Gunpoint

by Giles Tippette

  He scratched his chin again, studying me. He said, “I reckon not. But I will need your firearm off you.”

  I pulled my revolver and handed it to him butt first.

  He said, with a little laugh, “Habit of mine.” Then he looked around the bar. “All of ya’ll say the same thing? This feller here fired in self-defense?”

  They all said yes in one form or another. I followed the sheriff through the tables and to the front door. He paused and said to the barman, “John, I’d be obliged if you’d send for Aikins and get that body moved back to his funeral parlor.”

  John said, “I’ll do it, Shur’ff.” Then, just as we started out the door, John said, “Mister, you ain’t paid your reckoning.”

  It embarrassed me, but I quickly got out a five-dollar gold piece and passed it to him. “I’m sorry. What with one thing and another.”

  “You got change coming.”

  “Put it toward that piece of whiskey bottle I got left. I hope I’ll be coming back to pick it up.”

  John said, “One other thing. Shur’ff, this might interest you. That man layin’ on the floor come ridin’ up with three other hombres.” He nodded his head out the front door. He said to me, “Ain’t that yore colt and packhorse?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, them four pulled up an’ hitched right alongside. While that one back yonder was in here gettin’ hisself shot, one of them other three taken it upon hisself to untie yore colt an’ have the reins in his hand. When all the shootin’ started they taken off. The one holdin’ yore horse jest dropped the reins. You can see he ain’t hitched.”

  The sheriff said, “Three of them?”

  “Yessir.”

  The sheriff said, “Hmmmm.”

  We walked on out. I hitched the colt, more for the form of the thing than any other reason. He wasn’t going anywhere. But my mind was on the men. They’d been four. They had to have been the men I’d seen coming so hard from the direction of El Campo. They must have met up with the Mexicans and got the story out of them. Where they’d got the badge I had no way of knowing, but like I’d said, badges weren’t hard to come by. Well, at least I now knew for sure that my bushwhackers were on my trail and I knew how many of them there were. That is, if the remaining three were the balance and there weren’t more stationed around.

  Thinking back on the situation I’d been presented with, they’d had a hell of a good chance of getting me outside and into privacy. If the one pretending to be a sheriff hadn’t called me by name, I might never have tumbled until it was too late.

  The sheriff’s office was across the street and down a block. We got up on the boardwalk and then he let us in and took a seat behind the desk. I sat down across from him. His office looked about like every sheriff’s office I’d seen in every small town in Texas. He yawned and put my revolver on his desk, and then took a minute to take off his hat and scratch his head. He had a full head of hair, but it was mostly graying. He said, “Now, why don’t you tell me about this business and how you come to figure that man meant you no good.”

  Without going into great detail I told the sheriff about the threats on my life and the shots over my head. When I was finished he said, “So you figured to draw them out on the prairie where you could see them coming.”

  “That’s about the size of it. Only they never showed until I saw them four riders coming hard.”

  “And you think this bunch was that four and that one in the saloon was a part of it?”

  “I can’t see no other explanation.”

  “What’d Sheriff Vara think about this?”

  “He was with my brothers. Get away. But they wanted me to slip off and stay away and hope it all blew over. I knew it wouldn’t. Whoever has gone to so much trouble ain’t going to give up that easy. Besides, I wanted to draw the trouble away from the ranch and my family.”

  The sheriff said, “Speaking of that, I don’t want to sound unneighborly, but I’d as soon as you didn’t tarry here any longer than you have to.”

  “Sheriff, I might never have come in here at all if I hadn’t wanted some eggs and a cold beer and a barbershop shave so bad. And believe me, just as soon as you telegraph Lew Vara and get my bona fides I’ll be pulling my freight.”

  The sheriff shoved my gun over to me. “I don’t need to wire Sheriff Vara. I know you’re who you say you are. Besides ...” He pulled out a drawer of his desk and took out a thick sheaf of wanted posters. He went through them slowly and then finally slid one across to me. “That’s your sheriff from El Campo. Whiskey Jack Apple.”

  I looked at the face and the description. It all fitted the man I’d shot. He was wanted for robbery and manslaughter and cattle theft. I was surprised to see there was no mention of murder and said as much to the sheriff.

  He said, “Oh, that kind never get caught doing murder. They be mostly back-shooters. He’s one of them border bunch. I think he headquarters at Piedras Negras. He’d kill his best friend for a free meal.” He suddenly frowned.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Well, Whiskey Jack, as they call him, ain’t got the reputation for being a really top gun or all that smart. If you want some rough work done he’s your man, but if it is anything delicate requiring a little brain work I can’t see him runnin’ the show. I think they sent him into that saloon to test the waters. I think you got to look to one of them other three for the real threat.”

  “You get much traffic of his kind through here?”

  “Oh, yes. They stop to tend to their horses or buy supplies. Long as they don’t make no trouble I let ’em alone. This ain’t a good town to act up in. It’s a quiet little place an’ I intend to see it remains so.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for the trouble I caused you.”

  He shrugged. “I think you done us a favor. Everyone of them rattlesnakes gets shot is just one left to worry about. By the way ...” He pointed at the wanted poster. “The state had a five-hundred-dollar bounty on Whiskey Jack’s head. You’re entitled to apply for it.”

  I shook my head. “I ain’t turning up my nose at no five hundred dollars, but I just ain’t got time to floor with it. You claim it and do what you want with it.”

  “Maybe give it to the school. And it’ll cost to bury that bastard.”

  I stood up and holstered my revolver. I thanked the sheriff and said I hoped to see him on a more favorable occasion.

  He said, “Good luck, Mister Williams. I don’t got to tell you that three-to-one odds ain’t the best. But you look like you can handle yourself.” I took my leave and stopped back by the saloon to claim my bottle of whiskey. I threw a five-dollar gold piece on the bar for drinks for the house and then thanked the men there for their good eyesight. The body of Whiskey Jack was gone.

  From there I stopped at the cafe, got my loaves of bread, and then went back to my animals. They looked restive and ready to get moving. I shoved the bread and whiskey down in the tow sack that was hanging off the packsaddle. I’d get it all squared away the first stop I made. Right then and there I just wanted out of the confines of a town.

  I rode out about noon. It was a blazing noon and I’d of just as soon spent it in the shade of a saloon, but I understood the sheriff’s feelings. No matter who was in the right or the wrong, the last thing he wanted in his town was a gunfight. I didn’t blame him at all.

  The country was getting more and more broken up, though there was still plenty of grass. I was still a hundred miles away from the sand and rock and cactus country that was full of plunging draws and ravines and rock outcrops where a man could conceal himself and his animals from anything except the birds overhead.

  I was going to ride west toward the towns of Poteet and Devine and then swing north in the direction of Hondo. I had no intentions of going into any of the towns. The country would still be too open. But once I bypassed Hondo and headed north toward Rocksprings, I’d be into the country I wanted and then my hunt would begin.

  I traveled until mid-afterno
on, and stopped by the banks of a treeless little creek that was barely more than a trickle. But it was enough to give the horses a good drink and for me to soak myself down for a little relief from the sun. I didn’t feel like anything heavy so I drank the juice off a couple of cans of tomatoes and had one of the cans of peaches. I made sure I was drinking plenty of water. In that heat a man could keel over if he didn’t keep the water level up in his body.

  It was a brief stop and we went on. I rode for another two hours and then shaded up myself and my horses in a mesquite thicket. There wasn’t much grass, but the horses needed to get in out of the heat for a time. It was the hottest part of the day and we’d go on when it got cooler. I’d taken on twenty-five pounds of cracked corn at the mercantile, but the heat of the day was no time to be giving horses a grain like corn. They could make do with grass until we camped for the night.

  I took up a position on the east side of the thicket and, like always, studied my back trail. I looked a long time and didn’t see much. A few cattle were scattered here and there along with some clumps of trees, but I couldn’t see anything moving. I kept looking. Finally I could make out a few little dots heading toward the northwest. In a sense they were going away from me so they never got any larger. Finally they disappeared over the horizon. If that was my pursuers they were going the wrong way.

  I couldn’t figure their game. They’d of had no trouble picking up my trail out of Pleasanton but—and I was certain of it—no horsemen had come out of the town behind me, not even two miles behind me. Obviously they wanted to lull me to sleep, to convince me they’d given up after I’d killed their fellow bushwhacker.

  Or maybe they were waiting for the same kind of country that I was so they could get close enough to take me in hand and give me some sort of message before finishing me off. Obviously, if the plan had just been to kill me, that could have been done a hundred times over with no risk to themselves.

  Hell, it was too much of a puzzle for me.

  I thought of Nora, and wondered how she was getting on, glad she knew nothing of all this foolishness. Then I speculated on matters back at the ranch, wondering how fouled up Harley and Ben and Norris had managed to get things. Likely the herds of half-breeds had managed to get in with the Herefords and we’d be dropping crossed calves all over the place next March.

  Finally I roused myself, got the horses ready for the trail, and set off once again on a long ride. I tell you, this solitude business was starting to get a little wearing. At first I’d thought that just to get off by myself for a little time was just what the doctor ordered. And the first few days it had been. But now, with just horses for company, the whole matter was wearing thin. I was anxious to come to grips with my would-be killers, and get the matter settled, and go home and see Nora.

  I pushed hard that afternoon, riding until about seven-thirty of the evening. There was still half an hour of daylight left. I struggled the horses up a low, broad, little grass-covered hill that was about a hundred feet in height and about an acre across the top. I unsaddled the roan and unloaded the packhorse, put them on their picket ropes, and then gave both of them a good mess of cracked corn. They’d watered aplenty and there was more ahead. They would be content to spend a restful night grazing and sleeping. It would be well for them that they did because I intended to push hard the next couple of days. We’d been averaging about twenty miles a day, which was just poking along. I intended to almost double that. I wanted to get as much of a lead on my pursuers as I could.

  There was a little grove of trees on top of the hillock, but I made a cold camp, making do with ham and cheese and the bread I’d bought in the cafe. I hated to admit it, but their light bread was better than what I’d brought from home, even when it had been fresh.

  I had already circled Poteet sometime during the day, and now Devine was ahead some twenty-five miles. If the corn held out I intended to bypass that and make my next stop in Hondo for another telegram to Norris. I’d get supplies there also, for Rocksprings was sixty miles on past Hondo and there wasn’t a thing along the way except some poor cattle and a few green valleys that had been taken over by farmers and such. But there was plenty of water and plenty of cover.

  I stayed awake for about an hour after I’d eaten, sitting and smoking and drinking a little whiskey and looking out over the country from my vantage point. Sure enough, not too long after it got good dark, I saw a light just below the horizon and I knew damn good and well it wasn’t any star. The moon, which had been on the wane since my start from Blessing, was now just a quarter of itself and the night was good and dark, dark enough so that the flicker of flames could be seen with no trouble. Of course I didn’t know how far away they were, but the fire appeared to be north and east of my position and a little behind. I guessed they were about two miles away and two miles behind. And, it appeared, they were taking a more northerly track than I was, since my course still lay somewhat to the west.

  Well, they could be brazen and make a camp fire. They were either doing it because they didn’t think I would connect them with it, assuming it was just some working cowhands caught out on the range overnight, or because they weren’t afraid of me and didn’t give a damn if I saw it or not. Or they might be trying to frighten me. Well, they’d worried me all they were going to. They’d better start worrying about their own hides.

  I made an early start the next morning, getting away before dawn. It was tough packing the chestnut in the dark, but I got him loaded just good enough to get off the hill and make a few miles before the light came and I could do a better job of it. I made a breakfast out of water and a quick drink of whiskey and was on my way. I walked the horses off the hill, then mounted and rode quietly into the black morning. I figured it was not much after four, but I hadn’t wanted to strike a match to look at my watch so I’d just gone by the stars, having left as the last one was disappearing down the horizon.

  As I rode I considered the words of the sheriff that this Whiskey Jack that I’d killed might not have been the best of the bunch that was after me. But then, maybe they’d figured he looked more like a sheriff than the rest. I didn’t expect he’d figured to have to pull a gun on me, and certainly he’d figured that I wouldn’t have drawn on what I was supposed to have thought was a lawman. And I might not if he hadn’t made that fatal mistake. Of course they could have all come in and taken me out, but that would have given their game away for certain and we’d of had us one hell of a gunfight right there in that saloon.

  About ten that morning I struck a little branch of the Sabinal River, and paused to water the horses and have a quick bite. Then I pushed on. I wanted to be on the other side of Devine by nightfall, and hoped to make it look like I’d gone into the town to overnight.

  Two days later, early in the afternoon, I was just outside of Hondo. Hondo was an old town, a town that had sprung up because it was on the old Spanish trading trail, a route that led from inside Mexico to north Texas and had forts spaced out about a two days’ ride apart. The fort was long gone, but Hondo remained, a dusty, rough town with a fluctuating population, the kind of town where the saloons far outnumbered the churches. Every once in a while the stable citizenry would make an attempt to clean up the place and run the undesirables out of town, but it always ended up being a waste of money and lives. Hondo was a natural stopping-off place between the border and San Antonio which was near as bad as the border so far as the number of killers and crooks and bad hats went.

  It didn’t bother me going into the town. I was just going to pick up some feed for the horses, have a cafe meal, drink a few cold beers, and be gone. I was confident that I had a good lead on my pursuers, and besides, I didn’t figure it was the kind of town they’d want to start trouble in. And of course, they knew by now I wasn’t going to be taken off guard by any ruse they could think of.

  I took one last look behind me, but the country was too rolling and hilly for me to say for certain no one was on my trail. There were a hundred places they
could have been hid, just watching me go into town. I touched the gelding with my spurs and rode toward the dusty main street of Hondo.

  I was looking for a livery stable. I didn’t want my horses standing out on the street as a clear indication of where I was. I also didn’t want anyone fooling with them. It wasn’t any trick for someone to wedge a small pebble in the frog of your horse’s hoof. It wouldn’t be noticeable at first, but you’d have a lame horse within a mile or two.

  The livery stable was behind a ramshackle hotel, just about where I’d expected it to be. There was a stable boy on duty and I bought twenty-five pounds of oats off him, and gave him an extra two dollars to grain and water the horses, unpack the chestnut, unsaddle the roan, and give both of their backs a good rubdown with straw. I told the boy I’d be no more than an hour and that I would pack the oats myself, that he wasn’t to fool with my pack. I had long since taken the cash out of my saddlebags, and now I let him see plainly that I was going through the contents and was dead certain what was there and what had better be there when I got back.

  I’d passed the railroad depot on my way in. It was only a short walk, perhaps a couple of blocks. As I walked I noticed a good saloon right near the livery stable, also a general mercantile. I’d get off the telegram and then make my stops for a cold beer and provisions, get back to the stable, and be gone.

  The telegram I sent Norris wasn’t much different than the other two, except I added that I had come across the note-writer and there had been four of them. I figured he’d understand from that what I meant.

  Walking back toward the center of town I noticed there were a good many people in town. I figured it must have been Saturday but, truth be told, I had no earthly idea what day of the week it was. Most of the people looked like townsfolk or farmers or ranchers from the surrounding countryside. But there were a number of them who couldn’t be mistaken for honest citizens, not from the look of them and the way they wore their sidearms. I was just speculating that my three ’whackers might be any of the bunch when I saw a couple of men walking toward me on the boardwalk. They were walking shoulder to shoulder, taking up most of the walkway. I edged toward my right, expecting them to swing away, which would give us all enough room to pass. Instead, they veered to their left, which kept them coming directly at me. They were both nearly of a size to me, but one was older, perhaps forty. The other appeared to be in his mid-twenties. They looked like rough customers. The younger had some Mexican in him, how much I couldn’t tell. But it was the older that looked more dangerous.