Kilkenny waved a casual hand. “I’m sorry, Lord. I meant nothing. Only you and Steele have been damn hard on Davis, and he’s a man you’d like if you just got acquainted.” He paused. “By the way, what’s your theory on the killing of Des King?”
For a moment Kilkenny thought the older man would have a heart attack. His face went shockingly white and he clutched hard at the saddle horn. Lord’s teeth set and he turned his tortured, frightened eyes at Kilkenny.
“You better git!” Lord said, after a minute. “You better git goin’ now. An’ if you’ll take a tip from a man, you’ll keep movin’! You hear?”
He turned his horse and walked him away. Kilkenny, puzzled, watched him go. Then feeling eyes upon him, he turned to find Steve Lord staring at him, that strange, white look to his eyes that Kilkenny had glimpsed once before.
“Don’t bother Pa,” Steve said. “He hasn’t been well lately. He’s not been sleepin’ good, and I think this range war has him worried.”
“Worried?”
“Uh-huh. We need money, Kilkenny. If we lose many cows, or this war ruins our range, we’ll not be able to pay our debts. He’s a good man, Pa is. Too good a man, I think. Don’t worry him no more, Kilkenny.”
They talked quietly then, of range conditions, of vanishing cattle and of the trouble between Steele and Lord.
After a few minutes of this, Kilkenny rode his buckskin away from the ranch. Something about Des King was bothering Chet Lord. Well, why not? The man was his brother. They had been raised together, even though King had been much the younger man.
Was Chet himself the killer? No. Kilkenny could not accept that. There was no coyote in Chet Lord. He might kill a man in a stand-up fight, but he’d never shoot one in the back.
Yet, when he thought about it, Kilkenny had a strange feeling that Chet Lord had been worried about Lance Kilkenny, and not about himself.
Was it a premonition of some kind? Why should Chet Lord worry about Lance Kilkenny?
Why should anybody?
What weird, strange thing was happening here, that drove such a man as Chet Lord to the verge of collapse?
CHAPTER 14
MORE AND MORE the chain of events grew tangled. Kilkenny could sense powerful forces building up about him, and nothing so tangible as a simple gun battle awaited him.
Death rode the dry trails of Texas, and the border was now a haunted place where no man knew what tomorrow might bring.
Danger Kilkenny had always known. It was a way of life along the border and in the western lands. It was a thing one accepted with the rising and setting of the sun, and one dealt with it as best one could.
The long dry miles without water, the blazing sun, the cold blast of wintry winds, the rush of the stampede, the howl of wolves, the bucking of a wild horse … these were but taken in stride. And the settling of disputes by gun. It was a way of life—and a price one paid for the freedom, the space, the opportunity.
Yet what rode here was fear. A haunting thing, an elusive enemy that none could see, but one that struck suddenly from the silences.
Kilkenny was used to guns. Forced into a gun battle at sixteen, he had killed his first man.
Since then he had lived with an awareness of death, as had these other men around him. The wild lands offered much to live for but many ways in which to die, none of them easy. It was something a man accepted.
Steve Lord had implied that there was financial trouble, yet remembering the fat cattle he had seen, and the range over which he had ridden, Kilkenny could not convince himself that was true.
It was a cover-up for something else. There had been fresh paint on the Lord buildings—all too rare in Texas—new ranch buildings and new barbed wire.
Yet on the range a killer was loose, a fiendish killer who could kill ruthlessly and without warning. Somewhere in all this welter of trouble and trial there had to be a clue to who he was.
Kilkenny lifted his head and stared down the shadowy valley before him. He was riding back the way he had come, something he rarely did, and which he had scarcely noticed until now, so busy had he been with his thoughts. He glanced ahead, and the old instincts came alive. He was suddenly uneasy.
“Lord’s instilling his fear into me,” he muttered, half-aloud. “A man’s a fool, though, to ride back over the same trail.”
The buckskin was suddenly restive, tossing his head and snorting.
What he did then was sheer impulse. He whipped his horse around suddenly and took it in two quick jumps for the shelter of the wash.
As the buckskin gathered himself for the second jump, Kilkenny felt the whip of a bullet past his face! Then another and yet another, but the buckskin was running all out now and Kilkenny was weaving among the scattered oaks and cedars.
Buck knew what bullets were, and when he hit the edge of the wash he slid to the bottom, legs braced, and in the bottom, he wheeled and raced down the wash at top speed.
Right before them the bend took a turn, and if Buck could make that bend they might outflank the killer.
Lance went around the bend at a dead run, drew up sharply and hit the ground, Winchester in hand, running all out. Flattening himself behind a hummock of sand and sagebrush, he peered through. He moved, trying to see better and a bullet kicked sand into his eyes. He slid back into the wash.
“Spotted me, damn him!”
He sprang to the saddle and circled farther, then again tried the bank. Now he could see the nest of rock from which the killer had first fired.
Nobody was in sight. Then he caught a flicker of movement higher on the hill.
The killer was stalking him!
Crouching low, Lance watched a gap in the rocks. When he caught a shadow there, only a blob of darkness from where he huddled, he fired.
It was only a snap shot, quick, offhand, and it clipped the boulder, ricocheting off into the fading light, whining wickedly.
Then it began, a deadly game of chess, with each man holding a rifle, each maneuvering for a killing shot. Twice Kilkenny almost nailed him, and once a shot clipped a leaf within an inch of his skull.
An hour passed, and Lance had seen nothing. He kept turning, listening, watching the buckskin. Then he began the deadly game of stalking once again, working higher and higher up in the rocks.
Then he found it. A place where a man had knelt to fire, on the ground was a cartridge shell from a Winchester ’73.
He picked it up. “Now that might help,” he mused. “Not too many of them around. Most of the Rangers have them, and I’ve got one. Rusty still uses that old Sharps.
“But say! Tana had one, and if I’m not mistaken, Bonham was packing one.”
Three times now the killer had fired at him, if all three shots had been fired by the same man. Bonham was in the vicinity, but what reason could he have?
Actually, it might be one of many people, all within the general proximity of the places where the firing was done.
Kilkenny was no nearer discovering the killer now than in the beginning, although he had shells from the killer’s six-gun as well as his rifle. Yet he had no evidence aside from a healthy hunch that all the shooting had been done by the same man.
Did the mysterious boss at Apple Canyon have anything to do with it. He had not wanted Kilkenny killed then, so why now?
Bert Polti could be ruled out. Who else had reason to want him dead?
There seemed to be no real reason behind any of the odd killings that had taken place. Some strange influence seemed to be at work, something cruel and evil, something untypical of the range country where men settled their disputes face to face.
Kilkenny avoided trails and worked his way cross-country, varying his route constantly until he reached Botalla. The important thing now was to get Steele, Lord and Davis together to settle their differences. Knowing all three, he was sure they could reach an agreement.
The two big cattlemen were range-hungry, and Davis was a stubborn man, accustomed to making his own way, fighting his
own battles, and asking favors from no man. Each was a rugged man, accustomed to driving ahead. But now they must learn that much was also to be gained through cooperation and mutual assistance.
Botalla lay quiet under a late sun when the buckskin walked down the street. There were the usual loafers sitting around, the usual rigs along the street, people buying supplies or engaged in other business in the town and the locality. Among them were several punchers from the Lord and Steele outfits.
Kilkenny drew up alongside two of them. A short cowboy in bat-wing chaps and a battered gray hat looked at him from his seat on the boardwalk, rolled his quid in his jaws and spat.
“How’s things?” he asked, warily.
“So, so,” Kilkenny shoved his hat back on his head and wiped the sweat from his brow. “You’re Shorty Lewis, aren’t you?”
The short puncher looked surprised. “Sure am. How’d you know me?”
“Saw you one time in Austin. Ridin’ a white-legged roan.”
“I’ll be damned! You sure got a memory. Indians stole that hoss off me three years back. You sure saw me, all right.”
“Got to have a memory, living like I do. A man might forget the wrong face.” He stepped down from the saddle. “You ride for Steele, Shorty?”
“Six years. Before that I was up in the Nation.”
“Did you know Des King?”
Lewis got up slowly. “What’s on your mind, Kilkenny? Des was half-brother to Lord, but he was my friend. We rode together up in the Nation.”
“Lewis, I’ve been doing some nosing around, and I’ve got a hunch that the same man killed Des that killed Carter and Wilkins and a few others around here.”
“But King was killed years ago!” Shorty protested. “Long before this fight got started.”
“Right. I think somebody is riding this range with some other reason for killing men. There’s a man loose … man or woman … who is utterly cold-blooded and vicious. He may have some reason we don’t know, but I think he’s killing for the love of killing. Trouble is, he’s liable to blow the lid off this cauldron and have a lot of good men on both sides shooting each other.”
“What kind of a man would that be? Maybe you’ve got something there, for why would a man shoot into Des after he was down and helpless? Somebody who stood right over him? I was one of the ones who found the body, and Des was alive and struggling when those last shots were fired into him.”
Shorty Lewis looked thoughtful.
“The way he’d moved around in the dirt made us think he’d been paralysed by the first shot, and that then the killer had walked up and deliberately gutshot him whilst looking right straight at him.”
“There was an Indian killed before that, and a prospector, too. Did you know them?” asked Kilkenny.
“Sure … Everybody knew them. Old Yellow Hoss was a Comanche. He done a favor for Lord some time back and the old man kept him around … sort of on a pension-like. He was a good old boy, no harm in him, although in his day he’d been a heap big warrior. Well, one day we found him out on the range, shot in the back.
“No reason for it we could see, and the same with that old prospector … I forget his name, now. The prospector’s stuff had been gone over but nothin’ missin’ but a bone-handled scalpin’ knife he used to pack around. He had no enemies anybody could think of, and nothin’ worth stealin’. His rifle wasn’t taken, and his hoss an’ burros were left adrift.”
“Where were they killed?” asked Lance.
“Funny thing there. All were killed betwixt Apple Canyon and Lost Creek Valley. All but one. Des was killed on Lord range not far from Lost Creek.”
“Shorty? How about you askin’ Webb to come in tomorrow for a peace talk? I’ll have Lord and Davis there.”
Shorty Lewis agreed.
After telling some of the Lord hands to ask Chet to come in, Kilkenny walked his horse down to the general store. Old Joe Frame was selling a bill of goods to Mort Davis’s son. Through him, Lance sent word to Mort.
Rusty Gates was lounging on the boardwalk in front of the Trail House.
“If you swing a loop over the three of them it’ll go a long way in the direction of makin’ peace in the Live Oak. At least this piece of it.”
“Yes,” Kilkenny said, “after we find who is doing all the killing, and round up that outfit at Apple Canyon.”
Gates nodded. He touched his tongue to the edge of the cigarette paper and deftly rolled his smoke.
“May not be so hard. You’ve been makin’ friends, partner. Lots of the local people have been talking to me. Frame, Winston, Doc Clyde, Tom Hollins, and others. They all want peace, and they want some law in Botalla. They intend to show up at your peace conference, and they say if you need a posse, they’ll be ready.”
“That’s good news, the best news. They should carry some weight with both Lord and Steele.”
“Think they’ll try to break up your peace meeting?”
“They might, at that, but I’ve been thinking and I’ve got a little plan.…”
MORNING SUNLIGHT BATHED the dusty street when the riders came in from the Steele ranch. Webb was in the lead, riding with Tana, Jim Weston and two Steele riders. One of them was Shorty Lewis.
Rusty and Kilkenny were standing in front of the Trail House when they rode in. “She’s sure pretty,” Rusty said, staring at Tana. “Prettier’n a button.”
“Why not marry the gal?” said Lance. “Old Webb needs a bright, cow-wise son-in-law, and Tana’s quite a girl. She’s a mite spoiled, but a good steady hand on the bridle and she’d hold her gait.”
“Marry her?” Rusty shook his head. “You must be out of your mind. She wouldn’t even look at the likes of me. Anyway, I thought you were fixing to put your brand on her.”
“Not me,” said Lance. “Tana’s all right, but a man with my reputation had better stay clear of women. Marriage isn’t for me, Rusty, although there’s nothing I’d like better than a place of my own and the right woman. But sooner or later I’ll be too slow on the draw and she’d be a widow.
“No, I’ve been riding alone for a long time now, and I’ll not break any woman’s heart by getting myself killed. Right now there’s nobody. I’m a man alone.”
Lance paused. “If I was to change, it wouldn’t be Tana. I like to tease her a little, because she’s had it too easy with men and everything else, but that’s all. If I ever find a woman to tie to, she’ll have to be one with staying quality, the kind who can ride where I go, live as I live, and stay right with me through it all.
“It would be no life for a woman, Rusty. There’s loneliness and change and moving all the time, roosting no place, and always the chance of a shot in the back by somebody hunting a reputation, or some brother or friend of a man who took cards in the game and drew too slow at the finish.”
Webb Steele had rounded his horse to the hitching rail and swung down. Kilkenny looked at him with amused appreciation. Webb rode like a king, dismounted like one, and walked into the Trail House as one who commands, whose rights have never been questioned.
There were many such, and they had not come to it at once, for men who walked that way had won the right to do so. They knew what they could do and they did it.
A few minutes later, Chet Lord came in with Steve. Then the door opened and Mort Davis stood there. He stared bleakly at Steele and Lord, then crossed to the fireplace and stood with his back to it, his thumbs hooked in his belt, prepared for whatever might come.
Kilkenny sat down at the head of the table. “Guess we should call this meeting to order, gentlemen,” he said, quietly. “The way I hear it Lord and Steele are disputing about who fences in Lost Creek, and Mort here is holding Lost Creek.”
“He’s holdin’ it,” Steele said, “but he’s got no right to it.”
“Easy now,” Davis said imperturbable. “How’d you get your range, Steele? You just rode in an’ squatted. Well, that’s what I done. I’d been figurin’ on settlin’ Lost Creek for fifteen years. I com
e west with Jack Halloran’s wagon train and saw Lost Creek then.”
“Huh?” Webb Steele turned sharply around. “You rode with Halloran? Why, Tana’s mother was Jack Halloran’s sister!”
Davis stared at him. “You’re not foolin’? You all from Jackson County?”
“We sure are! Why, you old coot! Why didn’t you tell me you was that Davis? Jack used to tell us how you an’ him—”
Webb stopped suddenly, looking embarrassed.
“Go right ahead, Steele,” Kilkenny said, smiling. “I always knew if I could get you two together you’d be friends. Same thing with Lord here. You’re all good men. Each one of you has a good outfit and you can build it into something better.
“You, Steele, are importing some fine stock. So is Lord. Mort doesn’t have the money for that but he does have Lost Creek and he’s got a few head of cattle and the start of a herd. I don’t see why Lost Creek should be fenced. Fence out the upper Live Oak country if you like, but you three can get along and work well together.
“Somebody has moved into Apple Canyon and organized a bunch of rustlers. They’ve got to be cleared out, lock, stock an’ barrel. I’m taking on that job myself.”
“We need some law here,” Steele declared. “How about you becoming marshal?”
“No,” Kilkenny looked around at their faces. “Lee Hall dropped by my camp the other night, and deputized me, so I’m already an officer of the State of Texas.
“Before I ride out of this country I’ve got two things to do. I’m going to clean up Apple Canyon and I’m going to get the man who has been doing those killings.”
His eyes touched Chet Lord’s and the big rancher’s face was ashen.
Steve Lord spoke suddenly. “You make that sound as if you believed there’s no connection between those shootings and the cattle war.”
“There may be no connection. That remains to be discovered. But I think the person who killed Wilkins and Carter is the same person who killed Des King and the others. I think we have an ugly, vicious murderer loose on the range, and I intend to find him.
The Kilkenny Series Bundle Page 26
