by Paul Lederer
The Tanglewood Desperadoes
Paul Lederer writing as Logan Winters
CHAPTER ONE
Above the Tanglewood a three-quarter silver moon floated, surrounded and partly concealed by ghostly wisps of high cloud. Dan Sumner sat hunched in the copse of blackthorn, willow brush and scrub oak that proliferated in this southern section of Colorado. All of the night sounds were familiar to him. Coyotes lurking, the heavy beat of a low-flying horned owl’s wings, peeper frogs performing their nightly rituals, the gasps of bullfrogs along the stream which meandered across the Tanglewood, the occasional slithering sound of a harmless bull snake.
The wind shifted, grew cooler, and Dan Sumner drew his coat collar up, wishing on this one night that he were not alone. But he was; even Johnny Johnson, the kid who seemed to fit his name somehow, unremarkable, and forgettable, had gone off toward Lordsberg to settle scores with Storm Ross and Prince Blakely. Dan had not gone because he had made his try the day before and had gotten himself shot in the leg for his efforts.
Now swollen and fiery, his leg throbbed and caused him to throw back his head and collapse on his blankets to stare up at the drifting moon through the tangle of underbrush. A small creature, probably a kangaroo rat, crossed his chest, and Dan swatted at it in annoyance.
It was hard for a man to find peace.
Dan was beginning to hate the Tanglewood. He had begun to question his own good sense as he lay hunted, pursued and wounded in the vast array of broken canyons, ravines, twisted trails, and teeming vegetation of the Tanglewood. Here there were thickets of raspberries with almost inedible fruit, cane and mesquite, stunted pinyon pines, sumac, manzanita, blackthorn and scrub-oak trees all jumbled together in some nearly impassable tangle that Nature seemed to have formed as a joke or as a challenge to men. If you didn’t get stuck on a thorn or bitten by some small creature each day, you knew you were not in the Tanglewood.
On a few, occasional perfect mornings Dan Sumner had risen from his bed to appreciate the mysterious, primitive beauty of the Tanglewood. There was the silver-bright stream rushing down from the canyon head, the spray of color where the blue gentian and foxglove flourished along the banks of the stream, along with the lupine and black-eyed Susans across the scattered grassy parks.
But those days were rare. Tanglewood was a prison to those who sought refuge there. It was usually too hot in the day, too frigid at night, crawling with uninvited animal guests, neither edible nor friendly. Bobcats had a large community there. Badgers were not uncommon, nor were raccoons. Nor angry-tempered black bears and the occasional puma. Diamondback rattlesnakes were concealed under every flat rock.
All animals best enjoyed by viewing them in illustrated books.
They weren’t comforting to live with.
As for the pretty flowers, well, they were only an occasional sight as well. More common were the barren coils of raspberry vines, the sting of nettles, the thickets of nopal cactus, clumps of catclaw and cholla, or ‘jumping cactus’, ready to snag any passer-by with their silver barbs.
Along the creek there were treacherous bogs, clotted with cattails and dead reeds. The stench that rose from this rotting vegetation rivaled that of any black tupelo swamp in Dan’s home state of Mississippi. And Lord help you if you took the notion to try crossing one of these sinkhole areas. It wasn’t drowning a man would face, but a smothering death in the fetid ooze as it sucked him down. No one could save a man foolish enough to venture into the bogs.
Tanglewood Canyon was a mecca for the small things: chiggers, mites, fire ants, gnats, deer flies and mosquitoes. A few larger insect-types, such as scorpions, centipedes and tarantulas made it not advisable, but imperative, that you shook out your boots every morning before putting them on or suffer the painful consequences. Up along the high ridge, dwelling in small caves, there were clusters of brown bats which came out every evening, swarming to dart along the stream, looking for the smaller insects to devour, and in the daytime there was the cheerful presence of buzzards who seemed to have no trouble finding carrion in the Tanglewood – some of it human remains.
The Tanglewood was not a place lawmen entered willingly. They had more sense, apparently, than the outlaws who sheltered there. The law seemed to be saying, ‘Let them go. Tanglewood will take care of them soon enough.’
Dan sat up, scratching at his head. Something had gotten into his hair. He wanted to make a break for it. However, Lordsberg, where he was a wanted man, was to the east. To the west was the imposing bulk of the Rocky Mountains. To the south the land was open desert nearly all the way to the Mexican border. But that meant a trek of hundreds of miles across a waterless flat desert. Anyone looking for him would catch up with him quickly if he did not die along the way.
No, for now all he could do was continue to hole up in the Tanglewood, and hope the other boys had some luck. Having no real option, Dan sat up again with pained impatience, clutching his injured right leg as the mocking night moon drifted past the Tanglewood. Perhaps morning would bring some solution.
Trace Dawson led his small band of men along the dark back alleyways of Lordsberg, again wondering how things had gotten this far. So that life became a kill-or-be-killed proposition with the other side holding most of the guns. The men of the Tanglewood did not speak as they rode, not even sharing a whisper. Johnny Johnson on his little paint pony rode solemnly as he kept pace with Trace. His young face was as grim as a pallbearer’s. Perhaps it was an apt expression. They had likely planned their own funerals in returning to Lordsberg. And it would no longer be a secret to the town that this was what they had in mind. Dan Sumner had tipped them off yesterday when he had the desperate urge to visit his girlfriend, Kate.
Trace reflected that that was one of the things a man had always to take into account when dealing with youngsters. They were prone to dangerous impulses.
The night was still, the silver three-quarter moon suspended in the silence, but from across town they could hear the tinkly sounds of a piano from one of the three saloons. The Wabash, probably. Trace couldn’t remember either of the others having such a contraption. But then, he had been gone awhile and had never been much of a saloon-goer. They were places where men went to brag, get stupid, risk a fight and throw their money away. Trace Dawson was no Puritan, but the whole concept seemed pointless to him.
They reined their horses up in the stillness of the night. Trace, Johnson, Curt Wagner and Torrance. The bank was just ahead, and although they doubted that it would be guarded at this time of night, still Dan Sumner’s rash visit to town might have alerted Lordsberg.
Trace waited patiently, his big gray horse shifting its feet uneasily under him. How had they come to this?
He had his theories, of course. The West was no longer the sole domain of Western men. Trace thought the railroad was to blame for this. Where men like his kind had fought through bands of Indians and forced their way west, now it seemed that anyone with the price of a ticket or who was simply capable of hopping a freight was flooding into the new frontier towns. They did not know the ways of the West and couldn’t be bothered to learn them. They brought their Eastern ways, Eastern sensibilities with them, not understanding the Red Man, the wild country, survival on the plains. What they thought they knew of the West was that there was no code of ethics, that you were free to shoot a man down if you didn’t care for him or he was giving you an argument, that everything they came upon was there for the taking. It was like watching honor fade before his eyes. The vigor had gone from the land, but not the violence nor the greed.
The newcomers had no understanding of the old West where a man lived by a solemn, unwritten, but inflexible code. You treated every man with respect until he proved himself to be your
enemy. You did not lie, steal, poach, murder, back-shoot a man, or molest a woman. There was a long list of laws, not scribbled down anywhere, but as firmly etched in each of the oldtime Westerners’ minds as if they had been inscribed in stone.
But the new breed had come, viewing the West as a vast arena for rapaciousness, where there was no law and no moral restraints.
They had left their Bibles at home.
There was no telling what they wrote to their friends and family back home about how they were carving out a new life in the West, but the truth was they had simply come in with money and guns and had begun systematically robbing the early settlers and driving them off their land. Dan Sumner had been just a young kid trying to get his dirt farm started, hoping to make enough out of his patch to ask Kate Cousins to marry him. Johnny Johnson, even younger, had saved his wages from his cattle-herding days and thrown up a small cabin along the Wakapee River and finally managed to bring in some blooded horses to raise. There were only eight animals in his small herd, but he had hopes. Trace Dawson had bartered with the Ute Indians for ownership of a pocket valley south of the Wakapee and he had begun raising a herd of sleek cattle, most of them now shorthorn stock.
Ben Torrance had almost no land, but he had found a way to get by after striking water on his few acres of dry land. An entire summer he had dug with pick and shovel until he found water in his deep well which now served most of the poor, thrown-together town of Lordsberg.
The money men had come with their land claims signed by some bureaucrats two thousand miles away in Washington DC through bribery or corruption. The kind of men who had never had a shovel or a rope in their hands in their entire lives, and likely would not know what to do with either.
What it was, was legal thievery.
Curt Wagner had been a drifting man and tired of that way of life. Lordsberg had by almost unanimous consent hired him on as a sort of lawman – there were a few drunks and derelicts already attracted by Lordsberg’s first saloon, the Wabash, started by Kate’s father, Gentry Cousins who knew that there was always money to be made in rough country if there was a whiskey barrel handy.
Gentry hadn’t liked the manners of some of the incomers, especially when his daughter was serving bar, and he had asked Curt to take care of matters. And he had. For a while, but soon there were too many to handle. Men brought in by Blakely, Storm Ross and the others who had laid claim to everything the old-country-men had built up. Of course the old breed of men had no legal title to their claims. There was no such thing in the early years. A man found a place of his own, settled there and started building for his future and for his sons and daughters. Storm Ross and Prince Blakely knew this, of course, and they had maneuvered in the capital for possession of the Wakapee Valley.
And gotten it.
Almost all of the original settlers were now dispossessed. Gentry Cousins had managed to keep his saloon, the Wabash, but he couldn’t pour enough whiskey to keep all of the roughnecks working for Blakely and Ross happy and two new saloons had sprung up almost overnight – the Black Panther and the Golden Eagle.
Curt Wagner had tried to keep order in the town, but order wasn’t what the Blakely-Ross group wanted, and they had called an election to oust him. There were so many hired thugs on the other side that the original pioneers had no chance. A lot of them were roughed-up at the polling places. Curt had been stripped of his badge and a new town marshal, Kaylin Standish, installed.
A few of the evicted land-holders had objected vigorously to the way they were being treated. Ben Torrance had gotten into a gunfight with a host of Standish’s deputies and wounded two of them before he was driven off his property. Johnny Johnson had stood up to complain at what was supposedly a town council meeting, but had been called only to solidify the Blakely-Ross group’s effective stranglehold on the territory. Johnson had been beaten as he left the council chambers.
Each of them had been outlawed for causes such as resisting arrest, refusing to obey a lawful order and squatting on illegally-occupied land. What law there was in Lordsberg – the law of Blakely-Ross – had driven them off. Banished them to the Tanglewood.
They had gathered together, angrily plotting and swearing vengeance.
On this night their time had come. The time had come to take back the town.
There weren’t enough of them to accomplish this by main force, though Johnson and Curt Wagner still nurtured enough recent anger to make them vote for that suicidal plan. Trace Dawson had a different idea. He had suggested it as they gathered around a campfire in the Tanglewood.
‘We’ve got to see that the venture doesn’t profit Blakely or Storm Ross. When they start losing money, they’ll pull up stakes and take their roughnecks with them. After all, they’re only here for the profit.’
They had then discussed various ways of making the Lordsberg investment useless to Ross and Blakely. There were a few odd ideas proposed and some that were quite practical. The one they had all agreed on was designed to pull the capital out from under the land-vultures – they wouldn’t get far without money to pay their gang of thugs.
So on this night with the silver moon riding high, Trace Dawson and his band of men had set off to clean out the Lordsberg bank.
The frame building sat near the center of town, but was set off a little on a side street. They had discussed trying it by daylight, but Trace thought it better if they were not all identifiable. They were well known in the area, and although they could wear masks, their horses could not be similarly disguised. Besides, there was a greater chance of a shoot-out in the daytime.
Curt Wagner, who seemed to have some experience with such matters in his background, had taken a look at the bank vault a few days earlier and returned calling it ‘nothing but a glorified pillbox.’ He was sure he could crack it even by moonlight. So they had decided to ride with the rising moon. Perhaps it was not a wise decision, but these were desperate men and emptying out the bank would strike a sudden, piercing thrust into the heart of the Blakely-Ross organization.
Trace saw no one along the street, but that did not mean they were not there. Besides, the town marshal, Kaylin Standish must have had some system for routinely patrolling there. There hadn’t been time to learn Standish’s usual pattern; that would have meant some of them having to sneak around Lordsberg where they could have been instantly recognized and locked up.
They swung down from their horses beside the bank, in the alley that separated it from a saddlery. Trace, Curt Wagner and Ben Torrance made their way to the front of the bank leaving Johnny Johnson to hold the horses and keep watch.
The lock on the front door which had a formidable appearance was quickly opened by Wagner’s nimble fingers and they entered the darkness of the bank lobby.
‘Open those roller-shades,’ Trace said and Ben Torrance stepped to the black window shades, letting them roll up. Immediately the dark room was flooded with silver moonlight.
‘Perfect,’ Curt Wagner said, and he rubbed his hands together in anticipation as he stepped toward the bank vault.
‘Better keep an eye out, Ben,’ Trace told Torrance. Someone with a keen eye might notice that the blinds were up, although a casual passerby, if he were concerned enough to glance that way would probably assume that someone had neglected to draw the blinds that day.
‘Can you see?’ Trace asked Curt as the tall man peered at the locks of the safe.
‘If you’ll move your shadow,’ Wagner answered with a touch of irritation. Trace quickly moved aside and left Wagner to his task.
‘Someone’s moving out there,’ Ben Torrance hissed, and Trace went to the window where the sad-faced Torrance half-crouched looking out at the moonlit street.
‘Where? I don’t see anybody?’
‘Up the street. Near the corner of the dry goods store. No, I don’t see him now,’ Torrance said, wiping at his forehead nervously.
‘Keep watching. It’s early for the saloons to be closing and late for the stores to be op
en. Shouldn’t be many people around.’
‘Except Standish and his deputies,’ Ben Torrance said. The small, balding man was jittery, unhappy with his role in the robbery. Originally the plan had been to leave Torrance in their camp and bring Dan Sumner with them to the bank, but Sumner’s love life had ruined that plan.
Kaylin Standish had spotted Dan loitering around the Wabash Saloon, hoping to meet with Kate Cousins, and had opened up with his revolver, tagging Dan’s leg. Trace placed a hand briefly on the nervous Ben Torrance’s shoulder and then turned back to watch Curt Wagner at work.
There wasn’t much to see. Wagner had already opened the so-called pillbox. He stood grinning at Trace, his teeth bright in the moonlight.
‘I told you,’ Curt said.
‘Get everything out of there except the silver money. ‘Deeds, titles, legal documents. I mean to cripple Prince Blakely and Ross.’
Curt Wagner was already at it, shoving currency and documents – everything from mortgages to title papers – into the burlap bags they had brought for that purpose. Trace helped out, moving as rapidly as he could. They didn’t take a moment to glance at what they took, they just shoved it into their sacks.
Curt said, ‘There won’t even be anyone legally married in Lordsberg; do we want all these courthouse papers, Trace?’
‘Everything we can carry. Gold and currency first, then everything else that will snarl up the works.’
‘Hurry up!’ Ben Torrance urged them from the window where he still stood guard shakily.
It didn’t take them more than five minutes, since they stole at random and didn’t take the time to examine what they were taking. Crossing to the door, Trace told Ben:
‘You’d better go out first. We’ve got both hands filled with loot.’
Ben Torrance made a small miserable sound as he stepped through the door into the cool of night, gun in hand. Curt Wagner and Trace were right on his heels, lugging the stuffed burlap bags. Ten paces to the alleyway. Secure the sacks and off into the Tanglewood.
