Mustang (A John Cutler Western Book 5)

by H. V. Elkin

  “A drill!” she was astounded.

  Cutler shook his head in admiration. “Wouldn’t be surprised to see him start it up again.”

  “Why?”

  “A horse like that might want to show his mares they could still run fast, even after they’ve been runnin’. Damn, but I hate to catch Mesteño!”

  “I know,” she said, “but they can’t outrun bullets, no matter how much drillin’ they do.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Guess that’s why I’m here in the first place.”

  “Do you think you can catch him?”

  “Don’t know. Least I know one way nobody’s ever gonna do it, and that’s by tryin’ to outrun him. Don’t think even Apache could catch that horse, though he’d probably die tryin’.”

  “Then how?”

  “Guess we’ll have to try an eight.”

  “What?”

  “A corral shaped like an eight. Keeps ’em from doublin’ back.”

  “You think you’ll ever get them into any kind of corral?”

  “There’s a chance.”

  “All of them?”

  “More’n likely.”

  “What makes you so sure after what we’ve been seein’ here today?”

  “Oh, that’s the hard part for someone who don’t much like the job of trappin’ something that oughta stay free. You can pretty much depend on ’em to stay together, just like we saw. You get one and you’re likely to get ’em all.”

  “They won’t split up?”

  “Miss Harmon, that’s the hell of it. Maybe you look down there and you see Mormon horses. Just one male that’s considered superior enough to have more’n one female to boss around, more’n one female to bear children. And a bunch of females who take orders because they’re females.” He did not want to make it a question, but he paused in case she wanted to treat it like one.

  She blushed. “Well, what’s okay for horses may not be okay for people.”

  “Not all the stallions have this many mares,” Cutler said. “Sometimes, they don’t have any. Sometimes they only have one. But whether it’s one stallion and one mare, or one stallion and a dozen mares, it’s always the same thing among wild horses. Each band’s a family. Each one in the band’s loyal to the family.”

  “But that’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it’s something to respect, I guess. You and me can respect it in people, so we can respect it in horses, too. But that same thing we look up to in horses when they’re wild is what gives us a chance to tame ’em. We wouldn’t have rode here on horses if it wasn’t for that quality in ’em.”

  He looked back toward the horses. Four mares and a colt were standing with their necks over each other, forming a kind of wheel, heads at the hub and tails around the rim. The tails were switching. “See,” Cutler said. “There’s a bunch got together to keep away the flies. Can’t think of a better family picture than that, can you?”

  “No,” she said, “but what’s their family thing got to do with bein’ tamed? I can see how they might stay together and get caught together. But what about bein’ tamed? What’s it got to do with us ridin’ horses here today?”

  “If an animal’s got that quality, it can be taught to move it over to our side. It can be taught to think of us as its family and be loyal to us. Same thing happened when the wolf turned into a dog. So maybe when you see me ridin’ out with my rig after this job’s over, me with my two mules, my horse and my dog, you’ll see somethin’ besides a trapper who ain’t forkin’ a horse like a decent cowboy’s supposed to.”

  “You said that Dave Baker’s grandparents were brought here . . . like horses.”

  “Case of man treatin’ another man the same way. Them African tribes were close families, too. So a lot of ’em got to be loyal to the plantation boss. Some of ’em’s gettin’ something of their wildness and independence back now, same way some of those mares went from bein’ ranch horses.”

  “So that’s why Dave hates to see Mesteño caught.”

  “Everybody’s got his reasons.” Cutler smiled at her. “Even you.”

  “Then why are we doin’ it?”

  “We’re figurin’ he’s better off alive than dead.”

  “Well, I guess that’s so.”

  “Maybe,” Cutler said. “Maybe. I ain’t real positive about it myself. But if dying’s the only other choice, guess you might as well start livin’ another way first, least long enough to see if you can do it or not. A man, a stallion, he can always die any old time. Dyin’ ain’t hard.”

  “It is for some.”

  “Maybe so. Can’t speak for others.”

  She looked sidelong at Cutler as he continued to watch the mustangs. She realized he was telling her that, for him, living was harder than dying. Was that why he made a living trapping rogue animals? Did his life, whatever it was that made it hard for him, become easier if he lived on the edge of death?

  She remembered the death that was most recent in her life, when her mother passed away. Ellen had never cried about that. Instead, it made her figure that life was too short for tears. Her mother had been strong in the amount of work she was able to accomplish in a day, long after she ought not to have been doing it. But her mother had been weak in not being able to move to town when Harmon would not go with her. The mother had let the man have his way, and that was what killed her. So, instead of crying, Ellen had learned to live each day staying on her guard so she would not fall into the same trap that killed her mother. That meant not taking orders from men and not letting them get the best of her in any way. They had to keep trying to dominate her, so she had to keep strengthening her defenses.

  How did it happen, then, that in less than a day she was losing her defenses toward Cutler? Never, since her mother died, had Ellen ever let a man know he had something to teach her.

  Cutler, while watching the mustangs, was wondering why he had been talking so much. Normally, he was a man of a few words, only the words that had to be said to get a job done. This time he had gotten to the point where he heard himself talking. He did not think he was going to say another word for the rest of the day.

  Ellen sidled over near Cutler. It looked like she was just getting closer so she could whisper and not be heard by the horses but still be heard by Cutler. Their bodies touched.

  “Life’s simple for the mustangs, isn’t it? I mean for the mares.”

  He nodded.

  “Not so simple for women, though.”

  “Not for some,” he said finally. “Is for others, probably. Depends on the women.”

  “And the men.”

  He heard a new melody in her voice. He knew that he could put his arm around her now and she would not pull away.

  But then a shot rang out. And instantly, before the report had even stopped echoing against the hills that formed the valley, the mood on the rise and in the valley changed.

  Mesteño raised his head and let out a loud snort, and all the mares were alert.

  It was hard to know where the shot came from, but Cutler could tell from the direction Mesteño turned his head, toward a rocky hill forty yards from Cutler. Cutler looked over in time to see the glint of a rifle barrel. Cutler pulled his six-gun, but before he had it leveled, another shot rang out, this time from a spot across the valley, and Cutler saw some rock chip near the place where the first shot came, and the gun barrel disappeared behind cover. Cutler looked across the valley and saw a flash there as another shot echoed against the hills. He looked to Ellen who had drawn her own gun.

  “Who’s in the crossfire?” she asked with a strange calm. “Us or the mustangs?”

  “They don’t seem to be aimin’ at us,” Cutler said. “Not yet.”

  The mustangs were moving up a hill at one corner of the valley, a trail midway between the two snipers.

  “Damn!” Cutler said between his teeth.

  “What’ll we do?” Ellen asked. “Suppose I circle around for one of ’em, and you go for the other.”
/>   He looked at her. “You’d better . . .”He was going to say she should stay where she was and keep her head down, but then realized that would only make her ornery. Besides, she was probably as good in a gunfight as any man would be. So he decided she could go after the gun that was farthest away. If he got away before she got to him, which was likely, at least she stayed safer than if she went for the gun that was closer and seemed, to Cutler, more dangerous. “You’d better take the one over there.” He pointed to the spot where the second and third shots had come from.

  She smiled at him and inched her way below the crest of the rise until the second gun could not see her. Cutler watched her scamper to her horse, mount up and start her ride in a wide arc, using the cover of hills and rocks to keep out of sight of her quarry. When he saw that she was doing exactly what he would have done, Cutler put her out of his mind and moved in a low crouch toward the spot where the first shot had come, the one that had started all the trouble.

  As he got closer, there was another shot from the man he was stalking. He could hear the mustang hoofbeats on the hard earth fading. Then another shot from a distance. The two men were exchanging fire now, and that meant Ellen had a chance of getting to her man before he got away. It meant that Cutler had an even better chance of getting to his.

  With the sound of the gunfire to muffle his approach and moving as he did in the flat-heeled boots he wore, Cutler was able to get near without being heard. He came to a huge boulder that reached up to the sky and walked up the back of it, then crouched at the top and looked over.

  A man lay on his stomach twelve yards below, his rifle pointed to the other side of the valley, and he fired.

  Cutler heard a return shot from the other side. If Cutler raised himself enough to get a good bead on the man beneath him, he would also be exposing himself to the fire from the other side. He might jump to his objective fast enough to avoid being shot by either of the gunmen, but he might get a broken leg at the same time. He would have to crawl back down the boulder and take a chance on not being heard as he went around the side of it. At least it seemed wiser to take a chance on one gun getting him than to expose himself to both and getting too hurt in the leg to do much about it.

  He slowly lowered himself down the back of the boulder, the same way he had gone up it, then inched his way around the side until he could see a strip of the man’s shirt. He stepped back to get a running start and, in a lightning movement, sprang around the rock and onto the gunman’s back. The man’s gun went off when Cutler landed. But he was powerless. Cutler had his arm around the man’s neck, cutting off the air to his lungs until he dropped the rifle, Cutler’s own gun pointed at the man’s head. When the rifle fell, the man jabbed his elbows back against Cutler’s ribs, and Cutler pushed the man away. The man turned, his eyes on fire, and he was none other than Tom Chase.

  Cutler was mad enough before he knew who the man was. Now he was enraged. He wanted to break both Chase’s arms and both his legs and throw him in an alkali bog. Chase looked like he was having similar thoughts about Cutler.

  “Don’t you ever try sneakin’ up on me like that again,” Chase said.

  That made Cutler even angrier. It was bad enough that Chase talked about Cutler’s trying to sneak up when Cutler had snuck up, not just tried to. It was worse that Chase talked like he had the upper hand, like he was an incurable flannel mouth. Something in the back of Cutler’s head yelled at Cutler to shoot the man, shoot him now. He had his orders from Harmon, Chase did, and he had gone against them by being out here interfering with Cutler doing his job. A man like that would be nothing but trouble as long as he was alive. So shooting him now might save a lot of grief later on. No different than Chase’s wanting to kill all the horses, just to be sure to get the stallion, just to protect other horses in the future. No, not much different than that if Cutler shot Chase now, and there was a certain kind of justice in it. Cutler had never been closer to shooting a man in cold blood before but, when it came right down to it, it was an action Cutler could not perform.

  “Now I’m gonna have to do something about you, Chase,” Cutler said. “Can’t have you runnin’ around free, ‘cause it looks like you can’t be trusted.”

  “You gonna shoot an unarmed man, Cutler?” Chase grinned.

  “I’m thinkin’ about it.”

  “Man who thinks about it don’t do it.”

  “Maybe I keep you standin’ up like that, somebody’s gonna do it for me.”

  Chase’s grin went away as he remembered the other man with a rifle. His look went from Cutler across to the opposite hill. Then he looked back at Cutler. “Suppose we could get down some?”

  “No, I like you right where you are. ’Course, you could take a chance you’re right about me not shootin’ and make a move. Why don’t you do that?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Start by tellin’ me what you’re doin’ here and why you and that man are shootin’ at each other across a valley full of mustangs.”

  “I didn’t come here to shoot at that man over there. Don’t even know who he is.”

  “Then how’d he know you’d be here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What you doin’ here?”

  “I come to watch you work.”

  “Didn’t your boss tell you nobody was supposed to get in the way?”

  “Hell, I wasn’t in the way. I was over here and you was over there.”

  A shot came from across the valley, and a bullet ricocheted off a rock near Chase’s head.

  “Cutler,” Chase said, “I’m goin’ for cover!”

  “No, you’re not!” There was a sound in Cutler’s voice that Chase found more threatening than the gunfire.

  Chase flattened himself against the boulder and looked in the direction the bullet had come from. “That’s it, then. You’re gonna just hold me up here as a target for him.”

  “You got it, Chase. Not a bad gamble, is it? Chances of him comin’ that close again, from that distance . . . well, it’s more likely that I’d get you from this distance, ain’t it?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Chase,” Cutler seemed to be taking his own sweet time, “I can always smell a lie. Even something that just ain’t exactly the truth. Now I’ve been smellin’ that smell while you’ve been tryin’ to tell me what you’re doin’ here. I just don’t smell that you’re tellin’ me all of it somehow.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like everything, from the beginnin’.”

  “I come to watch you work, like I said.”

  “That don’t smell right.”

  Another shot hit the boulder six feet above Chase.

  “See,” Cutler said, “he ain’t gettin’ any better. You probably don’t have much to worry about.”

  “It’s the truth!”

  “Well, here’s the trouble I’m havin’ with it,” Cutler said. “I just can’t get it through my head why a man brings a rifle just to watch. Then again, if he doesn’t know who the other man with the rifle is, why’d he shoot first?”

  “I wasn’t shootin’ at him. Didn’t know he was there until he fired.”

  “Then what were you shootin’ at, Chase?”

  “I had a bead on one of them mustangs.”

  “Which one of them mustangs?”

  “Mesteño.”

  “So you was shootin’ at the stallion.”

  “Just one shot, and then someone shot at me.”

  “I thought I heard Harmon say he wanted the stallion alive. Somewhere I got the idea that’s why I was called to do the job.”

  “I wasn’t shootin’ to kill him.”

  “That a fact?”

  “No, I was just gonna crease him.”

  “Crease him?! Just stun him, huh?”

  “Sure, then we’d get him, he’d be alive, and that’d be that without all the fuss.”

  “Just crease him! From this distance, you was gonna make your shot just do a nice litt
le slide along the top of the neck. You must be one hell of a shot, Chase!”

  “Okay, I was takin’ a chance, but it was worth it.”

  “Worth it?!”

  “Sure, if it worked, you’d be thankin’ me now. Somebody didn’t take a shot at me, and I might still’ve done it.”

  “You have any idea how much work you just made for everybody with your crazy shootin’? We could’ve built an eight close to one of them entrances to the valley. Might’ve been easy. No way we’ll be able to do that now. Nobody’ll ever get near this valley and find mustangs in it anymore. We’ll have to build miles away from here and that means miles of furrows and fences to get them to the corral.”

  Another shot. This one did not ricochet nearby, but Chase figured he was still a target. He looked at Cutler, nothing more to say. Cutler looked back, his gun still leveled at Chase, and did not look like he was going to let the target go for cover.

  Ellen was angry when she got back to the spot where Cutler had left Apache. Cutler was mounted and waiting for her. Chase was on his horse, minus his rifle and six-gun.

  “He got away,” Ellen said, almost shouting it.

  “Get a look at him?” Cutler asked.

  “No, I told you! He got away!”

  She saw the disappointed look in Cutler’s face. She saw him trying to hide it, and that made it even worse. He had treated her like an equal and now, all the way back to the ranch and until she could get him aside, he had to think that his opinion of her had been unjustified. She had not come back with the gunman, and the fact that there had to be a space of time when Cutler had a lower opinion of her was grating.

  “Never mind,” Cutler said. “We can’t always finish what we set out to do.”

  “Well, I always do!” she snapped. And she rode on ahead of them all the way back.

  “She’s a real wildcat,” Chase observed.

  “Shut up!” Cutler told him, and neither man spoke for the rest of the ride.

  Ellen had in fact underestimated Cutler. He knew by her change in attitude that she had more of a story to tell, and that it was not a simple matter of her quarry escaping from her. He tried to figure out what it was all about, and finally thought he had a good idea. But until she got around to telling him, he decided he would just have to wait her out. Thanks to Chase, there was a lot of work to be done before the job could be finished, and that gave Cutler and Ellen some extra time.