The Long Trail (The McCabes Book 1)

by Brad Dennison

  “Cook and bartender, eh?” Fred took another sip. “Got gunhawk written all over him. And gunhawk means trouble.”

  “No, Dusty’s no trouble. He’s a good man. And besides, no man has gunhawk written all over him more than the man you work for. And you won’t find a more stand-up man.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  Fred took a sip of beer, and Hunter followed suit.

  “Y’know,” Fred said. “Strikes me as though I’ve seen him somewheres. Has he ever been through here before?”

  Hunter shook his head. “Nope. Never been to Montana before.”

  “Strikes me as downright familiar.”

  Hunter raised his brows, his eyes dancing with amusement, as though he were privy to a great secret. “Don’t he, though?”

  Dusty, still listening outside, found that downright puzzling.

  NINE

  Dusty found tending bar was not a strenuous job, but there was a downside. You had to work damned fast. Back at Lewis’s place in Nevada, Dusty had poured a few beers for travelers or miners, or some townsfolk drifting in looking for a respite from the hot, dusty day. But pouring beer in Baker’s Crossing was nothing compared to a cattle-country town on a Saturday night. The bar was continually lined with cowpunchers, each wanting a mug of beer or a shot of whiskey, and wanting it immediately. Dusty found having only two hands to be inadequate. With an apron tied over his gunbelt, he scurried behind the bar, trying to meet the demands of Hunter’s customers. One man wanted no head on his beer, another wanted an inch of foam. Hunter circulated about the room, greeting customers. When a cold beer was ordered, and many were, Dusty would call to Hunter, who would hurry down to the root cellar.

  Dusty was always to remain behind the bar while Hunter was down in the cellar. Hunter suspected that, on previous Saturday nights, some cowhands had filled their mugs from the keg behind the bar while he hurried out back to fill an order for cold brew.

  Many of the cowhands had no money. They were paid monthly, and some were paid only on credit, as their employers had little cash until their herd was ready to be driven to market, so Hunter kept a line of credit open to any cowhand who worked for one of the local ranches. If you were new to the area, and no local cowhand would vouch for you, then it was cash up front or no service. Dusty had a small ledger sheet in an apron pocket, and was tallying up the drinks as he went.

  Somewhere before nine o’clock, one cowhand shoved another, who staggered backward a few steps, jostling another and spilling his beer. Soon fists were flying, and Hunter was in the middle of it, standing almost an entire head taller than most of his customers, calling for them to break it up, and grabbing men by the shirt collar and banging heads together. A punch glanced off his bearded chin, knocking him back a step, and he grabbed the man behind the belt with one hand dragged him to the door, and threw him out into the street. Son-of-a-bitch!, Dusty thought. Hunter is strong! All the while, Hunter had a smile on his face. Dusty, watching from behind the bar, realized Hunter was enjoying himself.

  The fight had died away, barely, when a man stepped through the doorway, immediately attracting Dusty’s attention. His clothes were dusty, which indicated he was fresh from the trail. But it wasn’t the kind of dust that lands on a cowhand working long hours on the back of a horse. It looked like saddle-bum dust, dust that has built upon another day’s dust, with more than a little sweat mixed in. He wore spurs, which indicated to Dusty he was not from these parts, as Dusty had noticed most of the cowhands in the northwest did not seem to wear spurs. Dusty himself did not wear them, despite living most of his years in the Southwest, because Patterson had taught him to always move quietly, and spurs tended to make a metallic jingling as you walked.

  What caught Dusty’s attention the most about this man were his guns. Remingtons. One riding low on his right side, the other equally low on his left.

  The man stepped up to the bar. “I’ll take a whiskey, boy.”

  “I’ll take some indication you can pay for it, first.”

  “The only indication you’ll get is this.” The man reached for his right-hand gun, but before he could clear leather, he found himself staring into the barrel of Dusty’s Peacemaker, not a foot from his left eye, the hammer cocked.

  “Now, that ain’t too neighborly,” Dusty said.

  The saloon, which had been rising from a murmur to a roar and then dying back down throughout the evening, was suddenly quiet.

  “What’re you gonna do, boy?” the man asked.

  “Empty that eye socket if you don’t set that gun down on the bar. Then pull the other, real slow and easy-like, and set it down, too.”

  “You think you got the nerve?”

  “You want to try me?”

  The man decided Dusty did not look like he was bluffing, and did as instructed. First one pistol, then the other.

  “Time for you to leave,” Hunter said suddenly from behind the man, and he delivered what Dusty was coming to realize was his customary way of helping a customer out the door when he had worn out his welcome. One hand gripped the man by the back of his belt, the other at his collar, then Hunter dragged him across the floor while the man kicked with his feet and cut loose with a long string of obscenities, mostly at what line of work he thought Hunter’s mother might have been in, and Hunter tossed him out the door.

  The room erupted in laughter, then the murmur of a dozen conversations being conducted at once resumed.

  Some of the men eventually began to trickle out, their destination being the establishment owned by the woman named Alisha Summers.

  “That man with the guns,” Dusty said to Hunter. “He might be trouble.”

  “Him? I doubt it. Once his guns were gone, he wasn’t such a big man.”

  “It’s not that he was a big man. It’s that he was a small man. That’s what we’ve got to worry about.” Then, Dusty added, “Besides, standing next to you, every man’s a small man.”

  Hunter exploded into a belly laugh. The joke had not been funny enough to warrant such an enthusiastic a response, but Hunter had been helping himself to some of his own whiskey. Even though he was the proprietor of this place, it was clear to Dusty that Hunter was still a cowhand at heart, and it was Saturday night.

  “Why don’t you grab a beer and take a break?” Hunter said. “You’ve been workin’ hard all night, and the crowd’s starting to thin out. Must be past midnight.”

  That sounded good to Dusty. His feet were a little sore. He was accustomed to working long hours in the saddle, not on his feet. He untied his apron and dropped it in a heap at the edge of the bar. Grabbing a mug, he filled it from the keg behind the bar – he was too tired to climb all the way down for a cold one.

  He stepped out the door, then to one side so he would not stand silhouetted by the light of the doorway. Something he had learned from Sam Patterson, which had become second nature.

  The air was cool. A slight breeze touched his face, bringing with it a touch of balsam.

  He glanced about quickly for any motion in the shadows that might be out of place. Another habit he had picked up from Patterson. Such ways might seem needless to some, Dusty thought, but they can mean the difference between surviving and not. Especially since the drifter Hunter had tossed out the door was out there, somewhere in the night. Even though Dusty had taken the man’s pistols, he might have a rifle in his saddle.

  Dusty tipped the mug for a sip of beer, and something caught his eye. A small glow, white but tiny and with a barely perceptible hint of orange, out beyond the edge of town, and up a bit. A campfire, on one of the ridge slopes beyond the gap.

  He finished his beer, then returned to the barroom. A poker game was under way at a table near the stove. Hunter, the McCabe rider named Fred, and a couple cowhands were forming a small audience.

  “Hunter,” Dusty said.

  Hunter looked over.

  Dusty signaled with a nod for him to follow.

  Hunter tailed Dusty to the doorway, and Dust
y said, “Look up there, off in the hills.”

  Hunter did. “A fire. What about it? Drifters, probably.”

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  “It’s a little odd, I suppose. You’d think they’d ride into town, see if there’s a room available, and if not, or they couldn’t afford it, they’d camp just outside of town. That’s what most of ‘em do.”

  Hunter backed out of the doorway and returned to the poker table.

  Dusty, however, was not so sure. It was not simply the oddity of the location of the campfire, it was a feeling. Patterson had said, “Regardless of anything, no matter what anyone else says, always trust your gut-feelings.”

  The following day, Dusty fixed breakfast for himself and Hunter, and for Franklin and Fred and a few straggler cowhands who had slept off their whiskey in the livery stable or an alley, or a cot at Alisha Summers’. Then Hunter gave Dusty the day off.

  From his chair on Hunter’s porch, he watched the Sunday morning church crowd roll in. The church was a small, single-room building that also served as a local school. The preacher was a young Baptist man with hair that was receding into a jagged widow’s peak, who pushed a plow when he was not going about his pastorly duties. He had an almost too gentle and sincere way when he spoke. Watch out for the ones who try to act too sincere, Patterson had once said. They will always be the ones who will greet you with one hand but with the other they will be reaching for your wallet. Sincerity should come naturally, not be something you have to attempt. But the preacher also visited Hunter’s for coffee almost every morning, and laughed the loudest when the humor turned raucous. His wife was not much older than Dusty, and as they had no children, she spent her weekdays at the school-church serving as the school marm.

  The school-church was maybe two hundred yards from the last building in town, which was Hunter’s, probably to give the church-goers a feeling of separation from the more primal needs satisfied at Hunter’s or Miss Alisha’s. But from where Dusty sat on the boardwalk, he had a fair view of the building.

  The young preacher stood by the steps, shaking hands and it seemed to Dusty, selling himself to the flock.

  Dusty did not know how he felt about the concept of God. He believed, or rather, felt, that there was something to the concept. And when he was alone in the wilderness, he felt a serenity that seemed bigger than he was, especially in these Montana mountains.

  “Do you believe in God?” Dusty had once asked Patterson.

  Patterson shrugged. “I believe there is a God. I think everyone knows there is a God. They may try to talk themselves out of it, that such things are for superstitious fools, but deep down, in their heart, they know God exists. But I can’t say I believe in God. I’ve killed too many people, done too many wrong things, for him to believe in me.”

  Dusty was not sure about that. It seemed to him a god who created the mountains, the streams, the pine woods covering these slopes, would be too optimistic to fully give up on anyone.

  Dusty spent Sunday afternoon stretching out on the hay in the livery with a mug of Hunter’s cold beer within reach. And as darkness settled in, he stood on the boardwalk in front of the saloon, looking off to where the campfire had glowed the night before. The hills were dark. No sign of any fire. But Dusty wasn’t satisfied. He sat in his chair, rocking it back against the wall, and waited.

  Hunter stepped out eventually for a breath of night air. “Dusty. I didn’t know you were out here.”

  “Yeah. Just enjoying the night. I love the mountain air.”

  Hunter nodded. “Even after all the years I’ve lived in these mountains, I can never get used to how crisp and clear the air is.”

  Hunter brought Dusty a beer, then stepped in, and Dusty sat and looked off into the darkness. And to the hills outside of town.

  No campfire at all. Still, something tugged at him.

  He finished the beer, then rose to his feet and stepped into the barroom. Hunter had given him unlimited access to both kegs, part of the compensation for not being able to offer him pay. Dusty climbed the ladder down to the cool, damp root cellar, refilled the mug, and climbed back out. Hunter was leaning one elbow on the bar with a deck of cards in front of him, engaged in a game of solitaire. Hunter had a cigar going, and offered Dusty one. Dusty was not normally one to smoke, but what the hell? Good cigars did not come along every day.

  With the cigar clenched in his teeth and the mug of beer in one hand, Dusty opened the front door a crack and looked off into the darkness toward where he knew the ridges to be, which he had crossed on his way into town from the McCabe Ranch a week earlier.

  And there, high up on one of the ridges, was the glow of a campfire.

  The following morning, he pulled on his buckskin shirt, rather than one of the shirts he had bought at Franklin’s. As he poked at some strips of bacon sizzling in a skillet on Hunter’s stove, he said to Hunter, “I need the morning off.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m gonna saddle-up and take me a ride through the hills around town.”

  Hunter’s brows dropped questioningly. “Can’t it wait? The hills will be there after the noon stage leaves.”

  “What’s in the hills may not wait. And I might be gone all day, and may not even be back until tomorrow.”

  Hunter’s head rose a bit as understanding dawned on him. “You’re still worried about that campfire, aren’t you.”

  Dusty nodded, and he told Hunter of the one he had seen the night before.

  “It’s probably just some drifting cowhands,” Hunter said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “They didn’t drift very far, did they?”

  “Maybe they wanted to stay in the area a couple days. It was Sunday. Maybe they wanted to attend the church service.”

  “There weren’t any drifters in the crowd yesterday. I sat outside here and watched them all ride in. And if you were right, then why’d they move their camp? The fire wasn’t in the same place as it had been the night before.”

  Dusty turned from the stove to look at Hunter. “It may be nothing. Or it may be some Indians escaped from the reservation, on the run. It may be any one of a dozen things. But I’ve seen how dangerous men operate. I’ve got to check this out.”

  Hunter nodded. “I’ll get by today. You take care of yourself, up there in them hills alone.”

  “I’ll be all right. I’ve had a lot of training in how to be all right.”

  Before Dusty went to the livery to saddle up, he visited Franklin’s. The time for that Spencer rifle was now. A pistol was worn by a cowhand for protection, but not from outlaws or hostile Indians, like many a dime-novelist wanted folks back east to believe. It was protection from being dragged to death by your horse. The primary cause of death for a cowhand was being thrown from the often half saddle-broke mustangs they rode, finding one boot caught in a stirrup, and being dragged to death while the horse ran, or being trampled by its hooves. With a pistol at your side, you had at least a chance to shoot the animal and save your life. The pistol also gave you maneuverable shooting at close quarters, but generally, if accuracy was a requirement, you wanted a rifle.

  “I’m here for that Spencer,” Dusty said. He unbuckled his gunbelt, and set it on the counter. “I’ll trade you this Peacemaker for it, straight-up.”

  “I might be willing to let you start up a tab, Dusty. No need to lose your pistol.”

  “Thank you kindly, but I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in the area.” He still had not decided whether he was going to ride out to the McCabe house, bold as Boston brass, and introduce himself as Johnny McCabe’s long lost bastard son, or simply ride on to Oregon.

  Franklin slid the revolver from its holster to examine it.

  “Careful,” Dusty said. “It’s loaded.”

  “It’s a beauty, that’s for certain. The Colt Peacemaker will set the standard for pistols for many years to come.”

  Franklin pulled the hammer half-way back then pulled the trigger, and with his free hand gave
the cylinder a spin. “It’s in great condition. Oiled like it just came from the factory.”

  “I was taught to always take care of my guns and my horses. You don’t know when you might have to rely on one or the other to save your life.”

  Franklin looked up at Dusty curiously, almost as though he was trying to discern if Dusty was joking, but there was no sign of a smile on Dusty’s face. “All right, Dusty. An even trade, it is.”

  “Can you throw in a box of cartridges? A rifle ain’t much good without ‘em.”

  “One box is all I have. I don’t get much call for Spencer ammunition, anymore.”

  From a box behind the counter, Franklin grasped a box and handed it to Dusty.

  “Before the deal is final,” Dusty said, “I’d like to take it out back and try a few shots.”

  “By all means, please do.”

  A pine grew a hundred yards behind Franklin’s store, reaching more than eighty feet to the sky, its trunk as straight as an arrow’s shaft. The rifle was a fifty-two caliber. Dusty loaded seven shots, then chambered a round. He drew a bead on a branch of the pine tree, and fired. The branch splintered. Dusty jacked in another cartridge, and with this shot, broke the branch cleanly.

  Franklin was standing in the back doorway, watching Dusty select another branch and begin whittling away at it. Fine marksmanship. Franklin loved to watch a display of good shooting skills.

  “Excuse me,” came a woman’s voice from behind him.

  Franklin turned with a start. “Oh. Miss Ginny. I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you.”

  “Obviously,” Aunt Ginny said, her hands on her hips, one brow raised.

  Aunt Ginny wore a bonnet, and dangling from one hand was a drawstring purse. Behind her stood a dark-haired girl, maybe two inches taller, and she also wore a bonnet.

  “Miss Ginny,” Franklin said. “Miss Bree.”

  “Hi, Mister Franklin,” Bree said.

  “I was just watching a pretty incredible example of marksmanship out back,” he offered in explanation for not greeting his customers as they walked in the door, but knew it would be futile.