Born Savage

by William Hopson

  Somewhere up in the front of the house a door slammed. Hurried footsteps came running through the parlor. Kathy’s skirts rustled as she came into the doorway beside Ordway.

  She looked up at him, eyes wide with a new fear. Her face had lost its faint new color. “Chann! It’s Pa. He’s gone!”

  “Did you hear anything?” he rapped quickly.

  “Nothing. His blanket is in the chair but his gun is gone.”

  A little of the tension went out of Ordway. At least they hadn’t taken him prisoner.

  Ordway went into the kitchen and met Koonce. Koonce said calmly, “Hanse always cussed that black mare of Step’s about chewing herself loose, but I guess I forgot when I looped her reins. She’s gone, Chann, with your gun on the saddle.”

  So it had come. They knew. All element of surprise had been destroyed, and Lon Perry had slipped away.

  “We’d better get moving,” the ex-lawman grunted savagely.

  Ordway shook his head. “No, you’ve got a wounded man here they want dead. You’ve got three women that anything can happen to.”

  He was busy jerking off his spurs and then the short chaparajas, slipping his gun belt back into place. Doc Cartwright came awake and got to his feet. He yawned and stretched.

  “I’ve got my old rifle and a belt of shells out in the back of the buggy. Been carrying it under my canvases for quite some time. Poor Pete. This is one the limping old son-of-a-gun would have loved. He never stopped cussing me because of the job I did on that bullet-shattered tibia.”

  Ordway slid the heavy belt of useless .45-70 cartridges over his head and slipped noiselessly out into the night. The livery was the nearest cover and he made it, walking fast but quietly. There was a slim chance that Lon Perry might have stepped over to his house not far away, but he would have told Koonce.

  “I’ll bet a hundred dollars Step has been slipping him watered down liquor to get back on his side,” Channon muttered darkly.

  A dozen horses were in the corral where Ordway had fired a night shot at Sonny that missed, and another at one of his men that hadn’t missed. They were awake, switching tails, and one or two walked restlessly as though impatient for breakfast. Ordway slid in along the poles and came to the shed under which he had saddled the black mare. Familiar odors came to his olfactory senses; the old dung and the new, feed dust and hay and harness, ammoniac odor of horse, and one or two more, somehow familiar, but not identified.

  He looked up dazedly and some kind of intelligence blew away the mists in his clouded brain. “Go on,” he muttered thickly. “Do what you oughta done long time ago. Shoot me.”

  Ordway blew out the candle. The man tried to get up and fell with a hard crash. Ordway heard him try to roll over, try to get up on all fours. Then Lon Perry dropped flat on his face and passed into merciful oblivion.

  From the other end of the shed Sonny, rifle in hand and walking like a cat, heard the mumbles and the crash and grinned knowingly. Old Ethan. He never missed a bet. And neither did he, Sonny. He’d gone Ethan one better.

  Lon Perry had held out four lip-licking days after a friend, paid by Sonny, had slipped into his ear the information that there were a couple of quarts of Hanse’s best whiskey hidden in the desk of the livery office.

  Ordway heard the footsteps and flattened himself against the wall. He opened the sagging, weatherbeaten door to the office and let it hang naturally, using it as cover. His heart skipped a beat as Sonny’s cat-like boot steps approached.

  “Hey, Lon,” Sonny whispered grinningly in the night “That you in there, old-timer?” He heard a wheezing groan from the floor and risked a match.

  He blew out the match, grinning his sneering grin, his eyes yellow-flecked. And while he was light-blind, Channon Ordway smashed into him. A strangled cry went out of the outlaw sheriff. He dropped the rifle and clawed for his gun. He tried to yell, to scream a warning, but a hand was at his throat. It had been this way so many years ago when he and Channon had fought that day when Sonny had Kathy down in the weeds.

  Ordway smashed a fist into his face. He was raising it again to shut off Sonny’s throat-loosed cry when something like a giant catamount landed squarely upon his back. An odor he had smelled but hadn’t defined came to his nostrils. Indian.

  They were all over him now; choking him down, holding him, dragging him back. Four of them had Sonny in vice-like grips and were ramming a dirty buckskin gag into his mouth, while others held his hands and jerked off his boots. Sonny’s eyes were terrified as he smelled the smell of Ute, the same smell of the young squaws—though he hadn’t been too concerned then.

  “You quiet now,” a voice said in Ordway’s ear and a breath like the odor of warm entrails smote his nostrils.

  They released him and he straightened. He stood in silence as four figures carried a gagged, bootless, twisting, writhing, terrified rapist and killer toward the flagpole in front of the little flat-topped courthouse. On the very spot where Sonny had shot a saddled horse to death they held him while the flag rope was tied around his ankles.

  Dawn was breaking swiftly as they hoisted him.

  One of the figures jerked the gag from Sonny’s mouth above the long, tawny hair hanging straight down. They broke into a run toward hidden horses. The men with Ordway disappeared. He walked over, had picked up Sonny’s repeater, noting automatically that the ammunition in his belt would fit it. The pine tree flagpole was a sliver against the awakening sky.

  He stood there as Sonny, the tendons in his heels and hands slashed, hung there head down—one agonized scream after another coming from his throat.

  Old White Buffalo had spoken of a coyote that climbed a tree from which the limbs had been cut.

  Sonny Shackleford hung there with old Tobe Whitehouses badge on his shirt fronts and kept on screaming.

  FOURTEEN

  Tulac settlement came awake in the manner of a wary man feeling a hand on his shoulder and a whisper. It made no sound but lay alert and listening as the screams rose and fell and then diminished into whimpers. Lights went on but nobody investigated. A dozen heavily armed men had been in virtual control of the town for days, and they knew Ethan Ordway.

  The sky turned gray.

  Ordway stood with Sonny’s repeater in his hands, stony-faced, and, in a measure, helpless. He heard the sound of running feet and turned and both Henry Cartwright and Koonce hurried swiftly into the front corral. They ran past the office where Lon Perry was trying to roll over and came up beside Ordway near the water trough. This was where Step Eaton had struck down Kathy.

  “What in God’s name?” Doc asked.

  Ordway pointed with the rifle. Sonny was flailing his arm weakly and calling, “Ethan. Ethan. Help me.”

  “The Utes slipped in and got him. Believe me, boys, I knew nothing about it. I had him down in the dirt when they jumped both of us.”

  “What now?” Koonce asked, still breathing hard from the run.

  “Ask Doc. He’s the authority on such things. They cut the tendons in his heels and hands. Old Ute trick against an enemy they particularly hated.”

  “Nothing I can do,” Cartwright said. “Nothing I would do if I could. Hippocrates has been dead since 377 B.C. and the hell with the oath I took. Well, well. Take a look.”

  Ethan and Step and the members of Sonny’s outfit had emerged from the north entrance to Hansen’s saloon. They made no effort to go to the stricken man hanging head down from the pole. They stood grouped, silent They saw Ordway and Koonce and Doc, armed, down there in the livery corral. Ethan saw the dim faces of Mike and Hanse up there back of the big upstairs window in the bank, and he knew again they must die. All of them, including Doc. Well, it could be done and quite easily.

  “God-all-mighty, Ethan,” one of the toughs almost whimpered. “We just can’t let him hang there. Can’t get to him either. What are we—”

  “Ethan,” called Sonny’s pleading voice a hundred yards away. “Help me. They cut my heels and wrists. Come get me down! Call D
oc!”

  Ethan turned to Step, who was pale and on the verge of losing -three small drinks. “Chann’s Sharps is on the black mare’s saddle. Best gun in the country. I know because Tim gave it to him.” His voice turned harsh. “Go get it.”

  He stood there in the full dawn, thinking of Sonny, who should have been his son. He saw a tough little tow-head who’d worshiped him long before, and after, his father was lynched. A good cow thief, brand expert, a leader of rough men. Fast with a gun, and guts enough never to hesitate. He knew the right way to handle women too, with no nonsense. The same way Ethan had handled them.

  There was a world, a very secret world, in which Ethan lived alone and shared with nobody; a world of dreams and lost echoes. And in some of these phantasies he had liked to imagine that Sonny was his own boy and that Ellen Ordway was alive and loved him as she had loved Tim and that they all three lived together on Pronghorn Ranch.

  But her repeatedly ravaged body was dust, and Pronghorn was in ashes, and Sonny hung head down from a pine flagpole in front of the courthouse, his tendons Ute-cut.

  Step Eaton came up and handed him the stubby looking rifle. “There’s one in the chamber,” Step said chokingly. “I looked.”

  “Then use it,” Ethan ordered harshly.

  Step swallowed hard and shook his head, the bile in his throat as bitingly soured as it had been that day down in the Randolph’s living room when he faced the man he’d shot in the back.

  “I didn’t think you had backbone enough,” Ethan sneered and reached for the outstretched weapon.

  He cocked it and looked at the dangling figure. Step turned and hurried into Hansen’s saloon. Once inside he ran through to the old south porch and the black mare. He almost held both hands over his ears. To his surprise, the black mare didn’t rear or dodge when he picked up the reins. He stood holding them, looking past the curve of the old fort’s log buildings; looking past the south tip of the livery toward his home over there on the west edge of the settlement He waited for the heavy roar of the big rifle.

  Ethan stepped to a wooden awning support. He lifted the short barrel and laid it against a four-by-four and clamped it hard with a bear-claw hand. “Ethan,” came Sonny’s agonized cry. “Ethan, help me.”

  “Steady, boy!” Ethan Ordway cried out, and centered the front sight. The shot smashed the stillness and went rolling away over the lip of the promontory into Squaw Valley. The sound rocketed into the bowl that was Pronghorn Basin. It echoed old memories of Pete and Tobe Whitehouse and old man Shackleford and all the others. Ghosts of old memories.

  It was echoed again as one of the outlaws pulled his pistol and began firing at the three men over in the livery corral. Rifles began to speak back. A man let out a yell and grabbed his arm. From over at the bank came the crash of prized glass and the sharp reports of two old Winchesters. The wounded man died and so did another beside him. Led by Ethan, the others dived inside the protection of Hanse’s hewed log walls.

  Over at the flagpole the figure of Sonny Shackleford hung silent and motionless.

  “Get under cover,” Ordway yelled and broke for the protection of the shed.

  He dropped to one knee and began to drive a stream of .44-70’s aslant through the back door of Hanse’s saloon.

  At the old south porch, Step Eaton heard the popping of rifles from what sounded like a half-dozen different points. Doc Cartwright, agile for his age and profession, had sprinted out of the livery corral and made a dash for the courthouse, while Hanse and Mike drove a stream of fast levered slugs through the north door and the back room window. Doc was now working his Winchester, angling shots in along the east wall.

  The north end was sealed up but the old south end, where the horses were racked, was still open in case the toughs decided to make a break for it. Inside the saloon Ethan stood back of the bar and calmly poured himself a drink. The walls were thick and they had food and water and ammunition, not to mention a bit of whiskey as needed. In the excitement no one had missed Step.

  “Hey, Ethan, we oughta be gettin’ outa here,” called one of the crouched outlaws from across the room.

  “Why?” Ethan downed the drink. It burned into the partly healed gum tissue, but it felt good going down.

  “We ain’t got a chance to get at that bank.”

  Ethan corked the bottle and wiped his mouth. His face turned, grimly sardonic. “Why bother to take it out, Joe? We’d only have to put it all back in later.”

  A man laughed nervously. So did another. Suddenly they were roaring with coarse laughter.

  Outside Step heard the laughter and a gradual dying down of the first ammunition-wasting fire. He stood there with the black mare’s reins in hand and looked at the town where he had been born. All the common sense he possessed told him to get aboard her and keep going until she dropped dead under him. But there was a girl down there in a stone-fronted home. His wife. He’d treated her like an Indian treated a dog. He’d done worse. He’d taken her unborn child out of her body.

  He could go to her and beg forgiveness. He could tell her that he’d scattered all the outlaws’ horses to make certain they didn’t escape. He’d get down on his knees and beg, promise anything, if she’d forgive and come back to him.

  He went to the hitch rack and flung loose the reins of the horses. He was up in leather, fast, now, like in the old days, and a wild yell went out of him. The horses broke and scattered away at a run and Step Eaton wheeled the mare. He drove her at a run toward his and Kathy’s home.

  Ordway and Koonce were coming out of the livery corral, heading at a dogtrot to get into position and thus seal off the south end of the saloon. Hanse already had run down the back stairs of the bank and, great belly bounding, was coming flat footedly in from the east with the same thought in mind.

  Then a black mare flashed by the opening near the store and was gone in a thunder of hooves. Koonce threw up the shotgun, then lowered it with a shake of his head. “See you later,” he said. “Hold ’em til I get back.”

  “Give me your gun first,” Ordway said. “I hope you have better luck this time.’

  The deputy broke into a run, shotgun in hand. He ran awkwardly as men do who wear high heel boots.

  On the front porch of the neat home, Kathy stood with Vernell, shading her eyes against the first curved tip of the rising sun. The shooting had settled down to a sporadic rifle or pistol shot A footstep sounded and an old woman of nearly seventy came into view around the corner from her own home. Tobe Whitehouse’s widow carried a blanket under one arm. A thin dewlap of dried skin hung from beneath her chin, but her old shoulders were still sturdy, her steps firm.

  “I’m going over to that flagpole and cut Sonny down,” she said determinedly. “No matter what he done, he don’t deserve this. He never had a ma he knew, never had a chance. If we hadn’t taken Robert in when his pa got killed over in Nevada it mighta been him hangin’ out there.”

  She strode away and Vernell left Kathy and ran after her. “Wait, Mrs. Whitehouse. I’m coming with you.”

  They were fifty yards from the house when a black mare, belly low at a hard run, came flashing toward the house. Step shot by the two women and hauled her down with a cruel hand. Her haunches were almost on the ground when he stepped from Ordway’s Mexican saddle.

  “Step!” Kathy cried out. “What’re you doin’ here?”

  “Kathy—honey, I had to see you again,” he pleaded. “Listen, honey I’ve got to go away for a while but I had to see you first. I was all wrong about everything.”

  He moved toward her and she instinctively backed up a step. “Don’t you come no nearer,” she cried out. “You killed my baby.”

  “Honey,” he begged. “I was drunk, I was crazy jealous. I never done all the things they said I did. I didn’t burn the Rocking R. Chann did. I swear I didn’t shoot old Tobe in the back. Ethan did it. I—”

  He didn’t see the figure of the black-browed man coming at a lung-bursting long trot, shotgun in hand. His
eyes were upon Kathy, and for just a few seconds he almost believed himself.

  “Honey-”

  “You get outa here!” Kathy screamed at him, and looked around as though for a weapon. She found none and fled inside and bolted the door. Step Eaton hammered on it with his fist.

  “Please, baby-doll—”

  With one hand he pushed back his hair , and then put on his hat. He shook his head slowly. It was too soon, he told himself. She needed more time.

  He turned and walked out toward the mare, and then he knew that there was no more time left for himself. His right hand jerked down to his hip. A shotgun roared. Something struck him a screaming blow in the belly and knocked him down. He tried to roll over, to get up, then relaxed and clasped both hands over his blown-out belly.

  A shadow and then several more loomed over him. He thought he saw Kathy’s face, he wasn’t sure. “Bob,” he whispered chokingly.

  “What is it?”

  “In the house. Loose fireplace rock. I… wrote everything down. Miz Whitehouse. Please don’t hate me. I done to old Tobe what… Ethan made me do.”

  He closed his eyes and his bloody fingers unclasped themselves from across his blown-out stomach and fell limply to the ground. Another horse came running and Koonce rose from his knees as Hansen, aboard a captured outlaw horse, came up at an awkward gallop.

  “Bob,” he bellowed. “Get on that black mare and let’s go! Chann has just gone in on ’em with two guns. It’s a braceout!”

  They were gone in a clatter of hooves and Vernell remembered a man who had kissed her and saw him dead and went back to the porch with a suddenly tired old woman beside her. Kathy Eaton picked up the blanket her father had used to keep away the chill while he sat guard during the chilly nights. She went out and spread it over the body of Step, leaving only the once handsome face in view. Miniature balls of water ran down from both her large, dark-circled eyes.