by Ronald Kelly
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
TIMBER GRAY
By Ronald Kelly
FIRST DIGITAL EDITION
Copyright 2010 by David Niall Wilson & Macabre Ink Digital
&
Macabre Ink Digital Publishing
License Notes:
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication:
To Steven Lloyd Barnes; the truest of gentlemen
and the most loyal of friends.
Thanks for being there for me,
time and time again.
Chapter One
Seth Adams fished a pouch of tobacco from his shirt pocket and began to roll himself a smoke. As he sprinkled the makings into the trough of the paper and licked the edge, his eyes never strayed from the desolate plain of southern Montana.
Cupping his hands against the bitter wind, he lit his cigarette. He drew the smoke into his lungs, then exhaled as he reined his bay gelding along a ridge that ran southwest toward the Wyoming border. Seth’s horse stepped lively in the chill of early dawn. Its nostrils flared as a frigid northern wind hit their backtrail, then ebbed away into stillness.
Except for the wind and the easy progress of the horse and its rider, there was no movement whatsoever on the grassy expanse of the Whittaker ranch that morning. The plains were brown with frozen grass, the sky a violent gray with the threat of an approaching blizzard. Old snow from a couple of weeks ago lay in dirty patches beneath brush and leafless trees, untouched by what little warmth the sun could generate against the icy temperatures of late January.
Seth had worked for the Whittaker outfit for two years come March. He had traveled from his home in Amarillo, Texas to the cattle-rich lands of Wyoming and Montana when he was but a boy of sixteen. Seth had taken some ribbing and snide remarks from the bunkhouse veterans, but had soon proven himself a fair hand, especially with horses. He could ride and rope with the best of them, could handle a gun well, and wasn’t too proud to be assigned the menial chores of the winter months like milking cows and gathering wood for the cook fire.
For the last few days the foreman, Bill Brighton, had him line riding along the Powder River. He and Charlie Piper had the job of covering a fifteen mile area, making sure the cattle didn’t starve or freeze to death, the way the danged fool animals tended to do when the temperature dropped below freezing.
That was where Seth headed that morning, to look for Charlie. His partner had been out most of the night looking for a cow and her calf that had strayed from the herd. As of yet, Seth had seen nothing of Piper or the cattle.
He headed for a grassy meadow he had in mind, one with a watering hole
and a few scattered trees that might provide shelter for a couple of lost cows. He couldn’t understand it, though. Charlie would have surely checked the spot before any other and, if that was the case, should have herded the cow and her baby back into the fold by late last evening. But he hadn’t. Charlie had been out all night. Seth had awakened with the dawn, expecting to find his buddy in the neighboring bunk. But it had never been slept in. And that didn’t set right with the Texas-born cowhand.
Coming off the scrubby ridge, he urged his horse across a dry creekbed and up a small rise. On the other side was the pasture where the cows were most likely to have wandered. Seth grinned around the stub of his hand-rolled cigarette. Maybe the calf had gotten bogged down in the waterhole. Perhaps he would crest the rise to find old Charlie knee-deep in cold mud, cussing and carrying the bawling calf back to the safety of its mama’s udders. That would surely be something to fun poor Charlie about till spring roundup rolled around.
Seth’s good-natured grin faded the moment he reached the top of the creekside rise. His cigarette dropped limply from his chapped lips and his lean face paled with a sick panic that he had never experienced before in his young life.
“God Almighty!” he rasped. His spurs needled the gelding’s flanks, sending it down into the valley toward the scene of carnage that waited below.
The first thing that hit Seth was the blood. It seemed to paint the little clearing stark crimson, flecking the windswept grass and clouding the already muddy water of the drinking hole. Four bodies lay there on the frozen earth, bloodstained and torn, literally shred to pieces. The cow and her calf lay on one side of the watering hole. A saddled mare and the mutilated body of Charlie Piper lay near a spreading oak tree on the other.
The young cowhand swung down from his horse, which was siding nervously away from the ripened stench of new death. In the same easy movement, Seth pulled his Winchester from its boot. The .44-40 felt heavy and cold in his gloved hands as he walked toward the torn carcasses.
His eyes lingered on the cowhand and his horse for only a fleeting second, before the threat of rising bile forced his gaze elsewhere. Charlie had been killed in a way no man should be allowed to die. He had been set upon savagely and torn apart, his flesh and bone ripped asunder by the deadliness of flashing fangs. The horse and the two cows had been treated likewise, their inner flesh exposed, their entrails scattered away from them in the stiff grass of late January.
Overcoming the sickness of nausea and fear, Seth levered his rifle and fired into the cold, gray sky. The report thundered across the Montana flatland, followed closely by another. After the last shot died in his ears, there was only the emptiness of silence. A silence that had followed the awful sounds of screaming and the deadly snaps and snarls of a murderous pack only a few twilight hours ago.
Seth Adams backed away and sat on a boulder at the edge of the meadow, wrapped in the warm confines of a thick, woolen coat, but shivering cold never the less. His hands clutched the Winchester until his knuckles whitened and his frightened eyes looked to the south, watching for darting gray forms which had long since escaped across the plains.
Soon, the drumming of hooves and the excited shouts of Whittaker hands reached his reddened ears. But he did not move from his spot, nor pull his vigilant gaze from the horizon. He could only sit there and remember something his pa, an old cattleman himself, had told him the day he left Texas.
“Son,” the old man had warned, “you’ll be riding into some hard country now. A land where cattle is king and where everything else; weather, man, or beast is out to bring it down. There are four things you’d best keep watch for. Things that could be the death of you in the flickering of an eye.”
He remembered the old man’s face as he counted off the hazards, remembered the weathered features of a man who had seen his share of all four. “Blizzard, injuns, rustlers, and, perhaps the most dangerous of them all…”
Wolves.
Chapter Two
Louis B. Whittaker was known througho
ut the Montana territory as one of
the richest of cattle barons. Some said he owned over fifty thousand head of prime beef on his fifty mile spread, which was nestled between the Yellowstone and PowderRivers, just south of MilesCity.
But despite the rumor of him being a pompous, money-hungry man, Whittaker considered himself as “just plain folks”. So did the men who worked for him. They knew they could come to this quiet, one-armed man and unburden their troubles any hour of the day or night. So it wasn’t unusual that a small group of Whittaker’s hands stood expectantly in the cattle baron’s parlor on that blustery January morn, their hats in their hands and their thoughts lingering angrily and uncomfortably on the awful fate of their friend, Charlie Piper.
Whittaker stood at a tall, curtained window of his sitting room. He stared solemnly through the frosty panes as two men lifted the cowhand’s body off a horse and laid it gently on a wagon bed. The blanket that Piper had been wrapped in was stained with blood. The cattleman pulled his intense blue eyes from the scene outside and centered his attention on the four who stood nervously near the parlor doorway.
“It was those confounded wolves again!” he said, but it came out more as a curse than a question.
“Yes, sir,” replied his foreman, Bill Brighton, a large, bearded man in a buffalo skin coat and shapeless gray hat. “It looked to be the very same pack that killed those seven head last week.” Two men, Joe Boyce and Ralph Henry, stood to the foreman’s left, while Seth Adams, looking pale and shaken, stood to his right, still holding the Winchester in his hands.
Louis Whittaker paced the carpeted floor of his parlor. He was a tall, silver-haired man with sharp features and piercing ice-blue eyes beneath heavy brows. He was a devout Christian and a gentleman born of the Old South. He had led a brigade of Wheeler’s cavalry during the War Between the States. It was during one such charge that he had lost his left arm. A cannonball at StonesRiver had severed his arm cleanly at the elbow as he led his Confederate riders down upon an unsuspecting group of Yankee infantry. The wound would have killed most men or subjected others to the life of a hopeless cripple. But not Louis B. Whittaker. He had traveled westward and forged a new life from a hard and brutal land. Starting with only a few head of cattle, he had built a vast empire in the brief span of only fifteen years.
On that day, however, the old man’s thoughts lay on things other than success and good fortune. All that he could think about was unfortunate Charlie Piper, set upon by a monstrous pack of savage timber wolves; wolves that had killed his cattle for over a month now. If the reports were correct, the pack’s number was near fifty; larger than any wolf pack that had ever crossed the Montana territory, or the territories of Wyoming and the Dakotas combined. No one knew exactly where the beasts were heading, but Whittaker knew where they had been. They had crossed his land, staying to the forests until an insatiable hunger drove them onto the open plains to kill.
“Let us go after ‘em, sir,” urged Brighton. “I’ll round up some of the boys and we’ll hunt down the varmints that killed poor Charlie.”
“You know I can’t do that, Bill,” the cattleman replied. “We’re shorthanded as it is. We just don’t have the manpower to spare.” After the summer drive, most of his hands were working jobs in town or grub-lining. If word got out that half his winter hands were out wolf hunting, there was bound to be some rustling.
An awkward silence elapsed for a time, then one of the hands stepped forward and cleared his throat. “Mr. Whittaker?”
“Yes, Joe?”
“I heard tell there’s a wolfer in MilesCity. The one they call Timber Gray.”
Whittaker’s eyes settled on Joe Boyce, as did those of Brighton and the other two cowboys. The cattle baron’s gaze twinkled with a new hope. “Timber Gray,” he whispered.
The name was not unfamiliar to any of them. Most men west of the Mississippi had heard of the man who hunted dangerous game for the right bounty. Be it grizzly, mountain lion, or entire packs of wolves; the man called Timber Gray was the one to hire. His skill and his trusty Sharps rifle had tracked and killed more wolves than any other in the territories bordering the Rockies.
The one-armed man looked to his foreman. “Bill, I want you to ride into MilesCity and bring him back here. I want these beasts hunted down and eliminated once and for all. If it takes an expert wolfer to do the job, then I’m willing to hire one. Especially one with the reputation of Timber Gray.”
Whittaker noticed Seth standing there, pale with shock. “You might take young Adams with you, if he’s feeling up to it. The ride into town might do him some good.” The elderly cattleman put his single hand on the cowhand’s shoulder. “You doing all right, son?”
Seth nodded. “Yes, sir, Mr. Whittaker. Just a little rattled, that’s all. It was just seeing poor Charlie lying there like that…”
“I know, son.” Whittaker’s lean face was grim. “It’s a hard land, Montana is. But to tame it, there have to be sacrifices. Charlie Piper was one of those sacrifices and we’ll never forget him for that, now will we?”
“No, sir,” answered Seth. “Never will.” His reply was echoed by the other men in the room.
As they moved out of the parlor and made their way down the hallway to the main door, Whittaker’s resounding voice stopped them. “Bill, do the men go armed while riding the range?”
The bearded foreman nodded. “Just a rifle when they’re out line-riding.”
“From now on have them wear sidearms as well,” he said. Through the open doorway he could see the buckboard waiting with the dead cowhand’s shrouded body lying in the back. “I’ll not lose another good man to those murderous devils!”
Chapter Three
It happened in the autumn of 1865.
Five months had passed since the surrender at Appomattox courthouse and the South was grudgingly attempting to adjust to the trials of a Northern-imposed reconstruction. Most soldiers had returned home to find their farms burned, their homes destroyed, and their families stricken by disease and poverty.
But it had not been like that for a fortunate few. Those who lived in the wilderness areas of the Appalachian Mountains had found their former lives virtually untouched. Homesteads hidden in the mountain hollows had escaped the scavenging troops of both Union and Confederate forces. The only problem they found -- and it soon turned out to be quite a devastating problem -- was the sudden lack of food. The roar of wartime cannons and the steady report of musketfire had driven most of the wildlife further westward. Deer, the life’s meat of the mountaineer, had fled, leaving only small game and fowl behind as food for both man and more savage predators.
It was a crisp fall day in early October when Jefferson Gray walked a trail through the SmokyMountains of eastern Tennessee, his spirits high and his day’s hunting rewarded. His double-barreled shotgun had dispatched a sizable turkey an hour before and his stride was light as he made his way back home, the gobbler slung over his shoulder.
He came to Chestnut Creek and walked along the clearwater branch. His two-room cabin was only a hoot and a holler away, nestled in a stand of tall, green pines. There his wife would be, baking bread or churning butter, and his young son, Todd, playing around the house. As he continued on his way, Jefferson remembered that today was Rebecca’s wash day. She would be somewhere along the creekbed, washing what little linen they owned on the rocks of the babbling brook.
Sounds from up ahead drew his attention. His ears strained against the sound of the trickling stream, trying to sort out the noises. Suddenly they came to him like a slap in the face. There were screams – feminine screams – as well as the frightened cries of a child. And there were other sounds.
Sounds that sent a cold dread coursing through Jefferson Gray’s stocky frame. The fierce snaps and snarls of hungry wolves.
He dropped his prized turkey and sprinted along the trail, praying to the good Lord and reloading his twelve-gauge as he ran. He leapt over several deadfalls and tore through a thicke
t of blackberry bramble before he finally made the creekside clearing. And what he witnessed there beside the peaceful stream of Chestnut Creek made his blood run icy cold.
Three wolves had discovered Gray’s family, alone, as they tended to the day’s wash. Whether they had been hungry or just looking for something to kill, Gray couldn’t say. But they had found them, never the less, and had set upon them with a fevered vengeance that the young mountaineer had never witnessed before. With a hysterical curse on his lips, Jefferson Gray ran out of the canebrake, cocking both hammers of his scattergun.
Rebecca was already dead. They had caught her first, pulling her to the rocky earth and ripping at her with angry fangs until she no longer thrashed and screamed beneath them. Her throat had been torn open and, while two of the wolves went after the boy, a third remained, devouring his share of the easy kill.
Jefferson screamed in horror and raised his shotgun. The first barrel discharged its load, blowing the wolf away from the woman’s blood-splattered body. The second shot blew most the animal’s head into the forest at the edge of the creek. His muzzleloader empty, he turned away from Rebecca’s lifeless form and toward the screams of his son.
He found little Todd further downstream, still on his feet, but the object of two wolves’ hellish game of tug-o-war. A wolf had him by each arm, pulling and tearing, trying to drag him off balance. The fair-haired boy’s face was streaked with blood and tears. His eyes were glazed with fear, until they spotted his father running down the creek bed, his hands fisted around the gun’s double barrels.
“Pa!” screamed the child. “Pa, help me!”
“I’m a-coming, Todd!” the man called. “Just hold on, son!”
As he reached the wolves and their youthful prey, Jefferson swung his shotgun like a club, aiming toward a snarling, gray head. The cherrywood stock met bone with a loud crack and the beast loosened his hold on the child’s left arm. The shotgun descended again and again, until the wolf lay dead on the jagged rocks and the stock had splintered in half at the breech.