Guns of the Canyonlands

by Ralph Compton

  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, just under the rim of his hat.

  The big towhead 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 Charlie’s bottle and glass flying. Rinker tumbled off the table and fell flat on his back, his stunned eyes wide, unable to believe the manner and the fact of his dying. 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.

  Hammer back, Tyree’s gun swung on Charlie. But the little man threw up his hands and screamed, “No! Mother of God, no! Don’t shoot! I’m out of this!”

  “Shuck that gun belt and step away from it, or I’ll drop you right where you stand,” Tyree said.

  Charlie’s trembling fingers quickly unbuckled the gun belt like it had suddenly become red-hot and let it fall. He backed toward the door, looking down at Rinker, a tangle of shocked emotion in his eyes.

  “But Dave was fast,” the man whispered, shaking his head in disbelief. “He was the fastest around.”

  “Had he ever been to Texas?” Tyree asked.

  “No . . . I mean, I don’t think so.”

  Tyree nodded. “Figures.”

  From force of long habit, he punched the empty shells out of his Colt, reloaded, then stuck the big revolver back in his waistband. He turned to the bartender.

  “You saw what happened. I didn’t want this fight and Rinker was notified.”

  The man opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing, his Adam’s apple bobbing like he was trying to swallow a dry chicken bone.

  “What’s your name, bartender?” Tyree asked.

  “Zachary,” the man answered finally, his stunned, haunted eyes a mirror image of Charlie’s. “They call me Zack Ryan, when they call me anything.”

  Tyree motioned toward the dead man. “Well, Zack Ryan, will you take care of this?”

  The bartender gulped, then nodded. “Sure, sure, Tex, sure. Anything you say.”

  Tyree dug into the pocket of his pants and chimed three silver dollars onto the bar. “A man should be buried decent,” he said. “Lay him out fitting and proper in his best suit, and get a preacher to say the words.”

  “I’ll do it,” Ryan said, nodding again, his face gray. “I’ll do right by him.”

  Tyree lifted a hand. “Thanks for the beer and the food.”

  He turned and stepped toward the door, his spurs ringing like silver bells in the sullen, smoke-streaked silence.

  “Wait,” Ryan said, his curiosity overcoming his fear. “Did Owen Fowler really send for you?”

  Tyree stopped in his tracks. “Who the hell,” he asked, a vague anger tugging at him, “is Owen Fowler?”

  Chance Tyree ground out his cigarette butt on the heel of his boot, then swung his long leg back into the stirrup. “Well,” he said, to no one but himself, as is the habit of men who ride lonely trails, “maybe I’ll meet this Owen Fowler one day. Then him and me will have words.”

  Tyree shook his head and kneed the dun forward in the direction of the flats.

  He harbored no illusions about Crooked Creek.

  The town would be the same as the last he’d visited, and the ones before that. The warm beer and raw whiskey would taste the same. The same choking yellow dust would cloud the street and the people would be as he’d found them in all the other towns he’d passed through, uncompromising men and women bred hard for a harsh land where nothing came easy.

  Tyree was thirty years old that summer of 1883, and behind him lay a decade of gun violence, rake-hell years of blood, fury and sudden death. Many times he’d walked the line between what was lawful and what was not. In those days to be young and brave and full of fight were qualities other men admired, that fleeting moment of blazing, reckless youth when the old sat quietly in the shadows and watched and wondered and said nothing.

  His ma had died giving birth to him. His pa had grieved for a while, then taken a new wife. Tyree had been raised hard and tough, knowing little of parental warmth or affection. His pa was too occupied with trying to wrest a living out of a two-by-twice ranch on a dusty creek south of the Balcones Escarpment.

  When he was thirteen, his pa had given him a swaybacked grulla horse and four dollars and told him it was time for him to leave and seek his fortune. “Things are tough around here, Chance,” he’d said, “what with cattle prices the way they are an’ all. I got your new ma and the three younkers to care of an’ I just don’t have the money to feed you and put clothes on your back no more. So you see how things are with me here.”

  Tyree turned his back on the ranch without regret and spent the next seven years drifting, working in the hard school of the cow camps and the long, dangerous drives up the trails to Kansas.

  During those years he bought his first Colt revolver and learned how to use his fists. By the time he was eighteen he was counted a man and respected as a top hand.

  He’d just turned twenty, still lacking a man’s meat to his wide shoulders, when he’d first sold his gun. Tyree had ridden with John Wesley Hardin, the Clements brothers and the rest of the wild DeWitt County crowd in the murderous Sutton-Taylor feud. He’d learned his trade well, patiently tutored by Hardin, a fast, deadly and pitiless gunfighter who had shown him the way of the Samuel Colt’s revolver and taught him much of the men who lived by it.

  Since then Tyree had hired out his gun in five bitter range wars, worn a town-tamer’s tin star twice and for six months had ridden the box as a scattergun guard for the Lee-Reynolds Stage Company out of Dodge.

  Tyree had been shot once, by a gunman named Cord Bodie, who did not live long enough to boast of it. Three years later he’d taken a strap-iron arrow in the thigh during a running fight with Comanche on the Staked Plains.

  He stood three inches over six feet in his socks and weighed a lean two hundred pounds that year, all of it muscle crowded into his shoulders, chest and arms, the tallow long since burned out of him by sun, wind and a thousand trails through the wild country. When circumstances dictated, he’d suffered from the bitter cold of the high mountains like any other man, cursed the sweltering, gasping heat of the desert and gulped at the thick, fetid air of the Louisiana bayous and fervently wished himself somewhere else. But Tyree had the capacity to endure, to reach down deep and draw on a seemingly bottomless reserve of strength and will, and that was what set him apart from lesser men and made him what he was.

  If asked, the only reason he would give for riding into the Utah canyonlands was that he wanted to see a place he’d never seen before, to stand and wonder at its beauty and lift his nose to the talking wind.

  Like most of his restless breed, he knew that the iron road, the telegraph and the sodbuster’s plow were changing the vast Western landscape forever. Soon it would all be gone and there would never be its like again. Not in his lifetime, nor in any other.

  He could not dam the tides of progress, so he would see the magnificent land, live it . . . and in later times remember and tell others how it had been.

  And maybe, just maybe, he’d find a place out here where he could flee his reputation as a gunfighter, and hang up his Colt forever. He could drink his coffee of an evening from his own front porch, his face crimsoned by the fire in the sky. And maybe there would be a pretty woman rocking at his side and a passel of tall sons to take care of them both when they grew old.

  Tyree rode through blue hills fragrant with the smell of juniper and sage, the sun hot on his back. He was still a mile from the flats when he topped a rock-strewn ridge, then headed down into a narrow valley where a stream chuckled to itself as it ran over a pebbled bottom and crickets made their small sound in the grass. The gulch was
a pleasant spot, shaded from the sun by the leaves of tall cottonwoods, the air smelling of wildflowers. Tyree reined up and swung out of the saddle.

  The day was hot and the brassy ball of sun burned in a sky the color of faded denim. He decided to let his tired dun drink and then graze for an hour before taking to the flats. Crooked Creek could wait. There was no one there to welcome him, no woman with perfumed hair smiling from her doorway, her voice husky with desire—just strangers wary of other strangers.

  Tyree eased the girth on the horse and led the animal to the creek. As the dun drank, so did he, stretched flat out on his belly on the bank. After drinking his fill he splashed water on his face and combed wet fingers through his unruly black hair. He smoothed his sweeping dragoon mustache with the back of his hand then settled his hat back on his head, the lacy tree shadows falling dappled around him.

  The dun had wandered off to graze. Tyree took off his coat, fetched up against a cottonwood trunk and rolled a smoke. When he’d finished the cigarette, he closed his eyes, enjoying the quiet, lulled by the laughter of the creek and the soft, restless rustle of the cottonwoods.

  He eased his position against the tree as the dun wandered close to him, cropping grass, and he tilted his hat further over his face.

  Gradually, he drifted . . . his breathing slowed . . . and he let sleep take him.

  A hard kick on the sole of his boot woke Chance Tyree from slumber.

  “Get on your feet, you.”

  Tyree opened his eyes and saw a bearded man towering above him, the rock-steady gun in his hand pointed right at his head. He turned and saw another man a few feet away to his left. That one held a Winchester.

  Each wore a lawman’s star on his vest. They looked like grim and determined men.

  Moving slowly, his gun hand well away from his body, Tyree rose to his feet. The man with the rifle stepped closer, reached out and yanked the Colt from his waistband.

  “Who sent for you?” the rifleman asked. His hair was gray, his eyes tired and washed-out in a thin face lined deep with years and hard living.

  Tyree shook his head, cursing himself for letting his guard down. “Nobody sent for me. I’m just passing through.”

  “Like hell you are,” the bearded man said, his black eyes ugly. He was huge, big in the arms and shoulders, and he seemed to have the disposition of a cornered cottonmouth. “Are you kin to Owen Fowler? Or has he hired himself a Texas gunfighter?”

  “Mister,” Tyree said, a sudden anger flaring in him, “I’ve no idea who the hell Owen Fowler is. I’ve never met the man.”

  “What you think, Clem?” the lawman with the Winchester asked, a moment’s doubt fleeting across his face. “You think maybe he’s telling the truth?” Without waiting for an answer, he motioned to Tyree with the muzzle of the rifle. “What’s your name, boy?”

  “Are you asking, or is the law asking?”

  “What the hell difference does it make?”

  “The difference is I’ll answer to the law, but not to you.”

  “All right,” the man said. “I’m Deputy Sheriff Len Dawson. That there is Deputy Clem Daley, and around these parts, we’re the law. The only law.”

  “Then it’s Chance Tyree.”

  Daley scratched his bearded cheek. “Seems to me I’ve heard that name afore.” He thought for a few moments, scowling in concentration, then nodded. “Hell, now I remember. You were the kid gunfighter out of El Paso. I recollect you rode with John Wesley Hardin and the Clements boys an’ them a spell back. You made all the newspapers. They say you rannies played hob and not all of what you done was honest.”

  “That was a long time ago.” Tyree shrugged. “A man changes, and he rides so many trails, he forgets how it was after ten years.”

  “Strange though,” the lawman said. “I mean, you being here the week Owen Fowler gets back, and you being a Texas hired killer an’ all.”

  “Texas and other places,” Tyree said. His anger flared. “And I never hired on to kill a man who didn’t need killing.”

  Dawson spoke, his voice ragged with concern. “Clem, maybe we should take Tyree back to town. Best we let Sheriff Tobin decide what to do with him.”

  The man called Clem shook his great nail keg of a head. “Len, what did Quirt Laytham tell us, huh? He said to get rid of any gun-toting strangers who couldn’t give a good account of why they was riding into the canyon country.” Clem waved his Colt in Tyree’s direction. “Well, he’s a gun-toting stranger and he’s riding into the canyon country and he’s given no good account for being here that I’ve heard.”

  “I dunno,” Len muttered. “Maybe he’s tellin’ the truth—just passin’ through. Maybe he is. I still say we take him to the sheriff.”

  “Sheriff!” Clem yelled, disgust heavy in his voice. “I don’t take orders from Nick Tobin, that useless, pink-eyed tub of guts. I take my orders from Mr. Laytham and so do you. Laytham told us to get rid of saddle tramps like this ’un who might be riding for Fowler, and when he said get rid of them, he meant permanently.”

  Chance Tyree knew he had to keep these two talking. So long as they were jawing, they weren’t shooting and they might let down their guard long enough to give him an opening.

  “Listen, who is this Owen Fowler who’s supposed to have hired me?” he asked. “Like I told another feller back on the trail, I don‘t know the man.”

  “What feller?” Daley asked, suspicion shading into his eyes.

  Tyree shrugged. “A man called Rinker.”

  “Handsome Dave Rinker?”

  “Yeah, I guess that was his name. I never heard the handsome part.”

  “What happened between you and Rinker?”

  “He accused me of being a hired gun for Owen Fowler,” Tyree answered. “Then he drew down on me.”

  “You’re here,” Dawson said. “Where’s Rinker?”

  “In hell probably,” Tyree answered. He hesitated a heartbeat. “He was notified.”

  “Dave Rinker was fast on the draw, mighty slick and sudden,” Clem said, the suspicion in his eyes replaced by accusation.

  “Maybe hereabouts,” Tyree said. “Not where I come from.” He played for time again. “You didn’t tell me about this Owen Fowler feller.”

  “Him?” Daley said, his mouth twisting into a sneer. “Like you don’t know already. Hell, I’ll tell it anyway. Fowler murdered Deacon John Kent, the finest, most decent man who ever walked the earth. Deacon Kent was our town preacher, but Fowler shot him in the back anyhow and robbed him of his watch and the few coins in his pockets.”

  “If he committed murder, why isn’t Fowler in prison?” Tyree asked, wondering if Clem Daley would know a decent man if he met one. It seemed the big lawman was parroting words he had heard from others.

  “He was in prison,” Daley said. “He got twenty-five years at hard labor. That was nine years ago. But this spring cholera broke out in the jail and Fowler helped nurse the sick prisoners. They say he saved the lives of a hundred men, but to my mind that don’t count a damn against the thing he done.” Daley spat, as though the words he was about to speak tasted bad in his mouth. “Anyhow, the governor pardoned Fowler and now he’s come back. He’s at his ranch up near Hatch Wash—again like I’m telling you something you don’t already know. Well, we burned out that murdering rustler afore, and we’ll do it again. Only this time we’ll make sure because we’re gonna hang him.”

  Daley smiled like a snake about to strike. “Like I’m fixing to hang you, boy.”

  Tyree looked into the deputy’s burning eyes and found no lie there. On the slenderest thread of evidence, coming upon a stranger who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, the lawman suspected him of being in cahoots with a rustler by the name of Owen Fowler. Daley had set himself up as judge, jury and executioner—and he aimed to do exactly what he’d promised.

  Desperately, Chance Tyree tried to get Daley talking again, but the big man shook his head. “Pardner, I’m all through jawing.” He turned
to Dawson. “Len, bring me your rope.”

  Dawson hesitated, nervously chewing on the end of his mustache. “Clem, this ain’t right. Hangin’ is a hell of a way to kill a man. Let’s you an’ me take him into town. Maybe he can explain hisself to Mr. Laytham.”

  “His explaining is done,” the big deputy answered. “Len, like you said already, you and me is the law in these parts, and the law is gonna hang this hired killer. Why would he ride all the way up here from Texas if it wasn’t to sell his gun to Fowler? Huh? Tell me that.”

  Dawson shook his head. “I dunno. He says he’s passin’ through.”

  “In a pig’s eye. Quirt Laytham wants us to get rid of gun tramps like this, and that’s how it’s going to be.” Anger flashed red across Daley’s cheekbones. His scarlet-veined eyes scorched into Tyree like hot coals. “Now bring that damn rope like I told you.”

  There was no compromise in Daley and no mercy either, and Tyree knew it. He took his chance and dived for the gun in the lawman’s hand. Surprisingly fast and agile for such a big man, Daley danced to his right, swung the Colt and the barrel crashed hard against the side of Tyree’s head.

  As Tyree fell, he saw the ground rush up to meet him, then open wide and swallow him whole. He plunged, yelling, into the abyss.

  Chapter 2

  Awareness returned slowly to Chance Tyree and with it came pain, beating inside his skull like a gigantic hammer pounding on an anvil. A green sickness curled in his belly like a living thing and before his eyes he saw only a gray, shifting mist.

  He tried to remember, fighting through the agony in his head. It came to him then. He was headed for a town . . . What was its name? Crooked Creek. That was it: He must be riding across the brush flats to Crooked Creek. The big zebra dun danced restlessly between his legs and blew through its nose and he had a mind to pat the horse’s neck and settle it down.