“I wouldn’t carry stories to the Coltons or the Sagers, either one.”
“I know that or else I wouldn’t have told you. Why in the hell don’t you get out from between this ruckus? If I was a young puncher I’d make for the Milk River country.”
Babe shrugged his shoulders and laughed. He was thinking that was just what the Coltons wanted.
Charley said, “Coltons tryin’ to get Tom and his dad to start something, ain’t they?”
Babe didn’t answer that. He said, “I’m going to take a sleep here at the fort. If you happen to see Lily …”
“Yeah, I might happen to see her.”
Babe kept out of sight among the roofless log walls through the long hours of the afternoon, sunset, twilight. It was almost dark and he’d given up hope of seeing her when his bronc stopped cropping grass and upped his head. Babe walked out and saw a rider silhouetted against the sky. It was Lily.
She saw him, rode up, and swung down in her precise, small-booted manner before saying a word. She was dressed in Levi’s, a blue shirt open at the throat; a Stetson was on the back of her head with her hair knotted beneath it. She looked like a boy except when she turned and one could see the developing curve of her body.
She walked up and said, “Babe! I was scared you wouldn’t wait around.”
The quality of her voice was always a shock to him. Not once a month did he talk to a woman. She was quite close, with one hand lifted as though to lay it on his breast. He was aware of a faint perfume—the odor of the store-soap she used. He said her name, and she answered, “Yes?”
THERE WAS SOMETHING eager in her tone. A thought came that made him weak and sweaty. For a moment he forgot all about the fight brewing between Coltons and Sagers. Out on the lonesome prairie, or sleeping on the floor of the line shack, he’d dreamed of such a meeting with her and the things he’d say. But now he couldn’t force himself, and when he felt that he had to say something it was, “Pretty tough on your dad, getting the creek shut off.”
“We’ll get water!” The fierceness of her response was a surprise to him.
“What’s he going to do?”
“Don’t worry about us. Tommy will see to it that the Coltons get back as good as they give.”
“Lily, that’s why I came to you. I’m not a spy, riding here behind the Coltons’ backs, but I don’t want a lot of killing, either. They want him to start this trouble.”
Her head was high, and she said, “Tommy’s no fool! He knows all about the Coltons waiting to bushwhack him when he tries to get at the dam. But don’t think he won’t do anything.”
She was proud of Tom. He’d done as much to break their father as the big blizzard had, but he had a dash that appealed to women.
She said, “You don’t believe me, do you? Well listen, and—”
“You better keep it to yourself. I’m a Colton. For all you know I might carry it back home.”
She laid her hand on his arm and said, “Oh, Babe! I know you wouldn’t do that.”
He cried. “You don’t know any such thing. They get an idea I know something they’d kick my ribs in to find out. Maybe I’d tell. I don’t want to know what plan he’s got up his sleeve. But I’ll tell you this, if he starts anything the Coltons will be waiting for him. Once he makes a move, all hell will break loose.”
Her voice and the tilt of her head were challenging. “Maybe we can raise a little of that ourselves. Don’t think it’ll be just Dad and Tommy. We’ll have some men to back us, too.”
“Sure, McGruder and the Henry boys and Blackfoot Charley from down in the breaks. If you Sagers start throwing in with that bunch of horse-rustlers the whole country will be down on you and Hooks can do what he likes.”
She said bitterly, “I suppose you want us to give up.”
“Old Rufe is sick of the business, too. You Sagers are one up on them now, with Lester in his grave, so why don’t you go ahead and sell your lease on these fields? Get your price. Make it ten thousand. He might go for that, and the fields aren’t worth any such amount to you.”
“If you think we’d ever sell to the Coltons!” Anger brought her to the verge of tears. “You own a fourth of that spread, don’t you? Is that why you’re here?”
“Lily, you know it isn’t.”
She started away and he seized her by the arms. She had a wiry, rapid strength and almost slipped away.
She sobbed, “Let me go!”
“I came because of you. And on account of me, too, if you want to know it. I don’t know what would happen if this broke out in a range war. I’d have to choose sides or leave the country.”
She stopped struggling and looked up with her face so close he could feel her warm breath on his neck. “Which side would it be?”
“Yours, of course.” The thought came to him of riding with the Sagers against Hooks. It was all right to brag about it when Hooks wasn’t there, but down inside he wondered if he’d have the guts. Maybe Blackfoot Charley was right. Maybe he ought to drift to the Milk River country. Drift with his tail between his legs. He said to her. “Talk to Tom—to your dad. Try to keep him from tearing this thing wide open. It’s a last chance!”
“All right.” The fight had burned out of her now. “I’ll do what I can.”
He said good-bye to her a few minutes later and watched her ride away in the early darkness. He saddled and let his bronc take it at an easy wolf trot toward the brush of Elk Creek. Before dropping down to the wagon road he turned and sat for a while, watching for another sight of her, but the moon wasn’t up, and all he could see were the elongated, dark shapes of the Old Fort buildings, and, miles away, the bird-track gullies where the badlands commenced encroaching on the prairie rim.
A LIGHT APPEARED near one of the buildings. It was dim, elusive, so even while watching it he wasn’t quite sure it was there. Like the ghost fire sometimes given off by rotting wood in the beaver ponds back in the hills. It went out, and with a sick jolt it occurred to him that the light had come from a match in someone’s cupped hands.
He thought of Hooks. He could have followed him from the ranch, lain all day by the creek, and approached under the cover of night. But that wouldn’t be Hooks’s style. Besides, Hooks wouldn’t let him ride off. Fishface. Yes, it would be Fishface. He’d been suspicious the night before, and he’d been sitting on the corral fence that morning, watching as Babe had ridden away.
Babe wheeled his horse and rode slowly back toward the fort. He kept feeling his gun butt. He didn’t know what he’d do if he caught up with him. He wondered how much he’d heard. He couldn’t even remember just what had been said. He knew he hadn’t given away any secrets except that the Coltons wanted them to attack, and he hadn’t been very loud in saying that. It wasn’t what Fishface heard, but what he’d say he heard.
He was a quarter way back to the fort when he glimpsed a rider heading south toward the hills at a good gallop. He turned and rode parallel with the man’s course until he reached the hills. There he slanted over, hoping to intercept him at Dogtown Coulee, but the maneuver wasn’t successful. After a half-hour wait he rode back to the home ranch.
He turned his horse in the corral, went in the barn, lit a lantern, and found Fish’s saddle. The cinch was still damp—cold to the touch. It hadn’t been there more than an hour. He walked on the bunkhouse, climbed in his bunk, and lay back with no thought of sleep. Next thing he realized someone yelled, “Go get it or starve!” and the cookhouse bell was banging.
He was scrubbing when Hooks walked up and said, “Find that long-horse?”
“No.” He pretended his eyes were full of soap so he’d have time to think. There was no use of lying—Hooks knew. He rubbed dry and looked up to meet Hooks’s quartz-hard eyes. “Didn’t hunt for him.”
“What did you hunt for?”
“I rode down toward the fort and saw Lily.”
Hooks laughed with a hard twist of his mouth and said, “You got your guts.”
No more was sai
d about it. After breakfast Rufe sent him to the mailbox, eight miles away on the Middlefork stage road. When he got back all the Coltons except Rufe and Fishface had gone somewhere. The following night he was sitting in the bunkhouse, bending close to read a book in the light of a bacon-grease-dip, when Hooks came in, stiff-legged from hard riding.
“Hello, Babe,” he said in a velvety voice. “Never thought of it till now, but I forgot to give you a birthday present.”
He had something rolled up in his hand. Babe could feel the skin of his forehead draw tight from shock as he realized what it was. It was a belt—the prison-braid black and cream belt that Tommy Sager had been wearing in his black serge trousers that day he got off the train at Maverly.
Still smiling, Hooks tossed it to him. Then he clumped off in his stiff-tired manner to the dark, bunk-lined depths of the room.
3. The Back–shooter
The air now seemed suffocating. Babe blew out the grease-dip, and went outside. The night was cool, as it always was there in the hills no matter how hot the day, but sweat streaked down his cheeks. There was no doubt in his mind that Hooks had killed Tom Sager. He wondered if something Lily said that night had tipped him off.
He stood in the dark barn until thoughts became sorted in his mind. He knew he couldn’t go on living with the Coltons. He had his choice of joining the Sagers or quitting the country.
He took his saddle down from the peg, then he put it back. There were some things he’d have to get at the bunkhouse. He’d wait until tomorrow.
He went back inside, lay down in his bunk. He could hear the heavy breathing sounds of men. In the blackness he had the feeling that Hooks Colton was lying, his eyes wide, listening.
The belt was gone from the table when he got up. Hooks sat in the house, eating. He didn’t say anything when Babe came in. Babe put off packing his war bag, then, about midmorning, Andy and Clint came in, galloping hard, and had a talk with Hooks down by the corrals. Ho Chu saw them and put the skillet on, but they roped fresh horses and set off without eating, and Hooks went with them.
Babe had a hunch that things were getting ready to pop. He decided to wait awhile. He saddled and rode southwestward, through the hill notch where they’d disappeared. He saw no sign of the Coltons and made a wide swing to the north until he looked down on the soda-white flats where Wolf Creek sank away after leaving the hills. There for the first time he saw riders—five men in single file heading eastward through fields of sage belly-deep to their mounts. They were miles off, and he couldn’t tell who they were. Men from the 88, maybe, riding to town.
He returned to the home ranch as the sun sank, brownish-red from a grass fire.
At midnight Clint Colton and a cowboy named Will Roberts rode in and hitched up in the spring wagon. Jeef had been shot through both shoulders and they were going to bring him in from the Lone Tree Springs. The grass fire had been at Beaver Meadows and it had burned a strip half a mile wide and three long.
Clint said, “Always Jeef that gets it. Never satisfied but what he’s double-brave. He’ll be double-brave one o’ these times with a ton of dirt on his chest.”
They brought Jeef in and he lay on his stomach in the cookhouse while Wiley Gray cleaned out the wound and bandaged it. It was painful, but not necessarily serious. The bullet, fired from long range, had struck him across the right shoulder, shattered the bone and glanced downward across his back, missed his spine and came out near his left armpit without touching the big vein or artery.
“Dirty rustler outfit!” Jeef saying. “I’m going down there and blast the insides out of that dirty rustler outfit.”
Wiley said, “Not for three or four weeks you won’t.”
Hooks said, “We’ll get ’em, Jeef. We’ll get ’em before any four weeks are up.”
Babe had put the facts together and assumed someone had fired the meadows, the Colton winter range, and laid an ambush when the boys rode to fight it, but he heard them talking and learned the fire had been accidentally set by some Gros Ventres who were digging camas roots, while Jeef had been shot many miles to the north while he was riding the brush of Red Willow Creek.
NEXT EVENING, JUST before dark, Sheriff Walt Baker and Jim Conover, his deputy, rode up on the Elk Creek road.
Baker was a good-looking, tall man of forty, once foreman of the War-bonnet, which had been bankrupted by the hard winter of ’87; Conover was a short, blunt man ten years his senior who had been deputy under one sheriff after another ever since the county was organized twelve years before.
Hooks strode down the slope from the big house to meet them. He called them by name and shouted, “Hey, Fish, tell Ho to put on the skillet.” Then, as Baker swung to the ground, “You come to see about Jeef?”
“What about him?”
“Somebody tried to drygulch him down on the Red Willow. He’s got a broke shoulder, and maybe he’ll die if the poison sets in.” Conover cursed and looked sympathetic. Hooks went on with a saw-edge quality in his voice, “First Lester and now Jeef. How long do you think us Coltons are going to take this, Sheriff?”
“I’m doing what I can. You know how it is with me. A county the size of Ioway, and three men to cover it.” He looked in Hooks’s face and said, “You hear about Tom Sager?”
“What about him?”
“Somebody killed him.”
He stood back, looking surprised. Then he snorted breath from his nostrils. “I’ll have to get back to my black suit.”
Old Rufe hobbled down in time to overhear him. “Why you come here? You think we drygulched him? That what you think?”
“I’m going every place. Damn it, Tom gets killed, you Coltons ought to know the first thing folks’ll say.”
Andy grinned and said, “Where’d you find the dirty rustler?”
“By those alkali sinks where Wolf Crick comes out.”
Babe had been looking down on the sinks that afternoon.
Andy asked, “Was he shot?”
“Yes.”
Babe said, “Shot in the back!” A cold anger had settled in him. Anger, and a hatred of Hooks Colton that for a second overrode his fear, and made him say it. The words struck Hooks and made his shoulder muscles bulge to fill the sun-bleached fabric of his shirt. He started to swing around with his right arm long as though to reach for the gun at his hip, but he stopped himself tense and furious, without his eyes once resting on Babe, without saying a word.
“Why, yes,” Baker said, “he was shot in the back. A .30-30, I’d say, but there was no way of being sure because the bullet went all the way through. Somebody took the belt off his pants. Like an Injun countin’ coup.”
Babe couldn’t trust himself among the Coltons. He walked to the bunkhouse and sat on the split-pine bench out front. Against lamplight from the cookhouse he could see Hooks Colton. He was thinking Hooks didn’t follow Tom out of Maverly that day because he was scared. He didn’t have the guts to face Tom. He waited on his belly with a rifle and shot him in the back.
He went inside the bunkhouse, lighted the grease-dip, went to his bunk, filled his war sack, and made a blanket roll around it. He carried it on his shoulder to the barn and went back for his Winchester and his new Colt .45, silver-mounted, which he’d won in the keno lottery at Miles City the autumn before.
He stopped in the door of the barn with the Winchester in his hands, swung the lever down, and by moonlight saw the brassy glint of cartridge ready to go in the chamber. Hooks was inside the cookhouse, his head and shoulder visible through the window. It was about a hundred paces. Without levering the cartridge in, he lifted the gun and took aim. Hooks’s faded blue shirt looked white by lamplight and made a perfect target against the knife-edge front sight. It would be easy—too easy.
HE DIDN’T CATCH his horse. He stood in the barn, and was still watching when Walt Baker and his deputy mounted and rode away down the wagon road. Baker wouldn’t stay in the country. Now he’d made the motions of doing his duty it was a safe bet he’d get as far away
as he decently could.
Hooks came out, called “Andy!” and walked toward the house.
This was the chance Babe had waited for. Now he could catch a horse and leave without being noticed. He put it off. He watched and saw their shadows passing in front of the windows as they seated themselves—the Coltons and the picked punchers of their rough-tough crew. He left his war bag and saddle in a box stall, with his Winchester leaning against them, and walked up the rise of ground, around the oat sheds to the box elder tree. They were talking inside, but quietly, and only a mutter of voices reached him.
He crept forward, found concealment beneath the pole-roofed awning that ran along that side of the house, remained crouched for a minute with one shoulder against the log wall.
Someone said, “I’m not waiting for that,” and came through the door. The sound of boots and spurs seemed right atop him. Shadows loomed big. Clint Colton, Roberts, and a breed by the name of Joe Plain. They didn’t look his way. They passed and were so close he caught the tepee smoke odor of Joe’s gauntlet gloves.
“… No pinto for that kind of a job,” he heard Clint say while their boots crunched down the path. “I’ll take that big black… .”
Joe Plain said, “Dapple’s hardest to see in the dark… .”
Babe took a deep breath. He could hear his pulse. He waited for it to slow down, conquered an impulse to run, and moved forward until he was stopped by lamplight flooding from an open window.
There he could hear Hooks talking in clipped, restrained syllables. “Clint’ll be at the claybanks by midnight. Well, maybe not. What time you got?”
A voice he recognized as Clayton Gotschall’s said, “Ten past nine.”
“Then say one-thirty. That’ll put ’em at Blackfoot Charley’s by three, and get McGruder on the way.”
Wiley Gray said, “If they catch McGruder alone. Never tell about them damn horse-rustlers. Might find six men in that shack.”
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 8
