Collection 1989 - Long Ride Home (v5.0)

by Louis L'Amour

  “How’d you guess?” Ewing asked her.

  “That riding. I saw him do it on a circus, back East, when I was in school. He was supposed to be a clown, nearly got bucked off all the time, but always stayed on.”

  “Ritter’ll guess,” Magoon said. “He’ll run him off.”

  Web Fancher shoved back from the table. He got up. “I ain’t hongry,” he said, and disappeared through the door. A moment later there was a clatter of horse’s hooves.

  “Goin’ t’ warn Ritter. I wondered what that coyote was up to!” Ward said. He got up. “Well, ain’t speakin’ for nobody but myself, but I’m sidin’ the teacher!”

  * * *

  IN THE CAMP among the willows, Shan Brady was digging into his war bag. He had little time, he knew. Ritter would hear of this, and from all he had learned the Circle R boss would be smart enough to put two and two together. Besides, he might know that Old Mike had allowed the school to be built on his place.

  They would come for him, and he wanted to be ready. He had never killed a man, and he didn’t want to now. There were four, no, that Mexican in Sonora made five, who had tried to kill him. Each of them had lived through it, but each time they had collected a bullet in the hand or arm.

  Digging deeper in the war bag he drew out twin cartridge belts and two heavy Colt .45’s in black, silver-mounted holsters. The belt and holsters were rodeo, showman’s gear. The guns were strictly business, and looked it.

  With those guns he had shot cigarettes from men’s mouths, shot buttons from their coats.

  Rolling up a fresh smoke, he studied the situation. His position had not been chosen only for camping facilities, and not only because it was on the Shanahan place. It had been chosen for defense, as well.

  Logs had rolled downstream during flood seasons, and he had found several of them in an excellent position. He had dragged more down close, and under the pretext of gathering wood, he had built several traps at strategic places. Now, working fast, he dragged up more logs and rolled them into place. The stream provided him with water, and he had plenty of grub. He had seen to that.

  They had laughed at him for that, behind his back. “That teacher must think he’s goin’ t’ feed an army!” they had said. But he was planning, laying in a supply of food.

  His position was nicely chosen. From three sides he could see anyone who approached. The willows and the log wall gave him some concealment as well as cover.

  It was an hour after daylight when he saw them coming, Pete Ritter himself in the lead. Behind him were six men, riding in a tight knot. When they were thirty yards away, he lifted his rifle and spoke, “Keep back, Ritter! I don’t want any trouble from you!”

  “You got trouble!” Ritter shouted angrily. “You get off that place, an’ get out of the country!”

  “I’m Shanahan Brady!” Shan yelled, “an’ I’m stayin’! Come any closer, an’ somebody gets hurt!”

  “Let’s go!” Ritter snarled angrily. “We’ll run the durned fool clear over the border!”

  He started forward. Shan threw down on him and fired four fast shots. They were timed, quick and accurate. The first shot dropped a horse, the second picked the hat from Ritter’s head, taking a lock of hair with it, the third burned Lefty Brooks’s gun hand, and he dropped his six-shooter and grabbed the hand to him with a curse of rage. The fourth shot took the lobe from a man’s ear.

  The attack broke and the riders turned and raced for shelter. Shan fired two more shots after them, dusting their heels.

  Calmly, he reloaded. “That was the beginning,” he said. “Now we’ll get the real thing.”

  Chewing on a biscuit, he waited. Suddenly, he glanced at the biscuit. “That Claire girl,” he said, “can cook, too! Who’d a thought it?”

  The morning wore on. Several times, he sized up the rocky slope behind him. That was the danger point. Yet he had built his log wall higher there, and he had a plan.

  Suddenly, rifles began to pop and shots were dusting the logs around him. He waited. Then he glimpsed, four hundred yards away, what seemed to be a man’s leg. He fired, and heard a yell of pain.

  Suddenly, a shot rang out from behind him and a bullet thudded into the log within an inch of his head. Hurriedly, he rolled over into the shelter of the log wall. No sooner there than getting to his knees he crawled into the willows away from camp, then slid into the streambed.

  Rising behind the shelter of the banks, he ran swiftly upstream. Rounding a bend, he crawled up behind some boulders, then drifted along the slope. Panting, he dropped into place behind a granite boulder and peered around the edge.

  A man he recognized as one of those who had come to the school with Pratt was lying thirty yards away, rifle in hand. Shan fired instantly, burning the sniper’s ribs with a bullet. The man let out a yell of alarm and scrambled to his feet and started to run.

  Lying still, Shan hazed the fellow downhill, cutting his clothes to ribbons, twice knocking him down with shots at his heels.

  “All right!” The voice was cold, triumphant. “The fun’s over! Git up!”

  Turning, he saw Pete Ritter standing behind him, gun in hand. With him were Lefty Brooks and a man Brady recognized as Web Fancher from the Ewing ranch. “I figgered you might use that crickbed!” Pete sneered. “Figgered I might use it my ownself. Now we got you. Fust, you go back t’ the ranch an’ we let Neil get his evens with you. Then you start, for the state line.…You never get there!”

  It was now or never. Shan Brady knew that instantly. Once they got their hands on him he was through. Ritter had him covered, but…his hands were a blur as they swept down for the guns.

  Somebody yelled, and he saw Pete’s eyes blazing behind a red-mouthed gun. Something hit him in the shoulder, and he shot, and even as he triggered his first six-gun, he realized that what he had always feared was not happening…he was not losing his head!

  Coolly as though on exhibition, he was shooting. Ritter wavered in front of him, and suddenly he saw other Circle R riders appearing, and there seemed to be a roaring of guns behind him. Gunsmoke filled the air.

  Fancher was down on his hands and knees, a pool of blood forming under him; Ritter was gone; and Lefty Brooks was backing up, his shirt turning dark, his face pale.

  Then, suddenly as it began, it was over. He stepped back, and then a hand dropped on his shoulder. He turned. It was Magoon.

  “Some shootin’!” Magoon said, grinning. Curly Ward and big Frank Ewing were also closing in, all with ready guns. “You took Ritter an’ Brooks out of there! I got Fancher! That yeller belly of a traitor! Eatin’ our grub an’ working for Ritter!”

  Claire rode up the slope, her hair blowing in the wind. She carried a rifle. He looked up at her. “You, too? I didn’t’ know women ever fought in this man’s country?”

  “They do when their men—!” Her face flushed. “I mean they do when their schools are in danger! After all, you’re our best teacher in years!”

  He turned and started down the slope with her. “Reckon that old Shanahan place could be fixed up?” he asked. “I think it’d be a good place t’ have the teachers live, don’t you? It could be mighty liveable.”

  “Why, yes, but…,” she stopped.

  “Oh, we’d get a preacher down from Hurston!” he said, grinning. “That would make it all sort of legal, and everything. Of course,” he added, remembering the biscuits, “you’d have to find time to cook, too!”

  She flushed. Then laughed. “For you, I think I could!”

  Shan Brady looked down at the house Old Mike had built. It was a nice house. It was a very nice house. With some curtains in the window, and the smell of cooking.…

  THE TOWN NO GUNS COULD TAME

  * * *

  CHAPTER 1

  Town Tamer Wanted!

  THE MINER CALLED Perry stepped from the bucket and leaned his pick and shovel against a boulder. He was a big man with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Despite the wet, clinging diggin’ clothes, he moved with the
ease and freedom of a big cat. His greenish eyes turned toward Doc Greenley, banker, postmaster, and saloon man of Basin City, who was talking with the other townsmen.

  Perry’s head and arms were bare, and the woolen undershirt failed to cover the mighty muscles that rippled along his back and shoulders. One of the men, noting the powerful arms and the strong neck, turned and said something to the others. They nodded, together.

  “Hey, Perry,” Doc Greenley called, “drift over here, will you? Me and these two gents want to make a proposition to you.”

  Casually, Perry picked up the spare pick handle leaning against the boulder and walked over, his wet clothes sloshing as he moved. He stopped when he reached the trio, and his eyes studied them, coldly penetrating. The three men shifted uneasily.

  “Go ahead with it, then,” Perry said shortly.

  “It’s like this,” Doc explained. “Buff McCarty”—he nodded toward the larger of his two companions—“and Wade Manning, here, and myself have been worried about the rough element from the mines. They seem to be taking over the town. No respectable citizen or their womenfolks are safe. And as for the hold-ups that have been raising hell with us businessmen.…” Doc Greenley mopped his brow with a fresh bandanna handkerchief, letting the sentence go unfinished.

  “We want you to help us, Perry,” the heavy-set, honest-faced McCarty put in. “Manning, here, runs the freight line and I have the general supply outfit. We’re all substantial citizens and need a man of your type for town marshal.”

  “As soon as I heard you were here, I told the boys you were just the man for us,” Greenley put in eagerly.

  Perry’s green eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “I see.” His gaze shifted from Doc Greenley, the most prominent and wealthiest man there, to the stolid McCarty, and then to the young townsman, Wade Manning. He smiled a little. “The town fathers, out in force, eh?” He glanced at Wade, looking at him thoughtfully. “But where’s Rafe Landon, owner of the Sluice Box Bar?”

  “Rafe Landon?” Doc Greenley’s eyes glinted. “Why, his bar is the hangout for this tough crowd! In fact, we have reason to suspect—”

  “Better let Perry form his own suspicions, Doc,” Wade Manning interrupted. “I’m not at all sure about Rafe.”

  “You may not be,” Greenley snapped, “but I am! Perry, I’m convinced that Landon is the ringleader of the whole kit an’ caboodle of the killers and renegades we’re trying to clean out!”

  “Why,” Perry said suddenly, “do you choose this particular time to pick a marshal? There must be a reason.”

  “There is,” Wade Manning agreed. “You probably know about the volume of gold production here. Anyway, Doc has better, than two hundred thousand in his big vault now. I have about half that much. There’s a rumor around of a plot to loot the stage of the whole load.”

  “It’s Landon,” Greenley said, “that’s who it is! An’ do you know what I think?” He, looked from one to the other, pulling excitedly at his ear lobe. “I think Rafe Landon is none other than Clip Haynes, the toughest, coldest gunman who ever pulled a trigger!”

  Perry’s eyes narrowed. “I heard he was down in Arizona.”

  “But I happen to know,” Greenley said sharply, “that Clip Haynes headed this way—with the ten thousand he got from that stage job near Goldroad!”

  Perry looked at Doc thoughtfully. “Maybe so. It could be that way, all right.” He glanced at Buff McCarty, who was watching him from his small blue eyes. “Sure, I’ll take the job! I’ll ride in tonight, by the canyon trail.”

  The three men walked to their horses, and Perry turned abruptly back to the mine office to draw, his time.

  * * *

  THE MOON WAS rising when the man called Perry swung onto his horse and took the canyon trail for Basin City. The big black stepped out swiftly, and the man lounged in the saddle, his eyes narrowed with thought. He rode with the ease of one long accustomed to the saddle, and almost without thinking kept to the shadows along the road, guiding his horse neatly so as to render it almost invisible in the dim light.

  From the black, flat-crowned hat tied under his chin with a rawhide thong to the hand-tooled cowman’s boots, his costume offered nothing that would catch the glint of light or prevent him from merging indistinguishably with his background. Even the two big guns with their polished wooden butts, tied down and ready for use, harmonized perfectly with his somber dress.

  The trail dipped through canyons and wound around lofty mesas, and once he forded a small stream. Shortly after, riding through a maze of gigantic boulders, he reined in sharply. His keen ear had detected a sudden sound.

  Even as he came to a halt he heard the hard rattle of hooves from a running horse somewhere on the trail ahead, and almost at the same instant, the sharp spang of a high-powered rifle.

  Soundlessly, he slid from the saddle, and even before his feet touched the sand of the trail, his guns were gripped in his big hands. Tensely, he ran forward, staying in the soft sand where his feet made no noise. Suddenly, dead ahead of him and just around a huge boulder, a pistol roared. He jerked to a halt, and eased around the rock.

  A black figure of a man was on its knees in the road. Just as the man looked around, the rifle up on the mountainside crashed again, and the kneeling figure spilled over on its face.

  Perry’s gun roared at the flash of the rifle, and roared again as a bullet whipped by his ear. The rifle fired once more, and Perry felt his hat jerk on his head as he emptied his gun at the concealed marksman.

  There was no reply. Cautiously Perry lifted his head, then began to inch toward the dark figure sprawled in the road before him. A match flared suddenly up on the hillside, and Perry started to fire, then held it. The man might think him dead, and his present position was too open to take a chance. As he reached the body, the rattle of a horse’s hooves faded rapidly into the distance.

  Perry’s lips set grimly. Then he got to his knees and lifted the body.

  It was a boy—an attractive, fair-haired youngster. He had been shot twice, once through the body, and once through the head. Perry started to rise.

  “Hold it!” The voice was that of a woman, but it was cold and even. “One move and I’ll shoot!”

  She was standing at one side of the road with a pistol aimed at Perry’s belt line. Even in the moonlight she was lovely. Perry held perfectly still, riveted to the position as much by her beauty as by the gun she held so steadily.

  “You murderer!” she said, her voice low with contempt. “Stand up, and keep your hands high!”

  He put the boy gently back on the ground and got to his feet. “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, miss,” he said. “I didn’t kill this boy.”

  “Don’t make yourself a liar as well as a killer!” she exclaimed. “Didn’t I hear you shooting? Haven’t I eyes?”

  “While you’re holding me here,” he said gently, “the real killer is making his getaway. If you’ll put down that gun, I’ll explain.”

  “Explain?” There was just a hint of hysteria in her voice. “After you’ve killed my brother?”

  “Your brother?” he was startled now. “Why, I didn’t—”

  Her voice trembled, but the gun was unrelenting. “You didn’t know, I suppose, that you killed Wade Manning?” Her disbelief was evident in her tone.

  “Wade Manning?” he stepped forward. “Why, this isn’t Wade Manning!”

  “Not—not Wade?” her voice was incredulous. “But who is it then?”

  He stepped back. “Take a look, Miss Manning. I don’t know many people around here. I met your brother today at the Indian Creek Diggin’s. He’s a sight older than this poor youngster.”

  She dropped to her knees beside the boy. Then she looked up. “Why, this is young Tommy McCarty! What in the world can he be doing out here tonight?”

  “Any relation to Buff McCarty?” he asked quickly.

  “His son.” Her eyes misted with tears. “Oh, this is awful! We—we came over the trail from Salt Lake together, his
folks and mine!”

  He took her by the shoulders. “Listen, Miss Manning. I don’t like to butt in, you knowin’ the lad an’ all, but your brother came out here to see me today. He wanted me to be marshal here in Basin City. I took the job, so I guess this is the first part right here.”

  She drew back, aghast. “Then you—you’re Clip Haynes!”

  It was his turn to be startled now. “Who told you that?” he demanded. Things were moving a little too fast. “Who knew I was Clip Haynes?”

  “Wade. He recognized you today. The others don’t know. He wanted to see you tonight about something. He said it would take a man like you to handle the law job here.”

  Frowning thoughtfully, he caught up the boy’s horse, grazing nearby, and lashed the body to the saddle. Then he mounted the big black, and the girl swung upon her pinto. Silently they took the trail for Basin City.

  Despite the fact that she seemed to have accepted him, he could sense the suspicion that held her aloof. The fact remained that she had found him kneeling over the body, six-gun in hand. He could scarcely blame her. After all, he was not a simple miner named Perry. He was Clip Haynes—a notorious gunman with a blood price on his head.

  “Who’d profit by this boy’s death?” he asked suddenly. “Does he have any enemies?”

  “Tommy McCarty?” her voice was incredulous. “Goodness no! He was just sixteen, and there wasn’t a finer boy in Peace Valley. Everyone liked him.”

  Carefully, he explained all that had happened, conscious of her skepticism and of the fact that she rode warily, with one hand on her pistol. “But who’d want to kill Tommy?” she exclaimed. “And why go to all that trouble? He rides alone to the claim every morning.”

  Except for the glaring lights of Rafe Landon’s Sluice Box Bar and Doc Greenley’s High-Stake Palace, the main street of the town was in darkness. But even before they reined in at the hitching rail of the High-Stake, the body had been seen, and a crowd gathered.