Dead Before Sundown

by William W. Johnstone

  The other men concentrated their fire on the deadfall behind which Frank crouched. He had to duck lower as slugs slammed into the log and sent splinters and chunks of dead bark flying.

  When he risked a look again, he saw that one of the other men had spurred over to the bearded hombre. He reached down, grasped the bearded man’s wrist, and hauled him up.

  “Let’s get out of here!” the bearded man shouted.

  The men who were still mounted wheeled their horses and galloped toward the cliff, turning still more to race along parallel to the rocky face. They must have known where a trail was, because moments later they vanished into the trees that grew almost to the base of the cliff.

  Frank kept his rifle trained on the spot where they had disappeared as he listened to the hoofbeats fade. It sounded like they were really lighting a shuck out of here, but he suspected a trick.

  “Frank!” Salty called.

  “Stay where you are!” Frank replied. “Don’t come out until we’re sure they’re not doubling back! Are the two of you all right?”

  “We’re not hurt,” Meg called back. “How about you?”

  “I’m fine,” Frank told her.

  After a moment he couldn’t hear the horses anymore. He waited another fifteen minutes just to be sure before he stood up behind the deadfall.

  “All right,” he told Salty and Meg. “I’m pretty sure they’re gone now.”

  The two of them emerged from their hiding places in the pines. Salty went to gather up the horses and mules while Meg hurried over to join Frank as he went to check on the man he had shot off one of the horses.

  The man was dead, his eyes staring lifelessly at the sky. Frank had never seen him before.

  “I’m sorry,” Meg said. She pointedly avoided looking at the corpse. “They were on top of us before we knew what was happening. We tried to convince them to go on about their business, but they jumped us.”

  “What is their business?” Frank asked as he reloaded the cartridges he had burned in the Winchester. “Did they say?”

  Meg shook her head. “No. They seemed to have some idea that Salty might be a lawman, though. That’s what it sounded like from some of the talk I overheard.”

  “I used to be, you know,” the old-timer said as he came up leading the horses and the mules. “Range detective, anyway, and unofficial deputy a time or two.”

  Frank said, “If they were worried about star packers, that means they were likely up to no good.”

  Salty nodded. “I reckon you could bet a hat on that.”

  “Do you think they have anything to do with Palmer?” Meg asked.

  Frank frowned as he thought about it. After a moment, he said, “I don’t see how they could. But there are things going on out here that we obviously don’t know anything about.”

  “Dang mountains is downright crowded,” Salty said.

  “The same thought occurred to me. And it’s worse than you think, because I found those men you and I heard earlier, Meg.”

  She looked confused. “It couldn’t have been the same bunch. They came from opposite directions along the creek.”

  “That’s right. The men I saw appeared to be some sort of smugglers.” Frank thought about the chests he had seen strapped to the pack animals of the bearded man’s gang. “I don’t suppose this bunch said anything about what they were carrying?”

  “Not a word,” Meg replied. “What in the world is going on here, Frank?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I reckon it would be a good idea for us to find out.”

  Salty said, “I figured we’d stay on Palmer’s trail and keep headin’ for Calgary.”

  “The problem with that is, we don’t know whether or not Palmer has run into those smugglers. He could have even joined up with them.”

  Salty raked his fingers through his beard. “So we got to find them so-called smugglers, dodge that other bunch o’ killers, and look for Palmer all at the same time?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Frank admitted with a shrug.

  “You don’t never do nothin’ simple, do you, Frank?”

  “Well, sooner or later it usually comes down to killing.” Frank’s mouth tightened into a grim line. “Can’t get much more simple than that.”

  Anton Mirabeau seethed with anger. He and his companions had climbed to a rocky promontory where they could look back down the mountainside. One of his men had a pair of field glasses in his saddle bags. Mirabeau took them and scanned the rugged landscape that fell away in front of him, searching for any sign of the two men and the blond girl.

  He didn’t see them. Scowling in disgust, he handed the glasses back to the other man.

  “What do we do now, Anton? We’re short a horse.”

  “We’ll go back and get Pierre’s horse,” Mirabeau said. “From the way he fell, he won’t be needing it anymore.”

  Another rider spoke up. “I don’t like losing a man.”

  Mirabeau turned angrily toward him. “You think I do? Pierre was like a brother to me!” He made a curt gesture. “You all are. We are a band of brothers, are we not?”

  A couple of the men shrugged. The others just regarded him sullenly. They had started out on this journey with such high hopes, and now one of their number was dead.

  “The plan will proceed,” Mirabeau declared. He couldn’t allow their resolve to weaken. “Pierre will not be there to see us triumph, but triumph we will. Come. We’ll fetch his horse.”

  Mirabeau rode double with one of the other men this time as they headed back toward the meadow where the fight had taken place. He was confident that the man called Frank and the other two would be long gone by now.

  That turned out to be true. The three of them were gone … but they had taken Pierre’s horse with them. Pierre still lay there lifeless on the ground.

  Mirabeau ground his teeth together for a moment before he got control of his surging emotions. “We will bury him,” he declared. “Then we push on. We will take turns riding double. Our horses are strong. They will be all right.”

  This was a setback, though. There was no doubt about that. At least they still had the money for the guns. Soon, Joseph and Charlotte would make contact with the Americans and arrange the transaction. Soon, the Métis would have what they needed to win their freedom. That was the most important thing.

  But once that goal was accomplished, Mirabeau intended to turn his attention elsewhere. He would find out who Frank was. More importantly, he would find out where Frank was.

  And once he did, Mirabeau would settle the score.

  The man called Frank would die.

  Chapter 13

  They took the dead man’s horse with them. That would allow them to push on without having to wait for the animal that had gone lame to heal completely.

  Frank thought about trying to bury the man, but they didn’t have a shovel and it would be a difficult chore scratching out a grave in this rocky ground.

  Anyway, the hombre had tried to kill them, so Frank didn’t feel too bad about leaving him. Maybe the rest of the gang would come back and lay him to rest properly.

  The three of them mounted up and headed back to the creek where Frank had left the other horse.

  “I think it would be a good idea to find some other place to hole up for a while,” he commented as they were making their way down the heavily wooded slope.

  “Yeah, that bunch knows where we were campin’, so we ought to move,” Salty agreed.

  Meg put in, “Whatever errand they were on, it seemed to be important to them. Maybe they won’t take the time to bother coming after us.”

  “Maybe not,” Frank said, “but we can’t afford to take that chance.”

  The lame horse had wandered a short distance down the creek while grazing on the thick grass, but it wasn’t hard to find him. Once they had taken him in tow, they left the stream and headed for the far side of the valley.

  Frank hoped he could find some place over there wher
e they could fort up. He planned to go scouting for the smugglers and also for the gang of French-Canadian mixed-bloods, but he wasn’t going to set out on that mission until he had a safe place to leave Salty and Meg.

  “Métis,” he said suddenly.

  “What?” Meg asked.

  “Those fellas who grabbed the two of you, that’s what they’re called,” Frank said. “Métis. I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but I’ve heard the word. They’re the descendants of the early-day French fur trappers and the Indians who lived here when the white men first came to this part of the world.”

  He recalled hearing something else about them, too, something that nagged at him as if it was important, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.

  They came to a ridge that jutted up abruptly from the relatively flat ground of the valley. It was too steep for the horses to climb, so they turned and rode along the ridge until Frank spotted a wide crevice that ran back into the rock, as if someone had taken a giant knife and tried to hack the ridge into two pieces.

  The crevice’s opening was screened somewhat by trees and brush. Frank reined in and studied it for a while, deciding that with a little work they could conceal the opening even more than it already was.

  “That’s it,” he said, pointing. “We’ll put the animals in there, then drag enough brush into the mouth of the crevice that nobody’ll be likely to notice it if they ride past.”

  Salty nodded. “I reckon that might work, all right. Be a good place to fight off an attack, too. They couldn’t come at you from but one direction.”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Come on.”

  Once they were through the screen of brush at the mouth of the crevice, they found that it formed a box canyon extending about fifty yards into the ridge. The canyon was approximately twenty yards wide at its widest point, narrowing down to nothing at the far end.

  A man could probably climb up and down the walls inside the canyon. A horse definitely couldn’t negotiate them.

  “We’ll have to have somebody standin’ guard all the time,” Salty said, “but we can hold this place if we have to.”

  Frank nodded. “I agree. You and Meg can stay here while I try to find out why these mountains are so blasted crowded all of a sudden.”

  “Don’t you think it would be better if we all went looking for those smugglers and that gang of Métis, or whatever you called them?”

  “It’s a one-man job,” Frank said firmly.

  Salty chuckled. “Danged if you don’t sound like all the other fellas I ever partnered up with. Always so dadburned stubborn and determined to go it alone.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll come back for you,” Frank told the old-timer with a grin.

  “Oh, I ain’t worried. I know you’ll come back.” Salty paused. “We got the grub.”

  Frank laughed. “Let’s drag some more brush up to hide that entrance.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon working to conceal and fortify the box canyon. Frank used the pack mules to drag some logs into the canyon; then he and Salty stacked them three deep and five high to form a barricade of sorts, behind which they could kneel to fire their rifles if they needed to.

  By the time that was done, it was too late for Frank to venture out in search of either of the groups they had encountered earlier in the day. He would start his search in the morning.

  Salty built a small fire to boil coffee, fry bacon, and cook biscuits. While he was doing that, Frank and Meg made sure that all the horses were taken care of.

  After supper, they put out the fire. It would be chilly without the warming flames, but night was falling and they didn’t want to announce their presence here in the canyon.

  “I’ll take the first watch,” Frank said. “Salty, are you all right with the second turn?”

  “Sure. When you get to be my age, you don’t sleep much, anyway.”

  Frank knew what he meant. He wasn’t that far behind Salty in years.

  “I can take a turn, too,” Meg offered.

  Frank shook his head. “You’ll be responsible for keeping an eye open during the day tomorrow while I’m gone, so you’ll need to be alert then.”

  “All right,” she said with a grudging shrug. “I just want to do my share.”

  “Don’t worry, you will.”

  Salty and Meg turned in, rolling in their blankets near the glowing ashes of the fire, which would continue to give off a little heat for a while. At this latitude, the nights cooled off quickly once the sun was down.

  Frank took his rifle and walked to the mouth of the canyon, where he sat on the log barricade and listened to the small, stealthy sounds of nocturnal life carrying on around him. Everything seemed peaceful.

  He wished once again that he had Dog with him, as well as Stormy. The big cur and the rangy gray stallion could be counted on to warn him if anybody came sneaking around.

  They were hundreds of miles away in Seattle, though. Knowing that made Frank feel a mite lonely.

  So did the fact that he had no idea where his son was at this moment. Conrad had been through hell in the past year or so, losing his wife that way and then abandoning the life he had been living to roam the Southwest as a gun-toting loner, always getting in one scrape or another.

  Like father, like son, Frank thought wryly. That was how the old saying went, wasn’t it? When he and Conrad had first met, the younger man had been determined to have nothing to do with him and to be as little like him as possible.

  Fate, though, had had other ideas.

  Some men would have been glad that their sons were following in their footsteps. For Conrad’s sake, Frank would have given anything for that not to be true in their case.

  Unfortunately, the clock couldn’t be turned back. The tragedies of the past couldn’t be erased.

  This time, even in his musing, he heard the rustle of footsteps behind him. Turning, he saw Meg coming toward him. Enough starlight filtered down into the canyon for him to recognize her slender figure.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked quietly. “You’re supposed to be asleep.”

  “That’s easier said than done.”

  Even from here, Frank could hear Salty sawing logs. He laughed and said, “Yeah, I reckon you’re right. He’ll quiet down after a while, though.”

  She sat down on the piled-up logs beside him. “I was thinking about what happened earlier today, Frank.”

  “You mean when those fellas grabbed you and Salty?”

  “Before that. I’m talking about when you and I walked up the creek from camp.”

  Frank had thought that might be what she meant, although he’d hoped that it wasn’t.

  He wasn’t going to waste time pretending that he didn’t understand. He said, “We came mighty close to making a mistake there.”

  “Would it really have been a mistake, Frank?”

  “I think it would have been. Some things, it’s just hard to get past.”

  “Like the difference in our ages?”

  “Yeah, that and the fact that I’m too blasted old and set in my ways to ever settle down again. At least, not until I get too decrepit to ride a horse, and you wouldn’t want me then.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Meg said. “Anyway, you haven’t heard me say anything about settling down, have you?”

  Gruffly, Frank said, “Well, that’s what you deserve. A gal as young and pretty as you ought to have a husband and a home. A passel of kids, too.”

  “That sounds good … if I ever met the right man.”

  “You will,” he said. “That is, if you ever stop gallivanting around and getting into all these shooting scrapes with a couple of old mossbacks like Salty and me.”

  She laughed. “I’ve had more fun the last year than all the rest of my life put together.”

  “Well, then, you’ve got a mighty odd notion of fun, that’s all I can say. I seem to recall nearly drowning in the ocean, and being half frozen to death, and getting shot at
a lot.”

  “I guess it’s the company I was keeping while that was going on that made it enjoyable.”

  “Maybe so. But it’s no life for a young woman.”

  Meg sighed and leaned her head against his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Frank. I’m done. I’m not going to throw myself at you anymore.” She paused. “One of these days you’re liable to regret not taking me up on it, though.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a second.”

  They sat there in companionable silence for a while. Back at the camp, Salty snorted loudly, then grew quiet.

  “Hear that?” Frank asked. “He rolled over.”

  “Yeah. I guess I’d better go back and try to get some sleep.” Meg stood up. She rested a hand on Frank’s shoulder and bent over to brush against his cheek. “Good night … Uncle Frank.”

  “Get on with you,” he growled in response to her mocking tone. She laughed lightly as she turned to walk back to the bedrolls.

  She was wrong about one thing, despite what he’d told her. He wouldn’t regret this, because he knew he was doing the right thing.

  But sometimes being an honorable fella was damned inconvenient, he thought with a sigh.

  Chapter 14

  Palmer had been following Joseph and Charlotte Marat all day without them being aware that he was anywhere around. Their Indian ancestors would have been ashamed of them for being so unobservant, Palmer thought.

  For one thing, they didn’t appear to know what they were doing or where they were going. They roamed back and forth among the little valleys between the mountains, seemingly aimlessly.

  Maybe there was some method to their madness, but Palmer was damned if he could see it.

  Sometime during the afternoon, he heard a single shot. Then, an hour or so later, another shot was followed by a whole flurry of gunfire that echoed through the mountains, sounding like a small-scale battle.

  It was hard to be sure, but Palmer thought the shots were at least a mile west of the area where he was following Joseph and Charlotte.

  They heard the guns, too, and seemed to be quite agitated by the shooting, reining in their horses and looking around wildly. Palmer, watching them from the top of a wooded knoll about a quarter of a mile away, wondered if they were going to turn around and ride back the other way to see what all the shooting was about. He supposed that if they did, he would have to follow them.