by Lauran Paine
GUNS IN
WYOMING
A WESTERN STORY
LAURAN PAINE
Copyright © 2013 by Mona Paine
E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6131-5
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6130-8
Fiction/Westerns
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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Chapter One
There was a host of warm stars around a clear moon and the night was fragrant with soft spring air. That was the night they did it: May 20, 1885.
There were three cowboys riding down from the sheep camp at Shipman’s Meadows, liquid dark shadows moving through a lovely night, one behind the other saying nothing, swaying with their saddles, gun butts reflecting dark light, riding comfortably and unsuspectingly toward the cañon’s widening mouth.
Old Uriah Gorman watched them from his place of concealment while other crouched figures watched old Uriah. His head was well above the boulders, a strange white aura around it, starshine pointing out the unkemptness of his gray beard and white thatch of hair. It showed, too, the prominence of high cheek bones and the sunkenness of his eyes. He was a gaunt old man, better than six feet tall. His hands were dirt-ingrained, big, and liver-spotted. The one holding his carbine was scarred from fire; it was hairless and shiny. He moved that hand.
“Now!”
Guns came up amid the rocks and a series of traumatic explosions followed. The first cowboy went off his horse backward over the cantle. The second one had time to lift his head. Moonlight touched his face briefly; he was young, and in the space of a heartbeat he was also dead. The third rider folded forward. His hat fell off and dark curly hair jerked wildly from impact. His horse went down with him. In six seconds three men and one horse had died.
Then silence returned.
Uriah got to his feet, peering northward toward the cañon’s mouth. Two riderless horses trotted away on stiff legs. One snorted and yanked back, breaking the reins.
The other men stood up on both sides of old Uriah. One looked at the bodies and sank down upon a boulder. Another looked at his companions; they did not look back at him. Uriah went forward—big, gaunt, raw-boned—and poked at the corpses with his carbine. Somebody went back for their horses.
* * * * *
The spring was settled now and wild geese passed far above in perfect triangles, calling that winter was gone. Warm winds from Mexico met the frozen air of Canada and a good warmth resulted. It still froze at night but midday was pleasant. Game was returning, too, and the short grass made a green haze in sparkling distances. Within the stone fence was a low, rude house, part sod, part peeled logs. Beyond it was an ugly but functional barn. There were other buildings of log and mud—a farrowing pen, a woodshed, a bunkhouse. Behind the bunkhouse and covering the big distance to the barn were pole corrals. Farther out, a long way off but looking closer because of the rare clear air, were Wyoming’s Flint Hills, hard flanks squatting upon the flat flow of range, rising high in crumpled disarray and spiked with trees, mottled with brush, tilted and stony and barren.
Four men were driving gaunt cattle toward the corrals. Dun dust arose around them. They rode easy and slouched, warming sunlight upon their backs, then they halted and watched the cattle squeeze past the gate. The foremost man, grizzled in an old Cheyenne-tanned riding coat of nearly knee-length buckskin, worn and stained, looped his reins, stuffed a little pipe, jammed it between his teeth, and lit it. The smoke rose up and hung unmoving above his head.
When the last critter was through the gate, the other riders converged on him. They were younger men, alike in sinewy lankness. One wore a pistol with an ivory handle. He also had silver conchos on his saddle. The others did not. Their guns were hard-rubber butted and their conchos were plain serrated leather. Before they were together the last man raised his head, hesitated a moment, then spoke.
“Someone’s comin’ … yonder there … to the south.”
Each head swung and each face opened with quick interest.
The grizzled man puffed a moment, removed the pipe, and spat. “Where’s the other two?” he asked of no one in particular.
The rider came up fast. Long before he was close, they could sense his urgency.
“Something went wrong,” the older man said, a knife-edged sharpness coming into his voice.
Without a word they all rode toward the newcomer, passing the ranch house, the barn, bunkhouse, and a paralleling length of the stone fence on their right.
“It’s Dade Simpson.”
The grizzled man’s pipe was cold in his mouth. He removed it, knocked it empty on the saddle horn, and pocketed it. When the rider slid down to a spewing halt before them, he said: “They got ’em, Paxton. Got ’em where the cañon comes out onto the prairie.”
There was a heavy, long interval of silence, then Paxton Clement spoke past lips that scarcely moved: “Does your pa know, Dade?”
“He knows. He was with our riders when they found ’em.” Dade looked at the four motionless men before him. “They were hid in the rocks. When Clint and Pete and Asa came out of the pass, they were waiting.”
“It wasn’t no fight …?”
Dade shook his head. “All the shooting was done by the sheepmen. Our boys never got off a shot. Asa’s horse and Pete’s horse are loose somewhere on the range. Clint’s horse is lying half atop him.”
Paxton Clement looked as dark as thunder. His pale eyes were terrible to see but strangely his voice did not change from its knife-edged quietness. “All right, Dade,” he said. “You tell your pa to get the others together and meet me at the cañon in a couple hours … Bring spades …”
* * * * *
Ezekiel Gorman was as tall as his father, old Uriah, but much heavier. At thirty years of age Ezekiel was no paradox. He was the best rifle shot among the sheepmen. He was taciturn, massive, gray-eyed, and shockle-headed like the old man. He was also as knife-lipped and uncompromising.
Zeke’s brother—Robert Edward Lee Gorman, called Lee—was quiet like Zeke. He was only twenty-five to Zeke’s thirty years. He was also different in other ways. Not only in the expression of his face, which was full-lipped and thoughtful, but in the way he shrank from violence.
Lee could outwork a horse at planting time. He could outwork two men at the hardest labor—at the shearing pens, during lambing season, at the dipping vats. But he was nearly useless in the face of this gathering storm for survival that had split the free-graze men of Wyoming—the cowmen and sheepmen. He stood with Zeke now, behind their father, listening to the talk of a swarthy, squat man wearing a stocking cap, fingers scrabbling along the seams of his trousers, eyes looking far out, and lips lying closed with bitter pressure, corners pulled down.
“I was hid like you said,” the dark man was saying, liquid dark eyes fixed in fascination upon the gaunt old man standing like stone before him, like a prophet of old. “I saw ’em comin’ and watched. It was Charley Simpson’s crew from C Bar S. Was six of ’em. They came up and stopped and sat there for a minute just lookin’ down …”
“And?” the old man prompted.
“They dragged ’em together and covered ’em with their slickers. Simpson sent four riders away. They rode in different directions … th
ey rode hard, Uriah …”
“Yes,” the old man said, and bit it off. “To tell their friends. Then what?”
“Well, the others … the ones who stayed back … they went around behind the boulders and looked for sign. Finally Charley Simpson mounted up alone and commenced followin’ your horse tracks. The other two, they were still with the bodies when I left to come up here and tell you.”
“You did right,” Uriah said, but his mind was turning away from the killing even then. “Now, you tell the others to stay close to their camps within sound of one another and wait. Now it’s up to them. They killed Manuel Cardoza in his blankets and burned out the Shipman’s Meadow camp and we give ’em back Pete Slocum, Clinton Hoag, and Asa Logan.” The old man walked away.
Two years and two months before, in March of 1883, he had knelt weeping at the mud bank of the Missouri where a worn-out drab woman lay wrapped in soiled canvas—Amethyst Gorman, his wife, also from Virginia, dead at fifty-three. Dead of cholera it had been said, but, no, he knew better. She was dead of suffering, of hardship and persecution and extinguished hope.
“You boys spell off on keeping watch!” he called to Zeke and Lee. “They’ll be a-coming.”
He had been at Appomattox barefoot and with no crown in his straw hat, with a ration of parched corn in one pocket and eleven rifle cartridges in another pocket, a vanquished survivor of Major-General Stephan Ramseur’s brigade of Jubal Early’s Second Corps, Confederate Army.
He had arrived at Appomattox with his company the first of April, 1865—April Fool’s day—when the Confederate States of America had eight days left to live. He had sat in silence with the others, back against a stone wall where worn-out rifles stood, watching the mass and the might of the blue North come up, endless ranks of men, miles of wagons laden with food, with medicine and clothing and good canvas tents—but mostly with shoes. The Confederacy had marched itself barefoot two years before. Shoes were as dear as victory and of late more obtainable.
Then home to Virginia, to Old Dominion Virginia not belly-crawling Yankee-loving West Virginia, but to loyal Confederate Virginia. Home to Amethyst and her soft fullness. Home to the soil and Reconstruction and Yankee occupation patrols riding through his thin crops with hard laughter. Home to desolation, to hopelessness. But he had been a stubborn man. He had gone down the rows seeding, stirring the soil with a broken hoe. His hands knew the way of it. All his life had been spent in the service of the earth, close to free-growing things and beasts. The best of his strength had been spent here. But then, with Amethyst suckling their youngest, and quick-growing Zeke burnished with the red dust of Virginia at the cabin stoop, Uriah’s thoughts had gone beyond.
But Zeke was nigh as tall as the old man before they had finally cut the cord and begun their wandering. First to Alabama, then to Tennessee and finally to Missouri. Nearly fifteen years of it before they crossed the Missouri River heading for Wyoming Territory, and then, in the evening of his time, Uriah had buried Amethyst in alien soil, worn out from despair, dead not of cholera but of her soul’s defeat.
He remembered telling Zeke at the first scent of trouble: “If you want to live you have to fight. Everywhere I’ve ever been it’s like that. Wyoming’s no different from Virginia or Missouri. You’ve got to give as hard as you get, boy.”
They had been clearing ground at this very sheep camp not six months before when a party of horsemen had ridden up, rough men in wide hats and wool shirts, heavily armed men with belt guns and carbines.
A grizzled wiry man had called sharply: “What the hell are you doing here?”
And Uriah’s hot pride had answered up just as sharply: “We’re setting up a sheep camp, stranger. We’re newcomers who’ve joined up with the other sheepmen. That answer you?”
The grizzled man had sucked a moment on his pipe, and then he had said: “You’ll find out soon enough whether it answers me or not, you goddamned sheepmen!”
The horsemen had spun away then, and from that moment on Uriah had known what lay ahead.
He had made his boys live with their rifles while he took to wearing again the scarred, long-barreled Dragoon revolver that had been his companion for more than twenty years.
Some of the sheepmen had sold out and gone. Those who remained the old man had tongue-lashed into an organization for mutual protection. It had been no simple accomplishment, and even now, because fear kept them close and their woolly bands had to range and rerange the same graze that was becoming increasingly poor, there was much talk against him even in the sheep camps.
Only two things kept the sheepmen from quitting altogether. One, it was not a rare thing to find a man dead in his sheep camp, shot through the heart at the lambing pens. Fear kept many from attempting to flee.
The other thing was two disastrous winters—1884 had been an open winter, no snow pack to speak of and too dry and balmy. The following summer had seen drought and dying cattle. Then the winter of 1885 had come with unprecedented blizzards, snowdrifts ten feet high. Weakened cattle had died by the thousands. The cowmen had their backs to the wall. Many went down and the others were wavering. They had neither the money nor the time to fight Uriah’s kind the way they ordinarily would have fought them—with hired killers and torch-bearing night riders. They were fighting for survival against the elements. One more unnatural winter would finish them.
It had been Paxton Clement of XIH who had said that salvation for the cowmen lay in keeping all the free range for themselves. He had told his neighbors if they could get their herds grease-fat by fall, they could weather another bad winter, but, if they could not, then they must face disaster.
Uriah knew about this. He knew there was a mote of truth in it. But he also knew that Paxton Clement’s hatred of sheepmen was a depthless thing; it would make him warp his reasoning to expedite a war. It had already driven him to send cowboys to raid sheep camps, to kill herders and club woollies to death by the score. It was, in Uriah’s mind, the actual cause of the death of Asa Logan, Clinton Hoag, and Pete Slocum.
So, the old man stood apart, watching Zeke and Lee without really seeing them at work by the pens, letting gray thoughts claim him. The afternoon moved on; the sun went lower, throwing a bright yellow glitter over everything and as far as the eye could see was Wyoming—light-dappled mountains, purple-green and forested, an endless rise and tilt of flint hills and short-grass country.
He went to the sheep wagon and sank down there with an odd trembling in his legs, busy with the dark seeds of his mind, unmindful of the plaintive bleating along the side hills, unmindful of big Zeke’s quick, sure motions at the pens or of gentle Lee’s slumped posture and vacant long looks toward the horizon. Mindful only that the fighting had commenced.
He was so far lost in thought that Zeke called twice in his thundering voice before Uriah raised his head, then stood up.
“One man … comin’ alone,” Zeke said, standing massive in the puddling shadows, rifle crooked in one arm and his wealth of hair tumbling low. “Looks like a cowman.”
Uriah went forward with a thrusting stride, head up and eyes fiercely open. This could not mean an attack, not one man riding up alone. It probably was the law.
The three of them stood like statues, waiting for the stranger to breast the hill and draw rein. When he did so, each of them saw the silver circlet on his shirt with the star inside it. It was a new kind of badge to them. Not until the rider was nodding did they make out the little letters: Deputy US Marshal.
“Howdy, gents,” the lawman said softly, noting each face, each expression, and each weapon. “My name’s Garner. Burt Garner. I’m deputy US marshal from Denver … Mind if I get down?”
Uriah shook his head. “No, get down, stranger.” That was all he said. No howdy, no welcome of any kind.
Garner stood near his horse’s head, holding the reins. He was six inches shorter than any of the Gormans and he was between
the ages of Zeke and the old man with a sprinkling of gray above the ears. He wore one black-butted, short-barreled gun around his belly and a carbine lay snug under the rosadero of his saddle. He was a level-eyed, impassive man, efficient and capable-looking. In the face of obvious hostility, a solid wall of it, he stood relaxed.
“You know about the killings,” he said, making a statement. “I’d like to hear what you know about them.”
“Nothing,” Uriah said. “Nothing at all.”
After a moment of silence the marshal sucked his lips back, then blew outward. “I see. Well, there’s talk sheepmen done it.”
“If we’d all been in Saint Joe you’d have still heard that!” Uriah exclaimed.
Zeke broke in, his eyes full of challenge. “Is there also talk about dead sheep herders, clubbed sheep, and burned sheep camps, Marshal? No … you’re goddamned right there isn’t … not in the places where you hang out.”
Garner looked away from Uriah. He studied Zeke with deliberation, then gazed at young Lee. His eyes lingered there the longest.
“The law doesn’t take sides,” he said finally to Zeke.
Uriah made a short, flat laugh. “No? Then why’s the law dress like the cowmen? Why d’you wear cowmen’s boots and pants and hat?”
“What you wear isn’t important,” Garner replied. “It’s how you figure and act that counts.”
He looked beyond to the wagon, then at the pens, and finally at the woolly shapes browsing through the hillside brush, and, although the smell was strong, he seemed not to notice it. He looked again at the three big men, standing motionlessly and charily before him.
“I was just passing through on my way back to Denver from Laramie when I heard about the killings. Thought I’d sort of look around.” He toed into the stirrup and sprang into the saddle. Now his impersonal stare was for Uriah exclusively. “They told me your name back in Union City, Mister Gorman. They told me a lot of other stuff too, but I didn’t pay no attention to most of it. Still, when there’s smoke there’s usually some fire. That’s how come I rode up here today to tell you not to start a range war.”
