Black Hills (9781101559116)

by Thompson, Rod

  “My God!” pardner exclaimed finally, staring at Cormac in disbelief. “My good God!”

  There was a whole saloon full of witnesses to keep the sheriff happy, and staying overnight in this town no longer held the appeal it once had. After accepting an abundant amount of thanks from pardner and an offer to explain what had happened to cause the incident—an offer Cormac declined, it was more than he needed to know. He hadn’t known pardner’s name, didn’t need to. It was suppose to be his birthday celebration. He had just wanted to relax with a drink and a good steak. He wasn’t looking for trouble. He wasn’t making any trouble, and then, all at once, strangers were ready to kill him. For what? Just because he was sitting there? And then he had to shoot them just to keep himself from getting shot. He had never seen them before, didn’t know anything about them, and didn’t want to know anything about them. To hell with them. If they didn’t want to die, they should have just left him the hell alone.

  Cormac gave pardner a few dollars to tide him over, left enough money on the table to cover the food, drinks, and the chair that he had broken, and rode out. He had seen some interesting sights, had a few good drinks, and his belly was full of a great steak.

  “I guess that’s it for our celebration,” he told the horses disgustedly. “Happy Birthday.” Leaving town was the order of the day.

  Realizing they had never introduced themselves, pardner watched Cormac ride away from the livery. He didn’t even know his savior’s name. Wanting to know to whom he was indebted and remembering being told that his benefactor had registered at the hotel, he went there and explained to the clerk what had happened and asked to see the register.

  Cormac Lynch, known to many as Mack, had signed-in simply as Mack L. A bystander, listening when pardner explained to the sheriff what had happened, heard the name as Mackle. The name would be repeated frequently in other saloons and around campfires as the many witnesses told and re-told their stories of the Mackle guns. They were unbelievably fast and deadly . . . and they didn’t miss.

  It would also be told that he had shot a woman. The fact that she had just finished helping to kill an unarmed man and was pulling a gun out of her purse with which to kill yet another, not to mention Cormac, would be dropped from the story as it was passed around, but the message went out: “Stay the hell away from the Mackle guns.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Too upset at the turn of events to sleep, Cormac pointed their little group at a high peak silhouetted by the distant moon and rode half the night before calling it a day. Some coyotes yapping on the other side of a nearby hill woke him mid-morning. Strangely, he wasn’t hungry and settled on some coffee and cigarettes for breakfast while he thought about the previous day. It was unsettling.

  Sitting on a flat-top stone, he removed both six-guns from their holsters and placed them on the stone beside him, staring at them while he lit yet another smoke. Maybe Lainey’s attitude was right. She didn’t like the killing. But what else could he have done? He had killed men, but only in self-defense, or the defense of others. Would it be better to live in some city where everybody is protected by law officers? No more galloping over the prairies with Horse and Lop Ear? No more searching for whatever was on the other side of the hill? No. He wouldn’t be fenced in. He and Horse and Lop Ear needed room to breathe.

  Cormac poured himself another cup of horseshoe coffee and slowly and methodically dismantled, cleaned, and oiled each gun. He wished they weren’t needed but he did enjoy the feel of them in his hands. The smooth, hand-worn, wooden grips were comforting in his hands. Belatedly, he realized that they had left town traveling west when previously they had been going in a southerly direction. No matter. One direction was as good as another. What was to the west? Utah . . . or Idaho, maybe? No matter either. He had never been to either of them.

  Still in Colorado, he stopped in Leadville. The sign wasn’t much and neither was the town, but it had a lot going on. Having found himself on a trail going through the mountains, Cormac hadn’t expected much, but the place was bustling with people. Turned out there was a traveling judge in town and a fellow named Sanderson was being tried for shooting a guy in the back.

  Under a sign bragging that the crossing streets were named Third Street and Harrison Avenue was a cheerful fella being called Soapy making bets with passersby as to whether they could tell which of three shells was hiding a little pea after he had moved them. While the game was being demonstrated to new prospective players, Cormac noticed finding the pea was an easy feat, but somehow, once someone had placed a bet, the pea was nowhere to be found. He elected not to wager. His pa had warned him to never play the other man’s game.

  The trial was being conducted in a saloon with entertaining lawyers striding around the “courtroom” waving their arms and quoting the bible. It was claimed that Sanderson, a tall, gruff, and cocky gunslinger with the unshaven look of a thug, had killed somebody by shooting them in the back.

  It was claimed that Sanderson was a cold-blooded killer who would just as soon shoot someone from ambush, or in the back. That gave Cormac something to consider. Although he wouldn’t deliberately sneak up and shoot someone in the back to avoid the possibility of getting shot himself, if a person needed killin’, he couldn’t see as how it made a whole bunch of difference which direction he—or she, Cormac remembered—happened to be facin’. He pondered on that a spell.

  It was bad for a bad guy to shoot a good guy in the back. If Cormac was a good guy—some would dispute that—was it okay for him to shoot a bad guy in the back? Who, then, decides who are the bad guys and who are the good guys? More and more of these decisions were being made in courts, but many were still being decided out on the range when there was no law to be had for many miles. People couldn’t be bothered taking a rustler all the way to town and spending two or three days there to be a witness, or making a second trip when the traveling judge got around to coming to town. Consequently, a rustler was simply shot, or hanged, and it was over and done with.

  In this case, Sanderson was released when the only witness turned up dead on his way to testify. Cormac took the last room in the hotel and left the next morning. Fixing a broken wagon wheel for a lady farmer he met on a road a little farther down the line got him invited home for supper and to meet her husband. They offered him a job, and he stayed six months. They were nice enough people, over their heads when it comes to farming and planning to return to the east after the upcoming harvest. They offered him if he would stay and help out until then, they would give the farm to him. He told them thank you, but no thank you. He had lost his interest in farming. Apparently, he had become a full-fledged cowboy.

  Then a friendly cowboy that Cormac met on the trail and rode with for a couple of days convinced him to go back to Northern Colorado. “Why don’t you ride along?” he asked. “You and I get along pretty good, and they’ve got a good-sized spread. Big spreads can usually use another hand. If they don’t, wait a couple days, somebody will quit, and if no one quits, I’ll shoot somebody.”

  Cormac knew he was joking, but he turned out to be right. It was a good job with a nicely kept ranch, good food, and a decent foreman. Cormac was known there simply as Mack until one night at the local saloon, a gunslinger wearing two tied-down guns recognized him in town and remembered seeing the shoot-out at the “No Name Saloon.”

  “Mackle!” he cried out, and went for his guns. Cormac had heard talk around campfires that the fast gun at the “No Name Saloon” was someone called Mackle. He had no idea how that had come to be, but when he heard the call, he knew it was meant for him. Cormac had taken to keeping his hammer thongs off whenever in town or around other people. Catching Cormac in the middle of a sentence and turned half away from him toward the bartender had given the gunslinger an advantage that was almost enough.

  Cormac’s dedicated practicing had taught him it was a fraction of an instant faster, when reacting to sudden threats, to draw from whatever position he happened to be in. Accordingly
, he wasted no time in turning to face the threat. Turning only his head and moving nothing but his right arm, his Smith & Wesson came up firing.

  Cormac’s first bullet spun the gunfighter into a pole as his guns were leveling on Cormac. Leaning against the pole and dropping to one knee, the gunfighter was again bringing his guns to bear. Cormac’s first shot had been a practiced reflex action. Now his mind was also in the game. He put two fast-rolling shots into the gunman’s chest, and the contest was over.

  “Jesus!” exclaimed the bartender. “While I was thinking you were a goner, you were already firing . . . So you’re Mackle. I would not have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. What they say is right. You just may very well be the fastest gun alive.”

  “Mackle” met the eyes of the bartender for a contemplative moment before sighing a long and sad sigh, silently shaking his head, and walking out into the night. He had accepted the necessity of defending himself, but killing a man was not fun. When he drew his pay, the foreman told him about a neighboring rancher looking to hire a horse wrangler to ride herd on a hundred head of horses to Texas for two dollars a head to fill an order placed by the Texas Rangers. Cormac took the job. It had sounded like easy money, but horses are more spirited than cattle and keeping them in a group was sometimes a task; shooing off rustlers was a nuisance.

  On one such occasion, while the helper he had been given by the rancher had gone into a nearby town for supplies, three cowboys with bandanas over their faces rode out of a gulch he was passing.

  “We wanted to thank you for bringing your herd to us, so thank you very much. We’ll take them from here.”

  Cormac could see by their eyes behind their bandanas that they were all young fellas. Neither their clothes nor their horses were anything special. They had most likely been going someplace, seen his helper leave, and decided to take advantage of the situation “You have to be the most polite horse thieves around, but what makes you think I’m just going to give them to you? Your guns are still in your holsters.”

  “Because there are three of us and one of you. You can’t hope to outgun us all, so if you will just turn around and ride away, we’ll just take these horses off your hands.”

  Cormac answered amiably, “You look like intelligent fellas. Why don’t you forget this nonsense and go on your way? I don’t have to outgun all of you. I’ll just shoot you.”

  “Where will that get you? If you do, my friends will shoot you. Are those horses worth your life?”

  “Are they worth yours?” Cormac asked him.

  “No, I guess not.” The wanter-of-horses-without-paying-for-them reined his horse as if to leave and went for his gun. He saw only the fire-bloom spurting out the bore of Cormac’s gun and felt himself falling backward off his horse.

  The others remembered they had immediate business elsewhere.

  “I count one hundred and one,” said the ranger as he shut the gate behind the last horse. “Did I count wrong? I was told to expect an even hundred.”

  “No, your count is fine. Three fellas wanted to take the herd, but didn’t have what it took. I let the starch out of one, and the other two lit out for parts unknown. We picked up an extra horse in the deal and my helper got himself a new saddle.”

  The ranger smiled. “We’re glad you made it. The last herd didn’t get through, and we’re running short of horses. Come on up to the house . . . we’ll settle up. I was told you was to get two hundred dollars, and we’re to wire the rest to your boss.”

  On the way to the house, Cormac answered his questions about the drive. Inside were eleven other rangers, celebrating

  “No, it’s not a celebration,” answered the ranger when asked. “We’re just having a drink to the boys at the Alamo.” There were sturdy chairs and a few benches, a long kitchen table, western desert horse and gun pictures, gun cabinets and racks, an ammunition cabinet, two saddles on racks, gun belts on hooks, paths worn into the wooden floor: it was a house for men.

  The speaker was a wiry man of normal height with a large mustache and sun-wrinkled skin, brown from many hours under the Texas sun. The newness of a large red bandana around his neck contrasted with his aged and worn clothes. His boots were obviously comfortable, but had, also obviously, been in need of replacement for several months; his gun belt and pistol were well cleaned and well oiled, and the pistol grip appeared smooth and well worn.

  “This is March the sixth. Just forty-one years ago today it was, in 1836, that the Alamo was lost, along with Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, and William Travis; but it was one hell of a fight. One hundred and eighty-two volunteers, most of them Texans, held off twenty-six hundred Mexican troops for ten days. We think they deserve a drink in their honor. Care to join us?”

  “Absolutely,” Cormac answered. “Other than maybe mountain men that never come down from the hills, I ’spect most everyone has heard of them, but I understand Santa Anna lived to regret it.”

  “You damned betcha he did. He learned right well the folly of messin’ with Texans. Forty-six days later, Sam Houston run him to the ground, blocked off his escape, and cut his troops into mincemeat. Ole Santy Anna tried to escape by mixin’ in and trying to pretend to be one of his peons until one of Houston’s boys heard him called El Presidente by one of the real peons and that was that. He just signed over the rights to Texas just as big as you please.”

  “I didn’t know all that. I’d be proud to have a drink in their name.”

  “Speaking of names, what might be yours?”

  “Lynch,” Cormac told him, a smile on his face and his hand out. “Mack Lynch.”

  The ranger, a knowing and capable-looking individual, shook the offered hand. “I’m John Ford. The boys call me cap’n, most others call me Jack. I’ve heard of you.”

  A large, cold, and dangerous-looking ranger handed Cormac a tin cup half filled with an unidentified brown liquid.

  “You might wanna sneak up on that,” he growled. “The cap’n was over Kentucky way a while back and brought that back with him. It’s homemade. It’ll likely grow hair where you don’t have any and burn off what you do have, but it’ll get your attention.”

  Cormac clicked his cup with a couple of the closest rangers and took a swallow. The ranger wasn’t wrong. His first swallow burned its way to his stomach and set it on fire. He thought it a wonder there was anything strong enough to keep it in. The others were watching expectantly. The look on his face didn’t disappoint them; they all laughed.

  A ranger at the table spoke up, “I’ve heard you’re pretty quick with that gun of yours. Are you?”

  “I’m okay. I do the best I can, but I’m just an ole tater picker, trying to get along,” Cormac answered. It wasn’t somethin’ he liked to discuss.

  “I’ve heard you’re ’most as fast as Mackle,” said another.

  “Nobody’s as fast as Mackle,” offered the ranger who had given him the drink. He held up the jug, questioning if Cormac wanted more. With a smile and a headshake, Cormac declined. He would finish what he had, but if he had any intention of leaving under his own steam, what he had was more than enough.

  The ranger Ford came back with Cormac’s money and counted it into his hand. Cormac folded and buttoned it into his shirt pocket. The fast-gun conversation was still on.

  Jack Ford said to the others, “I’ve heard stories about both of them.” Then to Cormac, “I wouldn’t bet a nickel either way, but if you were to meet, I’d give a month’s wages to be there. How would you like to be a Ranger? We could use another good man.”

  Not one to pass up an opportunity for a little fun, Cormac said, “I’ve heard Mackle is almighty fast. You should recruit him.”

  “Not likely. I’ve never heard of you shooting anyone when it wasn’t self-defense; Mackle shot a woman.”

  It wasn’t funny anymore.

  “I heard that, too, but I got it from someone who was there, she had just finished helping to shoot an unarmed man and was getting ready to shoot him next.” C
ormac’s voice had taken on a bite.

  The ranger cocked his head and looked at Cormac from the corner of his eyes. “Calm down. Your tone of voice sounds like you’re defending him.”

  Cormac shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve ended up on the wrong end of the stick a time or two because someone didn’t understand something I did.”

  “If what you say is true, I probably owe Mackle an apology for helping to spread the myth. Let’s change the subject. What about you becomin’ a ranger? I could have used someone like you a few years ago when I was chasing an outlaw named Cortina.”

  “I think I’ll pass on that,” Cormac replied. “I don’t seem to be too hot on staying put anywhere, but I’m right flattered at the offer. I know the Texas Rangers are a tough group. Too bad there weren’t a few of you boys at the Alamo. Santa Anna might have gotten a surprise.”

  Cormac stayed overnight in their camp and went to sleep chuckling about a shootout between Mackle and him—such a thing.

  Remaining in Texas, he drifted from ranch to ranch, learning more about cattle and western folks as he went. Westerners were an odd mix of transplanted easterners and immigrants come west to make their fortunes. Some were looking for new starts, some were running from something—family, debt, the law—others, usually young men, just wanted to see the “Wild West” they had read and heard about.

  They came from all walks of life and trades: lawyers and doctors, storekeeps and barbers, tradespeople skilled at working with their hands, and any number of other professions. Many, although they hid it to fit in, were well educated and opinionated, generating interesting and sometimes heated conversations around campfires and in homes. Some were women looking for husbands, or excitement, and they sometimes settled on land by themselves, or found work as teachers, seamstresses, and waitresses or, frequently, ended up working on the shady side of town, or upstairs over a saloon. But all were looking for a change of lifestyle; all found one.