Cutthroat Gulch

by Richard S. Wheeler

  “Pa—”

  “We set him down at our table, fed him, got to know him. I didn’t much mind him. Hellions are fine with me, long as they stay on the right side of the line. Better than plenty of types of men not big enough for this country.” He wished he hadn’t said it, but there it was: better than Absalom. Jack Castle had what it took, what the wild land and new country required of a man. “He was a crack shot, good hunter, knew what to do if he met a bear, knew how to live outside in bad weather, knew how to deal with two-legged sidewinders, too. Independent. Didn’t need parents to mooch from, didn’t need government, didn’t need hand-outs. Never knew the meaning of fear.

  “He could track anything. Sat a horse with such grace, I don’t even know the damned words, like he was riveted into the saddle and was born there, and he has the gift of riding a horse without tiring it out. Some men grind a horse down just by sitting on it, but Jack Castle could take a horse out all day and bring it back as fresh as it started. I was thinking he’d make a fine deputy some day, a fine sheriff too, if Absalom...”

  “Your eggs are ready,” she said, slapping a chipped tan plate before him. It was a wonder the plate didn’t shatter.

  He didn’t care. Didn’t feel like eating. Didn’t feel like anything except putting Jack Castle back behind bars for the rest of his life, and hanging the son of a gun if he killed that stranger.

  “Smart, too. He hardly went to the schoolhouse, but he got his letters and arithmetic without half trying, and he could’ve been a merchant or banker. I watched him do numbers on a slate board, and I thought he could be a bookkeeper or a card shark. But he was best at running people, getting them to do what he wanted. I don’t know where he got that from. “His father was dead, a smalltime rancher that got pitched off a horse on his head and died when Jack was six or seven. His mother didn’t shine none and was too busy to put a curb bit in Jack’s mouth or rein him in. His older brother was a quiet bachelor toiler who put up hay and downed beers each night. But Jack had a way with people, just grinning, calculating, smiling, asking, pushing a little, always toward trouble. “He liked trouble, like it was the best life offered, stuffed his nose right into it. Give Jack Castle trouble and he was happy. If he got others into bigger trouble, he was even happier.”

  “Sweet on Tammy, eh?” Steve grinned at her. “It all comes out.”

  “Pa, that’s enough!” She didn’t want Blue to say one more word, and Blue knew why.

  All those young years, Jack Castle treated Tammy as his own property. No one else could dance with her, no one could even talk with her at the barn dances and socials. He’d take her out and they’d disappear into the dark, and Blue knew they were spooning, and he found himself watching Castle every moment because one of those times that boy would get into big trouble, or get Tammy into big trouble, and then there’d be hell to pay.

  Jack Castle was born dangerous, and that’s the type that women fall for the heaviest and hardest. And it was plain that if things went along much further, there’d either be a hasty wedding or Jack Castle would leave the country, and a sweet girl would be ruined. There were plenty of times Blue had stared at his daughter, wondering if that hellion had ruined her. But Tammy had a good head on her, and somehow it didn’t happen.

  Still, there was something about Jack Castle that Blue liked. He was a going to be a man, and that’s the kind he wanted Tammy to have, a man who could move mountains, give her a fine life and a happy family, and go places in a brand new land rich with promises. Castle was half like himself. Settle Jack Castle down some and he’d be just the sort of son that Blue always dreamed of. Blue took him fishing and hunting. They stalked cougars and grizzlies and wolves. Blue showed him every trick there was, until Jack could live in nature as well as Blue could, and could survive where other and lesser mortals would perish. There wasn’t anything Jack Castle did that Blue didn’t much mind, at least until things went crazy.

  But Olivia saw things different. She saw the mean jokes he pulled, the times he hurt dogs just for fun, the times he humiliated little boys, the times he lifted candy from old Moser’s cracker barrels without paying. Blue didn’t mind that so much, but she did.

  “Blue, you’ve got to tell him to stay away. He’s not right for her,” she had said. “There’s something in him that’s pure trouble.”

  “Oh, he’ll come around. Just needs a little tempering.”

  “Blue? You’re not listening to me,” Olivia had said, over and over.

  He had been accused of that often enough.

  Now Blue sat at Tammy’s table, wishing he had listened to her earlier, before things went to hell. Young Castle got wilder and wilder, began “borrowing” horses and returning them just before the owners went to the law. He always seemed to have cash, and learned how to buy hooch out of the back door of saloons like the Indians, and then go up into he hills with his pals and drink it until they were all stupefied. He always stopped short but goaded his young pals into sucking so much booze that they vomited and were sick for days. He enjoyed that, working people like they were cow horses obedient to his rein and spur. Sometimes word of it got back to the sheriff, and he growled a few warnings at Jack, but those were never enough to stop it. Then one day, when both Jack and Tammy were seventeen, Tammy announced that she was going to hitch up with Jack, and that’s when Olivia suddenly became someone Blue had never seen before: as hard as granite.

  “The hell you will,” she told Tammy, who gaped at the mother who never cussed, leastwise not in front of anybody.

  Olivia threw a shawl over her shoulders, marched into the autumnal cold, found Jack hanging out at the livery barn, as usual, and told him never to see Tammy again; if he did, he’d end up in bigger trouble than he’d ever been in before. Blue went along with it. He knew she was right; it was just that Jack still tickled him, even though he was crossing the line regularly now. Jack was so unlike Absalom that Blue could forgive him anything, even though Blue was the sheriff and Jack was pushing straight into big trouble. It was no longer youthful hijinks, it was something mean and dangerous blooming in that boy.

  Jack ignored her, came sniffing around, meeting Tammy behind Blue’s back, and that’s when Olivia went out one night with the Purdy twelve-gauge shotgun, found him, and put a load of buckshot into the livery barn wall three feet to the right of Jack. “Next time it’s your hide,” she snapped, as Jack howled and pulled splinters out of his arm.

  Tammy had sulked, but she knew her parents were right, and when Jack Castle sneaked around again, she cut him off cold. Blue had to give her credit for that. Even that didn’t faze Castle, and a week later he tried to abduct her, employing two stolen horses. Blue had gotten wind of it, caught the punk, told him to ride: Blankenship was no longer home to Jack Castle. “If I see you in this town again, I’ll toss you into my iron cage, and let you rot there,” Blue had told him.

  “How come? What’d I do?”

  “You’re messing with my daughter, and now you’re on the wrong side of the law.”

  “It’s your wife don’t like me,” Castle had said. “You going to let her rule the roost, old man? You gonna be a skirt-whipped old gelding? You gonna be like Absalom?”

  No man had ever talked to Blue like that. “Get out!” he bellowed.

  But it hadn’t ended. Castle was still roaming the county, getting into worse and worse trouble. Next came some crafty burglaries which Blue knew Castle did but couldn’t prove it. Then a rash of cattle rustling, one or two beeves at a time and then twenty prize shorthorns owned by Emil Bach, the brands altered, sold a hundred miles south. Blue knew who the hell did it, but Jack Castle was smart and no evidence led back to him.

  Jack Castle was running wild, laughing at Blue, throwing wild parties back in the mountains, charming the world like some modern Robin Hood, making friends everywhere, still trying to lure Tammy away, and then Blue decided to get the son of a gun once and for all. A Carter Brothers Stage Company Concord coach was coming from Salt Lake carryin
g some banknotes for cattlemen’s payrolls, and Blue intuited that Jack Castle intended to rob it. Blue knew exactly where, and Blue was right. That night he had quietly ridden to the place where the coach slowed and rounded a bend on a narrow mountain road, and he waited there with a pair of double-barreled scatter guns. Sure enough, Jack and two confederates, all in tan dusters and masks, crawled into hiding a hundred yards away. The coach creaked slowly round the bend, Castle and his confederates stopped it, jumped the coach, unhitched the six-horse team, disarmed the shotgun rider and passengers, pulled off the money sack, cleaned out the pockets of the passengers–-and then discovered Blue, quietly standing behind them with two barrels of double-ought buckshot, the hammers cocked.

  Castle surrendered, grinning, hands waving at the sky. “Took you long enough, Blue,” he said.

  The two confederates confessed to seventeen heists, and implicated Jack Castle in them all. Castle got eleven years. And as he was led out of the county courtroom, he began a little monologue aimed straight at Blue. He swore he would get even if it was the last thing he ever did. He whispered it softly, he shook a manacled hand at Blue, and pulled an imaginary trigger. “Skirt-whipped sheriff,” he said as the bailiff hauled him away. Jack Castle had been a model prisoner. Now and then Blue heard something from other lawmen. Castle was in the pen, doing hard time, smiling, nodding, busting up rock, counting the days.

  Tammy soon met Steve, a newcomer in the Territory, and married two years later. Steve was a fine man, a fine son-in-law, a hard-working Westerner who knew cattle and knew how to prosper in a tough business. Their firstborn was Joey, and two years later Sarah followed. Blue was pleased with all that: at least one of his children had come out just fine.

  So the time had come, Blue thought, worrying about Tammy, Steve, and the two children. I know who, I know why, but I don’t know what’s next.

  Chapter 10

  Blue woke with a start, sneezed, not knowing where he was. Sunlight gauzed through a through a lace-adorned window. A small face stared at him. A thick red and black Hudson’s Bay blanket covered him. He was lying on a horsehair settee.

  Tammy’s parlor. The Seth Thomas said four o’clock.

  “Joey,” he said. “You slept all day, Grampa. Momma wouldn’t let me in here.”

  “What? Didn’t mean to,” Blue said. He struggled up, stiff and half rested, staring at Tammy’s little rascal, who had been waving an iridescent peacock feather in Blue’s nose.

  “That’s why I did it,” Joey said.

  Blue roared like a grizzly, which sent delightful shivers through Joey.

  Last thing Blue knew, he was losing a battle to stay awake in spite of three cups of coffee. Tammy’s warm kitchen and a hot breakfast had done him in.

  The revelations of the morning rushed back to him, and he sat up abruptly. His belt and holster hung from a cowhide chair. Everything seemed peaceful.

  “Where’s your ma?”

  “Henhouse.”

  “Why aren’t you getting the eggs?”

  “Girl stuff,” Joey said. “Sarah can do that.”

  “Chores are everyone’s business, and the sooner you get them done, the more time you have.”

  Blue was full of lectures. The younger generation was going to hell, and he was going to do whatever he could about it.

  He stood and stretched, actually grateful that Joey had tickled him with the peacock feather. A killer was on the loose, and his family was endangered.

  “She take a gun?” he asked.

  “An egg basket.” Joey stared at him. “She gonna shoot the hens?”

  “Well there’s a rooster or two that deserves it,” Blue said. Blue tried out his legs and found they supported him fairly well, not at all badly after all those years. His knee still hurt. He found a coffee pot with some lukewarm java in it, black as spades. The stuff curdled his gizzard, but he downed a cup, all the while peering outside upon those slumbering sunbaked slopes and endless fields and grazing red shorthorn cattle and drifting puffball clouds. “Where’s your pa?” he asked Joey.

  “Making fence.”

  Blue felt his old worries crabbing through him, and headed out into the sunny yard. He could get back to Centerville by late evening, talk with Zeke, make some plans. He didn’t even know where the hell to start. The trail was colder than the north pole. Somewhere out there, Jack Castle was roaming like a rabid wolf, fueled by hatred.

  Blue walked out to the catch-pen to saddle up the bay horse.

  He opened the gate, looked over the stock, mostly ranch animals, and didn’t see the coppery bay. He headed for the barn. Steve must have stalled it, probably wanted to grain it. Blue entered the cavernous red-washed building, was smacked with the pungency of fresh hay and the acrid smell of old manure. A swift survey revealed nothing but empty stalls. Where the hell had Steve Cooper put that horse?

  Blue stormed out of the barn, found Tammy rounding a corner carrying a basket. Little Sarah was tagging along.

  “You’re up,” she said.

  “Where the hell did Steve put that bay?”

  She smiled wryly at his grouchy greeting. “Here, love, take these to the kitchen,” she said, handing the basket to Sarah. “And be gentle.”

  “Hi, Grampa.”

  “Done you break none of those eggs.”

  Sarah stared at him, and wheeled away.

  “Steve didn’t touch your horse,” Tammy said, heading for the catch-pen. “He rode Glory and had a mule packing some wire.”

  Blue watched her stride toward the pen, the breezes whipping her brown dress around her thin frame. She was a woman any man could be proud of.

  She stared. “It was here this morning,” she said, her face taut.

  “You got any paddocks?”

  “Yes...this.” She waved at a pole-fenced pasture that was empty of all animals. “Dammit, that horse is somewhere,” Blue said. “You got any holes in your fence?”

  That got him a glare from her. This was the best-kept ranch in the county, and Steve meant to keep it that way.

  He stormed back to the catch pen, worry building in him like a summer storm. “I’ll need to saddle up a nag and go looking for that bay. Must’ve got out.”

  “That buckskin’s coming along,” she said. “Steve’s been working him. Just needs watching. He hasn’t been under saddle long.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Blue headed for his saddle, which hung over a corral rail, and that’s when he saw it. His scattergun was gone. The sheath was empty. “What the hell?” he said. “Tammy, did Steve borrow my scattergun?”

  She stared mutely at him, fear building in her eyes. “Of course he didn’t,” he said. “Get into the house, and don’t walk, run. Don’t let anyone in.”

  She fled, and he watched her race toward the porch. Out of ancient instinct he slid his six-gun out of its nest at his hip, but there was nothing there, nothing to shoot at. He squinted at the distant lines of trees, the empty green meadows, the circling crows, and meandering, sparkling creek, the roofs of buildings, the occasional black stump that dotted the slopes. He was holding a useless damned piece of iron in his fist.

  Nothing. A worm of fear crawled along his gut. Castle here. Another calling card or two. What was all this? The man was stalking Blue Smith and his family. How’d he know to come here? Had he trailed Blue through the night? Did Zeke tell him? What the hell? This had started as a manhunt, going after a killer, and now Blue was the hunted—and maybe his family too. Maybe even Tammy, the girl Castle could not have.

  Blue slid into the catch-pen with a lariat and eased through the horses. The buckskin was leery and had a knack for putting itself behind half a dozen other nags. Blue was getting impatient. He hadn’t had a good horse since Hector was shot. But quick and catlike, Blue tossed his loop and it settled over the young ranch horse. The buckskin didn’t fight, which surprised him. Steve had gotten a good start on him. The horse had a gentle eye, but it shivered when Blue ran a hand along its back. Well, it
would do. He bridled and saddled the buckskin, worrying about what to do. He didn’t want to leave Tammy unguarded. He wanted to find the bay. He wanted to talk to Steve. He couldn’t go after Castle until he knew that Steve was back at the ranch house and looking after her and the children.

  Tammy stood on the porch, watching, her children gathered at her skirts.

  He boarded the buckskin and found it obedient. “Where’s Steve?” he asked.

  She pointed toward Axe Canyon, a steep defile that led to the hills and into a hidden, mountain-girt meadow.

  “He’s making fence,” she called.

  “I’m going to get him. You get yourself inside and pull the shutters and bar the door.”

  “Oh, Pa...”

  “Do it!”

  She herded the children inside, and he watched the door swing shut and heard the bar fall. It seemed absurd, forting up this peaceful June afternoon, with the whole world glistening sweetly, and the zephyrs gliding through the waving grasses, and the cattle resting content and fat.

  But fear crabbed at Blue. Jack Castle. The buckskin had a rough trot that hammered his tailbone, so Blue contented himself with a fast walk. That was good. He could keep an eye on the dark patches of trees where trouble might lurk. He didn’t know what the hell he would do armed only with a six-gun if he ran into Castle, but he would play the hand he was dealt. For half an hour he rode through the lazy afternoon, piercing a narrows hemmed by ancient gray limestone, following a narrow path that showed recent use, hoof and mule prints melding together.

  Then at last he burst into the hidden valley, a paradise of sloping green meadows guarded by vast slopes that vaulted into timber and high crags. He wondered why Steve was building fence in such a naturally enclosed pasture, but ahead he spotted Steve’s project, a paddock to hold cattle for branding or castrating or doctoring. Steve’s horse and mule stood beside a runnel, picketed on good grass. There was a line of newly-set posts gleaming whitely. But Steve was nowhere in sight. Uneasily Blue pushed the buckskin the last two hundred yards. Steve had to be around there somewhere.