Hell's Jaw Pass

by Max O'Hara

  “Let’s get around him,” he said, probably thinking Wolf couldn’t hear. But it was a quiet morning, the air was light, and the man who’d spoken was only a hundred yards away.

  Two peeled off the right side of the man who’d spoken, putting their mounts into hard gallops and approaching Wolf now from ahead and left. The other man peeled his own mount, a blue roan, off the left side of the man who’d issued the order. He galloped hard, elbows raised, leaning slightly forward in his saddle, toward Wolf on the detective’s right.

  “Hmmm,” Stockburn said, pulling back on Smoke’s reins, stopping the horse. “Trying to surround a man doesn’t seem all that welcoming if you ask me.”

  He looked at the man who’d issued the order. That man was trotting his horse straight toward Stockburn. The others were riding up on him hard but swinging wide to get around him. The scissoring hooves of their galloping horses thudded against the hard, dry ground.

  When the two riders on his left were roughly fifty yards away, and the single rider on his right was about the same distance but closing fast, Stockburn reined Smoke around sharply and rammed his heels against the stallion’s flanks.

  “Let’s go, boy!”

  Not about to let himself get caught in a whipsaw, Stockburn rode straight back the way he’d come.

  “Get him!” one of the men shouted behind him. “Get that son of a bitch!”

  Crouched low over his saddle horn, his hat brim pulled low, Smoke stretching his legs out in a ground-burning stride, Wolf said, “Now, how would those fellas know if I was a son of a bitch or not? I wouldn’t know any of them from Adam’s off-ox!”

  Behind him, one of the riders whooped.

  Another triggered a pistol, the crackling report rising through the hard thuds of the several sets of galloping horses and through the rush of the breeze brushing past Wolf’s ears.

  Ahead and to the right was a low ridge sloping down into the valley from another, higher ridge on that side. Wolf swung Smoke toward the ridge.

  As he did, more whoops and shouts rose behind him. A pistol cracked two more times. Stockburn heard one of the bullets sing through the air to his left. The other thudded into the ground off to his right and behind him.

  Smoke gained the lesser ridge and shot up the side at a northwesterly angle.

  Stockburn glanced over his left shoulder. The riders had closed together again, strung out side by side, roughly twenty feet apart. They were galloping hard and fast, crouched low, the man who’d issued the orders to get around Wolf holding a pistol barrel up in his right hand.

  As Smoke reached the top of the secondary ridge, Stockburn swung him right, following the upward tilting crest toward the larger, higher primary ridge dead ahead now. As horse and rider gained the pass where the two ridges intersected, Stockburn shot one more glance behind him.

  His four shadowers were keeping pace, maybe even closing a bit.

  Wolf reined Smoke on down the other side of the pass. A narrow canyon opened between two stone walls just ahead and on the right. Wolf swung Smoke into the mouth, knowing it could be a box canyon.

  On the other hand, he might be able to lose his pursuers in the rugged terrain. After another fifty yards the canyon forked. Stockburn reined Smoke into the left fork, which joined the right fork again soon after.

  The canyon swerved to the left, then right, then back left, the ground dampened by a runout spring. As Stockburn and Smoke swerved right again, a loud whoop sounded nearby. Too late, Wolf saw a man sitting a steel-dust horse atop the canyon’s right wall, which was only ten feet high at that point.

  The man grinned beneath the brim of his bullet-crowned cream sombrero. He wore a sack coat over a checked shirt, and leather chaps. Two pistols bristled on his hips.

  He was swinging a loop out from the lariat coiled in his left hand.

  Wolf tried to duck but not before the loop settled over his head and drew taut around his shoulders. The man dallied the lariat around his horn, and the braided leather drew suddenly taut, jerking Wolf out of his saddle.

  He kicked free of his stirrups so he wouldn’t break an ankle.

  Suddenly, Smoke was gone from beneath him. He turned a backward somersault and hit the ground hard about his head and shoulders—the second time in twenty-four hours he’d tried that painful maneuver, though it had not been voluntary either time.

  “Dutch ride!” screeched the man holding the other end of the lariat. His long face was a mask of predatory glee.

  Vaguely, Wolf was aware of other riders galloping toward him as he lay facing up canyon on his chest and belly, again trying to clear the fog from his brain. The man with the lariat spurred his own mount off the canyon’s low wall to Wolf’s right, shouting louder, “Dutch ride, fellas! Let give Wells Fargo the time of his life. Yee-HAH!”

  Wolf swung around to face the man spurring his horse past him, heading up canyon and intending to drag Wolf along behind him. At the moment, the lariat around Wolf’s arms was slack. It would not be in a few seconds, when his tormentor had gained some distance and pulled it taut.

  Wolf grabbed the Colt holstered on his right thigh and slid it out of the leather. Cocking it, he rolled up onto his left shoulder, aiming the Peacemaker from just above his right hip, angling the barrel up and hardening his jaws as he fired.

  The first shot missed the whooping rider galloping past him, but Wolf’s second shot took the man through the back of his left shoulder.

  The man screamed. So did his horse, which reared suddenly, clawing at the air with its front hooves and arching its tail. The rider flew over the tail to hit the ground and roll.

  Wolf whipped the lariat loop from over his head, and the fleeing horse dragged it off behind it, past its rider who was still rolling in the brush along the canyon’s right wall.

  Stockburn rose. The fallen rider rolled up on his left shoulder, showing his face, gritting his teeth, glaring at Stockburn.

  He had a pistol in his hand.

  As he cursed and clicked the hammer back, Stockburn extended his own Colt and shot the man twice in the chest. The man grunted as he fell back against the canyon wall, smashing his gun against the wall, as well, before dropping to a shoulder in deep brush, jerking.

  Still hearing riders galloping toward him, Stockburn ran to Smoke standing to his left, looking around warily, sidestepping and whickering. Wolf holstered his Colt and shucked his Winchester from its saddle sheath. He slapped Wolf on the butt, and the horse galloped back down the canyon the way they’d come.

  Guns crackled. Bullets sliced the air around him.

  Stockburn cocked the Winchester and dropped to a knee. “You want to dance,” he said, “we’ll dance.” He pumped a cartridge into the action.

  CHAPTER 18

  The other three riders were galloping down the forested slope on Stockburn’s right. Somehow, the man Wolf had just sent back to his maker had come down ahead of them. These men knew the terrain out here. Wolf did not. They had the advantage.

  The three riders galloped through the forest, meandering around pines and cedars, all three firing six-shooters as they rode, their horses hurling deadfalls and blowdowns, kicking up dead leaves and forest duff behind them.

  Stockburn lined up his sights on the man riding to the left of the other two and fired.

  The man screamed as the bullet punched him back over his horse’s rear end.

  That caused the other two to rein up suddenly and leap from their saddles.

  One paused to slide a carbine from his saddle sheath, eyeing Stockburn warily as Wolf ejected the spent casing, seated a fresh one in the chamber, and aimed at the man who’d been riding in the middle of the pack. That man was running toward a tree roughly thirty feet up the slope from Wolf. The man wore a red-checked shirt with a red neckerchief and a wool-lined deerskin vest; he held two pistols in his hands.

  Wolf fired.

  “Ach!” the man cried, wincing and grabbing his left thigh.

  He paused, glared toward Wolf, t
hen hopped on his good leg to the tree he’d been heading for. He spat angrily then slid a look around the tree’s right side.

  Just as his hatted head came into view, Stockburn fired. A quarter-sized, black hole appeared in the man’s left cheek, just beneath his eye.

  Stockburn didn’t watch the man fall. He didn’t need to. The man was dead. Hearing only the satisfying thud as the man hit the ground, Wolf threw himself to his left. He’d sensed the third rider lining up the sights of his carbine on him. His senses had not failed him.

  As he hit the ground on his left shoulder, the carbine belched. In the periphery of his vision, Stockburn saw the orange flames and smoke stab from the carbine’s barrel as it poked around the left side of a birch tree straight up the slope from Stockburn’s position.

  Keeping his head down beneath the canyon’s low, rocky wall, Wolf crabbed to his left. As he did, the man with the carbine sent three bullets hammering toward him fast.

  Angrily.

  The bullets zinged off the rocks and plunked into a cedar on the opposite side of the narrow canyon.

  They were followed by one more that spanged loudly off a boulder to Wolf’s left.

  Crows cawed loudly.

  Stockburn stopped, rose to a knee, and raised the Yellowboy to his shoulder. The barrel of the carbine poked out from behind an aspen tree, the aspen leaves making a bright golden carpet around the tree’s base.

  Wolf aimed at the carbine’s barrel. He chewed his lip and narrowed his right eye, watching the barrel extend farther and farther out from the tree until it was followed by the upper half of a brown-hatted head.

  The eye of the carbine-wielding pursuer appeared, staring toward Wolf. The eye was partly shaded by the brim of the man’s hat. As that eye found Stockburn, and the man saw the rifle aimed at him, the eye widened.

  Stockburn fired.

  The eye disappeared as the bullet pulverized it on its way through the socket and back through the man’s head, exiting the skull and thumping into the upslope behind the man, kicking up dirt and leaves. The back of the man’s head turned the yellow leaves red.

  He gave a soft grunt then fell straight back and lay on the gold-leaved carpet, thrashing his arms and legs for a moment, as though trying to make a leaf angel. Then he fell still. He broke wind—the last sound he’d ever make on earth.

  Stockburn pumped a fresh round into the Yellowboy’s chamber then lowered the hammer. He stared through his own wafting powder smoke, surveying the three dead men sprawled on the upslope before him.

  “Nice to meet you fellas, too.”

  * * *

  Stockburn reloaded the Yellowboy in case others like these four had similar intentions.

  What those intentions had been, exactly, Wolf didn’t know. Probably the same ones as the bastard with the Big Fifty. Whatever their intentions had been—to kill him or rough him up—a Dutch ride, which was frontier parlance for dragging someone behind a galloping horse until every stich of clothing had been ripped off, was no joke.

  The punishment Wolf had dished up had been severe but appropriate to the offense. Frontier justice, maybe, but justice, by God.

  He gathered the three bodies from the slope until all four dead men were lying shoulder to shoulder at the bottom of the shallow canyon. He inspected them closely. He recognized one, the man with the red shirt and neckerchief, as Lester Bohannon, a killer from Oklahoma.

  Wolf had once played cards with Bohannon in the Eldridge Hotel in Kansas City. Bohannon had walked freely in public because, while it was widely known that he’d killed a good dozen men—even he himself had bragged about it, flaunting the information as though on an unwritten public résumé for more of the same kind of work—the law had never been able to gather enough evidence to issue an arrest warrant.

  So, he’d drifted around, his cunning having made him modestly famous—or infamous, as the case may be, to those and the families of those he’d killed. He’d hired out his guns mostly to wealthy cattlemen in the southern Midwest with problems with nesters or rustlers or Indians but who wanted no blood on their own hands.

  Wolf toed Bohannon’s body. “You got careless, Lester.” Riding with other men will make a man careless for some reason when, riding alone, he would never let his guard down. Wolf thought it probably had something to do with believing others would back you. Or distract your opponent.

  Relying on others could get a man’s clock cleaned.

  Lester Bohannon stared up at Wolf Stockburn through heavy-lidded eyes. Beneath the left eye was the quarter-sized, puckered blue hole bored by Stockburn’s .44 rifle. A little blood had oozed out of it while Bohannon’s heart had pumped its last; that blood was now a half-inch, crusted, dark-red streak to the left of the hole, where it had started to run down the side of the dead man’s face.

  Stockburn studied the other three dead men. One looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place him. He’d probably run into the man—possibly even the other two at one time or another. While the West was vast, there still weren’t that many people in it. You could run into the same stranger over and over again quite by accident.

  After rummaging around in all four men’s pockets, including Bohannon’s, he found nothing to identify them or to give him any clue to who they’d been riding for. He had to assume, however, that they’d been riding for Rufus Stoleberg, since that was whose graze he was on.

  “What do you say, fellas?” Wolf asked, hooking his thumbs behind his cartridge belt as he scowled down at the four sad-faced, dull-eyed dead men. “Let’s go pay a call on the Stoleberg bunch and see what they got to say for themselves.”

  As Wolf gathered the three men’s horses then tied the bodies over the horses’ backs, a warning voice told him: “Could be riding into one hell of a hot bailiwick, Wolf. You gotta figure you might be going up against a whole lot more men similar to these. With the exact same intentions, which is more than likely to turn you toe down and kick you out with a cold shovel.”

  “Could be,” Stockburn responded to the warning voice of his more conscious and possibly more intelligent alter ego. “But I don’t have an army at my disposal, and I’m not gonna learn a damn thing dancing around the edges of this thing, so . . .”

  Having tied three horses together and holding the reins of the first horse in the string, Stockburn swung up onto Smoke’s back and booted the horse back in the direction he’d been heading before he’d been so rudely interrupted. The other four horses followed, whickering edgily at the blood and death stench.

  Smoke wasn’t overly keen on the smell himself. He occasionally glanced back at his rider, giving his copper-colored eyes a dubious roll, as if to say, “What kind of trouble have you gotten us into this time, you gray-headed devil?”

  Stockburn loped the five horses back down the valley and around Ship Rock. He picked up a well-worn trail curving into the valley from the west, and continued riding through rugged canyon and low mesa country peppered with widely scattered cattle. Now Gannett Peak was back behind him as he traversed the Wind Rivers’ southeastern slopes.

  As he rode, he spied a half-dozen cowboys moving a herd of cows on a distant slope to his right, just below dark volcanic caprock and a fringe of cedars. He couldn’t tell if the men spotted him. If they did, they gave no indication but continued to work their herd down toward the valley floor that Wolf and his grisly cargo were passing through.

  Though the punchers were a good half a mile away, Stockburn could hear them whistling and calling, “Come bossy! Come boss, come boss!” Occasionally, they tossed a loop at a herd-quitting calf or a calf and its mother.

  Ahead, the Tin Cup headquarters grew from a distant brown splotch in a shallow, fawn-colored bowl in the valley, abutted on its left by a distant but steep, rocky mountain ridge capped with snow, into separate buildings and corrals. A hitch-and-rail fence of unpeeled pine rails surrounded the entire compound, both ends connecting at the obligatory wooden portal straddling the trail with a high wooden crossbar bearing the
Stoleberg name and brand.

  The house sat up front and right with the barns, stables, and other outbuildings flanking it. There were two windmills, one before the house, the other to the rear, supplying water to the stock and the bunkhouse.

  Just as the McCrae range’s verdant health was reflected in the relative grandeur of its headquarters, the drab ill-health of the Stoleberg range shone in its own weathered gray buildings and the lack of greenery of even a single tree. The yard was entirely brown, minus any grass save a little dun-colored needle grass growing up around the foundations of the buildings. Tumbleweeds had been allowed to collect against the surrounding fence until they’d made a formidable bastion.

  The meek look of the place extended to the Tin Cup house, a humble log, barrack-like affair weathered to the color of the sky on a cloudy day. It appeared that the original cabin, consisting of only one or two rooms, had been added onto once or twice, when money had allowed, so that now there was an extended rear in the shape of a log rectangle, and part of a second floor.

  The chinking between the cabin’s logs appeared brittle and in need of patching. A single, sashed and dusty window looked down on the yard from the house’s front gable, beneath the steeply pitched, shake-shingled roof. The window frame had been painted white, but little white remained. Many of the shakes on the roof were missing or had been replaced by tin long since gone to rust.

  The large front porch sat listing to one side, adding to the house’s resemblance to a derelict ship.

  In front of that porch now, ten or so horseback riders sat facing the lodge.

  “Hmm,” Stockburn said to himself. “That’s quite a few fellas there. Maybe I should’ve listened to my smarter self and run in the other direction.”

  Too late now.

  He was within thirty yards of the portal and several of the riders, having heard the hoof thuds of his approach, had turned their heads to study the visitor. One by one and two by two, more heads turned to Stockburn as he passed beneath the portal and came on into the yard. He stopped about halfway between the portal and the house.