“My God,” the man who was sitting down rasped. “You’ve killed me.”
“It was your idea,” Frank told him.
Blood gushed from the man’s mouth and he fell over on his side. The other man, the one on his knees, pitched forward at the same moment and landed on his face. Blood began to form a dark pool underneath him.
Frank walked over, checked them both, and then reloaded the two spent shells when he was satisfied that the men were dead. He slid the Colt back into leather and turned to see Sheriff Wilmott and Marshal Keever coming toward him.
“It was a fair fight and they went for their guns first,” Wilmott said heavily. “Nobody’s going to arrest you, Morgan. But I wish you’d stay the hell out of town from now on.”
“That goes for me, too,” Keever put in. “You’re not welcome in Brownwood.”
“This trouble wasn’t my doing,” Frank pointed out.
“It found you all the same. If you hadn’t been here, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“So you’re telling me to get out of town?”
Both of the local lawmen nodded.
“I thought maybe you’d let me talk to Chris Kane.”
“Not hardly,” Wilmott said.
Frank saw that the crusty old sheriff wasn’t going to budge. He turned away and looked for Beaumont, thinking that he would reclaim Stormy’s reins and ride out.
Behind him, Wilmott told one of the bystanders to fetch the undertaker. “Tell Groner there’s plenty of work for him today,” the sheriff added.
If nothing else, the sudden outbreak of violence seemed to have defused the emotions that had gripped everyone earlier. The crowd had continued to split up, and now some of the men glanced at each other in something resembling embarrassment as they headed back to their businesses and homes. Maybe his words about taking the law into their own hands had gotten through to some of them, Frank thought. No matter what the reason, it looked like there wasn’t going to be a lynching today after all.
Beaumont met him halfway across the street with Stormy. As the young Ranger handed over the reins, he said quietly, “I heard what the sheriff said about this being your fault because you were here, Frank. I can see now that’s not fair. I reckon I understand—”
Rawlings was coming up behind Beaumont, and since Frank didn’t want Rawlings to overhear what his young friend was saying, he nodded and said, “Thanks for holding my horse.” Then he turned away before Beaumont could say anything else. They could talk about it more the next time they met at the cave on Blanket Creek.
* * *
“So that was Frank Morgan,” Coburn commented a short time later as he stood at the bar in the Palace.
“Yeah,” Rawlings said. “You got to see how fast he is for yourself. That going to make any difference?”
“You mean in whether I stand with you and the others?” Coburn shook his head. “Morgan’s fast. But so am I.”
“Which one of you is faster?” Rawlings asked bluntly.
Coburn tossed back his drink and smiled. “Maybe we’ll find out one of these days.”
Beaumont was sitting at a table with Callie Stratton and Vern Gladwell. Gladwell said, “I thought for sure there was gonna be a big fight out there today.”
“So did I,” Callie said. “And we were outnumbered.”
Gladwell jerked his chin toward the bar where Rawlings and Coburn stood. “Nothing to worry about,” he said sarcastically. “We’ve got a hired gun on our side now.”
“Coburn’s only one man,” Beaumont said. “He couldn’t have stood up to that whole mob.”
“You don’t like him, do you?” Callie asked.
“He rides up out of nowhere, admits he’s a gunslinger, and says he wants to side with us in our fight with the big ranchers. Doesn’t that sound the least bit suspicious to you?” Beaumont wanted to know.
Callie shrugged. “Maybe. But it could be just the way Coburn says it is.”
“Yeah,” Beaumont said, but he didn’t sound convinced. “I’d still keep an eye on him, if it was me.”
“I plan to.” Callie paused, then said, “Coburn and Frank Morgan are in the same line of work, but they’re not the same sort of man, are they? There’s something about Morgan that’s different.”
Gladwell said, “I wish he was on our side instead of Coburn, to tell you the truth.”
Callie nodded slowly, and Beaumont thought she looked like she was thinking the same thing.
The front door of the saloon opened and Skeet Harlan came in. Beaumont’s instinctive dislike of the little deputy made him frown. Harlan ambled toward the bar. He stopped beside Rawlings and Coburn and gave them what was intended to be a pleasant nod. It didn’t look all that pleasant, though.
“I went back to the office and looked through all the reward dodgers, Coburn,” he said.
“You didn’t find me on any of them, did you?” Coburn asked smugly. “I’m not wanted by the law, Deputy.”
“You mean you’re not wanted, period.”
Coburn tensed. “I’m not looking for trouble,” he said.
“Good. Stay that way.” With a sneer of contempt, Harlan turned away.
For a second, Beaumont thought Coburn was going to reach for his gun. The look that passed across Coburn’s face was one of sheer hatred and viciousness. But the gun-thrower controlled himself and turned back to the bar. With his left hand he thumped his empty glass on the hardwood and said to Rusty, “Another drink, damn it.”
Ace McKelvey came out of his office, noticed Harlan standing there, and said, “Deputy, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure,” Harlan said with a shrug. “You got a problem, McKelvey?”
“Let’s go in the office,” the saloon keeper suggested. “Rusty, give me a bottle and a couple of glasses.”
“Sure, Boss.” The red-bearded apron handed over the bottle and glasses. McKelvey ushered Harlan into the office and shut the door behind them.
Beaumont watched them go and frowned slightly as the door closed. There was nothing unusual about a local businessman having a talk with a deputy marshal. They could be talking about anything.
But Frank Morgan was convinced there was more going on in Brownwood than was apparent on the surface, and Beaumont found himself wondering if there was some connection he didn’t know about between McKelvey and Harlan.
One thing he knew for sure, Harlan and Flint Coburn had hated each other on sight. If they ran up against each other too often, then sooner or later blood would be spilled. There was Morgan to consider, too. Would Coburn feel compelled to test Morgan’s speed?
You could draw a line from Morgan to Coburn to Harlan and back to Morgan, Beaumont thought. It made a triangle, a deadly triangle formed of gunsmoke and hot lead....
* * *
“I had the door open enough to see what was going on,” McKelvey said as he sat at his desk and toyed with the drink in his hand. “You should go on the stage, Skeet. Anybody watching must have thought that you and Flint hate each other and wanted to draw. That was quite a fine job of acting.”
Harlan grunted and threw back his drink. “It wasn’t all acting. I could tell Coburn thinks he’s faster’n me. I’d like to see him try to prove it sometime.”
McKelvey leaned forward and frowned. “Don’t get too carried away,” he warned. “We’re all on the same side, remember?”
“I don’t see why we had to bring Coburn in before it was time to loot the town,” Harlan complained.
“Because we needed something else to tip the balance into open war!” McKelvey thumped a fist on the desk. “We’ve been working behind the scenes for weeks now, trying to push the two factions into fighting. Other than a few little skirmishes, we haven’t accomplished a damned thing. Now, with a famous gunman on each side, there’s bound to be bigger trouble.”
Harlan picked up the bottle and poured himself another drink. “Maybe you’re right,” he allowed. “That still doesn’t mean I have to like Coburn.”
“Just
be patient. The fuse is short now. It won’t be long until the explosion.”
“I hope you’re right,” Harlan said. “And when it blows, it better be a damned big one.”
29
The Brown County grand jury met the next day and indicted Chris Kane on charges of attempted murder—drawing his gun on Skeet Harlan—and destruction of private property—cutting the Slash D fence. The second charge would be difficult to prove, since Earl Duggan’s fence still stood unmolested along Stepps Creek, but that didn’t matter. The first one would be enough to send Kane back to the pen, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Kane would be convicted of it. Skeet Harlan would testify that Kane had been on the prod and had drawn first.
Nelse Anderson stopped at the little double cabin on Blanket Creek that evening and told Beaumont, “Al has called a meeting of all the small ranchers in this area. Some of the farmers are comin’, too. I’m headin’ there now. You better come along, Tye.”
Beaumont had finished the day’s work and was looking forward to a few hours of rest before he met Frank Morgan at the cave for their regular rendezvous. That would have to wait, though. He knew he needed to attend the meeting called by Rawlings. Rawlings might have it in his mind to do something crazy, and Beaumont would have to try to talk him out of it.
He threw a saddle on his horse and rode southwest with Anderson toward the Rawlings spread. They had to go the long way around to avoid some fences, and night had fallen before they finally rode up in front of the ranch house. Quite a few horses were tied up there. Light spilled through the open doors of the barn. The meeting was big enough so that it had to be held in the barn rather than in the house.
Several lanterns hung from nails around the inside of the barn, casting a flickering yellow glow over the two dozen or so men who were gathered there. Callie Stratton was the only woman in sight, Beaumont noted as he and Anderson entered the barn. Some of the ranchers and farmers in attendance were married, but obviously they had left their wives at home. This was man’s business. Callie wouldn’t see it that way, of course.
Everybody was talking at once. Rawlings climbed up on a bale of hay and raised his hands to call for quiet, and when he didn’t get it right away, he bellowed, “Hey! Settle down, damn it!”
An uneasy hush fell over the crowd, broken only by a few muttered comments. Even though Rawlings had assumed a leadership role in the effort to defy the big ranchers, not everybody in this group liked him all that much, especially among the farmers. It was unusual to see homesteaders and ranchers working together in the first place, but everything in the situation in Brown County seemed to be turned topsy-turvy from the usual state of affairs on the frontier. Barbed wire had made allies of men who normally would have despised each other.
“That’s better,” Rawlings said. “Settle down now, because we’ve got to decide what to do.”
“About Chris Kane, you mean?” one of the farmers asked.
“That’s right.”
“What can we do? The sheriff’s got him locked up, and he’s been indicted. He’ll have to stand trial.”
“And be sent to prison for something he didn’t do?” one of the ranchers said angrily.
“Well, we can’t just ride into Brownwood and take him out of the jail, now can we?”
“If there’s enough of us, we can!”
“Hold on,” Rawlings said, lifting his hands again. “I don’t like the idea of leavin’ Kane in jail, either, but if we try to break him out, there’ll be a lot of shooting, and some of us will get killed.”
More muttering came from the crowd, especially among the farmers who were clustered together. They weren’t gunmen. They might fight for their own land, but it would be difficult to meld them into any sort of force that could take the battle to the big ranchers. Beaumont was counting on that, in fact, to help keep the lid on the situation.
“I’ve been thinkin’ about it,” Rawlings went on, “and what we have to do is give Duggan and the others something else to worry about. They’re the ones who’ll be pressing for Kane to stand trial, and if they’ve got other things on their mind, maybe they won’t get around to it for a while. That would give us time to find him a lawyer and maybe get the case moved out of Brown County.”
Beaumont frowned slightly. With that talk of a lawyer and a change of venue, Rawlings was actually making sense for a change. He wondered if Callie had come up with that. She seemed more the type. But Rawlings’s comments about giving the big ranchers something else to worry about was what really made Beaumont frown. What was he planning now?
It didn’t take Rawlings long to answer that question. He said, “I think what we have to do is spread out all over the county and cut every damned fence we can find. It’s a new moon tomorrow night. It’ll be mighty dark, and if we all make our move at the same time, the cattle barons won’t be able to stop us.”
“Won’t that just make ’em mad and even more determined to put Kane on trial?” someone in the crowd asked.
“Kane can’t be blamed for cutting the fences,” Rawlings pointed out. “He’s locked up in jail.”
“But they could decide to make an example of him.”
“No more so than they already have.” Rawlings made a curt, sweeping gesture with his hand. “Look, anybody who wants out can leave. But don’t come crying to the rest of us for help later on.”
Beaumont could tell that the crowd was divided. All the ranchers and some of the farmers seemed to be in favor of a massive fence-cutting effort, but the rest of the farmers were worried about the consequences of such an act. Beaumont spoke up, saying, “Miss Callie, what do you think about this?”
Callie looked surprised that he was asking her opinion, but just as Beaumont expected, she wasn’t shy about giving it. “I think it might be enough to convince the big ranchers that they can’t fight us. We’re going to win sooner or later. At the very least they’ll be distracted from their vendetta against Chris.”
“Well, I think it’s a bad idea,” Beaumont stated.
Several men turned to glare at him. “You don’t have any stake in this, cowboy,” one of them said, the same argument that had been used against him before.
“You’re my friends, and I don’t want to see anybody else hurt,” Beaumont said. “Duggan and the others are liable to send their crews after you. They might even try to burn some of you out.”
Another of the ranchers shook a fist. “I’d like to see them try it! If they want a war, we’ll give them a war, by God!”
That was just the sort of talk Beaumont didn’t want to hear.
An older man took up the cry. “The Yankees tried to burn us out in the Shenandoah Valley!” he shouted. “But Mosby and the rest of us fought all the way to the end! We’ll do that here if we have to!”
Shouts of agreement came from the other men. Even the ones who had been reluctant a few minutes earlier seemed to be getting caught up in the spirit of the thing. Mob violence had been narrowly averted more than once in this conflict. They couldn’t keep dodging that bullet, Beaumont thought.
Nor could he argue too strenuously against the idea without running the risk of arousing the ire—and the suspicion—of Rawlings and the others. He nodded and said, “All right, if that’s the way all of you feel, I’ll go along with it.”
But already his mind was working, trying to come up with some way to stop this madness in its tracks.
Maybe Frank Morgan would have a suggestion when they met later, he thought hopefully.
* * *
“I don’t know of any way to stop it,” Frank said. “Not without getting a lot of people hurt or killed.”
He and Beaumont stood in front of the dark mouth of the cave on Blanket Creek, holding the reins of their horses.
“What if you tell Duggan what Rawlings and the rest of them are planning to do?” Beaumont said. “They could increase the patrols along their fence lines. Maybe once Rawlings and the others see that the ranchers are ready for them, the
y’ll back off.”
Frank shook his head. “More than likely, Duggan would order his men to shoot first as soon as they saw anybody moving around. I expect the other big ranchers would do the same thing.” He rubbed at his jaw as he thought. “You know, the best thing might be to let Rawlings and his friends cut those fences. Maybe Miz Stratton’s right. If every fence in the county is cut, maybe the ranchers will see that they can’t win this fight, not in the long run.”
“You really think they can’t?”
“You know there are a lot of electric streetlights in the cities back East now?” A wistful note crept into Frank’s voice. “There are telephones in a lot of places, including right here in Brown County. There’ll probably be electricity here before too many more years go by.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Beaumont said, sounding puzzled. “But what’s your point, Frank?”
“The West, the way it was, is just about gone. Cattle barons like Earl Duggan are relics. I hate to say it, but so am I.”
“Not hardly,” Beaumont protested.
Frank chuckled. “Oh, I don’t mind all that much being a relic. Better than being completely extinct, I reckon. But the days of the big cattle spreads are numbered, no matter what happens here. The small ranchers and the farmers will embrace the use of barbed wire like they have in other places, and they’ll take over. It’s as sure as the sun coming up in the morning.”
“I’m surprised the idea doesn’t bother you more.”
“I never said it doesn’t bother me. But I don’t argue with the sun and tell it that it can’t rise, either.”
“That’s all well and good,” Beaumont said impatiently, “but what do we do about Rawlings and his plans?”
“You can’t talk him out of it?”
Beaumont shook his head. “Not a chance in hell.”
“Let it go, then, and we’ll see what happens.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Beaumont said with a sigh. He changed the subject by asking, “What about Chris Kane?”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Rawlings has got the right idea for a change. Kane needs a good lawyer who can get the case moved to another county. If that happens, I’d say he stands a good chance of beating the charges, or even getting them dismissed before the case comes to trial.”
Violent Sunday Page 22
