his own hands. There was room in the graveyard for more than twenty burials. His father was in there with a simple headstone to mark his grave. His mother’s stone was there too, by the side of the first one, for she had died of a broken heart a year after the passing of her husband.

  The three men set to work digging with a will while Hawk, with that quiet efficiency for which he was famous, wrapped his wife in her best linen sheets, giving her one final kiss and embrace before sewing her into the cloth.

  He carried her down to the newly dug grave with the help of Clay, who was a big, solid man easily capable of carrying double that weight on his own. He was aware of a spreading numbness in his body that seemed to start at the top of his head and go down to his feet. He felt as if it were someone else who put his wife into her last resting place along with the rest of the men. He picked up one of the shovels, but Clay gently took him by the shoulders and sat him on the wall, then the three cowboys took up their shovels and buried the woman they had known since they were boys.

  Once they were finished, as if he had been rehearsing for days, Hawk came forward and said the words from scripture that they all knew, beginning with the words ‘ashes to ashes’. It was not the first time that they had been close to death in the course of their work, and every one of them had a copy of the Bible in their quarters. They had all – even Hawk who had had much of the knowledge of his ancestors passed down to him – been taught scripture in their early years.

  The men stood there with their heads bowed while Hawk said his final prayers to his wife. He ended with a short chant from his Blackfoot ancestors. As he did so the sky darkened and the rain began to fall steadily on his barely protected shoulders. He suddenly seemed thinner than before and much older than his years.

  ‘Where’s Rye?’ asked Holt. ‘He oughter know.’ Hawk turned and walked from the family graveyard with his men. His lips twisted as he looked at his employee and friend.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he said.

  Chapter Three

  Consciousness was not the result of a sudden wakening. He was dimly aware that he was slung across the back of a horse like a sack of potatoes. The knot inside his stomach that was there from the effects of the chloroform was nothing compared to the way his head felt. Fuzzy was a good description of the sensation in his brain. Each time he gathered his thoughts there would be a bump on the uneven ground that transmitted through the body of his equine transport and jolted away the gathering ideas. His mouth was dry and he could feel a lust arising in him for a drink of water. His hair was long, as black as his father’s, and was hanging down in front of his face. Gradually he realized that his legs and arms were tied, the knots chafing against his wrists as he bumped over the ground. At this rate the skin would be red raw.

  ‘Hey, looks like he’s waking,’ said a familiar voice. The horses were halted. Ryan, the man trussed up like tomorrow’s turkey dinner, was even more dimly aware that he was in woodlands, and that rain was hitting the leaves of the oaks and pines, some splashing down on his already soaking back. There was a crunch of snapping branches as a heavy man walked across from his own steed, grabbed Ryan by the hair of his head and looked directly into his face. ‘You with us, then?’ The speaker had sickly sweet breath laced with coffee and some variety of rotgut whisky. With a shock Ryan recognized Yancey Barnes, the simpleton who many employed and even more scorned.

  ‘You with us, boy? Well, that’s good news for us; be much quicker now. I am going to untie you. Don’t you try nothing stupid.’

  Ryan said nothing. He did not even have enough reactive force in him to hate the man. ‘Let me go,’ he croaked, ‘this is mad.’

  ‘That is as it might be,’ said Yancey, hooking Ryan off the saddle efficiently and flinging him to the thorny ground, straddling him like a bear and untying the ropes. He thrust out a hand, which seemed to have been modelled on the animal he so resembled, and grabbed Ryan, who was not a small man, by the back of his shirt and lifted him to his feet. He held on as Ryan’s legs buckled, preventing him from falling back down.

  He was facing three individuals now, all of whom had dismounted from their own steeds and were staring at him as if he were an exhibit in a freak show. Expecting bandits, his eyes widened in shock as he looked on them, two men and a woman. One of the men, with a cheek full of chewing tobacco, expectorated a brown stream of liquid at Ryan’s feet, the other two grinning as the young man pulled back against Yancey’s grip.

  ‘Welcome to your nightmare, cousin,’ said his kidnapper.

  ‘I need to find him,’ said Hawk. ‘I’ll set out in less than an hour.’ He looked at his men almost defiantly. They had the grace to look back at him and reflect the truth through Frank Flynn.

  ‘Boss, you ain’t going nowhere. Look at the state of you; your eyes have bags under them you could pack a wadrobe fulla clothes in, and you’re exhausted. You’re in a perfect state to be killed by whatever bastards have taken your boy.’

  ‘I’ll get him back,’ said Hawk briefly.

  ‘Look, get some sleep, as much as you can. Rest for a few hours and we’ll go into the village and get a posse together. We’ll do that right away, and we’ll look for them miscreants that took your boy.’

  ‘I’ll take no rest. There won’t be any rest for me while my boy’s out there.’ Without another word, Hawk returned to the ranch and began to pack the essentials he would need for the trip. Clay, Flynn and Holt had remained down by the bunkhouse for the moment but he was aware that they were discussing the matter deeply with each other. Hawk was essentially a man of peace, but he brought with him his two Colt pistols along with plenty of bullets, and a Winchester ’73, one of the most popular rifles that had ever been produced in the States: an essential for any expedition. He had killed wolves, bears and cougars in his time, but now it was time to hunt the worst enemy of all: man. As he emerged at the stables wearing his long woollen coat, he tucked the pistols into either side. His deep pockets were the right place for them to go: he didn’t have a gun belt and holsters like some fancy sheriff, and pockets were good enough for him.

  He led out his deep chestnut gelding, whose name was Swift, denoting the fact that he could eat up the miles with his sturdy legs without seeming to lose any stamina. Hawk saddled up with an ease borne of long practice and slid his Winchester into a sheath on his saddle, a statement of intent.

  His three men saddled up too, their horses already waiting for them down by the bunkhouse.

  ‘We’ll do what you say,’ said Hawk. ‘We’ll go into the village and see if we can get some more help. The wider the spread the more chance of catching the one
s who did this.’ He said nothing else but trotted off on his horse so quickly that the rest had difficulty keeping up with him. Hawk had not mentioned to them that he had a little secret concealed in one of his saddle bags: over two thousand dollars in paper and coin that he used for running the ranch and for his savings. He had more money in the bank but this would do to start with. Money meant very little to him right now; it was just a tool to be used, and the use for it was to get his boy back.

  The ranch was situated just over two miles from the village, not a great distance considering the size of the area. As they came over the hill, beside the river, it became clear at once that there was something wrong. Normally Main Street would have been bustling with people: the village was used for supplies for all the ranches, the hardware store and the livery were always busy, and the saloon was as well, popular as it was with the cowboys who worked in the outlying ranches who were never shy of slaking their thirst within its walls.

  Not that the saloon had any walls to speak of: it was a burned-out shell and it stood there as a stark reminder of how quickly destruction could come to a town. Knots of travellers stood here and there in surprised conversation, and the arrival of the new riders spurred the drawing of various weapons, put away when it was seen that they had a different intent.

  ‘What the hell happened here, Joe?’ asked Hawk, speaking to one of his fellow ranchers, a big, normally taciturn man called Lamington, who seemed as stunned as the rest.

  ‘We don’t rightly know, Hawk,’ said Lamington. For some reason he and his fellow ranchers normally called Hawk by his second name, but it was more a reflection of the quality of the word rather than some deliberate insult. ‘But they’re mostly gone.’

  ‘Gone?’

  ‘The villagers, all of ’em, ’cept for a few bedridden and young ’uns, all gone.’

  Holt and Flynn looked at their leader: they were thinking the same thing. Clay wasn’t there; he was poking about the ruins of the saloon, being a natural raker. He was being given the news by men who were carrying out a similar act.

  ‘Look at this,’ said Clay, returning with a faint air of triumph. He slid up his sleeve to show it was concealing an intact bottle of Scotch whisky. ‘Somethin’ from the wreckage,’ he said.

  ‘Where were they taken?’ asked Hawk with a trace of harshness in his voice.

  ‘That is the question.’ Lamington scratched his head. ‘Guess they was led away real fast by whoever did this. Could’ve been Indians,’ he squinted a little at Hawk as he said this.

  ‘No,’ said Hawk, ‘if it were the Cherokee they would have simply killed where they were. They don’t take prisoners.’ No one questioned this opinion.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ asked Clay. ‘It’s pretty hopeless, ain’t it?’

  Hawk did not answer him, but walked down the street and looked at the ground with some care. It did not escape him that the body of the trading post keeper, Linton Stack, was lying in between two of the buildings with multiple bullet wounds in his once sturdy frame. He came back to his men. ‘It’s easy enough to see. They went up into the hills through the woodlands at the edge of town; that in itself is not hard to see.’

  ‘How many?’ asked Holt, with an expression of eagerness; he really wanted to know.

  ‘A great many of them,’ said Hawk in a voice that did not seem to take in the magnitude of what he was saying. ‘Thirty or forty at least, maybe more.’ His expression was haunted as he looked at Clay, Holt and Flynn. ‘The numbers don’t matter, and I’m going after what is mine.’

  Chapter Four

  Ryan did not recognize the young woman. She had hair that seemed to be fair, but it was hard to tell because she did not look as if she had washed in a long time. The two men with her were not much older than Ryan, and he knew them both. One was Scott McArthur, his older cousin, and the other was Mack Jardine, a friend of his cousin whom he had known when they had played together as children. They were moving along together through the green woodlands, and he could hear the roaring of the river nearby, which made him wonder why they were heading for the water. The horses were being led by the two men, but the young woman was walking, and so was Yancey. Ryan, despite the fuzziness in his head, was able to keep up with them, powered by the strength of his young body.

  The reason why they were heading for the river was soon made clear. The Brazos was not one of those waters usually clear of obstructions, and the village had not been called Hatton Falls for nothing. Upstream, away from the weir that had given the village its name, the river widened out and rushed around an island right in the middle of the water.

  At the banks of the river was a rowing boat with two sets of wooden oars, a craft that was big enough for all five of them. McArthur pointed a pistol at Ryan. The weapon looked as if it was a large calibre revolver, old but deadly enough for his purpose.

  ‘You and the big man, you’re rowing,’ he said, ‘now push it out.’ Ryan started to obey, noticing that the rowing boat was anchored to the bank by a rope attached to a post. This was an opportunity for him to escape; one of his abilities was being able to swim like a seal, darting through the water. But his head was throbbing and he still felt faintly dizzy, which meant that there was a distinct possibility that he might be swept away by the power of the weir, which was not that far away, and swept to his death on the rocks below. The other young men climbed aboard, and for a moment it looked as if the girl was going to refuse, but Scott gave her a severe look and she bowed her head and climbed aboard. Once Yancey had followed – and he too had a touch of uneasiness in his manner – Ryan took up a pair of the oars and sat at the stern of the boat while Yancey took the other set of oars, released the rope and began to row with a vigour that showed the strength of his mighty body.

  Ryan knew that he had to pull too; the weight of the passengers and the force of the river mean that they would soon be pulled into the current if they did not fight the force of the swirling waters around them. He could feel the spray hit his lips as they rowed, but their efforts finally bore some fruit and they were at the island.

  From the shore their destination had looked like a vague green and brown shape in the middle of the river, but now they could see that it was much larger than it had seemed on first sight. The river was not just long; it was wide, so that they were already more than 500 feet from the banks and woodlands. The boat pulled up on the shore of the island. Scott jumped out with an eagerness that was perhaps prompted by his lack of enthusiasm for the river than the need for overseeing his prisoner. He jerked his gun at Ryan.

  ‘You,’ he said, ‘get this pulled up. Help him, Yancey.’ Together the two men pulled the boat inwards on the sandbar that made up this side of the island so that it was in no danger of drifting off. The girl was between the two men. She was slim and silent and had drifted out of the boat like a ghost.

  ‘Go forward,’ ordered Scott. ‘Gee, if it wasn’t so much trouble you’d be a dead man by now, Rye boy.’

  They were all on the island now. It was surprisingly large, much larger than it had seemed from the shore and sparked a flash of recognition in Ryan.

  ‘This is Shrine Island,’ he said. ‘It’s where the Cherokee come to worship their gods. This ain’t a safe place for any of us.’

  ‘For you, you mean, cousin,’ said Scott. ‘Come on, move.’ He brandished his pistol as he said this and there was a gleam in his eyes that said he was not about to listen to any kind of reason.

  To his surprise, Ryan discovered that there was a lean-to in the middle of the island, a type of shack that had been constructed hastily from clapboard and roofed with local materials. These were easily found; the silt and dirt that washed down the river was rich in minerals, and the island was covered in lush vegetation with large trees that went almost down to the shore. The interior was rich, green and steamy. Scott gestured to them again and they went inside the interior of the building. It was dank inside with little in the way of furnishings.

  ‘Thi
s is where you’ll wait,’ he said. ‘You can yell for help all you want, ain’t no one going to hear you. Turn around.’

  Ryan, who had been thinking about escape, did as he was told, and turned around only to have his wrists bound together. He was pushed down into a corner and, still dizzy from the chloroform, he fell heavily to the ground. He twisted around where he lay and glared up at his captives.

  ‘You won’t get away with this, Scott, or you, Mack. Yancey, they’re just using you.’

  ‘Can it,’ snapped Scott and booted his cousin in the ribs, making Ryan groan in pain. ‘Been wanting to do that for a long time, cousin. Come on, boys.’ He started to march out, with the girl following in a lacklustre way.

  ‘Taking her too?’ asked Mack.

  ‘ ’Course not,’ snapped Scott. He grabbed hold of the girl and stared into her face. ‘You stay here. Don’t set him free or you’ll get more of the same.’ Mack snickered at this.

  ‘Maybe he’ll give her more of the same.’

  ‘Don’t matter, she can’t come with us.’ He pushed the girl and she fell away from him and backed against one of the mouldy walls. She sank slowly to the ground, on the opposite side of Ryan, and stared blankly ahead. McArthur gave one final, derisive laugh and left with his two companions. Straining his ears, Ryan thought he heard a faint noise as the boat was launched, then he heard the splashing of oars in the water. Their captors were gone.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked the girl. She did not respond and he looked at her from his low position. ‘Can you help me get free?’ Still nothing: for all she was responding he might as well have been invisible. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked again, and this time she pulled away from him as much as she could, into the furthest corner and sat there with her legs drawn tightly together, rocking back and forth.

  Hawk was not the kind of man who could lay bare his thoughts. Like many of the Sioux from whom he was descended he saw his way of being that of a man, and men did not think too much about what they were doing and why: they simply took action.