The shorter man was already leading the way toward Bowdrie. “Chick Bowdrie? I’m Pat Hanley, Pinkerton agent. I’m employed by Tugwell Gatesby here. Do you have some news for us?”
“Not very much, Hanley, but if you would like to help, you can get at the records of the stage company. I think Sam Gatesby arrived here from El Paso, and was taken into the hills and murdered. I believe I know by whom. Can you check and see if he arrived here?”
Whatever happened, Chick knew, must happen quickly now. Sowers would not take defeat. Yet despite his wealth, whatever was done now must at least have the cloak of legality. Formerly there had been no law but Sowers’ own; now the country was settling up and there were different standards.
Chick did not discount the danger to himself. He had interfered in a situation in which he had no part that they could see, as his status as a Texas Ranger was not known. Sowers could not know who he was or why he had asked his question, but the question itself was a threat.
Stephen York was in an even more precarious position. Chick was sure that before the night was over one of Sowers’ men would pick a quarrel with either him or York, and try to kill whichever one it was … with maybe a stray shot to kill the other by “accident.”
With Sowers and York, Mary Mason had gone to the two-story frame hotel. Morel, Hensman, and Rubin had gone into the Lone Star. Hanley had gone to the stage station and Gatesby to the hotel. Chick Bowdrie started to move toward the hotel himself, when he saw Lute Boyer watching him. As their eyes met, Boyer walked over to him. He had a lean, cadaverous face and eyes that always held contempt.
“I’ve been lookin’ forward to runnin’ into you sometime, Bowdrie,” he said. “I nearly came up with you down around Uvalde, and again at Fort Griffin. I’ve heard you’re good with your guns.”
“Your friend Rubin warned me to get out of town before daybreak,” Bowdrie said.
Lute Boyer drew the makings from his pocket and began to build a cigarette. “Wait’ll Dick learns who you are. He ain’t even guessed, and you a Texas Ranger!”
“Lute, you ain’t done all the guessin’ that’s comin’ to you. Let me give you some advice. Don’t you be the one they send to get Stephen York.”
The Herrick House was not much of a hotel. A frame building with a large lobby and a rarely used bar. The Lone Star drew the town’s liquor business. There were thirty rooms in the ramshackle old hotel. One of these was where Chick Bowdrie was staying. In others Gatesby, Hanley, York, and Carlotta Mason were staying. She was now known as Mary Sowers.
Med Sowers was seated in the lobby when Bowdrie came in. As he started for the stairs, Sowers sprang to his feet. “Don’t go up there!” he said angrily.
Chick Bowdrie had found few people whom he disliked profoundly, but this man was one of them. He had never wanted to kill a man, but if ever one deserved killing, it was Med Sowers.
“Don’t be a fool!” he said impatiently. “This is a hotel, and I live up there! Dozens of others do, too.” He paused briefly. “Smarten up, Sowers. You aren’t runnin’ this country anymore. You’ve a lot to answer for, and your time’s up.”
He turned on his heel and started up the steps. He heard Sowers move, and he turned around. “I could kill you, Sowers. You’d better wait.”
He went to Stephen York’s room.
The tall young man was standing in front of the mirror combing his hair. His coat was off and he wore a shoulder holster, something rarely seen. He turned as Chick entered, and they stood facing each other.
“I’m glad she found herself a real man,” Bowdrie commented. “She’s going to need him!”
“You know about me?”
“It’s my business to know. Two years back, some of the riverboat companies hired a special officer from Illinois and sent him to New Orleans to put a stop to the robbin’ and murderin’ of their passengers. In four months he sent thirteen thieves to prison, and there were several who chose to fight it out and were buried.”
Chick pulled a chair around and sat astride of it; then he related the story of the Mason ranch, his quest for evidence, and all the indications that Medley Sowers was the guilty man. He revealed how Sowers planned to keep the daughter even as he had enslaved the mother.
He explained about the murder of Samuel Gatesby, and why Tugwell Gatesby and Pat Hanley were here. “Let’s go see them,” he said.
Hanley was explaining something to Gatesby as they reached the room. “Your hunch was right,” he advised Bowdrie. “Samuel Gatesby arrived here three days after leaving El Paso. Hicks remembers him well. Gatesby rented a horse from Dick Rubin after inquiring as to the location of the Mason ranch.”
“Something I was about to explain to Hanley when you gentlemen arrived. The man you call Sowers is wearing a Chinese charm on his watch chain that I gave Sam in sixty-seven. I recognized it this afternoon.”
Bowdrie turned and left the room, walking down the hall to Carlotta’s room. That was how he thought of her, despite the fact she had been using another name, that of Mary Sowers.
He tapped, there was no reply, and he tapped again more sharply. Hanley stepped into the hall and looked his way. Suddenly apprehensive, Bowdrie opened the door.
The room was empty!
“Hanley! York! She’s gone!”
He hit the steps running and reached the lobby in time to hear a clatter of hooves. As he stepped into the street, he saw Sowers go by with Lute Boyer. The girl was between them.
As he ran out to the street, he saw Morel across the street in an alley lifting a rifle to his shoulder. His reaction was immediate, and as the rifle settled against Morel’s shoulder, Bowdrie’s bullet took him right between the eyebrows.
It was two hundred yards to the livery stable, and his own horse was unsaddled. A fine-looking black horse stood at the hitching rail, and without hesitation he loosed the slipknot and swung into the saddle. He was going down the street on a dead run when the others rushed from the door.
There was an outburst of shooting behind him and a bullet whined near his head. Ahead of him was the dust of the kidnappers of Carlotta.
If Sowers had time, there was no telling what he might do. Money and his followers had made him confident. For twenty years he had been the local power, and he could not grasp the fact that an era had ended.
Dick Rubin and Hensman were still in town. Between them they might wipe out York, Hanley, and Gatesby. With nobody to press charges, they might evade punishment and go on as they had.
If Sowers reached his ranch, where more of his outlaw hands waited, there was no telling what he might do. The townspeople had no idea of the evidence against him. With the witnesses eliminated and everybody believing that Mary Sowers was his ward, they could go scot-free.
The black horse had heart, and he loved to run. He ran now.
Yet Bowdrie saw that overtaking them would be impossible. They had turned from the trail into a maze of canyons, and with the coming of darkness Bowdrie could not hope to keep to a trail. Yet, details were beginning to appear that were familiar. He had ridden over this country when he first discovered the Mason ranch and the remains of Gil Mason.
Moreover, there was no water of which he knew, except for the ranch, and the chances were, Sowers was taking a roundabout route to that very place.
If he went directly there now, he would arrive ahead of them and with a fairly fresh horse.
It was completely dark when he rode into the ranch yard. Riding directly to it, he had been sure he would arrive before Sowers.
The buildings were dark and there was no sound. Chick watered the black horse, then led him back into the brush to a patch of grass seen earlier. There he picketed him. He walked back to the ranch yard and settled down beside a big cottonwood not far from the water trough.
He had dozed off, and awakening suddenly sometime later, he saw a man’s head between him and the water. He recognized the shape of the hat.
“York!” he whispered.
York came back t
o where he was. “Bowdrie? They are coming in now. They must’ve stopped somewhere. Rubin’s already here. There was some shooting in town. Rubin’s wounded and Hensman was killed along with one other man. I think they ran into some more of their men who were on the way into town.”
“Where are Gatesby and Hanley?”
“Close by. Unless they bother Mary, we’d better hang back until daylight.”
It was hard waiting in the dark. Every sound was crystal clear, and they could hear movements and talk near the house, but words could only occasionally be distinguished.
“There’s seven of them!” Hanley said as he came up.
Chick nodded. “They’re holding the girl in the yard. They have her hands tied, but not her feet. I just saw them walking her over from the horses.”
He turned. “Hanley, you an’ Gatesby slip around and cover the out trail. Don’t let them get away.”
He touched York’s shoulder. “You wait awhile an’ then slip down an’ get into the house. There’s a back door. Get in if you can, and lie quiet.”
“What about you?”
“I’m goin’ down there an’ get her out of there before the shootin’ starts.”
“That’s my job!” Steve protested.
“I can move like an Indian. I’ll do it.”
Flat on his stomach, the side of his face to the ground, Bowdrie moved himself with his hands, elbows, or toes, inching along until he reached the hard-packed earth. He dared go no further by that means. His clothing would scrape against the solid clay, making too much sound.
He could see the girl lying on the ground, near her a guard. Bowdrie could see the glow of his cigarette in the dark. Seated with his shoulder against the corner of the barn, the guard would turn his head at intervals to glance all around him.
Chick worked his way to the side of the barn, and then, standing erect, he began to glide closer and closer to the guard. Once the guard turned, and Bowdrie froze to immobility, waiting, holding his breath. He saw the guard’s elbow move, saw his hands come up—he was starting to roll a fresh cigarette.
He was still rolling it when Chick’s forearm slipped across his throat from behind. Putting the palm of his right hand on the guard’s head, he grasped his right arm with his left hand and shut down hard. The movement had been swift and long-practiced.
The guard gave a frenzied lunge and the girl sat up with a startled movement. Holding his grip until the man’s muscles slowly relaxed, then releasing him, Bowdrie moved to the girl. Touching her lips with his hand to still any outcry, he swiftly cut her free.
Using the unconscious man’s neckerchief and belt, he bound him tightly. It was not a good job, but all they needed was a minute or two.
Already it was faintly gray in the east. He had not realized they had waited so long, nor that so much time had elapsed since he began his approach to the girl.
He had Carlotta on her feet moving away when there was a startled movement. “Joe? What you doin’ with that girl?” The man came to his feet. “Joe? Joe?” Then he yelled, “Hey! You!”
“Run!” Bowdrie hissed; then he turned, drawing as he moved.
Flame stabbed the night. Then a shot came from the stable, and he replied, rolling over instantly, trying for the partial shelter of the water trough.
At the first sign of trouble, Sowers lunged for the shelter of the house. Lute Boyer came up, gun in hand. “Got you, Bowdrie!” he yelled, and fired.
An instant late. Bowdrie saw Lute stagger back, blood running from his mouth as he tried to get his gun up. Bowdrie fired again, and Boyer turned and fell to his hands and knees, facing away from Bowdrie.
Hanley and Gatesby, their original plan foiled by the discovery, burst into the yard, firing.
Bowdrie ran for the front door, coming in from the side just as York tripped and fell, losing hold on his gun. York grabbed, got it, and rolled back from the door as Med Sowers started after him, firing. Sowers’ concentration on making a perfect shot caused him to step without looking. The ball of his foot came down, something rolled under his foot, and he fell, catching himself against the doorjamb, half in, half out of the door.
Bowdrie fired as Sowers’ body loomed in the doorway. The big man’s body sagged and he slowly slipped to his knees on the step. He stared at Bowdrie, his face contorted. The gun slipped from his fingers, and slowly he pitched forward on his face.
Bowdrie walked closer, and stooping, took the pistol from Sowers’ hand. It was a .41.
York came up. “He had me dead to rights. What made him fall?”
Bowdrie stooped and picked up a lead bullet, its nose partly flattened. “I dropped it when I was burying Gil Mason. He must have stepped on it.”
Bowdrie took the bullet and rolled it in his fingers. “Fired from Sowers’ own gun, sixteen years ago!”
In the gray light of morning, over a campfire a quarter of a mile from the ranch house, Carlotta looked across the small fire where they were making coffee.
“Steve has been telling me what you did. I want to thank you. I had never known anything about my parents. I was only three years old when I started living with Mr. Sowers’ sister.”
“He probably kept you first as a hold over your mother,” Bowdrie said, “but when you got older and he’d seen some pictures his sister sent, he began to get other ideas.”
“This was my father’s place?”
“He built it for your mother and him. He put in a lot of work. He was a happy man. He had the woman he wanted and the home he wanted.”
Bowdrie got up. He should be back at the hotel writing up his report.
“It was built for two young people in love,” he said.
“That’s what Steve was saying—that care and thought went into every detail of it.”
“No reason to waste it.” Bowdrie accepted the reins of the horse Hanley led to him. “See you in town!”
More Brains Than Bullets
The hammerheaded roan stood three-legged at the hitching rail in front of the Cattleman’s Saloon, dozing in the warm sunlight. Occasionally he switched a casual tail at a lazy fly or stamped a hoof into the dust.
Nearby, against the unpainted wall of the Bon Ton Café, in the cool shade of the wooden awning over the boardwalk, Chick Bowdrie dozed comfortably in a tipped-back chair. Hat low over his eyes, pleasantly full of breakfast and coffee, he was frankly enjoying a time to relax.
Fighting raiding Comanches and over-the-border bandits, as well as their own home-grown variety of outlaw, kept the Texas Rangers occupied. Moments of leisure were all too few, and to be taken as they appeared.
He had no family, so home was wherever he hung his hat. Had it not been for Captain McNelly, who recruited him, he might have been on the dodge himself by this time. He had been a top hand since he was fourteen, but too good with a gun, and there were too many around who thought to take advantage of a boy on his own, ready to steal stock in his care, steal his horse, or simply ride roughshod over him, and Bowdrie had met them a little more than halfway.
His family had been wiped out by Comanches when he was six, and for the next five years he had lived with his captors. Escaping, he was taken up by a Swiss family living near San Antonio. He attended school for three years, learned to speak French from his foster parents and a smattering of German from his schoolmates.
He had become a disciple of the old western adage that “brains in the head save blisters on the feet.” A little rest and meditation often saved a lot of riding over rough country, and right now he had a lot to think about, when he got around to it.
Two men came out of the café adjoining the saloon. The man with the toothpick was saying, “Who else could it be but Culver? Only the two of us had the combination, an’ I surely wouldn’t steal my own money.”
“The boy’s a good lad, Lindsay. I’ve known him since he was a baby. Knew his pappy before him.”
“We all knew old Black Jack Culver,” Lindsay replied. “The boy does have a good reputation. Maybe h
e is a good lad, but the fact is, somebody opened that safe with the combination! Nothing damaged anywhere. No signs of a break-in, and that safe’s a new one.”
He spat. “Far’s his pappy goes, he rustled his share of cows, an’ you know it, Cowan!”
Cowan chuckled. “O’ course I know it! I helped him! We all branded anything that was loose in them days, an’ there’s stuff runnin’ on your ranch right now whose mamas wore another brand. You can’t hold that against a man just because times have changed. Those days are past, and we all know it. We have the law now, and it is better that way. Besides, who knew in them days who a cow belonged to? Nobody branded for years, and of course, ol’ Maverick never did brand any of his stuff.
“When you an’ me came into this country, all a steer was worth was what you could get for hide an’ tallow. After the Civil War, everybody needed beef an’ things changed.”
Bowdrie had not moved. If they were aware of him at all, they probably thought him asleep. “The fact is, Cowan, I’m in a tight spot for money. I can’t stand to lose twenty thousand dollars just like that!” He snapped his fingers. “Six thousand of that was in payment for cattle I haven’t delivered yet, cattle I sold to Ross Yerby.”
“He buyin’ more cows? He picked up a thousand head from me just t’other day.”
“Don’t I know it! You deposited that money with me, an’ part of it was in that safe!”
“You don’t say!” Cowan was suddenly angry. “Dang it, Lindsay! What kind of a bank you runnin’, anyway?”
“It was you didn’t want me to accuse young Culver. Looks different when the shoe’s on the other foot.”
The two moved off, still talking. Chick sat quietly. No bank robbery had been reported to the Rangers, yet this seemed to be an inside job, embezzlement rather than a hold-up. His curiosity aroused, he arose and sauntered back into the restaurant. “How’s about some more coffee? I sure like your make of it. Strong enough to tan your boots!”
The ex-cow-camp cook brought a cup and the pot to the table. “I oughta know how a cowhand likes it,” he said. “I’ve made coffee enough to drown a thousand head of steers!”
The Collected Short Stories of Louis L'Amour, Volume 2 Page 25