It was a time when men shot first and asked questions afterward. The notorious outlaw, Sam Bass, was riding the trails, robbing banks and trains. John Wesley Hardin was running up his score of twenty-seven men killed. King Fisher had 500 men riding to his orders on both sides of the border, King Fisher with his tiger-skin chaps and silver-loaded sombrero. Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, Billy Tilghman, Ben Thompson, and a hundred other gun slicks and toughs were riding the trails, acting as marshals in towns, or gambling.
The long fences were cutting down the range. The big ranches would still have range, but there would be too little grass for the cattle of the small ranchers. For them it was the end, or a battle for survival, and such a battle could have but one result. Yet the small ranchers were banding together. They were wearing guns.
From the crest of a ridge, Lance looked over the valley of Lost Creek and could see the long silvery strands of barbed wire stretching away as far as the eye could reach.
“I don’t know, about this wire business,” he mused, patting the buckskin on the shoulder. “I don’t know who’s right. There’s arguments for both sides. It gives everybody a chance to improve breedin’ and have crops, and anybody can see the longhorn is on the way out. Too little beef. These whitefaces now, they have something. They carry a lot more beef than a longhorn. You an’ me, Buck, mebbe we’re on the way out, too. We’re free, and we go where we please, and we don’t like fences. If they build fences, this country is finished for us. We’ll have to go to Dakota, or mebbe to Mexico or the Argentine.”
The buckskin turned down the little trail through the tumbled boulders and cedar, a dim, concealed little trail that the sure-footed mountain horse followed even in the vague light of late evening. This was not an honest man’s trail, but Lance was not worried for he knew the manner of man he rode to see. That man who would never be less than honest, but he would fight to the last ditch for what he believed to be his own.
The trail dipped into a hollow several hundred yards across, and, when Lance had ridden halfway across it, he dismounted and led his horse into a sheltered position behind a boulder. It would be a long wait, for he was early. Sitting against a boulder, he watched the declining sun fall slowly westward, watched the shadows creep up the rocky walls, and the sunlight splash color upon the cliffs.
He must have fallen asleep, for when he awakened the stars were out, and he judged several hours must have passed.
It was quiet, yet when Lance lifted his eyes, it was in time to catch the gleam of starlight on a pistol barrel aimed over a rock. Then, even as he moved, the muzzle flowered with flame. As he hurled himself desperately to one side, he heard the bullet strike, then again, and something struck him a wicked blow on the back of the head. He tumbled on his face among the boulders. In his fading consciousness he seemed to feel something hot and sticky along his cheek…
The first thing Lance knew, a long time later, was the throbbing pain in his skull as though a thousand tiny iron men were hammering with red-hot hammers at the shell of his skull, pounding and pounding. He opened his eyes to see a distant star shining through a crevice in the rocks across the hollow. Then he saw something long and dark lying upon the ground. It was like the body of a man.
Turning over painfully, Lance got his hands under him and pushed himself up to his knees. For a long time then he was still, and his head swayed and seemed like an enormous, uncontrollable thing. He forced his eyes to focus, but the starlight was too slight to help him to see more than he had.
Then he got a hand on the rock beside him, and pushed himself to his feet. There he remained, leaning against the rock. One hand dropped instinctively to his gun on the right side, then he felt for the other. Both were there.
The first shot, if there had been more than one, had missed him. It had either ricocheted off a rock then and hit him, or else the unseen killer had fired again. He apparently had been left for dead. Feeling of his skull, he could understand why, for his hair was matted with blood.
Feeling around, his head throbbing fiercely, he found his hat and hung it around his neck by the rawhide chin strap. His head was too swollen for him to wear the sombrero. Stumbling to where he had left his horse, he found Buck waiting patiently. The yellow horse pricked up his ears and whinnied softly.
“Sorry, Buck,” Lance whispered. “You should’ve been in the stable by now, with a good bait of oats.”
He had swung into the saddle and turned down into the hollow before he remembered the shape on the ground. Then he saw it again.
There was more than the shape, for there was a standing horse. He dismounted and, gun in hand, walked cautiously over to the body. It was that of a stranger. In the vague starlight he could see only the outline of the man’s features, but it was no one he knew. Then he saw the white of the envelope.
Stooping, his head pounding, he picked it up. There was writing on the back. By the light of a shielded match, he read a painful scrawl:
Mort needs help bad. I wuz dry-gulched. He koodnt kum.
It was written on the back of a letter addressed to Sam Carter, Lost Creek Ranch. Scratched by a dying man.
Thrusting the letter into his pocket, Lance wheeled his horse and rode away down the trail.
Lost Creek Ranch lay ahead and to the south, but he turned the buckskin again and rode away from the trail, skirting a cluster of rocks and heading for the ranch, whose position he had ascertained from Rusty, and knew from a map that had been sent him. He drew his rifle from its boot and put it across his saddle bow.
Still several miles away, he saw a glow in the sky. A glow of burning buildings. His eyes grew hard, and he spoke urgently to Buck. The long-geared yellow horse quickened his pace.
Lance passed what must have been Mort Davis’s fence, but some of the posts were down, and the wire was gone. Lance refrained from watching the fire, keeping his eyes on the surrounding darkness. Maybe he was too late. A house was burning, and perhaps Mort Davis was dead. Suddenly he saw a man run out of the shadows.
“That you, Joe?” the man shouted.
Lance reined in, and swung his horse on an angle to the man. The fellow came closer.
“What’s the matter?” he demanded. “Can’t you hear me?”
The speaker was one of the two men Lance had whipped in the bar earlier that day. They recognized each other at the same instant. With a startled gasp the fellow went for his gun. Lance pulled the trigger without shifting the rifle, and the man grabbed his stomach, sliding from the saddle with a groan.
Chapter IV
Without looking down, Lance started toward the glow of the fire, his face set and angry. Had they killed Mort?
They had not. Lance was still several hundred yards away when he saw a rifle flash and heard the heavy bark of Mort’s old Sharps. Several shots replied.
Touching spurs to the buckskin, Lance whipped into the circle near the flames at a dead run, snapping three quick shots into a group of men near a low adobe wall. It was a gamble at that speed, but the attacking group was bunched close. There was a cry of pain, and one of them whirled about. He was fully in the light and his chest loomed up. Lance put a shot into him as he flashed abreast of the man, heard a bullet whip past his own ear. Then he was gone into the darkness beyond the light of the flames.
Sliding from saddle, Lance put the rifle to his shoulder and shot twice. Reloading in haste, he began smoking up every bit of cover near the burning house, taking targets when they offered, and seeking the darkest spots of cover at other times. When his rifle was emptied, he dropped it to his side and opened up with a six-gun.
Men broke from cover and ran for their horses. The old Sharps bellowed in protest at their escape, and one of the men fell headlong. He scrambled up, but made only three steps before he pitched over again, dangerously near the flames.
Again Lance reloaded, then walked forward.
“Mort!” he called. “Come out of there, you old wolf! I know your shootin’!”
A tall, dark-bea
rded man in a battered black felt hat sauntered down from the circle of rocks at the foot of the cliff.
“Looks like you got here just in time, friend,” he said. “You see Sam?”
Briefly Lance explained. Then he jerked his head in the direction the attackers had taken. “Who were they?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Mebbe Webb Steele’s boys. Him and Lord want me out of here, the worst way.” He scratched the stubble on his lean jaws. “Let’s have us a look.”
Three men had been left behind. With the man Lance had killed out on the prairie, that made four. It had been a costly lesson. Well, Lance told himself, they should have known better than to tackle an old he-wolf like Mort Davis.
A lean, gangling sixteen-year-old strolled down from the rocks. He carried a duplicate of his father’s Sharps. He stood beside his father and stared at the bodies.
“Don’t look like nobody I ever seen,” Mort said thoughtfully, “but Webb and Chet both been a-gettin’ in some new hands.”
“Pap,” the youngster said, “I seen this one in Botalla trailin’ with Bert Polti.”
Lance studied the man’s face. It wasn’t one of the men he knew. “Mort,” he asked, “where do the Brockmans figger in this?”
The old man puckered his brow. “The Brockmans? I didn’t know they was in it. Abel Brockman rode for Steele once, but not no more. He got to sparkin’ Tana, and the old man let him go. He didn’t like it none, neither.”
“It don’t look right,” Lance said as he rubbed his jaw reflectively. “Lord and Steele are supposed t’be fightin’, but so far all I’ve seen is this gang that trails with Polti. They jumped me in town.”
“Watch them Brockmans,” Mort said seriously. “They’re poison mean, and they never fight alone. Always the two of ’em together, and they got this gunfightin’ as a team worked out mighty smooth. They always get you in a spot where you can’t get the two to once.”
Lance looked around. “Burned all your buildin’s, didn’t they? Any place you can live?”
“Uhn-huh. We got us a little cave back up here. We lived there before we built us a house. We’ll make out. We’re used to gettin’ along without much. This here’s the best place we had for a long time if we can keep it.”
“You’ll keep it,” Lance promised, his face harsh and cold.
Mort Davis had done his share in making the West a place to live. He was getting old now, and deserved the rewards of his work. No big outfit, or outlaws either, was going to drive him off, if Lance could help it.
“Who knew this Sam Carter was to meet me?” he asked. “Or that you were?”
“Nobody I know of,” said old Mort. “Carter’s a ’puncher who started him a little herd over back of the butte. We worked together some. He was settin’ for chuck when them riders come down on us. I asked him to get you.”
Lance sketched the trouble in Botalla, then added the account of his run-in with Tana Steele. Mort grinned at that.
“I’d a give a purty to seen that,” he said. “Tana’s had her head for a long time. Drives that there buckboard like a crazy woman! At that, she can ride nigh anythin’ that wears hair, and she will! Best lookin’ woman around here, too, unless it’s Nita Riordan.”
“The woman at Apple Cañon?” Lance asked quickly.
“Yep. All woman, too. Runs that shebang by herself. Almost, that is. Got her a Yaqui half-breed to help. Ain’t nobody to fool with, that Injun.”
“You better hole up and stay close to home, Mort,” Lance said after a minute. “I’m dead tired, but I’ve some ridin’ to do. I caught a couple of hours’ sleep back in the hollow before the trouble.”
He swung into saddle and started back over the trail. It was late and he was tired, but he needed more information before he could even start to figure things out. One thing he knew. He must talk to Lord and Steele and try to stop the trouble until they could get together. And he must get more information.
Four of the enemy had died, but even as he told himself that, he remembered that none of the dead men had been in any sense a key man. They were just straw men, men who carried guns and worked for hire, and more could be found to fill their places.
And then Sam Carter was gone. A good man, Sam. A man who could punch cows, and who had enough stuff in him to start his own place, and to fight for what he knew was right. No country could afford to lose men like that.
Suddenly, on the inspiration of the moment, Lance whirled the buckskin from the trail and headed for the Webb Steele spread. He could try talking to Steele, anyway.
He was well into the yard before a man stepped from the shadows.
“All right, stranger! Keep your hands steady. Now light, easy-like, and walk over here.”
Lance obeyed without hesitation, carefully keeping his hands in front of him in the light from the ranch house window. A big man stepped from the shadows and walked up to him. Instinctively Lance liked the hard, rugged face of the other man.
“Who are you?” the man demanded.
“Name of Lance. Ridin’ by and thought I’d drop in and have a talk with Webb Steele.”
“Lance?” Something sparked in the man’s eyes. “You the gent had the run-in with Miss Tana?”
“That’s me. She still sore?”
“Lance”—the older man chuckled—“shore as I’m Jim Weston, you’ve let yourself in for a packet of trouble. That gal never forgets! When she come in this afternoon, she was fit to be tied!” He holstered his gun. “What you aimin’ to see Webb about?”
“Stoppin’ this war. Ain’t no sense to it.”
“What’s your dicker in this?” Weston asked shrewdly. “Man don’t do nothin’ unless he’s got a angle somewheres.”
“What’s your job here, Weston?” Lance said.
“Foreman,” Weston announced. “Why?”
“Well, what’s the ranch makin’ out of this war? What are you makin’?”
“Not a cussed thing, cowboy. She’s keepin’ me up nights, and we got all our ’punchers guardin’ fence when they should be tendin’ to cows. We’re losin’ cattle, losin’ time, losin’ wire, and losin’ money.”
“Shore. Well, you don’t like that. I don’t like it, either. But my own angle is Mort Davis. Mort’s a friend of mine, and, Weston, Mort’s goin’ to keep his place in Lost Creek. He’ll keep it, or, by glory, there’ll be Lord and Steele ’punchers planted under every foot of it.”
“Think you’re pretty salty, don’t you?” Weston demanded, but there was a glint of understanding in his eye. “Well, mebbe you are.”
“I’ve been around, Weston. But that don’t matter. You and me can talk. You’re an old trail hand yourself. You’re a buffalo hunter, too. What you got against Mort?”
“Nothin’. He’s a sight better hand and a whole lot better man than lots of ’em ridin’ for this ranch now.” He shook his head. “I know what you mean, mister. I know exactly. But I don’t make the rules for the ranch. Webb does…Webb, or Tana.”
They stepped inside the ranch house, and Weston tapped on an inner door. At a summons, he opened it. Big Webb Steele was tipped back in his chair across the table from the door. His shirt was open two buttons, showing a hairy chest, and his hard level eyes seemed to stare through and through Lance. To his right was Tana, and, as she saw Lance, she came to her feet instantly, her eyes blazing. Across the table was a tall, handsome man in a plain black suit of fine cut, a man with blue-gray eyes and a small, neatly trimmed blond mustache.
“You!” Tana burst out. “You have the nerve to come out here?”
“I reckon, ma’am,” Lance drawled, and he smiled slyly. “I didn’t reckon you carried your whip in the house. Or do you carry it everywhere?”
“You take a high hand with my daughter, Lance, if that’s your name,” Webb rumbled, glancing from Tana to Lance and back. “What happened between you two?”
“Steele,” Lance said, grinning a little, “your daughter was drivin’ plumb reckless, and we had a few words in wh
ich I attempted to explain that the roads wasn’t all built for her own pleasure.”
Webb chuckled. “Young feller, you got a nerve. But Tana can fight her own battles, so heaven have mercy on your soul.”
“Well,” Lance said, “you spoke of me takin’ a high hand with your daughter. If my hand had been applied where it should have been, it might’ve done a lot more good.”
Webb grinned again, and his hard eyes twinkled. “Son, I’d give a hundred head of cows to see the man as could do that. It’d be right interestin’.”
“Father!” Tana protested. “This man insulted me.”
“Ma’am,” Lance interrupted, “I’d shore admire to continue this argument some other time. Right now I’ve come to see Mister Steele on business.”
“What business?” Webb Steele demanded, cutting short Tana’s impending outburst.
“War business. You’re edgin’ into a three-cornered war that’s goin’ to cost you plenty. It’s goin’ to cost Chet Lord plenty, too. I come to see about stoppin’ it. I want to get a peace talk between you and Chet Lord an’ Mort Davis.”
“Mort Davis?” Webb exploded. “That no-account nester ain’t goin’ to make no peace talk with me! He’ll get off that claim or we’ll run him off!” Webb’s eyes were blazing. “You tell that long-geared highbinder to take his stock and get!”
“He’s caused a lot of trouble here,” the man with the blond mustache said, “cutting fences and the like. He’s a menace to the range.” He looked up at Lance. “I’m Victor Bonham,” he added. “Out from New York.”
Lance had seated himself, and he studied Bonham for an instant, then looked back at Webb Steele, ignoring the Eastern man.
“Mister Steele,” he said, “you’ve got the rep of bein’ a square shooter. You come West with some durned good men, some of the real salty ones. Well, so did Mort Davis. Mort went farther West than you. He went on to Santa Fé and to Salt Lake. He helped open this country up. Then he finds him a piece of ground and settles down. What’s so wrong about that?” Lance shifted his chair a little, then went on. “He fought Comanches and Apaches. He built him a place. He cleaned up that water hole. He did things in Lost Creek you’d never have done. You’d never have bothered about it but for this fencin’ business. Well, Mort Davis moved in on that place, and he’s a-goin’ to stay. I, for one, mean to see he stays.” He leaned forward. “Webb Steele, I ain’t been hereabouts long, but I been here long enough to know something mighty funny is goin’ on. Mort Davis was burned out tonight, by somebody’s orders, an’ I don’t think the orders were yours or Chet Lord’s, either. Well, as I said, Mort stays right where he is, and, if he dies, I’m goin’ to move in an’ bring war to these hills like nobody ever saw before.”
Kilkenny 02 - A Man Called Trent (v5.0) Page 3