“You sure are a disbelieving cuss,” said Grid, pursing meaty lips. “I tole yuh I read all about this Smith jasper in a broadsheet. He shot and kilt Flint Brand down in Burnt River about a month back. Ain’t that so, Ben?”
“Yeah, and Flint Brand was one of the best.”
“Well,” said Piano, “I still don’t believe Daybreak’s gone and hired him to hunt us down, anyway.”
“I believe it,” growled Sprod. “If I didn’t I wouldn’t be here fryin’ my hide on this mangy rock.”
That was Frank Piano’s cue to shut up and he took it. Of all the dangerous things a man could do in Calico Valley, arguing with Ben Sprod had to be about top of the list.
The oncoming horseman had covered another fifty yards. Sprod played the glasses over him slowly, growing more sharply aware that the rider wasn’t the kind you were likely to meet up with just any old day along the trail.
He was one hell of a big man, with ox shoulders and a barrel of a chest. He was rigged in leather shotgun chaps, scuffed boots and a battered curl-brimmed gray Stetson tilted forward against the sun. His shirt might have been a vivid purple once but was now many shades lighter from sun and too many river-washings.
A shining object dangling from a cord around the rider’s neck puzzled Sprod until he realized it was a harmonica.
The barrel chest was bared with the shirt unbuttoned to the waist and around the man’s middle hung a shell belt and Colt.
Sprod’s gaze lingered longest on that gunrig. The holster was of heavy, oiled leather thonged down to the muscular right thigh. The cartridge belt was also oiled and waxed against the weather, the brass tops of the shell casings glinting. The gun holster and belt in fact were the only items about the rider’s person in good condition. It could easily be a gunfighter’s rig, yet as Ben Sprod lowered the glasses he had his doubts.
Dick Grid began to have doubts of his own as the rider cut through the shadows flung by a gaunt, trailside finger of rock outcropping. “Hell, Ben, he’s kinda big, ain’t he?” Grid’s face wrinkled. “You ever see a gunslinger that big, boss?”
“Bounty-hunters come all sizes,” snapped Sprod. But to himself he had to admit the rider looked a mite big for fast work. This pilgrim was built like a brick house and looked as if he might lift locomotives for exercise.
“Yeah, he’s big right enough,” Buck Floren agreed. “Say, mebbe his size is what’s so surprisin’ about him.”
Floren chuckled at his own wit but Ben Sprod was not amused. In fact Sprod was taking what Floren said seriously. There had to be some reason for tagging a man Surprising Smith.
“All right, I reckon it’s him,” he said with sudden decision, bellying backwards away from the rock rim. “C’mon, we’ll get down below and make ready to take him.”
Piano, Grid and Floren wriggled backwards, then followed Sprod down beneath the overhang into the arroyo. The trio was untroubled by the possibility that the man they planned to kill might be anybody else but the man they were after. All they knew was that Daybreak was supposed to have hired a bounty-hunter to run them out of the valley, that this was the day he was scheduled to arrive, and that this big stranger was the first likely-looking loner to come up the trail all day.
If the rider was Surprising Smith, then they’d stop him cold before he got a chance to cause them any grief. If he wasn’t, he’d just have to rate himself dead unlucky.
The trio exchanged confident grins as they reached their positions behind the boulders in the arroyo that cut into the black rock shadow. They checked out their guns, and waited. This was going to be almost too easy. The way that pilgrim was sitting his saddle, he looked like he’d fallen asleep.
Two – Bad Men of Calico Valley
Hank Brazos was not asleep, even if he looked it. He was just relaxed, content to let his appaloosa set his own pace over the last dusty miles to Daybreak while he coped with a savage hangover and the legacy of assorted kicks and blows sustained the previous night in one of the wildest brawls he’d ever been in. In the shadow of the horse, his mean-looking hound, Bullpup, loped, tongue lolling. The dog was a little overhung too.
It was funny how a town could fool you, the big drifter was reflecting as he rode towards a lofty, bleached trailside rock. On riding into Red Fork a couple of days back he’d sized it up as a one-horser about as lively as a morgue. Not his sort of town at all, considering he was a man who liked his steak thick, his whisky straight, and his fun on the violent side.
Just went to show you how appearances could lie, he thought, as he’d discovered when the lid blew off last night. A ghost of a smile touched the wide mouth as he relived the memorable scene in Frontier Street...
There’d been no warning of trouble. He’d simply been escorting a certain little cowgirl out of the saloon with nothing more than a bottle and a little light courting in mind, when her pappy rode in. Pappy owned half Red Fork County. Her six big brothers were there right in back of him, and twenty dirt-mean cowboys from pappy’s big spread crowding their heels. It hadn’t taken the rancher long to get his message across; he didn’t aim to have any daughter of his sparkin’ with no flea-bitten overgrown motherless son of a saddle bum. Unquote.
Maybe pappy had sized him up about right, though Brazos was hanged if he would admit to fleas. What pappy didn’t know however was that Hank Brazos, cowboy, drifter, brawler, ex-soldier and foot-loose hell-raiser, was a man who dearly loved nothing so much as a good ruckus. He was ever ready to fight, at the drop of a hat, and if nobody else was eager, he’d even drop the hat.
Brazos’ smile widened, as he remembered, despite the fact that smiling pained his bruised mouth some. The fracas that had erupted then had been a classic. Pleasurably he recalled the swathe he’d cut in the cowman ranks with a handy porch bench, the heads he’d cracked, the faces he’d punched and most of all the way pappy had looked when Brazos had picked him up and tossed him through the front window of the hotel. That had been just two seconds before the sheriff had flattened him with a length of two-by-four.
The lawman had locked him up for the night, fined him ten dollars for being drunk and disorderly, and that morning had escorted him to Red Rock’s town limits with the firm warning not to come back. Ever.
That was okay by Brazos, for Red Rock sure was a dreary little town, despite last night’s fun. Maybe Daybreak would be a little livelier, he hoped, as he tugged out a packet of Bull Durham and twisted a brown paper quirly one-handed. If it was, then he might consider looking about for a job for, thanks to that ten-buck fine this morning, funds were running kind of low.
The thought of work depressed him a little, so to cheer himself up, he blew out a little tune on his harmonica, then sang the words of his own composition of which he was inordinately proud. The chorus ran:
“The son-of-a-bitch jumped over the fence, Goodbye my lover, goodbye.”
He thought he sounded pretty good considering last night. But Bullpup emitted a low growl and trotted ahead as if to escape the music.
“Hell, it wasn’t all that danged awful,” he grinned. And then in the space of a heartbeat he wasn’t grinning any more as he saw the short hair on the back of the great hound’s neck bristle, its fierce yellow eyes riveted on the lofty trailside rock slanted over a narrow arroyo not much more than a hundred yards ahead.
Brazos rode on. He reached into his pocket and tugged out his Bull Durham and commenced to roll another cigarette. It was the action of a relaxed man, but from beneath his tilted hat, his eyes were stabbing at the rock and its deep shadow falling across the arroyo beneath. For a moment he saw nothing. Then the blue eyes tightened as he spotted what Bullpup had seen first; the dull glint of reflected sunlight on blue metal in those deep shadows.
Brazos let his breath run out of him in a long slow gust as he cracked a match on his thumbnail and applied it to the cigarette. His brain suddenly very clear now, he surveyed the way ahead with Bullpup growling warnings from below. If that was an ambush up ahead, then he had two
choices. He could circle away down to the right and cut the trail further on, or he could find out what Mr. Drygulcher used for gut-stuffing. It really wasn’t all that much of a decision to make. By his book, a drygulcher rated alongside a rattler.
He sized up the situation, using an ex-soldier’s know-how. Before the trail got in range of the big rock, it dipped into a dry creek bed that wound out of the timbered rocky slopes to his left. There was brush in the creek, good cover. He puffed lazily on the weed, and blue smoke wafted back across his shoulder as the trail started to curve down.
The moment he reached the bottom of the creek bed, all laziness vanished. As he rolled out of the saddle and hissed to Bullpup to stay put, crouching low, he went snaking up the creek bed, spitting out his cigarette and hauling his six-gun.
He angled through the timber that clothed the hill slope above the big rock. He ran swiftly in a crouch, and despite the fact that he weighed two hundred and twenty solid pounds, made no more noise than a stalking Apache. Hank Brazos had played these games before, and the stakes had mostly been high.
Reaching the topside of the huge rock that had helped conceal his progress from whoever waited below he heard the voices. They were tense, uncertain. Somebody cursed. Brazos stretched out on a slab of sun-whitened rock not far from the giant rock and waited. He could have been a huge lizard basking in the sun, he was so still. Sweat trickled down from his thick hair onto his face and dripped off to steam on the stone beneath him. The sun was a hammer-head on his back trying to crush him. The earth lay gasping all around.
A man appeared from out of the arroyo. He was a big scar-faced pilgrim, muscled heavily in the shoulders. He stared intently up the trail, looking for the vanished horse and rider.
A voice from the arroyo said, “See anythin’?”
“Not a damned thing.”
“Then get up atop the rock and take a look.”
The man climbed reluctantly, now in full open view of the big still figure stretched out on the rock. Brazos could have tossed a rock and been pretty sure of nailing him, but made no move. He was waiting to see if the others would show themselves.
They didn’t. The scar-faced man reached the crest of the rock and yelled down, “I can see his hoss, Ben. Only he ain’t on it!”
Curses from below. “Somethin’s gone wrong! Come on, we’ll mount up and go find out!”
Brazos heard the stamp of horses in the arroyo as the man started lumbering down the rock. He couldn’t wait any longer. He got to one knee.
“Hold it right there, joker!”
Scarface Floren spun, gave a startled grunt, went white and tried to use the Peacemaker .45 in his fist.
Brazos’ gun beat heavy thunder, three shots clashing together in a continuous rolling roar. Floren cried out once, pitched headlong down the packed earth slope and came to rest against a small boulder staring sightlessly straight up into the yellow eye of the sun.
A small, vicious head suddenly appeared beneath the huge rock. Brazos threw himself flat, fired twice. He ducked low as answering lead came screaming back and a slug tugged his shirt. He punched fresh shells into his smoking Colt, then glimpsed the lanky, skull-faced figure leap back into the arroyo with a shout:
“He’s got the drop on us! Let’s git to hell and gone out of here!”
Brazos blasted a gunful of shots towards the arroyo to help them on their way. Hooves thundered, butter yellow dust climbed into the brassy sky, and then they were gone, clattering away down the arroyo bed, out of sight and out of range.
When the hooves had drummed away to silence, Brazos rose, poked his hat back with the barrel of his gun and went down the slope to look at the dead man. He had “drygulcher” written all over him, and right now looked the most surprised drygulcher in Calico Valley.
Cautiously, just in case, he made his way down to the arroyo and saw where they’d waited. By the look of it they’d been waiting quite a spell.
Holstering his gun, he tugged out his sack of Bull Durham and built a fresh smoke as he climbed back up to the lookout rock. His face was stony, his eyes cold as he reached the dead man and propped a dusty boot up on a stone, sucking smoke deep. The drygulcher’s eyes were glazed, his life’s blood very red against the sun-whitened stone.
The big man’s mouth turned bitter as he stooped and heaved the corpse over his shoulder as if it weighed nothing. As he trod heavily back to his horse, he felt the fire of battle burn away inside him, to be replaced by simple anger. What in hell kind of place was this anyway when an almost-law-abiding citizen could come within a touch of getting drygulched in broad daylight almost in sight of a town?
A damned good question, he figured, and one he meant to get an answer to, just as soon as he reached Daybreak.
Daybreak came out of its late afternoon lethargy with a bang, and the bang came from one hundred and eighty pounds of dead man landing on the front porch of the law-office.
Deputy Sam Fink was asleep in his chair when the jailhouse shook end to end, and by the time he knuckled his eyes, got to his feet, put on his hat and limped out, they were converging on the jailhouse from all over.
Sam Fink and the citizens of Daybreak immediately found themselves in a dilemma. They didn’t know which commanded more attention, the dusty dead man who had been so unceremoniously dumped on the boards, or the big, purple-shirted stranger who sat his saddle looking like a month of stormy weather.
“Drygulcher,” the big rider snapped. “Jumped me comin’ in up by that big rock on the east trail. It’s a hell of a note when a man’s got to shoot his way into a town.”
Sam Fink blinked, then collected himself and came out onto the gallery and turned the dead man over.
“Jumped up Judas!” exclaimed the deputy. “It’s Buck Floren!”
Uproar.
With barely concealed impatience, Brazos waited for them to calm down some, then demanded, “Who’s Buck Floren?”
They all spoke at once, but he managed to get the drift that Buck Floren was a member of Ben Sprod’s bunch and that Ben Sprod was known around as the Scourge of Calico Valley.
“Yeah, well, that’s mighty interestin’ I’m sure, but why the blazes was this joker and his pards gunnin’ for me?”
Nobody could even guess. There was a lot of excited babble, and then a fat man with a beard growing almost to his middle said, “You git a sight of the others, mister?”
Brazos nodded. “One of ’em. Ugly varmint with a little head, kinda like a snake.”
“Ben Sprod!”
A dozen voices said the name in unison. Then a big man with a big voice said, “By Taos, boys, this here’s a stroke of luck. Ben showin’ up right on our doorstep when we’re fixin’ to take after him. C’mon, let’s go tell the mayor.”
“Carbrook’s outa town,” another yelled. “I seen him ridin’ out to his ranch an hour back.”
“Then go fetch him, Josh,” the fat man shouted excitedly. “Time’s a-wastin’. Boys, go git your hosses and rifles. We’ll ride out as soon as Carbrook gets back.”
Brazos nodded in satisfaction then swung his horse away and forced it through the crowd. If they aimed to get a posse out after the badmen who’d jumped him, then that was all that concerned him for the moment. Right now he needed a drink, lordy did he need one.
Cutting across the street to the first building he saw with batwing doors, he swung down and went up the steps, thinking only about that drink.
Then very suddenly he had something else to think about as the batwings burst open and a dude came hurtling out to cannon into him with violent force. In a confusion of arms, legs and curses, both rolled off the gallery to land in the street sending up a great cloud of dust and frightening the hell out of the racked horses.
It took Brazos a full ten seconds to extricate himself from the tangle and lurch to his feet, and by that time his temper was alight again. This, he gritted through clenched teeth, was the last straw. Somebody was going to get his lumps, and who deserved them more tha
n this runaway tinhorn?
The big, knuckle-scarred fist was cocked to let fly as the angry-faced gambler staggered to his feet in the dust, swearing like a muleskinner in a fine Eastern accent. The bomb was on its way when something about that voice clicked in Brazos’ brain. The fist stopped. He stared at the face before him through the clearing dust and his jaw fell open with disbelief.
“The Yank!”
“Well, I’ll be a dirty name,” came the equally astonished response. “The Johnny Reb!”
Violence fled from two faces to be replaced by disbelieving grins. Two hands gripped, hands that had only met once before, and that on a day of madness, war and death, a day conjured up immediately now for two men who’d met one historic day in Georgia, and parted never dreaming they might one day meet again.
“Well, I’m busted!” Hank Brazos said finally. “The last joker I ever expected to bump into. What in hell are you doin’ out here, Yank?” And then, before the other could answer, “Dammit, but it just hit me. I don’t even know your handle.”
“Duke Benedict, Reb,” the handsome gambler smiled. “And you?”
“Brazos, Hank Brazos.” He flung his big arms wide in an expansive gesture. “Well, Judas, man, this calls for a drink, don’t it?”
“I should smile it does, Brazos,” Benedict replied readily. He swung towards the batwings of the Bird Cage, then halted with a frown at the recollection of a certain mean-faced bounty-hunter and an irate saloonkeeper. “Maybe you’ll find the Shotgun Saloon more to your liking, Reb. Confidentially, the liquor in here isn’t up to much.”
“Still got that there fancy accent, huh?” big Brazos grinned as they strode in the direction of the Shotgun Saloon. “You know, that’s one thing I always remembered about that there day... that foreign damn accent of your’n.”
“That accent as you call it,” Benedict replied amiably, “cost my folks about a thousand dollars to get for me at college. And talking about remembering things, it seems I recall that day that I’d never met a man who seemed to enjoy fighting as much as you. Judging by the look of your face, Reb, I’d say you were still enjoying yourself.” Brazos ruefully rubbed the marks of recent violence on his craggy, sun-bronzed young face as they shouldered through the swinging doors of the Shotgun Saloon.
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