by Peter Dawson
Other Westerns by Peter Dawson:
Dark Riders of Doom (1996)
Rattlesnake Mesa (1997)
Ghost Brand of the Wishbones (1998)
Angel Peak (1999)
Claiming of the Deerfoot (2000)
Lone Rider from Texas (2001)
Forgotten Destiny (2002)
Phantom Raiders (2003)
Ghost of the Chinook (2004)
Showdown at Anchor (2005)
Desert Drive (2006)
Troublesome Range (2007)
Posse Guns (2008)
Gunsmoke Masquerade (2009)
Willow Basin (2010)
First Skyhorse Publishing edition published 2017 by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency
Copyright © 2011 by David S. Glidden
“Rider on the Buckskin” first appeared as a twenty-eight-part serial in The New York Daily and Sunday News (11-11-56/12-8-56). Copyright © 1956 by The New York Daily News, Inc. Copyright © renewed 1984 by Dorothy S. Ewing. Copyright © 2011 by David S. Glidden for restored material.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Series cover designer: Brian Peterson
Cover illustration: Downing the Nigh Leader by Frederic Remington, 1890
Print ISBN: 978-1-63450-763-9
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-764-6
Printed in the United States of America
RIDER ON THE BUCKSKIN
Chapter One
At first light this mid-October morning the heavy overcast had loosed a steady drizzle all across the range to the west of the Bear Claws. And now at three o’clock in the afternoon the misty rain still fell steadily, laying a light haze along Ute Springs’ puddled streets.
Clouds hung so low along the valley that the tops of the tallest trees and the slender white spire of the church at the lower end of town were shrouded as in a settling fog. Even the brilliant golden-orange patches of cottonwood and poplar, heavily frosted this past week, did little to relieve the dull drabness of the day. And as Jim Echols stared across Sherman Street at a three-team freight hitch pulling past Rushmire’s corral, noticing the way the driver sat hunched over and so plainly miserable, he shivered in sympathy with the man against the bite of the damp, chill air.
Echols had been only half listening as Lute Pleasants once again drove home the same points he had been using since the beginning of their argument. Yet now he paid a stricter attention as the man demanded: “Name me a law that says I can’t put in this fence, Sheriff. Go ahead, try.”
Jim Echols was weary of Pleasants’s cocksure and faintly patronizing manner. Convinced that there was little point in discussing this further, he nonetheless countered: “There isn’t one. Not on the books, anyway. But the law doesn’t spell out how a man’s to get along with his neighbors.”
Lute Pleasants shook his head in much the same way as he might have had he been utterly nonplussed in trying to explain something quite simple to a child. He waited until a woman hurrying along this stretch of awninged walk had drawn on out of hearing before asking: “Why should I look out for Anchor? It’s my grass Fred and Kate have been using all these years to carry them over the winter, my.…”
“And it’s their hill graze you’ve used every one of the four summers since you bought the Beavertail,” the lawman cut in impatiently. “The same as Ruthling did before he sold you the layout. He figured it was an even swap. So did Anchor. And so did you until two weeks ago.”
He glanced at Sam Cauble then, abruptly aware that Pleasants’s foreman had spoken hardly a word in the ten minutes they had been standing here. “What’s your idea on this fence, Cauble?”
“Mine?” Cauble smiled dourly. “I don’t draw wages for havin’ ideas, Sheriff. That’s Lute’s department.”
The two Beavertail men, Echols thought, made an oddly assorted pair. Pleasants was dogmatic, assertive, while Cauble was close-mouthed, almost meek. Pleasants was fairly young—Echols guessed him to be close to his own age, thirty-two—and average height and heavy-muscled, not an ounce of fat on his big-boned frame. The Beavertail ramrod, on the other hand, was slight of stature and probably crowding fifty. And Cauble was lame, standing as crookedly right now as he usually sat a saddle.
It was perhaps this long interval of being on his bad leg that made Cauble abruptly add: “Seems we ain’t gettin’ much of any place hashin’ this over, boss. What say we ride?”
Pleasants paid Cauble not the slightest attention as his dark eyes narrowly studied the sheriff. “This fence is a plain business proposition, money in the bank, Echols,” he stated. “It’s got not one damned thing to do with the Bonds. I’m just saving my grass to fatten up culls over the winter. Come the thaw next spring and I’m ditching that creek meadow so as to double my hay crop. Doesn’t it all add up to plain horse sense?”
“Like hell. Not looking at it from where Kate and Fred Bond sit. They’ll have to trim down their herd quick and ship heavy. And on a poor market, all because of your damned wire.”
This explosive rejoinder for once caught Pleasants off balance. And as the man groped for a further point of argument, Jim Echols glanced disgustedly out onto the puddled street again, thinking that it wasn’t worth it.
Idly at first, then with increasing interest, he noticed a rider on a buckskin horse leading a pack mare in on an empty tie rail at the far end of the wooden walk awning close above. The fine conformation of the buckskin was what had caught his eye and held it. He was noting the animal’s high withers and powerful forequarters as Pleasants at length stubbornly insisted: “I still say I’m within my rights.”
“Suppose we leave it at that, then.”
Pleasants sighed gustily. “Wish you could see it my way.”
Jim Echols only shrugged.
Pleasants, finally gathering that nothing was to be gained in arguing this further, abruptly said—“Let’s go, Sam.”—and led the way out to the two Beavertail horses tied nearby.
The lawman watched them swing out from the rail, nodding sparely in answer to Pleasants’s parting lift of a hand, thinking: His head’s full of rimrock.
In one way he felt relieved, for ever since first hearing of Beavertail’s new fence he had supposed Pleasants would sooner or later want him to express an opinion on it. Well, he had made his views known. Typically he had done so in no uncertain terms. Even so he could take little satisfaction, for he saw it as having been completely futile, a waste of breath.
This session with Pleasants had left him in one of his rare bad moods. Knowing the man only casually, he had discovered some surprising things about him—a headstrong ambition, for one, and for another a rare callousness toward range ethics. Most startling of all, though, was putting what he had learned alongside the fact that as late as the end of the summer Lute Pleasants had taken Kate Bond to several Saturday night dances at the Masonic H
all, and to the Schuster cabin raising up West Wind Valley way.
Something must have gone sour there, and, though it was strictly none of Echols’s affair, he couldn’t help wondering what had happened between the two to make Pleasants turn such a blind eye to the situation his fence was creating. The lawman was fond of Kate and her brother, and it rankled to see them being treated this way, their beef being so suddenly cut off from winter forage with the cold months so close at hand.
With that sobering thought he turned up the walk now, speaking in unaccustomed curtness to a passer-by, and then abruptly noticing the buckskin horse once more. The animal was tied alongside the pack mare at the rail up ahead. Its rider had disappeared, probably into one of the neighboring stores, having thrown his patched yellow slicker across the saddle to keep it dry. Now that the saddle was empty, the buckskin looked even bigger than at first glance. And Echols, really impressed, all but forgot his ill humor as he forsook the shelter of the awning to step out into the mud and stand alongside the horse, head tilted against the raw slant of the rain.
“You’re a proud-lookin’ devil,” he muttered admiringly, running a hand over the wet, rippling muscles along the buckskin’s shoulder, feeling the flesh quiver at the touch of his hand, then relax.
He liked the way the horse’s ears stood so sharply forward, the mark of good breeding in the small head. He began wondering if he could buy the animal, and a small excitement lifted in him.
Then all at once he was noticing the buckskin’s jaw brand, a Half Moon, and trying to place it, for it was a brand strange to this country, yet one familiar to him. Suddenly he did remember where he had heard of it and his hawkish face went slack with surprise. And in that fraction of a second the past minute’s enjoyment ended for him; he was once again in the same foul mood he’d been in on parting from Pleasants. Only this time his temper flared for a far different reason.
He looked quickly around, scanning the walk in both directions, his interest in the buckskin’s owner sharpening. He stepped back under the rail to the walk and dipped his head to let the water run from the trough of his hat.
He was standing there some three minutes later when a tall, rangy man carrying a half-filled gunny sack appeared out of Dendahl’s Emporium two doors below and came toward him along the walk, small-roweled spurs whispering metallically at each stride.
It had become Jim Echols’s habit over his three years in office to take notice of strangers passing through the country. Yet rarely had he sized one up as carefully, or as scornfully, as he did this one.
The stranger wore a cowhide coat a trifle too small for his wide span of shoulder. He was smoking a pipe and he was young—the lawman put him in his middle twenties—with a lean and sun-darkened face shadowed by several days of razor neglect. Contrasting strongly with that deeply tanned skin was a pair of deep-set and alert blue eyes.
So this is him, Echols was thinking scornfully as the stranger approached. Not many of ’em darken down so soon after they’re out.
Noticing that his stare was being returned now, the sheriff’s irritation became even stronger than it had been while he waited. And it was because of his ill-humor, plus the fact that under any circumstances he wouldn’t have wasted his time being polite to this man, that he bluntly stated: “You must be Frank Rivers.”
The other halted two strides away, surprise washing over his angular features as he reached up to take the pipe from his mouth. Then, unexpectedly, he was smiling.
“So I am,” he drawled good-naturedly. “But where’ve I seen you before?”
“You haven’t.” The lawman caught no visible reaction in the man and tonelessly added: “Maybe it’d help if you knew my name. It’s Jim Echols.”
“Oh.” A definite reserve, a flintiness, settled across this Frank Rivers’s face. “Some relation of Bill Echols?”
“Bill’s my cousin.”
Rivers shrugged sparely. “So you know all about it.”
“I damned well do.” Derisively Echols asked: “Hasn’t been too long since the governor pardoned you, has it?”
“Four months.”
The sheriff just now happened to notice the end of a tied-down holster hanging below the line of Rivers’s coat. Nodding down to it, he tartly commented: “Didn’t know you were allowed to pack a gun.”
The taller man deliberately, coolly measured Echols all the way from hat to boots before saying: “It was a full pardon, Echols, not a parole.”
That deceptively soft drawl belied the steel behind the words. And before the sheriff had a chance to say anything, Rivers lowered the gunny sack to the walk planks, pocketed his pipe, and just as quietly added: “It appears you’ve got a chip on your shoulder, friend. Are you asking me to knock it off?”
Jim Echols started momentarily, left wordless, and he grudgingly wondered just then how bad a licking he or almost any other man would take if he chose to accept such a bald invitation as this. Rivers was big and had a look of rawhide toughness about him. And, now that he noticed it, the sheriff could see that Rivers’s clean-lined face bore marks of violence, marks probably left there by the man’s having survived the countless brawls of better than four years in the territorial prison. What might once have been an aquiline nose was slightly crooked and flattened, and the pale two-inch line of a scar showed through the wavy black hair over his left temple.
But what galled Echols the most was this man’s coolness and sureness, the almost good-natured yet deadly serious way he had spoken. Echols judged him to be quite capable of taking care of himself either with fists or with a gun, though that wasn’t the lawman’s reason for now remarking: “Better watch your step, Rivers. You’re talking to the sheriff.”
“So?” Frank Rivers seemed only faintly surprised and not at all impressed. “Well, now that you’ve looked me over, is there anything else you’d like to know?”
“One thing.” There was no tolerance whatsoever in Echols for this man and his tone was larded with contempt as he queried: “You’re still on the prowl for that pair? The men you say held up the stage and killed your father while they crippled Bill?”
“And framed me. Yes.”
The lawman smiled crookedly. “One was lame, wasn’t he?”
“Lame and a drunk. A carpenter.”
“Having any luck locating him?”
Rivers overlooked the biting sarcasm. “Not any … yet.”
“I can save you some time. The only lame man around here was talking with me right here when you rode in. Name of Sam Cauble. And he’s no carpenter.”
“So I just found out in that store back there.”
The lawman’s feelings toward Rivers had mellowed not at all, and now he gave vent to them by recklessly observing: “If I’d cooked up the story you gave at your trial, I’d maybe do the same as you’re doin’. Sashay around a few months letting on like I was hunting these two men, that lame one and his partner. I’d do it just to make the governor’s pardon look good.”
Rivers eyed the sheriff with a faint though patently genuine amusement. “I get a combing over like this every now and then. So go ahead, throw in the spurs.”
Jim Echols’s thin face tightened and reddened. “They’ve rigged up a chair for Bill with wheels on it. He spends his time in the chair and in bed. It’s been five years. He’ll never walk again.”
His voice grating with fury, the lawman was crowded into rashly asking: “Just how much of the gold you got off that stage did you hand over to that man to lie you out of prison?”
“Have your fun,” Rivers drawled easily, though his face had lost a shade of color.
Quite suddenly Jim Echols had had enough of this. “You’re not wanted around here, Rivers,” he said in a voice trembling and dry with indignation. “Get on that horse, hit the county line, and keep on going.”
“So I’d planned.”
Frank Rivers reached down now to lift the gunny sack from the walk. He stepped on past Echols and, ignoring him completely, went on out t
o the buckskin.
The lawman said loudly: “I meant that. Keep clear of this county.”
Rivers was pulling on his slicker and glanced around. “Bend’s over the county line, isn’t it? That’s where I’m headed, north and over the pass.”
“North? East, you mean. There’s a new fence closing off the pass trail. You’ll have to go around by way of the road.”
Rivers swung up into the saddle before dryly stating: “Found out about that, too. Only I’m told a man can ride around the end of the fence. So I’ll take the pass trail.”
He turned the buckskin away then, the pack mare following. And Jim Echols, watching him head out onto the mired street, glared at his broad back with a look of scalding dislike.
Chapter Two
The road running north from Ute Springs followed the winding, brushy creek bottom for the first four miles. And over much of that distance Lute Pleasants was thinking back on his talk with Jim Echols, trying to weigh the impression he felt he’d made on the man.
Finally he decided that it didn’t really matter. The main point their argument had proven was that Echols could and would do nothing about the fence. This in itself was so comforting that Pleasants could now dismiss all thought of any interference on the part of the law, something he hadn’t been at all sure of until this afternoon.
Things were working out about as he had supposed they would, even better perhaps, and the prospect of what the next year might bring was nice to think about. Because of that he wasn’t minding this raw, rainy afternoon at all. The earlier the winter, the better it suited his plans. Never had he felt more confident of the future.
Just now a sound, a whistling from overhead, intruded upon his reflections. He looked up in time to see a wedge of ducks circle low under the gray clouds in the direction of the creek, wheel, set their wings, and drop from sight beyond the brilliant yellow-orange background of the cottonwoods and willows up ahead. They’re early this year, he told himself, seeing this sign of winter’s premature arrival as a good omen.