Tanglewood Desperadoes

by Paul Lederer

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Trace Dawson said as he stepped forward. Dan had Kate Cousins with him which was not a complete surprise.

  But beside her, riding a trim little palomino, was Ruby Rose Lee.

  ‘What is this? A circus?’ Curt Wagner said between his teeth.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Trace replied. But he meant to find out. Just what did Dan have in his mind, bringing the two women into the Tanglewood? Was he going crazy?

  That didn’t mean that he wasn’t pleased to see Ruby, her red hair now drifting free in the wind, her hat on a string down her back. She somehow managed to smell fresh after the long ride and as she strode to Trace and embraced him, her remembered warmth and softness brought a rush of pleasure surging briefly through him. However, he held Ruby away, put a scowl on his face and whirled on Dan who was getting down from leather clumsily because of his injury.

  ‘What the hell is this, Dan!’ Trace demanded.

  The wounded man shrugged apologetically and answered, ‘Trace, I don’t know what it is – they said to leave it up to them, they’d explain it to you.’

  ‘Looks like you got yourself bamboozled,’ Curt Wagner said, watching as Kate Cousins came up to stand behind her man.

  ‘That doesn’t cover it,’ Dan Sumner said with a grimace.

  ‘Well,’ Curt Wagner said with a grin, ‘the gang is getting prettier, but I’m not sure we’re gaining any ground.’

  Later, then, over the fresh coffee Kate had brought, they had a conference. There was much to be decided. First on the agenda was what to do with the two women. That discussion didn’t last long. Both were adamant – they were staying. Kate and Ruby were better at arguing than Trace, and eventually he gave it up.

  Ruby had explained her reasons for leaving, saying, ‘After Ross and Blakely shoved Gentry Cousins out of the saloon, it started getting rougher and rougher. I thought I had experience with hard men, but then this new crew started drilling in, real hard-cases who even rode roughshod over the town toughs.’

  ‘Where’d they come from?’ Trace asked with concern, knowing that Prince Blakely and Ross might very well have imported some killers to track them to the Tanglewood.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ruby said sipping at her coffee as she waved a hand toward the sky. ‘All over, I guess. They call themselves the Clinch Mountain boys.’

  Trace and Curt Wagner exchanged an anxious glance.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Curt asked.

  ‘I should be! They proclaimed it loud and clear every time they wanted to start their bragging or scare off the local boys. I had to get out of there. They were plain mean.…’ Ruby’s voice faded as she caught the expressions on the faces of Trace and Curt Wagner.

  Ruby asked, ‘Why? Do you know something about them?’

  ‘Too much,’ Curt muttered, and he rose from the small group and walked away, his coffee cup still in hand.

  ‘What’s with Curt?’ Dan Sumner inquired.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Trace said.

  ‘And where are Johnny and Ben?’

  Trace told him briefly about Johnny Johnson’s rifling the bank loot and disappearing.

  ‘I guess we should have figured that,’ Dan said sourly. ‘But Ben?’

  ‘Don’t know where he is. I’m hoping that Johnny didn’t kill him.’

  ‘Johnny has his sneaky side,’ Dan answered, ‘but I don’t think he’d gun old Ben down.’

  ‘I don’t either. At any rate,’ Trace said with a sigh as he reached for the coffee pot once more, ‘that leaves us short-handed. And now Blakely and Ross have the Clinch Mountain boys on their side.’ He was thoughtful for a moment, staring into his cup. The wind shifted the brush around them. When he lifted his eyes he said to Dan Sumner, ‘Maybe it would be best if you took off for Pueblo, maybe Flagstaff, and took the women with you.’

  ‘I won’t go!’ Ruby shot out. ‘I won’t go anywhere without you, Trace. I thought that you had that figured out by now.’

  ‘I’d go if Kate wanted me to, I guess,’ Dan said doubtfully, glancing at the small dark-eyed woman at his side. ‘I’m still not in much shape for a fight, but – Trace, I wouldn’t like it a bit. I don’t know if I’d be able to live with myself if I deserted you.’

  ‘We’re not going,’ Kate Cousins said with quiet firmness.

  ‘But Trace,’ Dan asked with doubt still clouding his eyes, ‘how long do you mean to keep this up?’

  Trace rose to his feet and turned his back to them. Without glancing around, he replied, ‘For as long as it takes.’ Then he strode away into the dark depths of the Tanglewood.

  Curt Wagner returned to the camp before Trace did. He looked worried, but his anger was gone. When he crouched down in front of the small fire he removed his hat and they could see that Curt had taken the time to rinse off and sweep his hair back, combing it with his fingers.

  ‘Did you see Trace?’ Dan Sumner asked. Curt just shook his head. He had others things on his mind obviously.

  Looking up at Ruby, the tall man asked, ‘The Clinch Mountain boys, did you happen to get the name of who’s leading them?’

  ‘Sure did,’ Ruby said, frowning a little. ‘He mentioned it often enough, trying to impress folks, I guess – Cole Lockhart.’

  Curt made a small sound deep in his throat that might have been a curse or a murmur of satisfaction. Then he rose.

  Dan asked: ‘Do you know him, Curt?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid I do. I know Cole Lockhart quite well.’ Then Curt left them again, walking out into the woods. When he returned this time it was with Trace Dawson. The two sat down on a fallen oak and the others gathered around.

  ‘Trace has been telling me his plan,’ Curt Wagner said.

  ‘It’s not simple,’ Trace said, his eyes narrowing, ‘but I see it as our only course. We’re not going to hold our own against twenty armed men, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Well?’ Dan prodded.

  ‘When you kill a rattler, you take off its head and bury it. I mean to go after the head of this bunch.’

  ‘Blakely and Ross?’ Kate asked. He nodded at her.

  ‘Prince Blakely, anyway. He’s the prime mover. Ross is the money man, the banker; not a man of action. He’s indecisive unless it’s a matter of finance. I want to remove Blakely.’

  ‘Kill him?’ Ruby asked with concern.

  ‘Capture him. Kidnap him, and bring him out to the Tanglewood. With no one to give orders, his little army will soon fall apart.’ He paused. ‘Or so I hope.’

  ‘What about the Clinch Mountain boys?’ Ruby asked. ‘They’ve already been paid, haven’t they? That Cole Lockhart doesn’t seem like the sort to back down from completing a job.’

  Trace spoke carefully, looking at each in turn, ‘That’s the second part of the plan. We’re going to kidnap Cole Lockhart as well.’

  Dan almost laughed out loud. ‘How are we supposed to do that? A professional gun-for-hire who’s always surrounded by his gang of toughs. Blakely, I can see. We simply break into his house and remove him at gunpoint, but Lockhart! How, Trace?’

  ‘I haven’t gotten that quite figured out,’ Trace was forced to admit. ‘The problem, as you say, is getting him away from his gang, putting him in a vulnerable position. We could maybe try sending him a note, drawing him out into—’

  ‘I can do it!’ Ruby said emphatically.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Trace asked the red-haired woman.

  ‘Don’t you believe I can get a man to follow me around the back way to my room? I can play the temptress. Once I have him out in the alley, you could be waiting there to jump him.’

  ‘I won’t have it,’ Trace Dawson said firmly.

  ‘You said you didn’t have a plan,’ Ruby insisted. ‘I do. And why not? Kate and I are a part of the gang, too. We should start doing our part.’

  ‘I won’t have it,’ Trace repeated, his expression stony.

  ‘What do you think, Curt?’ Ruby asked. ‘I’ll put on my red dress and sashay around a
little. When the time is right, I’ll invite Cole Lockhart up to my room, lead him around to the back stairs. You’ll be waiting for him.’

  ‘Trace, I hate to say it,’ Curt commented hesitantly, ‘but it’s not a bad plan. Certainly better than trying to come up with some kind of a note to lure him out of the saloon and away from his gang.’

  ‘All right, then,’ Trace said with genuine anger. ‘We’ll put it to a vote.’

  Ruby won in the end, and Trace, even though he remained unhappy about the idea, had to admit that it was a workable plan.

  If everything went just right.

  They were not underestimating Cole Lockhart’s skills with weapons, nor his toughness. He had been the leader of the rugged Clinch Mountain boys for a long time without having been challenged. He was good enough and mean enough to make a lot of trouble. Curt, who knew a lot about Lockhart, was well aware of that, yet he thought a drunken Lockhart, alone in the midnight shadows of the alleyway could be taken with just a little planning.

  ‘What about Blakely?’ Dan asked. ‘Do we try to trick him as well.’

  ‘No, as you said earlier, a couple of us simply knock on his door with our guns drawn. It should be the last thing he’ll expect.’

  ‘Should be,’ Dan said considering, ‘but what if he’s hired men to stand watch – or if Marshal Standish has decided to post a deputy there?’

  ‘I don’t think they’ll have any idea that we’d be riding in there,’ Trace answered, ‘not with twenty armed men waiting to shoot us down on sight. It’s a desperate act, but I’ve gotten desperate. And tired of losing out to the range pirates.’

  They began working on the details of the plan. Ruby was to return to her room and dress for work as if she had never been gone. She hadn’t told anyone she was leaving and it was unlikely that anyone even knew that she had been away.

  Kate suggested, ‘I can go over to the Wabash as well, to help watch out for Ruby. And I could warn you if someone follows Cole Lockhart out the door. No one will say anything. Everyone knows me. I’ll just say I need to go into the office to get Father’s set of books and check them over. They’ll be too busy to care anyway.’

  Now it was Dan Sumner who didn’t like the suggestion. ‘You don’t need to get mixed up in this, Kate.’

  ‘I am mixed up in it, Danny,’ she said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Then I’m going along, bad leg or not,’ Dan said firmly. No one tried to talk him out of it.

  ‘Which one do we go after first?’ Trace asked. ‘Blakely should be the easiest. But you never know.’ You never did. Blakely could have hired guns surrounding his house, or Cole Lockhart might manage to draw his belt gun and get off a shot sure to bring the Clinch Mountain boys on the run. Curt Wagner had an idea:

  ‘I say we take Cole first. Sometime after midnight. Then ride to the Blakely house. If Prince Blakely will open the door for anyone at that time of night, it’s Cole Lockhart.’

  ‘If we can get Lockhart to go along with the ploy,’ Dan said.

  ‘Oh, I think I can convince him to,’ Curt said, his expression growing grim. ‘He knows I still hold a grudge against him. With the muzzle of my Colt against his back, he’ll comply. He knows I’d as soon blow his spine apart as not.’

  After Curt and Trace had walked off again, discussing details of the plan, Ruby asked Dan, ‘What do you think Curt has against Cole Lockhart?’

  ‘I think,’ Dan said, looking toward the Tanglewood where the two men had disappeared up a trail, remembering the angry look on Curt’s face, ‘that we don’t even want to know.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Ruby sat in front of her mirror in the upstairs room above the Wabash Saloon. Her fingers moved uncertainly as she pinned up her hair. More than once she dropped hairpins on to the floor. She had already changed into her red silk dress. Now she stood, glancing at the mirror as she smoothed her skirt down. This was going to be a dangerous night and she knew it. Still trembling slightly, she took a deep breath and went to the hallway door.

  The noise from below hit her like a wall of sound. The Wabash was in full uproar. Men roistering, whooping, banging and cursing. Ruby proceeded to the stairway. She had endured this all before. What was one more night?

  She looked straight ahead as she descended to the saloon and crossed the room to sit at the end of the bar. A glance showed her where Cole Lockhart was seated – in a far corner with three other rough-looking men. She did not let her gaze linger on the outlaw chief.

  The Clinch Mountain boys had been paid in advance, and they meant to see how much of it they could spend on cheap liquor. The irony of it was that they were spending their gold in a saloon now owned by Prince Blakely. In effect they were returning their pay to him.

  There were two bartenders on duty, both constantly moving to the counter. Abel Hicks, the older of the two gave Ruby a glance, perhaps wondering why she was not out on the floor, hustling drinks and laughing it up with the crude Clinch Mountain boys, but she saw a shadow of sympathy in Abel’s eyes as he poured more whiskey for the crowd at the bar.

  From where she sat Ruby could also see the seldom-used back door of the Wabash. Now as she glanced that way she saw it open, admitting a wary-looking but determined Kate Cousins. The manager of the Wabash, Zachary Upjohn went to meet Kate. Ruby could not hear their conversation, but it seemed amiable enough.

  ‘Good evening, Kate,’ Zachary was saying. He had always liked Kate and Gentry Cousins. The saloon was now making a lot of money, but it was only temporary he knew. When the band of thugs drifted out of town things would return to normal. Zachary did not like the new regime, and he would have drifted on himself except like so many people stranded in Lordsberg, he had no place else to go. Kate used her rehearsed speech.

  ‘Hello, Zachary. I came over to take a look at the books. My father was evicted so suddenly that we didn’t have time to do that.’

  ‘I know, and I’m sorry,’ Zachary said sincerely. ‘Go on into the office and do what you need to do. Maybe one day we’ll be back in business together.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Kate said with a fleeting smile. She let herself into the back office, leaving the door ajar, removed two black-bound books from the glass-fronted office book case at random and took them to the desk.

  From where she sat, she could see all the way across the crowded saloon to where Cole Lockhart sat getting slowly drunk. And she could see Ruby sitting alone at the end of the bar.

  She opened one of the ledgers and stared at the columns of numbers. They had no meaning to her just then. She glanced at the brass-bound wall clock every five minutes, willing the time to fly past, dreading its passage at the same time.

  There was death in the air on this night.

  Curt Wagner, Dan Sumner and Trace Dawson stood together in the cottonwood grove, staring out at the lights of Lordsberg, from time to time hearing bursts of raucous sound. Dan was uneasy about Kate.

  ‘Shouldn’t we be going?’

  ‘Not too soon,’ Trace answered. ‘We can’t chance being seen by some casual observer. That’s what happened to you the first time, remember?’

  ‘I remember,’ Dan said, rubbing his wounded leg. ‘But it’s hard to think of the girls down there by themselves.’

  ‘We’ll give it another hour,’ Trace said, looking to the pointer of the Big Dipper which told him that midnight was still that far off.

  ‘All right,’ Dan answered glumly. ‘I’ll just feel better when I’m doing something. I hate waiting.’

  ‘Dan,’ Curt said, going over the plan once again. ‘You’re the man with one leg, so you’ll hold back in the alley with our horses. Stay there unless we need you – if Cole has someone else with him, for instance. Which seems unlikely if he thinks he’s going to visit a lady in her room, but who knows?’

  ‘I don’t see how Ruby can convince him to take the back stairs.’

  ‘She’ll have something made up. The boss doesn’t like the girls to be seen taking a man into th
eir rooms – leave that up to Ruby. Kate is in the office near the back door. She’ll open it if she sees them leave the saloon. That’s our signal to hunker down and get ready.

  ‘Trace, you’ll be in the shadows under the back steps, right? I’ll position myself behind the loading dock. Men,’ Curt said worriedly, ‘don’t go to shooting unless it absolutely can’t be helped. At the first shot we’ll have a dozen Clinch Mountain boys on us and the game will be over.’

  Shortly before midnight they trailed into town. All three of Lordsberg’s saloons were going full-bore. The Black Panther and the Golden Eagle were flush with the displaced Wakapee Valley men who wanted as little to do with the Clinch Mountain boys at the Wabash as possible.

  The back alleys of the town, however, were dark and silent for the most part. They passed a few derelict drunks and startled a white mongrel dog into a scuttling run, but other than that they saw no one. Trace had reminded them to be alert for Marshal Standish and his deputies, but these it seemed did not wish to patrol too near to the Wabash at present. Kaylin Standish would not be eager to try stopping any fight that might break out among the Clinch Mountain crowd. For the time being Cole Lockhart’s men had taken control of Lordsberg.

  Reaching the cross-alley this side of the Wabash, they drew up and Trace and Curt Wagner gave their reins to Dan. Those horses were too well known in Lordsberg. They walked ahead keeping in the shadows which were deep and cold. The moonlight did not reach them between the buildings. Moving only by starlight they found their positions and settled in to wait, their eyes on the back entrance to the Wabash which Kate was supposed to open when Ruby and Cole left the saloon.

  If she could.

  They knew nothing of the situation inside the saloon, and to Trace it seemed now to be a wildlyhatched plan, based on hope alone. There was no telling what a man like Cole Lockhart would do at any given moment. He took up his position in the deep shadows beneath the stairs which led up to Ruby’s room and for the first time since he had started this odds-against war, gave in to despondency.