“We’ll gamble on that.”
Andy said, “That leaves Jinks Henry and the Sagers for us.”
“We’ll get Henry about when they get Blackfoot. Ought to put us at the Sagers by daybreak.”
“What about the girl?”
After four or five seconds Hooks said, “That’s up to her.”
Wiley Gray said, “I seen her shoot one time over at the Fourth of July picnic, and she can cut the eyes out of a snake.”
Hooks raised his raw, mean voice. “It’s up to her!”
Andy laughed and said, “Maybe we ought to send Babe.”
“That yellow pup?”
Babe scarcely noticed they were talking about him. All he could think of was Lily Sager. He knew how Hooks was. If he couldn’t have her, he’d rather see her dead. Hooks would kill her himself if it worked out so the others weren’t around to check him.
He moved back, one shoulder against the wall, step after step beneath the awning until he was at the lower edge of the house. There he felt safe to stand and start walking away, but someone was between him and the oat shed. Tall, gangling Fishface. He’d been placed there on watch.
Babe checked the impulse to leap out of sight. He stood perfectly rigid, knowing by the fellow’s slack manner that he hadn’t been seen. Fishface kept scraping at something with his boot toe. Then he turned and, seizing the opportunity, Babe crept to the box elder shadow, on up rising ground for fifty yards to some patchy buck brush that gave waist-high concealment.
He made a wide circle and came up to the corrals from the creek side in time to hear Clint and his men as they splashed across shallow water and up a rocky slope through a stiff tangle of serviceberry.
When they were gone he climbed over the corral rails, roped a big gelding, saddled him, and went inside for his war bag and Winchester. Suddenly, though the darkness was complete, he knew someone else was in the barn—was standing still, listening.
He made a guess and said, “Hello, Fish.”
He heard the man’s startled movement, and then his keyed-up voice, “Hello. What in hell you doing?”
Babe shifted his position and saw Fishface shadowed against the other door. Fish was retreating, bent a trifle, his right hand resting on the butt of his gun.
BABE WALKED TOWARD him. His boots were soundless in the cover of manure and rotted hay. They maintained the same distance apart, and when he was about to the door Fishface spoke.
“Why you saddlin’ the horse?”
“Why you think?”
“You were listenin’, weren’t you? I thought I saw—” He stopped; he suddenly realized he’d made a mistake in letting Babe know. They were alone here. Fishface didn’t have his brothers to back him.
Babe said, “You thought you saw me but you weren’t sure, so you came down to check up. Now what, Fish?”
“Nothing. I ain’t got nothin’ agin’ you. Honest, Babe—”
Fishface took two steps back while he was talking. That placed him just outside the door. He spun and took three long-legged leaps. He had his gun out. Moonlight struck it with a bluish gleam. He turned on his third step, and the gun exploded with a white flash that seemed to be right in Babe’s face, but the bullet flew high and ripped a board over the barn door.
Babe had already drawn. He hesitated a quarter-second, unable to distinguish man from shadow, then shot. The bullet struck Fishface and knocked him on his back.
He lay with arms outflung and his mouth open, front teeth prominent like a dead prairie dog’s, and Babe thought his bullet had hit him through the heart, but he was down from the shock of a wound through the fleshy part of his neck, and the shock left him suddenly. He twisted over, ran stumbling, dodging through the dark. The sound of gunfire brought men from the house. “Babe. He heard. He heard you. He’s saddled and ready to tell ’em. By the barn …”
Babe kept hearing him. He found his Winchester in the barn, started away, and came back for two boxes of shells in his war bag. He had to open the gate, lead his horse through. Someone saw him. A gun cut the darkness and the bullet seemed to scorch him.
The gelding was bucking when he reached the saddle. He managed to find the other stirrup and stayed for a couple of jumps until he could get the animal to running.
He was around the corral with gunfire still raking the dark. He rode through the creek and up a trail-narrow cleft along the dirt bank where serviceberry bushes tore at his clothes.
Clayton Gotschall, with a Winchester in his hands, ran around the corrals and took a snap shot at him. Babe had his own rifle out and fired a second later just as his horse, slowed by steepness, looked for footing, and the bullet was close enough to put Gotschall on his belly amid the slather of mud and manure by the creek.
He swung over the crest and down a steel dip into more brush. He cursed his luck. He’d been beaten out of his chance to warn the Sagers. He still might get there ahead of them but it would only be a few minutes, and not enough to make much difference when you considered the number of men the Coltons could throw at the place.
This trail was a tough one, through one dip after another, and every one of them clogged with thorns. After a mile he cut back to the wagon road.
4. The Victors
He stopped for a moment, heard a man shout in the distance, the clack of a hoof on stone. He turned down the wagon road, pushing the gelding hard, but not too hard.
The miles that took him out of the hills gave him time to think of his best course. Straight across at the end of the Old Fort fields lay Jinks Henry’s place. The Sager home ranch was sharply to his right, seven or eight miles farther along. Going to Jinks’s house first would take him only a mile or so out of his way, and he usually had a puncher working for him. With a little help they might hole up in the rimrocks a couple miles this side of the Sager place, stop the Coltons, and raise enough of a shooting row to let Dad and Lily know there was trouble afoot.
Halfway across the meadows he stopped and scanned the country behind of him. A file of riders had emerged on a hillside, silhouetted by moonlight. He counted six. He wondered who the extra ones were. Alderdyce, probably, and the pale-eyed fellow who’d just hired out—the one calling himself the Alberta Kid.
He had a good start. Ten or twelve minutes. The gelding wasn’t fast, but he could take the long going. It showed now as he drove hard across the remaining miles of flats, and down the coulee to Jinks Henry’s house.
A shepherd dog commenced barking when he was still a quarter-mile off. He could see a cluster of corrals, a horse shed, and the dark shack beyond, perched on a shelf above the coulee bottom.
The dog stopped barking, and that told him that his master was somewhere around. He pulled in and called, “Jinks! Where are you?” He rode on, warily. “Jinks, this is Babe. Babe Colton.” He saw movement by the house and the shine of a gun with its blue worn off. “Jinks, that you?”
“Yes, what’n hell do you want?” When he saw Babe coming straight across the coulee he slapped his rifle with his palm, making its lever rattle, and said, “Stop where y’are!”
Babe was close enough so he didn’t have to yell. He stopped in some mud that seeped from a spring on the coulee side and told him what the Coltons were up to.
“What do you want me to do?” Jinks said.
“You here alone?”
“Yes.”
Babe cursed through his teeth. “You want to help me head ’em off? They figured on coming here, but now they’ll go straight for the Sagers. Think the two of us can stand them off at the sandstone pillars?”
Jinks shuffled forward. He was barefooted, dressed only in shirt and underwear. He was about fifty, a veteran of the Civil War—a Union veteran, which didn’t add to his popularity in a country where two-thirds of the men had ridden up from Texas. He squinted at Babe’s face.
“You out to fight your brothers?”
“They’re not my brothers.”
“No, they sure as hell ain’t.” With a sudden decision he lean
ed his rifle against an old gold rocker and started for the house. “I got to get my boots and pants. Toss a saddle on that bay bronc.”
JINKS WAS DRESSED and down at the corrals before Babe had found the bridle. Jinks got it and fought the bronc all around the corral, wheezing and saying, “Easy boy—damn Injun bronc!” under his breath. “You jest take it easy!”
Babe would have headed back to the main trail, but Jinks said, “This way,” and took him up the steep side to a ridge bearing on its crest the rain-deepened channels of the old travois tracks where Indians once traveled between Fort Ludloe and Piperock Crossing on the river. “This looks like a long way around, but it’ll get us there sooner.”
They followed forking ridges to the sand-rock cliffs and pillars that overlooked the coulee about three miles above Sager’s home ranch. There, in a wild jumble of rock and juniper, they left their horses and clambered downward across sharp-edged boulders big as wagon boxes.
“There! Up-coulee!” Babe grabbed Jinks and pulled him down. Six men were in sight, coming down-coulee, easing their broncs warily.
He left Jinks and clambered along the broken slope towards them. He stopped, waited, levered a spent cartridge from his gun, felt the slight grab of lead as a fresh one went in. They were almost directly below at a range of one hundred and fifty yards when he aimed barely ahead of the lead horse and fired.
The bullet pounded dust that looked white as flour in the moonlight. Jinks cut loose a second later, and the six men scattered; three of them left their horses and dived to the first cover available; one broke toward the far wall at a gallop, and there, at far range, swung down and hunkered with his rifle behind a boulder; two others turned back the way they’d come and kept riding until they were a quarter-mile out of range and there stopped to appraise the situation. A bullet struck the rock by Babe’s cheek and left him temporarily blind from powdered fragments. He moved to new positions one after another and fired his gun dry.
Those two up at the coulee would stand watching. They might come around to the ridge and attack from behind. He loaded up and shot dry again. The gun was hot and its action stiff from the gumming corrosion of black powder. He spat on it and kept working it back and forth while he watched the two start a steep climb up the far side. They wouldn’t attack from behind. Their destination would be the Sager place.
He crawled back and found Jinks Henry. Jinks had his back to a boulder, looking at a wrist wound. “Got me with a sliver o’ lead,” he grumbled. He twisted and got his bandanna from his hip pocket. He wrapped it around and tried to pull it tight with his teeth.
Babe did it for him, and Jinks rolled back with his rifle over the edge of rock. He said, “Got one of ’em. Know who I think it was. Your old pal Hooks.”
Every mile of his ride that night Babe had been certain that he’d end by facing Hooks. He was sure that Hooks was one of those who’d ridden to Sager’s. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t glad. But he was. It was like walking down a corridor to die only to find freedom at the other end.
He said, “Then who rode toward Sager’s?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“Can you handle things here?”
“I’ll handle ’em. I’m harder to drag out than a badger out of a bar’l. What you got in mind?”
“I’m going on to the Sager place.”
“All right, but don’t do nothing foolish.”
BABE CRAWLED UPHILL among the rocks. His gelding was tied to a sagebrush. He got him free, led him fifty yards around the hill without drawing a shot. Then a gun drove him to cover, and the horse tore away and galloped back around the hill, head to one side, dragging bridle.
Babe had no chance of catching him without exposing himself, so, with his rifle across his thighs, he slid downhill from rock to rock, digging his boots and spurs to check his descent. He stopped by a rock reef, tried to skirt it, but that rifle had shifted position and put him to cover again.
It had been a mistake coming down. He had no choice but to retrace his course upward among the rocks. As he climbed, the sound of distant gunfire came to him. That was from the Sager place.
He abandoned caution, sprang to his feet, and ran along the steep sidehill while that rifle, now better than a hundred yards off, dug dirt around his boots. He found a little gully, slid down it through rock and sagebrush, and following it he reached the coulee bottom a quarter-mile below the pillars.
His boot heels kept turning on rocks and tufts of grass as he ran. He stopped to get his breath and kick his spurs off. A ruddy light appeared over one of the round-topped hills. It died and rose again higher than before. It marked the position of the Sager place. They’d set fire to one of the buildings. He ran harder though his Colt, loaded belt, and extra Winchester cartridges in his hip pocket all weighted him down. Flame under-lit the billowing smoke, and to his nostrils came the odor of burning hay and wood.
The coulee was pinched down between walls of sand rock, then it widened and he had a view of the ranch.
It was the house burning. Upset against it was a half-burned buggy. The buggy had been loaded with hay, set afire, and rolled down the incline from the barn.
Someone was still inside the house. Gunfire ripped back and forth between there and the barn. The ground steepened. It slowed Babe to a faltering trot as he ran toward the barn. The fire, which had been enclosed in the rear room of the house, started to run along the ridge pole.
A voice he recognized as Clayton Gotschall’s; “Hey, they’re runnin’ for the root cellar. Let’s go get them hounds!”
Sixty yards away he located Gotschall, on his belly behind a heap of aspen corral poles. Gotschall heard him and twisted around. He did it with a catlike motion, rising enough to get one knee under him. He brought his rifle up but he shot too soon and the bullet whipped air a couple feet to Babe’s left. Babe, still moving forward, fired from the waist.
The Winchester slug struck Gotschall in the midsection and doubled him like he’d been hit by a sledge. He took three dead man’s steps and collapsed, with head and knees hitting the ground at the same instant.
“Gotschall!” a man shouted from the barn loft, and the shock of his voice was like a knife in Babe’s middle. The voice belonged to Hooks Colton.
BABE KEPT GOING and half fell when he reached black shadow inside the barn. He got hold of something—it was a harness box—pulled himself to his feet. He fought air to his tortured lungs and got the dizziness of near-collapse from his brain.
Hooks! It was another man dead in the coulee. He should have gone gutless again. He was up against it now, the final showdown, the thing he always knew would come. It occurred to him that Hooks would probably kill him. It didn’t seem important. The shock and crash of fighting had done something to him.
He groped, touched a ladder. The ladder to the loft. He started to climb. The second step brought him to a glassless window, and even at that distance he could feel heat from the burning house. Flames lay a bright circle around it. A man was down on the ground. Shot through the legs, trying to drag forward. Dad Sager.
A second later, Lily ran into sight. She was barefooted, her hair down. She’d had time to pull on a pair of Levi’s and push the nightgown into the top of them. She had a rifle in one hand.
Lily reached her father, bent over him, got one arm under his shoulder, tried to lift him to his feet.
Hooks shouted her name. “Lily! Lily, come here!”
His voice seemed to be right over Babe’s head, only a few feet away.
Lily let go and reached back for her rifle. Hooks fired—his bullet, aimed downward, dug dirt under Dad Sager’s legs. Hooks laughed when he saw her lower the gun.
If Babe had any fear holding him, the sound of Hooks Colton killed it. His hatred of the man drove him forward, up the ladder. His Winchester clattered as he made the loft. Hooks heard him and cried, “Gotschall?”
Babe stood up, the rifle in his hands. He took one step. He could see nothing.
Hooks’s voice, a new edge in it. “Gotschall?”
Babe said, “No, Hooks. Not Gotschall. He’s dead.”
Hooks fired, but Babe had expected it and moved. The gun flash was less than a dozen yards away. Babe returned it, and sidestepped as he did so. There were four more explosions, two from each gun.
Then a ringing silence, the air still carrying the rock of close-held concussion. Both men on the move. Babe touched the wall with one shoulder. There were holes here and there where hay could be forked down to the mangers. He’d have to look out. He drew cartridges from his pocket, fed them through the spring opening of the magazine.
A board creaked. He stood without breathing. The sound was repeated again, again, each time changing position, and so he was able to get a rough impression of Hooks’s movement across the loft floor. It stopped for several seconds, and he was aware of a slight tremble. The floor had been released of weight. Hooks, a big man, had dropped below.
Babe heard the scuff of boots and knew he was running. He sprang to the ladder, laid down his Winchester, and dropped.
The Winchester still above, he laid his hand on his Colt, stepped into the central passage.
Hooks was running, back turned, silhouetted against the far door.
“Hooks!” Babe shouted.
HOOKS STOPPED AND spun around. He had his six-shooter in his hand. Babe drew with a half pivot and brought the gun up as he turned. He hesitated a fifth of a second, that brief instant a man needs to freeze on his target when it’s more than twenty paces away. Their guns exploded almost in unison.
Babe felt the whip of burnt powder as the bullet went past his cheek. Hooks was hit. He was knocked backward. He dropped his gun. It struck his heavy-muscled thigh. Thudded to the floor. His right boot heel flipped over and dumped him. By ruddy, reflected light Babe was aware of his shocked eyes, his sagging moth.
“I’m … hit!” he said in a raw whisper. Like he was telling it to himself. “Got me.” Then some focus came into his eyes. “What more you want?”
He was crouched, sitting on his heels, his hands far forward, fingers on the barn floor. He fell back, and with a dragging movement the fingers of his right hand found the gun, and he blazed wildly.
A Century of Great Western Stories Page 9
