Paint the Hills Red

by Ron Schwab

  Paint the Hills Red

  Ron Schwab

  Poor Coyote Press

  Contents

  Also by Ron Schwab

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Afterword

  New Release

  Also by Ron Schwab

  Sioux Sunrise

  Paint the Hills Red

  Ghosts Around the Campfire

  The Lockes

  Last Will

  Medicine Wheel

  The Law Wranglers

  Deal with the Devil

  Mouth of Hell (forthcoming)

  The Coyote Saga

  Night of the Coyote

  Return of the Coyote (forthcoming)

  PAINT THE HILLS RED

  by Ron Schwab

  Poor Coyote Press

  PO Box 6105

  Omaha, NE 68106

  www.PoorCoyotePress.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by Ron Schwab

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews—without written permission from its publisher.

  ISBN: 1-943421-04-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1-943421-04-6

  1

  DAN MCCLURE STARED at the blank canvas that was perched on the wooden easel in front of him, soaking in the warmth of the afternoon sun that caressed his naked back. He had moved his materials outside hoping that the fresh spring air would lift his black mood and release his creative juices. But although his mood had brightened, he had not yet touched a brush to the forbidding canvas. He knew what he was going to paint, but the first stroke of a new painting had always been agonizing. It was as though the virgin canvas resisted his touch, challenged him to invade its cloak of white. But inevitably he would confront the cold and unresponsive canvas and seduce it with all the love and tenderness he could muster, make it warm and pliable to his touch. He knew that, for in the end, the decision was simple: he had to paint.

  He sat on a three-legged stool in the middle of the quiet, barren ranch yard with the oils on his palette turning dry and crusty in the sun. A gold-breasted meadowlark warbled from the corral fence near the barn and drew Dan’s eyes away from the canvas. The bird beckoned him to take a walk through the ponderosa-studded hills that loomed behind the ranch buildings, and he surrendered easily. He stood up and placed his brush and palette on the stool. Then, like a drowsy mountain lion, stretched his tall, lean frame, working the stiffness out of his muscular arms and back. His arms stretched skyward like a savage praying to his gods.

  Suddenly a rifle cracked from the trees behind him and drove a bullet into his back. The bullet hit him like a sledge, and he pitched forward, crashing into the easel and toppling over it before he sunk to the ground and collapsed atop the stretched canvas.

  He lay there motionless, helpless, as a terrifying numbness spread over his back and consumed his body. He was dying, he thought, strangely unafraid as he drifted into darkness, and a river of blood snaked its way over his back and down his ribcage before dripping onto the white canvas and painting an expanding crimson lake there.

  2

  THE TWO RIDERS reined in their horses at the sound of the gunshot and paused, listening as it echoed through the hills that surrounded the grassy valley in the heart of Nebraska’s Pine Ridge country. Megan Grant might have been mistaken for an Indian as she sat astride her pinto gelding, clad in faded blue denims and a dusty, well-worn buckskin shirt, her straight raven hair falling from beneath a wide-brimmed Plainsman’s hat and dropping to mid-back. From a distance, few would have guessed she was a woman, for in the saddle, her slight and slender figure gave her a boyish appearance.

  She turned to her companion, a stocky, grizzled cowhand with a leathery face and deep bird-track creases extending from the corners of his eyes.

  “That came from over by Ike Hanson’s place,” Megan said. “Winchester, I’d say.”

  Solomon Pyle shifted in his saddle and spat a brown, gooey wad of tobacco that made one cheek look like a chipmunk’s. “Hunter, maybe. Them hills is fat with white-tail lately,” he croaked in a gravel voice.

  “Ike’s place is deserted,” she said. “He was fretting about squatters taking over when he moved to Omaha. Suppose we ought to take a look?”

  The old man cocked his head to one side and, squinting against the sun, looked back at her poker-faced. “What if I say no?”

  “I think I’ll take a look anyway,” she said tossing her head haughtily. Then she kneed her horse and took off at a dead run across the meadow. “Go on home, old timer,” she called back. “You look tired.” She gave her pinto free rein, and it flew through the lush grass at a fast, even gait, and she felt like a bird leaning into the gentle spring breeze with her hair flying about her neck and her body gliding easily with the motion of the horse. She did not look back again, for she knew that Sol would follow.

  Solomon Pyle had been with her on the small ranch north of El Paso at her birth some twenty-one years before, and he had been there when her mother died five years later and again when Ben Grant pulled up stakes in Texas and headed north for the new cattle country in the Nebraska Panhandle he had heard tales about. And he was still with her again little more than a year ago when she had arrived home and found her father, or what a sawed-off shotgun had left of him, sprawled in the open doorway of their ranch house.

  Yes, Solomon Pyle had always been there. But why? She had a feeling there was a story that had not yet been told.

  “Maggie, hold up,” came Sol’s voice as she neared the Hanson place.

  There was an urgency in his voice that cautioned her, and she slowed the gelding while Sol caught up. When he drew even with Megan he gestured to the northeast toward a feathery plume of dust that hovered where a rider had just disappeared over the crest of a sandstone ridge. They slowed their horses to a walk.

  “That fellar was goin’ like a cat with his tail afire,” Sol growled.

  “But what would he have been shooting at?” she asked. “And why was he in such a hurry?”

  “A man don’t ride like that if he just took hisself a shot at a deer. He was high-tailing it away from Ike’s place. While you was riding hell-bent for election, I saw him movin’ on. If you’d spend more time looking and less time ridin’ the hell out of that poor horse, you’d learn something, sis.”

  She pretended she did not hear his words. Sol was preaching again and a retort would simply trigger another sermon.

  They came onto a wagon trail that left two shallow dimples in the grass and angled northward up the valley toward Ike Hanson’s. When Megan saw the outline of the leaning, lopsided Hanson barn, she dug her boot heels gently into the gelding’s flanks, and the horse lu
rched forward, ready to race again.

  But Solomon Pyle called her up short. “Maggie, hold up, damn it!”

  She obeyed, realizing instantly she was behaving like a giddy tenderfoot. What had gotten into her? She had better sense.

  Sol sidled up next to her. “You let me ride in first. You trail me a ways behind. Be ready to back me up, just in case.”

  Her hand moved to the stock of her rifle, and she slipped it out of the saddle holster. Sol had taken charge now. It would be unthinkable to go against his instincts when danger might be near. She would subdue her rebellious streak for now. She had learned the hard way. For a fleeting moment she wondered again if Ben Grant might still be alive if she had not behaved so childishly and so impetuously the year before.

  She shook off the thought and nudged the pinto up the wagon trail lagging some hundred feet behind Sol as he rode cautiously to the fringe of the ranch yard.

  She could not make out Sol’s face as his horse feinted to the right and then to the left. But she knew that those translucent, all-seeing eyes would be searching the surrounding terrain like those of a wary pronghorn approaching an open meadow. And Sol’s nose would be twitching like a birddog’s, too. He claimed he could smell trouble, sniff it out, within a mile. She more than half believed him.

  He wheeled his horse toward her, waved her in, and turned back and galloped into the ranch yard. By the time she got there, the old cowboy had dismounted and was kneeling over the prostrate form of a man. A dead man, she thought. The scene reminded her of a steer slaughtering.

  She dismounted and ran to Sol’s side. The man lay ominously still. His ashen face was half-buried in the dry dust. The fresh thick blood that slicked his bare back flowed slowly in tiny rivulets that went across his flesh in all directions like a bloody spider web, finally forming crimson pools on the earth and the artist’s canvas beneath him. “Is . . . is he dead?” she asked.

  Sol dug an old kerchief out of his hip pocket and commenced clearing away the partially coagulated blood that the warm sun had already started baking on Dan McClure’s back. “Nope. He’s bad enough, but looks a hell of a lot worse than it is.” Sol’s fingers probed gently at the scarlet flesh a few inches to the left of Dan’s spine and near the base of the ribcage where the bullet had entered. “Hardly bleeding here anymore.” He leaned over and slid his hand along Dan McClure’s ribcage and under his chest and then pulled it back. The hand was slippery wet with dark red blood. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “He’s bleedin’ like a stuck pig from his belly side. We gotta plug that quick or he’s a gonner.” Sol started to peel off his shirt, exposing faded red long johns. He slipped the Bowie knife out of its sheath at his waist and handed the knife and shirt to Megan. “Here, cut this up, sis. It ain’t clean, but it’s all we got.”

  As Megan fashioned crude compresses, Sol folded the bloodied kerchief and pressed it against the back wound and then rolled Dan gently over. “Whiter than a damn ghost,” he mumbled.

  “But his breathing’s steady,” Megan observed. She handed Sol a broad strip of soiled flannel.

  Sol rolled the cloth up quickly and, with a deftness that belied his gnarled hands, pressed it against the bleeding, pulsating hole in Dan’s belly. “He ain’t dead yet, but come within a cat’s whisker. Looks strong as a golderned bull.”

  He was a big man, Megan thought. Tall, very tall. And handsome in a rugged sort of way. Thick wiry hair, reddish-brown, almost the color of ponderosa bark. His face appeared chiseled and hard like Wyoming granite, and his arms and shoulders were thickly muscled although his body had a hungry-dog leanness to it. She wondered how old he was. Early thirties?

  “Meggie, did you hear me? What in tarnation’s gotten into you?”

  She looked up. “What? Did you say something?”

  “Good Lord, gal, are you deaf? I said there’s a bucket over there by the well. Get some water and we’ll try to clean this hombre up and see what he looks like under this mess. I need help, and there you are squattin’ on your haunches eyeing him like he was a prized stallion.”

  She could feel the heat spread across her cheeks as they flushed with embarrassment, and then she bolted up. “All right, I’ll get your damned water. There’s no reason to get mean and crotchety about it.”

  “Ah, Meggie,” Sol whispered to himself as she stomped off to retrieve the water. “What’s to become of you? You’re prime and in season, and we’re hog-tied in these hills and in the middle of a range war to boot. This ain’t no place for a young filly. Or a dried up old stud horse, either,” he added, shaking his head resignedly.

  “Just about got that blood dammed up,” Sol said as Megan dabbed the moist cloth at the bloody torso. “Know what I think?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “We just heard one shot. This hole ain’t deep, just spitting a lot of blood. I think the damn bullet went in his back and rode his rib bone around the front and came out here. It knocked him loco, but if he didn’t lose too much blood, he just might pull through.”

  “He’ll pull through all right,” Megan said firmly. “I know he will.”

  No sooner had she said it than Dan moaned and moved his head groggily from side to side. Megan dipped a fresh cloth in the bucket and placed it on Dan’s forehead. His eyes blinked several times and then opened. They seemed glazed with pain and confusion. And they were deep mahogany brown. She had hoped they would be brown.

  Dan started to lift himself up, but fell back. Sol put a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Take it easy, son. We’re friends. You’ll be all right if you don’t push yourself. But you ain’t going no place for a few days.”

  Megan watched as the stranger tried to focus his eyes on Sol. “Who . . . what happened?”

  “You took a slug in the back, son, but near as I can tell, the bullet went out on its own and didn’t hit no vitals. You bled a bucket, though. You’ve got a couple of nasty wounds. I’ll tell you straight out, you’re gonna be a sick man for a spell. You’ll feel a hell of a lot worse before you feel better, but I got a hunch you’ll make it.”

  Dan shifted his body slightly and winced. “I don’t know how I could feel much worse,” he said.

  “You will. Take my word for it.”

  “Sol,” Megan scolded, “don’t be such a pessimist. The man doesn’t need that kind of talk right now.”

  “The man’s entitled to the truth, Meggie. That’s all I gave him.”

  Suddenly Megan was aware that the stranger was staring at her as if he had just, at that moment, become aware of her presence.

  “The young lady’s Megan Grant,” Sol said. “She owns the Bar G that joins this place on the west. I’m Solomon Pyle. I work for Miss Grant. Sort of anyhow.”

  Without drawing his eyes away from Megan, Dan replied with a low, raspy voice, “I’m Dan McClure. I just bought this ranch. I moved in about a week ago.” He turned his head back to Sol. “My first caller wasn’t very friendly.”

  Sol rubbed the stubble on his chin with his free hand. “You didn’t know about the trouble we got here?”

  Dan’s brow furrowed. “What trouble?”

  “Well, that’s another story, friend. It’ll hold.”

  Megan was incredulous. This stranger bought Ike Hanson’s place? Impossible. Ike would not have sold it without giving her first chance. They had been friends and neighbors. Ike’s place had only two sections. Ike knew he could have set his price and the Bar G would have raised it some way. They would have mortgaged to the hilt if they had to. No, Ike would never have let the place go to a stranger.

  Suddenly, she did not like this man. He was lying. She could restrain herself no longer. “You didn’t buy this place from Ike,” she snapped.

  The man looked at her with those mahogany eyes. Eyes that now seemed to be trying to see what was behind her own. Eyes that made her unexplainably uneasy and skittish.

  “Isaac Hanson, ma’am, that’s the name of the old codger who sold it to me. We made t
he deal in Omaha. Check with the Land Office and see for yourself. I had the deed recorded before I ever saw the ranch.”

  “I will see for myself,” she said. “I don’t believe you. Ike wouldn’t have done that. And buying it without seeing it . . . that’s some tale, mister.”

  “It’s the truth.” Dan’s voice faded and he slipped back into unconsciousness.

  “Damn your hide, Meggie,” Sol scolded. “Now look what you’ve done. You got no cause to pick a fight with this fellar. Least ways let him get back on his feet. I swear, sometimes you’re meaner than a rattler on a hot skillet.”

  Megan cooled quickly. Sol didn’t have to tell her that her temper had gotten the best of her again. “What are we going to do about him?”

  “Well, I suppose if it was up to you we’d leave him here for the buzzards.”

  The old devil. He always had to have the last jab. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have talked to him that way. But I do think he’s lying.”

  “Liar or not, we can’t leave him here.”

  “Should we take him over to our place?”

  “We shouldn’t move him no more than we got to. I see he’s got a buckboard there, but if we juggle him in that for four or five miles, he’ll be bleeding like a mountain creek again. No, we’d better put him up in his house. I can stay the night, but I want you to hightail it home before nightfall. Tell the boys what happened and maybe post a guard tonight. Sounds like Dunkirk’s gettin’ set to stir things up again.”

  “How do we get Mr. McClure here in the house?” she asked. “We can’t carry a man that size.”

  “Well, sis, if you can keep from cuttin’ the poor devil up with your tongue, we’ll just get him woke back up, and he’ll have to help us out a little. You’re right about that. There’s too much man there for us.”