Ralph Compton Bullet For a Bad Man

by Ralph Compton

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Brothers Born

  Parting the Tie

  Den of Chance

  Shades of Virgin

  Gun Spree

  The Living Dead

  Sidewinders

  Deadly Tally

  Border Ruffians

  For Want of Breath

  Border Ruffians

  Ruler of the Roost

  Curly Wolves

  To Tree a Sawbones

  Sassy Tree

  A Secret Place

  Layers of Deceit

  Lightning Rod

  Accident Prone

  Plans Awry

  Devil’s Brood

  Claws of the Schemer

  Snakes in the Grass

  Good and Evil

  Nest of Vipers

  Revelations

  Liquor into Smoke

  Threads

  Arrows and Lead

  Barrens Affray

  Hell Bound

  Reckoning

  Snakes in the Grass

  Icy fingers clutched at Boone’s chest as he realized what he had done. He had taken his eyes off the grass. He remedied that just as the ground in front of the palomino erupted and out of it reared an Apache. Boone glimpsed a stocky, swarthy body clothed in a long-sleeved brown shirt and a breechclout and leggings. He saw steel flash, and he fired from the hip, two swift shots that slammed the Apache back and down.

  Boone used his spurs. To his right and left more figures reared, and they had rifles. He fired at a warrior on the left, swiveled, and fired at a warrior on the right just as the warrior’s rifle banged. Pain seared his side but he didn’t stop.

  Ahead rose two more, with bows this time. Strings twanged and arrows took flight. Boone fanned a shot, but the Apaches went to the ground. He reined to the left just as a feathered shaft whizzed past his neck. He was not as lucky with the second. It sheared into his left shoulder, and the shock nearly unhorsed him.

  The palomino was at a gallop. Soon the Apaches fell behind; they never kept coming once it was pointless. They would follow, track him at their own pace, and if his wounds brought him down, they would finish what they had started. . . .

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, October 2008

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2008

  All rights reserved

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  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the ‘‘American Cowboy.’’ His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska,

  Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  Brothers Born

  The Civil War was over.

  The horror of citizen brother pitted against citizen brother ended with the brothers from the North killing more of their brothers from the South than the brothers from the South could kill of their brothers from the North. The South surrendered while they still had brothers left.

  The brothers from the South went back to a land blighted by the brutal slaughter.

  Many of the brothers from the North went back to their old lives too. But some wanted something new.

  Ned Scott was from the North. He was born and raised in the same state as the president, who had decided that spilling blood was the only way for brothers to settle a dispute.

  Ned enlisted early in the war and went off to fight his brothers in gray. He enlisted not because he thought slavery was the greatest evil ever known, although he did believe no man had the right to lord it over another because his skin color happened to be different. He enlisted not to preserve the glory of the Union, although he did believe in the Constitution of the United States of America and felt the states should stay united and not break apart.

  Ned enlisted because he wanted excitement in his life. At the start of the war he worked as a clerk and made enough money for him and his wife, Lillian, and their young son, Epp, to get by. During the war he was
granted leave to go home for a week, with the result being that after the war he had another mouth to feed in the form of his second son, Boone.

  Ned knew he had been fortunate. Many thousands killed, many thousands maimed, and he had gotten through the war without a scratch. It helped that he was assigned to the artillery and not the regular infantry or the cavalry. He got to lob cannonballs at the enemy and blow them apart from a distance rather than rush up to them and bayonet them in the guts.

  With the war at an end, Ned needed to keep feeding the mouths of his family. He could not go back to being a clerk. The very notion made him cringe. Clerk work was boring, the same dull routine day in and day out. The prospect of spending the rest of his days in a cage made of stocked shelves scared him more than the cannonballs his brothers from the South had lobbed at him during the war.

  Ned did what many young veterans were doing. He decided to head west. Land was to be had for the taking and a man could make something of himself if he was willing to take a few risks. Hostiles were one of those risks. Renegade whites were another. Wild beasts, floods, starvation and dying of thirst were also on the list, but Ned considered them minor nuisances compared to the boredom of clerk work.

  So it was that in 1866 Ned packed his family onto a Conestoga and lumbered west at the vanguard of the restless tide seeking more out of life than was offered east of the Mississippi River.

  Ned and Lillian had talked it over. Ned did most of the talking and Lillian did most of the listening. First Ned wanted to head for Texas, but Lillian said there were Comanches in Texas, and of all the red devils ever born, Comanches were the worst. She refused to live in Texas no matter what. Next Ned proposed they go to Oregon country, but Lillian said that meant they would live at the far end of the continent and she would hardly ever get to see her parents. She refused to live in Oregon no matter what.

  ‘‘How about Arizona Territory?’’ Ned asked. He did not know much about it other than that Congress had created the territory a few years ago and there was supposed to be a lot of land for the taking. There were also supposed to be Apaches, but he did not know much about them either, and he decided not to mention them after Lillian’s tiff over Comanches.

  Arizona Territory it was.

  The hand of Providence had kept Ned safe during the war, and the hand of Providence was at work again as Ned crossed the mile-wide Mississippi and ventured where few white men had ventured before him. He and his family made it across the vast prairie to Bent’s Fort and joined a freight train to Santa Fe. From there they rattled and clattered to the southwest until they came to Phoenix, and from there drifted to Tucson.

  Lillian was tired of traveling and tired of living out of a wagon and just plain tired. She told Ned he had better find a place for them to live and he had better find it quick, and Ned, startled by her rare burst of temper, then and there made up his mind.

  Ned had heard about a valley. An old man with a beard down to his waist and a bottle of whiskey in his hand had been leaning on a post outside a Tucson saloon when Ned brought his wagon to a stop in the dusty street. The man asked Ned where he was from, one thing led to another and the old man told Ned about the valley.

  It was between the San Pedro and the San Simon rivers, and south of the Galiuro and Pinaleno mountains. It had that rarity of rarities in Arizona, a year-round stream. The grass grew green and there was plenty of it, the old man assured Ned. The old man had stumbled across it during his trapping days, and he would live there himself except that it was too far to Tucson, and whiskey.

  Ned asked the old man to write directions on how to get there, but the old man could neither read nor write so he sketched a map. The map was not much of one, but Providence once again showed it was fond of Ned and he found the valley without much difficulty.

  And what a wonderful valley it was. Everything the old man, whose name Ned never asked, had said it would be. A great circle of green with a single red butte at its center. Ned named the valley Circle Valley and the butte Red Butte and claimed them for his own.

  Naming the stream proved harder. Ned wanted to call it Lillian, as a gesture to his wife, but she said she did not want animals drinking out of her and people washing their unmentionables in her and she would rather not have a stream named after her, thank you very much. Ned thought that was just about the silliest thing he ever heard, but he honored her request. From then on, it was just ‘‘the stream.’’

  Ned hauled timber from the mountains and built a house and a barn and a corral. His idea was to take up farming. But then he was in Tucson one day buying supplies and he struck up another fateful conversation. This time it was with a drummer who was selling everything under the sun, and then some.

  The drummer asked Ned what he did for a living and Ned proudly mentioned he was going to raise wheat and corn.

  ‘‘And do what with it, Mr. Scott?’’

  ‘‘Why, sell the surplus, of course,’’ Ned informed him.

  ‘‘Who to?’’ The drummer pointed out that Arizona did not have enough hungry bellies for Ned to make much money. ‘‘What you need to do,’’ the drummer then said with the air of a man who knew all there was to know about the business of business, ‘‘is to go into cattle.’’

  ‘‘Cattle?’’ Ned said dubiously. ‘‘Do you mean raise cows?’’ He made it sound about as smart as raising chickens for a living, and no one in their right mind did that.

  ‘‘Not the kind of cows you are thinking of,’’ the drummer said. ‘‘The kind you find in Mexico and can bring north.’’

  The drummer had traveled all over, and he had talked to a lot of people and everyone swore that the demand for beef would soar now that the war was over. All those people in the East liked to eat meat and there just wasn’t enough of it.

  ‘‘Those same people will need wheat and corn too,’’ Ned pointed out.

  ‘‘Yes,’’ the drummer conceded. ‘‘But you don’t have to plant cows. You don’t have to fertilize cows and keep them free of weeds and worry they will be destroyed by high wind or hail. Cows take care of themselves. All you need is grass and water, and to round the cows up now and again. Cattle are a lot less work than crops.’’

  Ned liked the idea of not having to work as hard to get his due. He liked it a lot. A month later he hired two local men to help and they drifted into Mexico and helped themselves to some cattle they came across. It was that easy. Ned had the start of his herd.

  The years passed and Ned prospered. His herd grew. The Circle Valley Ranch became known far and wide for its fine beef.

  By 1880 Ned had twenty hands minding his thousands of head of cattle. He smoked five-dollar cigars. He wore the best of clothes. His boots were polished daily by his servants. When he went into Tucson he did so in a carriage, not a buckboard.

  Ned liked having money. He liked the trappings that went with having money. He liked it so much, he did not think of much besides money.

  Lillian didn’t mind. She liked money too.

  As for their sons, each had a different opinion.

  Eppley was twenty-two. He was fond of good clothes and good food and he grew fond of Tucson’s sporting houses, as well. He often complained of the days he wasted getting there and back. As for the ranch, he did the work his father asked of him, but he did not like doing it. He did not like to work at all.

  Boone was sixteen. He did not mind work. He went in for plain work garb, and his mother’s cooking was enough to suit him. And he liked the ranching life a lot.

  Everything revolved around their cattle. Each year the cows had to be rounded up, the calves had to be branded and hundreds of head had to be driven to market.

  Cows, cows, cows—that is all Epp’s life was, and he hankered after something more. Like his father, he liked excitement. He liked it more than anything.

  Boone was content with ranching. Still, his brother’s constant talk about how wonderful the rest of the world was stirred him. One day he mentioned to Epp that he was thinking of
going off and seeing some of what it had to offer.

  Epp smiled. He was bigger and heavier than Boone. He had his father’s hooked nose and brown eyes, but his bushy eyebrows were his own. Those eyebrows were always pinched together, as if in disapproval of the world around them. His mouth was thin and nearly always curled down. Epp looked, as one of their punchers once put it, like an overfed wolf hungry for more.

  Boone was lean and muscled and had hair the color of corn. His eyes were blue, like his mother’s, and his small ears and oval chin were hers too. His hands came from his father. They were strong, swift hands, so swift that he could draw and fire a revolver three times in the time it took most men to do it once.

  Boone spent almost all his spare time practicing. He was partial to a black leather rig decorated with silver conchas. His revolver came direct from the Colt factory, a special order he placed for a nickel-plated beauty with ivory handles and a four-inch barrel. The grips were etched with eagle heads, and the cylinder and barrel engraved.

  As one of their hands remarked, ‘‘That there is the prettiest six-shooter I ever did see.’’

  Ned Scott was proud of his son’s ability with a pistol, but Lillian said time and time again that no good would come of it.

  Then came the day she was proven right.

  It started as most days did, with an early breakfast. Boone had a healthy appetite, but Epp picked at his eggs and took only a few bites of toast and was done.

  Since the Circle V was a ranch and not a farm, the barn had become a stable, and a corral had been built at the back. Boone and Epp saddled their horses and headed out across the Circle V range just as a golden crown poked above the rim of the world.

  ‘‘Another roundup,’’ Epp complained. ‘‘Why Pa insists we help I will never know. Dan Morgan can take care of things.’’

  A Texan by birth, Morgan was the Circle V foreman, and as cow savvy a man as ever lived. Ned had heard about him from a fellow rancher and induced Morgan to come work for the Circle V by offering him twice as much money as he was making in Texas.