The big rancher sagged back, struggling to get his gun up while his eyes slowly glazed over and the gun fell from his fingers to the floor. Then Kleinback fell across it. For an instant there was utter stillness while the wheel on one of Kleinback’s spurs did a slow turn.
“It wasn’t me!” Hofer gasped. “Man, I—”
Clarabel was around the table and had him in her arms.
“It’s all right, Uncle Bill! Everything is all right.” She looked over at Tandy, and there was a smile for him in her eyes. “You were going to stay with old Jim?” she asked. “Why don’t you? It would be nice to have you for a neighbor.…”
In the morning, Red Ringo grinned at Tandy. “He should have knowed better than to draw against an hombre slick with a gun as you,” he said. “That was plumb suicide!”
“Luck,” Thayer said honestly. “Pure luck!”
“Huh!” Ringo was disgusted. “After that card I saw you shoot a hole into?”
Thayer reached in his pocket and took out another card.
“Look!” he said. Spinning it into the air, he drew and fired. “Now take a look at it.”
Ringo walked over and picked up the card. It was a trey, and all the pips were shot out. He stared at it.
“But you only shot once!” he protested.
“Sure.” Tandy Thayer reached in his pocket and pulled out a deck of cards with all the pips shot out. “I shoot ’em out first, then always have one around. You ain’t got any idea how many arguments they stop!”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
* * *
THE PASSING OF THE OLD WEST
The opening of the western lands went through many phases, and the settlement was very uneven. When some sections had become settled communities, other areas were just opening up, but wherever there was land, some settler would be sure to move in and establish himself. The old west passed reluctantly, changing with the times. Perhaps the end was in 1916, give or take a few years.
The last two holdups of stages by horse-riding bandits took place in 1916, one in Yellowstone Park, the other at Charlestown, Nevada. Charlestown—a wild, wild town during its brief day in the sun—was one of those towns born of misguided optimism. It is remembered, aside from the holdup, by the story of a sheriff who rode into Elko and stood at the bar having a drink. He shook his head in amazement several times and the bartender asked him what was the trouble.
He said, “Times are sure changing. This country ain’t what it used to be. Why, I just rode all the way through Charlestown and nobody shot at me!”
There was a brief Indian outbreak on the Colorado-Utah border in 1915 when a small band of Paiutes led by Old Polk and his son Posey stirred up trouble in which at least one white man was killed and several Indians. The last known white man killed by Indians in Montezuma County, Colorado, was in 1886, but there was sporadic fighting all through the 1880s.
This area of southwestern Colorado and the bordering counties in Utah was one of the last to be settled in the United States. Here and there in other parts of the west, similar areas remained relatively wild and untamed after all the rest had been settled and life had to some extent been stabilized.
BILL CAREY RIDES WEST
* * *
THE MAN ON the flea-bitten mustang was a gone gosling. That was plain in the way he sat his horse, in the bloodstained bandage on his head and the dark stain on his left shoulder.
The horse was gone, too. The mustang was running raggedly, running the heart out of him to get the man away. The mount swept down through the pines and juniper, hit the bare slope, and stumbled, throwing the rider free.
He hit the ground hard, rolled over twice, and lay still.
Jane Conway had come to the door of her ranch house when she heard the rattle of flying hoofs. She stood there, shading her eyes up the hill against the sun. No rider was in sight.
“Anybody coming, Janie?” Her father’s voice was weak, worn-out with pain and helplessness. “Thought I heard a horse runnin’?”
“I thought so, too,” she agreed, puzzled, “but there’s nobody in sight.”
She went back to preparing supper. It would soon be dark, and they must save the little coal oil they had. There was no telling when they could get more.
Up on the hillside, consciousness returned slowly to the wounded man. Somehow, he had rolled over on his back, and he was looking up into a star-sprinkled sky. Cool wind stirred his hair, and he rolled over, getting his right hand under him. Then he pushed himself to his knees.
He felt for his guns. They were still there. Slowly and painfully, for his left arm was stiff and sore, he pushed shells into the two empty guns. Then he got to his feet.
The mustang was dead. He looked down at the little gray horse and found tears in his eyes, though he wasn’t a crying man.
“You had nerve, boy,” he said softly. “You wasn’t much, and I hadn’t had you long, but you had the heart of a champion!”
His rifle was in the boot, and he got it out. Then gently he worked the saddle loose. Shouldering it, he staggered painfully to a clump of juniper and dropped the saddle out of sight. For a minute he hesitated, staring down at the heavy saddlebags. He touched one with his toe and it jingled faintly. Gold. Well, it wouldn’t do him much good.
* * *
DOWNHILL HE HEARD metal strike against metal, then the sound of a bucket being dipped into the water—the splat as the side of it struck the water, then the heavy gulp as the bucket filled. It was a still, cool night. Chambering a shell in his rifle, he started downhill.
No dog barked, and he was puzzled. A ranch in this lonely place would certainly have a dog. When he got closer he could see the house, small and neat, could see the rail corral, the log barn. But there was no bunkhouse. That simplified matters. Bill Carey wasn’t wanting any shooting now.
He crossed the hard-packed earth, puzzled by the lack of light. It was early, judging by the stars, and he had been unconscious only a short time.
Something moved in the doorway, and he froze, his rifle covering the bit of white he could see.
“Stand still,” he said, his voice low and hard. “I don’t want to shoot, but I will if I have to.”
“You don’t have to shoot,” a girl’s voice replied. “Who are you? What do you want?”
A woman! Carey frowned, then he moved a step nearer. “Are you alone?” he said, low voiced. “Tell the truth!”
“I always tell the truth,” she replied coolly. “Did Ryerson send you?”
“Ryerson?” He was puzzled, yet he lifted his head a little, some response coming to him as he heard the name. “Who’s Ryerson?”
“If you don’t know that,” Jane Conway replied drily, “you’re a stranger. Come in.”
He walked forward, watching her keenly. The girl made no effort to move until he could almost touch her, then she saw the bandage on his head.
“Oh, you’re hurt!” she exclaimed. “What happened? Did your horse throw you?”
“No.” He looked at her, watching the effect of his words. “I was shot. By a posse,” he added grimly. “I robbed a bank.”
“Well”—Jane’s voice was even—“every man to his own taste. You better let me have a look at your head.”
He stepped into the darkness and waited, hearing her moving about. She went to a window, and he saw the grayness blanked out. Then another window. Then she closed the door. A moment later and a match flared.
They looked at each other then. Jane Conway was a tall girl with gray eyes and ash-blond hair. She was pretty, but too thin, a result of the heat and too much work.
She saw a big man with enormously broad and powerful shoulders, and the biceps revealed through the torn sleeve were a bulge of muscle. His face was haggard and hard, unshaven, with a brutal jaw on which was a stain of blood. This had evidently run down from under the bandage and dried in the stubble on his cheek.
He wore two guns, down-at-heel boots, and patched Levis. She saw the blood on his shirt and looked up at
him again. Somehow she felt she had never seen so much raw power as she was seeing now. There was something, too, in the forward thrust of his jaw that made him seem indomitable. This man, she knew, would never accept defeat. He would drive on and on, against whatever obstacles there were.
“Sit down,” she said sternly, “and don’t worry. There is no law here.”
“No law?” He seated himself, stared up at her. “What do you mean, no law?”
She smiled without bitterness. “These are the Shafter Hills,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”
He had heard. The Shafter Hills. A patch of wooded and lonely hills, and among them the Hawk’s Nest, the place where Hawk Shafter and his outlaws holed up. A nest of the most vicious criminals unhung.
Ryerson! The name struck him now like a blow. Tabat Ryerson! He was here! Bill Carey smiled grimly. He would be. Troubles never came singly.
“You mentioned Ryerson?” he asked. “What about him?”
Jane looked down at him. She could hear her father’s even breathing. He was resting. That was something.
“If you were one of his crowd,” she said, as though to herself, “you’d not come here.”
As she took the bandage from his head and began to bathe it with warm water, she told him, “Tabat Ryerson is Hawk Shafter’s right-hand man. He’s a killer. Some say he’s taking over from the old wolf. I thought he might have sent someone for me when I heard you coming. Then I knew if he had, you’d come on a horse. He said he was coming for me tonight or tomorrow—to take me to the Nest.”
* * *
THE WARM WATER felt good, and her fingers were gentle.
“You want to go?” Bill Carey asked.
“No.” Gently she began combing his tangled hair. “No woman would willingly go to Tabat Ryerson. He’s a brute and a fiend. I’ll kill him if I can. I’ll kill myself if I can’t get him.”
He looked at her, shocked. Yet what he saw in her face told him she would do what she said. And she was right. Ryerson was a beast.
“He’s been running this country,” she went on, softly, “ever since the Hawk had his fall from a bronc. Shafter gave more and more power to Tabat. Every herd that’s rustled means beef for him; every robbery means a percentage for him.”
She began taking his shirt from his shoulders. There was no nonsense about her. She did what was to be done.
“He’ll kill you if he finds you here,” she said. “You’d better mount and ride when you’ve eaten.”
“My horse is dead,” he said simply. “Run to death.”
“We’ve got several. There’s a big black that will carry you. Take him and welcome.”
“I can pay,” he assured her grimly.
“I don’t want stolen money,” she replied. “Not any part of it. I’m giving him to you. A man as big as you,” she added, “should do more than steal!”
Stung, he looked up quickly. “The bank foreclosed on my ranch. It was legal, but it wasn’t right. He’d told me he’d give me more time. In the spring, maybe I could’ve made it.”
“Listen!” Her voice quickened. “They are coming!”
She looked at him anxiously.
“Go!” she said quickly. “Out the back! You can wait until we’re gone, then take the black and go!”
He stood up, huge and formidable in the darkness as she doused the light.
“No,” he said sullenly. “I don’t run well on no empty stomach.”
“Open up, Janie!” The voice outside was sharp and ugly. “Tabat sent us down to get you.”
Bill Carey opened the door and stepped outside. He stood there in the vague light of the rising moon.
“Get out!” he snarled. “Get out—fast!”
“Who the devil are you?” a man’s voice demanded.
Bill Carey’s hand made a casual gesture, but the gun that suddenly filled it was not casual.
“You know the lingo this iron speaks,” he said. “Get out! And tell Tabat Ryerson to leave this girl alone or I’ll kill him!”
“You?” Anger crowded amusement in the man’s voice. “Kill Ryerson?”
“Tell him to stay away,” Carey continued, his voice ugly, “and tell Hawk Shafter an hombre from Laredo sent that word. If Tabat don’t understand that, Shafter will! Now get!”
The two men backed their horses, turned them. A little way off they stopped, talking low voiced.
Carey watched them, his eyes narrow. “I got a rifle,” he called drily. “If you two want to get planted, you can do it mighty easy!”
Their horses started moving, and he listened a long time. When he walked inside the girl had lighted the lamp again and was dishing up some food. He watched the steam rise from the coffee she poured into the thick white cup.
When she had put frijoles, potatoes, and cornbread on the tin plate he sat down and started to eat. He did not talk, but ate with the steady eating of a big man who was very, very hungry.
“Ryerson won’t take that,” Jane said warningly. “He’ll come himself next time!”
“Uh-huh. I reckon he will.” Bill leaned back in the chair and looked up at her quiet, rather pretty face. “But he won’t come until morning. I know Ryerson.” He chuckled cynically. “Some men ain’t so big as the shadow they throw.”
Bill Carey got up from the chair and looked down at the rag rug on the floor.
“Better get some sleep,” he advised. “I’ll sleep here.”
She started to protest, then turned away without speaking. In a few minutes she was back with a blanket. Using his holsters and rolled belt for a pillow, he pulled the blanket over him and stretched out on the floor.…
* * *
DAWN WAS GRAY in the eastern sky when he got up from the floor. After folding the blanket and buckling on his gun belts, he walked outside. Gray serpents of mist lay along the low places and wound back up into the trees along the mountain. The air was fresh, cool.
Bill Carey walked down to the barn and watered the stock. It was merely a matter of lifting a small board and letting water run into the trough in the corral. He forked hay over to the horses, and then studied the country with a knowing eye.
It was a good place for a ranch. There was plenty of water, and the gentle slope toward the creek was subirrigated by water from the mountain. There would be green grass here most of the year. A man could really make a place like this pay. It was even better than his own ranch, so recently lost.
His eyes were somber as he studied the dim trail that led toward the Hawk’s Nest. So this was to be it. The old enmity between Tabat Ryerson and himself was to come to a head here, after all this time.
It was a feeling of long standing, this between him and Tabat. Five times they had fought with their fists, and four times Tabat, who was older and stronger, had whipped him. The fifth time, in Tombstone, he had given Ryerson a beating. Tabat had sworn to kill him if they met again.
Yet Tabat Ryerson knew, even as old Hawk Shafter knew, that Bill Carey was a dangerous man with a six-gun. Had Carey been a vain man there could have been eleven notches on his guns.
Four were for members of a gang which had tried to rustle his cattle. He had cornered them, and in the subsequent fight all four had died in the mountain cabin where they had holed up. Carey, shot three times, had ridden back to town for help.
Three others he killed had been badmen who tried to run a town where he had been marshal. The other four had been gunmen, two of them Hawk Shafter’s men, who had tried him out—one in Silver City, two in Sonora, and the last in Santa Fe.
When Bill walked back to the cabin the old man was awake. Jane was working over the fireplace, preparing breakfast.
“How’s it, old-timer?” Carey asked, looking down at the grim, white-mustached old man. “Feelin’ better?”
“A mite. My heart’s bad. Ain’t so pert as I used to be.” He looked at Carey shrewdly. “You on the dodge? Janie told me some of it.”
Carey nodded. “Don’t worry. After a bit I’ll be on my way.�
�
Conway shook his head. “Ain’t that, son. We’d mighty like to have you stay. Place needs a man around, and like I say, I ain’t so pert no more.” His face became grave. “Them outlaws is bad, son. Ride across my place every once in a while. Regular trail through here. Wasn’t so bad when old Hawk was up and around. This Ryerson’s poison mean.”
Bill Carey was drinking coffee when he heard them coming. He was sitting there without a shirt, as Jane had taken his to wash. He got up, a big, brown, powerful man, and walked to the door. He was catlike on his feet, but when he got there, he put his rifle down alongside the door and leaned against the doorjamb, watching the horsemen.
Ryerson could be spotted at a distance. He sat a horse the same as he always had. Carey watched him and the other outlaws with hard, cynical eyes. There was no fear in him, no excitement. This was not a new story, but one he could face without a tremor. He knew he could kill Tabat Ryerson without remorse. The man lived for cruelty and crime. He was nothing but a rattlesnake.
Three men. Carey smiled drily. Tabat must think well of himself. They reined in, and all three dropped to the ground. Bill did not move.
Then Ryerson took two steps, but froze and his face changed. Bill could not be sure whether it was a fear or fury that filled the man he faced as recognition came.
“You, is it?” Ryerson demanded. “What are you butting in here for?”
Carey straightened, and a slow smile came to his hard mouth.
“Maybe because I like these folks,” he drawled. “Maybe because I don’t like you.”
“Don’t ask for it, Carey,” Ryerson snapped. “Get on your horse and take out, and we’ll let you go.”
Bill chuckled and ran his fingers through his thick hair.
“Don’t wait for me to leave, Tabby,” he said drily. “I like this place. Looks like the place a man could build to something.”
Collection 1988 - Lonigan (v5.0) Page 16
