Storm in the Saddle (An Ash Colter Western)

by Ben Bridges

  I spun away from him and shoved back through the gate. Carr must have seen the contempt on my face, for he stopped me as I reached the door.

  I glared back at him, tight-mouthed. He warned, ‘Leave well enough alone, Colter. I mean it. This is no longer any of your affair.’

  I closed the door behind me and stood a moment on the boardwalk, pulling down air. The day was hotter than ever, and big, green-bodied flies zipped sluggishly before my flushed face.

  It was about then that I happened to notice Jane Dawes on the other side of the busy street, walking back up towards the hotel from a store on the corner, a wicker basket held in her arms. Almost immediately I felt some of the frustration ebbing out of me as I followed her cautious progress with my eyes. She held her head high and her short, careful steps betrayed only the slightest uncertainty as she made her way home.

  Again she touched something deep inside me. I could not and cannot tell you what it was, only that it was good and healing to my troubled soul.

  Putting Sheriff Carr from my mind, I crossed the street quickly to catch up with her. When I was near enough, I cleared my throat to let her know I was there, and said, ‘Good afternoon, Miss Dawes.’

  She stopped and turned towards the sound of my voice, her smile was radiant. ‘Why, Mr. Colter!’ she said at once. ‘Whatever are you doing here? I thought—’

  ‘Here,’ I said, reaching for her basket. ‘Allow me.’

  She surrendered the burden and said, ‘I thought we had seen the last of you this morning.’

  My mood lightening, I teased, ‘My apologies if I disappoint you.’

  ‘Quite the contrary,’ she countered. ‘But what brings you back to Beaver Dam so soon?’

  By way of reply, I said, ‘Actually, you may be able to help me, there. Do you have a doctor around here?’

  Her fine brows met above her sightless green eyes. ‘Are you ill then, Mr. Colter?’

  Briefly I sketched out the events of the past few hours. They brought trouble to her otherwise serene face. When I was finished, she said, ‘We had better go and tell Dr Hathaway.’

  ‘There is no need for you to get involved, Miss Dawes. All I need are directions.’

  But she shook her head, and her chestnut-gold hair shivered around her face. ‘It will be easier for me to take you there,’ she replied, and reached for my arm, grasped it and said, ‘Come along.’

  As we turned back the way she had just come, I saw Sheriff Carr standing on the boardwalk outside his office, watching me. We locked stares for but a moment: then he turned and strode off along the street.

  For someone who had never actually seen it, Jane knew the layout of the town remarkably well, and led me straight to a store above which the Beaver Dam medico had his surgery. We climbed the wooden staircase at the side of the building in single file, then sat for a time in an outer room while the doctor dealt with a young child with earache.

  When it came to our turn, I told the doctor what had happened to Ernie Franklin and what I had done about it. He listened without comment, then asked one or two questions about the look of the wound and the state of the patient when I had left him. At the end of it he said, ‘Sounds like he’ll keep long enough for me to make my house calls. When I’m through with those, I’ll go on out and see to him. Fair enough?’

  I thanked him and put some coins on his cluttered desk to cover the cost of the visit. The doctor gave me a strange look before he scooped the money into a drawer. Perhaps he had heard of me, heard that I had been summoned here by the Association and yet was now throwing in with the Association’s enemies. That would puzzle him, I supposed.

  Afterwards, Jane and I left the surgery, and I held her hand as we descended once more to the street. At the bottom of the steps, she looked blindly up at me for a moment, then said, ‘Will you come and take coffee with me before you leave again, Mr. Colter?’

  ‘I’d be honored, Miss—’

  ‘Jane. Please.’

  ‘All right. And if it comes to it, I’d feel more comfortable if you would use my given name, too.’

  We set off with Jane’s hand resting lightly on my arm, and it was good to no longer walk alone. As we started to make our way back up towards the hotel, however, a man pushed away from a porch-post sixty feet ahead of us and planted himself firmly in our path, left thumb hooked in his weapons belt, right palm just grazing the rubber grips of the .45 on his hip.

  At once my throat went tight and I thought, My God. Because it was him, Tod Lawson—and he looked set on making trouble.

  Chapter Five

  I slowed to a halt and Jane had no option but to slow with me. I heard the rustle of her collar as she turned her puzzled face towards me, heard a question take form on her beautiful lips, but I didn’t look back at her and I didn’t say a word, I just looked directly ahead, at Lawson, and rattlesnakes uncoiled inside me at the sight of him.

  He was, as I have already mentioned, a big, lean-flanked man, thin of face, with deep-set blue eyes, a hooked nose and a lipless, unsmiling mouth beneath a trimmed moustache the same premature white as the wispy hair under his high-crowned gray hat.

  As he set himself in front of us, there could be no mistaking the challenge in his posture. He was here for trouble, no doubt about it. And he would not leave again until he’d had it. But I did not care to oblige him, not then, for I had Jane at my side, and above all else her safety was paramount.

  She said, at just that moment, ‘Ashley...?’ and her fingers pressed into my sleeve, but I ignored her, my attention still trained on Lawson.

  He wore a dark blue shirt tucked into high-waisted California pants, and stovepipe boots bedecked with cruel, hand-forged prick spurs. Stiff leather cuffs with fancy snap and lace fastenings stretched from wrist to elbow, and the hands that projected from them were large and veined and shaded with downy white hair. He wore his Colt in a cutaway holster knotted to his thigh, and unless I missed my guess, the pocket would be greased to add speed to his draw.

  As I looked at him, a voice in my head said, Carr. Carr’s put him up to this. The revelation in no way surprised me.

  At last he raised his voice and spoke. He said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to show yourself, Colter. I hear you’ve been bad-mouthing me.’

  I felt Jane’s head snap forward again, to face the voice, and quickly I gave her back the basket and pushed her sideways, away from me, saying urgently, ‘Stand aside a moment, Jane.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Stand back, I said!’

  Lawson came a couple of slow steps closer, and I thrust Jane from my mind, hard though it was to do so.

  A few people, who had heard him speak, had congregated on the street, well out of the line of fire, to watch the confrontation unfold, and I sensed rather than saw still more curious faces pressed to store windows. But the boardwalk between us was empty.

  Forcing my voice to come out strong and even, I said, ‘You’ve heard wrong, Lawson.I have never bad-mouthed another man in my life. But I did make an accusation to Sheriff Carr about events that happened last night, and your name was mentioned there. Perhaps you would care to go over to his office now and straighten it all out?’

  He shook his head, just as I had known he would. ‘I don’t justify myself or my actions to the likes of you.’

  ‘You do,’ I corrected him, ‘when those actions leave one man more dead than alive, and his family burned out of house and home.’

  I heard a whisper race through the watchers, saw Lawson’s narrow blue eyes narrow still further. He spat, ‘You don’t get away with making accusations like that around me!’

  And he came a pace nearer, and his right hand brushed closer to the diamond crosses molded into his gun butt.

  I took my eyes off him for a moment, scanned the other side of the street for sign of Carr or his deputy, but saw neither. Putting my eyes back on Lawson, I noted that he had come nearer still, that his face was tightening the way I had seen so many others tighten before him, th
at violence was imminent, and so was death.

  He had come here to fight me, and I knew there would be no talking him out of it, and knowing the inevitability of it did nothing to make me feel any easier about it. But when I remembered what he and those other men had done to Franklin and Franklin’s family, I just wanted to get on with it.

  To that end, I pinned him with a hard eye and said, ‘Well, I’m not going to take back what I said, Lawson, and it’s for certain I’m not going to apologize to you for it, so where does that leave us?’

  He didn’t tell me, he showed me. His body seemed to shrink into a hunching crouch and his hand blurred for the .45, but as fast as he was, he was nowhere near as fast as me.

  It sounds conceited to say it now, though I do not mean it that way. But the truth of the matter is that what happened next came so naturally to me that I did not even have to think about it. My right hand seemed hardly to move: then, all at once, the .442 was leaping from leather, filling my palm, and I was bringing it up in a blue-black sweep of movement.

  Lawson brought his gun up too, and fired hastily. His bullet thudded into the boards two feet ahead of me and splinters danced over my boots. My .442 came up, fully extended, I pointed it at him, saw him realign his own weapon—

  Time slowed then: I saw the expression on his face change, his eyes widen, his mouth twist down at the corners; I saw his body-shape alter, saw him straighten and turn and shift sideways.

  I shot him.

  The bullet took him in the upper chest and shattered his sternum, and he jerked under the impact and back-pedaled, and his shirt burst open and blood surged forth in a crimson tide.

  But it didn’t end there.

  Even as I watched, he brought his gun back up, his face betraying the titanic effort it took to lift that two pounds and five ounces.

  Around us, women were screaming, men were yelling, children were crying. In that moment, Beaver Dam was a place of chaos and confusion and sheer, blind panic. But I blanked all that from my mind. It wasn’t important to me then, it did not matter. Only Lawson and his gun mattered.

  So I shot him again.

  The second bullet caught him roughly near the first and he jerked again and slammed over backwards without triggering any more.

  He was dead before he hit the boards.

  It all flooded in on me then, the noise and panic, and I let the gun drop to my side and swayed a little with reaction to the killing I had just committed.

  I saw movement at the edge of my vision and looked around as Carr appeared as if from nowhere, hustling across the street shock-faced, his too-close eyes shuttling back and forth between Lawson and I. He roared, ‘What happened here? What the hell do you think you’re doing here, Colter? I’ll take that gun! Come on, now!’

  I turned on him so suddenly that he pulled up sharp and very nearly backed away from me. I said quietly, ‘What’s going on here, Sheriff? You mean you don’t know?

  He opened and closed his mouth a couple of times, then jabbed his right hand at me, palm up, and flexed his thick ringers impatiently, trying to bully me into compliance. ‘I’ll take that iron!’ he said again. ‘You’re under arrest, damn you!’

  His thinking was plain enough to see. If I was not with the Association, then I must be against it. Therefore, I had to be removed, any way they could do it. At Carr’s suggestion, Lawson had tried it his way, and failed. Now Carr himself was about to make the same mistake.

  Deliberately, defiantly, I thrust the weapon back into leather, and he glared at me with fury darkening his face.

  ‘What’s the charge, Sheriff?’ a man in the crowd asked suddenly, and a few of the men surrounding him echoed the question.

  ‘Murder!’ Carr growled back over one beefy shoulder.

  That caused another stir, but of outrage, not support. ‘Murder be damned, Alex! This here feller shot that other one in self-defense!’

  ‘That’s right, shurf! That other feller drew fust!’

  Carr glowered at me, angered by his own impotence. But I was no longer concerned with the Beaver Dam sheriff. My eyes had come to rest on a rangy, black-hatted figure propping against a tie-rack on the other side of the street—Ward Jameson.

  I did not know how long he had been there, but it had probably been long enough for him to have seen my draw, gauged my speed, studied my technique.

  I looked at him, Carr, Lawson and all the others temporarily forgotten. There was fire in Jameson’s glassy brown eyes, and an easy smile on the mouth that lurked beneath his thick, dark moustache. Maybe he had seen enough of my draw to know that his was better. Maybe that was why he was smiling. Maybe he now knew for sure that he had the beating of me.

  Then he lifted one hand slowly to the brim of his hat and threw me a measured salute. One half of his face was bruised and puffed, I saw, and the sight of it gave me an absurd and uncharacteristic sense of satisfaction.

  I did not bother to return the salute. There was no need. We both knew we would be seeing each other again before this business was finished, and that our meeting then would be through gunsmoke.

  He turned and walked away, his pace casual and unhurried, the man himself apparently not in the least bit concerned that he had just seen one of his own gunsels cut down. I wondered then if he had put Lawson up to it as well as Carr: if he had deliberately sacrificed one of his own men just to see how fast I really was, and thus give himself an advantage when we finally went against each other, as I knew eventually we must.

  Jane came back into my mind then, and I turned to find her still cringing beside the wall where I had thrust her, slim frame trembling visibly, face as pale as parchment, lips moving, green eyes searching blankly. I went to her, reached for her, felt pain when she flinched under my touch.

  Then she realized who I was and reached for me too, and said, ‘A-Ashley...did you...that man...is he...?’

  She didn’t wait for me to reply. She already knew the answer. All at once she dropped the basket and threw herself against me, buried her face in my chest and started crying, and I held her and tried to comfort her, and holding her was a comfort for me, too.

  Her father came pushing through the crowd just then, demanding to know what was happening. Jane and I broke apart as he came upon Lawson and pulled up sharp. When he looked up again, his jowly, normally-ruddy face was bleached of color. He staggered towards us, his tiny eyes travelling from Jane to me, then back to Jane. Around us, it suddenly grew deathly silent.

  Finally, Zachary Dawes looked back at me and gestured to the gun in my belt. ‘You did... that?’ he demanded hoarsely, glancing back at Lawson.

  I nodded dumbly.

  ‘While you were in the company of my little girl?’

  Recovering herself, Jane said, ‘Daddy—’

  But he paid her no mind, and his eyes compelled me to reply. I said, ‘I did not seek the trouble out, Mr. Dawes, and I apologize to you, and Jane also, for the upset I know it to have caused.’

  He stood absolutely still, not really hearing me, wearing that same stunned look that everyone else there was wearing. He wasn’t interested in apologies. He didn’t even want to know what had started the fight in the first place. No: he was too busy thinking more about what might have happened, what might have happened to Jane, and I didn’t blame him.

  All at once he reached for Jane, grabbed her by one arm and pulled her towards him. Again she cried, ‘Daddy!’ But still Dawes ignored her. Stiffly he said, ‘Yesterday you saved my little girl from serious injury, sir, and for that you have my gratitude. But I would be obliged if you did not see her again!’

  And before I could say anything in reply, he dragged her away with him, the crowd drawing back to allow them through, then pushing forward again to hide them from my sight.

  I left town quickly after that, badly shaken and in need of solitude, but I was not so much affected by the gunfight as I was by the thought of never seeing Jane again.

  I tried to tell myself that Dawes had been right, that
I was no good for his daughter. But still I ached to see her, and feel again that calming influence of hers working to hush my tortured soul.

  Eventually my regret turned to anger, but I was not angry with Dawes, I was angry with myself for behaving so foolishly, and taking too much for granted. There was no future for me with Jane. How could there be? I had only known her for a day, if that. And yet, now that I came to think on it, it was almost as if I had known her before, perhaps in some earlier existence, that we were not so much beginning a new relationship as picking up from where we had previously left off.

  To make my sense of loss more acute, I felt that Jane had also experienced pretty much the same feeling.

  In bleak mood, I headed for Franklin’s place, what was left of it. I had nowhere else to go. When it finally came into view, I tried to put everything that had happened in town from my mind, but it wasn’t easy.

  I saw that Franklin’s wife—I did not know her first name—had not been idle during my absence. She had salvaged as much as she could from the wreckage of the house and rigged up a blanket shelter further back in the trees. I rode in slowly, so that she would see me coming and have plenty of time to identify me. As I reined down and dismounted before the makeshift camp, she came to meet me with her husband’s Winchester held athwart her chest. The sun was already slanting westward, spreading saffron rays down through the twisted branches to give the glade a smoky look.

  I asked after her husband. She told me that he had been sleeping peacefully all afternoon. I nodded at that. ‘Good. The doctor will be coming out to see him later on.’

  I off-saddled, hobbled the mustang, watered him and then turned him loose to graze. Mrs. Franklin watched me for a long time, then shoved a strand of fair hair back from her pale face and said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Colter. You’ve been very kind.’ She said it awkwardly, the way people do when they’re not used to being shown a little generosity.