Hell's Jaw Pass

by Max O'Hara

  The man looked up at Stockburn, his eyes wide and round with shock. His chest rose and fell sharply. The man opened his bloody mouth, winced from the pain likely racking every inch of him, then said very softly, raspily, “Did I kill Ivy?”

  “Yes,” Stockburn said, fuming.

  “Damn,” the man said with true regret.

  His eyes rolled up, his lead tipped up slightly and to one side, and his chest fell still.

  “You bastard!” Wolf rammed his right boot into the man’s ribs, making the body rock.

  He walked over and dropped to a knee beside Ivy. The poor, dead girl.

  Stockburn knew she’d somehow aligned herself with the bastard with the big rifle, but her death still grieved him. She might have been a flaming coquette and got herself mixed up with all kinds of trouble in and around Wild Horse, but he would not, could not believe that she was anything but an innocent, a naïve bystander exploited and corrupted by the evil men around her.

  Men like Kreg Hennessey.

  She’d been too damned pretty for her own good. Stockburn had barely known her, but he was going to miss her.

  He turned to where Smoke stood looking back at him from the far end of the aspen copse. Wolf stuck his finger in the corner of his mouth and whistled. Twenty minutes later, he and Smoke had fetched the rifleman and Ivy’s horses, and Stockburn had tied both bodies, wrapped in their own bedrolls, over their saddles.

  He stepped into his own saddle and started the trip back toward Wild Horse.

  * * *

  Lori McCrae was also headed back toward town.

  In fact, she was galloping into Wild Horse now as long shadows stretched out from the buildings on the west side of the broad main street.

  It was almost five o’clock. Supper fires were stoked all over town, and the smoke waved like tattered flags over the rooftops. The shopkeepers were hauling their wares off the boardwalks fronting their shops and into their stores in preparation of closing.

  Two dogs—a thick-furred collie and a short-haired mongrel were fighting over a bone in front of Cyrus Milgram’s Haberdashery. One had probably swiped the bone from the butcher shop while old man York had been butchering in his rear shed and the other one, in typical dog fashion, wanted it all for himself.

  But, then, dogs weren’t all that different from men, Lori silently opined in only a vague sort of way. She had more important things on her mind than dogs fighting over bones.

  Lori angled her buckskin to the street’s right side, opposite the haberdashery and the fighting dogs, to where Watt Russell stood outside his two-story stone and wood-frame jail house/office, staring up the street to the south. The middle-aged town marshal had his thumbs hooked behind the cartridge belt encircling his thick waist, the belt and shells mostly hidden by the man’s heavily sagging gut.

  “Marshal Russell!” Lori called, halting the buckskin in front of the man.

  Russell jerked his head toward the girl with a start. “Miss McCrae!” He looked surprised and puzzled as he studied her, then slowly slid his still-puzzled gaze up the street to the south again.

  Turning back to Lori, he said, “I don’t . . . I don’t under—”

  “Understand what?”

  “Well . . .” Russell hooked his thumb to the street beyond them.

  Lori had no time for the man’s thick-headedness. Her father had said that Watt Russell was “soft in his thinker box,” and Lori didn’t doubt it a bit. She said, “Have you seen Wolf Stockburn, Marshal?”

  Russell turned back to her again, his puzzled expression becoming a look of indignation, color rising in his cheeks. He was most likely remembering how Lori and her father’s attorney had compelled Russell to release Stockburn from his jail under threat of dire legal consequences after Stockburn’s dustup in the Cosmopolitan with Kreg Hennessey.

  “Stockburn? No, can’t say as I have. Can’t say I want to see that—”

  Lori shook her head. “Never mind that. He was supposed to meet me earlier this afternoon at the Lutheran church by the Big Sandy River, and he didn’t show. I thought he might have ridden to town. I’m worried something might have happened to him, Marshal. He rode up to inspect the scene of the massacre again.”

  Lori hadn’t ridden up that way herself, because she’d been worried her father’s men, maybe even one of her brothers, who were likely engaged in the fall roundup up near where the track layers had been killed, might see her and force her to return home against her will.

  She’d known that finding Stockburn here, without his having stopped to pick her up at the church first, was a long shot. But she hadn’t been able to sit still. Besides, she didn’t want to spend the night alone in that creepy church.

  “I got no truck with Wolf Stockburn,” Russell grumbled, turning his attention back toward the south. “That man’s been nothin’ but a thorn in my backside. Maybe you can answer me this question, Miss McCrae.”

  The marshal shuttled his puzzled look back to Lori. “What’s your brother and three hands from the Triangle gonna do with all them guns they’re loadin’ into their ranch wagon yonder?”

  “What?” Lori said, shocked. “Where?”

  “Over there.”

  Lori followed Russell’s pointing finger toward where a ranch wagon sat in front of Hyde’s Gun & Ammo shop, on the street’s west side roughly a half a block south of the jailhouse. Sure enough, Lori’s oldest brother, Law, was handing a square wooden crate to one of the two Triangle hands standing in the wagon’s low-sided box, one hand crouching to receive the crate.

  A third hand just then emerged from the shop’s open front door, carrying two Winchester rifles in his hands, with a third one clamped beneath an arm. As Law turned to walk into the shop, Lori said in a hushed voice that betrayed her own befuddlement but also a good bit of fear, as well, “I have no idea, Marshal.”

  “I take it you didn’t ride into town with them . . . ?”

  “No, I did not,” Lori replied to the inane question. Russell had seen her ride into town not more than two minutes ago—alone.

  “Well, I reckon I’d better go over and have a talk with ’em, then.” Scowling curiously, apprehensively toward the gun shop, Russell stepped down off the boardwalk. Pausing to bend his legs as he hitched up his sagging canvas trousers, he set off up the street at a southwesterly angle.

  “Marshal, please don’t tell them you’ve seen me in town!” Lori appealed to the man, keeping her voice down.

  She wasn’t sure if Russell had heard her. He gave no indication but only ambled in his shamble-footed way toward the gun shop from which Lawton McCrae, clad in his usual cream Stetson with a curled brim, plaid work shirt, and batwing chaps, was emerging carrying two more Winchester repeating rifles.

  Lori had grown up around rifles, had even shot them herself from time to time; she could tell these were Winchester repeaters, all right.

  Lori quickly neck-reined the buckskin to the north, keeping her head down, not wanting Law to see her. She galloped back the way she’d come until she reached the north end of town.

  She swung the buckskin west around an abandoned stable and then turned south along the alley paralleling the main street along the backsides of the main street-facing business buildings.

  When she came to the rear of Hyde’s Gun & Ammo Shop, she stopped the buckskin, swung down, and dropped the reins. She strode quickly up along the north side of the gun shop, between the gun shop and a barber shop on her left.

  As she approached the front of Hyde’s, she pressed her right shoulder up against the shop’s north wall, crouching, not wanting to be seen from the street. Fortunately, this break between the buildings was filled with the deep-purple shadows of the early autumn dusk, concealing her well.

  At least, she hoped it was. She couldn’t be too careful. It Law spotted her, he’d drag her home, for sure.

  * * *

  Watt Russell moseyed up to the Triangle wagon.

  At least, he tried to mosey. Truth was, he was a might
on the tense side.

  The Triangle riders, backed by a powerful man—a man much more powerful than Russell had ever been or ever would be, even with a badge pinned to his shirt—made him nervous. There were three powerful men in or around Wild Horse—Norman McCrae, Rufus Stoleberg, and Kreg Hennessey.

  All three made him nervous.

  Russell cast a look into the wagon and whistled. “Now, that there is quite a load of guns and ammunition!” He gave a nervous chuckle.

  The two hands standing in the wagon looked back at him.

  “Goin’ on a big hunt this fall, are ya?” Russell asked, trying to sound affably conversational.

  “You could call it a hunt,” Lawton McCrae said as the tall, thirty-five-year-old rancher, with the long, bowed legs of a natural horseman, said as he stepped out of Hyde’s Guns & Ammo Shop. He was carrying three or four cartridge bandoliers over his shoulders, all belts sporting glistening new shells.

  “You don’t say,” Russell said, leaning against the wagon and hooking his thumbs behind his own cartridge belt. “What you goin’ after? Some of them big elk that been movin’ down into the lower meadows? You know, I can hear them of a night when I’m sittin’ out on my front porch, having a last smoke and a cup of coffee. Kinda eerie soundin’—that bugling during the rut!”

  He chuckled dryly.

  “Nope.” The customarily stone-faced, taciturn Lawton McCrae handed the four sets of cartridge bandoliers to the two men standing in the wagon.

  That’s all he said: Nope. Wasn’t going to give Russell the respect and decency of any explanation at all. That’s how the McCraes were. They were uppity that way. They saw themselves as bigger than the law.

  Anger burned in Russell’s cheeks as Law McCrae turned to walk back into the shop again, not even looking at the lawman standing at the rear of the wagon.

  “Well, doggoneit, Lawton, what in the hell are you goin’ after, then. Can you tell me that? I am the law here in town. And I am a deputy county sheriff, to boot. I mean, it ain’t like I’m just bein’ snoopy!”

  McCrae stopped five feet from the shop’s front door. He turned back to Russell and said, “What’s the matter, old man? Did you run out of spittoons to empty in Hennessey’s Saloon?”

  The two men in the wagon chuckled. The fourth man laughed from inside the shop behind McCrae.

  Russell’s heart thumped in the old lawman’s ears. McCrae was referencing the widely held belief that Russell was merely here to haul Kreg Hennessey’s water. He’d always tried to shrug off the reputation and to keep his chin up in spite of it.

  The only problem was the tactic rang a bit hollow, for the belief was not all that far from the truth. Russell had hauled Hennessey’s water in the past. More than a few times, in fact. But that was back when he’d been drunk more than sober, and he hadn’t been able to resist the temptation of the extra money he’d occasionally found in envelopes slipped under the door of his house.

  Now he was working on getting his good reputation back. That’s why Law McCrae’s words, delivered so evenly and coldly, backed by a cold set of hazel eyes, wounded him so deeply. They made his heart throb and his right knee quiver.

  Yeah, he’d helped Hennessey against his enemies. He’d jailed innocent men, and he’d freed guilty men, but he’d never done anything to earn the wrath of the uppity McCraes.

  When Russell could not find the words to speak, Law McCrae stepped forward, pointing an accusing finger at the middle-aged lawman and further hardening his straight fine jaws. He narrowed his hazel eyes.

  “I’ll tell you this, Russell, since you’re so concerned. We wouldn’t have to do what we’re about to do if you’d been doing your job. You always talk about how you’re a deputy county sheriff. Well, I sure don’t see you out in the county all that much. Where were you when Stoleberg long-looped a good hundred and fifty of our beeves and hazed them on to Tin Cup graze?”

  “What?” Russell said, finally finding his tongue. “What’re you talkin’ about? I thought you—both families—done buried the hatchet. Or, leastways called a truce!”

  “That is obviously what old Stoleberg wanted us to believe,” McCrae said tightly, his voice quavering with barely checked emotion. “But yesterday during the fall gather, my men came across tracks of a large bunch of moved cows. Our moved cows. They found those cows in a box canyon on Stoleberg graze.

  “Ol’ Rufus was obviously holding them there, intending, probably after the moon had waned, to ship those beeves to market as his own—just like he used to do before the so-called truce!”

  “So Stoleberg is who you’re huntin’?” Russell said in disbelief, his own voice now quavering on the implication of a renewed, all-out land war. He remembered the last one. It had been hard, and it had been bloody.

  You might think a land war effected only the two warring factions. But it didn’t. Especially not when the two warring factions had such influence over the town that supplied them and that banked their money.

  A land war like that pitted other, smaller ranchers and farmers against each other, businessmen against businessmen. Passions could burn and spread like wildfire. It could mean the ruin of a whole town, a whole county.

  “That’s right,” McCrae said. “We’ve had enough. We’re kicking that whole damned outfit out with a cold shovel. We’re gonna kill every man and we’re gonna burn every building to the ground and sift the ashes when we’re through. What’s theirs will now be ours.

  “Stoleberg doesn’t have enough men nor guns and ammo to stand against the Triangle. Shouldn’t take long. Not long at all. Don’t worry, Russell. You go to bed with a bottle and one of Hennessey’s whores. I’m sure he’ll give you a nice deal on one. We’ll let you know when the smoke’s cleared.”

  The cold-eyed McCrae glanced at the men in the wagon. “Dave, Pete—get that wagon ready to roll!”

  Russell took a lumbering step forward and said, “Hold on, hold on! How can you be so sure it was Stoleberg who rustled your beef?”

  But Lawton McCrae was done talking.

  He swung around and walked into the shop, saying, “You got the numbers all tallied up, there, Ray? Come on, get to it. We don’t got all night!”

  A minute later, the two ranch hands sat down on the wagon’s hard wooden seat. One of the two released the brake and swung the horse into the street, turning around and heading north.

  “Hy-yahh!”

  Law McCrae and the fourth ranch hand followed on sleek ranch horses, the wagon rattling, hooves thudding, the sounds dwindling as the men, guns, and ammo merged with the shadows slanting across the rolling purple prairie beyond the town.

  CHAPTER 32

  As Watt Russell stood gazing after the departing Triangle men from beneath the crown of his high-crowned black Stetson, Lori McCrae stepped out of the shadows between the gun shop and the barber shop. She glanced worriedly to the north where her brother and the hands and the horses and wagons were jostling dots growing ever smaller.

  Russell glanced at her. “You heard?”

  Lori nodded. “I don’t believe it. The Stolebergs wouldn’t rustle our cattle. They have no reason to. They want peace, not war. They just want to get by.”

  She looked at the big lawman. “Either someone else rustled those cattle and wanted the blame to fall on the Stoleberg family, because they wanted to see a land war, or my brother is lying about those cows. My family has another reason to be crossways with the Stolebergs, Marshal. It has to do with me.”

  “I know.”

  “What?” Lori looked at the big man with surprise. The man’s unexpected response had been like a slap to her face.

  Russell returned her gaze and shrugged a heavy shoulder. “I hate to say it, Miss McCrae, but most folks know. Word got out right after the boy was born. Folks don’t talk about it over much, on account of them bein’ afraid of your family and the Stolebergs, as well. But we all know. Don’t worry. I don’t hold it against you.”

  A strange tenderness entered the ma
rshal’s voice. “I know . . . I know how . . . things . . . can happen. You can’t control a pretty, restless girl anymore than you can tame the wind.” He sighed, looked off, wagged his head, then turned to Lori again. “But the reason your brother came to town for guns and ammo ain’t about you. Leastways, it ain’t only about you.”

  Lori frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I just know, that’s all. Somethin’ else sparked that fire.”

  Russell’s brow furled as the thuds of an approaching horse sounded. Both he and Lori turned to gaze north again.

  The lawman said, “Now, who’s that?”

  Lori squinted her eyes as she tried to clarify the rider moving toward town along the trail her brother had just rode out on. The approaching rider, wearing a black hat and a buckskin coat, was trailing two horses.

  “Wolf,” Lori whispered, hope rising in her.

  * * *

  Stockburn’s gut tightened when he recognized the beefy gent standing beside Lori as Watt Russell. He was relieved to see Lori, for when he hadn’t found her at the church near the Big Sandy River, he’d thought maybe her family had taken her kicking and screaming back to the Triangle.

  He wasn’t as enthused about seeing Watt Russell, however. He had bad news for the man.

  Stockburn reined up, staring toward Lori and the marshal. Knowing there was no use in prolonging the inevitable, he gigged Smoke forward, trailing the other two mounts by their bridle reins. The westward-tumbling sun brushed the prairie before him, between him and town, with soft copper hues.

  The shadows of Lori and Watt Russell angled on the ground beside them, to the east, growing longer and longer as Stockburn and his dark cargo approached.

  “Wolf,” Lori said, gazing up at him with concern as she walked up to meet him. “When you didn’t meet me at the church?”

  “I know,” Stockburn said. “I got delayed.”

  He stared at Russell. The lawman seemed to have had a premonition about what . . . or who . . . Stockburn was carrying belly down across one of the horses behind him. Or maybe the big lawman had seen the blond hair hanging down toward the ground from the blanket roll it had tumbled out of during the ride.