Bannerman the Enforcer 46

by Kirk Hamilton

  He sighed. “All right, Mrs. Svendborg ...”

  “I told you to call me Texas. I don’t want you dropping that name ‘Svendborg’ at the wrong time.”

  “Okay. Texas it is. But we wait till daylight. And we get you a horse ...”

  “I have one.”

  Yancey frowned. “Damned if I could find one when I went looking for you.”

  “It was in the cave I used as a hideout. I saw you this afternoon.”

  Yancey pursed his lips. “You seem pretty much up in the art of survival, Texas. Know anything much about wilderness living?”

  “I’ve had to learn fast these past few weeks. I remember a lot that—Lars had told me. Don’t worry about me, Bannerman. I can take any rough trail and hardship you hand out. As long as I find those murderers at trail’s end.”

  Yancey shrugged and made a helpless gesture in Cato’s direction.

  “What can I do?”

  “Just ride along, pard,” Cato said quietly. “Ride along with Texas. And I only wish I was comin’, too.”

  Chapter Six – Vengeance Trail

  Albany was on the old Western Cattle Trail and to reach it from Amarillo meant a week of travelling down the Potter and Bacon Trail. That is, a week if you had a good horse and the Red River wasn’t in flood, or there were no bushfires to make you ride miles out of your way or the outlaws and road agents who preyed on travelers didn’t come out of hiding and try their luck to see what valuables you were carrying.

  Or if the same outlaws didn’t simply slip into your campsite at night and slit your throat from ear-to-ear, then, while you bled, squatted down by the campfire and ate your supper.

  It was a rugged, dangerous trail, crawling with outlaws and killers since it had been abandoned as a cattle trail some years earlier. When the longhorns had been driven north by Potter and Bacon, the owlhoots had begun to gather, looking for easy pickings as they had along the other Kansas-bound trails. But Potter and Bacon only blazed the trail, used it once or twice and then quit to go ranching in New Mexico. It kind of left the outlaws on a limb, but they found that other travelers followed in the wake of the trail drivers and so they stayed around that neck of the woods. Other trail men drove herds north, too ...

  It was rugged enough to be good country in which to hide out from the law, too, and, particularly around the Brazos River area, where it was known as Robber’s Roost.

  This was not to say that every pilgrim between Amarillo and Albany, or vice versa, was attacked by outlaws: scores made the journey and wondered what the trail’s bad reputation was all about. But, in general, at that period, it was looked upon as a chancy journey to make, even by stage coach, let alone horseback.

  Yancey had travelled the trail before and had to shoot his way out of trouble when a bunch of curly wolves pegged him for a trail boss on his way north to hire cowhands and carrying plenty of money. After he had downed a couple of the men, shot the horses out from under two others, the rest had scattered and he had been left alone for the remainder of the journey.

  Now he rode with his rifle out of its scabbard, the butt resting on one knee, eyes restlessly scanning the country all around. The girl rode to one side, a little behind, and she, too, carried her rifle, but across her knees. She was tense and unsmiling, squinting into the glaring sun, starting at every jackrabbit that burst from cover or when a prairie dog popped up out of his hole to yip-yip at them.

  Yancey watched her silently, out of the corners of his eyes. She needed a clean-up and some decent clothes, and many a square meal under her belt. She hadn’t said much so far, but he had gathered that she ate only enough to survive. She had no interest in food or her appearance or he suspected, in life itself—beyond finding and killing her husband’s and baby’s murderers.

  It reached down into Yancey’s heart when he realized from what she reluctantly told him that she had put her own ordeal almost out of her mind: or at least, wouldn’t consciously allow it to surface. She had been beaten and raped and abused and near drowned, but none of these things mattered to her now. They were terrible experiences that she would recall at sometime and maybe suffer the effects. Right now, they had happened, but only as an off-shoot of the murder of her husband and baby. It was the killings she wanted to avenge: what had happened to herself was of little consequence to her now.

  The men who had abused her were the murderers. It was the way she saw it.

  He marveled even more that she could take this attitude when he learned of her somewhat gentle background, growing up in a boarding house in Dallas and so on. He realized she must have tremendous inner strength to be able to steel herself for the grim task she had set herself, after her early life.

  Yancey was a compassionate man and it bothered him that just possibly, Emily Svendborg—‘Texas’, as she called herself now—might break when it all caught up with her. It was one reason he was here now, riding along with her: he didn’t like to think of what might happen when she finally broke, if she dropped her guard for a moment and the emotion and trauma of her terrible experiences broke through her steel shell.

  It had to happen sooner or later. He didn’t know what he could do if it did—if he could do anything—but he felt he wanted to be close by. At the same time, he felt his own seething rage swirling within him for the men who had committed the crimes. Laramie Kane he knew about: the man had a reputation that stretched from Canada to Mexico, California to New York. There were wanted dodgers out on him all across the Northern States; he was scum, and it was only natural that other scum would rally to him.

  Yancey felt it was his duty to rid the world of such lowdown degenerates and knew he would feel no compunction at all about gunning down Kane and his pards—on an even break, from the back, any way at all.

  He was as determined as the girl to see them dead ...

  “Why don’t you get cleaned up in the next waterhole and we’ll outfit you with some decent clothes in Clarendon? We’ll be there by sun-up,” Yancey suggested on the second day out from Amarillo.

  Texas snapped her head around and shot him a hard look.

  “You would, of course, turn your back while I bathed?” she asked with a twist to her mouth.

  Yancey was surprised at her tone at first, then realized that after what she had been through, it was natural enough. He smiled, trying to put her at ease.

  “I’ll ride off a couple miles if you want, ma’am. I was thinking you’d be the more comfortable.”

  “I can put up with a lot more discomfort than I have known lately, Bannerman,” she told him shortly.

  He knew she was right. She didn’t care about her looks or personal comfort. The only thing she could see in her mind—apart from the bodies of her husband and baby—were the men responsible for the killings, dying at her hands.

  But, when they reached the next waterhole, she sat her saddle, hands folded on the horn and looked at him, deadpanned.

  “I think just over to that butte would be far enough,” she said.

  He frowned, puzzled at first and then realized she was referring to his offer to ride off a couple of miles while she washed-up. Yancey smiled crookedly, touched a hand to his hatbrim and rode towards the butte she had indicated, perhaps a half-mile away from the waterhole.

  When he reached it, he sat down and smoked a cigarette, climbed to the top of a rock with his field glasses and swept the lenses around the country beyond. There were no signs of other campfires or riders. So far the trail south seemed clear. He turned a full three-hundred and sixty degrees, sweeping the horizon and every foot of the land between there and his butte.

  He hesitated as the glasses momentarily touched the waterhole. There was a flash of white as the girl stood knee deep in water, bent over to scoop up a handful of fine sand to scrub her thin body with. Yancey shook his head slowly, moving the glasses on. She was skin and bone, ribs showing, skinny-shanked.

  That brief glimpse of her nakedness somehow only made his compassion for her stronger. It seemed
ludicrous that a slim girl like this could devote her life to going up against a bunch of killers the way she had. He had never known another woman with such iron nerve and dogged determination.

  She had washed her ill-fitting clothes when he returned, had them spread over rocks near the fire to dry. She clutched a blanket around her and he smiled as he dismounted, noting that she kept her rifle within easy reach at all times.

  “Texas, I don’t aim to attack you, or even peek at you. Just try to relax, huh?”

  Texas glanced up from the mess of the beans and bacon she was stirring in the skillet. She said nothing, merely reached for a tin plate and dumped a ladleful of food onto it, holding it towards him.

  “Coffee’ll be ready by the time you’ve got that down.”

  Yancey nodded, sat on a rock, eating slowly with a fork. He paused when he saw her gnawing at a piece of stale cornpone.

  “That all you having?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Don’t be loco! You’ve hardly eaten anything since we started out. You’re as skinny as a plucked chicken! You’ve got to get decent food in your belly or you’ll never be strong enough to go on.”

  She was looking at him with narrowed eyes, cornpone halfway to her mouth, one hand now resting on the rifle.

  “How d’you know how skinny I look?” she asked in a quiet voice.

  He stiffened and then smiled faintly. “The field glasses happened to drift across the waterhole while you were washing. Now, take it easy, damn it!”

  He threw himself backwards as she brought up the rifle and it exploded abruptly, taking him by surprise: she must have had a shell in the breech all along. The tin plate flew from his hands, spattering him with beans and sauce. But his old instincts made him lash out with a boot and the rifle was wrenched from her hands. She staggered and dived for it, but, with the blanket starting to slip, stopped abruptly and clutched desperately at the coarse cloth.

  Yancey casually stepped forward and stood with one boot on the rifle. She glared at him, breath hissing through pinched nostrils.

  “Look, learn to control that temper, will you? I wasn’t meaning to peek at you. I just caught a glimpse ... Texas, you’re safe with me. I don’t have any—designs for you. I want to help you. I ain’t looking for any kind of—payment, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  She continued to glare, but gradually she controlled her breathing, and her hands worked on the blanket at her throat.

  “Texas, we aren’t all scum like Kane’s wolves,” Yancey told her quietly.

  She lowered her eyes.

  “Sorry,” she said in not much more than a whisper. Then she set her angry gaze on him again and added, “But if I ever catch you ...”

  Yancey held his hands up. “Peace, Texas, peace!” He grinned, but she remained unsmiling and the Enforcer sighed, walked down to the horses to rub them down and see they had water and feed for the night. When he returned, she had put her old clothes back on, although they were still damp.

  She also had the rifle beside her hand.

  He sighed and began to lay out his bedroll across the fire from hers ...

  Clarendon was a twelve man and a dog town, tumbledown, clapboard, passed-by during the days of the big cattle drives, and it had never recovered. It was still a mite too far off the main trail for many people to bother visiting.

  As they rode down the dusty main street, under the eyes of the openly curious locals, Yancey gestured to the show window of a clothing store.

  “You could get yourself a dress in there, if you want. I’ve got money.”

  She looked at him sharply. “I don’t want you to spend your money on me.”

  “No obligations, remember?” he reminded her.

  She frowned. “Why are you doing this, Bannerman?”

  He shrugged. “Scum like Kane shouldn’t be walking this earth. I’d like to make sure he’s stopped.”

  “You don’t think I can do it alone?”

  “No,” he said candidly.

  Her mouth tightened. “You don’t know me very well.”

  “Mebbe. And mebbe you don’t know yet what you’ve got yourself into.”

  “I know,” she assured him. Then abruptly, surprising him yet again with her sudden change of mind, she said, “All right, thank you, I will have some new clothes. But no dresses. Shirt and trousers and a new hat. If that’s all right ...?”

  He grinned, took out a golden twenty-dollar piece and handed it to her.

  “Go buy what you want. I’ve got some business to do.”

  They met outside the livery an hour later and he nodded in approval at her choice of whipcord trousers that fitted comfortably, a checked shirt and a small flat-crowned hat with a rawhide tie-thong and rattlesnake skin band. He held out a brown-paper-wrapped parcel towards her.

  “Something to complete the outfit,” he said in answer to her puzzled look.

  “A gun!” she exclaimed when she had unwrapped the package, revealing the oiled blued-steel of a revolver in a saddle-stitched holster with narrow looped cartridge belt wrapped around it.

  “A Smith and Wesson, double-action in .38 caliber. A small gun by the usual cowboy’s standards but large enough for you, Texas. And a .38 slug in the right place will stop a man just as fast as a .44 or .45.”

  She was staring at the gun, turning it over and over in her hands. Obviously she was surprised at its weight and the steeply curved butt was still a mite large for her small hand. But she was delighted with it just the same and her mouth softened, almost but not quite lifting a little at the corners. There was even a suggestion of dampness about her eyes when she looked at Yancey again.

  “I’ve only fired a revolver once,” she confessed. “Lars had this old Dragoon. I could hardly lift it, even in both hands, and I had trouble cocking the hammer. It jumped out of my hands when I pulled the trigger.”

  “This is only half the weight of the Dragoon, heaviest handgun ever made at four-and-a-half pounds. In fact, this weighs just under two pounds. No need to cock the hammer either. It’s a double-action, which means you just keep pulling the trigger and the cylinder revolves and it shoots until the chambers are empty.”

  Texas was very interested now, dry-firing several times, the hammer clicking on empty chambers.

  “But, I don’t believe I could hit the side of a house at ten feet, Bannerman,” she told him regretfully.

  “By the time we reach Albany, you’ll be shooting necks off bottles at twenty paces, five out of six times. I’ll show you how to shoot. Damned if I can rest easy thinking about you taking on someone like Kane and his crew and barely able to shoot ...”

  She put out a hand and rested it hesitantly on his forearm, looking up into his trail-weary face.

  “Thanks, Bannerman,” she said very quietly. “You are a good man ...”

  So she strapped on the holster rig but the belt was too big and slid down over her slim hips. Yancey laughed, took out his clasp knife and made a new hole for the buckle pin. The holster rode high on her narrow waist, on the left side, the gun butt foremost. She frowned.

  “You wear your gun on the right side.”

  “Yeah. Used to it. But I reckon a cross draw style better suits a woman. I’ll show you how to get it out fast.”

  They cleared Clarendon in another hour, Yancey grateful that the girl had agreed to his buying her a meal of beefsteak and vegetables.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said, Bannerman,” she told him, eating the juicy steak. “I have neglected myself because I no longer care how I look or whether I live or die. But I must avenge Lars and Erik, and so I will eat good food to keep up my strength and try to stay healthy. Until I track down Kane. Afterwards it doesn’t matter, but, until I have seen him dead, I will take better care of myself. And, if you teach me to shoot properly ...” She shrugged, still unsmiling, still as sober and as determined as ever.

  In fact, more so ...

  The Smith and Wesson made a cracking sound w
hen it was fired, in contrast to the big, rolling boom of Yancey’s Peacemaker .45.

  It rode up a little in recoil because Texas did not yet know how to grip it properly and it took Yancey quite some time to show her how to wrap both hands around the butt, using the inner palm of the left under the butt as a solid rest. When it became second nature for her to grip the gun in this way, her shooting improved immensely. She hit four bottles out of six, consistently.

  But this was a two-handed shoot, with the girl’s body braced against a rock. It was most unlikely that such a situation would exist when she came up against Kane or his men.

  Yancey started her shooting at rocks and sticks, growing cactus, even running groundhogs, yelling instructions suddenly as they rode along.

  “Draw! Shoot! Higher! More to the left! Down!”

  When he admonished her for missing a scurrying jackrabbit with all six shots, Texas looked at him coldly while she reloaded and said,

  “I din’t want to kill it. We don’t need the meat. We have plenty of food, and there didn’t seem to be any point in just shooting it and leaving it to rot in the sun.”

  Yancey stared at her for a spell and then shrugged. “Just don’t ever confuse Laramie Kane with that jackrabbit,” was all he said.

  He taught her the cross draw. Her hand was too small for the gun butt, there was no getting away from that, and she tended to fumble each time. He knew she would never be able to get the Smith and Wesson out of leather fast enough to go up against a real gunfighter. But she was becoming very familiar with the handgun now and could disassemble, clean and oil it without making any mistakes.

  Yancey showed her how to handle her rifle better, too. She tended to pull the trigger instead of squeezing it and it was a hard trigger, made for her big Danish husband. Yancey took the action apart by firelight one night and filed down the sear slightly. He shortened the hammer spring to take some rebound out of it and did not finish until well after midnight.