by Jonas Ward
The Home of Great Western Fiction!
He stepped back and gazed at the tall, smiling man with wonderment. He had just seen him lick the most deadly gunslinger in the West with his bare lists.
“Where’d you come from?” he asked admiringly.
“No place in particular,” Buchanan said.
“Is that a fact? And where you bound?”
“Same place.” Buchanan laughed.
“You must like it there,” the little rancher said.
“I like it best wherever I am,” Buchanan replied gently.
BUCHANAN 20: ONE MAN MASSACRE
By Jonas Ward
First published by Fawcett Books in 1958
Copyright © 1958, 2020 by Eileen Ard
First Digital Edition: August 2020
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.
One
The little old man and the big young one sat side by side on the top of the mountain, faces turned thoughtfully toward the rugged Big Bend country directly below, backs disdainful of the magnificent sunset being staged over the whole state of Chihuahua.
They sat together without speaking, the one with his ancient and fragrant Meerschaum, the other with his diminishing sack of Bull Durham, and soon the moonless night began closing in on them and the mountain and all the borderland like some softly closing door. Then it was pitch black, and something he saw made the young one shift his wide shoulders restlessly.
“Damn it all, Fargo, you did it again,” he growled.
Surprise made the old man’s pipe glow brightly.
“Did what again, Buchanan?” he inquired.
“Lost track of another damn day.”
“The hell you say!”
“Look for yourself, old-timer,” Buchanan told him and Fargo looked, looked straight down from the mountain-top. He shook his white-haired head incredulously.
“Now what can those pure fools be thinking of?” he demanded. “How come they to light up Scotstown of a Friday night?”
Buchanan sighed and ground his cigarette into the earth.
“’Cause it’s sure-as-sin Friday,” Fargo continued positively. Then he snapped his fingers. “Say—I’ll bet it’s the Fourth of July!”
Now Buchanan laughed.
“Should of quit when you drew even,” he suggested drily. “Now you’ve lost us a month.”
“Ain’t it July yet?” Fargo asked, doubt lining his voice.
“Not if we got here the middle of March. That makes it a Saturday, middle of June, give or take a week.”
“Well I’ll be damned! How come I to miss checkin’ off a day like that?”
“Same way you misjudged the soft life of gold mining,” Buchanan said.
“Not me, son. No, sir! I never claimed nothin’ for mountain livin’ nor mountain minin’.”
Let it go, Buchanan thought wearily, remembering full well how the old man had showed him the dog-eared map in that El Paso saloon, the picture he’d painted of the two of them stuffing their pockets with nuggets the size of eagle eggs. What the fast-talking old faker was looking for in Paso was some two-legged jackass to break his back against a goddam mountainside sixteen hours a day. Meet Mr. T. Jackass Buchanan.
“We ain’t doin’ so bad,” Fargo was telling him now. “Not bad at all. Betcha the stuff we got assays out to thirty, thirty-two dollars the ounce.”
“Sure.”
“It will! Don’t you think Fargo Johns knows the pure dust when he gets it in his palm?”
“Hell, I reckon it’s real enough, Mr. Johns. I just hadn’t figured on spending the next fifty years of my life swinging your pickaxe.”
“And you won’t! You sure won’t! Afore winter we’ll have enough to sneak us twenty, thirty Mexicans up here. Just see if we don’t. Then you and me, boy, we’ll just sit on our duffs and straw-boss the whole shebang.”
“Sure,” Buchanan said. “Before winter.”
The rebuff sent Fargo back to his pipe, lapsed him into troubled thinking. Nothing in this life comes easy, he argued to himself; then had to admit he’d never thought it would be this hard. Their take to date probably didn’t amount to more than three or four hundred dollars—and something he’d been observing for the past few weeks augured worse for the future. Oh, the ore was there all right, plain as a wart on your nose. But though the mountain might be one pile of rich gold, getting it out was going to get rougher and rougher—too rough even for someone with the prodigious size and energy of his young partner. They badly needed waterpower, drills, three crews of Mexicans working round the clock.
The pipe went out, sending a bitter taste along the curved stem. Story of my life, he thought. Sixty-four years of it. Or was it sixty-five? Born July 18, 1782, he knew that much. And been hanging by my thumbs ever since.
Buchanan’s great arm slipped around his thin shoulders.
“Don’t mind my griping,” Buchanan said. “Those town lights threw me off kilter.”
“Man gets pretty fine-honed, livin’ like this,” Fargo conceded.
“Yeah. Go turn in, Fargo.”
“Be some risky, droppin’ down there for a visit,” the old man said probingly.
“Some.”
“Stranger in town, busybodies askin’ him questions. Feller takes a drop or two too many and he starts braggin’ about his gold mine.”
“Right. Get your sleep, old-timer.”
“Rascals be scramblin’ up our mountain like pack rats,” Fargo continued. “Steal us blind ...”
“Night, Fargo.”
The old man got to his feet, stood looking down at the blocky figure of Buchanan anxiously. Even as the younger one was now, seated, motionless, he communicated a throbbing vitality, a wildness that was all the more felt because he was caged.
“Hell’s bells!” Fargo burst out impatiently. “What harm can it do?”
Buchanan raised his chin. “Now what?”
“Go on down there for a couple hours. Let some steam off.”
“Why don’t we both go?”
“Me? Go all the way down this mountain in the black of night and back again just for some white corn?” He laughed scornfully at such a notion. “Catch me travelin’ all that distance just to get cheated of my hard-earned money.”
“You’re gonna talk yourself into the trip pretty soon,” Buchanan commented.
“You couldn’t take me there piggy-back,” Fargo said resolutely, walking off. He returned in a few minutes carrying a small leather pouch.
“Don’t throw it all away in one place,” he said, passing the fifty-odd dollars’ worth of gold to the big man. “And whatever you do, don’t let no two-legged wolves follow you back up here.”
“Bring you back anything?”
“Well, if there’s some left over, buy me a little tobacco.”
“That all?”
Fargo hesitated. “Got a birthday comin’ up pretty soon, if I keep close track of the days. Might treat myself to a bottle of the mountain dew.”
“See you in the morning,” Buchanan said.
“Watch yourself, now.”
“Sure.”
“Hey, ain’t you goin’ to arm yourself?”
&n
bsp; “Travelin’ light,” Buchanan said.
“Just as well,” Fargo concluded. “Can’t get into trouble without a gun.”
Buchanan crossed the clearing and disappeared over the side of the mountain, strolling with the lighthearted air of a man on a lark. If the lights of Scotstown meant only five miles of hard traveling to Fargo, they promised his tall partner a few hours’ reprieve from the lonely mountain life. The prospect of hearing just one other human’s voice paid for the trip in full.
Two
Gibbons was a man of not more than medium build, but his specially made boots and high-crowned white Stetson gave the impression of someone much taller. His entrance into the Edinburgh Hotel was impressive as well, the manner in which he strode directly across the small lobby telling all present that here was a man whose every waking moment was of urgent importance and significance. Following exactly one pace behind him, in pseudo-military fashion, were two lean-faced, bleak-eyed ones with the stamp of gunfighter all over them.
The man in the Stetson stopped at the desk, turned when the clerk answered his brief question by pointing to a group of men standing across the room, then walked that way in his brisk fashion.
“Do I have the honor of addressing Mr. Malcolm Lord?” he asked the heavy-set, hawk-nosed man in the center of the group.
“You do, sir,” Lord told him formally. “And you are Captain Gibbons?”
“At your service.”
They shook hands then, and Malcolm Lord’s eyes made an approving appraisal. He introduced Gibbons then to the other four—Butler, Watson, Sims and MacPike. Gibbons acknowledged each one ceremoniously, unsmilingly, then swung aside.
“Gentlemen, my aides—Sergeants Leach and Gruber,” and by the act of turning his back to them in the next moment he spared the Lord party any further socializing with underlings.
“I suggest we adjourn to the Glasgow,” Lord suggested. “We will have privacy there for our business.” They left the hotel and crossed Trail Street to the noisy, brightly lighted Glasgow Saloon. Somehow the “sergeants” made their way to the head of the party and it was they who pushed open the swinging doors and entered the place first. And somehow the way they paused just inside the doors, hands hooked above high-riding gun butts, brought a hush in the sound, sent a warning to every man in the big room. They moved to either side then and let the group come in.
“This way,” Malcolm Lord directed, leading them to the private room he had reserved for the evening.
Suddenly a voice cut through the semi silence from the direction of the long bar. “So that’s Black Jack Gibbons!” it said belligerently, colored perhaps by whisky, but far from drunk. “Feast your eyes, gents—there’s the man that claims full credit for the Brownsville massacre!”
Leach and Gruber had closed in instantly around Gibbons, who had stopped in his tracks at the first sound of the quarrelsome voice.
“Good company you’re keeping, Malcolm Lord,” the speaker went on. “The Rangers couldn’t stomach him after Brownsville, but I guess that don’t hold for you.”
“You’re sodden drunk, as usual, Angus Mulchay,” Lord snapped back across the room. “One more insult to my guest and I’ll forget your weakness ...”
“No you won’t,” the man named Mulchay answered. “You’ll get somebody else to do your fighting, just as you’ve imported this butcher ...”
“No,” Gibbons said curtly to Leach when the gunman had started toward the bar. “Not here.”
“... and I’m onto you, Lord,” Mulchay continued. “You’ve been raising a big bogeyman about Mex bandits for months now. But you don’t fool me or any of the rest of us on the riverside. We know what you’re after, and by God we’ll fight you tooth and nail!”
“Whatever I do is for the benefit of us all,” Lord said, addressing himself to everyone present. “For Scotstown and for the Big Bend.” With that he started again toward the door of the private room.
“For the benefit of Overlord!” Angus Mulchay shouted after him. “You won’t stop till you own it all!”
The door opened and the party went on through. Gibbons stopped briefly on the threshold.
“No one else comes inside,” he told his men. “And avoid trouble with that loudmouth. This deal isn’t set yet.”
“I was fixin’ to cut the dust some,” Leach said, his manner truculent by nature. “It’s a long ride from Lajitas.”
Gibbons studied him, his small mustache bristling, and in his mind he was weighing Hamp Leach’s ability with a gun and Hamp Leach’s talent for making himself unpleasant. The gun won.
“Take your pleasure, Hamp,” he said. “How’re your funds?”
“What funds?”
Gibbons took a thick wallet from his coat, extracted two twenty-dollar gold certificates and gave one to each of them.
“Go easy, boys,” he cautioned. “The treasury is feeling a pinch.” He went on in and Leach left Rig Gruber to guard the door while he himself sauntered to the bar. He did not move to where the garrulous Mulchay still held forth—not because Gibbons had ordered it, but because of someone who had caught his eye at this end. She was tall for a woman, taller than many men, and her long, raven-black hair and piquant Scotch beauty lent an air of tamelessness about her. Barmaids in Hamp Leach’s considerable experience were either overly shy or overly bold, but this one earned herself with a kind of quiet dignity, as if this were a profession to be proud of. Leach knew different. Border women doing this work had descended to it, and every one was a wench for the asking.
“The best in the house, honey,” he told her, leaning his loose-jointed frame far over the bar, bringing his high cheekboned face familiarly close to the girl’s. Now he stared insolently down the neck of her dress, and each thing he did was the sure-footed, no-nonsense approach that had never failed him from El Paso to Brownsville.
“Put your leerin’ mug back on its own side of the stick,” Rosemarie MacKay told him, enough of the burr and the heather in her voice to indicate she hadn’t been transported across the ocean too long ago.
“Watch yourself, dossie,” Leach cautioned. “I’m not one of your two-bit cow chasers.” His glance fell again to her queen-size bosom and rested there for another disrespectful moment.
The girl took a step backward, her mind flashing a warning. He was a different proposition from the men who came to the bar and flirted with her in their half shy, good-natured way. There was evil in this one.
“What will you have?” she asked as neutrally as she could manage.
“Like I told you, baby—the best in the house.”
“We have Scot’s whisky and corn. Beer in the keg, but no ale tonight.”
“You got a sister over in San Antone? Half-breed?”
“Whisky or beer?”
“Set up along your general lines?” Leach went on, his eyes taking another long journey. “And friendly to a fighting man.”
“The friendship here is in the glass,” she told him, then started to move away.
“A bottle of the corn,” Leach ordered, his voice abruptly turned surly. She lifted a quart bottle from the back bar, uncorked it and set it in front of him with a glass. Suddenly his powerful fingers snaked forward, much too quick for the girl to retract her hand. His grip closed harshly around her slim wrist.
“Listen good, dos—you’re doing business with Hamp Leach ...”
“Let go of me.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll call for help.”
Leach, still holding fast, cocked a derisive glance over his shoulder. Ranchers, punchers, clerks and barflies—typical cow town gathering on Saturday night. The young bucks might come to the Glasgow later, but not until they had kicked up their heels to every jig and reel at the dancehall down the street.
“Call,” Leach invited, but she had seen the same faces in the crowd he had, knew them all for basically good men but certainly no match for this professional troublemaker.
“Please let me go,” she said.
“What’s goin’ on?” a voice demanded, and it was the self-same Mulchay, two drinks older than he had been and making his way recklessly along the bar.
“Watch yourself, Angus.” A friend tried to caution the little terrier like rancher, but he might just as well have warned a cock let loose in the pit.
“Take your mitts off that lass!” Mulchay demanded, coming to an unsteady halt. A wicked smile signaled Leach’s intentions just a bare instant before he brought a heavy-booted foot from the floor, planted the heel deep into the older man’s belly and kicked out with it. With a sickening grunt Angus Mulchay was jolted backward into a table and down. He lay there for several seconds, fighting for breath, then rolled to his hands and knees and started to rise again.
“No, Mr. Mulchay,” Rosemarie cried to him. “Don’t!”
Mulchay got to his feet, weaving from side to side, and Leach, smirking at the man’s determination, slid the .45 from its holster and flipped it easily so that he held it by the long barrel.
“Come on, Angus-boy,” he said goadingly. “Step up and get your thick skull split open.”
The words were spoken into a heavy silence that had fallen over the big room. Mulchay eyed the weapon steadily, and so deep was everyone’s concentration that no one heard the batwing doors swing wide to admit another spectator.
“Come on, Angus,” Leach invited again, his voice thick with the desire to inflict pain. “Come and get it, cowman.”
Mulchay passed a hand across his mouth and stepped toward him, recklessly. Leach’s arm swept back—and then a huge shape shouldered itself between the two of them.
“If you’re not too busy, ma’am,” Buchanan said to the wide-eyed Rosemarie, “I’d sure like a drink.”
“Get the hell outa my way!” Leach snarled, and Buchanan turned with a look of surprise. Now his shoulders blocked Mulchay off completely.
“If I’m in your way, brother,” he said amiably, “then walk around me.” His attention returned to Rosemarie and the sight of her made him smile. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble ...”
