William W. Johnstone

by Savage Texas

  Luke hefted his crutch and hobbled around, prowling through Monty’s gang’s saddlebags and pouches, riffling through them. A triumphant shout announced that he’d made an important discovery.

  “Look—my wooden leg!” he cried, holding the object up for Johnny to see. The prosthetic device consisted of a carved wooden foot and shin with various leather straps and buckles for holding it in place.

  “Glory be,” said Johnny.

  Grinning hugely, Luke sat down on the ground and wrestled on his artificial limb.

  His fingers worked at the fastenings, tightening straps and pulling them into place, buckling them. He rose, walking in circles. He still needed the crutch, but moved with greater facility and surety.

  “Never thought I’d see this again,” Luke said. “Wonder why they kept it?”

  “Thieves never throw away something of value. Wooden leg’s useful, plenty of market for it since the war. They just hadn’t gotten around to selling it yet,” said Johnny.

  “Reckon so.”

  “Or maybe Monty just wanted to have something to remember you by.”

  Luke fished out the gold tooth from his jacket pocket and held it up. First rays from the rising sun caught it, glinting off it, making the yellow metal look molten. “I got something to remember Monty by,” he said.

  “Hell, you got Monty hisself,” Johnny pointed out. “Him and his pals didn’t get up and bury themselves during the night. We’re going to have to get rid of ’em.”

  “Not before turning out their pockets to see what’s inside,” Luke said.

  “Let’s clean ’em out and haul ’em out of here before they go to rot and ruin, stink up the place. I don’t want ’em on Cross land.”

  “Where’ll we plant ’em, Johnny?”

  “The Snake Pit. We won’t have to bury ’em, just toss ’em in.”

  There had been five men in the gang. They’d left ten horses in the corral, in addition to the seven horses from the ford and the chestnut Johnny’d been riding. Each dead man had owned a saddle and firearms, guns and rifles. A search of their corpses yielded eighty dollars in gold and silver and one hundred and sixty in paper money.

  Johnny and Luke split the take fifty-fifty, even shares.

  “That’s more money than I made during the whole war,” Luke said, face alight with cheerful greed.

  “Soldier’s pay ain’t much, and that’s when the Confederacy got around to paying it, which wasn’t often,” Johnny said.

  “That string of horses is worth plenty, and the saddles, too.”

  “We got to get us a running iron to change up what brands are marked on that horseflesh before selling it. I don’t reckon that bunch was too particular about where they got their animals.”

  “We’re rich, Johnny, rich!”

  “It’s a start, anyhow. The trick is gonna be hanging on to it—and not hanging.”

  The sun had cleared the horizon. The day was already warm and heating up fast.

  “The horses will keep till later. We can water and feed ’em when we get back. Let’s clear them bodies out of here quick. The hotter it gets, the more snakes there’ll be,” Johnny said.

  Luke rubbed the lower half of his face, looking thoughtful. “Let’s not be too hasty, Johnny. Could be we’re throwing away good money. Bunch of no-goods like this must be wanted by the law. Mebbe they’s a price on their heads we could collect.”

  Johnny shook his head, smiling. “You’re a caution, Luke. Yesterday you didn’t even have a wooden leg to stand on. Today you’ve got more cash money in your pockets than you’ve ever seen in one place and you’re scheming how to drag down more.”

  “I always figured I’d make a good businessman if I had half a chance,” Luke said.

  “The first rule of business is, don’t tie into the law if you don’t have to. Some of those horses are stolen—hell, most of ’em, probably—and we can’t produce a bill of sale for a single one of ’em. Uncharitable folk like sheriffs and judges and such might say we stole ’em. Things may be fast and loose in these parts but they still hang horse thieves, last I heard.”

  “. . . You might have something there,” Luke allowed.

  “Who’s the law in Hangtown these days, Yerkes?”

  Luke shook his head. “He got killed fighting at Goliad. The new man’s named Barton, Mack Barton.”

  “Don’t know him. What’s he like?” Johnny asked.

  “He’s a mean one. Hutto put him in as sheriff. Anybody gets out of line, he cracks down on ’em hard. Collects taxes and fines, too, plenty of ’em. Those who can’t pay get put on a county work gang breaking rocks and clearing brush.

  “Barton can take care of hisself, though. He ain’t no yellowbelly. Three rannies from Quinto up in the Nations came in last winter, tried to hoorah the town. Barton cleaned up on ’em with a shotgun. Left ’em dead in the street,” said Luke.

  “Between him and Yankee soldier boys moving in to take over, let’s not go shining a light on ourselves just yet,” Johnny said. “One more thing: Monty’s bunch wasn’t alone. Their pards from the Breaks are liable to come along sometime, anytime, to see what happened to ’em. Don’t be caught without a gun or where you can’t put your hand to one right quick.”

  Luke waved a hand in airy dismissal. “Teach your grandma to suck eggs, you don’t have to tell me twice about being ready with a gun. Nobody’s gonna get the drop on me again.”

  “Good,” Johnny said. “Let’s get to work. Now that you got your wooden leg back, you got no excuse for dogging it.”

  It was mid-morning when Johnny and Luke set out from the ranch as part of a macabre procession. Johnny rode the chestnut. A rope tied to his saddle horn trailed behind him, leading a string of two horses. Each horse had one of Monty’s gang tied facedown across its back.

  Luke rode a bay horse. Roped to it was a duncolored animal of quarter-horse proportions; a big horse, deep-chested, broad in the beam, built along the lines of a dray or farm horse, a horse made for drawing a heavy load.

  Harnessed to it was a travois, a kind of land-based sled used by Plains Indians to carry heavy loads for long distances. It consisted of a fan-shaped wooden framework over which was stretched and secured a strong blanket.

  Johnny and Luke had felled and trimmed saplings and branches for the wood. The pieces were strong enough to bear the load, yet light enough to avoid overly encumbering the horse.

  A pair of ten-foot-long straight poles served for the outer ribs. They were crossed at one end with the tips overlapping and tied with rope, causing the poles to make a V shape. Then came the crosspieces, tied down at regular intervals at right angles to the poles. Each piece was successively longer to span the widening fan shape. A horse blanket was pulled taut over the framework. Rawhide strips were threaded through holes punched in the blanket and lashed to the woodwork.

  Monty and two other dead men were loaded into the travois, cradled in its hammock-like concavity. They were tied in place to keep them from falling out.

  The travois was without wheels, the draft horse literally dragging it behind itself. For all that, it was remarkably effective in transporting a load of over five hundred pounds across the terrain.

  The group traveled at the rate of its slowest element, the horse pulling the travois.

  It proceeded at a walk. The travois kicked up a fair amount of dust; that couldn’t be helped. But the effect of the telltale dust cloud would be minimized within the Breaks, whose rock walls would screen its source.

  The procession filed into the eastern pass of Wild Horse Gulch. Ridges and cliffs blocked the sun, filling the gulch with cool blue shadows.

  The men had filled their canteens with fresh water and packed a quantity of beef jerky for the trip. Luke augmented his firepower with a sawed-off shotgun and a leather pouch filled with twelve-gauge buckshot shells that had belonged to one of Monty’s gang.

  After a few hundred yards, the eastern approach opened up into the gulch proper, a parklike space enc
ompassing many square miles of well-watered grasslands. Rolling fields were dotted with groups of wild horses, stallions, mares, colts. They looked up from their grazing to eye the intruders, running away well before the strangers neared them. Mustangs are wary of men and devilishly hard to catch.

  Johnny Cross continually scanned the landscape. Danger could come from any direction—probably from the one least expected. The file rode north along the foot of a rocky ridge running north-south.

  Shadows provided cover as well as welcome relief from the steadily mounting heat. Springs in the hills spilling down the slopes, becoming brooks and streams on the flat, watering tall green grass.

  The horses plodded along. Limestone deposits and rock formations took fanciful shapes: a castle tower, a crouching beast, a ship’s prow. That last was a wedge-shaped protuberance on the gulch’s western wall, jutting out into space several hundred feet above the canyon floor.

  It was the landmark Johnny had been looking for. “The Snake Pit’s yonder on the far side of the gulch,” he said.

  He, Luke, and the horses with their morbid burdens turned left, striking west across the gulch. The sun showed over the top of the eastern cliffs, filling the gulch with buttery yellow light and heat.

  Opposite, on the west wall, the promontory shaped like a ship’s bow was a marquee pointing to a gap in the rock walls. “Signpost to the Snake Pit,” Johnny said.

  “Ain’t likely to forget it,” Luke said, nodding. “Sure is different from the war, eh, Johnny? Back then we never had to clean up what we killed, just left ’em laying where they fell.”

  “Peacetime’s shaping up as a whole lot of extra work,” Johnny said.

  They rode into a ravine below the ship’s-bow stone marker. It began as a narrow, sandy-floored cleft in rock with sandy floor, barely wide enough for the travois to make its way through, sometimes pressing close to the sides at the base of the fan-shaped carrier. The dust had a flinty smell.

  The ravine wormed its way through rock walls. They began to part, opening outward from each other. The corridor gave on to a pocket valley. It was dry, waterless. Stony soil was covered with thin, short, colorless grass. Mesquite trees, gnarly and twisted, dotted the rocky flat. There were clumps of prickly-pear cactus, too.

  “Watch out for rattlers,” Johnny said.

  “Ain’t nothing but rattlers in this hole,” Luke said, with feeling.

  At the far end of the valley, a slanting boulder twelve feet high sheered off from a rocky ridge. It was shaped like a hard-boiled egg standing upright, with its wider end half-buried in the ground and with one side sliced off at a slanted angle.

  Johnny and Luke rode toward it, carefully eyeing the ground ahead for rattlesnakes. This was prime rattlersnake country. A rattler could spook a horse, cause it to panic, maybe blindly step into a rabbit hole, stumble and break a leg.

  Nearing the slanted rock, it could be seen that at its base gaped a big hole.

  Horse nostrils quivered, widening, getting the scent of snake. The animals grew skittish. Johnny reined in a stone’s-throw from the hole, near a clump of stunted mesquite trees little bigger than bushes. “This is as far as the horses will go,” he said.

  The hole in the ground was a sinkhole, a natural vertical shaft in the limestone rock about ten feet in diameter and fifty feet deep. The Snake Pit—a den of rattlesnakes.

  Rattlers thronged the stony ground ringing the hole, sunning themselves. They looked like several dozen separate lengths of thick, yellow-brown rope strewn carelessly about the rocks, except that they were moving.

  Johnny and Luke got down off their horses and hitched them to the trees, making sure they were tied good and tight so the horses couldn’t break away. Johnny loosed his carbine from the saddle-scabbard and handed it to Luke. “You see any rattlers coming this way, shoot ’em before they get close,” he said.

  “I sure will!” Luke declared.

  Johnny used his knife to cut one of the dead men loose from a horse. The body hit the ground with a thud. Another followed. He cut the ropes binding the other three corpses to the travois and rolled them out of it onto the ground.

  He pulled on a pair of riding gloves, fitting his hands into them. He bent down over the bodies, lining them up with their feet pointed toward the hole. Luke with his crutch and wooden leg was no good for this kind of work. Johnny did it by himself.

  Luke stood guard, facing the sinkhole, holding the carbine in one hand. Johnny finished arranging the bodies to his liking and straightened up. He’d worked up a pretty good sweat. He used his bandanna to wipe his brow.

  A rattlesnake as thick around the middle as a young girl’s arm separated itself from the group around the hole and started wriggling toward the clump of mesquite trees. Its triangular head rose up from the ground as it moved forward.

  A shot cracked. The rattler’s head exploded.

  Smoke curled from the muzzle of the carbine. Luke had fired holding the weapon in one hand, pointing and shooting with seeming casualness.

  “Nice shot,” Johnny said.

  “I may not be no pistol fighter, but I’m a fair hand with a rifle,” Luke said.

  Those unfortunate enough to have disturbed a hornet’s nest know the unforgettable sound of the hive buzzing in mounting fury. The sinister sound of a rattlesnake rattling its rattles is of an order several degrees of magnitude greater in its chilling menace.

  Nature, which has equipped the rattler with venom sacs loaded with deadly poison and gleaming, sharp-pointed fangs to inject it has thoughtfully equipped it with rattles at the end of its tail. When the reptile’s ire is roused, its rattle warns: I’m dangerous! Beware!

  Now, not one, but many rattlesnakes around the sinkhole reared up, wedge-shaped heads weaving, beady eyes glittering, tails agitating their buzzing rattles. They sounded like a rhythm section of percussionists for a mariachi band simultaneously shaking their maracas.

  Something primal in that rattling drone, instinctive, to make the hair stand up on the back of a man’s neck, send shivers up and down his spine, and chill his blood.

  Johnny held a pair of loaded revolvers he’d taken from a saddlebag, these in addition to the twin guns worn holstered on his hips.

  “Here they come!” Luke warned. He took up a wide stance, bracing himself solidly on the crutch so he’d be able to use both hands to work the carbine fast.

  Rattlesnakes arrowed away from the hole toward the clump of mesquite trees where the men and horses were grouped. They were swollen with venom and hostility.

  “They’re moving fast,” Luke said tightly.

  “Let ’em have it,” Johnny said, opening up with the pistols. He pointed a gun at the nearest rattler coiling toward him and squeezed the trigger. The flat crack of the report sounded simultaneously with the rattler’s head disintegrating into pulp. Its long, looping body writhed and spasmed, a living whip being wielded by an invisible hand.

  The carbine spat, tagging another rattler in the body, slamming it sideways. More rattlesnakes came on, six, twelve, more.

  Johnny squared off against the venomous horde, firing first with the gun in his right hand, then with his left, covering a wide angle of approach. Hot lead pulverized snake flesh, spraying corrosive mist into the air.

  Luke wielded the carbine, potting away at the plague of reptiles. As the lead snakes halved the distance between them and the men, shots came in rapid succession, sending up their own lethal chorus of rattling gunfire.

  A rattler slithering in from the side managed to get within a man’s length of Johnny and Luke. It reared, wicked yellow eyes glaring, open maw gaping to display a double set of wickedly close fangs. It was so close that the droplets of venom beading on the needle-sharp tips of curved fangs could be seen.

  Johnny placed a shot right between its horns, taking off the top of its head. The monster rattler continued writhing and whipsawing on the ground, minus its forward motion and hostile intent.

  “That was too close for comfort!” Lu
ke shouted.

  The wave of advancing rattlers was checked by gunfire, broken. The terrible thing was that even after being shot dead, some of the reptiles continued to move, spasming convulsively.

  With a dozen or more of their number shot into pieces—though the pieces continued moving—the surviving rattlesnakes got the message that their attack meant death. They peeled off to the sides, scattering, fleeing the area of the sinkhole.

  It was a sullen, furious exodus of rattlesnakes, slithering and S-curving away from the shooters, darting into rockpiles and disappearing into clumps of tall, yellow-gray grasses.

  Johnny squeezed off some more rounds, driving off some of the stragglers. The ground before them was littered with sections and coils of the reptiles, most of them still jerking with the convulsive half-life of spasmodic muscular reaction.

  There was a lull in the shooting. Johnny and Luke exchanged glances. Luke’s eyes were bulging in a face shiny with cold sweat. Johnny wondered if he looked the same.

  Luke rubbed his face in the crook of an arm, using the sleeve of his jacket to wipe the stinging sweat from his eyes. “They heads is blowed clean off and they still ain’t got enough sense to know that they’re dead. Must be pure meanness that keeps ’em going,” he said.

  “Like us,” said Johnny. He stuck the two guns in the top of the gun belt, freeing his hands.

  The horses were anxious, upset. Pointed ears stood straight up. Hooves pawed the ground. The animals danced, sidling. It wasn’t the noise and violence of gunfire that had done it, it was the smell of the snakes and the buzzing of their rattles that had sounded deep wells of unease somewhere in the depths of their brains.

  Johnny went to the chestnut, speaking softly to it. “Easy, boy, easy. Ain’t nothing to get on your hind legs about.” The horse quieted some at the sound of his voice. He patted its corded muscular neck, stroking it.