He cussed himself for sticking his head in the clouds. As an Army scout for the last six years since the end of the War Between the States, he’d learned that paying attention meant staying alive.
He shucked his hat and left it on the ground near the elm, then he eased off to his right, following the Henry’s muzzle. Even though he knew he was being hunted, he went slow-footed and kept his feet light and spread apart, never crossing one foot over the other so he could turn quick if he had to and not get tangled.
Thirty feet away, still back in the brush and headed higher up on the hill, Sam wished he had Ready Eddie with him, or Pete Sanders. Both of them were scouts same as Sam, and both of them had kept their hair from the Indians and their lives from Confederate soldiers and Mexicans still at war with the United States. Mike Tucker would have been best of all. Sam had never seen a surer gunhand than Tucker.
Sam’s horse whickered forty yards downhill and to his left. He figured one of the men had to be near that position. A blue jay leaving its nest to dive at an intruder marked a second man’s location left of that. A twig snapped underfoot about twenty yards in front of Sam. To the right, a few branches moved wrong when the sulfur-laden air blew.
Four men. At least. Long odds.
Nervous and not wanting for any trouble nor any killing, though he was certain it would come to that, Sam came to a deliberate stop behind a blackjack tree that stunk of sap. Tall and lean and broad-shouldered, Sam married his shadow to the tree’s as he stood with his shoulder to the trunk. He held the Henry perpendicular and tight against his chest. Sweat trickled down his back and from his thick, shaggy black hair to cascade across his stubbled cheeks.
“I found his hat.” The man’s voice was barely raised above a whisper.
Sam immediately raised the tally. He was facing five men, and they were closing fast. He swallowed and felt the dryness in his throat. The water in the nearby creek was undrinkable and he’d left his canteen back with the horse. He was wishful for a drink and knew he’d shed blood before he got it.
“Means he knows we’re here.” That voice came from where the blue jay still flitted.
“Hey, mister.”
Sam turned his gaze toward the area where the branches had moved wrong. Thirty feet away, the man’s shadow stood framed on the brush. He’d caught a break there. The men weren’t trained bushwhackers. Then he smiled grimly. If they had been, old Sam, you’d already have been dead.
“Can you hear me, mister?”
“He’s probably afraid.”
Yeah. Sam took a fresh grip on his rifle. I’m afraid enough to shoot you dead if you give me any cause.
“This don’t have to go hard, old man.” That voice was more harsh, more cocky. It came from where the horse was. The leader of the pack definitely wasn’t in the forefront. “We saw that money you were flashing around in town. We just come for that. Don’t want to kill you. Unless we have to.”
Sam thought back to his visit to Shooter’s Cross that morning. He’d arrived there late last night, wanted a real bed to sleep in and a warm bath instead of bathing in a creek. He was a few days ahead of the Army unit he was scouting for. Those men would be hunkered down for a week yet while hunters filled their larders. Captain Brushy had orders to track down a group of deserters that had gone south with Army gold.
No one in town had taken any special interest in Sam that he’d noticed. But he’d been a long time between towns and civilized places. Everything in Shooter’s Cross had seemed stressful to him. When he’d heard about Rancho Diablo and the spread being up for sale – and cursed – he’d gotten curious. That was a bad thing for a man in lands strange to him to be.
“You’ve heard what they say about this place, haven’t you, old man?”
Sam bit back a sharp retort. He was forty-two come this December, and he was an older man. Not an old one. The gray at his temples had come early.
“This place is cursed.” The speaker’s tone was mocking. “Indians cursed this ranch because it used to be a sacred place to them. That’s why this godawful stink is everywhere. It’s the smell of all them dead Indians. Some folks say they seen the ha’nts of them Indians roaming around this forest at night. This would be a bad place for a man to leave his bones, I’m thinking.”
The man on the right was on the move, going toward higher ground. His movements were hurried and he stirred the brush as he went.
Young. Sam felt bad about that.
“You believe in ha’nts, old man?”
Turning slowly, Sam waited for the man to break cover. Dressed as he was in buckskin chaps over jeans and a buckskin shirt, Sam knew if he didn’t move sudden the man would have a hard time spotting him. That little bit of time would make all the difference.
“Are you deaf?” The speaker sounded irritated now. “I’m trying to make this easy on you. Give us your money and we’ll let you live. You won’t get a better offer.”
At that moment, the man circling behind Sam stepped out from behind a wall of scrub oak. He looked like he was in his twenties, a rawboned young man with scruffy cheeks, dressed in Levi’s, and a cotton shirt. He wore a short-brimmed hat and carried a Spencer rifle.
Smooth and steady, Sam raised the Henry to his shoulder and spoke low enough that his voice carried only a few feet. “Put that rifle down, boy, and I won’t blow a hole in you.”
For a moment, the young man froze, then he started a sick trembling and his eyes rounded white as he finally spotted Sam in the brush. Then he gave a panicked shout. “Jacob! He’s over here! I got him!” He pulled the Spencer around to fire.
Sam didn’t move anything but his trigger finger, sliding it neatly over the trigger and taking up slack. The hammer fell and the rifle banged back against his shoulder.
The .44 round slammed into the young man’s chest and knocked him backwards. The Spencer fell from his hands. Before he hit the ground, his four companions opened fire on Sam’s position.
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RANCHO DIABLO: HANGROPE LAW
When an old friend named Orion Pike shows up at Sam Blaylock’s door with lawdogs and outlaws at his heels, the hands of Rancho Diablo have to figure out where true justice lies.
Sam has never been one to desert a friend, but Pike has put the Blaylock family squarely in a dangerous crossfire.
1
Titus Blaylock eyed the trees warily as he rode toward them. He knew the Comanches were in there, just waiting to charge out, chase him down, shoot him off his horse, and scalp him.
Of course, he only had to worry about the Comanches if those outlaws hidden in those rocks to his left didn’t ambush him. Which they probably would. A dozen of the meanest, bloodthirstiest owlhoots in the whole state of Texas were waiting for him, intent on shooting him full of holes.
They were in for a big surprise when he whipped out the pair of revolvers holstered on his hips and started blazing away at them. Left, right, left, right, one gun after the other roaring and spitting hot leaden death at the varmints . . . Wipe ’em all out, that’s what he’d do, and when he was finished killing outlaws, why, he’d charge right into the thick of those painted savages and make them sorry they’d ever gone on the warpath. Yes, sir, by the time the famous gunslinger Titus Blaylock was through with them, those outlaws and Comanches would be sorry they had ever dared to venture onto Rancho Diablo.
“Yeee-hah!” With all the sheer exuberance of his sixteen years, Titus let out a whoop as he leaned forward in the saddle, dug his boot heels into the horse’s flanks, and sent the animal racing alongside the Brazos River.
One of these days, he thought. One of these days, all the adventures he dreamed about would come true.
In the meantime, he could live out those adventures in his head and enjoy the feel of the wind in his face as he galloped over the rugged landscape of his father’s ranch.
What made it even better and more satisfying was that Elijah and Miriam were back home, tending to his chores for him. Let them get the
weeds out of Ma’s garden this week. Elijah didn’t mind the work; he was the sort who would rather read about somebody having adventures in a book than get out and have some of his own, and Miriam, well, Miriam was just a girl, no matter how much she might wish she had been born a boy so she could get out and raise hell like her brothers. One of her brothers, anyway.
Who could stand around on a beautiful spring day like this and get blistered hands from chopping weeds with a hoe, anyway? The trees were blossoming, the wildflowers were blooming, the wind was warm and sweet, and the Texas sky was the deepest, clearest blue Titus had ever seen. It was a day for adventuring, not working.
Titus reined the horse back to a walk. He intended to be gone from the ranch house all day, and he didn’t want to wear out his mount too quickly. He paused to watch the Brazos River make its slow, stately way past him.
He had looked at maps – that was one of the few things books were good for, sometimes they had maps in them – and had traced the course of the Brazos far, far up into the wilds of northwest Texas, where the Comanches still ran free. Someday he would follow the river all the way to its source, he vowed. That would be an adventure to tell stories about for a long time.
With a smile, Titus heeled his horse into motion again. He had passed the rocks where the imaginary outlaws were hidden, ridden through the trees where the Comanches of his own creation had been waiting to lift his hair. But there was a clump of brush ahead, next to the trail that followed the river, and what dangers might be lurking in it? Maybe a bear or a mountain lion, Titus thought. He could just see himself wrestling for his life with a bear or a big cat, using a Bowie knife to slay the beast . . .
Something moved in the brush.
Titus stiffened in the saddle and brought his horse to an abrupt halt as he stared at the branches swaying back and forth. Were there really bears or mountain lions in this part of Texas? His family hadn’t lived here long enough for him to be sure.
But something was in there, and it let out a menacing growl.
Well, not really a growl so much as a moan, Titus thought after a moment, and when the sound came again, he could tell that it wasn’t all that menacing, either. In fact, it was more like a noise somebody would make when they were in pain. He couldn’t be sure about that, though.
The smart thing to do, he told himself, was to turn the horse around and light a shuck out of here, just as fast as he could, before whatever it was charged out of there in a killing frenzy.
He was about to do that when the thing in the brush said, “Help . . . help me . . . please . . . I can hear your horse . . .”
So it wasn’t a bear or a mountain lion, but rather a man. A hurt man – or at least a man pretending to be hurt.
Titus swallowed hard, got a good grip on the reins and his nerves, and said, “Come out of there where I can see you, mister.”
“I . . . I can’t.” The voice was thin and reedy, like it belonged to an old man. “You gotta . . . come in here and help me . . .”
It’s a trap, a voice in the back of Titus’s head warned him. You go in there, you’ll never come out.
“I’ll go find somebody – ” he started to say.
“If you do, it’ll be . . . too late. You got any . . . water?”
Involuntarily, Titus glanced down at the canteen hung on his saddle, right next to the sheath that held his Henry rifle. Both items helped him make up his mind.
“All right, mister,” he said. “Hang on just a minute.”
A weak chuckle came from the brush. “I ain’t goin’ anywhere . . . unless it’s the fiery pit . . .”
Titus had heard enough preaching in his life to know what the man meant by that. He swung down from the saddle and drew the Henry from its sheath. Then he took the canteen loose and draped it over his shoulder by its strap.
“I’ve got a rifle” he said as he approached the brush. “If you’re trying to trick me, I’ll shoot you, sure as the sun came up this morning.”
“No tricks,” the unseen man told him. “Thank you, son, thank you . . .”
His voice trailed off and he didn’t say anything else.
“Mister? Mister, you still there?”
That was a stupid question, Titus told himself. If the man really was hurt bad, he couldn’t get up and run off, and if he wasn’t hurt, he’d be lurking in there, waiting for Titus to get close enough to grab him.
Using the Henry’s barrel to push the branches aside, Titus worked his way into the thick growth. He spotted the shape lying motionless on the ground ahead of him. The man’s clothes were ragged and torn and covered with trail dust. A battered old hat lay upside-down on the ground near him, as if it had fallen off when he collapsed. Strands of thinning gray hair were plastered by sweat to his pale scalp. A gun butt with walnut grips stuck up from a holster on the man’s right hip.
Titus had to swallow hard again. A part of him wished he was back home, fighting those dang weeds in the garden. He was scared, no doubt about that.
But at the same time, finding a wounded man like this was an adventure, wasn’t it? And hadn’t he been wanting to have an adventure?
The stranger was still breathing. Titus heard the rasp of air in the man’s throat and said, “Mister, can you hear me? Mister?”
No response came from the man. Titus took a deep breath. He had to know what he was dealing with here. He approached the man with care and knelt beside him, setting the rifle aside so both hands were free. But he kept the weapon close, where he could get it in a hurry if he needed it.
He reached out and took hold of the man’s arm. With a grunt of effort, Titus rolled him onto his back. For a second Titus was frozen by the sight of the weathered, leathery-skinned face and the ugly bloodstain on the man’s shirt.
Then suddenly the man’s eyes popped open and his claw-like hand shot out to clamp down with painful force on Titus’s arm.
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Dead Man's Revenge Page 10
