Hell's Jaw Pass

by Max O'Hara

  He’d no sooner spat the “now” from his lips than the moan came again, growing louder.

  Thump-PEWWW!!! went the bullet hammering into the ground behind Wolf but not before warming and curling the air the breadth of a cat’s whisker off his right ear.

  “Close one!” Wolf leaped off the creek’s low bank and into the water. “That’s all right,” he mused, breathless. “Save the barber from having to cut the hair out of that ear next time I go in for a trim!”

  He ran hard, throwing his rifle and left arm out for balance, negotiating the slippery rocks polished by the shallow stream. He counted to five then stopped suddenly and ducked.

  The bullet didn’t come.

  “Damn!”

  Wolf took off running again. The water was maybe six to eight inches deep through this broad stretch of stream. It splashed up around his hips as he ran.

  Glancing to his left, he saw smoke puff above the barrel of the rifle on the ridge. He swerved sharply and ducked. As he did, his left boot slipped on a rock and he fell forward, dropping his left hand to the bed of the stream, catching himself.

  Again, he was lucky. The shooter must have anticipated Stockburn’s sudden swerve and duck, because the bullet sang through the air only inches above Wolf’s head—where his head would have been had he not slipped on the rock and fallen forward.

  “The fella means business!” Wolf heaved himself to his feet and continued running.

  He reached the stream’s far side just as another bullet caromed toward him and kissed the nap of his coat collar on the left side of his neck.

  He ran.

  One more stride. Two more strides . . .

  Another bullet moaned.

  Stockburn’s third stride carried him into the forest beyond the stream.

  The bullet thudded sharply into a tree just as Wolf ran past it and into the forest. Bits of bark and slivers of wood rained through the air around him, pattering onto the spongy forest floor. He dropped to his hands and knees, drawing air in and out of his lungs, trying to catch his breath.

  “I smoke too damn much, me thinks.”

  More bullets caromed toward him, thumping into trees. The trees offered good cover. Glancing around an aspen, he could see the ridge from which the shooter was continuing to fire at him even though he was no longer a good target.

  The man was madder than an old wet hen. He was firing out of frustration. He should have cored his target before Wolf had made it to the stream, but he hadn’t.

  “Not as good as you think you are, you fork-tailed devil!”

  Stockburn rose and trotted forward. His wet boots squawked on the soft ground, crunching fallen leaves. His wet pants hung on him. They were cold, but he was too hot from the fury and the hard run to be chilled.

  Trotting, meandering around trees and leaping over blowdowns, he quartered to his left, approaching the base of the ridge. He came to where the forest ended, and dropped down behind an uprooted cottonwood, the giant ball of roots and dirt mounding up to his right.

  He stayed low but inched a look over the top of the cottonwood, casting his gaze up the ridge.

  The nest of rocks was fifty feet up from the base of the ridge. He could see the barrel of the big rifle resting on a rock. He could also see the crown of the shooter’s black hat. The man was cheeked up against the rifle’s rear stock, probably aiming through a sliding rear sight ladder.

  The son of a bitch was aiming into the trees on Wolf’s left.

  Looking for his quarry.

  Stockburn stretched his mustached upper lip back from his upper teeth in a cold grin and said under his breath, “You’re my prey now, you black-hearted coward!”

  He raised the Yellowboy, rested the barrel on the top of the cottonwood’s trunk. He lined up the sights a little above the barrel of the bushwhacker’s rifle and squeezed the trigger.

  Smoke, flames, and lead lapped from the barrel.

  Stockburn blinked against the wafting powder smoke as he stared up toward his target. The man’s hat disappeared. The rifle barrel rose sharply then it, too, disappeared in the rocks as the man either dropped it or pulled it back into his nest.

  Wolf ejected the spent cartridge and pumped a fresh one into the action.

  He waited, staring up at the shooter’s nest of rocks. Nothing moved for nearly a minute, then the man appeared. He was no more than a shadow from this distance and against the gray rock behind him. The shadow moved to the right side of the stone nest.

  Stockburn triggered three quick rounds toward the man, who disappeared right after the second shot had blasted rock dust out of the ridge above the nest. The man had jerked down and to the right, and then he was gone.

  Wolf pumped a fresh round into the Yellowboy’s breech. He spied movement against the ridge, above the nest. He couldn’t see much because the shooter was partially hidden from his view. There must have been a perpendicular niche in the ridge. The shooter had stepped back into that niche and was climbing toward the top.

  “You bastard,” Wolf muttered, and hurled several more rounds at the man.

  It was his own turn to fire in frustration. He did so until the hammer dropped with an annoyingly benign ping, the last round having been spent.

  He stared at the ridge. He couldn’t tell if he’d hit his target. The man was gone.

  Wolf cursed. He sat back against a tree bole, laid his rifle across his thighs, and began reloading from his cartridge belt.

  “Stockburn!”

  Wolf whipped his head back around to stare up the ridge. The man stood on the crest. A lean, dark figure wearing that low-crowned, black hat. Long hair fell straight down to his shoulders. The man turned full around, dropped his pants, leaned forward, and reached around with both hands to open the rear fly of his longhandles, exposing his bare behind.

  “Black-hearted, chicken-livered coward!” Stockburn shoved another round through the Winchester’s loading gate then raised the rifle, slamming a live round into the action.

  By the time he’d leveled the gun over the fallen cottonwood, the man was gone.

  Wolf gritted his teeth in anger. He wanted so much to drill a round through the bushwhacker’s bare ass. Despite himself, he chuckled. He sat back against the tree and had a good, hearty laugh over the ridiculousness of the man’s last gesture.

  Finally, his laughter dwindling, he raked a hand down his face and shook his head. “Till we meet again, you devil.” He stared up the ridge again, and the humor faded from his eyes, replaced by a stony resolution. “Till we meet again.”

  CHAPTER 13

  As Lori McCrae rode up and over the last hill and saw the Triangle headquarters spread out in the broad valley before her, at the foot of the fir-clad Crow Mountain, she choked back a lump of deep consternation and churning sadness.

  God, how she loved her home. She’d missed it and these mountains so much when she’d been away at school. She’d yearned to come back here, had virtually cried herself to sleep every night out of loneliness and a deep, almost morbid longing for the hauntingly beautiful valley in which she’d been born and raised.

  But seeing it now, the Triangle and the lush valley it sprawled in, surrounded by the black dots of lowing cattle, had lost its luster, the sweet feeling they had once filled her with. Not all of that luster and sweetness was gone, of course. She still felt better being here than in that bland old school back East, in that wretched city with its smell of offal everywhere. But the Triangle did not look nearly as fairy-tale idyllic and wonderful and welcoming as it had before, back when Lori had been a younger, more innocent girl.

  Now, it even appeared a little forbidding—due in no small part to the fact that she was no longer wanted here.

  She’d been ordered away from here, from her home, sent away by her parents, escorted away, like a prisoner, by her oldest brother, Lawton. She’d attended Miss Lydia Hastings Academy for Young Women last year. She’d spent the summer back here on the Triangle though her parents had wanted her to live with
her mother’s brother’s family in Philadelphia until school resumed in the fall. But Lori had resisted.

  Her parents had relented and allowed her to return to the Wind Rivers for the summer. One last summer. The Triangle was no longer her home, they’d explained. Now, as a beautiful, intelligent, and precocious young lady—one with money behind her, no less—“she must prepare for a life in the more civilized world of the East.”

  Those words, she knew, had merely been short-hand for marrying an appropriate suitor—one with even more money than the McCrae’s—and raising a family. Back East. Far away from the Triangle and the trouble she’d gotten herself into here in these beautiful mountains that, because of that former trouble, would no longer be the fairy-tale mountains she’d known when she’d still worn her hair in pigtails.

  Still, even with a dark patina of danger, grief, and sorrow that obscured them now, like a perplexing fog that refused to burn off with the sun, these mountains, this valley and ranch were her home. She wouldn’t . . . couldn’t . . . leave them again.

  She was here to stay.

  How would she explain that to her father and mother? How would they take it? Would they sternly forbid it, or would they . . . eventually, after much argument, no doubt . . . see that she’d made up her mind and that there would be no point in refusing lest their head-strong daughter take to the streets of Wild Horse and live a life most unbecoming of a McCrae.

  Yes, that’s exactly how she would put it, if she had to, she silently opined as her horse’s hooves clomped across the bridge spanning Crow Creek. She trotted smartly through the wooden portal at the edge of the yard, glancing up at the two triangle brands burned into the cross timber, one to each side of the name MCCRAE blazed deeply and darkly—proudly—into the weathered wood.

  As she entered the yard, she saw a dozen or so cowboys gathered in and around the breaking corral, most sitting on the rail. Oh, what a sweet sight! The men were watching one of the horse-breakers working with a horse tied to the snubbing post. They had their backs to her.

  That was good. Lori didn’t want to be seen just yet. As soon as she was seen, there would be so much surprise . . . so many questions. She wasn’t ready to explain herself just yet to the men. She wasn’t even ready to explain herself to her parents, but that was not a matter she could delay any longer.

  While she felt a little giddy about being home and being surrounded by so much that was warm and familiar—even the smell of the horse manure finely ground into the dust of the yard was a sweet perfume in her nostrils—she felt sick with dread, as well.

  As she turned the horse toward the stables on her left, a boyish man’s voice yelled, “Lori! Hey, Lori! What’re you doing back so soon, sis?”

  Lori winced and tightened her shoulders with dismay.

  She glanced over her shoulder. All of the men on the corral fence had their heads turned to regard her dubiously. Lori’s brother, Hy, short for Hiram, stood inside the corral, holding the halter rope of the horse he was working with.

  Three years her senior but with the guilelessness of a much younger man, he grinned at her innocently, and waved, rising up on the toes of his worn boots to peer over the corral fence, between a couple of the incredulous riders.

  “Hey, Lori!” He called again. Hy had always been her best friend and advocate here at the Triangle while her oldest brother Lawton had been more of a father figure.

  Lori waved, feigned a smile. “Brother, you just saddle that jackrabbit and hang on. I’ll tell you about it later!”

  As Lori handed her horse’s reins to one of the stable boys who’d been helping the taciturn blacksmith put new shoes on a wild-eyed peg pony, Lori caught sight of her oldest brother, Lawton.

  Tall, rangy, and curly-haired, and with a tough and formal way about him, the oldest of the three McCrae sons sat atop the corral. Lawton stared at her darkly from over his shoulder, brows severely furled as he took a drag off a cigarette and blew the smoke out forcefully, angrily.

  As Lori met his gaze, he turned his head abruptly forward, dismissing his younger sister in bitter disgust.

  “All right, Law,” Lori said, “have it your way.” Turning to the stable boy who was leading away her horse, she said, “Billy?”

  “Yes, miss?”

  “A man from the hotel will be bringing my luggage along in a few hours. Bring the bags to my room, please. He’ll be returning the filly along with its saddle and bridle to the Federated Livery back in Wild Horse. Make sure she’s fed and groomed.”

  “You got it, miss.”

  “Thank you,” she said, ignoring the incredulous look in the stable boy’s eyes. He was the blacksmith’s son. Now she noticed the blacksmith, lightly hammering a smoking horseshoe on his anvil, regarding her the same way. Not staring but darting his eyes at her, speculatively. Wondering what the little princess was doing home so soon. Maybe knowing the row it would cause . . .

  Lori swung around and started for the house, feeling as though she were walking the proverbial plank. The ship housing that plank—the McCrae ranch house—stood before her, set back and at an angle to the yard where the unseemly but necessary toil happened.

  It was a sprawling, white clapboard structure with a wide, wraparound porch outfitted with wicker chairs and ashtrays that had to be emptied regularly, for Lori’s mother forbade her husband to smoke his cigars indoors. Even in the winter, he’d bundle up in his long, wolf fur coat and floppy-brimmed hide hat and long, mule-eared elk hide boots and baggy corduroy breeches, and slump down in one of the scattered wicker chairs, smoking and scowling off across his holdings—a grumpy king with undisputed reign save the ability to smoke inside his own house.

  A low brick wall ringed the house as well as the small, irrigated yard with its transplanted trees freighted in from the East and Midwest and immaculate vegetable and herb gardens. Lori opened the gate, passed through the wall, and stopped suddenly.

  Her mother, clad in the rugged clothes she wore when tending her trees and gardens, stood atop the porch steps, regarding her only daughter gravely but with a building sadness, as well.

  Lori glanced down and drew a breath to steel herself. Here we go . . .

  She walked the plank of the long brick path between an ornamental ash and a small poplar and an apple tree and stopped at the foot of the steps. She smiled up at the tall, once-beautiful woman standing customarily erect on the porch above her. Elizabeth McCrae held a mum flower, its roots ensconced in a ragged ball of black dirt, in one hand, a garden trowel in the other.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “Lori . . .”

  Lori smiled painfully. “I’m back . . . to stay.” She tightened her voice on that last word.

  Elizabeth McCrae just stared at her, her eyes as black as her hair once had been. She was a tall, reedy woman, her silver-streaked black hair pulled up into a bun beneath her canvas gardening hat.

  Her hands were skeletal, liver-spotted, untrimmed by rings, not even a wedding ring. She’d birthed Lori when she was forty-two—“an unexpected surprise.” Her current expression was no surprise to Lori. She’d always regarded her youngest child with a vague curiosity, as though everything Lori did touched her with a mix of weariness, incredulity, and wry amusement.

  Now she shook her head slowly and quirked her thin, lightly mustached mouth up at the corners.

  “Oh, God!” came a man’s raspy voice behind her.

  It was only then that Lori realized her father had been standing several feet back from the open doorway. She could see only the lumpy shadow of his slump-shouldered, potbelly figure. He must have been sitting in the large parlor to the right of the door. Hearing Lori’s voice, he’d stepped into the foyer, likely with a great deal of dread and exasperation.

  Now he swung around and disappeared into the house’s deep shadows.

  Elizabeth glanced behind her then returned her gaze to her daughter. She smiled gently. “Go to him, dear.”

  Lori nodded and climbed the steps. She stepped u
p in front of her mother and gazed directly into her eyes, not something she’d always been able to do in the past. Elizabeth McCrae was a formidable, often frightening woman for whom motherly tenderness came hard.

  Suddenly, Lori wrapped her arms around her mother’s slender shoulders, hugging her gently, feeling the fragile bones in her body that belied the toughness of her spirit. But, then, it had taken a tough young woman, recently from Scotland, to marry the tough Texan that was Norman McCrae and then to follow him with his first two babies up here from the Red River country, fighting Indians, outlaws, sickness, dust, pounding wagon wheels, and dangerous rivers. And then to take and hold this land they’d fought from the Arapaho and Shoshone who’d called it home for hundreds of years and who’d fought desperately to keep it.

  Then, of course, there was the feud—an ongoing one—with Rufus Stoleberg, which turned out to be nearly as savage as the war with the Indians.

  Yes, a tough woman was Elizabeth McCrae. And a skinflint when it came to paying out affection, even to her only daughter. She did, however, after a few seconds, raise her arms slowly and returned Lori’s hug, albeit a bit stiffly. Lori warmed at the feel of her mother’s slender arms pressing against her, drawing her however briefly taut to her mother’s bony chest.

  Lori pulled her head away. “I’m staying, Mama. You won’t send me away again. Do you know why?”

  Elizabeth regarded the girl with a curious furl of the skin between her thin brows.

  “Because I’m as tough as you are.”

  “Dear . . .” Elizabeth slid a lock of stray hair from her daughter’s cheek with one cold, leathery finger. “You’re not telling me anything I haven’t known since you were three years old.”

  That made Lori smile though she wasn’t sure that her mother had meant the remark as a compliment. Still, she took it as one. There were worse things than being as tough as Elizabeth McCrae, though Lori hadn’t realized she owned such strength until just a few days ago, when she’d made the firm, final decision to defy her parents and return home.