Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Historical Note
Dogfight
Oates kicked out at the female coyote and the hard sole of his right foot took her full on the snout. The canine yipped in pain and backed off, snarling. The dog coyote, hearing his mate’s cry of hurt, was startled and he too bounded back a few steps.
The first round to Oates. But, wiser now, the coyotes attacked again.
This time both of them jumped on Oates, and he collapsed under their weight. He smelled the feral stench of the animals and felt their fangs rip into his back and thighs.
Desperately, Oates tried to sit up, striking out with his right arm. He hit the dog a couple of times, but his punches were weak and ineffective. Blood sprayed around him and dripped like rubies from the muzzles of the coyotes.
Then the flat statement of a rifle shot racketed through the hollow quiet of the evening. The dog coyote shrieked and fell away, landing on its back, its legs twitching.
Another shot. The female dropped without a sound, her deadweight suddenly heavy on Oates.
He felt the coyote being lifted from him and a bearded face with good-humored hazel eyes swam into his view. “You all right, pardner?” a man’s voice asked. Oates tried to answer, but darkness took him and he knew no more.
SIGNET
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First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,
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First Printing, July 2009
eISBN : 978-1-101-05696-7
Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2009
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THE IMMORTAL COWBOY
This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.
True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.
In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?
It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.
It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.
—Ralph Compton
Chapter 1
At ten o’clock sharp on a fine spring evening, the Honorable Company of Concerned Citizens, City of Alma, New Mexico Territory, hanged the Hart brothers: Billy, Bobby and young Jimmy.
Next morning, at dawn, they came for Eddie Oates, the town drunk.
Let it be noted that at first the four Concerned Citizens present tried to wake the sleeping Oates almost gently. But when the little man continued to snore and slobber in his sleep, the boots went in.
Even after he woke, red-eyed and puking, kicks slammed into Oates’ ribs, none driven harder and by more rage than those of Cornelius Baxter, Alma’s only banker and richest citizen.
To even the most casual observer, the reason for Baxter ’s anger would not have been hard to find.
His expensive patent leather ankle boots, hand sewn by Rigby and Sons of New York, Boston and Denver, were splashed with the green bile that had erupted from Oates’ mouth.
God alone knows how it would have ended had not John L. Battles, proprietor of the Silver Nugget saloon, stuck out a pudgy hand and pushed Baxter away.
“Let it be,” he sa
id. “We didn’t come here to kill the man.”
It took the banker a while.
The others present saw the boiling fury in Baxter bubble away gradually, then settle to a low simmer. He lifted pale blue eyes to Battles, for the saloon keeper was a tall man, and said, quiet and even, “John, don’t ever lay a hand on me again or I’ll kill you.”
After twenty years on the frontier, Battles was not a man to take a step back from anyone. He said, “Anytime you want to heel yourself, Baxter, we can have at it.”
Baxter’s face was crimson, the mouth under his mustache a thin, hard line, white and pinched at the corners.
Tall, stringy Jeddah Piper, the town undertaker, saw the danger and decided to act. “Here, this won’t do,” he said. “The Apaches have us under the gun and we’re all on edge. Gentlemen, let’s not start fighting among ourselves.”
The fourth citizen present, Clem Hamilton, who owned a dry goods store, tossed in his two cents’ worth. “Jed’s right,” he said. “Are we going to fight over a drunken nothing like Eddie Oates when we got Mescaleros all around us?”
Piper saw hesitation in the faces of Baxter and Battles and said quickly, “Get him to his feet. We’ll take him outside, where he can join the rest of them.”
“Wait,” Baxter said. He began to wipe his shoes on Oates’ shirt and pants. “The little son of a bitch can’t smell any worse.”
John L. Battles laughed, and with that, the bad blood that had lain between him and the banker was forgotten.
Chapter 2
Eddie Oates blinked like an owl against the morning light.
His sides hurt from the kicking he’d taken and there was the taste of blood in his mouth. He needed a drink but doubted there was one to be had.
When the Concerned Citizens had found him, he’d been asleep in the alley where he had fallen into unconsciousness shortly after the hanging of the Hart brothers. Now, suspended between Baxter and Battles like a crucifixion victim, his bare toes dragging behind him in the dirt, he was manhandled into the street and tossed in the zinc horse trough outside the Silver Nugget.
Oates sank, then rose, sputtering, gasping like a just-landed trout. Somebody rammed his head under the surface again. He was down there, swallowing water for what seemed a long time, then was suddenly released. He floundered, kicking, into a sitting position and heard laughter.
“First bath you’ve had in years, huh, Eddie boy?” a man yelled.
Other voices rose, harsh, amused and merciless.
“Why don’t we just drown the little shit?”
“Swim for it, Eddie!”
“Don’t piss in the trough, Eddie. My horse got to drink that stuff!”
More laughter followed; then came the voice of John L. Battles. “That’s enough, boys. Get him out of there and take him over to the gallows with the others.”
Rough hands dragged Oates from the trough. The cool water had not sobered him, or so he believed. For the past seventeen years, since he was twelve years old, he’d never been sober, so he had no clear remembrance of what it felt like.
Not being numb all the time, he recalled that. And the world he’d known as a boy didn’t spin around him so fast that he couldn’t catch up and find a place for himself. That too he remembered—or thought he did. Maybe he’d just dreamed that had been the way of it all those years ago.
Prodded by kicks to his butt, Oates was surrounded by a dozen grinning men and pushed, stumbling, toward the gallows.
The Hart brothers still hung there. Three long, lanky bodies swayed in the morning breeze, stinking of the vile stuff that had erupted from them and trickled down their legs as they kicked while being strangled in the rough embrace of the hemp.
Oates’ brown eyes lifted to the dead robbers; he vaguely remembered them.
He was not allowed to drink among men, but now and again he’d been welcomed into the saloons to perform tricks for whiskey—usually Good Doggy, when he got down on all fours to bark and play fetch.
He’d been retrieving a whore’s garter in the Silver Nugget when he’d overheard that the Hart brothers had been caught after a stage robbery in the course of which the guard was wounded and a traveling preacher killed.
All agreed that the shooting of the Holy Joe had been accidental, but the guard promptly died of gangrene poisoning and the Honorable Company of Concerned Citizens sentenced the brothers to death by hanging.
That sentence had been set for a week hence to allow the Hart womenfolk time to get in from the family ranch to attend the hanging and collect their dead.
But then Victorio, aided by ancient old Nana and Geronimo, had led a mixed band of Chiricahuas and Mescaleros out of the Mogollon Mountains and everything had changed.
With the town now under Apache siege, the brothers had been hanged ahead of time. Everyone agreed the three men were no great loss.
The guard, a feisty old former buffalo hunter by the name of Gray, had blown off most of Bobby’s lower jaw with his Big .50, and had shattered Billy’s right arm, and young Jimmy had taken a ball in the brisket.
Even John L. Battles, normally a softhearted man, had opined that the Hart boys were done as fighting men, so there was no point in keeping them alive any longer.
As he watched the bodies sway and heard the hemp creak, Oates had a sudden moment of clarity. He’d been puzzled before, but now he knew why he was being hanged. He was not a fighting man either.
“Get over there, you.”
A hand pushed Oates in the small of the back, and he crashed heavily into the gallows. Around him men laughed as he bounced off the pine boards and staggered, but a helping hand reached out from somewhere and steadied him.
“What are they going to do with us, Mr. Oates?”
Oates blinked at the owner of the hand, then slowly recognized the frightened, freckled face of young Sam Tatum. He remembered that he liked Sam. He was the only person in Alma, or any other town, who had ever called him Mister.
“I don’t know, Sammy.” Oates’ voice sounded like the hinges of a rusty gate. “I don’t know anything.”
“Will we get hung, Mr. Oates?”
Oates turned away. He didn’t want to think or look at Sam anymore. God, he needed a drink.
His mind screamed as the whiskey hunger raked him, giving him no peace.
He wanted to cry out, “Hang me, you bastards. Get it over with, but let me have a drink first,” but he could not form the words. Besides, who would listen?
Later, the citizens of Alma who’d crowded around the gallows that morning would recall that Eddie Oates had been in truth a pathetic sight.
“Standing there, dripping water, rubbing his mouth all the time. Poor thing.”
“Like a little drowned rat, wasn’t he?”
“He smelled bad too. How does a man get to smell like that?”
“Well, who cares? He’s probably dead by this time anyhow.”
But that was then; this was now.
Cornelius Baxter stepped among the crowd and threw up his hands, demanding silence. Deciding that his portly five foot seven was less than impressive at ground level, the banker stepped up onto the gallows platform and stood in front of the purple-faced bodies.
Again he raised his arms and slowly the hubbub died away to a ragged silence.
“Fellow citizens of the fair city of Alma,” Baxter began. Up went a cheer, which the banker acknowledged with a smile and a slight inclination of his head. Then he continued. “As you are all aware, I am talking to you at the time of our greatest peril.”
Baxter waved a hand, encompassing the whole town. “As you can see, we have alert sentinels posted at each end of our city, and stalwart riflemen on our roofs. I have tasked them with one duty—keep keen watch for Victorio and his bloodthirsty fiends.”
The banker stopped, as though expecting another cheer. But there was none. People looked uneasily over their shoulders and then at one another, the very name Victorio enough to cause a ripple of fear to go through th
e crowd.
“The trails in and out of town were cut by the Apaches days ago,” Baxter said. He paused and then added ominously, “There will be no more supply wagons for some time to come, and already our food supplies are running perilously low.”
Against a background of worried murmurs, the banker said, “But who better to tell us where we stand than our very own Will Jackson.”
All eyes turned to a small, round-bellied man who, even at this early hour, was wearing a spotless white apron. Jackson owned the only general store in town and was a founding member of the citizens’ committee.
Without any preamble, the little man began to tick points off on his fingers. “Flour, one week’s supply; bacon, five days’; salt pork, ditto; coffee, one week; sugar, ditto.” He paused, thinking, then continued. “Cheese, eggs, butter, red meat and beans . . . as long as they last, which won’t be long. Ditto salt, pepper and other spices. I’ve already run out of canned milk, canned meat, peaches and most other canned goods.
“Now, as to prices, I’m afraid that from today I’ll have to increase—”
“Yes, yes, Will, we understand,” Baxter interrupted quickly. He addressed the crowd again. “Given the Apache menace and our shortages of food, last night the Honorable Company of Concerned Citizens, myself presiding, decided that we can no longer tolerate parasites within our community. In short, there will be no more useless mouths in Alma.”
Baxter indicated the hanged men. “This was a start, but there are others.” He took a slip of paper from the pocket of his frock coat, then said, “Pike, Sanderson, you others, bring them forward.” Then, to the expectant crowd he said, “The loafers, shirkers and slackers who would take the very bread from our children’s mouths.”
To yells of approval, three women and Sam Tatum were pushed beside Oates.
“There they are,” Baxter said. “All wear the Mark of Cain and flaunt that vile brand as bold as brass. Look into their faces, citizens. I assure you, you will find not the slightest trace of remorse for the wasted, sinful, lustful lives they have led.”
Ralph Compton The Man From Nowhere Page 1
