Guns of the Canyonlands

by Ralph Compton

  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

  Epilogue

  ONE WAY OUT

  Rinker was ready, his hands close to his guns. There was a strange light in the man’s eyes, a glowing mix of sadistic joy and the urge to kill that Tyree recognized only too well. He knew right then that this man would not let it go.

  Then Dave Rinker went for his gun.

  Tyree drew fast from the waistband, and his first bullet hit Rinker square in the chest. Another, a split second later, crashed into the man’s forehead.

  The big man convulsively triggered a round that thudded into the sod roof. Then his Colt dropped from his hand as he slammed backward onto the table, sending glass flying. Rinker tumbled off the table and fell flat on his back, his stunned eyes wide. The gunman tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come. He rattled deep in his throat and blood bubbled scarlet and sudden over his lips. His glazed stare fixed on the glow of the lamp above his head . . . but by then he was seeing only darkness.

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, February 2006

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2006

  All rights reserved

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-09923-0

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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. in

  —Ralph Compton

  Chapter 1

  Who the hell was Owen Fowler?

  As he crossed a broken lava ridge, then rode through high green hills on his way to the three miles of brush flats that would take him to the town of Crooked Creek, the rider on the long-legged zebra dun asked himself that question time and time again.

  And with good reason.

  Less than four hours before, Owen Fowler, whoever he was, had cost a man his life—and Chance Tyree, now staring moodily beyond the hills to the dusty, sunbaked flats, had killed him.

  As they so often did, the gunfight had come up suddenly—and ended with deadly finality.

  Tyree reined up in the shade of a post oak, hooked a leg over the saddle horn and built a smoke. He thumbed a match into flame, lit the cigarette, then, dragging deep, brought the shooting to mind, remembering how it had been. . . .

  Twenty miles back along the trail, he’d ridden into a settlement, a decaying annex to nowhere built along one bank of a wide, sandy creek. Even as such places went, the town wasn’t much—a sod-walled saloon with a sagging timber roof, a general store of sorts, a scattering of tarpaper shacks and a small livery stable fronted by a corral built hit or miss of pine poles. The windmill that pumped water from the creek into an overflowing barrel at one side of the store screeched for oil, and a skinny yellow dog hunting sagebrush lizards nosed around in a clump of bunchgrass near the stable.

  The dog lifted its head to look as Tyree swung out of the saddle while he was still a good twenty yards from the saloon. The animal studied the tall young rider for a few speculative moments, decided he was of little interest and went back to its exploring.

  Keeping the dun between himself and the saloon, Tyree opened his saddlebags, lifted out a black gun belt and slid a Colt from the leather.

  For a few moments the young man studied the worn blue revolver as it lay in the palm of his right hand. In the past, the weapon
had seen much of gunfighting and there was within Tyree a growing desire to set the Colt aside, to move into a present clear of powder smoke where all the dying was done and past and the screams that echoed through his dreams at night would finally fade into silence.

  There is little a man can do about the past, except forget it. There is, however, a great deal he can do about the present and the future.

  With this thought uppermost in his mind, Tyree shoved the Colt into his waistband. A man armed and belted attracts attention. Eyes go to the iron on his hip and other men wonder: Is this just a drifting cowhand who carries a gun only to use the butt to pound nails, the barrel to stretch fence wire? Or is this man of a different stamp, a skilled and sudden fighter who has made his mark and killed his man?

  All too often the answers to those questions were written in hot lead. Not wishful of inviting such speculation, Tyree took a hip-length, elk-skin coat from under his blanket roll and quickly shrugged into the garment, pulling it almost closed to cover the walnut handle of the Colt.

  The coat was fringed, decorated on the shoulders and front with Kiowa beadwork. A few years back it had cost Tyree a good paint pony and a jug of whiskey. He figured he’d gotten the best of that trade.

  Tyree led his horse to the saloon, looped the reins around the hitching post and stepped inside.

  The saloon was a single room, built tight and close, but Tyree was grateful for its relative coolness, willing to ignore the pervading stink of tobacco juice, man sweat and stale beer. Dust-specked light from a pair of unglazed windows angled onto the bar—a timber plank laid across a pair of sawhorses. From the ceiling hung an oil lamp, casting a dim orange halo in the gloom. An assortment of bottles stood on a shelf behind the bartender, a big-bellied man wearing a brocaded vest and dirty, collarless shirt. Above the shelf hung a printed sign that asked: HAVE YOU WRITTEN TO MOTHER?

  To Tyree’s right a small, thin man with the quick, sly eyes of a bunkhouse rat sat at the only table in the place, a bottle and glass in front of him. A couple of men stood at the bar, one middle-aged and nondescript, a puncher by the look of him, the other a tall, wide-shouldered towhead, Colts holstered low on his thighs, wearing his gunman’s swashbuckling arrogance like a cloak.

  All this Tyree took in at a glance, aware that he had in turn become the object of scrutiny.

  The two at the bar and the man at the table were studying him closely, taking in his wide-brimmed Stetson, the Kiowa work on his coat and the jinglebob spurs chiming on the heels of his boots, the rowels cut from Mexican silver pesos. The boots themselves were custom-made, the expensive leather sewn sixty stitches to the inch, using an awl so fine that if it had accidentally pierced the boot maker’s hand the wound would have neither hurt nor bled.

  Tyree knew that his outfit spoke loudly of Texas, and this was confirmed when the bartender smiled and asked, “Fair piece off your home range, ain’t you, Tex?”

  “Some,” Tyree admitted, prepared to be sociable if that was what it took. He was aware that the towhead’s intent gaze was slowly measuring him from the top of his hat to the tip of his boots. The man was on the prod. A combination of belligerence and meanness bunched up hot and eager in his pale eyes.

  Tyree had run into his kind before, a would-be hard case, probably with a local reputation as a fast gunman. Such men were not rare in the West. Boot Hills from Texas to Kansas and beyond were full of them.

  Tyree, mindful of his decision to leave gun violence behind him, made up his mind right there and then to have no part of him.

  “What will it be?” the bartender asked.

  “Anything to eat around here?”

  The bartender scratched under a thick sideburn, then nodded to a glass-covered dish at the end of the bar. “What you see is what I got. You like cheese? I got cheese and soda crackers.” He glanced behind him. “Maybe I got soda crackers.”

  “It’ll do,” Tyree answered. “And a cold beer.”

  “All I got is warm beer.”

  “Just so long as it’s wet.”

  The bartender found a plate, dusted it off on his apron and moved to the end of the bar. He fingered some chunks of yellow cheese onto the plate, added a handful of soda crackers, then set the plate in front of Tyree. From somewhere at his feet he came up with an amber bottle of beer, thumbed it open and laid it alongside the plate.

  Tyree took a sip. It was warm and flat, but it cut the dust of the trail in his throat. The cheese smelled strong and the soda crackers were stale.

  The man watched Tyree eat for a few moments, then asked, “Where you headed, Tex?”

  Tyree shrugged as he picked a cracker crumb off his bottom lip. “No place in particular. Just passing through.”

  “That’s a damn lie.”

  The voice had come from behind him, that quick. That raw.

  “What did you say, mister?” Tyree asked, his hazel eyes, more green than brown, moving to the towhead who was now standing square to him, straddle-legged, thumbs tucked into his gun belts.

  “You heard me plain enough. I called you a damned liar.”

  There was a vindictive challenge in the towhead’s words, the voice of one who had killed his man and was anxious to kill again.

  A man can step away from a woman’s insult. He may feel that he’s all of a sudden shrunk to three feet tall, but he can swallow his pride and walk away from it. An insult from another male is a different matter entirely. There’s no walking away from that, not if a man wants to hold his head high and be judged and counted among other men.

  This Chance Tyree knew, and he felt a familiar anger burn in his belly. The towhead was a reputation hunter acting out a timeworn ritual Tyree had seen before. This man would not be turned aside by talk, yet Tyree knew he had to make the attempt.

  He popped a piece of cheese into his mouth and chewed, looking at the towheaded gunman reflectively, unhurried, seemingly lost in thought, like a man pondering the frailty of human nature. Finally he slowly shook his head, turned to the bartender and made a rubbing motion with his fingers. “Towel? Your cheese must have been feeling the heat because it was sure sweating considerable.”

  The bartender laid both hands on the counter, his alarmed eyes slanting to the towhead. “Dave, I want no trouble in my place. You heard the stranger. If he says he’s passing through, then he’s passing through. Hell, he ain’t even carrying a gun.”

  “I don’t believe that. He’s got one hid away fer sure.” The rat-eyed man at the table stood. He stepped beside the man called Dave. “We know why he’s here, don’t we, Dave? I say he’s tryin’ to fool us.”

  “Sure we know why he’s here, Charlie,” Dave answered. “But he ain’t fooling nobody and that’s why he’s got two choices—ride on back the way he came or die right where he stands.”

  Charlie smiled, showing prominent green teeth wet with saliva. “Better make your choice, stranger. This here is Dave Rinker. He’s killed more men than you got fingers. He’s fast on the draw, mighty fast.”

  Tyree ignored both men and again turned to the bartender. “Where’s that towel?”

  The man threw Tyree a scrap of dirty dishrag, then watched as the tall stranger wiped off his hands. He leaned across the bar, his mouth close to Tyree’s ear. “Now fork your bronc and ride on out of here, Tex, like the man says,” he whispered. “The food and the beer are on the house.”

  “Much obliged,” Tyree said. He turned to face Dave Rinker, a slight smile tugging at his lips. “Now all Mr. Rinker has to do is apologize for that ill-considered remark about my honesty, and I’ll be on my way.”

  To Rinker, this was the grossest kind of affront. He was a man used to bullying lesser men, who spoke and acted respectfully, wary of his low-slung Colts. Tyree’s quiet demand had thrown him. The big gunman’s jaw almost dropped to his chest and his pale blue eyes popped. “Me, apologize to you? Apologize to a two-bit hired bushwhacker? The hell I will.”

  “Owen Fowler sent for you, didn’t he?” Charlie asked, a t
aunting note in his voice. “Admit it, Tex. Didn’t that no-good preacher killer send for you?”

  The other man at the bar, the gray-haired oldster in puncher’s clothes, stepped away, opening space between him and Rinker. “I ain’t waiting for apologies or otherwise,” he said, his wary eyes lifting to Tyree standing cool and ready. “I’m ridin’.”

  Rinker laughed. “You scared, Tom? Hell, I can shade this saddle tramp.”

  “Maybe,” Tom said. “Maybe not. Either way I don’t plan on sticking around to find out.”

  After the old puncher swung quickly out of the door, Tyree said, “Care to make that apology now, Rinker?”

  A tense silence stretched between the two men, the saloon so still that the soft rustling of an exploring rat in the corner was unnaturally loud. Then the bartender spoke, his words dropping into the taut quiet like rocks into an iron bucket. “Maybe he’s telling the truth, Dave. Maybe Owen Fowler didn’t send for him. He could be just passing through like he says.”

  “Zack, you shut your trap,” Rinker said. “I know why he’s here. He’s sold his gun to Fowler all right. You know I got no liking for Fowler, so now this is between Texas and me.”

  “The worst and last mistake you’ll ever make in your life, Rinker,” Tyree said, his voice suddenly flat and hard as he moved his coat away from his gun, “is to keep pushing me. So go back to your drinking and just let it be.” He smiled, forcing himself to relax. He decided to make one final attempt to get this thing to go away. “But just to show there’s no hard feelings, I’ve decided to pass on the apology. I’m going to let bygones be bygones.” He nodded toward the door. “Now will you give me the road?”

  “Sure,” the big gunman said, full lips stretched wide in a cruel grin under his sweeping yellow mustache, “you can go through that door—with four men carrying you by the handles.”

  Rinker was ready, his hands close to his guns. There was a strange light in the man’s eyes, a glowing mix of sadistic joy and the urge to kill that Tyree recognized only too well from past experiences. He knew right then that this man would not let it go.