Feud On The Mesa

by Lauran Paine

  Caleb got up and stretched. It had been a long day for him. “I’m goin’ to get some sleep. Tonight’ll probably be about the best for sleepin’ for the next few days.”

  Brit nodded wryly. “You’re more’n likely right at that, Caleb. Well, I’m goin’ back out to the ranch to-night, but I’ll be back in Lodgepole by the time you’ve eaten breakfast. Don’t want to miss nothin’, y’know.”

  Caleb ate at Sally Tate’s café. It was a very frugal place with hard puncheon benches along a low counter of new fir. Sally was the orphaned daughter of some emigrants that didn’t make it. She was a honey blonde with level, violet blue eyes, a luscious full mouth, and a figure that made all the Lodgepole cowboys sigh. Her nose wrinkled across the tiny saddle of freckles when she saw Caleb enter.

  He smiled back. “Sally, you’re the prettiest woman in this café, y’know it?”

  Her laugh was disturbing in a throaty way. “An’ you’re the prettiest man. Chili beans?”

  “I reckon.”

  Caleb ate slowly and Sally leaned over the counter. “Caleb, is there something wrong in Lodgepole?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Every cowboy who’s been in here today acts like he’s afraid to kid me.”

  Caleb’s deep eyes squinted in amusement. “Well, I’d say that was the best sign in the world. There’s a Texas herd camped on this side of the sink.”

  “Oh.” It sounded very small and the large violet eyes were on him with an unusual gravity. “Are you mixed up in it?”

  “Uh, well, not exactly. I’m not a cattleman. I’m an old friend of Jack Britt’s though. He and I used to scout for the Army together.”

  Sally’s taffy hair waved when she nodded. “If Jack gets into it, you will, too, because he’s your compadre, is that it?”

  “Well, sort of. Y’see___”

  Sally straightened with an exasperated look on her face. “You men! You’re like little children. This is no concern of yours, Caleb Doom. Besides, if there’s trouble, you might get hurt.” Sally caught herself and blushed wildly.

  Caleb looked up, a spoonful of chili beans poised in his hand. At that precise moment, the door slammed gently and Sally’s flustered face raised and her eyes went quickly over the tall, recklessly smiling two-gun man who was drinking in her freshness with languid, bold eyes. The newcomer frowned a little and his small, dark eyes read Sally’s embarrassment and his Lauran Paine gaze dropped abruptly to Caleb’s broad back. “This here squawman botherin’ you, ma’am?”

  Caleb felt the sting of the insinuation. Many new-comers to the northern country thought every white man who wore fringed buckskin was a squawman. Most, however, were very careful with the term. Graveyards all over the West were populated by men who had insulted others by calling them squawmen. The stranger saw the horror in Sally’s eyes and didn’t wait for her answer. With two large steps, he was be-side Caleb and a talon-like hand grabbed for the scout’s shoulder. “In Texas, we don’t tolerate no insultin’ o’ women, squawman!”

  Caleb was out from under the reaching fingers of steel, on his feet, facing the man. Texan was stamped all over him. He was obviously one of the drovers with the Texas herd. Caleb noted the two tied-down guns, too. Texas gunfighter. He shook his head slowly and his eyes were frosty. “This young lady happens to be a friend of mine, an’, if I were you, Texan, I’d go easy on that squawman term up here.”

  There was a sneer on the tall man’s face. “Y’would, would ya? Well down in Texas….”

  “You’re not down in Texas now.”

  The man’s face darkened. He looked contemptuously at the smaller man for a second, then one long, wiry fist shot out. Caleb rolled with it and the blow glanced off his shoulder. The Texan was making a very common and fatal error. He was over confidently underestimating the man in front of him. Caleb had fought the best brawlers on the frontier, Indian and white, and he was respected by both. He moved forward on the balls of his feet with the speed of light, and a massively muscled arm shot out. The Texan looked surprised when it smashed into his stomach. He went over a little to take some of the shock out of the blow.

  Sally Tate, ashen-faced and horrified, was rigid be-hind the counter as the tall Texan swore violently and lunged at Caleb. The scout wasn’t there when the stranger’s ham-like fist, a bludgeon of bone and sinew, whipped into the hot atmosphere. Caleb stepped clear of the furiously charging gunman, ducked under the long arms, and bore in. He shot a rock-like fist into the Texan’s stomach that stopped the larger man. Before the gunman could recover, another bone and muscle piston crashed into his chest, and the third, as the Texan was rocking back on his high boot heels, slammed into his jaw like the kick of a mule. There was a loud popping sound, sharp and clear in the charged atmosphere, and the Texan went down half in, half out of the café, his head and shoulders lying through the half-opened door.

  Caleb turned and looked at Sally. Her large eyes were glassy. “Sit down, Sally. Get a hold of yourself. I’m awfully sorry. It shouldn’t have happened in here.”

  A rush of color came back into the girl’s cheeks as she turned to Caleb. “Is he dead?” Caleb looked down at the stunned Texan and shook his head. Sally let a long, pent-up gust of air out of her lungs. “Caleb Doom”—the violet eyes were snapping angrily with released tension and relief—“you’ve hurt that man badly. You ought to be ashamed, Caleb. You had no right…. ”

  Caleb was halfway up the plank sidewalk toward his room at the Lincoln House, before the voice finally died away behind him. He was amused at Sally’s reaction and irritated at the overbearing arrogance of the Texan, and, when his mind reviewed the happenings of the day, he felt foreboding over what the future held. If all the drovers with the Texas herd were of the same stripe, there would be no way to avoid trouble. The hotel was dark when Caleb went up to his room. The bed felt good, and, until he sank down into it with a comfortable sigh, he had had no idea how tired he was.

  When Caleb awoke, it was to find a pair of worried, squinted blue eyes, faded and anxious, bending over him. “Come on. Hell, ya can’t sleep all day.”

  “No? Jack, you don’t know me, once I’m in one of these manmade beds.” He swung his feet out of the bed and reached for his boots and britches with a prodigious yawn. “You get run off the ranch this morning? Hell, it’s twenty miles from your place on the Verde to Lodgepole. You must’ve gotten astride before sunup.”

  Britt rolled a lumpy cigarette while he waited for Caleb to finish his toilet. His voice drowned out the splashing of the scout at the commode set on the marble-topped dresser. “Well, dammit all, I didn’t allow I’d have to come to town till later, but some of the Box J boys come by last night, pretty late, an’ tol’ me that some firebrand laid out the foreman of the Texans in Sally Tate’s café.” He popped the cigarette into his mouth having lit it with an angry gesture. Through a cloud of grayish smoke, his voice was edgy and harsh. “As if trouble ain’t comin’ fast enough, some damned fool has to beat hell outen the ramrod of that trail herd, makin’ trouble a certainty now. Oh, Lord, sometimes I wished I’d never seen this burned-out corner of hell.”

  Caleb cocked his head a little as he held up the worn towel to dry his face. “Ain’t that rain, Jack?”

  “Sure it’s rain. Been rainin’ off an’ on all night. Well”—the hard lines softened a little—“that’s one blessing, anyway. Now the grass’ll come back.”

  Doom rubbed himself musingly. “Jack, that Texas gunman came into Sally’s lookin’ for trouble. I’m the one that downed him.”

  Britt looked up incredulously. “You?”

  “Yep. He didn’t leave me any choice.”

  Britt groaned and took a deep draw on the quirly in his hand. “Well, I know you ain’t a troublemaker, so he more’n likely got just what he was after. But it sure clinches things.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack.”

  “Did you say he was a gunman?”

  “I reckon. Anyway, he had two tied-down guns an’ that look
about him, if you know what I mean.”

  Britt nodded curtly. “I know what you mean, all right. Well, let’s go down an’ get some breakfast.”

  Sally glared at Caleb when she set the thick plates of fried eggs and side meat down in front of them. “Bad enough to knock him unconscious, but why did you have to leave him here for me to take care of?”

  Caleb shrugged and smiled. “The way you were eatin’ into me, I figured I’d be safer with a nest of mountain lions, so I left. Did he say much after he come around?”

  Sally smiled lopsidedly “Well, nothing complimentary, I can assure you. He wanted to know who you were and I told him. Also, he said he’d be back today with his crew and they were going to take over Lodgepole, as well as all the grass land they needed to run their cattle on, until their boss figured out what they were going to do about the Crows’ refusal to let them go on north.”

  Jack Britt finished his breakfast, paid Sally, and got up. “Sally, I wish you’d get married.”

  The girl was startled and looked up quickly. “Why, Jack?”

  “Because you’re the only one I’ve every known who could make this hombre settle down.” He wagged his head solemnly at the red-faced girl and ignored Doom’s embarrassed frown. “He’ll never amount to a damn, Sally, till you take him in hand. The West is changin’, girl. Scouts an’ the like are a lost breed now. It’s goin’ to be a cowman’s West, an’, if you’ll get him shook outen those fringed suits, he’ll make his pile along with the rest o’ us.”

  Caleb was smiling dourly at his old friend. He nodded at Sally with a wink. “Sure must be some-thin’ in what he says, Sally. That’s the longest speech I ever heard him make. Scouts turned cowmen sure get windy, don’t they?”

  Jack growled under his breath. “Come on, Caleb. Let’s go see this here imported town marshal Lodge-pole hired a few months back. They tell me he’s a ripsnorter from down in New Mexico Territory.”

  III

  Marshal Holt was a hard-eyed, lean-jawed III man of middle age with a bear trap line for a mouth and an angular, spare body Tomatch. Only his thinning gray hair gave a clue to his age, and that seldom was uncovered from beneath the low-crowned, flat-brimmed hat he wore tilted slightly forward, low over his slate gray eyes. “Yeah, Britt, I heard it was comin’.” The bony shoulders rose and fell. “Well, let’er come. I’ll kill the first gunman who draws a gun in Lodgepole. That’s my job.”

  Caleb studied the marshal and didn’t particularly care for what he saw. Marshal Holt was a killer, through and through. Cold, unemotional, and ruthless. Jack Britt frowned heavily. “Oh, I don’t think we gotta take any such quick action as that. Do…. ”

  “Look, Britt. This here is my headache, not yours. I get paid to keep the peace, and, by Gawd, I’ll keep’er. Any o’ them Texans come into town huntin’ trouble, I’ll handle’em.”

  Without a word, Caleb and Jack left Marshal Holt’s office. On the plank sidewalk outside, Jack’s smoky eyes were narrowed a little. He pulled his coat a little closer about him. The rain was starting again and its tiny fingers were cool on the back of his neck. “I’ll be damned if I like what’s comin’, Caleb. That marshal’s a gun hawk if I ever saw one. Oh, hell”—he turned up the walk toward the Long-horn Saloon—“let’s go get a drink.”

  Caleb pulled the flat, stiff brim of his low-crowned hat down over his eyes. The rain didn’t bother him half as much as the brusque town marshal did. They walked among the huddled people on the sidewalk and edged into the saloon. A rancher was loudly praising the rain over a tin cup of lukewarm beer. He raised the cup with one hand, his luxurious mustache with the other, and drank with loud, gurgling sounds. There were about fifteen Lodgepole townsmen and cattlemen in the place. A sprinkling of younger cowboys, flushed and alert, were scattered through the crowd. In a far corner, a poker game was going full tilt, the players impassively smoking and ignoring the rest of the room.

  “What’ll it be, gents?”

  “Couple o’ beers, Sam.”

  The tin cups slid before Caleb and Jack, and the bartender looked at them anxiously. “Trouble’s brewin’, boys.”

  Jack drank a little and nodded sourly. “You ain’t tellin’ us nothing, Sam.”

  “No? Well, there was three o’ them Texans in here a while back, an’ one of’em was a big hombre with tied-down guns. They didn’t stay long, just looked us over an’ left.”

  Caleb was surprised that they were in town so early. He said nothing and drank his beer slowly, eyes on the backbar mirror. Jack Britt shrugged. “Most o’ the cowmen been in, Sam?”

  The bartender nodded wryly. “Hell, yes. I reckon every cowman fer a hundred miles been here once or twice this mornin’.” He shook his head. “They’re wanderin’ aroun’ town like lost dogs, lookin’ to be in the right place at the right time, I reckon.”

  “You there, at the bar. Squawman!”

  The room got suddenly quiet enough to hear men breathing. Caleb had seen them come in while the bartender and Jack had been talking. He had seen the lanky foreman of the Texans single him out to the crowd of cold-eyed, bronzed-faced men behind him. Caleb set the beer cup down easily and answered without turning around. “If you mean me, Tejano, remember what I told you about callin’ folks squawman up in this country.”

  The big man’s hands were poised to swoop for his tied-down guns and his even, white teeth were visible through the flat lips. “Turn aroun’, squawman!”

  Caleb didn’t move. He calmly studied the hard faces behind the foreman. “How many men you got there, gringo salido?”

  The insult was worse than being called a squaw-man, and the Texans all knew it. The foreman ripped out an obscene oath. “Enough to take care of any Lodgepole cowmen who want to buy into this game.”

  “Well, Texan, tell’em to get out from behind you,’cause these boys aren’t doin’ my fightin’ for me an’ I don’t want to hit some man I don’t have nothin’ against.”

  The Texan crouched a little lower. His voice was soft and deep. “All right, squawman, it’s just between us, then. Turn around an’ take your medi-cine.”

  Out of all the witnesses to that fight, none could ever swear that they saw what happened. There was a blur of action, a swish of fringes, and the Long-horn Saloon was rocked by two deafening explosions that were magnified by the four walls and roof. There were no second shots. This was a gun-fight between two thoroughly experienced gunmen. One shot each; that is all it took. For a long moment, there was a deathly silence, then the bartender spoke up in a rasping, small voice: “See if he’s dead, boys.”

  None of the local men went forward and two of the Texans, hesitatingly, looking uneasily at the Lodgepole cowmen and the cowboys, walked gingerly over and bent over their foreman’s sprawled, still form. One of the riders looked up at Caleb, still standing against the bar, his voice small with awe. “Plumb through the head.” There was a rash of movement at the batwing doors and Marshal Holt, savage eyes slitted in his hawk-nosed face, hat brim low and menacing, stood just inside the opening. “Who done it?”

  Caleb nodded. “I did.”

  “Witnesses?”

  Holt’s hard, flat voice broke the spell and the room buzzed as some men turned to the marshal while others turned to their neighbors and began talking in strained voices. Holt came over beside Doom. “Must’ve been self-defense, from what ever’body says.” He let his cold eyes travel the full length of the scout and back. “I knew that hombre, once. He was Powder Hudson, one of the killingest gunmen in the Southwest.” Marshal Holt shook his head slightly. “Don’t see how ya done it. There’s goin’ to be trouble here, hombre, an’ I don’t want you in town when it hits. Git your horse an’ slope.”

  Caleb’s thoughtful gaze was direct and calm. “You’ve made a mistake, Marshal. That man asked for what he got, an’ I’m not leavin’ Lodgepole be-cause I defended myself.”

  Holt’s eyes blazed suddenly with a crazy light. “I say you are, hombre.”

  Jack Britt s
tepped up, red-faced. “Holt, you’re the marshal here, not the governor. You don’t order any respectable citizen outen Lodgepole, now or any other time.”

  For a second, Holt’s body tensed and his face went white. Caleb was watching for the little telltale tightening around the edges of the mouth. Several of the other Lodgepole men came forward. Three of them were prominent cowmen.

  “Jack’s right, Marshal. This here man’s got as much right here in Lodgepole as you have. He stays.”

  Holt looked at the tight knot of angry cowboys and ranchers around him, estimated his chances at nil, and relaxed with a savage smile. “Can’t argue with the whole damned town.” He swung back to Doom. “What I said still goes, hombre. You got till midnight tonight.”

  Doom smiled softly. “That’s all the time I’ll need, Marshal.”

  Marshal Holt held the door open for two of the Texans who struggled through with the remains of Powder Hudson, ramrod of the Texas trail herd. Several of the Texans tossed hard looks at the Lodgepole cowmen as they went out. Jack Britt tossed off the rest of his beer with a big sigh. “Well, boys, unless I’ve got these Texans sized up all wrong, hell’s goin’ to pop loose any minute now.”

  The old white-headed man, who had argued with Holt over Doom’s leaving town, shrugged. “I wouldn’t bet on it, Jack. Them coyotes are pretty much all air, and now, with their foreman shot down, they just might take their damned critters an’ head out around the Lodgepole country an’ go on up north by way of Canon del Muerto.”

  Jack was looking thoughtfully at the older man when the bartender spoke up. “Here, you fellers, have a beer on the house. Gawd that was the quickest gunfight I ever seen. Two shots an’ it’s over. Did’ja see where that Texan’s shot went?”

  Caleb shook his head dryly. “No. As long as it didn’t go through me, I don’t care.”

  “Right here. Look. Man that was awful close.” Caleb and the others looked down at the front of the bar. The dead man’s slug had missed Caleb’s body by a fraction of an inch and had gone through the bar front and out through the back wall. “Close, damned awful close, I’d call it.”