Payback at Big Silver

by Ralph Cotton

  Realization set in just as Barber heard a rifle levering not too far behind him. He swung around toward it, cocking his rifle, raising it to fire. He saw the Ranger standing behind a waist-high rock thirty feet away—saw him just in time to see the blue-orange fire streak from his rifle barrel.

  “Holy—!” His words broke away as the bullet thumped into his forehead and sent him spilling backward beneath a red mist of blood and brain matter.

  The Ranger stepped around the rock levering a fresh round into his rifle chamber. He looked down at Barber and kept walking, seeing no more of a problem there. He walked on, picking his steps down the rocky hillside until he stood over the badly wounded ambusher.

  “Marlin Oakley,” he said, recognizing the twisted, pain-filled face staring up at him. “Imagine meeting you here.”

  “You . . . go to . . . hell, Ranger!” Oakley snarled, clutching his abdomen with both hands.

  The Ranger only nodded. He stepped in closer and raised the wounded outlaw enough to lean him back against a rock. Oakley lay trembling, sweat pouring. He tilted his head and looked down his chest at his bloody shirt pocket as the Ranger pulled a thin cigar from it. He watched the Ranger light the cigar and hold it down to his mouth. Oakley took the cigar between his teeth, bit down on it and settled a little, puffing on it.

  “I ain’t . . . thanking you . . . you killing son of a bitch,” he groaned, and coughed.

  “You weren’t out to kill Freddie Dobbs, so it must have been me,” Sam said quietly, ignoring the insult. He sat down on a rock facing the dying man, his rifle across his lap. He knew he had to get down the hill and help Dobbs, but he also needed to know who was behind this.

  “Yeah . . . it was you,” said Oakley. “I’ve nothing . . . agin Dobbs.” He settled a little more, puffing on what he knew to be his last cigar. “Would have . . . got you too, had it not . . . been for—”

  “Who sent you?” the Ranger asked, cutting him off, knowing he wasn’t going to last much longer.

  “I said, go . . . to hell,” Oakley said.

  “Don’t make me take back the cigar and stand on your belly,” the Ranger said in the same quiet tone.

  Oakley stared up at him and puffed some more, weighing whether or not he would do it. He believed he would.

  “Silas Rudabaugh,” he said finally.

  “Meaning Edsel Centrila,” Sam said, “since Rudabaugh is his top hired gun.”

  “Um-hmm . . . Centrila wants you dead.” He puffed on the cigar. “But it might . . . have been anybody. Nobody likes you . . . much.”

  “Rudabaugh say why Centrila wanted me killed?” the Ranger asked.

  “No . . . I just figured . . . all these paybacks going around . . . one just got stuck to you.” He coughed and wheezed and clutched his abdomen tighter. “Seems everybody’s . . . got a mad-on at somebody, wants them killed these days.” He sighed, wistful. “I shoulda made a fortune at it. . . .”

  The Ranger watched him gasp and relax, staring up blankly at the sky. Reaching down, he took the sagging cigar from Oakley’s lips and crushed it under his boot.

  Paybacks. . . .

  Oakley was right. There were powerful men like Edsel Centrila around, rich men who spent big money to avenge themselves of wrongs committed against them, both real and imagined. It wasn’t just Sheriff Stone’s whiskey-tangled nerves making him edgy and suspicious. Not only did Centrila want Stone dead; he wanted the Ranger dead too.

  Why? he asked himself. Vengeance by association? He stood up, rifle in hand, looked all around and headed back to the thin path he’d followed up the steep hillside. It really didn’t matter why, he told himself. Centrila’s paid gunman, Silas Rudabaugh, sent men to kill him. So be it.

  Leaving the two ambushers where they were in the rocks, the Ranger picked his footing down the hill path back onto the trail. He stooped down beside Freddie Dobbs and rolled him onto his back.

  “I screwed up, Ranger . . . ,” Dobbs gasped through bloody lips.

  “Take it easy, Freddie,” the Ranger said. He cradled his head on his knee and looked him over, seeing blood seeping through his clothing from three different wounds.

  Freddie saw the grim look on the Ranger’s face. He tried to give a dark chuckle, but it stuck in his shattered chest.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t . . . make any plans, huh?” he said.

  The Ranger let out a breath. “Lie still. I’ll get you some water,” he said.

  “Naw, I don’t . . . need any,” Freddie said, gripping the Ranger’s forearm. His voce fell to a raspy whisper. “But do me a favor?”

  “The man who shot you is already dead if that’s what you’re going to ask me,” Sam said.

  Dobbs shook his head a little.

  “Naw, I never was . . . vengeful,” he whispered. “Will you . . . keep them flies off me?” He half grinned; his eyes had already started to drift aimlessly.

  “I’ll do my best, Freddie,” said the Ranger, watching him slip on away. He brushed a fly from Dobbs’ pale bloody cheek, picked his hat up from the ground and laid it over his face. Then he stood up and walked back toward his dun, seeing Freddie’s bay had returned from its fleeing frenzy and stood calmly near the edge of the trail with its head lowered.

  “Glad you could make it,” he said wryly to the sweaty horse. He picked up its reins and led it over to the dun. He swung up into his saddle, shoved his rifle into its boot and rode forward, leading the bay beside him.

  Chapter 10

  Merchants and townsfolk in Fort Hamlin stood watching as the Ranger rode into town leading two horses carrying the bodies of Freddie Dobbs and Boomer Phipps across their backs. The manager of the prisoner relay facility, Oscar White, stepped down off the boardwalk out in front of his heavily barred office and met the Ranger. He took the lead rope to the two horses from his hand with a “Howdy, Ranger” and led the animals to the hitch rail. Sam touched the brim of his sombrero toward him.

  “Howdy, Oscar,” he replied, hearing the scorched dryness in his own voice.

  White looked at Boomer Phipps’ huge body as he wrapped the lead rope round the rail.

  “Glad I’m not having to feed this one,” he commented. “My budget is in a strain as it is.” He gave a grin through a tangled gray beard. “I’ll receipt you for them and get them under the ground right away.”

  “Obliged,” said the Ranger. He swung down from his saddle and stretched his back. “This one is Freddie Dobbs and this big fellow is Armand Phipps—went by the name Boomer.”

  White took a small pad of paper and a pencil stub from his shirt pocket and officiously wrote the two names down. As he wrote he spoke idly.

  “Tried to escape, did they?” he said.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “Boomer tried to escape from jail over in Big Silver. Freddie Dobbs tried to escape from me and some ambushers shot him. I’ll write it all up this evening.”

  “Tell me the particulars and I’ll write it up for you, Ranger,” White said. “I know you’ve no fondness for paperwork.”

  “Obliged,” Sam said. He eyed White curiously. “When you offer to do my paperwork, I figure you want something in return?”

  White grinned and struck the pencil and pad back in his shirt pocket.

  “Can’t fool you, Ranger,” he said. “The fact is I’ve got a jail wagon that hasn’t shown up. It should have pulled in here early yesterday—the wagon your prisoners would have rid on to Yuma had they not got their clocks stopped.”

  “The one taking Harper Centrila to start serving out his sentence?” Sam asked, interested.

  “Yep, that’s the one,” said White. He gave Sam a look. “See why I’m a little more concerned than usual?” he said.

  Sam nodded. “I know their trail route. I’ll ride out and follow it, soon as I water my horse and get something to eat along the way.”

  “Obliged,
Ranger,” White said. “I’ll get a couple of men and get these off the street.” He gave a slight shrug. “Who knows? Could be the wagon shows up before you’ve gone five miles.”

  “Let’s hope so, Oscar,” Sam said. “I’m getting more than my fill of the Centrilas lately.”

  • • •

  Three hours later the Ranger sat atop a blaze-faced bay looking out through a telescope across rugged desert terrain. He rode the livery bay in order to let his dun rest at the end of the short lead rope he held in his gloved hand. The dun sidled up close to him on the narrow cliff and looked out as if searching the land with him. This was the third time he’d stopped and searched for the wagon. The other two times he’d seen no sign of it.

  But this time he saw three wagon horses still hitched together, a splintered wagon shaft and part of a broken doubletree hanging between them. A few yards away a fourth horse stood with hitch rings and a short chain dangling down its sides. In the distance behind the horses he saw two buzzards circling high overhead.

  “Bad news,” Sam murmured.

  Lowering the lens from his eye, he closed the telescope and put it away. He picked up the lead rope from his lap, turned both horses around from the cliff’s edge and rode away. He followed the trail down and across a narrow valley. Across the valley he took another winding trail upward until a half hour later he found the wagon horses standing facing him as they grazed on clumps of pale desert wild grass.

  “Easy, boys,” he said quietly to the horses, stopping a few yards back and stepping down from his saddle. As he walked to the three horses, the fourth horse clopped up at a slow gait and stood beside the others. Sam used both hands to rub the horses’ muzzles as he looked at the path of hoofprints stretched out along the rock trail behind them.

  Clearing the broken team equipment from the horses, he lined and tied the animals in a horse string along with his dun. Then he mounted the bay and led the string back along the rail until he came to the bodies of the guard and the driver lying where the gunmen had left them. Three buzzards stood atop the dead.

  Rifle in hand, Sam stepped down and walked forward swinging the Winchester back and forth until the reluctant buzzards finally lifted up grudgingly in a hard batting of wings. The big greasy-looking birds flew only a few yards away and landed and screeched at him. The Ranger ignored them as he forced himself to look at the gruesome remains of Ernest Shule and Curly Ed Townsend. He looked all around and down the steep hillside as the screeching buzzards settled.

  He saw the strange meandering tracks of the wagon leading up and over the edge of the trail. He surveyed the tangled, twisted bars, broken planks and scraps of wagon parts strewn down the hillside. In the broken pine tops and among the rocks below, he saw what was left of the rig after making the final plunge. He let out a breath and looked back down at the two bodies, the scattering of horses’ hooves surrounding them.

  “You deserved better, Ernest. . . . You too, Curly Ed,” he said softly.

  As he looked down at Shule’s mangled, picked-over corpse, he saw where the old Ranger’s shirt had been ripped away by the buzzards. Around his neck hung a strip of rawhide with two keys on it. Sam stooped and slipped the rawhide off and stood with the keys in his hand.

  Cuff keys, he told himself, recognizing the familiar items to be the same as the key he carried in his trouser pocket. Off the side of the trail he noted the footprints both booted and bare in the loose dirt, on and among the hillside rock.

  “Obliged, Ernest. You stalled them as long as you could,” he said down to the dead, mangled body. “I’ll take it from here,” he whispered. Gripping the keys in his gloved hand, he looked off in the direction of the hoofprints riding down the trail in the direction of the nearest border village.

  Mejores Amigos, he said to himself. To get rid of their shackles and cuffs.

  Wasting no time, he dragged both bodies off the trail and covered them with rocks to foil the buzzards’ dinner plans. When he made his way back to Fort Hamlin, he’d make it a point to send someone out and have the bodies brought in and buried proper. For now this would have to do, he thought to himself. Being lawmen most of their lives, Ernest Shule and Curly Ed would understand.

  With the four wagon horses and the dun on a lead rope, he looked over his shoulder at the trail site as he rode away. Two of the buzzards had flown away. A third stood staring at the rocks as if pondering the unfairness of life. Turning forward in his saddle, he gave a tug on the lead rope and batted his knees to the bay’s sides.

  And he rode on.

  • • •

  Sam realized there was a chance the prisoners had found a way to get rid of their cuffs and shackles, but the fact that their tracks led toward Mejores Amigos convinced him otherwise. He was convinced that Ernest Shule had thrown something out among the rocks and told the gunmen it was the keys to the prisoners’ restraints. It was something a wagon guard would know to do given the circumstances. While it had started as a hunch when he found the keys around Shule’s neck, the more he thought about it, the more strongly he believed it. Following their horses’ hoofprints only made him believe it more.

  The riders had headed for the little border village so quickly that they paid no heed to hiding their tracks. Old Ernest had played his hand right up to the very end, he told himself, riding the last two miles to the little desert town.

  As he drew nearer, he saw two old men get up from where they had been sitting watching him. They walked away slowly and disappeared into a row of ancient crumbling adobes. Yet when he rode up moments later, they had returned with a third man joining them. The three stood watching him with dark, worried expressions. Even the sight of the badge on his chest did not serve to loosen the tightening concern from their weathered faces.

  “Hola,” the Ranger called out, continuing in Spanish, “Puedo hacerle algunas preguntas, por favor?” He kept a respectful distance of fifteen feet between them and gestured a hand down at the hoofprints he’d followed across the stretch of sand flats. The same collection of hoofprints led away from the small village back into the desert.

  “Hello,” one of the men replied in stiff border English. “Yes, we will answer any questions that we can for you.”

  The Ranger noted a wariness in the three men. Why? And why was he spoken to in English, having let them know he could speak their language? But he sat still, the team horses and his dun gathered up beside him, and he glanced around the small village with its many alleyways and crumbling adobes.

  “Gracias,” he said. He wasn’t going to ask if the men had come there—that part was a foregone conclusion. Instead he would ask how long ago? What was their condition? Did they get the chains removed? “I’m following the prisoners who came here looking for someone to remove their chains.”

  The three Mexicans shook their heads as one.

  “No one has come here to our village wearing chains, señor,” a thin elderly man said.

  The Ranger stared at him for a moment. In the sand he saw both boot and barefoot prints. He even saw what looked like the imprint of a shackle chain. But he would make no mention of it. Instead he raised his Winchester from across his lap and kept his thumb over the hammer, ready to cock it.

  “I understand,” he said. “May I water my horses at your well? Then I’ll be on my way. I have money to pay you.”

  “Our well is very low and full of mud and grit, señor,” the same thin Mexican said. “Perhaps you go to the water hole.” He gestured toward a rise of sand in the distance.

  Sam nodded. He was familiar with the water hole.

  “That’s what I’ll do, then,” he said. Without another word he turned the horses and rode away. As soon as he was back onto the path of the hoofprints he’d followed to Mejores Amigos, he nudged the bay up into a hard gallop, let the slack out on his lead rope and led the dun and team horses directly behind him.

  Watching the R
anger ride away, the three Mexicans looked at each other with stark trepidation.

  “Stirs up a lot of dust, don’t he?” said Crazy Bill Seadon, walking up behind them, Bennie Eads only a step behind.

  “I don’t trust this one damn bit,” Eads said, staring out at the roiling dust.

  “You don’t have to, I do,” Seadon said sharply. White-hot madness danced in his eyes. He held the woman, Dafne, against his side, her arm twisted up behind her back. The woman’s tattooed face was covered with welts and bruises that had come from Seadon’s hands. Seadon himself didn’t look much better, owing to the trouncing the Mexican wrestler, Paco Herera, had given him several times before Harper Centrila had brought the show to an end.

  “I’m just being cautious, is all,” Eads put in quickly, trying not to upset Crazy Bill. He pictured Paco’s body now lying in a drainage gutter behind a goat pen. He’d watched Seadon deliver a forceful blow and sink the blade of the ax that had helped remove the prisoners’ chains into the top of the wrestler’s skull, no sooner than Harper and the others had left Mejores Amigos.

  “Careful, wagon guard,” Seadon warned him. “Remember the old saying ‘Curiosity killed the Quaker.’” He turned, Dafne’s arm in hand, and glared at Eads. “So watch your step with me,” he said with a sneer.

  Curiosity? The Quaker . . . ?

  Eads just stared; he didn’t know what to say to that. He hadn’t mentioned curiosity or Quakers. Not that it mattered, apparently, he decided. Crazy Bill’s warped brain had a way of twisting things to suit his own thinking. Eads stepped over beside Seadon and the woman and stared out as the Ranger and the string of horses disappeared up over the distant rise toward the water hole. A thick cloud of dust loomed in his wake.

  “He fell for it!” Seadon laughed. “The stupid fool fell for it like a fish for a bowl of stew!” He continued to laugh loudly. Eads just stared; the three Mexicans gave each other confused looks and stood rigidly watching for whatever came next from this lunatic.