Crackaway's Quest

by Will DuRey

  Wes withdrew the blade, wiped it on the dead man’s blue calico shirt and replaced it in its sheath. He dragged the body to the edge of the roof and tipped it over on to the street below.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sheriff Johnson tried to restrain his anger when Wes climbed down to the street. Two men dead and the doctor busy digging a bullet out of a prominent citizen was not his idea of a peaceful town, which was his goal. The brutal way the frontiersman had hurled the body from the roof didn’t sit easy with him either.

  ‘Who is he?’ he asked Wes Gray.

  ‘He’s the link that connects John Lord with the Cheyenne River Agency,’ Wes replied. ‘His name is Lame Dog. He’s an Agency guard and I assume he came to Palmersville with a message from Agent Archer. There’s a conspiracy to cheat the Sioux on the reservation. The army will soon be riding into this town to arrest John Lord. If you take my advice, Sheriff, you’ll put him in jail until they get here.’

  As they walked back along the main street Wes explained the situation to the sheriff. Sheriff Johnson was incredulous but was forced to agree that the situation was serious when he learned that not only the army but also the Bureau of Indian Affairs were involved.

  ‘I’m not sure I have any cause to hold him,’ Sheriff Johnson said, ‘but I suppose there are questions that need answering.’

  ‘Not least of which is why Tad Carter and Lame Dog were out to kill me.’

  The lawman had been thinking more about the activity that had taken place at the warehouse which tended to fit in with Wes Gray’s claim of double-dealing, but as they had reached John Lord’s office he spoke no more about it.

  The door was locked. Sheriff Johnson rattled it and rapped on it with his knuckles but without receiving any answer. Wes looked through the window. A door leading to a back room was slowly closing. ‘Is there a back door?’ he asked, his voice urgent.

  Sheriff Johnson pointed to an alleyway at the end of the block. ‘Down there,’ he said, and when Wes rushed off in that direction, he followed.

  Wes recognized the spot as soon as he turned the corner. The body had been removed but this was where he’d had the shootout with Tad Carter. Its proximity to John Lord’s office proved to him that the rancher had been instrumental in setting up the assassination attempt that ended in the wounding of Hal Adamson. Any thought of mentioning that to the lawman, however, was instantly banished when John Lord, astride his high black saddle horse, burst out of a wooden stable building directly opposite the rear entrance of his office.

  In the narrow alleyway there was little room to avoid the onrushing animal. The sheriff yelled for John Lord to stop but it was clear that the rancher had no intention of obeying the instruction. Instead, he extended his right arm. He brandished a long-barrelled Colt and fired once. The bullet hit the lawman, who spun and crashed into Wes Gray. The pair fell to the ground, the sheriff groaning with pain and Wes struggling to unholster his own gun so that he could return the rider’s fire.

  John Lord fired a second shot, which struck the wall above the tumbling frontiersman’s head and ricocheted away down the alley. Stretching his arm behind as his mount picked up speed, he fired again. The bullet flew high of its mark and Wes, who had now drawn his own gun, was able to send shot at the fugitive before he gained the main street and disappeared from view.

  Wes spared a moment to inspect the sheriff’s injury. The bullet had entered the right side of his body just above the waist. Wes couldn’t see an exit wound but guessed by its downward trajectory that it had lodged against the lawman’s hip-bone. ‘I’ll get help,’ he promised as he set off in John Lord’s wake. He directed a couple of men to the location of the stricken sheriff and ordered another to find the doctor. His own pursuit of John Lord was too important for delay.

  When he reached the blacksmith’s shop, Bob Best confirmed that John Lord had passed by in an almighty hurry only seconds earlier. Wes leapt on to the pinto’s back and set a course past the cemetery and on to the range land that led to Lord’s ranch. In addition to scanning ahead for a sight of his quarry he also kept an eye on the fresh ground tracks. He’d gone less than a mile before reining the pinto to a halt. Dismounting, he knelt to inspect the dark specks that had begun to show on the ground. As he suspected they were blotches of blood. Either his hurried shot had hit Lord or it had hit his horse. When he rode on, the prints he was following became deeper, an indication that his quarry was travelling more slowly. The blotches were also becoming more pronounced. Whoever was wounded, man or horse, they were beginning to lose a lot of blood. Up ahead, wisps of dust hung in the air signposting the route of the refugee from justice. A mile ahead he’d ridden into an extensive rock formation. Wes pushed on, determined to catch up to the rancher.

  It was the pinto, again, that passed on a warning to Wes. They had slowed down to walking pace when they entered high cliffs and boulder land, but the Indian pony stopped suddenly and lifted its head in the unique way it had done on two previous occasions. Wes sat astride the animal for a few silent seconds then, conscious that he provided an easy target for anyone planning an ambush, dismounted. He ground-hitched the pinto then plotted a route that would take him in a high circle through the surrounding rocks.

  It was John Lord’s black that had been wounded by Wes’s snap shot. He hadn’t climbed far when he espied it at the other side of the outcrop, behind which he’d left the pinto. The wound was along its flank but the motion of running had sprayed blood all over its rear leg and rump. Its distress was slight and Wes was sure that with proper care it would soon recover. He was more concerned about finding John Lord, wondering if he was hiding somewhere among the rocks, waiting to ambush the next person to ride that way and steal their horse, or if he was continuing on foot towards his ranch house.

  He didn’t have to go much farther to discover the answer. Looking down, he could see John Lord lying on the shoulder of a weather-formed boulder that overlooked his troubled horse. His rifle was in his hand; he was ready to waylay anyone who should happen by. Wes suspected that John Lord knew who would be first on his trail, and perhaps, looking back, he’d seen his dust when they were still on the open-range land.

  Wes descended without displacing the smallest stone, rustling the leaves of the sparse bushes or snapping any of the dry twigs that lay in his path. When he was five yards behind the rancher he removed his hat and skimmed it so that it landed a few feet in front of the rancher’s face. John Lord’s initial reaction was to tighten his grip on his rifle and half turn to face his pursuer. Then he relaxed, didn’t complete the turn, but seemed to address his words to the frontiersman’s hat. ‘Come to take me back? It won’t do any good. I know too many people in high office for anything to be proved against me.’

  ‘The trouble with people like you is that you think the people you know are the only ones in high places. I’m sure they have their own enemies and those enemies will know how to use charges of corruption to topple them. You might find that those friends in high places have already deserted you to protect their own positions. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is hot on your trail, the army, too.’

  John Lord gave a short laugh, which was meant to be derisory but only reflected the concern that Wes Gray’s words had evoked.

  ‘But you shot Sheriff Johnson back in Palmersville,’ Wes continued. ‘You’ll be in jail for that while the federal charges are being collected against you.’

  Again, John Lord tightened his grip on his rifle. The scout was painting a bleak picture. He didn’t want to go to jail. If he could ride clear of this territory then he was sure he would be able somehow to turn the situation to his advantage.

  Wes Gray was still talking, his voice a deep, threatening monotone. ‘Of course, before getting back to Palmersville you have to answer for the death of my friend, Crackaway. You shouldn’t have done that.’

  The threat in the words and the voice frightened John Lord. He looked over his shoulder. The buckskin-clad figure had adopted a stolid stanc
e; his legs firmly planted, his hands either side of the buckle on his gunbelt. Lord’s index finger slipped inside the rifle’s trigger guard as he weighed up the odds of turning and firing before Wes Gray could draw his gun.

  ‘And then there’s Crackaway’s daughter,’ Wes added. ‘You shouldn’t have hit her. I told you Jenny was under my protection. You have to answer for that now.’

  The relationship between Jenny Trantor and the old man who’d observed his men stealing from the Indians’ grain sacks had little chance to register with John Lord and might have been of no significance if it had. All he really heard was the frontiersman’s final word, ‘now’, and he reacted with the determination of a thoroughbred sprinter to the starter’s gun. He rolled, pulling the rifle with him to get it in line with his adversary, his finger automatically tightening on the trigger.

  Wes reached for his Colt. Two shots cracked and echoed among the rocks. The rifle slid unfired from John Lord’s dead hands.

  Wes washed the blood from the black’s flank but the animal was limping so he didn’t load it with its owner’s body. Instead, he slung John Lord’s corpse over the pinto and they walked the three miles back to Palmersville.

  Wes stayed another night in Palmersville. The injuries to Sheriff Johnson and Hal Adamson were painful but not fatal. Both would recover, although the sheriff would evermore limp and the storekeeper would have difficulty thereafter reaching down goods from high shelves.

  When he left, early next morning, Jenny didn’t travel with him. The lawyer, Harry Portlass, had proposed marriage and she’d accepted. They were staying on in Palmersville, which Harry believed would develop into a good community. Every good community, he’d assured Jenny, needed legal representation. He’d hung his shingle in the town and wanted his business to develop with its growth. Jenny had struggled for a while with her decision, saddened by the thought that she was not fulfilling her father’s dream. The plot of land he’d worked for all his life would have to be resold without anyone of the family ever seeing it.

  ‘I don’t think that matters, Jenny. Your pa was striving to provide a home for you when you were a little girl, but you’re a woman now. You have to live life the way that’s best suited for you. If you want to be the wife of Harry Portlass then that’s what you’ve got to do.’

  As promised, he visited Kitty Belton on his way back to the Missouri. Her brother wouldn’t be home for another two days. Unlike Jenny, for whom more people and advancements in science and technology were something to embrace, something that might bring wealth and position to her husband, Kitty was nervous of the future.

  ‘Hauling is all that Rafe has ever known,’ she told Wes. ‘I don’t know what will happen if the railway comes this far north.’

  ‘There might be opportunities farther west,’ Wes advised. ‘Perhaps Montana where they fell great redwoods. They’ll be hauling lumber from the slopes for many years to come.’

  ‘I’ll tell Rafe,’ she said, ‘otherwise it might become necessary for me to return to the job I had before I became an army wife.’ She dropped her head, then looked up at him coyly, her big, dark eyes glinting. ‘Want to spend a dollar?’

  Later, on the banks of the Missouri, Wes rubbed the pinto’s muzzle while Black Lance put the canoe in the water and packed Wes’s few possessions.

  ‘Yesterday the Bluecoats came and arrested the Agent,’ Black Lance informed Wes. ‘Will they remain on our land?’

  ‘Only until a new Agent is appointed.’

  ‘Will he also cheat us?’

  ‘I hope not, Black Lance, but I have no say in the matter.’

  ‘It should be you, Wiyaka Wakan. You we would trust.’

  ‘I have another job.’ Not for the first time Wes wondered if that was true, if he would get to Council Bluffs and discover that the last wagons west had already gone and that he and Caleb Dodge, the wagonmaster, had outlived their usefulness. Things were changing for everyone. No one could predict the future. He pushed away from the bank and paddled downstream.