Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!
The trickle of blood from a scalped corpse in a deathly quiet Stillwater saloon told Hart that the Cheyenne had paid a visit … But there had to be a reason.
A crooked rancher called Fredericks … a loud-mouthed cowboy who deserves what’s coming to him … a shady deal with the Cheyenne on the receiving end … and that two-bit rustler called Belle Starr with a liking for hard-hitting, hawk-eyed gunmen – like Wes Hart.
HART 2: BLOOD TRAIL
First published in the U.K. in 1980 by Pan Books
Copyright © 1980, 2013 by John B. Harvey
Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: September 2013
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Cover image © 2013 by Edward Martin
edwrd984.deviantart.com
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Published by Arrangement with the Author.
To the memory of James M. Cain
1892 – 1977
Chapter One
The wind moved westward across the grass, bending it in swathes. An endless expanse of high plain that swerved like a green sea. The sky that covered it was steel gray; the blue-tinged gray of gunmetal. If a man looked to the east, into the eye of the wind, he could see a dull, jagged line of yellow that cracked across the grayness like a bowl someone had dropped carelessly.
A man looked.
Wes Hart leaned back in the saddle and turned his head in the direction he’d come. Three days he’d been riding; three days since he’d flung his deputy’s badge in the marshal’s face; three nights since he’d faced Charlie Bowdre and Dan Halloran across a campfire and put two slugs into Halloran that had left him for dead, breastbone smashed apart.
Riding west the way he’d come, Hart had seen scarcely a living soul – unless you counted jackrabbits and white-tailed deer and such. Once, between Red Fork and Deep Fork in the Creek Nation, a bunch of Indians had followed him for three or four miles, just trailing after him, never getting any nearer. Likely wondering whether it was worth the risk of riding in under his guns and trying to get his handsome dapple-gray mare away from him. If that had been the case, they’d thought better of it. As suddenly as they’d appeared they’d slipped away again.
Within sight of the Cimarron he’d met up with an old timer trading goods out of his wagon. Aside from the Indian agencies and the forts, he’d be lucky to find a customer from one month’s end to the next.
Hart had bought a piece of dried salt beef from him, along with a small sack of coffee. The old man had been glad of the trade, glad of the company. For the best part of a half hour Hart had listened to him rambling on about every damn thing that teemed into his head. His one remaining tooth had showed clearly at the right of his mouth and a thin line of almost white slaver had run down from both corners. Only once had he really pricked Hart’s attention.
A band of Cheyenne had ridden northeast and crossed the Cimarron less than a week back. A raiding party, twenty or more braves.
The old timer must have recognized Hart’s quickened interest, for he chuckled and rubbed more vigorously at the dark tobacco in the palm of his hand.
‘They after horses,’ Hart had asked, ‘Or ridin’ some kind of grudge?’
The old man shook his head and pushed some of the tobacco into the corner of his mouth. ‘Never seen ’em. Only heard.’
‘Heard what?’ Hart’s voice had edged harder.
‘Attacked a few settlements, run off some stock, Lord knows there ain’t much in this damned country worth fightin’ for.’
‘You know any places? Names?’
The old man spat a squirt of rich brown juice down into the grass and a length of it hung for several moments before falling.
‘Got friends up that ways? Folk?’
Hart had shaken his head and stood up; it wasn’t any use questioning him any closer. There was only one way to find out and that was to see for himself. He’d left the old man messing with the harness of his mules and shaking his head at younger men’s impatience.
Letting the gray move into a trot Hart thought back to what the man had said about friends and folk. A wry smile played at the even line of his mouth. He had kin somewhere: a brother and three sisters. Last time he’d seen any of them was over twenty years back. The girls in a line, patched aprons tied about them, white faces staring up at him as he sat bareback on the old plough horse. The youngest, Christine, biting her lip and trying not to let the tears come. Ann and Veronica simply staring, not understanding. Sean, three years of age, held fast to the fence post and refused to look at Wes at all.
Hart couldn’t remember what he’d said, what any of the girls had said. He just saw them all frozen in that moment, like in a daguerreotype. Eighteen fifty-eight. He’d been fourteen. Now he was thirty-five. Thirty-five and when the old man had asked if he had friends he couldn’t answer.
Hell! What did it matter?
Hart touched the gray with his spurs and the mare responded, stretching her legs beneath him.
He rode tall in the saddle, the wind tugging at the sleeves of the dark green wool shirt that he wore. A flat-crowned black hat was held on his head by a loop of narrow cord. Brown pants were tucked into boots of scuffed, plain leather. None of these things marked him out as anything different from most other men who might be riding across the territory.
What did were the weapons he carried. The handgun that sat in a cutaway holster was a Colt Peacemaker .45 with a mother-of-pearl grip upon which was carved the likenesses of an eagle and a snake; the eagle grasped the snake in its beak and with both claws.
Two more guns were sheathed on either side of his saddle. On the left there was a lever-action Henry .44 rifle with a fitted rear sight. On the right something more curious. A Remington 10 gauge shotgun, its twenty-eight inch barrels sawn down to little over half their normal length.
A double-bladed knife was hanging in an Apache sheath that was tied to the pommel of his saddle. A second pistol, a double-action Starr .44, was out of sight in the saddlebags that were partly covered by his blue, red and white Indian blanket.
His weapons and his eyes: from up close, his eyes.
From his lean, stubbled face with its high, prominent cheekbones and from under the brim of his hat and the falling wisp of darkening brown hair, they stared out at the world. Seeing everything, registering but rarely showing feeling. At times those faded blue eyes burnt with the strength of cold fire.
Hart reined in and stood in his stirrups. The dark blotch ahead to the left would be Guthrie, at the edge of the Cimarron where the river bent southwards. He could ride in there and get a meal, a drink, take a bath while his horse was tended to. Or he could cross the river and go on to Stillwater straight.
He remembered the single tooth waggling in the old timer’s head and heard again his words about the Cheyenne. Hart looked up at the sky and it was still steel gray.
‘C’mon, Clay.’
He flicked and pulled at the reins and headed towards the Cimarron. The water was cold and surged against his legs, splashing up into his chest and back. Hart kept his mount under tight control, fighting the current. His gun belt bounced against him from where he had fastened it about his neck.
When the mare pushed through and clambered up the far bank, both man and animal shook themselves free of excess water and were eager to
move into a gallop.
Soon the only traces of dampness on the horse’s neck were of sweat.
Stillwater was stranded in the middle of the plain like the whitening skeleton of a buffalo the hunters had stripped bare and left. Once it had been a stage depot on the route south from Wichita, but the line had transferred west to Baker’s Stage Station and most of the point had been drained from Stillwater’s existence.
The old depot, low and long with its reinforced log walls, was the only building of any substance left. The few stores that had grown up there were mostly abandoned except to the wind. There were a handful of cabins and a few more sod houses and that was it.
Stillwater.
Hart brought his horse to a standstill and shifted the angle of his hat on his head. He expected the place to look pretty dead, but...
Automatically his right hand went to the butt of his Colt, lifting it a little inside the polished and greased holster and letting it fall back. His left hand reached for the stock of the Henry and pulled it out of the scabbard. Moving the rifle across his body, he levered a shell into the chamber.
‘Clay.’
The animal’s name came out as a whisper and Hart rocked his body in the saddle. The gray went forwards at a slow walk, Hart’s eyes moving from side to side, eating in every detail.
The first thing he saw was a man’s leg in dark blue pants pushing its way through the open doorway of one of the sod houses. There was no need for Hart to dismount – he could read enough into the leg’s angle and its obvious stiffness.
Next it was a bright flutter of yellow, a piece of cotton material flapping in the east wind. Hart swung his right leg over the saddle and dropped silently to the ground. Rifle angled across his chest, finger tight against the trigger, he went forward.
The material was part of a dress; the yellow was traced through with the faint pattern of flowers; it blew against the side of the wooden frame door and then rested back on the bare skin of the woman’s leg. As Hart watched the wind continued to move it, as if it had life.
Hart eased the door back with his boot. The interior of the soddie was dark and smelt of damp and something else. Damp and dried blood and something else. He dropped into a crouch beside the woman’s body.
A knife wound cut deep across her chest, slicing through the top of her yellow dress and the woolen garment she had been wearing underneath. It sliced through her left breast, folding the heavy, pendulous flesh on either side of a wound that was now ridged with scabbed blood.
It had not killed her. What had killed her was a blow to the side of the head with something blunt, heavy, a war club. There was just enough of the top of the head remaining to tell. Whoever had taken the woman’s scalp had done so in a hurry. The skin below the knife incision had ripped badly, coming loose almost to the bridge of her nose. The bared roof of her skull was matted with dark blood and thick with the almost silent movement of small insects.
Hart turned his head aside and stood up. Outside in the air he breathed deeply and moved on.
The crack in the sky had disappeared; the grayness had thickened and was pressing down, closing. The wind had finally wrenched the sign away from its one remaining nail above what had been the saddler’s. The square of painted wood bounced and slid across open ground, stopping against the broken-down fence of the stable.
Hart kicked back a warped door and went inside. There was a fast scuttle away from the centre of the room and something moving low and close to the ground. Hart brought the Henry to chest height and fired once, twice, three times. The sound of the rifle echoed round the almost empty room; light from doorway and window showed up the outlines of a cupboard, two chairs, a bed whose mattress had been pulled towards the floor. The straw stuffing had been ripped out in several places, and spilled out of the gaps savaged in its striped cover. Lying close by the bed, close to the room’s centre were two children. It was hard to tell, but from their size they were likely around six or seven.
The picture of Hart’s youngest sister, Christine, standing and biting her lip as he prepared to ride away, jumped unbidden to his mind.
Hart shook his head as if physically to clear the image away. He looked from the mattress to the children’s faces to the dark, bloodied bodies of rats he had shot in the corner of the room. Vomit rose to the back of his throat and he choked it back down.
He slammed the door behind him and walked to the old depot building, striding fast. Curving trails of flour wound their way from the entrance; a sack had been dropped and left in the haste of their going. Rats had been at that, too. A bolt of bright blue cloth unraveled itself through one of the side windows and the wind tangled it tighter and tighter.
Hart stepped over the dead man who lay immediately inside the doorway and went inside. The tin chimney from atop the central stove had been smashed down and lay in sections. Tables had been upturned to use as shields. In one of them a group of three arrows stuck as close and tight as a man’s heart.
Broken glass was scattered all over the long room, here and there dark with dried blood.
One man had tried to get out through a window. He must have been almost through when the ax head had been driven into his spine. The wound ploughed deep; the white of bone showed through, smeared and stained.
Amos Grant sat in the same armchair he always took his rest in. Arrows pinned him to it, fixed fast through his body – arms and side, one piercing the folds of his belly, another through his neck, the hardwood shaft narrowly missing the windpipe.
Grant’s fingers gripped the frayed fabric of the chair arms, almost as if he were sitting there waiting for the barber to step across to the depot and give him his weekly shave and maybe trim the thinning wisps of hair that fell past his ears.
Hart wondered why they hadn’t scalped him, as they had most of the others.
He wondered what had happened to the old Colt Navy Grant had used to back him up not too many weeks before.
He wondered what the old man had thought as he died; if he had thought anything at all.
Hart remembered sitting by the stove with him, a bottle of good whisky passing to and fro between the pair of them. As the night had worn on, Grant’s eyes had become misted as he’d moved further and further back in time. He’d told Hart of his wife, Sophie, how the two of them had bundled all their belongings on to a wagon and joined a train heading west. Smiling in their hopes for a new life. She’d never lasted those last years and Amos Grant had been glad.
In the end all he’d had left were his old gun and the horsehair armchair and a few memories which betrayed him whenever they strayed into his mind.
Hart leaned forward and touched the man’s cheek: it was cold, waxen, the flesh beneath it set hard. Hart tightened the line of his mouth and stepped away. It took him a quarter of an hour to find what he was looking for. He drank a third of the bottle of whisky first and then he went out with the spade and dug a deep, wide hole through the sod and dark earth.
It wasn’t easy shifting man and chair out together but he managed it. He cut away the arrows at the level of the body and threw them into the wind. Then he lowered the chair down into the grave, Amos Grant sliding over to one side as he went down. Hart drank some more of the whisky before filling the grave in. By the time he’d finished sweat was pouring from his arms and down his back, making the wool of his shirt stick to his skin. The sides of his brown hair were flat and wet against his temples. Muscles in his arms ached.
Finally he fetched the saddler’s sign and scratched Grant’s name on to the back of it with the point of his knife. He hammered the board into the head of the grave with the flat of the shovel.
Hart stood straight and stretched his arms and back. He picked up the whisky bottle and raised it over the mound of newly turned earth.
‘Here’s to you, Amos.’
He set the lip of the bottle to his mouth and swallowed hard; the raw liquor burned the back of his throat. He moved his arm and upturned the bottle, letting the remains of th
e whisky splash down over the grave.
Then he hurled the bottle against the wall of the depot and let the smash of glass shatter the silence.
The stink of death clung to the inside of Wes Hart’s head; the touch of it to his ringers. He hated it, feared it, refused to think about it. As soon as a man who lived by the gun thought too long about death it claimed him, slowing his hand when he made his draw, making him careless about walking into darkened alleys, about sitting with his back to the street.
He climbed up into the saddle and urged the mare through the town, towards the graying horizon. Already the sign at the head of Amos Grant’s grave had tilted towards the ground.
Chapter Two
Hart’s direction was due south, towards the Cimarron. The day was closing in about him as he rode, the wind driving into him, stronger than before. He reached round behind and loosed the knots that held the blanket in place. Twisting the reins round the saddle pommel, he threw the blanket round his body so that it hung over his right shoulder with a loose knot below his left hip.
He’d had the blanket the best part of ten years, since scouting for the army amongst the Navajo. He’d got himself working under a captain called Rodway who reckoned he knew everything in the whole damned world that’d been invented and quite a few things that hadn’t. Sure claimed to be an expert on Indians – so expert he thought it was his right to wipe them out of existence.
It wasn’t that he bore them any grudge; on the contrary, Rodway had a lot more respect for the Indian than most whites, especially those in the army. He simply thought they were in the way.
‘The Indian is a primitive,’ he’d say, holding forth to his fellow officers, ‘even one with signs of some kind of civilization like the Navajo. He has no ambition to rise beyond his gods or do more than grow corn for his family and weave blankets. This country needs land to grow and the Indian simply sits in the way.’
Hart remembered him: thin, bow-legged, body like a grayhound; dark hair flattened to his scalp, intense dark eyes that were rarely still, a beaked nose over thin, small lips.
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