Trail Drive (The McCabes Book 5)

by Brad Dennison

  Bree said to Jessica, “Why can’t he just be satisfied with being who he is? Why can’t he just be a rancher. Why can’t we just get married one day and have a small ranch? I don’t want him swaggering about with a gun and looking for trouble. Do you know how many gunfights my father and brothers have been in, in just the past three or four years?”

  Jessica shook her head. She was standing on the porch beside Bree, now, and Bree could see her in the dim orange light thrown out from the hearth inside.

  Bree said, “I couldn’t really count. I’d have to stop and think about it.”

  “I’m new to the family, but I’ve heard about a gun battle in town a couple of summers ago. Jack was home from college and had been hired as the local marshal. Back before the town was what it is now. Some outlaws were coming in to free a member of their gang who Jack had in his jail.”

  “That’s right. It was a bloody fight, too. Mister Carter got shot and almost lost his leg.”

  “It seems I’ve heard that you rode in to take part in it.”

  “Well, I couldn’t let Jack handle it alone. Josh and Dusty were off with the herd. And I’m hell-on-wheels with a rifle.”

  “In fact, I’ve heard that you were actually the one who arrested the member of their gang, after putting a beating on him.”

  She chuckled. “Yeah. Try to mess with me, and you live to regret it.”

  “It seems to me it’s not just the McCabe men who are gunhawks. Latter-day-knights, as Aunt Ginny calls them. It seems that you fit that definition, too.”

  Bree stood looking at her for a moment. “I never thought about myself that way.”

  “Last summer, when Aloysius Randall tried to force himself on you, what’d you do?”

  “I beat him to a bloody pulp.”

  “It seems to me Charles tried to defend you, but was outmatched by Randall. You had to give Randall a beating not only to save yourself, but to save Charles.”

  “Are you saying I was wrong to have done that? There was no other choice.”

  “No, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying, put yourself in Charles’s place. A man wants to protect the woman he loves. It might sound a little barbaric to the suffragists back East, but it’s part of human nature. Maybe life out here on the frontier brings this sort of thing more to the surface. I don’t know. But he wanted to protect you, and couldn’t. And again, just a few weeks ago, you were in danger again. We all were. And it was Mister Carter who had to protect us. Do you think Charles could have stood up to that man?”

  Bree shook her head. “He would have gotten himself killed.”

  “I think Charles wants to be a man who can ride alongside you. Who can protect you in times of trouble. A man who can stand alongside your brothers.”

  “But I don’t need him to be. I love him regardless.”

  “Maybe he needs to be. Sometimes loving a man is about letting him be the man he needs to be, even though he might worry you to death.”

  Bree let that sort of settle on her for a moment.

  She said, “Do you worry about Pa?”

  Jessica said, “All the time. But he’s the man he needs to be. It’s part of loving him.”

  Ginny said to Charles, “You need to be the man you need to be. But what’s important in all of this is that you don’t evaluate your sense of self-worth based on Josh or Dusty or anyone else. You have to be your own man. And, as Mister Carter and Mister Chen show you what they know, remember not to lose yourself. Don’t lose the redeeming qualities that make you the good man you are.”

  He finished the whiskey and thanked her for the conversation, and headed back out to the porch. He passed Jessica on the way out, as she was stepping back into the house.

  He stood on the porch facing Bree. They were silent a moment, then he said, “I think I understand.”

  She said, “So do I.”

  And they pulled each other in for a long hug.

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  They stood out behind the farmhouse, Charles Cole and Harlan Carter. Cole was facing a line of cans that were standing on a fence rail. They were running low on empty cans, so some of the cans already had bullet holes in them, and had been warped or bent from being shot already.

  “Turn around,” Carter said.

  Charles looked at him.

  “I’m serious. Turn around. Put your back to the fence.”

  Charles did.

  “Now, turn and drop and take out six of those cans.”

  Charles spun, grabbing his gun as he did, and twisted down to a kneeling position and began unloading his gun on the cans. A cloud of gunsmoke grew around him, and cans went flying away.

  When he was done, six cans were on the ground. It had taken him seven seconds.

  He rose to his feet and flipped open the loading gate on his revolver to drop out the empty cartridges.

  “Not bad at all,” Carter said.

  “I’m not as fast as Dusty.”

  Carter snorted a chuckle. “Ain’t seen anyone who is. Not even the old man, himself.”

  “I don’t think I’m as fast as Josh, either.”

  “Maybe not. But it don’t matter how fast you are. What matters is how good you are.”

  “I’ve seen Dusty do a trick where he holds the pistol with the trigger squeezed tight, and shoots by swiping at the hammer with his other hand.”

  “That’s called fanning. It’s a trick shot.”

  “I saw him do it and get three out of six cans, but he got off those shots fast.”

  “That’s the problem with it. Ain’t very accurate. I could never do it and hit any cans at all.”

  The most recent box of ammunition Charles had bought was now empty. He reached to the cartridge loops on his belt to find more to feed into his pistol.

  Carter said, “I think we’re finished. I’ve done taught you all I can. You’ve learned a lot in the past five weeks. You’re better with a gun than I ever was.”

  Charles looked at him with a little surprise. “We’re done?”

  Carter nodded. “The last part of it, I can’t teach you. No one can. It’s the ability to keep calm and steady when the bullets start comin’ at you. Most men find their hands shake. Fear hits ‘em. But to hold calm and just shoot back with your hand steady—that’s the secret. Don’t matter how fast you are. What matters is how calm and steady you are.”

  “How do I learn this?”

  Carter shrugged and shook his head. “You can’t. You either have it or you don’t.”

  “Dusty. Josh. Mister McCabe. They have it.”

  “Bree does, too. Seems to be inherited.”

  “So I still may not be good enough.”

  “Ain’t about being good enough. Your ability to stay calm and shoot steady in a gun battle ain’t what makes you a man. It’s integrity. Courage. Honesty. You were already a real man, Charles, before we even began these training sessions.”

  It felt good to hear that. Charles couldn’t help but smile.

  Charles said, “I’m beholden to you.”

  He reached out his hand and Carter shook it.

  “Weren’t nothin’,” Carter said.

  It was only ten in the morning, so Charles rode back to the ranch. There was some work to do. Mostly firewood to split, so he grabbed an axe and went to work. In a few days, he thought he might take another ride out to the line cabin. Check on the boys there. See what the condition of the range was. The work on a ranch was never done.

  He ate a light lunch. Roast beef sandwiches, and biscuits oozing with butter. Just the way he liked them. Afterward, he sat on the porch in an upright chair. His shirt had a streak of sweat running down the back from his work on the woodpile, and he had some trail dust on him from the ride out to Carter’s farm and back. He didn’t want to go inside the house in this condition.

  Bree came out and sat with him.

  “So,” he said, feeling like he was in a mood to playfully needle her. The tension that had been between them was now long forgotten. “These
sandwiches are mighty good. Did you make them?”

  He knew the answer. Bree was practically an authority on horseflesh and knew a lot about cattle. She could track a deer and was a good shot with a revolver, and was the best shot around with a rifle. But she was as out of place in a kitchen as you could be.

  She sighed with what he took to be a little mixture of exasperation and embarrassment. “No. Temperence did.”

  He nodded. “Well, I was thinkin’. If I asked you to marry me, and we started our own ranch, who would do the cookin’?”

  “Oh? Are you thinking on asking me to marry you?”

  He shrugged. “Well, I thought about it, but I’m afraid we might starve to death.”

  She gave him a shove and he fell out of his chair, and sat there on the porch floor. He was laughing and so was she.

  She stood up and reached a hand down to him, to help him up. He took her hand and pulled her down to him. She landed on top of him.

  They kissed, then she pulled back a bit and looked at him. Her hair was back in a bun, but some strands had come loose and were hanging across her face. He reached up and moved them aside.

  She said, “Maybe you better ask me to marry you soon, mister. I don’t know how much longer I can trust myself.”

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  Once lunch was done, he saddled up. He was going to head into town and grab some more ammunition. Not for target practice. There would be no more of that, except maybe for fun once Dusty and Josh were back. He felt Mister Carter was probably right. The rest of his journey toward being a gunhawk would be based on what was inside him. His nerve. How steady he could be in a gunfight.

  He had to admit, he hoped he wouldn’t have to find out. He respected life. He surely didn’t want to die, but he didn’t want to have to kill anyone, either. That one Comanche he had killed on a trail drive years ago left him feeling a little shaken. He didn’t want that feeling again. But he hoped if Bree should ever be in danger again, he would be able to defend her.

  He was down to five rounds in his gun and eight more in his belt. He would remedy that with a visit to Franklin’s. And then maybe stop at the Second Chance and grab a cold beer, and thank Mister Chen again.

  He told Bree he would be back before nightfall, and headed out. He took the back trail that would come out behind the Second Chance. A mile or so of trail that wound through a small heavily wooded pass. After the pass but still a short ways before the town, the land widened out a bit. Rocks and short pines at either side of the trail.

  He was riding out of the pass and into the more open stretch of land and was thinking about a cold beer, when a gun was fired from ahead and off to the right and the bullet took his hat off.

  His horse reared and he knew what was happening. The shot had not been an accident. Someone was shooting at him.

  He let himself fall backward off the rearing horse, hoping his feet wouldn’t stick into the stirrups. They didn’t. He fell cleanly to the ground, rolling to break his fall.

  He got to his feet, drawing his gun as he did so.

  A bullet whizzed by his ear, and he could see the man standing halfway in view from behind a rock a couple hundred feet ahead and to the right.

  Charles should have been afraid. His knees should have been shaking. But they weren’t. He felt strangely calm. He didn’t aim but just pointed his gun like Mister Carter had taught him and got off a shot. He missed, but the bullet ricocheted off the rock not a foot from the man’s head, and the man ducked back.

  Another shot came at Charles from behind a rock and off to his left. This one nicked his left shoulder.

  He turned and ran, cutting to his left and back and away from the shooters. The land formed a natural trench here. Gravel that had been washed away by spring run-offs over the years. He jumped into it. He landed in a sitting position and came to a sliding stop on the gravelly slope.

  He checked his arm. It was bleeding, but not much. He figured it wasn’t anything more than a deep scratch. If he lived through this, he would have Granny Tate take a look at it.

  He had four shots left in his pistol. He flipped open the loading gate and dropped out the empty, then reached to his cartridge belt for two more. This filled his gun to the limit with six shots, but was left with only six more in his belt.

  He decided to risk a peek above the edge of the trench, but when he did, a bullet kicked up dust inches from his face. He pulled back.

  He had to think fast. He had twelve shots left. There were at least two men out there, and they probably each had more bullets than he did. He would have to out-think them.

  He asked himself, What would Johnny McCabe do in a situation like this?

  He figured his answer immediately. Mister McCabe wouldn’t have let himself get into this situation. He would have been watching the trail ahead, and not thinking about a cold beer. He would have been watching for anything that seemed amiss. Anything out of place.

  So, I’ve learned my lesson, he thought. Now let’s hope I live long enough to do things different.

  He realized he wasn’t going to get out of this by out-shooting these two. They had him pinned down. He thought by the sound of the shots that they were using rifles, too. Much more accurate.

  He decided if he was to come out of this alive, he was going to have to do it by outthinking them.

  An idea occurred to him. He had always been good at small-stakes poker. He played some in the bunkhouse and once in a while at the Second Chance. He liked Five Card Draw the best because it relied a lot on reading your opponents and outthinking them. He decided he was going to take the poker approach to this. And the approach he was going to use was one he had used on Josh a couple of months before Josh left for the trail drive. Charles had been holding a pair of threes, and he could tell by the way Josh was betting that Josh had a good hand. Charles just kept pouring money into the pot until Josh decided enough was enough and folded. Josh had three kings, but lost to a pair of threes. Dusty had laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair.

  Charles decided these men had to know one of their shots had hit him. They could tell by the way he flinched to one side when the bullet skimmed his shoulder. What they wouldn’t know was how badly he was wounded. He was going to let these men think he was hurt a lot worse than he was.

  With his gun fully loaded, he scrambled down to the base of the trench. There, he lay down on the ground on his stomach. Eventually, the two gunmen would come out from cover to check on him. See if he was hit. See why he wasn’t trying to return fire.

  He hauled back the hammer of his revolver, his body muffling the click of the gun being cocked.

  He was going to have to shoot fast, he knew. Any window of opportunity would be brief, and it wouldn’t come again.

  The sun was hot, baking down on him. There was no shade in this trench.

  Then he heard a sound. Like gravel scraping on a boot sole. Then he heard the voice. It was coming from above, and he figured it was one of the men standing at the edge of the trench.

  The man said, “He looks dead.”

  There was a second voice. “Go down and see.”

  “Why should I have to go down?”

  “All right. We’ll both go.”

  Charles heard more sounds of boots scuffing, and men huffing for breath as they half-walked, half-slid down the side of the trench.

  Charles took a deep breath and held it. He didn’t want these men to see him breathing. They had to think he was dead or at least unconscious, if his plan was going to work.

  They walked over.

  One of them said, “Give him a kick.”

  He had to time this perfectly.

  He rolled over and snapped off a shot, catching the one closest to him in the forehead.

  The second one was ten feet away and holding a rifle in both hands, aiming at Charles from the hip.

  Charles snapped a shot at him and missed. He then fanned two more quick shots at him while the man’s rifle went off. The rifle bullet caught Charle
s by the right sleeve near his elbow. Both of his bullets caught the man in the chest, and he staggered back.

  He kept his balance for a moment, and looked at Charles with surprise. He dropped to his knees in the gravel, and then fell face-forward.

  He rose to his feet and with his gun ready and still holding four shots, he checked first one man and then the other for any signs of life. There were none.

  He nodded to himself. He had now killed three men in his life. Not a good feeling. And yet he couldn’t help but feel a little smile trying to rise to the surface at the thought of telling Mister Carter how he had used a trick-shooting method like fanning his gun to save his own life.

  Charles rode out from the trail, emerging behind the Second Chance. He was leading two horses, and each horse had a body tied to the saddle.

  A boy was crossing the street. A boy who was the son of a man opening a general store that would compete with Franklin’s. A boy with a wild mop of dark hair and freckles. He was in coveralls and barefeet, and he stopped to look with his mouth hanging open at the two bodies draped across the horses Charles was leading.

  “Billy,” Charles said. “Run and fetch the marshal, will you?”

  Billy nodded and took off running toward the marhal’s office.

  Charles had a bandana tied around his left arm just below the shoulder. When Charles finally had the chance to look at the wound, he saw it was a little deeper than a scratch, and had bled some. Once he had dropped these two men at the marshal’s office, he would take a ride out and see Granny Tate. See if she could clean the wound.

  Hopefully it’ll leave a good scar, he thought with a smile.

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