Vigilante Dawn

by Ralph Compton

  “You’re damn right I am!”

  Turning to the rider beside him, the second masked figure peeled off his burlap sack. “You see?” Lem said as he tossed his mask aside. “I told you it would be easy to get him to confess.”

  The man at the head of the group took off his mask as well. Jarrett dropped the sack and said, “Good enough for me. How about you?”

  Brakefield scowled down at them. “None of this means a thing.” When he pointed to the house behind him, armed men appeared in the windows and a few stepped out to flank him on the porch. “You fire a shot at me and it’ll be the last thing you do.”

  “I don’t think so, John,” said one of the other masked men. When he took off his mask, the rest of the riders did the same.

  Now Brakefield was truly flummoxed. “Marshal Vernon?”

  The marshal nodded. “And it’s too bad I’m not one of the lawmen you have in your pocket. You could sure use a friend like that right about now.”

  “Come on inside, Marshal,” Brakefield said in a voice dripping with honey. “Let’s talk this over.”

  “You’ve said more than enough, John. Let’s talk in my office.”

  “No. We can—”

  “Now, John,” the marshal snapped.

  One of the gunmen at Brakefield’s side got anxious and started to bring up his gun. That was enough to cause Jarrett, Lem, and every lawman present to raise their weapons and prepare them to fire. After that, Brakefield decided to go along quietly.

  • • •

  Sometime later, Jarrett and Lem were riding away from the Triple Diamond Ranch. “You think the marshal’s got enough to put Brakefield away?” Lem asked.

  “That rich man back there better hope it is,” Jarrett replied. “Because jail is the safest place for him. I’m fairly certain a man like that has partners who’ll lose faith in him once it gets out that the law is onto him.”

  “There’s bound to be a few other gunmen he hired that’re still out and about,” Lem added. “Once they learn Brakefield is in custody and spelling out everything he’s done and who he did it with to the marshal, those men will come around to silence him real quick.”

  “Even if Brakefield would do such a thing, how would those men find out about it?”

  “I know plenty of ways to spread the word among some men in bad circles,” Lem said. “They’ll be more likely to put Brakefield down than gamble on him actually showing a spine and keeping his mouth shut.”

  “That just makes business sense.”

  “Now you’re thinking straight.”

  They rode for a few more minutes, headed into town where a bottle of whiskey was waiting for them. Before their horses could hit their stride, Jarrett asked, “How did you know Brakefield would confess?”

  “Men like him are itching to show how smart or tough they are. All they need is a little nudge and half an excuse. Besides, if he didn’t feel like talking, one of his men we captured would have given up enough to spur the marshal along until they all wound up in jail anyway.”

  Jarrett nodded, finally feeling the weight from his shoulders ease up a bit. The cool pain in his heart, on the other hand, wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  “There’s another batch of men who worked with Clay not too far from here,” Lem said. “Most likely, they’re the ones Brakefield was bragging about hiring.”

  “How long do you think it’ll take to track them down?”

  “If we go in with guns drawn, it shouldn’t take long.”

  “What about if we want to live through the experience?” Jarrett asked.

  “Oh, so now you’re thinking past the next day or two?”

  “How long?”

  After a moment’s consideration, Lem said, “After some scouting and talking to some old friends who might be able to get me in close to them, I should be able to convince a few of them that I’m still on the wrong side of the law. It ain’t as if Clay is around to tell anyone any different. I tread lightly enough, I imagine the both of us could get in real good with them and then bring down the lot of ’em real easy. Give me a few weeks to build the foundation and we should figure out a way to contact that Canadian slaver to see about arranging a meeting.”

  “Good,” Jarrett said. “That gives me enough time.”

  “For what?”

  “To pay my nieces a visit at my sister’s place. I need to teach Grace how to make her mother’s peach cobbler.”

  Read on for an excerpt from

  SHOWDOWN AT TWO-BIT CREEK

  A Ralph Compton Novel by Joseph A. West.

  Available now from Signet in paperback and e-book.

  “Seems to me a man who has so much mought want to spare some for poor folks like us, who have so little.”

  Buck Fletcher sighed, sensing the danger even as he recognized an old, familiar pattern that he’d experienced more times than he cared to remember in the clamorous saloons of dusty cow towns from El Paso to Dodge.

  He was being set up, backed against the wall, and only his death in a sudden, roaring blaze of gunfire would satisfy the two men facing him.

  The men stood tense and eager in a dugout that passed for a saloon in the Bald Mountain country of the Dakota Territory. They were rough, dirty and bearded, buffalo hunters by the look of them, and Fletcher recognized their stamp. These were men who would rather steal than work, and they would kill without hesitation or a single moment’s remorse.

  Both wore filthy sheepskin coats that were buttonless and tied around with string, moccasins to their knees and shapeless, battered hats that looked like they’d once belonged to other men. Fletcher figured these two shared maybe six rotten teeth between them, and even at a distance of eight feet he could smell their rank stench.

  The man who’d spoken was the younger of the two, a mean-eyed towhead with a Sharps .50 caliber cradled in the crook of his arm, his loose mouth grinning, confident of his gun skills.

  The two were on the prod, hungry to take what was Fletcher’s: his guns, horses and the three hundred dollars in hard gold coins he carried in his money belt.

  Fletcher was well aware that what he had was little enough. It wasn’t much for a man to show for four years of war, another four as a ranch hand, two as a cow town marshal and then five rakehell years as a hired gun.

  During those years, Fletcher had learned his profession well—the difficult way of the Colt’s revolver, the draw and fire that took so much time and patience to master. The years had honed him down to six feet of bone and hard muscle, and he was lean as a lobo wolf and dangerous beyond all measure.

  That Fletcher had now and then stepped lightly across the line that separates the lawful from the lawless goes without saying. It was the curious way of the gunfighter, a man who was part outlaw, part honest, upstanding citizen.

  He had little enough, to be sure. But still, too much to be so easily parted with. A man should be allowed to keep what is his and not be expected to give it up without a fight.

  Buck Fletcher had known men like these two before.

  Huge, uncurried and wild, they had the look of drygulchers and back-shooters. They were men completely without honor, living by no code except that of the wolf. They were bullies who would meet face-to-face only the old, the weak, the timid and afraid.

  The men didn’t know it then, though they should have as their lives ticked down to a few final moments, but Buck Fletcher was none of these things.

  But he was a man who had already seen more than his share of killing, and now he tried his best to walk away.

  “Boys,” he said, “I’ve been on the trail for a month, and all I want is a bottle to cut the dust in my throat and a quiet hour to drink it in. I’ve never seen you men before, and I mean you no harm.” He reached in his pocket and laid a gold double eagle on the rough plank that served as a bar. “That’s yours. Now
, drink up and welcome.”

  The men grinned, and the younger man shook his head. “You don’t get our drift, rube, do you?” he asked. “Let me fill you in—we want it all. Every damn thing you got, including them boots an’ fancy jinglebob spurs of yourn.”

  “Now, there’s no need to rush your drink.” The older man smiled. “Take your time, feller. Me and my boy here, we’ll strip what we want from you after you’re dead.”

  Fletcher turned to the man behind the bar. He was as dirty and unkempt as the other two, his eyes sly and feral.

  “Can you do something?” Fletcher asked softly. “I mean, can you make it go away and let a man drink in peace?”

  The man shook his head, a gleeful, knowing glint in his eyes. “It ain’t my problem, feller,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Figured you’d say something like that.” He’d been standing belly to the bar. Now he turned slowly and faced the two grinning men. “You two have been pushing me mighty hard,” he said wearily. “I’m not a man who likes to be stampeded, not by trash like you. So let’s haul iron and get it over with.”

  Fletcher carried a seven-and-a-half-inch barreled Colt low on his right hip, its mahogany handle worn and polished from much use. Another revolver, its barrel cut back to four inches by an Austrian gunsmith in Dodge, hung in a crossdraw holster to the left of his gunbelt buckle.

  In that single sickening instant as Fletcher turned to face him, the older man knew he’d made a big mistake. He looked at Fletcher more closely and thought he saw something—something that ran an icy chill through his body and made him think he’d lost his reason. The tall, hard-eyed man wasn’t afraid like others he’d known. He stood calm and ready, as if repeating a ritual he’d gone through many times before.

  It came to the older man then that he should back off, call the whole thing an unfortunate misunderstanding and get drunk on the twenty dollars lying on the bar. Besides, there might be a better opportunity later, somewhere on the trail when they could use the Sharps big .50 and get a clean shot at this man’s back.

  That the young man facing him was a practiced gunfighter, there was no doubt, and the realization chilled the older man even deeper, all the way to the bone. There was danger here. Cold death was hovering very close, and he knew as the moments ticked by that he was fast running out of room on the dance floor. Now was the time to walk away from this. Now, before it was too late.

  He opened his mouth to speak, planning to smooth things over, make what was happening stop before it went any further.

  He never got the chance.

  His son, meaner but less intelligent and not so perceptive, brought up the muzzle of his Sharps. He was lightning fast.

  Fletcher was faster.

  He drew his long-barreled Colt in a blur of motion that had long since become instinctive to him and slammed a shot into the younger man’s chest. The towhead screamed and staggered a couple of steps backward. His father roared, gripped by both fear and anger, and drew from the waistband. His gun never cleared the top of his pants. Fletcher fired, the bullet crashing into the bridge of the man’s nose. Blood splashed in a scarlet cloud around his head.

  The older man’s eyes curled back in his head, showing white, and he fell, shaking the foundations of the dugout.

  The towhead, badly hurt, screamed something unintelligible and tried desperately to bring the Sharps into play. Fletcher shot him again. The man’s face showed stunned surprise, an utter inability to comprehend that he’d caught a fighting scorpion by the tail and that he was the one doing the dying.

  He gasped. “I thought . . . I thought . . .” Then he was falling headlong into black nothingness, the rifle dropping from his lifeless fingers.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Fletcher saw the bartender come up with a double-barreled Greener. The man fired, but Fletcher was already diving for the dirt floor. Buckshot hissed like a striking snake past his head. He rolled, then came up on one knee and slammed two shots very fast into the man’s chest. The bartender crashed against the sod wall behind him, dislodging a shower of bottles from the shelf, then sank to the floor, the light already fading from his eyes.

  The air in the poorly ventilated dugout was thick with acrid gray powder smoke, and the concussion of the firing guns had extinguished the oil lamp above the bar.

  In the gloom, Fletcher thumbed fresh shells into his Colt, then shoved it into the holster. He looked at the two men on the floor. They were both dead, the older man’s twisted face revealing the stark horror and disbelief of his last moments.

  The bartender was sprawled behind the bar . . . if a rough plank laid across two barrels can be described as such. A framed motto had fallen off the sod wall of the dugout and lay across the dead man’s chest. It read:

  HAVE YOU WRITTEN TO MOTHER?

  Fletcher shook his head. “Mister, she must be right proud o’ you.”

  He left the twenty dollars lying on the bar. It would pay to bury the dead, should some charitable soul pass by. Otherwise, they could rot for all he cared.

  A sick, bitter emptiness in him, Fletcher took one last look at the three men, then stepped outside, gratefully gulping in drafts of cold fresh air.

  He stepped into the saddle of his big American stud and caught up the rope of his mustang packhorse just as a small black-and-white-speckled pup ran around the corner of the dugout. The pup stopped and looked up at him, whimpering.

  “You go on home,” Fletcher said. “Find your mama.”

  The pup, his eyes wide and sad, stayed right where he was and whimpered even more.

  Fletcher nodded. “Little feller, I think maybe you don’t have a mama.”

  The pup was obviously a stray who’d been hanging around the saloon. Judging by his slatted ribs, the animal had missed his last six meals and then some.

  “Where I’m headed, I got no place for a pup,” Fletcher said sternly. “So just go on about your business. I want no truck with you.”

  He swung his horse around, preparing to ride out. The pup stood and immediately started to howl, then lay down again, resting his head on his oversized front paws, and crying softly.

  “Oh hell,” Fletcher swore. He dismounted, picked up the pup and set him on the saddle in front of him. “You piss on me, boy, and you and me will part company right quick.”

  The pup made happy little yelping noises and began to lick Fletcher’s hand. The big man smiled. “Well, maybe not.”

  He turned his horse again and rode away from the dugout and its three dead men without a single backward glance.

  • • •

  Buck Fletcher was going home, riding north with the long winds that stirred the buffalo grass of the Great Plains into a restless sea of green and brown.

  Fifteen years of wandering lay bleak behind him, and ahead . . . he had no idea.

  There was little hope in him, no dream of a better life with a wife and tall sons and girls as pretty and fresh as bluebonnets in the spring. Such thoughts were for other men: ranchers, farmers, storekeepers. They were not for the likes of him.

  He knew only that he was going home. As with the ragged Vs of the wild geese in the sky over his head, it was an instinctive thing, unplanned, the action of a man who had reached the end of his rope and was now hanging on by a thread.

  A rootless, violent past lay dark behind him, and he firmly believed all that was left to him now was to die well. The closing act of a famed gunfighter’s life was remembered and remarked upon where men gathered, and Fletcher fervently hoped his final curtain would be drawn with dignity.

  Yet he feared that when death came for him, it would come as it so often did for his kind—on the filthy sawdust of a barroom floor, where he would meet it with a gun in hand, hot blood filling his mouth with a taste of woodsmoke.

  That fall of 1876, Buck Fletcher was twenty-nine years old, a tall, h
eavy-shouldered man with a long hatchet blade of a face honed sharp by sun, wind and hard times. Even so, women did not turn away from him, for his features were saved from irretrievable homeliness by a wide, expressive mouth that in times long past had been quick to smile and eyes that sometimes revealed a faint, self-mocking humor and a well-hidden but nonetheless inherent kindliness.

  But those eyes could change in an instant from blue to a cold, pitiless gray when the six-gun rage rose in him. Now, for eleven men, that gray had been the last thing in this life they ever saw.

  Fletcher had ridden out of the Badlands and into the Dakota Territory astride his long-legged stud, leading the mustang packhorse.

  Some packhorses pony willingly, keeping up with a rider and his mount so that the lead rope is mostly loose. But the mustang, mouse-colored and evil-tempered, was a reluctant traveler and held back constantly, pulling on the rope so that Fletcher feared his arm would be ripped right out of its socket.

  He turned in the saddle and yanked on the rope for maybe the hundredth time that morning. The mustang, resentful, unforgiving and sly, shook his head indignantly and sidestepped to his right, stretching the rope even tighter.

  “I swear, hoss,” Fletcher said bitterly, wincing against the wrench on his arm, “keep this up and before too long you and me are going to have a major disagreement.”

  The mustang, instinctively made wary by the tone of the human’s voice, once again dutifully fell into line behind Fletcher’s stud. But the big man knew by the crafty look in the pony’s one good eye that he was just lying low for the moment, planning further deviltry. As he rode, Fletcher pondered the sheer cussedness of the mustang breed and shook his head more in sorrow than in anger.

  Fletcher was tired, tired beyond his years. It was the tiredness he’d seen in men when they were old and full of sleep, seeking only a rocker in the shade where they could doze away the long, empty days.

  But such a life was not for him. He had thought to head for Deadwood and the gold fields, where mine shafts were boring deep into the Black Hills and the precious orange metal was being ripped from the earth.