Bannerman the Enforcer 39

by Kirk Hamilton

  “How long before you can gimme something more definite, Doc?” Cato wanted to know.

  “We’ll have a look at your hand in a week, but I’ll likely inspect the forearm tendons before that. You’re lucky to have that arm still attached to your body. If that machete had cut a little deeper, you might well have had gangrene set in, and, if you had made it back here, I might have had to amputate.”

  Cato nodded, his face grim at the memory of that machete fight with the mad gringo outlaw in the Mexican town under the baking sun. i Left hands tied together with a three-foot length of rawhide, a razor-sharp machete each, and both hating each other’s guts. It had been a fight to the death and Cato knew he had been lucky to escape alive and more or less whole, even though the wound in his forearm had near-frozen his finger movement so that he was unable to hold a six-gun, let alone draw with the speed of lightning as he had always done before.

  His pard, Yancey Bannerman, and a gutsy Mexican señorita, had gotten him safely back to the U.S. through marauding killers and eventually here to Doctor Boles. The medic, never one to mince words, but knowing that Cato’s very life depended on his assessment of the wound, had told him bluntly that he might never again have full use of his fingers and the flexor tendons in his right arm.

  “I’ll need to operate right away to even get things hooked-up more or less as they were,” Boles had told him. “But after they’re repaired, there’ll need to be a whole series of further operations before I can give you a final decision about your fingers.”

  “If you think it’d do any good sending him East to surgeons in Philadelphia or New York,” Governor Dukes had said without hesitation, “you just say so, Doc, and he’ll be on his way.”

  “Only one man could do it better’n me,” Boles had replied without boasting, “and he’s gone to Europe. Nope. I’ll do what I can. And if, after the third operation, I haven’t been able to give you feeling in the tips of your fingers, Johnny, then I’m afraid it’s a desk job for you.”

  “Like hell!” Cato had gritted and even now, four operations later, his resolve had not weakened.

  Even if his hand was not fully operable, he did not aim to stagnate behind a desk. He knew the risk he would be taking, riding the wild trails, with or without his Enforcer authority to back him, with a gun hand that didn’t function perfectly. He would likely be a dead man in the space of a couple of months but he would rather risk that than push a pen or accept what he thought of as Dukes’ ‘charity’, a pensioning-off, because of the wound. He was thirty-seven years old—no, damn it, thirty-seven years young, in his prime, and he would rather die that way, fighting for his life, than live another twenty years surrounded by musty files and clerks.

  “Doc,” he had told Boles firmly, before the first surgery, “you do all you can. I hate chloroform and sickbeds and all that stuff but I’ll endure them and worse for a chance that I’ll get my gun hand workin’ again. You go ahead, do whatever you figure is necessary, try anythin’, even if it’s never been done before. You can’t make things worse.”

  Boles had looked at him soberly. “You’re wrong, John. I could make things a whole lot worse. If I do something wrong, I could cripple your gun hand into a stiff, useless claw.”

  Cato had thought about it long and hard and reached his decision.

  “Go ahead, Doc.”

  And now, after the final operation, he had felt excruciating pain clear to his fingertips. He knew it was only the start, but it was a good sign. Up until now he had had no feeling at all in his fingers, only a subtle numbness that seemed to spread through the bones of his hand like an intolerable ache, just as if he had plunged his hand into an icy mountain stream, withdrawn it, and held it up to the biting wind blowing across a snowdrift.

  “Doc, you’ve given me new hope,” Cato told Boles now as he lay back in his bed. “I got a feelin’ that my fingers’ll be fine, this time.”

  “I’m afraid they have to be, John,” Boles said heavily. “There’s nothing more I can do. I’m sure you’ll be able to flex your fingers when we remove the bandages, because you have feeling in them. But whether that will allow you to have full use of them as before, and whether they will serve you as you need them to ...” He shrugged. “We’ll just have to wait and see about that.”

  “A week. That what you said?” the Enforcer asked.

  “About that.”

  Johnny Cato turned his gaze to the trim young nurse standing by the end of the bed and his intentions were so nakedly obvious in his eyes that she blushed to the roots of her hair.

  “I’m sick, Doc, but I ain’t dead by a long ways. I reckon the time’ll pass pleasantly enough.”

  Boles arched his eyebrows and glanced briefly at the flushed nurse.

  “Just remember there are upwards of fifty stitches in that arm and hand,” he said gruffly, putting away his instruments. He set his stern gaze onto the nurse. “You can give Mr. Cato a sip or two of iced water now, nurse. Say, no more than two teaspoonfuls each hour, for the next two or three hours. You can see that he takes the water at the rate of one spoonful each half-hour if you like. Just remember he needs to rest, too.”

  He winked unsmilingly at Cato and turned and walked out. The young nurse blushed even deeper as Cato grinned at her. He still had one good arm and he figured that was all he needed right now.

  Chapter Two – Time and Death

  It was a complete disaster, and both Deborah and Tate Jarrett knew it.

  The young brother and sister sat by the drift fence at the edge of the pasture and looked at the blackened, smoking corpses of their thirty prime steers. Leastways, they had been prime steers only a few hours ago. Now they were crowbait, food for the buzzards already circling high in the hot still air. The place reeked with the stench of burnt hair and hide and meat, overpowering the sharper smell of singed grass.

  Tate was younger than his sister, lean and knobby-boned like most men in that part of Texas, a sinewy, leathery youth who now looked close on twenty years older than the nineteen he could actually lay claim to. His clothes and flesh were singed and blistered from fighting the brush fire that had wiped out their steers, their only means of meeting the mortgage payment, already a week and a half overdue. The Longbow Bank wouldn’t take kindly to this, Deborah knew, with Seth Bainbridge behind the President’s desk. The man seemed as mean with money as he was with words when his prune-like lips clamped together at mere mention of a request for an extension.

  Deborah was in her mid-twenties, mousey-haired, tanned, her skin already weathered by the sun and wind. She was the driving force of the small ranch, had been ever since their father died three years ago. Their mother had died soon after Tate was born, so Deborah had had a hard life and was used to setbacks, but she figured this was the worst one so far.

  It had happened so easily and it had been such a freak accident that she was tempted to believe that some unknown malevolent force had taken a hand. But Deborah was a God-fearing woman, and put as much faith in her prayers as she did in her hands and her strong back. She wasn’t a passive Christian, though, one who merely turned up to Church on Sundays, sang hymns, said her prayers, and then sat back and waited for them to be answered. When Deborah Jarrett prayed for help she firmly believed it was then her job to go out and start working towards her goal. If God wanted to help her, he would somehow point the way so that her prayers were answered.

  But now, looking at the dead steers, she knew that only a miracle could save the ranch from the Longbow Bank foreclosure.

  They had battled screw-worm in their cattle last season, fighting it with frequent, almost constant administrations of the standard rangeland cure, a foul-smelling mixture of axle-grease and carbolic acid. Deborah and Tate had worked hard to combat this disease and they had gotten on top of it and brought the herd along nicely, packing good solid beef onto the bones, nurturing beeves through the bitter winter with hand-feeding and by building windbreaks for them. They kept the herd deliberately small so they cou
ld devote all this attention to them, for they knew thirty really prime-class head of stock would wipe out their mortgage and give them time to really work at their ranch for their own benefit.

  Then a few mavericks had wandered down out of the hills and they had seemed healthy enough but they had brought a skin disease with them similar to the mange. Every cattleman of that day and age knew the best treatment for the mange was plain old coal oil or kerosene. It really didn’t even take a lot of work. All a man needed to do was fill a can with coal oil and ride in amongst the steers, pouring the raw oil over their hides, regardless. Coal oil was cheap and it was effective.

  Tate had done the job, riding all over the pasture as he chased some of the steers, a couple really bawling and going wild when the oil ran into their eyes. He refilled the can many times but in the course of a morning’s work, he had doused all the steers and counted it a good job well done.

  He had sat in a corner of the pasture, boot hooked over the saddlehorn, wiping his hands on a piece of rag, before building a cigarette. He could still smell the oil on his fingers and swore when he saw the greasy marks left on the cigarette paper. It would taste like coal oil, he figured, but to hell with it, he was dying for a smoke, hadn’t stopped all morning for a draw and this would keep him going till lunchtime.

  The thing was, when he struck the vesta and lit it, there was more coal oil on the paper than he reckoned. The paper cylinder of tobacco flared up abruptly and singed his eyebrows, burned his lips and nose, so that, reacting instinctively, he had wrenched the blazing paper from his mouth and flung it from him.

  The grass of the pasture was dark and greasy from spilled oil. Within seconds of the burning cigarette landing, the pasture was cut by snaking ribbons of flame streaking through the grass. The fire rivers shot beneath the belly of an oil-dripping steer. There was a whoosh and it was a roaring torch in a second, bawling pitifully, running panic-stricken right into the heart of the main bunch that had packed together in a corner of the pasture.

  They might have escaped if their fellow hadn’t run amongst them in its blind, bellowing agony ...

  It had taken an hour for Deborah and Tate to extinguish the grass fire and to keep it away from the drift fence and the thick brush beyond. By then, charred steer carcasses littered the blackened stubble and the herd was entirely wiped out.

  “It was a freak accident, sis!” Tate said hoarsely, throat burning from the smoke he had swallowed, stomach churning from the stench. “A damn lousy string of bad-luck things! The cigarette blazin’ up, me droppin’ it right on an oily patch of grass, the fire catchin’ that lone steer an’ him runnin’ in amongst the others! We’re jinxed, I reckon!”

  Deborah was inclined to agree with him right then. She said slowly:

  “We’ve lost the ranch, Tate. It’s done now. Bad luck or not. We’re lost. And we’re homeless.”

  Tate looked at her sharply. He had never before heard such defeat in his sister’s voice, or seen her shoulders slumped under such a weight of depression. It shook him worse than the knowledge that she spoke the truth about them having lost the ranch. Even so he tried to be optimistic.

  “We can explain to Bainbridge, sis. He’ll have to see it was plain bad luck! He’ll have to!”

  She looked at him almost pityingly.

  “He’ll see it, all right,” she admitted. “But he’ll see it as bad luck for us. Be good luck for him and the Bank, getting our ranch. It’s got mighty potential and all that was holdin’ us back was that mortgage. Once we had it clear, we could’ve had this place worked-up in five years. Now—we’ve lost it.”

  “Hell, sis! Don’t talk like that! Don’t give up! Hell, if you give up where does that leave me? You’ve always been the strong one.”

  She stared at him and pushed a fugitive strand of hair back from her eyes, red-rimmed from smoke. There was a raw blister on her cheek and another one on her neck. Her bodice had been burned through in several places. Her hands were blackened, the nails broken.

  Yet, when she straightened and pulled back her shoulders, it was as if all these things had faded away for she suddenly looked stronger, taller, unbeatable.

  She even managed a faint smile. She put a hand on Tate’s forearm. “You’re right, Tate. I was on the verge of actually giving up. It’s never happened before, but I guess there’s always a first time. But we’ve got nothing to lose now, so we’ll try everything. We’ll get cleaned up and put on our Sunday best, take what money we’ve got and lock up the homestead. First, we stop off in Longbow to see Seth Bainbridge and if, as I suspect, he refuses us more time to pay, we’ll go over his head!”

  She paused and Tate stared in puzzlement. Again Deborah gave him that faint smile.

  “We’ll go on down to Albany and see the President at the bank’s head office. His decision can over-ride any that Seth Bainbridge can make. He may be a big frog in a little puddle in Longbow, but the head office President can make Bainbridge jump when he says so.”

  Tate smiled then. “Heck, sis, you reckon we can talk the big feller into extendin’ our mortgage? You really figure we can do that?”

  Deborah didn’t try to hide her doubts, but she looked at him squarely and said, “What have we got to lose by trying?”

  Tate nodded slowly and then she slipped her arm through his and they walked slowly back towards the ranch house on the ridge near a giant, spreading oak.

  The homestead had been built by their father from logs cut from trees felled in the nearby hills. They had both grown up there within its walls. The section of rangeland it dominated had a great future potential and their father had seen that from the start. But when Mother had fallen ill, he had mortgaged the place time and again in order to pay the doctors’ bills. All in vain.

  When he died, he had little more to leave them than he had at the time his wife had first fallen ill. All his years of effort had gone into paying back the mortgage but he had never managed to wipe it out before his death.

  Now it was up to Deborah and Tate to keep that house, for they saw it as almost a monument to their parents and they didn’t aim to let it go without one hell of a fight.

  All they needed was a little more time.

  But Seth Bainbridge wasn’t about to give it to them.

  In his mahogany-paneled office in the Longbow Federal Bank, he listened silently and without expression as Deborah and Tate told him about the accident that had wiped out their prime steers. Before Deborah even had time to ask for an extension, he began shaking his head.

  He was a well-fed man with plump jowls and these trembled like a turkey’s wattles as he continued to shake his head even as the girl began to ask for more time.

  “Out of the question, Deborah, my dear. I’m sorry. I’ve already given you one extension and now you are a week and— uh—four days past that due date. You know you can’t possibly hope to round up a herd of saleable beeves that would earn you sufficient to pay the Bank what you owe. Not even if we gave you six months’ extension. No, my dear, I’m afraid you’re only wasting your time and mine. I will start foreclosure proceedings forthwith.”

  “Damn you!” muttered Tate, ignoring the warning hand that Deborah placed on his arm. “You’re gettin’ the better deal an’ you know it! You’re gettin’ a better ranch than you loaned the money on in the first place an’ all that’s already been paid off! You can’t close us out like this!”

  Bainbridge sat back in his chair, outwardly calm as he regarded the young rancher. “I would advise you to keep a civil tongue in your head, young man.”

  “To hell with civil talk!” Tate raged. “I don’t have to kowtow to you! It’s a business deal, an’ you’re playin’ it dirty an’ you know it.”

  “I assure you I am operating within the law, Tate. Your father signed a legal contract with the Bank which became your liability upon his death. It’s not the Bank’s fault if you people are incapable of organizing your own affairs so that you can honor your obligations.”

  Deb
orah was standing now, almost physically restraining her brother. Her own eyes were cool as she looked at the banker.

  “Like Tate says, Mr. Bainbridge, we don’t have to eat crow. We asked you politely and you refused. So be it. We’ll have to look for other ways.”

  The banker frowned. “I don’t see what other ways are open to you, but that’s your worry. I will be starting legal foreclosure right away. Good day.”

  Tate looked like he wanted to strike the man and Deborah would have been glad to help him but she knew that it would gain nothing.

  Pulling Tate after her, she left Bainbridge’s office, and down on Longbow’s main street she turned him towards the railroad depot.

  It looked like their only hope now was the bank’s head office in Albany.

  They were still there. Yancey lowered the field-glasses from his eyes and muttered a curse. Even without the glasses he could see the smudge of dust out there on the badlands’ trail that told him Tallis’ kinfolk were still after him.

  He had been riding for close on a week now—he had lost count of the actual days—and the men out there had dogged him all that time, night and day, keeping on the pressure, forcing him to move out into the badlands. They had come close on two occasions, close enough for him to see there were three of them, two negroes and a white man. He had shot the white man’s horse from under him but he must have gotten another from somewhere for Yancey had counted three horsemen seen through the lenses of the field-glasses.

  He was on a rim now, above a wide, sandy-floored canyon. It was a good place to hole-up, though he didn’t want to spend the time on a shootout. Still, he knew if he didn’t, they might close the gap and come in and take him by night. The big-chested black had stepped down a gopher hole and strained a tendon in its left leg. This had slowed him considerably, and he figured if it hadn’t happened he might well have outdistanced the pursuers.

  Now the black couldn’t go much farther. Its fetlock was badly swollen and it had started to limp badly. In country like this, he couldn’t force it on, for there was too much cover that could be used by the killers to close in on any camp he might make.