Bannerman the Enforcer 7

by Kirk Hamilton

  “You know what I’m after, Keller,” Cato told him. “Don’t waste time. Tell me what I want to know.”

  “Go to hell!” Keller panted.

  Cato sighed. He glanced behind him at the blazing building, fumbled in his shirt pocket and took out something that the outlaw couldn’t see. Then Keller’s face blanched as Cato snapped a vesta into flame with his thumbnail and held it out from his body.

  “One more fire wouldn’t even be noticed,” Cato said casually. “They’d figure it threw sparks down into this yard and these crates, bein’ tinder-dry, just blazed up. They might find enough of you to see you were shot first, but I reckon the heat’ll melt the bullet in you and they’ll never know. They’ll just figure you hurt yourself gettin’ down off the roof and were too weak to crawl away from the fire.”

  “Hold up!” Keller screamed in a strangled voice as Cato leaned down towards some splintered crates with the vesta. “Hell almighty, Cato! You wouldn’t roast a man!”

  “Injuns do it and I’ve always figured I’m no better than any redskin, or him than me for that matter.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you what you want to know!” exclaimed Keller, trying to back off from the vesta. He relaxed some when the match went out, but tensed up again as Cato took a fresh one from his shirt. He coughed and grabbed at his chest. “I—I guess I’m about done for anyway.”

  Cato didn’t argue with him though he figured the man would live if he could get to a sawbones. It wouldn’t hurt any for Keller to figure he was dying, though.

  “Burdin’s bunch are holed-up in the Sierra Blancas,” the outlaw panted abruptly. “Place called Totem Canyon.”

  “There’s no way in there,” Cato cut in. “And it’s not big enough to hold an army.”

  Keller coughed, held up a hand, imploring Cato to wait as the man lifted the vesta, thumbnail poised.

  “There is! There is a way in,” gasped Keller, eyes fixed on that vesta. He cringed a little as something collapsed in the cantina and there was a fiery explosion which threw a column of sparks and burning debris high into the air. “Down through Sagebrush Pass. Halfway down the grade there’s a tall slab of rock that seems to have been split from the face of the canyon wall, just a little. Brush growin’ all round the base.”

  “I know it. Leans out as if it’s gonna fall any time.”

  “That’s it. If clouds are movin’ behind it, it looks like it’s topplin’ down. We call it Hanging Rock. Well, you ride through the brush at the base and you’ll find a defile where’s it’s split away from the main wall. Only room for one rider. I’ll take you beyond what looks like the rear wall of Totem Canyon. There’s another, bigger one behind. Got water and grass and trees. Injun showed it to Burdin a long time back.”

  Cato looked hard at the man, the flickering flames dancing in his cold eyes. “This better be gospel, Keller.”

  “It is!” The outlaw looked fearfully at the flames bursting from the cantina in a score of places now. “Get me out of here, Cato!”

  “Not yet.”

  “Judas! Why not?”

  “Want to be sure you ain’t holdin’ back.”

  “Man, I’m not! I swear it! We don’t move, that wall’s gonna come down on top of us. Look at the cracks in the adobe now with the heat! I can see flames through ’em they’re gettin’ so wide.”

  Cato didn’t turn around, though he could feel the heat from the walls. “We’ll wait a spell.”

  “What the hell else do you want to know?” Keller almost screamed. “I’ve told you where Burdin is!”

  “How many men’s he got?”

  “Twenty! All hand-picked, and they’re all gatherin’ in Totem Canyon right now.”

  Cato stared at the terrified man. He seemed to be talking gospel but there was something that still bothered Cato. He couldn’t put his finger on it, not quite. Just a hunch that there was something more Keller was holding back.

  “Come on!” Keller yelled, lifting an arm across his face as some blazing timbers clattered down from the top storey. “These crates’ll be afire any minute.”

  “I can jump the fence quick enough,” Cato said, tying a kerchief around his bleeding arm.

  Keller was panting. His eyes were bulging in his head. He looked wildly around, tried to move, groaned at the pain it caused him and clasped his chest, coughing.

  “Please, Cato!”

  The small man tied the knot with the aid of his teeth, felt the crude bandage to make sure it was firm and then looked around at the wall of fire rising behind him. He could feel his clothes getting hot now. Some of the crate timbers were already smoldering. He looked down at Keller again.

  “What else about Burdin?” he asked remorselessly.

  “All right!” Keller yelled, frantic with fear. “He’s preparing to move! He aims to take over Van Horn, the whole damn town! It’s on the governor’s schedule for the Texas Independence Day celebrations. Burdin aims to nail Dukes when his train pulls in.”

  Cato was alert now. “How soon does Burdin aim to move on Van Horn?”

  “Three—three days!”

  “You sure?”

  “Hell almighty! I’m sure! That wall’s gonna come down on us in a minute!”

  Cato glanced at the heat-cracked wall and saw the raging flames through some of the openings in the baked adobe. He grunted and pulled the Manstopper abruptly. Keller cringed but Cato slugged him expertly behind the ear, holstered the gun, then shouldered the wounded, unconscious man and hurried towards the fence.

  Three days. Barely enough time to get to this Totem Canyon and try to stop Burdin. No use sending for the cavalry. They would never get into a place like that. While they were struggling through that defile, Burdin and his men would go out another way. No, it was a job for only, one or two men. And that meant himself and Yancey Bannerman. He didn’t even know where Yancey was.

  Even if he did, the odds would be mighty big, he thought, stumbling out into the back street, staggering through the muddy puddles, away from the blazing cantina, the wounded Keller stirring slightly on his shoulder. Yeah, the odds would be mighty big.

  Two against twenty.

  Two – Canyon of Death

  Cato killed a horse on his wild ride for Van Horn, literally running the animal into the ground. Luckily, he was within a few miles of his destination and he shouldered his saddle and rifle and started walking.

  There was a full moon and he had no difficulty in staying on the trail. He came within sight of the town just before sunup. The buildings were silhouetted against the false dawn, a band of pink and gray, shot through with orange that reminded him of the flames he had left behind in Juarez as the cantina burned to the ground. He had dumped Keller on the steps of a medico’s house across the bridge in El Paso, grabbed the first likely looking horse he had seen and lit put, lickety split.

  There was a pale amber light washing through the deserted streets of Van Horn as he staggered into the town. Then at the same time as he saw the barricades further along the street, a harsh voice commanded him to stop dead and throw down his arms. Cato let the saddle drop and lifted his hands shoulder high, frowning.

  “Drop that sidearm too, mister!” cracked the voice. “Easy-like!”

  Cato let the rig thud to the dust, swaying with fatigue, blinking, wondering if he was dreaming this. But, no. As the sunlight spread rapidly across the land, there were harsh shadows now in the street, and he saw that men were up on the roofs, with guns. As he glanced up, shading his eyes, sunlight glinted on blued steel rifle barrels. He lowered his gaze at a sound to one side. A door opened in a cafe and a man stepped out, grim-faced, double-barreled Greener slanted across his chest. Another door opened on the other side and he saw the reflection of light on a brass badge.

  He released a sigh slowly. For a while there he had figured he was too late, that Burdin had already taken over the town.

  “Name yourself, mister!” called the badge-toter; his was the voice that had given the earlier comma
nds.

  “Cato, John Cato. Enforcer for the governor of Texas.”

  There was silence for a while. Then, “Prove it.”

  “Have to lower my hands.”

  “Do it easy. You’d be loco to do it any other way. There’s forty guns trained on you.”

  “I’ve no hankerin’ to see what a coffin looks like from the inside,” Cato said quietly, fumbling at his big brass belt buckle. There was a four-inch, honed steel blade welded to that buckle, encased in a secret pocket in the belt itself. He released the buckle-knife by pressing the stud through the slot in the leather and let it drop to the ground. He knew all eyes would go to that, for it was an unusual weapon and these men would never have seen its like. Then he probed deep into the pocket and pulled out a small oilskin package. He unfolded it and took out some thin papers.

  “Bring ’em over,” ordered the lawman. “Slow.”

  Cato walked across, hand extended and looked at the hard-faced sheriff. The man stared at him, taking in every line of his face, before reaching out for the papers, one-handed. He kept his rifle pointed at Cato as he read swiftly. When he looked up, his expression was just as hard as previously.

  “Bannerman told us to be on the lookout for you,” the lawman said suddenly, but he made no move to take the gun off Cato or to give the man permission to lower his arms. “Said to ask you one question so’s we’d know it really was you.”

  “Ask away,” Cato said, his mind seething with questions about Yancey.

  “What was the name of the town where you and Bannerman first met?”

  “El Moros,” Cato said without hesitation.

  “Where is it?”

  “Mexico. Matancero Province. It was two years ago.”

  The sheriff stared at him a moment longer then, unsmilingly, nodded for him to lower his arms.

  “Where the hell is Yancey?” Cato asked, rubbing at the stiffness in his wounded arm.

  “Gone up into the Sierra Blancas.”

  “He knows about Totem Canyon?”

  “Seems so. He ran some hombre named Calhoun to ground and had to kill him. But he found papers in the man’s saddlebags that told about this Burdin hombre plannin’ to take over this here town. We set up barricades right off and sent word to the army post at Orogrande. But Bannerman said he couldn’t wait for ’em to show and he took off into the hills to try to find this canyon.”

  Cato swore. “He’ll never do it unless he knows what to look for. How long since he was here?”

  “Sundown. He stayed only long enough to eat, grab some ammunition, and a fresh horse, then took off.”

  “I’ve got to get after him. Can I get a good mount?”

  “You can have anythin’ you like,” the sheriff told him. “Guns, men, horses.”

  “Just a good fast horse. I can travel faster alone.”

  Cato picked up his belt-buckle and gun-rig. One of the townsmen lifted his saddle for him and, with the sheriff, they hurried through the light-flooded streets towards the open maw of the livery behind the barricade.

  “Sorry about the welcome,” the lawman apologized. “Figured you could be one of Burdin’s crew, sent in to throw us off-guard.”

  “You did good,” Cato told him. “Don’t relax until you hear from Yancey or me. Burdin’s gonna take some stoppin’.”

  “We got men willin’ to join a posse,” the lawman offered, but Cato shook his head and swiftly told him how it was up in the sierras.

  “Just couldn’t get a bunch of men in there,” he concluded. “We’d spook Burdin and his crew. Could maybe use a little dynamite, though.”

  “No problem.”

  “Some empty coffee cans, too. With lids.”

  The sheriff looked at the man toting Cato’s saddle.

  “I can fix it,” the man said and added by way of explanation, “I run the general store.”

  They strode through the large doorway of the stables, the sheriff yelling for the liveryman to get the hell up here and break out his fastest horse for Cato.

  ~*~

  Yancey rode through Totem Canyon for the seventh time, walking his mount slowly under the towering walls, rifle in hand, stifling a yawn. He was damned tired and would have liked nothing better than to stop and curl up in some protected corner where he could sleep for a few hours. But time was running out and he still hadn’t found a way past this rock-studded, desiccated canyon.

  There had to be some hidden entrance to another place, for this wouldn’t hold an army and there were no signs at all that Burdin and his men had ever been here. Yet, the papers he had found in Calhoun’s saddlebags named this place and something called Hanging Rock. No one in Van Horn had ever heard of any such place, and the only landmark in the canyon that came close to the description was that mighty slab that seemed to have been split from the main wall by some giant axe. Yet it didn’t appear to go all the way to the bottom, so there could be no entrance behind that. But there was thick tangled sagebrush growing around its base and there was a reference to Sagebrush Pass in the papers. Could be there would be something that would ...

  He froze, hauling rein fast, rifle coming around, ready. He heard a horse. It was moving slowly, picking its way into the canyon from the southwest, the way he had come. He knew just where it was by the sounds its hoofs made on the hollow-sounding pebbles that were scattered around the bed of a long-dry waterhole, just beyond a patch of sand. The sound carried far in this sounding-box of a canyon.

  Yancey eased his mount back into the thick sagebrush, aware of the spicy aroma, hoping the pollen floating about on the dry air wouldn’t make him sneeze. Whoever the rider was, he wasn’t taking too much trouble to keep his passage quiet. That meant either some innocent drifter or one of Burdin’s men riding confidently for the hidden entrance to the canyon.

  It turned out to be neither. It was John Cato, and he rode in swiftly, though not carelessly. He was standing in the stirrups, cocked rifle in one hand, eyes travelling around the canyon constantly. He spotted Yancey at the same time as the big man recognized him and they both lowered the hammers on their rifles, rode out to greet each other.

  “Lucky I didn’t blow your head off and look to see who it was afterwards!” Yancey said, smiling faintly.

  “I knew you weren’t that good a shot,” retorted Cato, answering his smile. He threw Yancey a brief salute. “Good to see you, pard. Hear you downed Calhoun.”

  Yancey arched his eyebrows. “Then I guess you came by way of Van Horn. Which likely means you caught up with Keller.”

  “Down in Juarez, of all places. You find a way into the canyon yet?”

  “No. Was going to start looking through this here sagebrush when I heard your horse.”

  “Had to take a chance you were still hanging around the canyon. But you’re on the right track. There’s an entrance behind this sagebrush, according to Keller.” Cato gestured to the huge, split slab of rock. “They call this Hanging Rock. There’s a defile behind it that leads to Burdin’s camp in another canyon.”

  “Figured it had to be something like that. They tell you in Van Horn I’ve sent for the army?”

  Cato nodded. “No good, though. Defile’s so narrow they would only spook Burdin and he’d get out before we could do anythin’ about it.”

  Yancey swore briefly. “That means it’s you and me against—how many?”

  “Twenty, according to Keller. Seems he spoke gospel about this place so no reason to figure he wasn’t speakin’ it about the number of men, too.”

  “High odds,” Yancey said, lips pursed.

  Cato tapped his saddlebags. “Can shorten ’em a mite. Got some dynamite from Van Horn.”

  Yancey looked at him sharply. “We’ll have to get close to use it.”

  Cato grinned. “Mebbe. But you was just tellin’ me how you come close to blowin’ my head off. Now’s your chance to show just how good a shot you are.”

  “After you tellin’ me I’m a lousy marksman?”

  “Prove me wron
g!” Cato invited with a wide grin.

  “Might just do that. Okay. Lead on. You seem to know your way about these parts.”

  “In theory.”

  Cato pushed his sweating horse past Yancey and the big Enforcer turned his horse and followed him through the sagebrush. It was thick and the roots were half above the ground, finding it hard to grip the earth in this wind-blown canyon. The horses stumbled and Cato’s whinnied once. They stopped dead, listening, rifles ready. But there was only the eerie moaning of the wind between the Hanging Rock and the canyon wall proper. It was a massive split and writhing veins of crumbling ironstone crawled over the ancient rock like fossilized snakes.

  They put their mounts forward again and found the defile well in from the canyon proper. The brush was thicker than ever here, like a living wall, and they had to literally push it aside to squeeze past. It sprang back at them, raking the horses’ flanks and their own bodies. But then the rock dropped away in a series of natural steps and they were in a narrow chasm with red ironstone walls. When they looked up, the walls were so close they felt their breathing quicken with a sensation of being crushed. Cato had been right: no mounted soldier troop could get through here without spooking Burdin’s men if they were indeed beyond.

  The walls brushed the horses’ legs and made them uneasy. In one part it was so narrow that they had to take their boots from the stirrups and place them on the mounts’ backs. Even so, the stirrup irons scraped along the rock. Then it widened so that they were able to ride abreast and they could feel their horses relax beneath them.

  They didn’t speak. There was brilliant sunlight ahead, striking rock outside the defile and reflecting back in. There was sand underfoot now and it muffled the horses’ hoofs, so that they were able to reach the end of the defile and surprise the dozing guard.

  He was hunkered down with his back against a boulder, in the shade, a coffeepot standing in the dead coals of a campfire near his leg. His rifle had slipped from his fingers and flies crawled over his chin and around his slack mouth as he gently snored.