Bannerman the Enforcer 2

by Kirk Hamilton

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  Twenty one thousand dollars ... to get their hands on it, Reno Slade and his gang killed two innocent people and then high-tailed it into the Indian Territory. But they hadn’t reckoned on Sven Johansen’s daughter Anya, who would stop at nothing to bring her parents’ killers to justice.

  She knew exactly the way to do it, too. She’d heard of Governor Dukes’ two ‘enforcers’, Yancey Bannerman and Johnny Cato. Though based in Texas, she knew they could flout jurisdiction and state lines, and ride the lawless land until the account with Slade was settled in blood.

  She wanted that above all else. And nothing was going to stop her from being in at the kill!

  BANNERMAN 2: RIDE THE LAWLESS LAND

  By Kirk Hamilton

  First Published by The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd

  Copyright © Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  First Smashwords Edition: January 2017

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd.

  Chapter One – Blood Money

  It was the land known as the Indian Territory or, sometimes, the Indian Nations. There was no law and only federal marshals with special warrants had any jurisdiction there. Consequently, it became the hiding place of every outlaw who had a price on his head and wanted somewhere to lie low for a while.

  But, besides being outlaw territory, it was, as the official name implied, ‘Indian’ land. The tribes were free to roam and hunt and live their own lives here; but there were white men who cast greedy eyes over the rolling plains of grass and the wide rivers, the teeming herds of buffalo, and ... the traces of gold.

  Any white man crazy enough to cross into the Territory, either to hunt buffalo or search for gold, ran the risk of losing his scalp to the Indians, or being murdered by the free-roving outlaws. Some of the men who did make the forbidden journey were as tough and ruthless as the lawless men themselves and

  gave good account of themselves in pitched battles.

  Two such men were Zeke and Calvin Satterlee. Mountain men from way back, used to the ways of the wild and little better than animals, they found a promising trace of gold leading into the walls of a gulch and, deciding that it was going to be hard work to dig deep enough to see if it would lead to the mother lode, they rounded-up a half-dozen Comanche braves, plied them with rotgut whisky, and enslaved them. They shot the Indians’ mustangs, stripped them of all clothing and weapons, shackled them and flayed their hides with bullwhips. They dug deep into the gulch wall, following the vein of gold, but it seemed to be thinning-out and hopes of finding a mother lode faded. It only made Zeke and Calvin drink more rotgut whisky, and the drunker they got, the meaner they became. They finished up killing one Indian, flogging him to death ...

  It wasn’t the sort of thing that could be kept quiet, even in that lawless land, not when there was so much coming and going, and word eventually reached Governor Lester Dukes in Austin. A just and humane man, Dukes wasn’t about to run to the federal marshals and wait until a man was available and special warrants sworn out before someone was sent in to investigate. Dukes called in his two Special Operatives, his ‘Enforcers’ as he termed them—Yancey Bannerman and Johnny ‘Colt’ Cato.

  “That’s just across the line from Texas!” Dukes told them angrily, his daughter Kate trying to calm him, knowing how emotion could adversely affect the heart condition he lived with daily. Dukes ignored the girl’s ministrations, looked across his office at his two top men, the tall one, Yancey, and the short, older man with the huge twin-barreled gun he called the ‘Manstopper’ strapped to his thigh. “The Satterlees are Texans. I’ve worked hard to keep the peace with the Comanche for the safety of the ranchers up that way and I don’t aim to let a couple of gold-hungry mountain men undo all my work. Yancey ... John. I want those men brought back, alive or dead. Most of all, I want those Indians freed, and I want them to know that the Satterlees are going to pay the full penalty for what they’ve done ... You’ve got no real jurisdiction in the Territory, in fact no more than the Satterlees, but there’s a principle here and I don’t aim to be tied up by red-tape.”

  Yancey and Cato had ridden out within the hour, eager for action: they hadn’t seen much since agreeing to act as the Governor’s Enforcers after saving him from an assassination attempt some weeks earlier. They made their way to the Big Red, crossed the swift-flowing waters and rode into Indian Territory. Two weeks later, they found the Satterlees in their gulch and by that time there were only four Indians working the mine.

  “Alive or dead?” Cato asked as they settled onto the rim with their rifles.

  Yancey flicked up the special tang peep sight that Cato had added to his Winchester ’76 rifle, made a quick adjustment and took a bead on Zeke Satterlee down below as the man coiled his bullwhip over his left shoulder.

  “They’re scum,” Yancey answered and it was good enough for Cato. He agreed with Yancey, but just as he settled and lined his rifle up on Cal Satterlee, three more riders appeared in the gulch and it was plain to see that they were pards of the Satterlee brothers. The stone whisky jug was passed around and the men dismounted. There was a bit of horseplay and back-slapping and Cato glanced across at Yancey.

  “Odds have gone up. In their favor.”

  “About even, I’d say,” Yancey allowed, and triggered, startling Cato.

  Zeke Satterlee went down with a .45 caliber bullet smack between the eyes. The others, hair-trigger nerves reacting instantly, ran for cover, their guns out, blazing wildly at the rim. Cato sighed and picked a man in a black Montana peaked hat and shot him through the chest. Both men on the rim ducked hurriedly as a fusillade of shots clipped stones from their shelter and sent sharp slivers spinning past their eyes.

  Yancey made a swift sign to Cato and slipped back on his belly. Cato moved a few feet to his left, snapped three fast shots down into the gulch, seeing the enslaved Indians appearing at the mouth of the mine, attracted by the shooting. Then Cato rolled back several feet, threw two more shots down into the still-running men below. He caught a glimpse of Yancey, doubled over, clutching his rifle close to his chest, running along the floor of the gulch, keeping a line of rocks between himself and the outlaws. Then he was spotted and a man rose to snap a shot at him and to yell a warning to the others. Cato shot him in the neck, and then Yancey leapt onto the top of a rock and launched himself headlong at the remaining two outlaws, his rifle held out stiffly in front of him in both hands.

  The men reared up, spinning towards him, but the big man was on top of them and the rifle smashed into one man’s face, sending him reeling. The weight of Yancey’s body knocked the other man spinning and then Yancey was tucking his head down low and somersaulting, lighting on his shoulders, rolling and twisting around to come up onto one knee. The man was lying on his side and bringing his gun around fast. Yancey fired and the rifle muzzle was barely a foot from the killer’s chest. The man was hurled back a yard by the impact of the lead. Yancey levered but he fumbled and the spent shell jammed halfway through the top ejector.

  The second man, dazed, bloody-faced, l
urched to his knees, still clutching his gun. Yancey flung the rifle at him and went for his own Peacemaker but, fast as he was, he knew he wasn’t going to make it. Then there was a thundering blast and the outlaw’s body was picked up as if by an invisible hand and flung six feet into a boulder, face-first. He flopped back, dead, his shirt and head bloody. Johnny Cato stood atop a boulder with the chunky lower barrel of his Manstopper smoking. Yancey nodded: he knew that special underslung barrel had just delivered a charge of buckshot into the outlaw. It was this addition to the big Dragoon-based gun that gave it its name.

  “We got to lug all these hombres back with us?” Cato asked, looking around at the dead men and the one survivor who was nursing a bleeding chest.

  “Nope,” Yancey replied. “Just the Satterlees. That’s Cal you just blasted and I got Zeke first shot. Better take a look at our wounded man there and then set the minds of the Indians at ease. They likely think we’re just moving in to take over the mine...”

  The wounded man would likely live and the enforcers gave him what doctoring they could, telling him he was on his own now. Then they went to the mine mouth where the Indians waited, gaunt, half-starved, backs and shoulders scarred by the whips of the Satterlees. The Comanches watched them approach with blank eyes, impassive faces, and a defiant tilt to their chins. Yancey lifted his hand in the Peace sign, but it wasn’t until he and Cato blew the shackle chains off their ankles that the red men believed that they were at last free again. They stared in puzzlement as Yancey tried to explain with signs and in the few words of Comanche that he knew.

  Slowly, the Indians relaxed. The tallest and gauntest man, who bore the most scars, stood up and gripped Yancey’s shoulders in the sign of friendship. He had only half an ear on the left side of his head.

  ~*~

  Sven Johansen couldn’t believe it when the cattle agent offered him thirty dollars a head for his herd. He had seven hundred steers that he had driven to the railhead from his small ranch to the north of Fort Worth. His four riders were sitting on top of the holding pen rails, smoking, and only one of them, Reno Slade, was watching Sven and the agent.

  Sven scratched his graying hair, lifting his hat a little, as he shook his head incredulously.

  “You’ll never make a poker player, Mr. Johansen,” the cattle agent grinned. “I can read pleasure all over your face! I’d say we have a deal. Am I right?”

  “You are right, Mr. Agent!” Sven agreed, jamming his hat back on and thrusting out his big gnarled hand. He gripped hard with the other, sealing the deal. “A price I never expected!”

  “Well, you picked the right time to show up,” the agent said, leading Sven towards the office. “Yours is the first herd in for three months and I’m the only agent on the job. Tomorrow, there’ll be a dozen. But I’d say I’ve made you a fair offer and I doubt if you’d better it by waiting.”

  “Who waits?” the Swede asked as he slouched along beside the cattle buyer. He was a tall, gangling man in his fifties with the heavy square-jawed, determined look of his Viking ancestors. His clothes were homespun and coarse and he had the look of a man who would be happy to work from sunup to sundown, seven days a week.

  And this is what Sven had done for many years, both at home in his native Sweden, and here in Northern Texas, since emigrating with his wife and daughter, Anya. He had worked at a variety of jobs in many parts of these United States until he had some money, enough to buy land of his own. And then he had felled the lumber, pit-sawn it into planks and built his house. He had kept enough aside for Anya’s education and had bought a couple of cows for their own use. Gradually, over the years, toiling twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day in the long summers, Sven built up his ranch; adding rooms to the house, fencing the pastures, constructing a small dam, and irrigation ditches to his feed pastures. He rode up into the hills and trapped a bunch of wild-eyed mustangs. Then he built a corral on the spot and spent the next week breaking them in. He rode on round up with some of the huge spreads to the south, and, like so many others he used his spare time to chouse out mavericks from the brush and thickets and burned his own brand into their hides: a crude Viking helmet with curved horns. It not only was a novel brand in that part of Texas, it was also one that would be difficult for wide-loopers to change by running iron.

  From a small bunch of mavericks, Sven built up his herds, nursing them through the harsh seasons, the blistering summers and the numbing blizzards. He dragged feed to them in hip-deep snow, carried dogies and stricken calves back to the house and warmed them by the fire, gave them milk from a bottle. And, as he made small profits, at the urging of his wife, Agnetha, he hired a ranch hand to help with the chores. The years were passing and Anya was growing into a young lady; time for her to be going East to complete her education. More money. Harder work. Longer rides up into the hills and more mavericks to be popped from the brush. More fourteen-hour days ... But it was for Anya, and so Sven and Agnetha made no complaints.

  ~*~

  And now, with over a thousand head of cattle on his range, four men working for him and Anya soon to return from her college, Sven figured that Lady Luck must be riding with him. The agent’s offer of thirty dollars a head for his trail herd reinforced this belief as he entered the buyer’s office down at the railhead.

  Reno Slade, perched on the top rail, flicked his cigarette away and turned to his brother, Lem, next to him.

  “You hear that? Thirty bucks a head! What’s that work out at for the seven hundred head?”

  The other two men, Chet Mundy, and a Mexican named ‘Jimi’ Jiminez, stopped their conversation to look at the Slade brothers. Lem, the better educated of the two, took out an old envelope and a stub of pencil and began to laboriously work out the price. He wrote a figure and then went over his calculations again, looking at Reno with surprise on his lean face.

  “Heck! I make it twenty-one thousand bucks, Reno!” Jiminez and Mundy whistled and looked at Reno Slade. He was a medium-tall man with the thick, brown curly hair that ran in the Slade family, and a hawk nose with close-set gray eyes. His mouth was a slash, almost lipless, and this feature gave him a curiously corpse-like appearance. He sniffed loudly and spat, eyes narrowing as he looked at the others.

  “Hear that? Over twenty-thousand bucks ... for a goddamn squarehead who can’t even speak proper American!”

  “Me neither, sometimes, amigo!” Jiminez pointed out, with a grin.

  “Aah ... you’re only a greaser,” Reno said contemptuously and Jiminez shrugged, not insulted. “And you ain’t got twenty bucks to your name, let alone twenty thousand.”

  “Well, maybe one day you’ll have a ranch like the Swede and be able to sell your herds at a good profit, too, Reno,” Chet Mundy said.

  Reno scowled. “Like hell. Not with all the best land bein’ taken by these squareheads, pourin’ into the country by the shipload, takin’ jobs and land away from native Americans.” Lem chuckled. “Since when you been so patriotic, Reno?”

  Reno glared at his brother. “Since I been slavin’ my guts out workin’ for that Swede!”

  “Aw, he pays well enough, Reno,” protested Lem.

  “How much you figure we’ll see of that twenty thousand, huh?”

  “Well, reckon we’ll get our pay and, knowin’ Sven, I guess he’ll give us some kind of bonus. He’s a fair man, Reno.”

  “He’ll throw us a few bucks, that’s all,” Reno growled. “A few bucks, while he shoves the rest of that money into his bank or spends it on that gal of his he’s always talkin’ about.”

  “Well, guess he can do what he likes with his own dinero,” Mundy said.

  Reno swung down, stood looking up at the three men still sitting on the rails. “What’s wrong with you roosters? You been dodgin’ the Rangers for so long, your brains scrambled or somethin’? We was gonna take our pay after this trail drive and quit, sure, but we don’t have to do that. We can ride back to Sven Johansen’s spread with him.” He paused briefly before adding: “Just to
make sure nothin’ happens to all that money.” Jiminez shrugged, easy about the veiled suggestion, but Lem and Chuck frowned.

  “Hell, Reno, we been on the dodge for a long time and we’ve had a clean trail for months now. We don’t want to do anythin’ that’ll bring the Rangers a-runnin’ to this neck of the woods.” Lem was uneasy, seeing the greed glinting in his brother’s eyes. He knew how stubborn Reno was once he made up his mind about anything.

  “What you say, Chet?” Reno asked Mundy.

  Mundy shrugged uncomfortably. “Inclined to agree with Lem, I guess. They’ll hang us if they catch us. Why bring ’em down on us again?”

  Reno nodded slowly. “Sure. They’ll hang us. If they catch us. But any of you hombres thought about just how close it is here to the Indian Nations? ’Bout thirty miles, is all ... and it’s a land where there ain’t any law.”

  He saw Lem and Chet exchange a glance and Jiminez pursed his purple lips thoughtfully.

  Just then, Sven Johansen came out of the agent’s office and beamed at them.

  “Come on, boys ... I buy the drinks, ja?” Sven called, gesturing for them to follow him as he turned and started back towards the main stem of the trail town.

  The agent smiled after the big Swede and went back into his office. Reno Slade and his pards walked slowly along, following Sven.

  “Just thirty miles,” Reno reminded them. “That’s all ... and no law can touch us out there!”

  ~*~

  Sven Johansen could hold his liquor all right, even the rotgut frontier whisky, and Reno soon abandoned the idea of getting the big Swede drunk, thereby making the job of relieving him of his money so much easier. Sven was willing to celebrate but when he saw his ranch hands were getting drunk, he called a halt to the drinking and offered to pay the men their wages plus a bonus. He was genuinely pleased when Reno told him that they had decided to stay on and work for him.

  “Good,” Sven boomed. “We get our things and start back, ja? It is not good to leave my wife so long alone ... ”