Bannerman the Enforcer 43

by Kirk Hamilton

  He was right. As they rode fast down into the valley, the guns in the shack opened up, bullets raking the slope around them. Yancey waved for Lang to break away from him, giving the rustlers two wide targets. Then they hit the flats and rode in on the shack, rifles to shoulders. Yancey flicked the toggle on his trigger guard and got off a whole magazine in a matter of seconds, the bullets raking the front of the shack, splintering the planks around the windows and door. He wanted only to make the men in there keep their heads down so as to give Lang a chance to get in closer from his side.

  Yancey wheeled the paint away behind a tree and hastily thumbed fresh loads into the magazine tube. He ducked as three bullets gouged bark from the tree. Then he was loaded again and he saw that Lang had quit his mount and was diving headlong for the shelter of a grassy hummock. The top hand rolled swiftly behind cover and threw up his rifle, as soon as he was in position, firing fast.

  The Enforcer spun as he heard a whinny and cursed when he saw Lang’s running mount go down threshing. The rustlers had shot it coldly. He dismounted and, crouching, ran from the tree’s shelter for the remains of an old wagon bed lying on its side a few yards away. Lead ripped grass and dirt about his pounding feet. He launched himself in a headlong dive, rolled behind his shelter and heard lead thud into the weathered planks.

  Some were splintered and he was able to use this area as a kind of loophole, shooting in through the closest window of the shack. He thought he heard a man yell but couldn’t be sure. Then during a lull in the shooting, he distinctly heard a door slap open at the rear of the shack. Yancey leapt up instantly, running forward.

  “They’re going out the back!” he yelled to Lang but the top hand was already up and running. He made for a corner of the shack while Yancey ran for the front door.

  He hit it with his boot, smashing it almost completely off its hinges, going in crouching, taking in the open door at the rear of the shack, getting a glimpse of a still body on the earthen floor.

  The Enforcer ran to the rear door, saw two men in the process of mounting-up, one with a dangling, bloody arm. They threw down on him and Yancey dropped, levering twice. The man, just climbing into leather and shooting across his mount’s back, reared up and was flung back by the strike of lead. The second man was shooting at Lang and the top hand nailed him dead center with his last shot. The man fell across his horse and the animal snorted and leapt and ran, jolting the body off before disappearing around a corner of the shack.

  Yancey was already standing over the man he had brought down, rifle muzzle pressed against the man’s head. He used a boot toe to heave the outlaw onto his back. The man was dead, hit in the throat, but there was the edge of a dirty bandage showing through the front of his shirt. The Enforcer ripped this off and saw there was a wound in the man’s side, a bullet wound, a few days old.

  “Wonder where he got that?” Lang asked.

  “I’d say when he tried to hold up the Dallas train,” Yancey opined. “I winged a couple. You know that other hombre?”

  “Sort of. He worked for Big-B a couple of days last fall. We suspected he was stealin’ from war bags in the bunkhouse and he slipped away one night and we never seen him again.”

  Yancey stood up. “There’s another one in the shack.”

  “Only three men to handle all them mavericks?” Lang queried as they stepped back inside. “Must’ve been a hard chore.”

  “Reckon there was more and the others have moved on, left these three behind to wait for us. And the hombre up on the ridge.”

  “Great Godfrey! Look who it is!” exclaimed Lang as he turned the dead man onto his back.

  It was Virg Enderby and he had been shot through the heart.

  “Must’ve slipped away from Big-B and rode on ahead to warn his pards,” Lang allowed.

  Yancey had been examining the body and stood up now, face grim.

  “Reckon not. That blood on his shirt is dry. The cloth is scorched by powder burns which means he was shot at close range. And he’s stiff, been dead at least four, five hours.”

  “What the hell!”

  “Looks to me like he was killed someplace else and his body dumped here so we’d think he got killed in the shoot-out—and that he was in on the rustling.”

  “Why would anyone do that? And who would?”

  “That’s what I aim to find out,” Yancey said grimly. “If you ask me, they planned to nail us out here, too. Me, anyway. But we proved to be a little tougher than they figured. And they’ll damn well live to regret that, I swear!”

  Twelve – Deadly Back-Up

  “Bannerman!”

  Yancey, striding towards the Dallas railway depot, turned, right hand close to gun butt, at the sound of his name. He saw Sheriff Buckmann waving and riding a dusty mount towards him. The Enforcer waited for the lawman to come up and the sheriff dismounted stiffly.

  “Two full days in the saddle! No wonder the damn ground won’t stay still,” growled Buckmann, leaning against his mount. He thumbed back his hat. “Heard you had a little ruckus out on the range, nailed yourself some rustlers.”

  “Some. But there must’ve been others who got away. Or left long before Lang and I arrived.”

  The sheriff nodded. “You find out any more about Virg Enderby?”

  Yancey shook his head slowly. “Nope. Loomis reckons as far as he knew the ramrod had turned in after Lang and I rode out from the ranch. Next morning, when he wasn’t at breakfast, he just figured he’d gone on out to the round-up camp early. He says.”

  Buckmann squinted at the big Enforcer. “Don’t much like Todd Loomis, huh?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with it. Reckon I can tell when a man’s lying, that’s all.”

  “Uh-huh. You think Enderby knew too much? Or was involved in the rustling and maybe asked for a bigger bite?”

  “Something like that. Seems Big-B’s been losing quite a deal of stock and hasn’t been showin’ much profit for a spell. Pa was suspicious, which is why he didn’t mind when I suggested a round-up and tally. I’ve since found out that Loomis doesn’t do his own books. The bank handles ’em, being part of the Bannerman Texas empire, so to speak ... Seems that Lincoln Barnett and Todd Loomis are mighty good friends.”

  The sheriff whistled softly.

  “Full-scale conspiracy, huh?”

  “Got the earmarks of one. You figure it out for yourself. Be mighty easy for the two of ’em to work together on something like that.”

  “Sure it would. But you’d need a heap of proof to make it stick.”

  “It’ll have to show up in the books some place. That’s why they tried to kill pa, I reckon. And me. I figure that rustling deal was to get me away from the ranch and, with some luck, nail me by bushwhack. But it’d also leave pa unguarded and easy for ’em to get at. But I spiked that by having old Peggy the cook sit outside his room with a double-barreled shotgun. They knew he’d use it, all right. My guess is Enderby got a mite too greedy so they killed him and dumped him in the rustlers’ shack to make it look like he’d been nailed in the shoot-out.”

  Buckmann scratched at his stubbled jaw. “You got a helluva lot of theory and nothing else, man.”

  “So far,” Yancey admitted. “I’m on my way to meet the Austin train. Pard of mine and Governor Dukes’ own sawbones are arriving on it. I figure we’ll have all the proof we need pretty soon.”

  “Father not gettin’ any better then? I mean, I know he was wounded, but his general health? Deteriorating?”

  “Kind of strange. I got a theory about that, too, but reckon I won’t say anything till Doc Boles gets here. How you doing with the bank robbers?”

  “Might have something you can use. Pretty sure it’s Milo Wolfe’s bunch we want. Did a little riding up in the hills and smoked out a couple of hard cases I know up there who owe me a favor. They tell me Wolfe was seen at a sawbones in Liberation, feller known to patch up bullet wounds, no questions asked, long as the pay’s right, preferably one hundred percent over
proof liquor.”

  Yancey arched his eyebrows. “Liberation, huh? Wolfe hurt bad?”

  “Shoulder wound. Witnesses said your pa nailed the feller in the buscadero rig in the left shoulder. Couldn’t get any more out of my contacts but I rode on down to Liberation. Picked up a little here and there. Wolfe had been there, all right, with three, four of his men. They picked up a couple saloon gals and hightailed it. They rode south out of town but that don’t mean a thing. They could circle back in any direction. Main thing is they’ll be going to ground some place if they’ve taken women with ’em.”

  “Any ideas?”

  Buckmann shook his head regretfully. “Like I say, this ain’t Wolfe’s usual stampin’ ground. I dunno who he knows.”

  “Except that drunken sawbones.”

  “Hell, you’ll get nothin’ out of him. Too liquored all the time. You could pour five gallons of sourmash into him and he’d still let nothing slip he didn’t want to.”

  Yancey smiled faintly. “Wonder what he’d do just to get his hands on a bottle of whisky—if he hadn’t had any for twenty-four hours or so?”

  “He’d never go that long without a drink. Twenty-four minutes’d be pushin’ it.”

  “S’pose he was kept from it?” Yancey asked.

  “Hell, he’d go loco! You’d drive him mad! He’d put his own mother on the gallows for just one drop.” He shook his head slowly. “Mighty cruel, Bannerman.”

  “Obliged for your co-operation, Buckmann,” Yancey said, and started to swing away.

  “This is still my territory. I could handle this my way.”

  Yancey looked at him levelly. He nodded slowly. “That’s right. You could. And I could get official sanction from Governor Dukes to take over in as long as it takes to send a wire and get a reply.”

  Buckmann’s mouth was tight and his eyes narrowed as they looked into Yancey’s hard face.

  “Well—I guess it is your father,” he said quietly. “And Liberation’s on the edge of my county. Beyond that is Ranger territory and I figure that’s where you’ll find Milo Wolfe.”

  “Obliged, Sheriff. I won’t forget this.”

  Buckmann didn’t reply. He muttered a curse and lifted his reins, turning his horse and walking over towards the livery stables.

  Yancey watched him for a minute, and then continued on his way to the railroad depot.

  The Austin train pulled in just under an hour late and Johnny Cato and Doctor Boles were among the first passengers to step down. Yancey grinned his pleasure at seeing his old sidekick, Cato, after so many weeks of separation. They had been on different assignments before he had come up here in answer to Mattie’s letter.

  Cato wasn’t very big, only about five-eight, and he weighed no more than one-forty pounds. He was dressed neatly in good quality clothes—one of his weaknesses, the other main one being women—and he tended to walk a little lopsided, leaning slightly to the left to counterbalance the weight of the big gun high on his right hip. The holster was tilted forward at the base, back at the top and was permanently molded to his hip shape by a sheet iron insert sandwiched between the leather on the holster back. The gun itself was a top-break action, originally a Smith and Wesson, but highly modified into Cato’s original design that incorporated a cylinder that held eight high-velocity .44 caliber cartridges and, in the center, a twenty-gauge shot shell fired by a special toggle-worked pin through an underslung smoothbore barrel.

  It was the deadliest firearm in the West at that time and was known, with every good reason, as The Manstopper.

  Beside the small Enforcer Doctor Boles swung along, cadaverous, dressed in sober black claw hammer coat and trousers, wearing his half-moon silver-framed eyeglasses and carrying his leather medical bag. Both men shook hands with Yancey.

  “Thanks for coming so fast, gents,” the big Enforcer said. “Things are hotting-up.”

  “Fine with me,” Cato admitted, and, at Yancey’s raised eyebrows, added: “Gal I was interested in in Austin turned out to be married. I was kinda glad of the excuse to get out of town and a little gunsmoke sounds like sort of relaxin’ stuff after what I been through!”

  Yancey laughed. “How about you, Doc? Got any jealous husbands chasin’ you?”

  “At my age I wish I could answer in the affirmative, Yancey! In fact, I’d give anything to be able to do so!”

  The Enforcers grinned and Yancey led the way from the depot. “We’re going out to the spread, and I’ve got a lot to tell you. Doc, I’d be interested for you to examine pa right off and let me know exactly how he is. Soon as you tell me, I reckon Johnny and me’ll be takin’ a ride down to Liberation.”

  Cato and the medic exchanged glances. It sounded as if they were both in for an interesting time.

  Yancey and Mattie waited impatiently in the hallway outside of C.B.’s room in the ranch house. The Enforcer was smoking and the way he jerked the cigarette from between his lips, blew out smoke in a small explosion, then jammed the stub back in his mouth, told Mattie that he was apprehensive about Doctor Boles’ diagnosis of their father.

  She felt all knotted-up inside herself but was trying to hide it behind an expressionless face.

  “Where’s Johnny?” she asked suddenly.

  Yancey stubbed out his cigarette butt in an ashtray and looked at her steadily. He took a few moments to answer and she knew he had his mind on other things.

  “Johnny? Kitchen, I guess. He just found out that Mrs. Gomez has a daughter in her teens.”

  Mattie couldn’t help smiling. “Same old Johnny! I thought he was already running from an irate husband.”

  “Figures he’s far enough ahead to stop and dally a spell, I guess ...” Yancey broke off and they both tensed as the door opened and Doctor Boles came out. The medic had his bag in one hand and held a bottle of C.B.’s cough mixture in the other. There was little they could read in his face. “Doc ...?”

  Boles looked at them both and then nodded towards the end of the passage. All three walked down there and stopped by a window that overlooked the ranch yard.

  “I won’t beat about the bush,” Boles said. “Your father’s got some lung congestion right enough. It’s more than just acute bronchitis, but sure not pneumonia. Nor consumption.”

  Mattie’s face lit up with hope. Yancey was more cautious. “Can you be sure, Doc? I mean, I brought you in because I don’t want any mistakes about this.”

  “Well, of course, I would need laboratory sputum tests to say with absolute certainty one way or the other, but I reckon I’ve been practicing medicine long enough to know symptoms and signs well enough. I’d say your father either has a chronic bronchitis or an asthma-related condition.”

  “Then Carmody was wrong. Could it have been deliberate, Doc? Or a genuine mistake?”

  Boles frowned and stared levelly at Yancey. “Normally, I would have to say that it was probably a genuine mistake, especially if your father had been coughing any blood ...?” He looked quizzically at Mattie.

  “Yes. He had been. That and the chest pains finally made him decide to see Carmody.”

  Boles nodded. “Coughing a little blood is not unusual with a bad bout of bronchitis and the condition would have been aggravated by the ’Frisco Bay fogs. The pains could have been a touch of pleurisy or even muscular. There is a lot of tension there and I must admit a strange sort of murmur in his heart, but no real heart trouble. I hasten to add, it could be a forerunner of some, though, if he doesn’t ease up on his workload and I’ve told C.B. this but it was like water off a duck’s back ...”

  “You said ‘normally’ you’d say Carmody made a mistake, Doc,” cut in Yancey. “Why wouldn’t you say that now?”

  Boles held up the bottle of cough mixture. “This. It’s an expectorant. I detect squills and ipecacuanha, both of which will make a man with inflamed lungs cough like hell. What should’ve been prescribed was a linctus that would soothe the tissues, prevent the coughing.”

  “He always coughed violently aft
er a dose of medicine, Doctor,” Mattie said, frowning worriedly. “And I’ve been pouring it into him every few hours as Carmody instructed!”

  “Well, it probably hasn’t done him any good, but I don’t believe it’s done a lot of harm, except keep the coughing symptoms alive.” Boles looked at Yancey again. “It would appear that Carmody deliberately set things up and recommended that your father come out here in order to get him out of San Francisco—for reasons best known to himself.”

  Mattie stared, horrified, but Yancey nodded.

  “What I figured, Doc. There’ve been takeover attempts on the business in ’Frisco. Pa managed to juggle his stocks and so on and fight them off. As long as he was in control of the Coast business, whoever wanted to take over didn’t have much chance. So I figure they got to Carmody—a vulnerable man, with kids that needed schooling and so on—and rigged it so that pa came way out here.”

  “The attempts on his life?”

  “I guess if they’d come off, then there would’ve been no visit out here. But they failed, so they reverted to medical pressure and taking that medicine finally made him sick enough to make the trip out here.”

  “You mean, while pa’s been in Texas, someone has been working behind the scenes to take over his financial interests in ’Frisco?” Mattie asked Yancey.

  “Well, I figure that’s why they wanted him away from the Barbary Coast.”

  “Then what about all the attempts on his life—and yours—out here?”

  Yancey’s mouth tightened grimly. “That’s what we aim to find out. Me and Johnny.”

  Thirteen – Streets of Dallas

  Yancey’s first plan was to ride directly from the Big-B ranch down to Liberation and work on the drunkard doctor, getting information out of him in regard to the whereabouts of Milo Wolfe and his sidekicks.