Ride the High Lines (An Ash Colter Western Book 2)

by Ben Bridges

  The gun boomed and a foot-long spear of orange flame spat at me. Once again instinct took over and my right hand swept down towards the .442 at my hip. All at once the weapon filled my hand, blurred up, spoke some thunder of its own, and the other man hunched up, called out something, stumbled sideways like a drunk and then toppled over.

  Behind me, I heard racing footsteps. Kidd was getting away! I turned, bawled, ‘Hold it!’ But he had no intention of stopping, he just kept running, having retrieved some of his scattered gear.

  I raised my gun, fired once more over his head.

  He broke stride but then, realizing that I had not hit him, picked up speed again.

  ‘Hold it, damn you!’

  He kept running, heading for the brush at the back of the property.

  I tilted the .442 so that it was centered on a point between his shoulder-blades and took up the first pressure —

  Someone crashed into me from behind and I was punched earthward again. We hit the dirt in a jumble, and a flurry of blows caught me in the face and made me screw my eyes shut. We rolled, I came out on top, jabbed my gun straight into the other man’s face and husked, ‘Hold it right there — you’re under arrest!’

  I saw then that I had not been attacked by another man. This was a woman — probably the very same woman who had screamed when the first of the gunfire had erupted. She glared up at me, her dark brown eyes twin pools of fiery hatred, her bottom lip trembling with anger.

  My respect for women had long been ingrained into me, and automatically now I stood up and stepped back from her. Still, I could not help gaping. Her thin, diaphanous nightgown offered practically nothing in the way of cover for her at all, and her curved figure was revealed clearly beneath the thin, impractical material.

  She was not armed — not that I could see — and apart from her initial attack, I did not see her as any real danger. I looked around. There was no sign of Kidd. But there was still a constant and worrisome rattle of gunfire coming from the front of the house, so I stuffed my handgun away, snatched up my rifle and hurried around there to lend a hand.

  The yard looked more like a battlefield. Two men lay in the dirt, one still, the other trying to claw his way painfully back towards the bunkhouse, still twenty feet away.

  Muzzle-flashes winked at me from some of the shattered bunkhouse windows, and hurriedly I threw myself down behind a water-butt to one side of the porch. I flinched as bullets punched into the far side of the barrel. Then, after it went quiet again, but for the sound of water emptying out through the bullet-holes, I raked my surroundings for sign of my companions.

  The first man I spotted was Saul Yarbrough. He was kneeling behind a trough opposite the bunkhouse, sighting carefully, then firing his Winchester every time he caught a movement inside the building. A bit further away, firing into the bunkhouse from behind a pile of cut logs, was Henry Morse.

  I thought about the situation we had gotten ourselves into, and wondered how we were going to resolve it.

  The wounded man was still dragging himself towards the bunkhouse, slithering inchmeal like some gigantic snake, and leaving a slimy trail of blood in his wake. Suddenly he just stopped moving and lay there with his face in the dust, and I knew with a sick feeling that death had just overtaken him, that I had actually seen him die.

  I wondered then if all the shooting and killing would ever end.

  Lem Winch caught my attention from the other side of the yard at just that moment. He had somehow worked his way down between one of the sheds and the outhouse, and now he yelled, ‘The barn, cap’n! Couple of ’em got inta the barn!’

  Even as he said it and I spun that way, there came an ominous rumble and suddenly the big barn doors juddered open and horses streamed out in a wild, rushing torrent.

  Riderless and half scared to death by all the gunfire, the first of them wheeled left and came racing right through the centre of the yard with the remainder — upwards of thirty animals — following blindly on at a frenzied gallop.

  The yard was hurled into absolute chaos. The ground trembled beneath their crashing hooves and the noise was deafening. The horses flooded past in a fast—flowing river of blacks, browns and paints — and there, right in the middle of them all, I spotted three half-dressed men huddling low in hastily-cinched saddles.

  ‘There!’

  I came up, snap-aimed at one of the outlaws and fired my rifle. He twitched and slumped backwards, but somehow managed to hold onto his horse’s reins and stay in the saddle.

  He fetched a big black handgun around on me. I levered my rifle — a good, reliable Yellow Boy — and shot at him again. I missed. His horse was moving too fast, and because he was swaying about so violently, he was a hard target.

  But that didn’t matter, for he finally lost his balance and slipped from the back of his horse with a horrified scream. He struck the earth so forcefully that he actually bounced a little against the hardpan. Then the rest of the horses ran over him, carried him along a short way, broke him, pulped him.

  The last of the horses left the yard behind them.

  All that was left at the ranch was a kind of shocked silence and dead or near-to-dead men.

  With effort I found my voice and called upon the men still holed up in the bunkhouse to surrender.

  There was no response. We waited for a time, as the weak, hazy sun slowly strengthened. I think we all knew that those men who had been pinned down in there had long-since used all the confusion to make their escape.

  Saul came out from behind the trough. No-one shot at him. Carefully he approached the bunkhouse, long gun at the ready. The rest of us hardly dared to breathe as we watched him. He made it as far as the half-open, bullet-chewed door, and used the rifle barrel to push it wider. He went inside. A moment later he came back out and confirmed what we had already half-guessed.

  ‘They’ gone, Mr. Colter. Left one dead man behind ’em, an’ a feller nursin’ a busted wing.’

  I came up straight. ‘All right. Rest of you men okay?’

  Saul I already knew about. Winch called over, ‘Ayuh.’ Henry came across from the log-pile looking sheepish.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Colter,’ he said, obviously angry with himself. ‘I bollixed this up for you, an’ no mistake. Got around to the back of the bunkhouse quiet as you like. Then my boot caught on an empty whiskey bottle, an’ all hell busted loose.’

  I told him to forget it. What else could I say? He had been game to come along in the first place. After all, this was not his usual line of work. He was a cowboy, not a man-hunter.

  I had Saul and Henry patch up the wounded man as best they could and then keep watch on him until we could take him in to the nearest town and hand him over to the authorities. I sent Lem back to fetch our mounts. There was no point in trying to pursue the rest of the outlaws — they, like their horses, would have scattered by now.

  I checked out the main house. The remnants of the previous night’s party were sour reminders of better times past. I went through the kitchen and out into the backyard. The girl who had stopped me from shooting Kidd was kneeling beside the first man I had killed. She had dragged a coat over the nightgown and her head was bent, so that her long black hair hung down over her face.

  I knew she was crying.

  I looked down at the dead man. Al Tate. After a moment, the girl looked up at me, and as the hair fell back from her face, I studied her closer in the gray daylight.

  I judged her to be somewhere in her early twenties. She had a round, coppered face with small, attractive features. But her brown eyes, her full, slightly pouting mouth — even the aggressive tilt of her nose — spoke of rawhide toughness and fierce determination. She was of a hardy, stubborn breed, I could tell — and yet there was something tender in her too; something she tried to keep well-hidden.

  She palmed the tears off her cheeks, her movements sharp and jerky, as if she were angry that someone else had been here to see her shed them. She looked at me for a long moment.
Then she said, ‘You’d be Colter.’

  I was surprised. ‘You’ve heard of me?’

  ‘John told me about you. About what happened in Fort Wray, the Buckhalter spread.’

  ‘You’re Kidd’s woman?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Have you got a name?’

  ‘Ella Morris.’

  ‘Where has he gone, Miss Morris?’

  She laughed. It was a harsh, embittered bark. ‘You think I’d tell you?’

  I pointed to the body at her bare feet. ‘This morning it was Al Tate, and those other men out front. Tomorrow it could be Kidd. Better we take him peacefully than he ends up shot to death.’

  Her eyes were tired and lifeless. ‘He’ll die, one way or the other, when the law gets a’hold of him. At least while he’s free, he’s got a chance.’

  I couldn’t argue with that. I looked at her. Again, I needed information, everything she could tell us. But she did not look like the sort who would give anything away.

  I considered the position. What was I to do — starve her of her sleep until she broke and told us everything, just the way I had with Kansas Bill Johnson? No, I could not do that. I could not do that again to anyone, least of all a woman.

  ‘Well,’ I muttered, ‘it probably won’t count for much, but I regret what happened here today. I regret it very much.’

  She tilted her head to one side and looked at me. I felt uncomfortable under her brazen scrutiny. At length she said, ‘You’re right. It doesn’t count for one single, damned thing. But for what it’s worth, I believe you mean what you say, mister.’

  I left her there with the body and went back through the gloomy, cluttered house. We had four dead men, aside from Al Tate, and one wounded, to identify. One was a brand-blotcher by the name of Eli Pedersen. The second was a small, wiry man with bloodshot eyes called Norris. The third was a felon named Walter Braid, and the fourth was called McCain.

  I went into the bunkhouse and questioned the wounded man. He was Jim Taylforth, the second of Kidd’s brand-blotchers. He was stretched out on a bunk midway down the low, dark room, clutching his shattered, blood-soaked shoulder and groaning through clenched teeth. Yes, I questioned him but he could tell us nothing save what we had already learned from Bill Johnson. He said he had no idea where Kidd might have gone to ground, and I believed him.

  Frustrated, I went back outside and stood looking across the grassy flats. Clouds were gathering again, and it was cold enough for more snow. I felt glassy-eyed from lack of sleep, hollow from lack of food. I didn’t know what we could possibly salvage from this affair. It had all gone so entirely wrong. Try as I might, I just could not think how we were going to pick up any further leads on our man’s whereabouts.

  Or could I?

  Ella Morris was standing on the porch, watching me through dark, troubled eyes. I paid her no mind, but concentrated instead upon bringing some order to this shambles. Henry volunteered to see what he could throw together in the way of a meal and strode off in the direction of the cook-shack behind the bunkhouse. Lem rode in, leading our horses. I took them from him, then told him to ride out and see if he could round up enough strays to help us pack the dead and wounded in to the nearest town.

  Ella Morris was still watching me. Perhaps she was wondering if she was also a prisoner. She wasn’t. Although she didn’t know it, she was just about to become the bait.

  We wrapped the dead men in their blankets and lay them out in a row before one of the sheds. Sometime later, Lem herded four of the stray horses back into the yard, and we harnessed them up to the light wagon we had found inside the barn.

  At length we were ready to go. By my reckoning, the nearest town of any consequence was Overton, which lay some forty miles to the north. I walked my mustang over to Ella Morris and looked down at her. She was dressed now, in a thick blue-wool dress and the coat, for the day was raw. I said, ‘Have you thought any more about what I asked you earlier?’

  Her smile came out sour. ‘You’ll not get John’s whereabouts from me, Mr. Colter.’

  There was no point in trying to persuade her. There was iron in her tone: she meant what she said. I put my fingertips to my hat-brim and said, ‘So long then, Miss Morris.’

  She watched us leave.

  We rode for about five miles through a slanting, sleety rain before I called a halt and turned my horse to face the others. Saul and Henry were sitting on the high wagon seat, their horses tied to the tailgate. Jim Taylforth was squeezed in among the bodies, towards the rear of the coverless vehicle. ‘Saul, Henry — I want you to take these men on into town,’ I announced, reaching into my jacket pocket. ‘Here’s my letter of introduction from the Cattlemen’s Association. If the sheriff in Overton wants to confirm anything, you tell him all he’s got to do is wire Simon Black.’

  They were all looking at me from beneath frowns, and the rain was making their eyelids flutter.

  ‘What ’bout you an’ me, cap’n?’ asked Winch, curiously.

  ‘We’re going back to the ranch,’ I said.

  His eyebrows lifted. ‘You think Kidd’s gonna chance goin’ back there after the scare we throwed inta ’im this mornin’?’ He shook his shaggy gray head. ‘Hell, he might be crazy, but he ain’t that crazy.’

  ‘Well, the way I figure it, we’re in with two chances, Lem. If Kidd won’t come back to the woman, maybe the woman will go out to Kidd.’

  A slow grin moved the fuzz around his mouth. ‘You mean we let her lead us to him?’

  ‘If we get lucky.’

  ‘What about us, Mr. Colter?’ asked Saul. ‘After we seen the sheriff, I mean?’

  ‘Meet us back in that stand of willows just west of the ranch. Ride careful and make sure you’re not seen. Take the long route around, just to make sure.’

  It was a long chance, I knew. But in the circumstances, I could think of nothing better, so Lem and I hauled our horses over to one side of the trail and waved the others on. We watched them until they were lost around the timbered bend, then turned our mounts back to the south.

  We found a spot among the willows and took turns in watching the ranch. The place remained quiet for what was left of the day. Every so often, Ella Morris came out to fetch wood or water, or just to stand before the house and survey the damage we had wrought. But nobody came, and nobody went, and when darkness fell, the windows of the main house lit up like lonely beacons.

  The next day was the same. A couple of the horses wandered back into the yard, having run far enough and then lost all inclination save simply to return to their home ground. Ella fetched and carried, kept house, performed a hundred and one menial little tasks, inside and out. But still there was no sign of her beau or any of his men.

  The weather turned murky. It remained damp, and mist wreathed in among the trees and brush.

  Saul and Henry rejoined us later that same day, having delivered their burden to the county sheriff. Still we kept a watch on Kidd’s ranch.

  It was a wretched, cold, uncomfortable time. We chanced a small, smokeless fire and took it in turns to eat half-cooked rations straight from the can, to drink stewed, thick black coffee and search for that elusive patch of dry ground upon which to spread our blankets and try to sleep.

  ‘Do you think she’s guessed that we’re watchin’ her?’ I asked Lem on the third day.

  He shook his head. He had more patience for this business than I. ‘Doubt it.’ Then he glanced at me and frowned. ‘Hey, cap’n — you feelin’ all right?’

  I blinked at him. ‘Sure.’

  ‘You look a mite peaked, is why I ask.’

  ‘I’m fine. Cold is all.’

  He accepted that and turned his attention back to the ranch. But in fact I was feeling ill. The unrelenting chill had given me a permanent headache, and my stomach had become a source of great discomfort to me.

  On the morning of the fourth day, a band of riders came into the yard. Ella Morris came out to greet them, clutching a shawl around her firm, broad
shoulders. Saul Yarbrough squinted at the newcomers and finally whispered, ‘See that big feller with the beard, Mr. Colter? That’s Dugan, the county sheriff.’

  This Dugan handed down a sheet of paper that Ella scanned briefly. There followed a heated exchange of words, and then Sheriff Dugan turned and addressed the men behind him. After that they turned their horses around and headed for the pastures beyond the house.

  ‘I’ve a suspicion them other fellers’d be brand ’spectors,’ opined Henry in an undertone. ‘They musta come on out to confiscate the cattle.’

  He was right, for later that same morning we saw them hazing a sizeable herd of cattle south, to Overton. There they would be held in pens until representatives of Simon Black’s Association could arrive to identify them and prove ownership.

  Six days later we were still no better off. Nobody came, nobody went, and nothing happened. Ella gave no indication that she was expecting visitors, and made no attempt to leave the ranch to go elsewhere. In all, we froze there in those willows for seven whole days, and all to no avail. In the end, I had no choice but to face the fact that we had lost Kidd yet again.

  With some bitterness, we saddled up and headed for town. We had wasted a week. That was all I could think about. Our man could be halfway across the other side of the country by now, and most likely was.

  But wasn’t that just what he would expect us to think? Surely, he had always been renowned for doing what was least expected of him. So perhaps he was still in these parts, after all.

  Once I started thinking along those lines, everything else fell into place and I began to formulate a plan that was not entirely to my liking, but which I felt might stand some reasonable chance of success.

  We reached Overton, put our horses up at a stable and went to get our first bite of decent, home-cooked food in the better part of a month.

  It was as we were lingering over coffee at a quiet corner table, and rainy dark was stealing across the sky outside, that Henry Morse said, ‘You’ awful quiet all of a sudden, Mr. Colter. Somethin’ on your mind?’

  I looked up and nodded. Keeping my voice low, even though there was scant chance of being overheard, I said, ‘I’ve been thinking. We need to get a man inside Kidd’s gang.’