The Tenderfoot Trail

by Ralph Compton

  Garrett tested the rawhide rope around his arms, but it was drawn tight and he could not move. He was helpless, and there was nothing he could do to help Zeb. A sense of failure tugging at him, he watched the Crows working themselves up for their charge into the arroyo and he thought about Jenny. Would she be taken alive? Would he live long enough to see what happened to her?

  That would be the worst torture of all, more than he could bear. Like Jacob McGee, he would die screaming.

  As his head cleared and his breathing eased, Garrett steeled himself. He would run at Weasel and try to knock the Indian off his horse. If he got the chief on the ground he’d try to kill him with the only weapon he had—his teeth. He would die in the attempt, he knew, but better that than watch Jenny stripped naked, then get passed from man to man before they tired of her and killed her.

  Garrett felt a slackening of the rawhide rope as the Crow who held the end bent to load his rifle. It had to be now.

  He leaned forward, ready to make his run—but stopped dead in his tracks when Weasel’s head exploded.

  Chapter 11

  The large-caliber bullet hit Weasel in the middle of his forehead, just under the blue tradecloth rim of his war bonnet. A crimson halo of blood and brain erupted around the man’s head as he fell backward off his pony.

  Another Indian went down, and a third crashed to the grass under his wildly kicking horse.

  The Crows milled about in confusion as yet another fusillade of shots ripped into them, spreading death.

  Garrett felt the rope around him slacken and he dived for the ground. Hooves pounded to his right. He turned his head and saw a line of a dozen horsemen coming on fast, rifles bucking at their shoulders.

  Hit hard, their war chief dead, the Crows broke and ran, galloping to the south, leaving six of their number dead or dying behind them.

  The horsemen, bearded, wild-looking men in stained buckskins, circled around the fallen Indians, pumping bullets into the quivering bodies until all movement ceased. A few threw shots after the fleeing Crows as others swung off their horses, drew knives and began the grisly task of scalping the dead.

  Garrett looked around him, squinting through a shifting veil of thick yellow dust at the bloodstained hands of his grinning rescuers, who were busily tearing away dripping scalp locks.

  “This one’s worth ten dollars at Benton,” one man yelled, holding the scalp high for the rest to see. “Look at them braids, boys. Hell, I’ve barked squaws that didn’t have braids like this’n.”

  Men laughed and one, a huge, red-bearded man with a savage knife scar down his right cheek, said, “But he don’t have teats, Benny. What you gonna do for that new tobacco pouch you wanted?”

  The man with the scalp yanked down the Crow’s loincloth, his knife poised. “Guess,” he said.

  The red-bearded man roared and slapped his thigh. “Benny, you’re true-blue. I always knowed you was true-blue.” He noticed Garrett on the ground and kneed his horse close to him. “Now what in the hell are you?” he asked, his pale eyes amused.

  The young rancher scrambled to his feet, found his hat and settled it on his head. “Name’s Luke Garrett,” he said, wiping his hands on his chaps. He glanced quickly toward the arroyo, saw no sign of life, then added, “I was trailing a herd north when I was took by the Crows.”

  “That your wagon over there?” the man asked. The amusement in his eyes had been replaced with a shrewd, calculating look and Garrett realized he was not dealing with a fool.

  “Uh-huh. My cook and hired hand lit a shuck soon as they saw the Indians.” Garrett managed a smile. “I don’t know your name, mister, but I want to thank you for saving my life.”

  “Think nothing of it, boy. Name’s Kane, Thetas Kane.”

  The mention of the name felt like a knife sliding into Garrett’s belly. This was the man Annie feared more than Indians, more than outlaws, more than anything.

  He managed to keep his voice neutral. “I’m beholden to you, Mr. Kane. If you’re ever in the Judith Basin country look me up and I’ll show you a time. But right now I guess I’ll fork my bronc standing over there and head out after the herd. No point in keeping you here any longer. I’m sure an important man like you has urgent business elsewhere.”

  Kane grinned, showing remarkably white teeth, the canines long and prominent, like wolf fangs. “I can see in your eyes that you’re keeping something back from me, boy. I reckon you got something hid in that canyon you don’t want me to see. You got a woman back there? Your wife maybe?”

  “Nah, no woman,” Garrett said easily. “I trailed up from the basin with a cranky ol’ cuss of a cook and a wore-out puncher.”

  Kane shook his head. “You’re lying to me. I can smell a woman.” He turned to the others. “Hey, boys, any of you getting the scent of a female somewheres?”

  A man with rodent eyes and a matted black beard down to his belt buckle lifted his nose in the air and sniffed. “Sure do, Thetas. Smell her right enough, like she was standing here beside me.”

  Kane nodded. “Thought so. Go take a look-see in that arroyo and bring her out here, Lenny.”

  “I wouldn’t do that if I was you, Lenny,” Garrett said. “There’s a mean old man back there and he’s good with a gun.”

  Lenny looked at Kane, uncertainty in his glance. “Go see,” Kane said. He nodded toward another bearded rider. “Take Cates with you.”

  “I’ll go,” Garrett said quickly. “You’re right. There is a woman there.” He tried a desperate gamble, hoping it would work. “I’ll bring her out. See, the old man is my hired hand and he won’t shoot at me.”

  Kane looked down at Garrett, his blue eyes suddenly hard. “I’m starting to take a real dislike to you, boy. You told me your hired hand had skedaddled. I got the feeling you’ve been stretching the blanket since we first got to talking, and my feelings are never wrong.” He turned to Lenny. “Go, bring that sage hen out here. Hog-tie her if you need to.”

  Anger flared in Garrett. “Look, Kane, I thanked you for saving my life. Now ride on out of here.”

  “Tell you something, boy, a man without a gun can’t afford to get mad,” Kane said. “Now you shut your trap or I’ll drop you right where you stand.”

  Helplessly, Garrett watched Lenny and the man named Cates ride into the arroyo. A couple of slow minutes dragged past, Kane and the others saying nothing, their eyes fixed on the canyon.

  A shot echoed from deep between the hills, followed by two or three more in rapid succession. Then silence.

  “Garrett, I guess my boys met up with that hired man of yours,” Kane said, grinning. “See, Lenny and Cates are pretty good with guns their ownselves.”

  But as time dragged by, the two men did not reappear. Then a horse walked slowly out of the arroyo, its reins trailing. It was Lenny’s horse.

  “Damn it, Garrett,” Kane yelled. He swung out of the saddle and grabbed the young rancher by the front of his shirt. Kane pulled Garrett close to him, his eyes blazing. “Who’s back there?”

  “Like I told you before, Kane, a mean old man who’s real handy with the iron.” Garrett allowed a smile to touch his lips. “Zeb Ready’s holed up tight as Dick’s hatband and he’s got plenty of water and ammunition. If you and your boys want to get at him, it will have to be one at a time, and you’ll leave dead on the ground.”

  Kane backhanded Garrett viciously across the face, and the young rancher tasted blood salty in his mouth from a split lip.

  “Ride on, Kane,” he said, knowing it would bring another blow. “There’s nothing for you here but death.”

  But Kane did not hit him again. He pushed Garrett away and turned to one of his men who was standing close. “You, bring Deke over here.”

  The man stepped over to a rider on a big American stud and slapped him on the thigh. Without a word he pointed to Kane, and the rider nodded and kneed the horse forward.

  Unlike Kane and the others, all bearded, shaggy-haired men in buckskins, the brown hair of
the man called Deke was clipped short, his sweeping dragoon mustache trimmed. He wore a black frock coat, a low-crowned, flat-brimmed hat of the same color, a shirt that was almost white, and a string tie. It was the classic uniform of the frontier gambler/ gunfighter, and one he must have carefully chosen to set himself apart from lesser men.

  But what Garrett noticed most of all were the .44 Smith & Wesson Russians in crossed belts around Deke’s hips and, strangely out of place, the old powder horn that hung on a rawhide string from his left shoulder.

  Kane remounted his horse and Deke moved closer beside him, their stirrups almost touching. Now Garrett saw the purpose of the powder horn. The gunman stuck the narrow end of the horn into his left ear and leaned attentively from the saddle. Kane put his mouth to the bell of the horn and yelled, “Canyon! Old man! Kill him!”

  Deke nodded, his cold gray eyes expressionless, and swung his horse away, moving toward the mouth of the arroyo, checking the loads in his guns as he rode.

  Kane looked down at Garrett and grinned. “That’s what years of practicing with six-guns will do to a man. But deaf as a cow skull or no, Deke Pickett is one of the best with the revolver there is.” He shrugged. “Well, now I study on it some, maybe Temple Yates down Fort Benton way is faster, I don’t know. I’d sure like to see them two go at it, though. Damn close run thing.” Kane’s grin widened. “ ’Course, I’m faster than either of them, and they know it.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Kane?” Garrett asked, a slow anger burning in him. “You maybe trying to impress me?”

  “Nah,” Kane said, his good humor vanishing as his eyes turned suddenly icy. “I’m not trying to impress you, on account of how pretty damn soon now you’re going to discover just how fast I am.”

  It was not an empty threat and Garrett knew it. He had no gun, his Colt lost somewhere in the grass, and no way of defending himself—unless, somehow, he could get to a gun. He realized his chances were slim to none, and slim was already saddling up to leave town. It was not a thought calculated to bring comfort to a man.

  A few minutes passed, the smell of blood and the smoke of the prairie fire hanging heavy and thick in the still air. Then Deke Pickett rode out of the canyon.

  The man waved an arm and hollered something, the words so distorted by his deafness that Garrett could not make them out. But the meaning of the waving arm was clear.

  Kane turned to a man with long yellow hair tumbling over his shoulders, pointing at Garrett. “Throw a rope on the puncher and bring him,” he said. “And one of you others catch up that black of his.”

  A loop snaked through the air and settled around Garrett’s neck. He was almost jerked off his feet as he was hauled behind the towhead’s horse, the rope biting deep as the loop tightened.

  He stumbled along behind Kane and the others as they headed for the mouth of the arroyo, his mouth dry and his heart hammering.

  There had been no shooting after Pickett entered the canyon. Was Zeb dead? And what would happen to Jenny after she fell into Kane’s hands?

  As he was hauled across the scorched, still smoldering grass, these were questions Garrett couldn’t bear to think about. Yet he knew he would have his answers all too soon.

  Chapter 12

  Thetas Kane led his riders into the canyon, following Deke Pickett. Garrett was dragged across the trampled grass where his Durhams had grazed, then, as the surrounding hills crowded closer, around a narrow bend made even more cramped by stands of mesquite and cactus.

  Beyond the turn, the arroyo opened up again and began to gradually grade upward, and it was there that the bodies of Kane’s men lay sprawled and undignified in death, like broken puppets thrown away by a bored child.

  The slope continued for a hundred yards, rising to a height of about twenty feet until it met the saddleback formed by the meeting of the hills.

  Annie Spencer and three of the other women stood at the top of the slope. Beside them kneeled Jenny, Zeb Ready’s head in her lap.

  Kane spared hardly a glance for his fallen men, his eyes on the women. “Get down here,” he yelled. Immediately Annie and the others started down the rise, but Jenny stayed where she was. “You too, blondie,” he hollered. “Leave him. He’s already a dead man.”

  Tenderly Jenny laid Ready’s head on the grass. Then she rose and joined the others. Her eyes touched Garrett’s, and he saw in them a knot of feelings, fear uppermost but also pity, and what could have been hurt for something she’d found that was soon to be lost.

  Garrett looked beyond Jenny to where Ready lay unmoving in the grass. He began to remove the loop from around his neck, but the towhead jerked it tight. “You just stay right there, cowboy,” he said. “You ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  Kane sat his horse, looking down at Annie. “Been a long time,” he said, a humorless smile touching his lips. “Four years since you walked out on me in Cheyenne.”

  “That was your own doing, Thetas,” the woman answered. “I couldn’t take the beatings anymore. And the killings.”

  Kane nodded, lifting his voice so the others could hear. “The years haven’t been kind to you, Annie. You’ve lost your looks, gone all dried out and scrawny like a wore-out old whore.”

  The woman’s expression did not change, but Garrett saw sudden, raw wounds in her eyes. “I was twenty-one when I met you, Thetas, and I was pretty then,” she said. “What I am today, you made me.”

  “I guess you heard I planned to gun you on sight first time I saw you again,” Kane said. “See, I was real mad because you left me.” His voice rose again as he looked around at his grinning men. “Now I’m glad as all hell you did.”

  A roar of laughter went up from the surrounding riders, and when it had died away to a few lingering cackles, Kane said, “Where’s Charlie Cobb, Annie? And what are you and the cowboy doing on the Whoop-Up Trail with them others?”

  Desperately trying to save Jenny and hoping that Kane might possibly fear Cobb, Garrett intervened. “Kane,” he called out, loosening the rope around his throat, “these women are Charlie Cobb’s property. They’re all virgin brides I’m escorting to Fort Whoop-Up to meet their husbands-to-be.”

  Another bellow of laughter sounded through the arroyo, Kane laughing loudest of all. Finally he wiped tears from his eyes with the back of his hand and hollered to his men, “Boys, these whores stopped being virgins the first time they couldn’t outrun their brothers, Annie included.”

  After the resulting merriment ended, Kane looked down at Annie. “What’s good ol’ Charlie got planned at the fort, Annie? There’s got to be money in this bride business to interest a goldbrick artist like him.”

  “You go to hell,” the woman said, her eyes blazing.

  “Please, Annie, after you,” Kane said. He drew his Colt and thumbed back the hammer, the triple click loud in the waiting silence.

  “Kane, wait!” Garrett yelled. “I’ll tell you.”

  The man turned and his cold eyes met Garrett’s. “You string another whizzer at me, boy, and I’ll gun both you and Annie.”

  “What I’m about to tell you is the truth,” Garrett said. “Cobb told me to collect two thousand dollars from each of the miners for their brides. I’m to take the money back to him at Fort Benton and he said he’d give me five hundred for my trouble.”

  Kane sat his saddle, his brow wrinkled, thinking it through. Finally he eased the hammer back on his gun and shoved it into the holster. “Catalog brides, huh? Sounds like something Charlie would think up, all right.”

  Kane swung his horse around, facing his men. “Boys, at two dollars a pelt we could kill wolves all this summer and the next and never come close to clearing ten thousand. I say we take these women up the trail to Fort Whoop-Up and collect the money from the miners ourselves.”

  “Thetas, what about them?” a man with hot eyes asked, waving a hand toward the women. “Don’t we get a taste?”

  “You will, but only after we get our ten thousand. I don’t want these women al
l marked up an’ bit when they meet the miners. Hell, we’ll just take ’em back again and you can share them among you. There’s plenty of honey for all.”

  “Who gets Annie?” the man asked, his tongue touching his top lip. He was young, with a hard mouth, and there were several notches cut on the walnut handle of his gun.

  “You want her, Jim, she’s yours.” Kane smiled. “You like ’em tough and scrawny, huh?”

  Amid laughter, the man called Jim said, “Man needs a belly warmer on a cold night. Maybe she’s all wore out, but, hell, she’ll do.”

  “Then it’s settled,” Kane said. “We escort the, uh, virgin brides”—he waited until the laughter he knew would come faded away—“to the fort and collect the money.”

  “And then we take them back, right, Thetas?” a man called out.

  “Yeah, then we take ’em back and have ourselves a little fun while we do some wolf hunting and whatever else comes our way,” Kane said.

  As a cheer went up from his riders, he grinned and waved an acknowledging hand. “Now let’s grab some grub before we move out, boys. Killing red-skins gives a man an appetite.”

  As the wolfers dismounted and began to picket their horses, the man who had been holding Garrett let go of the rope. “You stay close, cowboy,” he said. “I see you wandering too far and I’ll put a bullet into you.”

  Garrett took the loop from around his neck and walked toward Ready. Jenny stepped in his way, her face pale. “Luke, I’m scared. These aren’t men. They’re . . . they’re wild animals.”

  Aware that several wolfers had stopped what they were doing and were looking at him with hard, calculating eyes, Garrett kept his distance from the girl. “Jenny, I promise you, I’ll get you out of this,” he whispered.