by Ron Schwab
Twilight of the Coyote
Ron Schwab
Contents
Also by Ron Schwab
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Afterword
Also by Ron Schwab
Sioux Sunrise
Paint the Hills Red
Ghosts Around the Campfire
The Lockes
Last Will
Medicine Wheel
The Law Wranglers
Deal with the Devil
Mouth of Hell
The Last Hunt
Summer’s Child
The Coyote Saga
Night of the Coyote
Return of the Coyote
Twilight of the Coyote
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TWILIGHT OF THE COYOTE
by Ron Schwab
Uplands Press
PO Box 6105
Omaha, NE 68106
www.UplandsPress.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Ron Schwab
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews—without written permission from its publisher.
ISBN: 1-943421-30-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-943421-30-5
In memory of my mother, Millie Schwab—gentle, patient and quiet, but strong as steel at her core
Chapter 1
KATE
Kathleen Rose Connolly dismounted, plucked her binoculars from the saddlebags, and left her Appaloosa gelding in the shade of a solitary ponderosa pine that resided at the top of the granite bluff. She did not worry that War Paint would wander beyond the sound of her whistle. They had been together ten years now, since the gelding was a foal and she was ten years old. Kate had been sitting on a pile of straw in the corner of a stall at the foal’s birth. She had named him for the three white streaks that extended like Sioux war paint from beneath the eyes down each side of his face, giving him a fierce look, she thought. Other than its namesake markings and some generous white splotches on its rump, the horse was coal-black.
She sat down on her favorite bench-rock and brushed back the silky strands of copper-colored hair from her green-tinted brown eyes and looked out over the lush valley as she had countless times over her young lifetime. She felt a cold, wet nose against her cheek and reflexively put her arm about the thick shoulders of Galahad, her black Labrador retriever and pulled him close. He had been her friend and companion for only a few years less than War Paint and was an early descendant of a breed finding its way to America from Newfoundland by way of England. His name had been inspired by her obsessive reading of Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, twelve narrative poems retelling the legend of King Arthur and his knights. Galahad was known for his gallantry and pure heart, and the traits had called to her as a young girl—and still did in her dream world.
As far as Kate was concerned, she was more than half way to heaven in this special place she had never shared with another human. It was her first trip to the top of the bluff since spring break. It was late June 1927, and the sun’s warming rays more than offset the stiff, cool breeze that whipped the uplands this morning. She scanned the steep, craggy slopes of South Dakota’s Black Hills National Forest across the valley to the west, but she was perched on Connolly Shamrock Ranch land—just barely.
As she looked out over the valley, she could not shake off the quarrel she had with her father, Owen Connolly, at breakfast. His Irish temper had flared when she announced she would not be returning to the South Dakota State College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts in Brookings, where he believed she was enrolled in a home economics curriculum and diligently seeking a rancher husband. She had been an honor student at the college, but, unbeknownst to her father, she had enrolled in an agricultural program and was on track to graduate with the class of 1928 in another year. She would earn a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture with an emphasis in beef production if she finished. She had not really lied to her father. He had just told her what to do and assumed she had done it and rarely showed any interest after that. She intended to ranch, with or without her father, and, while she had a healthy interest in the opposite sex, her destiny was not to be some man’s brood cow. A husband would be nothing but a nuisance right now.
She already owned fifty Angus cows out of the Shamrock’s five hundred cow herd, and she would cut hers out and lease her own place and start fresh and free of his pig-headed notions of where a woman’s place was, if it came to that. She would find another job to subsidize her ranching until it could stand on its own. She was paying for her own education and could do what she darn well pleased. She would tell her father tonight what she had been up to and what she planned to do.
She pressed the binoculars to her eyes and, as they roamed the creek on the valley floor, she caught sight of a fisherman attired in hip-length waders and a fancy fishing vest, casting for trout in the fast-flowing stream that sliced through the Shamrock’s ten thousand acres of pasture, hay and row-crop ground and half-naked hills. The fisherman’s hat was perched evenly on his head, and, as serious fishermen tended to be, he appeared oblivious to anything but his quest. She pegged him as a dude, probably an Easterner. He was also a trespasser.
She would ride down and let him know he was on private property, and then she would give him permission to fish there. Visitors to the Hills frequently wandered innocently onto Shamrock range, the ranch being tucked between the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation lands to the east and Black Hills National Forest to the west and north.
She was curious. The fisherman didn’t appear to have a horse. How did he get to the remote fishing spot? He was miles from any lodging or campground that she knew about. She turned her binoculars northward along the rocky park service road that snaked into the Hills and formed a rough boundary line between government and private lands. She paused when she saw the Model T Ford parked on the roadside midway up the steep hillside. The road was a path to nowhere carved from the granite slope and dead-ended a few miles further up. It was rarely traveled except by forest rangers and maintenance
personnel, or the occasional hiker or lost tourist.
The nose of the automobile pointed downhill, so it had already been to the dead-end turnaround. What she found strange, however, was that there was a stocky man dressed in a white shirt and tie and suspenders leaning against the vehicle, his hat pulled down over his forehead in a losing effort to ward off the sun’s glare. She swore she could make out a shoulder holster and pistol hitched on the left side of the man’s torso, an outfit like she had viewed on screen at a Lon Chaney movie. Mobsters sometimes carried their guns that way in films. But, so did plainclothes lawmen. Was she watching a gangster of some kind? Or a good guy? Either way, he must be the source of the fisherman’s transportation.
A swirl of dust moving up the service road caught her attention. Another Model T. Not surprising, since more than half the automobiles in the country were the economical Ford that sold for less than three hundred dollars.
The vehicle rolled to a stop, nudging the front bumper of the other Ford and pushing it back a foot or so. Mr. Suspenders had strolled toward the oncoming car with one hand raised in an apparent effort to halt its course, and now he was totally exposed when two men with pistols aimed leaped out of the car. The armed driver quickly joined them. In the middle of the road, three guns faced one. Mr. Suspenders dropped his weapon, and the driver walked over to the man and slammed the butt of his pistol into the side of Suspenders’ head. He fell like a burlap bag of corn onto the road.
The newcomers engaged in animated conversation for several minutes, evidently plotting the next step of whatever they were doing. Finally, the driver and one of the men drug the felled man off the road and rolled him over the edge, where he slid twenty feet or so down the steep hillside until coming to a stop in a cluster of chokecherry and skunkbrush. She could not determine if he was alive or dead.
One of the men retrieved rifles from their car, and, with the driver remaining behind, the other two started down the deer trail that led to the valley below, and, ultimately, to the stream. They were obviously stalking the fisherman.
It would be a simple matter for her to take a back trail and reach the fisherman before the stalkers arrived. But what was the point? The fisherman was a stranger, and, for all she knew, they could be lawmen tracking a wanted criminal. It seemed unlikely, however, that such persons would have struck a man down and tossed him off the roadside. Would they have not taken him into custody and escorted him to the back seat of their Model T? Of course, the fisherman could still be a gangster. Maybe the Chicago mobsters were bringing their wars to the Black Hills.
She decided it wouldn’t harm anything to take a closer look at the occupant of the trout stream. She could decide what to do about him after she had a chance to size him up. She whistled for War Paint, and, in a matter of moments, Kate and her companions were headed down the serpentine trail that took them back to the foothills. Less than a half hour later, she dismounted, pulled her Winchester from its saddle holster and abandoned the Appaloosa. Followed by Galahad, she inched her way through the aspen, birch and scrub oak that lined the stream. When she reached the clearing where she had sighted the fisherman, she found him standing in the knee-high water that broke swiftly around his legs as it followed its course downstream. His back was to her, but if he turned, he would certainly see her at the edge of the clearing.
He was a slender man, a few inches shy of six feet, she guessed. She saw no sign of a stringer full of trout, and she thought he seemed a bit inept at tossing the fly, almost as if he was not very serious about catching a trout.
“Good morning, young lady.”
She started when she heard the man’s voice. He turned toward her and began slogging toward the streambank, the rapid waters pulling at his feet. When he stepped upon the rocky bank, he tendered a closed-lip smile and cocked his head, obviously waiting for her to speak.
“I thought you should know, mister, that you’re trespassing on private property.”
He looked genuinely surprised. “Good heavens, I had no idea. I was informed this was park land. This is very embarrassing. I’ll pick up my things and move out of here. My auto and driver are on the road up that way.” He pointed northwest, where Kate had viewed the altercation.
“No, that’s all right. Folks are welcome to fish here if they respect the property. That road separates the Black Hills National Forest from Shamrock Ranch land. I just thought you should know.” She smiled. He seemed to be a soft-spoken man in his mid to late fifties, and she did not find him the least threatening.
“I do want to know,” he said. “I have the utmost respect for private property. And, with your permission, of course, I would like to return to this little clearing. It’s very peaceful here. I have a car and driver waiting for me on the road, however, and I really must be going. I am expected at the lodge for a late lunch.” He peeled his rubber waders down his thighs and sat down to work them off his feet. When Kate saw him struggling clumsily to get free, she leaned her rifle against a tree stump and stepped over and knelt and helped tug the encumbrances from his feet. He stood and started a futile effort to brush the wrinkles from his trousers, which seemed a bit too nice for an outdoor expedition.
“You haven’t done much trout fishing, have you?” Kate asked.
“First time. My wife said I should take a guide, but I wanted some time alone. I’m a pole and catfish man by heritage.”
“Well, I’d be glad to teach you a few things about angling for trout, but time’s wasting. Are you a crook or anything like that?”
“I’ve been called a crook and a lot worse. But, no, I don’t think of myself as a crook.”
“Well, forget about going back to your car.” She told him about the run-in she had witnessed.
His face turned somber, but she saw no panic there. His brow furrowed, and then he said. “I hope Harvey isn’t badly injured, or worse.”
“I truly can’t say. They didn’t shoot him. I suppose they were afraid that would alert you.”
“I guess I’d better be on my way. And you had better go, too. I thank you sincerely for the warning.”
“And where do you think you’re going?”
“I will stay with the stream. It will eventually take me to civilization of some kind.”
“In a dozen miles, maybe. There’s a cave in the rocks no more than a quarter mile from here. We’ll go there. Even if they find us, I could hold them off for hours with my Winchester. If I don’t get back home by lunchtime, Grandma will make Dad and Stretch come looking for me.”
“I will be missed, also. I put my life in your hands, young lady.”
“Kate. Call me Kate.”
“You may call me Uncle Cal.”
Chapter 2
KATE
Uncle Cal seemed like an odd bird, but he was nothing if not a perfect gentleman. He didn’t say much, but Kate could sense that a deep intelligence lay behind those translucent blue eyes. Wheels were turning in that head.
They had taken shelter in a deep cave with an entrance that made a tight squeeze for Uncle Cal to inch through. The opening would be difficult to see from the creek bed that lay some thirty feet below. She had never explored the depths of the cave. There were many in the Black Hills, and its tunnels might traverse for miles, connecting with countless openings in the region. She was a bit claustrophobic, and she was determined they would make their stand, if necessary, near the entrance.
Uncle Cal sat leaning against the wall on the opposite side of the cave just inside the opening. Galahad snuggled against him while his new friend stroked his head and scratched his ears. The dog slightly annoyed her with the instant rapport he had formed with the stranger. It meant nothing as far as the man’s character was concerned. Galahad would make friends with an axe-murderer, so long as the axe was not directed at Kate.
“Kate,” Uncle Cal said, “if you will allow me to take your rifle, I will keep an eye out for the men. I grew up on a farm in Vermont. I am a respectable marksman . . . or used to be.”
>
She was not about to surrender her Winchester to a stranger. She still carried doubts about her judgment in interjecting herself into this situation. This man seemed pleasant enough, and, for that matter, he had a familiar look. But she might have seen his image on a wanted poster at the post office. “Sorry, I’m hanging on to the rifle. It’s not a decoration for my saddle. I can use it.”
She could make out enough of Uncle Cal’s face in the beams of sunlight admitted by the cave’s opening to see that it registered some surprise at her response. But he remained silent. She scooted closer to the entrance and peered out. They had arrived. The two men hurried along the stream banks, one on each side. She worried they would stumble onto War Paint. The gelding would be grazing a short distance downstream. Of course, the two men would never catch him, but they might scare the horse off, in which case it would probably head for the home place.