Once a Renegade

by Peter Brandvold

  Why did he think the taller of the two was Dave Groom? Groom, being the foreman and having lost his two front teeth in the humbling midst of the men he supervised, probably felt he had a point to make—damn the lanky devil to hell and gone ...

  A horse's whinny rose from the lean-to, and Stillman cursed.

  "What do we do?" Jody whispered.

  Stillman turned to reply, but before he could rake air across his vocal chords, a surprised yell followed by an agonized cry stopped him short. The first yell was followed closely by another, and by the time Stillman had whipped his gaze back to the cabin, the figures were gone.

  At least, their bodies were gone. Their startled cries filled the night and pricked the hair along Stillman's backbone.

  "What the...?” Stillman mumbled. "Did you see?" he asked Jody.

  Young Harmon stared with a dazed, befuddled expression at the cabin. "No, I was lookin' at you."

  Stillman was staring at the cabin, wondering what the hell had happened, what the hell was going on, when a blue-red light flashed in one of the windows, and a rifle barked. The slug tore into the fallen cottonwood he and Jody were crouching behind.

  "Get down!" Stillman yelled as another light flashed in the window. It was followed by another rifle crack and another slug tearing bark and splinters from the cottonwood.

  The trapper's horse whinnied and kicked the corral—a flitting shadow right of the cabin.

  "Those stupid devils," Stillman rasped, lifting his head above the log and swinging the Henry around.

  Jacking a shell, he fired. He jacked another round and fired again, hearing the slugs hitting the cabin with solid bangs. He brought the Henry back down and ducked behind the cottonwood as Shambeau fired back, three angry shots splitting the quiet night, one of the bullets spanging off a rock in the forest behind Stillman and Jody.

  "You keep your head down," Stillman told Jody as he lifted his rifle.

  "Come on, Ben. You can't take him alone. He's on to us now!"

  "Keep your damn head down!"

  "All right, all right."

  Stillman shot twice and ducked as Shambeau returned his fire. So it went for the next several minutes, a useless exchange of lead, neither man hitting his mark.

  Stillman thought he might be able to pink Shambeau through the chinking in the cabin logs, but the man must have applied the mud good and thick, probably to ward off the winter cold. There were two glassless windows, one on either side of the door, and the trapper moved between them effectively, further confounding Stillman's efforts at hitting his target.

  "If they're not already dead, I'm gonna kill those two," Stillman groused, meaning Falk and Groom.

  Something rustled in the woods behind him. Someone kicked a rock.

  "Oh, crap," he said as he squeezed off a round at the cabin. He turned around.

  "Stillman!" It was Hendricks.

  The Bar 7 men must have heard the shooting and come running. Stillman could hear them snapping twigs and rasping orders in the forest around and behind him. He shook his head and spat another curse. All he needed now was a passel of trigger-happy brush poppers to really turn this into a Dodge City free-for-all.

  "Walt, dammit—keep your men the hell back!"

  But it was too late, and he knew it even before the men started shooting from various points around the cabin.

  "Hold your fire!" Stillman shouted, but his voice was swallowed up by the thunderous clamor swarming up around him, the din of the repeaters spitting lead as fast as the waddies with their tails curled could jack the levers.

  The din continued for about ten minutes. Stillman just sat there behind his log, shaking his head, Jody hunkered down behind him, hearing the thunder of the rifles and the thwacks of the bullets hitting the log walls. After the horse was killed, there were only two deviations in the sounds, and those were the surprised, angry cries of men whom Shambeau, firing from his virtual fortress, had found with bullets.

  The cries evoked no sympathy in Stillman. He wished the trapper would send them all to the devil's doorstep. It would save him the trouble of arresting them, which he was by God going to do once he got back to Clantick. If any of them survived, that was.

  This shooting was futile. Shambeau was well-protected behind those stout logs. Stillman was ready to settle back and wait for the Bar 7 men to run out of bullets when someone shouted, "Hey, look! Fire!"

  Stillman peered over the cottonwood.

  Sure enough, a wavering, umber glow shone in one of the windows, from far back in the cabin. Suddenly it flashed up, spreading.

  A few seconds later Stillman felt the air sucked out of his lungs and, at the same time, a hot wind smacking his face, blowing his hat from his head and filling his eyes with grit. Close on the wind's heels came an explosion so loud it sounded like God applauding, shaking the trees and buckling the earth and blowing the roof off the cabin, grinding it into toothpicks borne on a ball of orange flames and flinging it beyond the treetops.

  The shock wave picked Stillman about two feet off the ground and threw him back about ten yards. Feeling wood and cinders from the cabin raining upon him, he quickly turned onto his belly and covered his head with his arms. He lay there for what seemed a long time before the sound of the cabin roof thunking and thumping back to earth, snapping branches on the way down, finally ceased, leaving an eerie silence in its wake.

  Slowly he lowered his arms and lifted his head, looking around

  Bits of wood and brush from the cabin roof lay burning or smoldering on the ground and in the branches around him. He saw Jody lying six feet away. He was facedown and hatless, his coat covered with grit and ash and wood slivers. He peeled his hands from his face and lifted his head, looking around warily.

  When his eyes met Stillman's, Ben said, "You all right?"

  The kid glanced back along his body, making sure all his parts were there, and moved his legs. "I... reckon. What the hell happened?"

  "Appears ole Louis was storing bang juice."

  "Dynamite?"

  "Probably used it for well-digging or stump moving or... who the hell knows?" Stillman sniffed the air. "Smell that? Magic Powder."

  Stillman climbed tenderly to his feet, feeling creaky and bruised. His ears were still ringing, and his eyes felt sandblasted. He strode forward, stepping over the log he and Jody had been using for cover.

  Regarding the cabin, he whistled softly through his teeth. There was little left but a pile of burning rubble. The front wall had been blown wide, away from the cliff behind the cabin, and spread across the clearing in small, burning snags. The side walls were half-standing but wouldn't be for long. The whole mess was ablaze, sending cinders floating on air currents. The clearing was lit up like a torch.

  The air was thick with a fetid mishmash of burning pine, gunpowder, and skunk oil—the man must have stored gallons of the stuff—and burning animal hides. Chunks of wolf and marten furs lay a few feet to Stillman's left, smoldering and making his nostrils pucker.

  Jody sidled up next to Stillman. "Well, I guess that takes care of ole Louis."

  Ben nodded thoughtfully.

  Before him, on the ground about six feet before the burning cabin, something moved. Instinctively Stillman crouched and grabbed the revolver from his holster, thumbing the hammer back.

  "Don't shoot, damnit!"

  It was Tommy Falk. He appeared to be climbing out of a rectangular hole before the cabin. His head bobbed, then his arms appeared, heaving his body out of the hole.

  He got a leg up, dug a boot into the ground, and rolled clear, coughing on the smoke and cinders filling the air around him.

  Stillman and Jody ran forward, each grabbing an arm, and half-dragged, half-carried the kid to the edge of the clearing, where they dropped him unceremoniously against a tree.

  Hendricks and one of his men, both sporting a layer of ash and dirt, were standing nearby and gazing awestruck at the blue-faced Falk, who was fighting what appeared to be a losing battle to regai
n his breath. He'd lost his bandanna in the conflagration, and his scabs were oozing blood and pus.

  Stillman, Jody, Hendricks, and the Bar 7 rider watched as the kid slowly regained his wind and leaned back against the tree, lolling his head back and forth against the trunk.

  "I swear that kid has nine lives," Hendricks chuffed.

  "He's gonna wish he had ten by the time I'm done with him," Stillman said. He glanced back at the hole from which the kid had appeared, grumbling, "What the hell?"

  "Bear trap," Jody said.

  Squinting his eyes against the heat of the burning cabin, Stillman moved toward the hole, Jody, Hendricks, and several Bar 7 riders, who'd emerged from the woods, following suit. Shielding his face with his hat, Stillman gazed into the hole, grimacing at the grisly sight

  A half-dozen stout branches, their ends whittled to spear points, jutted from the bottom of the hole. Draped over them, as though bent over to tie his shoe, was Dave Groom, several spears protruding from his back. His arms and legs hung at his sides.

  Stillman shook his head as he stared at the bear trap into which Groom and Falk had fallen. The kid must have avoided serious injury by lighting along an edge of the hole, where there were no spears.

  "The trapper must have had it covered lightly with wood and dirt, and the kid and ole Dave didn't see it," Hendricks speculated.

  "What in the hell did he have a trap this close to his cabin for?" one of the riders snapped, grimacing down at the hole.

  "With all the butchering and skinning he did in there," Jody offered, "he probably had all kinds of unwanted visitors prowling up to his door. Not the least of which was probably bears."

  "Yeah, I'd have me a trap out here," another rider said, looking warily around the remote clearing, which was paling now as the sun rose. "Too bad ole Dave had to fall into it, though."

  "Well," Hendricks said, turning away from the hole, "at least he won't have to worry about his smile anymore."

  Stillman gazed at the cabin with a look both pensive and relieved. "That's the end of ole Louis, I guess," he said with a sigh, donning his hat and starting away.

  "I don't think so, Ben," Jody said, grabbing Stillman's arm. "Take a look."

  Stillman turned and peered down Jody's pointing arm into the cabin, where the fire was beginning to run out of fuel. Through the thick, wafting smoke, he saw the cabin's back wall, which was the face of the granite cliff jutting up behind it. In the cliff was a crack just wide enough for a man to walk through sideways.

  Stillman scowled at Jody. "You telling me there's a back door to this place?"

  Jody didn't say anything. He and Stillman looked at each other. Then, cursing under his breath, Stillman wheeled and ran around the side of the cabin to the cliff face behind it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  STILLMAN CLIMBED THE trough in the granite cliff, sending rocks and pebbles rolling down behind him. Breathing hard, he made the crest.

  The sun was an opal smudge on the eastern horizon, and the sky had paled considerably, offering a wider field of vision. To Stillman's right, aspen branches with curled, dried leaves lay strewn about the pitted granite slab in a straggly line. They had to have been placed there, for no aspens grew within a hundred yards of the place.

  Pulling the branches aside, Stillman uncovered a crack in the granite running back from the cabin for about fifty feet. A yard wide in places, the fissure traversed the entire width of the granite slab, opening onto a deep valley filled with rocks and pines.

  Stillman's heart pounded. Sure enough, this was the back door to Shambeau's cabin, which the trapper had no doubt used before the dynamite had been ignited by the fire.

  Stillman muttered an incoherent string of curses as he removed the last of the branches and stepped into the fissure, walking toward the corridor narrowing so much at times that he had to turn sideways. There was a slight elbow he had to sidestep around, and then, before him, at the end of the fissure, he could see the back of the smoldering cabin.

  Glimpsing something at his feet, he squatted down and picked up a piece of relatively fresh bannock. Shambeau had no doubt dropped it from a packsack on his way through the passageway, on his way toward freedom. Tossing it away, Stillman gave another exasperated curse, turned, and headed back out the way he had come.

  When he emerged from the rock, Jody, Hendricks, and several Bar 7 riders were waiting for him looking incredulous.

  "You mean to tell me that son of a duck got away?" Hendricks barked.

  Stillman looked at Hendricks, who stood with the morning wind buffeting the fur in his hat, his expression turning tentative and sheepish, his eyes lurking within the puffy foxholes of their lids. He knew Stillman was furious and didn't want to say anything more to fuel his fury. For Stillman's part, he wanted to pummel the rancher with his fists, but knew that doing so, while making him feel better, would be a foolish waste of time and energy.

  The man had been supposed to keep a tight rein on his men and hadn't, but nothing Stillman could do now was going to change a damn thing. His biggest mistake had been letting the Bar 7 crew ride along, but if they hadn't ridden along, they would have tried tracking Shambeau themselves and really fouled everything up.

  Ignoring Hendricks, Stillman turned to inspect the ground where the corridor opened onto a gentle grade falling away to another valley. He picked up several mocassin prints and followed them until they disappeared in a large bed of shale carpeting about fifty square yards among stunted pines and junipers.

  "Hoofing it in those moccasins, he's not going to be as easy to track as he would on horseback," Jody said, scouring the ground as he made his way slowly across the talus.

  The Bar 7 riders watched him and Stillman from the granite ridgetop.

  "That's no doubt his plan," Stillman said grimly. At the edge of the talus, he slowed and pointed. "Here we go," he said. "I've got him again."

  Bent over, scrutinizing the faint trail through the blond brush, he followed the prints through cedars, over a knoll, around a boulder, and down the mountainside. Jody caught up with him at the bottom of the valley, near a spring bubbling around an uprooted Cottonwood.

  "They head that way down the valley," Stillman said, pointing southeastward.

  "Slippery devil."

  "How much of a lead you think he has on us?"

  Jody squatted to scrutinize the tracks. "I'd say half an hour. He's probably a mile beyond us."

  Stillman glanced at the sky splashed with low, charcoal clouds. "Well, we'd better get our gear and get a move on before that snow hits."

  Breathing hard, he and Jody climbed the ridgetop, then descended into the opposite valley, where the cabin smoldered in the clearing. Two of Hendricks's men had been assigned the gruesome task of removing Dave Groom from the hole while Falk and two others dug graves.

  Hendricks was smoking a cheroot on a deadfall log, one boot crossed on a knee. "How many men you lose, Walt?" Stillman asked him, his level tone belying his anger.

  “Two dead, with Groom. Another man got his ear damn near shot off, but he can ride."

  "Good for him," Stillman said. He turned to retrieve his rifle.

  "You pick up his trail?" Hendricks asked.

  Stillman did not reply.

  "Hey, Stillman," Hendricks called. “I...uh... I want to apologize for my men... for the kid and Groom. The stupid devils were working on their own when they stormed up to the cabin earlier."

  Hendricks waited, but Stillman didn't say anything.

  "It won't happen again," Hendricks assured the sheriff with an air of chagrin, studying his cigar ash.

  Clutching the Henry, Stillman started down the hillside toward the camp. "No, it won't."

  Frowning, Hendricks watched Stillman and Jody walk away down the hill. "Hey, where you goin'?" he called angrily.

  Stillman didn't reply.

  When they got back to the camp, Stillman and Jody quickly rigged out their horses, forgoing breakfast. The weather did not look good, and S
tillman wanted Shambeau in hand before a possible storm hit. While tracking would be easier in the snow, an April squall could hold them up for days.

  Stillman slid his rifle in its sheath and walked his horse to a tree. Tying Sweets to a branch, he said to Jody, "Hold your buckskin good and tight, son."

  "What are you gonna do?"

  Jody watched Stillman untie the rope picketing the Bar 7 horses between two pines. When the horses were free, Stillman unholstered his Colt and fired three shots over their heads, sending the bucking, kicking herd galloping away through the brush.

  Stillman watched the horses disappear, feeling the ground rumble under their pounding hooves, and turned to Jody, who was grinning. "Well, that should keep the Bar Seven boys busy till, say, noon or so?" Stillman's mustache curled wryly.

  Jody chuckled. "At least."

  Mounting his horse, Stillman turned to see Hendricks and several of his men running red-faced into the camp, their eyes on the fallen picket line and the gap between the two trees where their horses should have been.

  "Damn you, Stillman!" Hendricks raged.

  Calmly Stillman kneed his horse over to the man, halting when his stirrup lay six inches from the rancher's protruding belly. "Now, it's gonna take you at least half the day to round up your horses, Hendricks. When you do, go home. The first man I see out here again—you, Falk, or any of the others—is gonna get a bullet courtesy of the sixteen-shooter riding my saddle boot."

  "That's against the law!"

  “That's my word," Stillman said. "Good as bond."

  He heeled his horse forward into the main ravine, and started down the hill, letting Sweets pick his route to the bottom.

  He and Jody picked up Shambeau's trail a half hour later, after skirting the granite cap, and followed it along the valley bottom for nearly an hour before it suddenly climbed a saddle. From the saddle, it descended a shallow ravine, cut back northward through a snaking gorge, and appeared again on a wide, grassy plateau that had seen a fire in recent years. The pines and box elders stood darkly skeletal against a low, gauzy sky, the lightly falling snow limning their branches from which the bark had been seared.