Between Hell and Texas

by Ralph Cotton

  “Yep, Henry is one of the deputies in Somos Santos,” said Higgs. “Lematte didn’t want a big gunman like you carrying a mad-on at him. So he sent us to see if you was still around.”

  “That’s all? Just check on me?” Dawson asked.

  “Yes, so help me that was all,” said Higgs. “Me and those other two ain’t fools. We wasn’t about to try and do you any harm.”

  “And you three came straight here?” asked Dawson, just to see how persistent they had been in their search.

  “No, we started at the old house where he heard you’d be staying. We followed your tracks from there toward here, what was left of them anyway.”

  “This Snead, what does he look like?” asked Dawson, already having a pretty good picture of the broad, powerful young man who’d dragged him outside the saloon and shoved him up into his saddle.

  “He’s your height, or thereabout,” said Higgs. “He’s got a big old gold tooth right up in front of his mouth.” He took a drink of tepid water and poured a thin trickle onto the wet bandanna. “Strong as an ox, he is. Got broad shoulders like a bare-knuckle fighter. He lifts nail kegs, whiskey barrels, and such…just to keep himself strong.” He looked Dawson up and down. “That’s why I say, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, him knocking you down that way.”

  “I’m not ashamed of it,” said Dawson. He considered it for a moment then said, “A gold tooth, eh?” He pulled up a vague image of Henry Snead’s smirking face standing above him while he lay on the ground wracked by pain.

  “Yep,” said Higgs, dabbing the wet bandanna to his swollen forehead. “The word is he didn’t even have a missing tooth there. He just wanted to wear a shiny gold tooth…had the dentist yank one out and replace it.”

  Higgs eyed him closely. “I reckon you’ll be calling on him now that you know who to look for?”

  “I’m not looking to even the score,” said Dawson.

  “You’re not, sure enough?” Higgs asked, giving him a dubious look.

  “No, I’m not,” said Dawson. “If I send you back to Somos Santos, will you tell him so? Tell him and Lematte both that as far as I’m concerned it’s over. I don’t want any trouble.”

  Higgs’s look turned to one of disbelief. “You are Crayton Dawson, ain’t you? The man who helped bring down the Talbert Gang?”

  “That’s right, I am,” said Dawson. “And if I wanted to even any scores, I could have killed all three of you men up here. But I didn’t, did I?”

  “No, and I’m obliged for that,” said Higgs.

  “Then tell Lematte and Snead that all I want is to be left alone. Can you make them understand that for me?”

  “I’ll try my best,” said Higgs. “Can I walk on back to town now?”

  “You’re free to leave here when you feel like it,” said Dawson. “But you don’t have to walk to Somos Santos.” He nodded over his shoulder. “There stands your horse. I caught him for you.”

  Higgs squinted as if there might be some trick. “Alls I got to do is get on my horse and ride?”

  “That’s all,” said Dawson. “But don’t let me catch you snooping around spying on me and the woman again.” He looked embarrassed. “Now get up and go.” He raised Higgs’s pistol from behind his gun belt, unloaded it into the dirt and pitched it to him. “Here’s your side arm.”

  “Obliged,” Higgs said, struggling to his feet, still looking suspicious. “How come you’re being so good to get along with, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I want to be able to ride into Somos Santos when I feel like it and not have to be looking over my shoulder,” said Dawson.

  “No kidding?” Jewel Higgs chuckled, dusting the seat of his trousers and shoving his pistol into his holster.

  “That’s right,” said Cray Dawson, ignoring Higgs’s bemused laugh. “Is that going to be a problem?”

  “Not to me it ain’t,” said Higgs, walking toward his horse, still holding the wet bandanna to his swollen forehead. He unhitched his horse and climbed up into his saddle. “I can see where Henry Snead might have a hard time with it.”

  “Then I’ll have to deal with that when the time comes,” said Dawson. He watched Higgs turn his horse and ride away. Before Higgs’s dust had settled on the trail, Dawson raised himself into his saddle and said to his horse, “Come on, Stony. Let’s hope that’s the end of it.”

  Dawson rode back to the hacienda and found Carmelita watching for him through the front window. She hurried out to him carrying a rifle, but then she dropped it on the ground and threw her arms around him as he stepped down from Stony’s back. Dawson felt her trembling against him. “Take it easy,” he said, hoping to soothe her. “Everything’s all right, see?” He held her back for a second at arm’s length, letting her get a reassuring look at him.

  But she only looked him up and down quickly, then pressed herself back against him, saying close to his chest, “I heard shooting! I was afraid you had been killed!”

  “Those were my shots, Carmelita,” he said, holding her, letting her settle down in her own time. “I fired those shots to scare them away. We’re all right. They’re gone.” He stroked her dark hair.

  “They?” she asked. “How many were there?”

  “Three of them,” he said. “But don’t worry, they’re gone now.”

  “Three of them, and they were watching us?” she said, trembling again. “I can’t stand thinking that their eyes were on us while we—”

  “No, no,” said Dawson, “put it out of your mind. They were too far up to see anything if they’d wanted to. But they weren’t watching us,” he lied. “They had only gotten there about the time I saw the flash of the sunlight off of a canteen.” He wasn’t about to mention the telescope he’d kept and shoved down into his saddlebags on his way back.

  “Oh?” She seemed to ease down. She looked up into his eyes, saying, “They were not watching us?”

  “No,” said Dawson.

  “But how do you know if you scared them away?” she asked.

  “Because I caught one of them,” Dawson said, seeing that he would have to tell her the whole story, except for the part where the three men had been taking turns staring at them through the telescope. “They’re deputies for Martin Lematte, the new sheriff in Somos Santos. The one I caught told me that Lematte sent them to check up on me. They tracked me all the way here from my place.”

  “Check up on you?” Carmelita drew back from against his chest and looked up into his eyes. “Check on you? How? Why? Haven’t they done enough to you already?”

  “It sounds like Lematte mostly just wanted to know my whereabouts,” said Dawson. “The man who hit me works for him. A tough fellow by the name of Henry Snead. Lematte is afraid I’ll think he was behind this.”

  “And was this Sheriff Lematte behind this?” Carmelita asked.

  “That’s a good question. I don’t know.” Dawson looked away from her for a moment. She saw something cross his mind. Then he said, “Snead is no doubt wondering if I’m going to come looking for him, to even the score.”

  “Are you?” Carmelita asked.

  “That’s not the message I sent to him,” said Dawson, appearing to not want to give her a straightforward answer.

  “Yes, I understand that it is not the message you sent. But are you?” she asked pointedly.

  “I think I’m going to have to,” Dawson said grudgingly.

  Carmelita shook her head. “Even though you have told his man that you want no trouble with him?”

  “I’ll give this man no better than he gave me, Carmelita,” said Dawson. “He hit me without warning. When and if I hit him, I’ll do it the same way. He didn’t try to kill me, so I won’t try to kill him, unless he brings it to that level.”

  “Listen to yourself! You say you want to put an end to this thing,” said Carmelita. “There will be no end to it until somebody is willing to take their loss in order to stop the violence.”

  “I thought that was what I did,” said Dawson. “I
took my loss. I came here and tried to put it behind me.” He shrugged. “After all, except for the pain it caused me, it was only a punch in the gut.” A silence passed as he seemed to run it all through his mind. “Had this happened to me a year or two ago, it would have been over before I rode out of town. Now, because I’m thought of as a big gun, this thing is going to keep on going whether I want it to or not.”

  “Then you will soon be going to Somos Santos looking for trouble?” Carmelita asked.

  “No,” said Dawson, “I won’t go looking for trouble. But I’d be a fool not to go prepared for it.”

  “Why go at all?” she asked.

  “Because it’s my home town. It’s the only place to go for supplies in forty miles,” Dawson said. “How would it look, riding forty miles out of my way over somebody punching me in the stomach.”

  “Oh, I see,” said Carmelita. “So it is a matter of your pride, and of appearance. You are concerned with what others will think of you.”

  “If you think that, you don’t know me as well as I thought you did,” said Dawson. “I’ve never cared about pride, or what kind of showing I make to the rest of the world, Carmelita. But folks call me a gunman now. Whether I want to be one or not, it doesn’t matter. That’s how folks are seeing me and that’s how it is, I reckon. It’s bad enough that other gunmen want to try me on. If the word gets out that I’m ducking a man who has already made me crawl in the dirt, even saddle tramps and backshooting cowards will want to try to put a bullet in me, just to be able to say they did it.”

  “But if you do not go to Somos Santos, who will know that you are ducking anyone? Perhaps in time this incident will die down and be forgotten.”

  “I wish it were so,” said Dawson. “But I didn’t go looking for those three. They came here looking for me. There’ll be others now that they know where I am. The more I let them push, the harder they will push. The more I let them take, the more they will take from me.” Without mentioning the telescope or the fact that the three men had been spying on them, he added, “I can’t let them have the next move, Carmelita. I’ve got to get ahead of them and turn this thing around…for both of our sakes. Do you understand what I mean?”

  She nodded in silence, avoiding his eyes on hers. Then she took a step back from him in resolve, put an arm around his waist, and said, “Come. I must feed you and help you keep up your strength.”

  Chapter 9

  Eddie Grafe and Joe Poole didn’t slow down long enough to rest their horses until they’d reached the bottom of the hill line and traveled across a three-mile stretch of high, rolling ground dotted with mesquite, scrub juniper, and piñon. When they finally stopped at the crest of a creek bank, Joe Poole jumped down from his saddle, raised his horse’s right front hoof and examined it. “Just my luck, he’s stone-bruised sure as hell!” he said in disgust.

  “We ain’t got time for no stone-bruised cayuse, Joe, damn it to hell!” Eddie Grafe exclaimed, looking back across the undulating trail at a distant rise of dust. “That gunman’s onto us! We’re going to have to go fast!”

  Joe Poole dropped the horse’s hoof from his hands and winced, studying the rise of dust. Then he said, “Well, we ain’t no match for facing a cold-blooded gunman like Crayton Dawson straight up.”

  “We sure as hell can’t outrun him riding double,” said Grafe, nodding at Poole’s injured horse.

  “If we start dragging along, he’ll kill us both the way he did poor Higgs.”

  “You’re right,” said Grafe, looking all around. “We better find a good spot to put an ambush on him.”

  “There ain’t no better spot than right here,” said Poole “I say we get ready, drop him as soon as he clears that rise.”

  “Then we better hit hard. He’ll get real suspicious once he sees we’re not making any more dust in front of him,” Grafe said.

  “I ain’t going down without a fight,” Poole vowed.

  “Me neither,” said Grafe. He dropped from his saddle and pulled his rifle from its boot.

  Beside him Poole did the same, saying “We should’ve done this in the first place, instead of letting him run us down out of the hills.”

  “It’s too late to worry about what we should’ve done,” said Grafe, checking his Spencer rifle before levering a round up into the chamber. “We won’t get a second try at saving our own lives here. Soon as he tops the rise, turn him into chopped mutton!”

  Jerking a double-barreled shotgun from his saddle boot, Poole said, “don’t worry, he won’t know what hit him.” He broke open the shotgun, quickly checked to make sure it was loaded, then snapped it shut. They waited tensely, watching the dust until the sound of pounding hoofs came into hearing range. Then the two separated, putting the thin trail between them, letting their horses’ reins fall to the ground.

  In moments, the hoofbeats had grown closer, coming up on them from the other side of the rise. “Get ready!” said Grafe.

  “I am ready,” Poole hissed in reply, his hands tightening on the shotgun. As the ground beneath his feet vibrated to the rhythm of the coming hooves, he cocked both hammers on the shotgun and raised it to his shoulder.

  Poole whispered as the horse and rider sprang into sight, “This is for Jewel, you son of a bitch!” He fired both barrels, unable to stop himself when he saw at the last second the terrified face of the very man he had just sworn to avenge.

  “Oh, no!” Jewel Higgs screamed a split second before the shots from Poole’s double-barrel and Grafe’s rifle hit him at the same time. The blasts launched him upward from his saddle and flung him backward and to the ground like a bundle of rags.

  “My god, Poole! What have you done?” Grafe shrieked, running to the bloody body lying sprawled in the dirt.

  “Me?” shouted Poole, running alongside him. “What about you? We both shot him!”

  “I didn’t mean to!” cried Grafe, throwing himself onto his knees beside Higgs, whose entire body quivered and tried to rise up, his face, chest, and belly mangled by buckshot and lead, and covered with dark blood. “No, Jewel! You lay still now,” said Grafe. “You’re hurt really bad. We’ll save you!”

  “Get…get the—” Higgs tried to talk, his voice a choking, halting rasp.

  “What’s that?” asked Poole, staring down and shouting close to Higgs’s face. “Speak to me, Jewel! What did you say?” he asked the bloody face staring up at him, the eyes glazing and slipping fast.

  Jewel Higgs struggled hard to speak. “Get…get, the…”

  “Yeah, Jewel!” said Grafe, “Tell me, what is it you want? You just tell us!”

  “Get…get—” Higgs was fading fast. Grafe and Poole saw it. “Get the…hell, away, from me…” he managed to say, his voice faltering and ending in a deep sigh as his face went slack and he gave in to death.

  “Lord, Eddie, we’ve killed the poor bastard,” said Joe Poole, turning loose of Higgs and standing up, dusting his knees. “How the hell are we going to explain this to Lematte?”

  “Explain what to Lematte?” asked Eddie Grafe. “How we got ambushed up in the hills? How somebody shot poor Higgs dead with a rifle?”

  “No, I mean about us killing him!” said Poole, not getting what Grafe was trying to tell him. “It wasn’t Dawson who killed him, it was us. His own pals!”

  “I don’t know about you,” said Grafe, “but the last time I saw Higgs we were all three up in the hills above the place we tracked Dawson to. If Lematte wants to know, Higgs got himself shot clear out of his saddle. I ain’t saying it was Dawson who shot him, and I ain’t saying it wasn’t. We just tell it like it happened, except we drop the part about him riding in and you blowing him to hell with that shotgun.”

  “Why do you keep acting like I’m the only one who shot him, Eddie?” Poole protested. “We both had a hand in it.”

  Ignoring Poole’s question, Grafe said, “Does that sound about right to you? We just stick to our story on this. Don’t try to get clever and make up a bunch of details. It’s them
added details that trip a man up every time.” His hand dropped close to his holstered pistol. “Are we agreed on what I’m saying?”

  “I ain’t adding no details; I’ve never tried to be clever in my life,” said Poole.

  “Are we agreed on what I’m saying?” Grafe repeated in a stronger tone.

  Joe Poole swallowed a dry knot in his throat and stared down at the body of Jewel Higgs in the blood-splattered dirt. “Yeah, I understand you, Eddie,” he said quietly. “I believe that’s the best thing we can do.”

  “Come on then, give me a hand,” said Grafe, bending back down beside Jewel Higgs’s body. “Let’s drag him off a ways and get him underground.” He grimaced with remorse. “This is the awfulest mess I ever seen.”

  Poole bent down with him and together they picked the bloody body up between them and carried it off the trail. “It’s a shame them boots are going to have to go to waste,” Poole said quietly, nodding at Higgs’s limp feet.

  “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, you best put the notion out of your mind, Poole,” Grafe warned him.

  “I’m just saying it’s a shame is all,” said Poole, struggling along with his end of the body.

  They found a sunken spot alongside the creek bed, dropped Higgs’s body in it, and covered it with rocks. When they had finished their task they mounted their horses in silence and rode the rest of the way into Somos Santos as evening shadows began to overtake the land.

  In the back room of the Silver Seven Saloon, Sheriff Martin Lematte looked three new girls over with a gleam in his eyes, a gray wisp of cigar smoke curling upward and drifting above his head. “You gals are in luck, arriving today. I just saw the owner of the Double D Ranch and a few of his hands ride into town. They’re over at the hotel settling in right now. You’ll all three get to make some fast money starting off.”

  “Good,” one of the young women murmured, all three of them looking at one another and nodding.

  “But first,” said Lematte, “I want each of you to tell me a little about yourself.” He blew a thin stream of smoke studiously between his lips, then said, pointing the wet end of the cigar, “You there. What’s your name and where did you come from, sweetheart?” He asked this of a young black girl who stood in the middle of the three, who were standing abreast, facing him for inspection.