Ride the Savage Land

by William W. Johnstone

  “He had nothing to do with this,” Baylor said. “He stayed out of the fight completely.”

  “That’s true,” Ace said. “We were just scuffling with these four.”

  “All right.” Courtright frowned. “Something else I just thought of. What happened to the snake?”

  “Over here, Marshal,” said a man with a deep, calm voice.

  Everyone looked around and saw the Indian who had been sitting with Shelby, Baylor, and the others before the battle erupted. He held up his knife. Skewered on the end of it was the limp, lifeless body of the big rattlesnake. “Good eatin’.”

  “Chauncey!” Dugan wailed.

  * * *

  Shelby, Baylor, and the other two men were disarmed and ushered out by Marshal Courtright. A doctor carrying a medical bag bustled in to tend to Dugan’s wounded arm. Obviously someone had sent for the medico. Since Ace and Chance hadn’t been arrested, they remained in the Lucky Panther and sat down at one of the tables.

  Chance sighed, and Ace said. “I don’t know what you’re looking so glum about. We’re not behind bars.”

  “Yeah, but I won that bet fair and square.” He held up a hand to stall Ace’s protest. “I know, I know. We’re not any worse off than we were before, but that lawman didn’t have any right to make us give our winnings back. It’s the principle of the thing.”

  A new voice spoke up. “When Longhair Jim lays down the law, it stays laid down.”

  Ace and Chance looked up to see the whiskery old-timer Ace had been talking to earlier. Most of the saloon’s customers were filtering back into the place now that the fight was over and word had spread about the rattlesnake’s demise.

  “That’s the marshal?” Ace said.

  “Yep. Longhair Jim Courtright. Fast on the draw and a dead shot. Lew Shelby may have thought about takin’ him on, but with Jim’s gun already drawed, Shelby knew he’d be stretched out on the floor gettin’ cold iffen he tried.” The old-timer looked hopeful. “You boys fixin’ to have a drink?”

  “I’m sure you’ll want to join us if the answer is yes,” Chance said.

  “Weeellll . . . if you’re askin’ . . . reckon I don’t mind if I do.”

  “Sit down.” Ace caught the attention of the aproned man who had taken over as bartender while Dugan was getting patched up and held up three fingers.

  The old-timer sat down. “I heard you boys say your name’s Jensen. Mine’s Greendale. Harley Greendale. Fancy moniker for an old pelican like me, ain’t it?”

  “Glad to meet you, Mr. Greendale.”

  “Call me Harley. Mr. Greendale was my pa, damn his black heart to hell.”

  Ace didn’t ask what that comment was about. There was a good chance Harley would tell them sooner or later anyway. The old man was the garrulous sort.

  “You boys always carry this much excitement around in your back pockets?”

  “That ruckus wasn’t our fault,” Chance said. “Nothing would have happened if Shelby and Baylor had just admitted I won that bet fair and square.”

  “Them two ain’t the sort to take kindly to losin’, like I was tellin’ your brother earlier.”

  One of the serving girls delivered three overflowing mugs of beer on a wooden tray. Harley leaned forward eagerly, picked up one of them, and sucked the foam off the top. He sighed in satisfaction. “That bunch drifted into town a couple months ago.”

  The Jensen brothers hadn’t asked him to fill them in on Shelby and the others, but Ace thought it might not be a bad idea to learn more about the men with whom they had clashed. Shelby especially struck him as the sort of hombre who would hold a grudge and try to act on it.

  Harley took a healthy swallow of beer and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Inside a week, Shelby was mixed up in a killin’. Plenty of witnesses saw the other feller reach first, so Shelby didn’t go to jail for it. Nor for the other two shootin’s he’s been part of since then. Both of them were over card games. Fellas didn’t like losin’ to Baylor. Didn’t come right out and accuse him of cheatin’—there wasn’t no proof of that—but they pushed it hard enough that guns was drawed anyways.”

  “It sounds like they have a partnership,” Chance said. “Baylor fleeces the lambs, and Shelby shoots the ones who object too strenuously to being shorn.”

  “Reckon that’s about the size of it.”

  Ace asked, “What about the other three?”

  “They just sort of hang around with Shelby and Baylor. Jack Loomis is the bald-headed one with the big belly. Feller who always looks like he just bit into somethin’ sour is called Prewitt. Don’t know that I’ve ever heard his first name.” Harley paused. “Then there’s the Kiowa. Nobody ever calls him anything else.”

  The Indian had left the saloon after Marshal Courtright herded his friends off to jail. As far as Ace and Chance knew, he had taken the dead snake with him and might be cooking it over an open fire at this very moment.

  “He never says much,” Harley went on. “I don’t like the look in his eyes. Just as likely to scalp you as to say howdy. Probably more likely.” He swallowed more suds. “All I know is that they’re a bad bunch. Iffen I was you boys, I reckon I’d be ridin’ out of Fort Worth tonight. First thing in the mornin’ at the latest, ’fore Longhair Jim lets those varmints outta jail. Shelby is liable to come lookin’ for you.”

  “Let him come,” Chance said. “I’m not going to run away from anybody.”

  “That’s a good attitude to have, son. But in this case, you might ought to give it some extry thought.”

  Chance was going to argue with the old-timer, but Ace lifted a hand from the table to forestall the wrangling. When he had Chance’s attention, he tipped his head toward the saloon’s main entrance.

  Marshal Jim Courtright had just come in and was looking around the place. When his gaze landed on the table where the Jensen boys sat with Harley, he started across the room toward them with a stern look on his face.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I was hoping you fellows had enough sense to be on your way by now,” the lawman said when he came up to the table.

  “You didn’t actually order us to get out of town, Marshal,” Ace said.

  “I advised ’em it’d probably be a good idea, though, Jim,” Harley put in.

  Courtright didn’t sit down, but he rested his left hand on the back of the remaining empty chair, pushed his coat back a little, and hooked his right thumb in the lower pocket of the vest on that side. That pose kept his gun in easy reach. “I’d just as soon not deal with any more killings than I have to. Shelby and Baylor will come after you for what happened tonight, if you’re still around.”

  “That’s what people keep telling us,” Chance said.

  “If you’re gone, I doubt they’ll go to the trouble of tracking you down,” Courtright went on. “I can get away with keeping them locked up until nine o’clock. You can be well away from Fort Worth by then.”

  “What about their Kiowa friend?” Ace asked. “He’s still loose, isn’t he?”

  Courtright nodded. “I couldn’t justify putting him in jail.”

  “So even if we leave town, what’s to stop him from following us? He could ride back later and tell the others where we went. They could come after us and ambush us on the trail.”

  “The world is full of danger,” Courtright said. “But my bailiwick is Fort Worth.”

  Chance said, “So you don’t care what happens to us as long as it doesn’t happen here.”

  The lawman smiled. “That’s about the size of it.” He straightened from his casual pose and strolled toward the bar. All the broken glass had been cleaned up, as well as the other damage from the fight.

  Ace looked across the table at his brother. “We were probably going to be riding out tomorrow anyway. We might as well get an early start.”

  “It seems to me like running scared,” Chance said. “I don’t cotton to that.”

  “Neither do I,” Ace admitted. “But that marshal’s not g
oing to give us any more breaks. If there’s more trouble, we’ll wind up behind bars . . . assuming we live through it.”

  A shudder ran through Chance. “I’m not sure but what I’d rather go out fighting than be locked up.” He sighed. “All right. We’ll pull out first thing in the morning. Which direction?”

  “West,” Ace said without even thinking about it. He was perfectly content to let his instincts and a hunch guide him.

  “In the meantime,” Harley Greendale said, “we could use some more drinks.”

  “We haven’t finished these,” Ace pointed out.

  “Well, drink up, boys! You’re fallin’ behind.”

  * * *

  After months of herding cattle, mending fence, digging post holes, and pulling calves out of the mud, Ace and Chance had been ready for some excitement and entertainment. They’d been staying at an inexpensive hotel a couple blocks closer to the Trinity River, not far from the edge of the bluff overlooking the stream, while they looked around to see what diversions Fort Worth offered.

  Even without the violent encounter in the Lucky Panther, they were ready to move on. Their fiddle-footed nature never allowed them to remain in one place for very long unless it was absolutely necessary.

  They left Harley Greendale happily snockered in the saloon and walked along Throckmorton toward the river.

  More than thirty years earlier, an army detachment had established a garrison on the bluffs to help protect the expanding frontier from the Comanches and named it after General William Jenkins Worth, a hero of the Mexican War who’d never set foot in the post named after him. The fort had long since been abandoned and no sign of it remained, but it had given its name to the town that grew up around it and still existed.

  Fort Worth had boomed since the opening of the cattle trails to the railheads in Kansas. The steel rails had arrived in Fort Worth a few years later, and now there was talk of building a large stockyards area on the north side of the river to accommodate the vast herds that poured in from all over Texas to be shipped to the rest of the country.

  The town once noted for being so sleepy that a panther was spotted dozing in the middle of Main Street was now bustling with industriousness.

  If Ace and Chance had been ambitious sorts, Fort Worth—or Cowtown, as some people were starting to call it—would have been the perfect place for them to settle down. Since they weren’t ambitious by any stretch of the imagination . . .

  Ace reached in his pocket and brought out the double eagle Dugan had paid them. “This will cover the rest of our expenses. We’ll be leaving town with almost as much money as we had when we rode in. That’s not bad.”

  “We should have been two hundred dollars richer,” Chance said. “Hell, six hundred dollars richer because Shelby lost that last bet, too, and he said double or nothing.”

  “We have money for supplies and ammunition. We won’t need anything else for a while. What would you do if you had eight hundred dollars? Put it in a bank?”

  Chance looked at his brother with disgust on his face, thinking Ace had just made the most revolting suggestion he’d ever heard. “Banks are for people who stay in one place.”

  “Doc had money in several banks. Santa Fe, Denver, and San Francisco, if I remember right.”

  “That’s different. He was raising two young’uns, and he wanted to put something away for us, for when he was gone . . . which I hope is still a long time from now.”

  “Me, too,” Ace agreed. He couldn’t imagine a world without Doc Monday in it, although they saw him only rarely.

  They were nearly to the hotel, a two-story frame structure with a balcony along the second floor front.

  Ace glanced up at it and frowned as he thought he saw something move. The half moon cast silvery light down on Fort Worth, but that glow also created shadows. Maybe he’d imagined the movement, Ace told himself when he didn’t see anything else.

  Still, he was wary as they approached, making sure that his right hand didn’t stray very far from the Colt.

  Nothing happened.

  The brothers went into the hotel lobby, where all the lamps had been turned low at this hour, and crossed quietly to the stairs leading to the second floor. Behind the desk, the night clerk dozed in a chair tilted back against the wall. His lips flapped as he snored.

  Ace and Chance turned right at the landing and went around to their room, which was on the front of the building. Ace took the key out of his pocket, unlocked the door, and stepped into the room.

  Instinct and the smell of something rancid like bear grease warned him at the last second that he had been careless.

  He dived to the floor as something whipped over his head. Powering into a swift roll, he crashed into the intruder’s legs. He had seen someone on the balcony—someone breaking into their room through its single window.

  “Chance, look out!” he called as the intruder fell heavily to the floor beside him.

  A small oil lamp burning in a wall sconce at the far end of the corridor provided the only light in that part of the hotel, so the room was full of shadows. Ace caught a glimpse of a man with long, dark hair lunging at him as he tried to get up.

  The Kiowa.

  Light glinted for a split second on something else as the two men grappled. Most likely a knife, Ace knew. He reached up blindly with his left hand, brushed the Kiowa’s wrist, and caught hold of it, straining to keep the blade away from his flesh. With his right, he threw a punch where he hoped the Kiowa’s head would be.

  The blow missed. With muscles like bundles of steel cable, the Kiowa rolled Ace onto his back. Ace twisted to avoid the knee thrust at his groin and heaved his opponent to the side.

  Over and over they rolled, which made it impossible for Chance to risk a shot from just inside the door way . . . even if the light hadn’t been so bad.

  Ace and the Kiowa bumped against the bed, stopping them. Ace grabbed his opponent’s wrist with both hands and slammed it against the floor. He heard the knife skitter away.

  Unarmed, the Kiowa turned to wrestling. He writhed free, got behind Ace, and looped an arm around his neck. Ace felt the terrible pressure on his windpipe and desperately drove an elbow back into the Kiowa’s midsection.

  It took two more powerful blows before the arm pressing into his throat slipped. Ace ducked his head to keep the Kiowa from getting a hold on him again and bucked up off the floor.

  At that instant, light flared in the room. Chance had flicked a match to life with his left thumbnail. His right held the Smith & Wesson .38. Ace was half-blinded by the sudden glare, but knowing it was coming, Chance had squinted his eyes against it and could see well enough to shoot. The .38 barked as the Kiowa scrambled to regain his knife. The bullet chewed splinters from the floor just ahead of the intruder’s outstretched hand.

  The Kiowa jerked back, abandoning the knife. He made it to hands and knees and then to his feet. A swift step carried him toward the open window as Chance fired again.

  Evidently the Kiowa wasn’t hit, because he never slowed down. He dived through the window just as the match burned out and the light vanished.

  Charging past his brother, who was still struggling to see clearly, Chance leaned out the window and triggered again at the fleeing form. The Kiowa reached the end of the balcony, put a hand on the railing, and vaulted over it. He dropped out of sight as he fell toward the street.

  “Damn it!” As far as Chance could tell, all three of his shots had missed.

  Ace got to his feet and stumbled over to the window. “Did you get him?”

  “I don’t think so. He was still moving pretty fast the last time I saw him.”

  “He was going to kill us!”

  “Yeah,” Chance said dryly. “Seemed like that was what he had in mind. Why would he do that? He wasn’t even mixed up in that fight we had with the others. He was chasing that damned snake while the ruckus was going on.”

  “I guess he feels some loyalty toward them. He figured that while they were l
ocked up, he would settle the score on their behalf. Maybe he hoped Baylor and Shelby would give him some money for getting rid of us.” Ace shook his head. “I don’t guess there’s any way to know for sure. We’ll need to keep our eyes open for him until we’re well away from Fort Worth.”

  “You think he’ll try again?”

  “I don’t know, but we can’t rule it out.”

  Ace found a match in his pocket, struck it, and lit the lamp that stood on the small table next to the bed. As the light washed over the room, he took a careful look around. No blood on the floor, so it seemed likely the Kiowa was unhurt.

  The door still stood open. A footstep sounded from the hallway, prompting the Jensen brothers to turn in that direction. Carrying a shotgun, Marshal Jim Courtright stood there with a disgusted expression on his face.

  “You two again,” he said. “You’re just determined to keep me from having any peace and quiet tonight, aren’t you?”

  “We’re leaving in the morning,” Ace said.

  “And it’s not our fault that blasted Indian decided to sneak in here and ambush us,” Chance added.

  Courtright raised an eyebrow. “The Kiowa was here?”

  “He was waiting in our room when we got here,” Ace said. “I didn’t think about that until I was walking in, even though I thought I saw someone moving around on the balcony while we were still outside. I’m just lucky he didn’t cut my throat before I realized what was going on.”

  Chance said, “Luck’s got nothing to do with it. Jensens are quick.”

  Courtright grunted. “Jensens are trouble. If you want to swear out a complaint against the Kiowa, I’ll have a look around for him. I can’t guarantee that I’ll find him, mind you—there are plenty of places to hide around here—but I’ll look.”

  Ace sighed and shook his head. “No, I don’t suppose it would do much good. Anyway, he didn’t get what he came after—” As he said that, something made him reach down and rest his hand against the pocket where he carried the roll of money he and Chance had earned with their months of hard labor. He caught his breath as he realized he didn’t feel the familiar lump.