Stark’s men had dismounted and were strung out along the crest of the hill.
For the next several hours they kept a steady fire on the cabin. The door soon shredded into splinters but, at least for now, the table held.
Masterson had fired a dozen shots in reply but claimed no hits. The riflemen on the hill were well hidden among the trees and were difficult to take down.
Inside the cabin the air was becoming rank.
Horse manure littered the floor and the animals were lathered in sweat and restless, kicking out at the two lawmen every chance they got. Masterson’s sorrel had given Crane a bruise on the back of his thigh from a flying rear hoof and had tried to bite him more than once.
“At least he had the good taste to piss all over the late Mr. Hope.” The sheriff grinned. “Probably the first bath he’s had in years.”
Crane smelled his own rank sweat and the cloying air lay on him like a damp, putrid blanket.
A bullet chipped wood from the table and the marshal swore.
“It’s getting too ripe in here,” he said. His eyes were red rimmed and gritty. “I’m eating horseshit in air I sucked clean an hour ago.”
“What do you suggest we do, Gus?” His eyes traveled over the marshal’s face, searching for a reply. But when it came, it was less than he’d hoped.
“I don’t know.”
“We could rush them with guns blazing, I suppose.”
“They’d cut us down before we covered ten yards.”
“Then quit complaining and eat your horseshit like a good little marshal.”
Crane swore again. “Damn, but you’re an irritating man, Masterson.”
Another hour drifted past.
Stark’s men kept up a desultory fire on the cabin. A ricocheting bullet burned across the buckskin’s rump like a metal hornet, sending the big stud into a bucking, kicking frenzy. The sorrel caught his companion’s mood and began to kick out on his own account. The lawmen battled to calm them, fearing the animals would injure themselves, and their riders.
In the end the horses settled down, but Crane was seething with rage and directed his anger at the men on the hill.
He stepped to the door, leaned across the table and dusted the hilltop until he shot his Henry dry.
The marshal made no hits that he could see, but did succeed in filling the cabin with greasy, gray gunsmoke.
“Feel better now, Gus?” Masterson asked, grinning.
Suddenly Crane wanted to bash the man’s face in with his rifle butt.
Chapter 24
The rain stopped, the clouds parted, the afternoon sun scorched and the land steamed. It was like an oven inside the cabin and the hot, damp air around the place shimmered.
Sweat trickled down Crane’s face and back and black wedges stained his shirt under his armpits. The stinking air was clotted and hard to breathe, like gulping down the foul contents of a rancid stewpot.
There had been no shooting from the hill for the last twenty minutes.
“Could be they’ve gone, Gus,” Masterson said.
“Could be.”
“You think they are?”
“I think, maybe they are.”
“Why would they leave?”
“Beats me. We don’t even know that they have gone.”
“You said they had.”
“I said maybe they had. I said maybe.”
Masterson thought for a few moments, then offered cheerily, “Why don’t you step outside, Gus. See if you draw fire.”
“Why don’t you?”
“They won’t shoot at a United States marshal.”
“Hell, they’ve been shooting at me for hours.”
Masterson fell silent, then said, “I’d go, but my leg hurts.”
“Are you wounded?”
“Nah, banged my knee on the table, I think.”
Crane gave the sheriff the full force of his rainwater stare. “I’m going outside because you’ve got me by the cojones. But I swear, Paul, if they gun me I’m going to make damn sure I put a bullet in you before I go down.”
“I’ll cover you, Gus. Don’t worry, to me you’re gold dust and I don’t want to lose you.”
“Thanks. I’ll carry that thought into hell with me.”
Crane pushed the table aside and swung the tattered door wide. He studied the rise. Nothing moved and there was no sound.
“See anything?”
Masterson stood in the doorway, his rifle in his hands.
The marshal shook his head.
Crouching low, he moved toward the rise. Suddenly Masterson was beside him.
“I reckoned I’d better come with you, Gus.” He grinned. “You might bumble right into an ambush.”
“Leg isn’t bothering you none, huh?”
“Nah, cleared up by itself.”
“Maybe it’s because I said I’d put a bullet into you.”
“Yeah, could be. You did make a powerful argument, Gus.”
Then Masterson was running. He stopped at the bottom of the rise, tilted back his head and scanned the rim.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
The two lawmen scrambled up the slope and reached the crest. Apart from a scattering of empty shells and cigarette butts, it was deserted.
“Now why would they pull out like that?” Masterson asked. “They had us pinned down in the cabin and all they had to do was bide their time.”
Crane’s eyes were filled with thought.
“They didn’t leave on their own account,” he said finally. “They were pulled off by Stark.”
“How come?”
“Because he’s planning for a bigger battle elsewhere and needs every gun he’s got.”
“Hollister?”
“You bet. He won’t give up his range easily.”
Masterson looked down the hill to the cabin. The horses, with the wonderful resiliency of animals, were placidly grazing as though nothing untoward had happened to them.
“I say we ride for Rawhide Flat,” he said, “and see if there’s any news of Hollister and how he’s handling this. Unless you want to ride for the Rafter-T and try to talk reason into Stark.”
“I’m not riding into the middle of a war, surrounded by a sight of enemies and mighty few friends. Stark isn’t going to listen to me, or anybody else.”
The sheriff’s eyes focused on the rain-washed blue sky, but he spoke to Crane. “Gus, about Sarah. I’m sorry.”
“She’s young, only a child really. I . . . worry about her.”
The inflections of the marshal’s voice suggested there were many layers of hidden meaning in that simple statement and Masterson recognized it.
“I’m real sorry, Gus,” he said again, knowing how inadequate he sounded.
Crane sucked it up. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.
The bullet that had plowed across the buckskin’s rump had cut deep and angled under the saddle blanket, scarring the animal’s hide.
“It’s a sorry cowboy who’ll ride a sore-backed horse,” he told the big stud. “But right now I don’t have any choice.”
He swung into the saddle, Masterson beside him, and headed north.
Ahead of them, all the way to the horizon, the sky was a faded blue, but to the west it was the color of blood.
The day was shading into evening when Crane and Masterson rode into Rawhide Flat.
Despite the day’s drying sun, the street through town was muddy and the wind whispered a bleak promise of more rain. Shadows hung from shadows in the alleys and around the dark-windowed stores. Only the saloons were brightly lit, optimistically offering the siren promise of whiskey and women to those in need of either or both.
Scores of cow ponies stood at hitching rails or were ground-tied in the street and men were talking loud in the Texas Belle, not from drink but from anger.
The two lawmen left their horses at the livery and walked to the saloon.
The place was crowded with cheering men, and a few o
f them had drawn their guns and were shooting into the ceiling.
Ben Hollister was being offered helping hands as he climbed down from a table. His handsome face was beaming and it looked like he’d just made a speech that had been very well received by the assembled ranchers and punchers.
Hollister saw Crane come in and he elbowed his way through the backslapping crowd and stopped in front of him. His face was flushed, but the marshal couldn’t smell drink on him and guessed it came from either anger or triumph.
“You hear what happened?” he asked. “Stark and them pilgrims of his have moved onto my land, like . . . like . . .” He gave up trying to describe what like, turned his head and yelled, “Jed Battles, git over here.”
The big rancher faced Crane again and his face lit up as a simile suddenly came to him. “Like damned locusts.”
Battles was a wiry, round-shouldered cowboy with a mustache so droopy it covered his mouth. He had a sling on his left arm and a purple bruise on his forehead.
He stood beside Hollister.
“Tell the marshal what happened,” Hollister said. He saw Battles hesitate and yelled, “Damn it, man, speak up.”
The puncher swallowed, his prominent Adam’s apple bobbing.
“They cut the fences and spread out across the range.”
“Like damn locusts,” Hollister said.
“Worse than locusts,” Battles said. “They took over the ranch house and kilt Ed Grange, the cook, when he tried to stop them. Luke Hill got shot over to the corral, Bill Foster got it in the bunkhouse and so did old Harry Reid, who was down with the rheumatisms. Harry got his head split open with a wood axe. I got shot, but managed to get away.”
“You see Reuben Stark?”
“Marshal, there were hundreds of them. All I saw was faces riding by. I didn’t wait to tarry and study ’em.”
“It’s Stark all right, him and his sons,” Hollister said. “All those people with him think he’s some kind of prophet and the Rafter-T is the Promised Land.”
“How do you know all this, Hollister?” Crane asked.
“Because we caught one of them.”
Cheers and more gunshots greeted this statement and the rancher waved a hand for silence.
“One of Stark’s sodbusters decided to do a little plundering on his own account. He rode up to Tom Hickman’s place when only Tom’s wife, Bella, and a colored woman were at home. He had his way with Mrs. Hickman, but then he made the last mistake of his life. He told the colored woman to make him something to eat and while he was waiting, a couple of Tom’s hands rode in and caught him.
“Tom Hickman ain’t here. He’s at his ranch trying to comfort his wife, but from what I was told she won’t be comforted. Poor woman doesn’t seem right in the head anymore.”
Hollister yelled, “Bring me that sodbuster.”
A couple of grinning cowboys dragged a man, or what was left of him, and held him erect, showing him off to Crane.
Both the man’s eyes were black, so swollen they were closed shut. His nose had been smashed into a bloody pulp and most of his teeth had been knocked out. An ominous scarlet stain drenched the crotch of his pants.
Crane couldn’t guess if the man was young or old. It was impossible to tell.
“He won’t rape any other women,” Hollister said, smiling. “He’s all done with that.”
“I’ll take him into custody,” Crane said.
“The hell you will, Marshal,” Hollister said loudly, to cheers from some, angry protests from others. “We’re gonna hang him.”
“That’s murder, Hollister,” Crane warned.
“He’s gonna die anyway. Cut off a man’s cojones and his pisser and he bleeds to death. Everybody knows that.”
From the man’s splintered mouth escaped a whisper that was almost a sigh, like a delicate breeze. “Kill me. . . . Please, Marshal . . . kill me. . . .”
“See, he wants to be hung,” Hollister said.
A man knows when it’s time to take a stand. Crane knew this wasn’t it.
Bowie knife surgery cuts and haggles at the body dreadfully, and Hollister was right, the man could not last much longer.
Besides, here was a rapist, caught in the act, who was begging for death.
Sometimes it was best to forget the law and let rough-and-ready frontier justice take its unforgiving course.
Hollister read Crane’s decision in his eyes. In a strangely quiet and subdued voice the rancher said, “Take him out boys. Hang him.”
A dozen punchers dragged the man outside. He made no sound. Crane hoped they’d break his neck and not strangle him to death. He’d once seen a man die long and hard that way, and the memory lingered.
Like a novelist who has completed one chapter and moved on to the next, Ben Hollister called out, “Osmond, Dyer, Swenson and the rest of you ranchers, round up your men. We’re moving out.”
As half a dozen ranchers moved to the door and stepped outside, Crane said, “How many riders do you have, Hollister?”
“Near threescore and another eighteen volunteers signed up for twenty dollars a day.”
“You don’t have enough.”
“It’s enough. Every one of my boys is handy with the iron.”
“Stark may have three hundred fighting men.”
The big rancher laughed. “Sodbusters don’t know how to fight.”
“Seems to me a bunch of sodbusters in Confederate gray did all right at Chickamauga and Fredericksburg.”
Hollister shook his head. “This isn’t the War Between the States. It’s a battle for my spread and every other rancher’s. We don’t aim to fight by the rules of war, Crane. If we have to, we’ll burn those nesters out and kill them all, seed, breed and generation of them.”
“Hollister, you’re a squatter yourself. You don’t own a square inch of the land you claim. All that mountain pasture of yours is open range. The law isn’t on your side on this.”
“You’re the law, Marshal, you and Masterson there. Are you two on my side?”
Crane clutched at a straw, realizing he was about to drown anyway. “I guess you can say we are, so let us handle this.”
“We’ll arrest Reuben Stark. Once he’s gone, his followers will melt away.”
Hollister’s blue eyes lay cold on Crane’s face. Under his mustache his mouth was a straight, hard line.
“Marshal, in the spring of ’seventy-two I drove five hundred longhorns up from Texas and settled that mountain pasture you say I don’t own. I fit Indians and outlaws to hold it and buried friends. I don’t give a damn what the law claims. The land is mine and I won’t let anybody take it away from me.”
A tall, lank man with sad eyes appeared at the saloon door. “Boys are ready to ride, Ben.”
Hollister nodded. He looked at Masterson. “Be here when I get back. You and me are going to have words.”
The sheriff smiled. “You know my terms. I’ll be here.”
“So be it.” The rancher’s eyes moved to Crane. “Will you stand aside and give me the road?”
“Listen, Hollister—”
But the man brushed past the marshal to the door, leaving three words drifting in the air behind him.
“Go to hell.”
Chapter 25
Crane and Masterson stood at the edge of the boardwalk outside the saloon and watched Hollister’s army move out of Rawhide Flat under a starless black sky that threatened rain.
The rancher had a low opinion of Stark’s fighting men, but he was cautious enough of ambush that he’d hired a Piute to ride point.
The young Indian was painted for war, the streak of red and white across his nose and cheekbones marking him as a former cavalry scout.
Hollister looked hard at Crane as he rode past, but did not speak.
Behind, in a column of fours, rode every puncher the ranchers could muster, wild young teenagers for the most part who laughed and joked as though they were headed for a Sunday school picnic.
But the faces of
the more seasoned men were somber. A few were married and were aware that, even fired by a sodbuster, a rifle bullet is a widow maker that doesn’t discriminate.
Bringing up the rear were the volunteers, frontier drifters of all kinds, from taciturn, professional gunmen to ashen drunks who were determined to stay sober just long enough to collect their twenty dollars a day.
“I guess Hollister plans on a dawn attack,” Masterson said.
“Seems like.”
“The Piute will be a help.”
Crane didn’t answer.
“You’re thinking about Sarah.”
“Some.”
“Maybe we should have gone with them.”
The marshal shook his head. “It wouldn’t have helped none. Not many of those boys are coming back. All we’d accomplish is to die with them. How would our deaths help Sarah?”
“Hell, try looking on the bright side for a change, Gus. That’s a tough bunch with Hollister, real door busters.”
“But Stark has fanatics filled with the false fire of a false prophet. The only way you can stop people like that is to kill them. That’s why, so long as Reuben Stark is alive, they’ll fight to the death and won’t surrender.”
Crane smiled slightly. “Come sunup, I reckon Hollister will discover he’s got a cougar by the tail.”
“So, what do we do? Wait around to pick up the pieces?”
“No, Paul, I’m going to trail after them. I have to do what I can to save Sarah.”
“You really cotton to that little gal, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. After all this is over, I plan on taking her with me. I’ve never known what it’s like to have a kid of my own, and she comes mighty close to filling the bill.”
“Then I’ll ride with you.”
“Sarah is my responsibility, Paul, and only mine. You got no call to get involved.”
Masterson looked like a man about to put his head in a noose. “Gus, do you have a conscience?”
“Every man has.” Crane smiled. “Yeah, I’ve got a conscience. But I manage to sleep o’ night. Well, most nights.”
“Mighty strange thing, mine just snuck up and buffaloed me. Gus, it’s like I’m on trial before a hanging judge, but there’s no witness so dreadful, no accuser so horrible as my own conscience.”
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