Rancher's Law

by Dusty Richards

  “Nice-looking place. It ain’t new,” he said, rolling over on his side to hand the glass to Choc.

  “No, this place belongs to someone.”

  “You think Hart is squatting here?”

  Choc nodded and looked hard through the eyepiece. “I’ve been here before. Didn’t know if he was at this one. I think the only way out is the front door and that one window.”

  “Good. Will he surrender if he’s in there?” Luther asked, sprawled on his belly beside the man.

  Choc shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe have to stuff green leaves down that chimney and smoke him out.”

  “Fine, I’ll give him a chance to surrender first before we do all that work. If we have the wrong place, they should tell us.”

  “Good idea.” Choc smiled and collapsed the brass scope.

  “Buddy Hart! Buddy Hart! U.S. Deputy Marshal Haskell here! Come out with your hands up!” A double echo of his words came back and he waited, the rifle ready. The bleached gray wooden door remained closed.

  Ben sat on his round butt beside them and scratched his right ear with a hind foot as if bored by their actions. Then he licked his upper lip and nose to complete his ritual.

  “That damn dog acts like he knows he’s down there.” Choc belly-laughed at the notion. “Maybe Buddy knows you got Ben up here and don’t want to get bit in the butt.”

  “If he’s inside, he sure ain’t answering.” Luther saw the door barely open. The barrel of a long gun poked out the crack. “Get down!” he shouted, and they flattened out.

  The shotgun blast roared and soon spent pellets filtered down upon them. Ben snorted his disapproval, rose, and went downhill behind them as if that would be a safer place.

  Hard pressed on the ground, they scowled at each other over the reply. Rage swelled in Luther’s chest. Hart wanted to play tough, they’d play tough, too. He would soon learn he’d messed with the wrong men doing a stupid trick like that. Keep up that foolishness and he might even go back to Fort Smith in a wooden box.

  “He answered us,” Choc said, on his elbows beside him.

  “Yes, he did. How can we stop up that chimney?” Luther asked, still perturbed over the shooting.

  “You watch the front door. I’ll go gather some leaves. We’ll smoke him out.” On his hands and knees, Choc backed down the hill.

  Luther wondered how his man would ever get them into the chimney, but it was worth a try. He set the rifle on the ground a little ahead of his body to be handy, then looked back at his partner and agreed with a nod.

  Choc half rose as he retreated. With him gone, Ben crept up to rejoin Luther, his belly close to the ground, until at last he lay beside him. He panted as if out of breath.

  “You getting braver, General?” Luther reached over and scratched the bulldog’s scalp. A low growl curled out of Ben’s throat and his brown eyes focused hard on the cabin.

  “We need to get this one, old boy.”

  Ben sneezed, but quickly recovered and resumed acting on his guard.

  Over half an hour later, Luther rose enough to observe Choc making his way from the decrepit shed toward the side of the cabin. No more actions from the occupant, only some noisy crows and a squirrel chattering overhead about their invasion.

  At last he could make out that Choc carried something resembling a large ball. Uncertain of the nature of the man’s package, Luther spoke for Ben to quit his whining. Then he cocked the Winchester. Beside the chimney’s base, Choc swung the cloth ball on the end of a rope. He gave it a high toss. It landed on top of the stone and mortar structure and went out of sight.

  Choc grinned as if pleased, then he moved to the right to stay out of the line of gunfire. Smoke no longer rose from the stack. Enthused about his man’s success, Luther felt they were making progress at last. In a short while, the sounds of coughing from inside could be heard. Gray wisps seeped from around the top of the closed door. Getting bad in there, Luther decided.

  At once the door burst open. A small woman coughing in her hands came out, waving a white kerchief, shouting, “Give up! Give up! No shoot!”

  Still leery of what Hart might try next, Luther rose with the rifle in his hands. Filled with caution, he advanced down the hillside. After a curt word to control the growling Ben beside him, he saw Choc moving in from the right with his shotgun ready.

  “Tell Hart to come out!” Luther ordered the girl. The next few moments could be crucial. Was he using her for a ploy? Luther stopped fifty feet from her.

  The figure of Hart broke out of the doorway. With his wide eyes fiercely searching around, he spotted Luther and Choc. Before Luther could raise his gun sights, the fugitive disappeared around the side of the cabin. No chance for a shot by either man with her standing there.

  “Get him, Ben!” Luther shouted and the eager bulldog jumped into hot pursuit. A blinding fury of white and black, he tore past her, made the corner on his side, issuing a roar to match a lion the whole time. She fell back screaming, though Luther knew the dog had missed the girl by inches.

  Luther shouted for Choc to go the other way around the cabin and he took the left side. Running hard, he came around the house and spotted the fugitive in the forks of a small peach tree. The bush tottered with his weight, almost breaking it. Each time the angry General Ben McCollough lunged off the ground, he snapped his flashing canines like a bear trap only inches from any of Hart’s body parts.

  “Ben! Ben, get over here!” Luther ordered and slapped his leg.

  One final try to sink his teeth in the fugitive’s hide and Ben quit. With a look of disgust at his master, he came over to Luther, plopped his butt on the ground, and began to scratch his right ear. For Ben, his part of this arrest was complete.

  The wide-eyed Hart looked like a man who had seen the devil and somehow lived through the ordeal. Acting as if unsure he was not to be eaten by the monster, he looked with distrust at the seated bulldog and clung to his tenable place in the waving peach bush.

  “Get down,” Choc said, armed with the handcuffs and ready to put the irons on him.

  To Luther, Hart hardly looked out of his teens. The fugitive glanced one more time at Ben, then unceremoniously climbed down. On his feet, he said something in tongue to Choc, who locked up his wrists.

  “I didn’t kill that white man,” Choc answered him.

  The boy nodded as if he understood his half brother’s statement.

  “He blaming you?” Luther asked Choc when he joined them.

  “He wanted to know what I would do if I were in his moccasins.”

  Luther agreed with a nod. Tough deal. If Hart had killed a white man in the act of a crime or with malice, then his chances were good of having a meeting with Judge Issac Parker’s hangman.

  In front of the cabin, Choc spoke to the girl about food. She looked even younger than the boy; Luther doubted she was more than fifteen. Her reply was in tongue.

  “She has some fried bacon and corn bread,” Choc announced. “We better eat it. May be dark before we can get back to the wagon.”

  “You have a horse?” Luther asked the prisoner.

  Acting defeated, he shook his head and looked down at his worn out shoes without laces and socks.

  “It’ll be a long walk back to Moss’s Store,” Luther warned him, and started to leave. But a question rode heavy on his mind as he turned back and asked, “Were you drunk when you killed him?”

  “Bad whiskey.”

  “Better think up a better defense than that,” he said offhandedly.

  Choc and the girl had gone inside the smoky cabin for the food. They soon returned coughing. Choc tossed his sack of green leaves out in the yard to smoulder. She put a skillet of burned corn bread on the porch stoop, then went back inside and returned with some browned bacon slices on a slab of wood.

  After setting the platter on the stoop, she stepped away from it. Luther nudged the anxious Ben back with his toe. Then he walked up, bent over, and took a piece of the meat. A little salt
y to his tongue, but he nodded his approval as he chewed on it. Seated on the step, Choc used his jackknife to slice the dark bread and dug out a crumbling piece.

  “Ain’t bad inside,” he said, chewing on a large hunk. “Little black outside.”

  “Where do you live?” Luther asked the girl, who stood with her hands locked in front of her skirt.

  “Here,” she said in English.

  “No,” he said, busy trying to get some bread out of the pan, but it kept breaking up and crumbling apart with his efforts. “Where is your home?”

  “My folks—live—on—the—Grand River.”

  “Will you go there?”

  She shook her head vehemently.

  “Where will you go?”

  “Fort Smith.”

  “To wait for him?” In defeat, he stuffed a pinch of crumbs in his mouth, then raised up. Her nod told him she would follow her man like he expected. The poor girl would go live in Shack Town, do whatever she had to do to sustain herself during the months ahead. In the end, they would probably hang her lover. By that time, she would either be a drunken whore in the alleys of Fort Smith or have drowned herself in the muddy river water.

  “Why don’t you go home—to the Grand River!” he said louder than he intended, sick to his stomach and feeling depressed by the ugly picture of her demise.

  “I am his woman,” the resolute-sounding girl said, her eyes dark as diamonds, shing hard in the flickering sunlight coming through the overhead leaves.

  With disgust, he looked at her, wanting to say something powerful enough to change her mind, then without a word, he turned on his heels. “Come on, Ben, we need to get the horses.”

  “More food here,” Choc said, squatting beside it, busy feeding his face. He gave the bulldog some of the corn bread, which Ben lapped up.

  Luther never answered his man, but kept walking up the slope. He wanted to be on their way back to Moss’s. His hunger had turned to nausea at the thought of the girl’s bitter future. And all because of the supposition he had framed from Hart’s own information; how some white men sold that boy bad whiskey. A really good reason to kill him. Yeah. Would he ever learn how these people thought?

  The next morning at Moss’s, they prepared to leave the shackled Hart chained to a pine tree behind the store. The Indian girl, who called herself Martha, promised to feed the prisoner and bring him water. Choc cautioned her not to try to free him. She agreed. The two lawmen rode out with Ben trotting behind on the heels of their horses.

  “Will he be there tonight?” Luther asked when they were out of her earshot.

  “Yes.”

  He nodded in approval. Choc knew the limits and the ways of these people. Without a jail facility, chains and irons were the only method of restraint they could use while they went out to serve the other warrants. It forced Luther to leave his prisoners in irons each day and in care of someone to see to their needs.

  “Did Buddy kill that man over bad whiskey?” Luther asked as they rode beside the rail fence that protected a healthy-looking patch of knee-high corn.

  “Bad whiskey or no whiskey. He was drunk. Probably wanted more.”

  “Had no money?” Luther asked.

  “Probably was broke. Whiskey does terrible things to some Indians.”

  Luther agreed and they pushed their horses into a long trot down the dusty road. It hadn’t rained in a week or longer, and the last of the moisture had evaporated in the stiff winds from the south that this time of year usually brought thick clouds to the Nation. All spring, the winds had only delivered hot weather even in the mountains, where one could usually escape some of the high temperatures.

  They headed for Ellis’s sawmill. The warrant Luther wanted to serve was for an Indian, Smoky Kline, charged with stealing an Army mule. He hoped the day’s planned arrest would be a quiet one. Most of their apprehensions went well because of his Indian partner’s presence. Choc was familiar with many people in this district, who knew him as a no-nonsense, tough person. In Luther’s book, the breed being along saved him many serious out of hand altercations with the red men they arrested.

  Mid-morning, when they rode off a steep hillside into the wide clearing, Ellis’s vast mill operation bustled with activity. Smoke spewed from an iron chimney in a great column that marked the sky. The scream of the blade digging its steel teeth in the wood fibers filled the air. A powerful smell of turpentine pine and sour oak sawdust hung like a heavy perfume. Men labored to unload log wagons, and others with mules skidded single cuts to the main mill. A mountain of bark slabs rose beside the steam engine, which huffed like a great fire-breathing dragon under a shake-roofed open shed, providing belt power for the saw.

  A short white man dressed in waist overalls, longsleeved shirt, a weathered cowboy hat, and holding a great brown oil can came out and nodded to them over the noise. Luther tried to read the man’s look. He showed no great pleasure over their presence. Obviously, he knew they were not there to buy lumber.

  “We’re looking for Smoky Kline,” Luther said, and dismounted.

  “You the law?”

  “Yeah, U.S. Deputy Marshal. I have a warrant,” he said, loud enough over the clatter and whine for the man to hear him.

  “What did he do?” the white man asked, as if troubled by the matter.

  “Sold a U.S. Army mule to a man at Van Buren,” Luther read from the bad handwriting by the clerk on the warrant.

  “Well, he wasn’t very smart then, was he?” The man laughed, which broke some of the tension between them, and shook his head in disappointment. “Hell, anyone dumb enough to sell a branded mule like that sure deserves to be arrested, don’t he?”

  “He work for you?”

  “Oh, yeah. I don’t figure he’ll give you a minute’s trouble.” Ellis took off his felt cowboy hat and scratched the thin hair on top of his head. “Hate it. Pure D hate it. He’s a good worker. Family man. Wonder why he ever did that for. Hell, you two don’t know the reason why. You’re just serving them papers, right?”

  Luther agreed. They soon found Kline stacking lumber and handcuffed the tall Indian.

  “Boy! Why in God’s name did you sell a U.S. branded mule for?” Ellis asked the prisoner.

  The broad-shouldered Kline shrugged and shook his head. “He was lame and I couldn’t ride him anymore.”

  “Still, that was pure D dumb of you, boy.” With that said, he left them, wagging the oil can, headed across the yard for his steam engine.

  Late afternoon, they arrived back to the store and added Kline to the chain with the dejected Billy Hart. Martha cooked them two chickens she had bought earlier from a nearby farmer with Luther’s money. She also fixed a big kettle of brown rice for their supper. The sun was about to set when they finally ate the meal.

  The first food since daybreak in Luther’s mouth drew the flow of his saliva. Martha’s chickens looked a little blackened on the outside, but the leg he twisted off tasted good enough.

  To get their attention, Ben stealthfully crawled up on his belly and began making snorts and grunting sounds out of his flat nose. Luther ignored him. The bulldog could be a real pest at mealtime.

  “That dog’s begging again,” Choc said between bites of the chicken breast in his hands.

  “Don’t pay him no mind,” Luther said.

  “Who we going after tomorrow?” Choc asked, turning his head to the side to eat more meat off of the bone.

  “Two White Crow brothers. Josh and Tag.”

  “What they do?”

  “I think it’s robbery.”

  Choc nodded. “They will be at Red Springs. Maybe making whiskey.”

  “You can get in trouble drinking it or making it. Good food, Martha,” Luther said to the girl as she gathered up the tin dishes. “You can give Ben some corn bread, if you’ve got any left.”

  She nodded in the firelight and looked back at him. “I’ll feed him.”

  “Go on with her,” he said in a head toss to Ben.

  The b
ulldog rose, stretched his back, and then plodded off into the growing night after her. It drew a laugh from Choc.

  “He understands English better than my own children.”

  “Ben understands eating,” Luther said, and chuckled.

  After their breakfast of reheated rice with chicken, they set out on Texas Road for Red Springs. Luther left Martha with seventy-five cents to buy something to cook for supper, promising to return by evening or past. He and Choc trotted their horses away from Moss’s Store.

  The coolness of the predawn felt good to ride in. He knew it would heat up again by late afternoon. Each day grew hotter than the day before. Besides, they wouldn’t be in the mountains after these two. The place, Choc mentioned, Red Springs lay in the foothills.

  Mid-morning, they rode up a rutted path. In Luther’s book, it could hardly be called a road. Simply two ruts that wound around and up a narrow draw. Riding in the lead, Choc twisted in the saddle often and frowned with displeasure at him. A profuse growth of head-high saplings lined the way blocking their view of everything.

  When Luther checked on Ben, the dog acted normal, padding along under him. He could smell and hear better than either of them. Luther felt easier that they weren’t riding into an ambush, though one could surely spring out of this mess of brush at any moment.

  At last they rounded a bend and reached a clearing with several open fields. Ahead of them stood a brush arbor housing several wooden barrels beneath it. At the discovery of their appearance, three fat Indian women began screaming in panic; they ran away, each in a different direction. Ben rose to the occasion with a deep-throated growl and started after one of them.

  “No! Ben! Get back here!” Luther shouted, unholstering his handgun and dismounting. Far more concerned about the possible presence of their men than the fleeing females, he searched around as he dismounted.

  “I’ll catch one and bring her back,” Choc said, and sent his roan after a woman who was headed down the weedy field and still in view.

  “Ben!” Luther said again to halt the dog, and viewed the shack to his left. He hitched the horse, looking around, trying to familiarize himself with the layout.