A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  Ironhand scowled, gripping his Henry rifle with his powerful right hand. “I am. Isn’t your fight.”

  “I am here, so it will be. There is no reason not to cook again. Have you any sticks left in the saddlebag?”

  IRONHAND SLEPT BADLY, rolling around with his carbine clutched against his middle, the way he’d slept with it nightly since he met the prowling Indian. A new moon shed pale light on the plain, which was flat for miles in every direction save north, where a pronounced tilt raised the horizon. Along that horizon the crooked trees stood out. If there were a fight on this barren hump of island, would he have to look out for Manitow and Little Joe Moonlight at the same time? A threat of death from two directions?

  He wished he could sleep but it was impossible. Manitow lay to his left, hands crossed on his shirt bosom, profile sharp in the pale moonshine. The Indian breathed softly, steadily, like a small boy sleeping without care.

  He must have dozed. He woke to Manitow barking his name. Ironhand floundered to his knees, saw Manitow standing beyond the mules and pointing to the stunted trees. Two riders were pounding down the inclined plain, riding with their knees and reins in their teeth. Each held a brace of revolvers. Four guns against his one.

  “Protect yourself,” Manitow cried, diving under the belly of a snorting, bucking mule. Seizing Ironhand, he tried to throw him to the ground. Little Joe Moonlight and his burly pardner were riding hell-bent for the hump island, but Ironhand refused to cower. He shook off the Indian and took his fighting stance with his carbine at his shoulder. His blood was up; he didn’t care that he presented a perfect target.

  The riders were closer. He distinctly saw Little Joe’s mean white triangular face, his long Chinese-style mustaches, his leering smirk. Still short of the river bank, Little Joe and his pardner opened up with all four barrels. Ironhand stood his ground and squeezed his trigger. Manitow tackled him. Yelling, Ironhand toppled. Only the fall prevented one of the flying bullets from finding him.

  He didn’t realize this; all his anger was directed against the damned Indian. He screamed oaths, trying to get up as Little Joe Moonlight galloped into the stream, closely followed by his henchman. Manitow snatched his double-barrel rifle from its saddle loop. The blued metal flashed.

  The charging horses tossed up fans of moonlit water. Little Joe passed to the left of Ironhand and the Indian, the henchman to the right. They were firing continuously. One of their bullets hit Manitow’s rifle, a lucky shot that blew apart the breech. Manitow leaped back, momentarily blinded. A bullet hit Ironhand’s left thigh just as he stood up. With a cry he fell a second time. The back of his head struck the earth. Stars danced.

  The mules bucked and bellowed. Two of them tore their picket pins out and ran into the stream, braying, Ironhand heard the attackers splash to the bank of Paint River behind him and there wheel for another charge. His back wound, cruelly bruised by his fall, hurt nearly as much as the thigh wound bleeding into the leg of his hide trousers. He had to get up … had to. Tried it and, with a howl of despair and fury, fell back again. He heard the attacking horses coming on, in the river.

  Standing over the wounded trapper, Manitow said, “Give me the rifle.”

  He’ll use it to kill me …

  “The rifle!”

  Don’t dare, I can’t trust …

  “White man, if you don’t, we’ll die.”

  There was a halo of hoof-driven dust around Manitow’s head. He looked like some ghost of one of his primitive ancestors. His outstretched brown hand opened, demanding. “White man—obey me!”

  The hooves were thunderous. Risking all, the supreme act of trust, Ironhand flung the carbine upward and Manitow snatched it and put it to his shoulder. Bullets were flying again but Manitow stood firm and fired and kept firing. As the horse of Little Joe’s henchman passed within Ironhand’s field of vision, the trapper saw the nameless bravo lift in his saddle as if being jerked to heaven. The bravo’s horse ran out from under him and he crashed and rolled into the brown water, staining it with blood from his open belly.

  Ironhand was shouting without realizing it. “Stop firing, there are only five—”

  Too late; some part of his brain had already counted five shots. Manitow had exhausted the magazine in one volley.

  And Little Joe Moonlight, his long thin mustaches whipping against his cheeks, was unhurt.

  He wheeled his horse in the water, making him dance to the island, then stand still while Little Joe raised his revolver with his shooting hand, clasped it with his other hand and pointed it at Manitow’s head at close range.

  It all happened quickly. Ironhand acted from instinct, coming upright, dizzy and tortured by pain but willing it not to matter. He leaped at Little Joe Moonlight and his prancing horse. Little Joe was angrily heeling the animal while trying to steady himself for the shot. Manitow crouched and pulled his knife to throw it but Little Joe would fire first. There was no cover to keep the Indian from death.

  The horse sidestepped again; Little Joe screamed a filthy oath. He realized too late that his mount had sidestepped toward Ironhand… .

  Ironhand’s face contorted into a bestial parody of a grin. His filthy mitten closed on Little Joe’s right arm. Little Joe understood his peril and shrieked girlishly. Ironhand brought his huge right hand upward from his hip at great speed while pulling his enemy out of the saddle. The angle was right; the edge of the trapper’s hand struck Little Joe’s windpipe with speed and force.

  Paralyzed, Little Joe dropped his revolver. Two streams of blood spurted from his nostrils. Ironhand threw Little Joe on the sere ground and knelt on his chest with one knee. He snatched his knife from the thong at his waist. Poised to cut Little Joe’s throat, Ironhand started at a touch on his shoulder.

  “Wait. Look at him. His spirit is gone. It flew before he touched the earth.”

  Ironhand changed position so that he could press an ear to his enemy’s chest. He hunched that way for a long space, then raised his head, starting to shake from shock. Manitow was right again. The heart of Little Joe Moonlight had stopped.

  Ironhand lurched up. His wounded leg would barely support him. His back was screaming with pain. He poked his knife at the thong loop on his belt and missed. He missed a second time. Manitow took the knife from him and put it in place, giving the thong an extra twist to secure the hilt.

  Ironhand raked a trembling hand through his dirty beard. “I—didn’t want to give you the rifle.”

  “Why?”

  “I knew you’d kill me after you saved yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “Your brother—”

  “The white man’s mind,” Manitow said with enormous disgust. “Don’t you think I had a hundred opportunities to kill you before this?”

  “But you said I was responsible—”

  “That was before I met you. I wanted to learn what sort you are. I learned. You learned nothing, you were full of poison bile of fear. You’re like all the rest of the whites, even though not as bad as some. It’s lucky you broke down and gave me the rifle or the story would end differently.”

  He stepped forward suddenly—it seemed menacing until Ironhand realized the true import. Then he felt a fool. Manitow supported his back and forearm gently. “Now you had better lie down before you fall down, white man.” He no longer sounded scornful.

  STIFF AND SORE in heavy bandages, Ironhand rode alone up the dirt track to the gate of Kirk’s Fort. Draped in a U over the neck of his horse Brownie was the smelly corpse of Little Joe Moonlight.

  Kirk’s Fort was old and famous on the plains. It was a large rectangular stockade with a blockhouse at every corner. Cabins and warehouse buildings formed two of its walls. Ironhand passed through the palisade by the main gate, which opened on a long dirt corridor of sheds and shops. A second inner gate led to the quadrangle, where Indians were never admitted; all trading was done in the corridor, though even here there were precautions. Bars on the shop windows; iron shutters on the wind
ows of the storehouse that held trade goods.

  A toothless fort Indian sat against the wall, looking sadly displaced in a white man’s knitted cap and a white soldier’s discarded blouse. He popped his eyes at Ironhand, whom he recognized. The trapper rode on through the second gate and straight across the trampled soil of the quadrangle to the Four Flags headquarters building. Company employees appeared around corners or from doorways of the accounting office, the strongbox room, the powder house, staring at Ironhand in a bewildered way. Someone called a greeting he didn’t acknowledge. No one stopped him as he kicked the office door open and lumbered through, Little Joe’s stiffening body folded over his shoulder, his Henry carbine tucked under his arm.

  Alexander Jaggers was occupied with familiar things: his quill, his account books. Seeing the looming figure, he exclaimed, “Ewing! Laddie—what’s this? Ye dinna hae the courtesy to knock or announce yersel—”

  He was stopped by Ironhand slipping the Henry onto the seat of a chair, then laying the body of Little Joe Moonlight on top of the wide wooden desk. It disarranged the account books and overturned the ink pot, which dripped its contents on the old floor.

  “He met with an accident. It happens often in the mountains,” Ironhand said with a meaningful look at the master of Four Flags.

  Jaggers reddened, puffing out his cheeks. He darted a hand to a drawer of the desk but Ironhand was quicker. He leaped on the desk, over Little Joe’s corpse, and pushed Jaggers, toppling him and his chair at the same time. Jaggers flailed, kicking his legs in the air and yelling decidedly un-Christian oaths.

  Ironhand jumped down and retrieved his Henry rifle from the chair. He took aim and emptied the revolving magazine, five rounds, into Mr. Jagger’s pump organ in the corner. After the roar of the volley, the organ exhaled once, loudly, like a man with pierced lungs gasping his last.

  The trapper stepped to the pump organ and attacked its wood cabinet with his right hand. The hand beat and smashed like a hammer; a mace; a sledge. Thin veneers cracked and snapped. Jaggers was screaming and vainly trying to rise, but his fall had sprung some leg muscle, and each attempt was more futile than the last; he continued to wail on his back, heels in the air.

  Ironhand locked his two hands together, the good with the ruined, and brought this huge hammerhead of flesh and bone down on the frame of the organ, breaking it in two as if it were a man’s spine.

  Jaggers screamed misery and rage.

  Ironhand picked up his Henry and walked out without a backward look.

  THE DAYLIGHT WAS waning too soon. Sunset was many hours away. But the sky and the prairie were dark, and the air was damp. Away in the north, thunder was bumping.

  The dew and damp produced a ground mist that congealed and spread rapidly. As Ironhand rode to the cottonwood grove two miles west of the fort, he craned around in his saddle—at no small cost in pain—and saw the corner blockhouses floating above murky gray mist-clouds, like ogres’ castles in the sky in a fairytale.

  When he reached the grove, Manitow woke up, scratched his back, stood, asked, “Where for you now?”

  “Back to the mountains. Back to the beaver. It’s the only trade I know. They aren’t all wearing silk toppers in New York town yet, I wager.”

  Manitow paused before saying, “I know secret streams, Old Ironhand. Three or four, locked so far in the Stony Mountains you would never find them alone.”

  “Hmm. Well. Let’s see. I’d like a pardner again. A free trapper needs a pardner. But I never paid your brother any sort of fee, like many do. We split what the plews brought in.”

  “That would be agreeable.”

  “If you think you can trust me not to cost you your life?” Ironhand asked, a sudden flash of sourness.

  Manitow took it calmly, seriously. “The old Scot will trouble you no more, I think. But can you trust me?”

  Ironhand’s wreck of a face seemed to relax. “We crossed that river awhile back.”

  Slowly, with graceful ceremonious moves, Manitow the Delaware drew from his waist his splendid long Green River knife. He held it out, handle first.

  With equal ceremony, Ironhand took his equally fine knife from its thong. He held it out the same way. Among the men of the mountains, white and red, there was no more significant gesture of trust.

  “Pardner.”

  “Pardner.”

  They exchanged knives. Manitow kissed the fingers of his right hand and raised them over his head in a mystical gesture. Ironhand laughed, deep and rumbling. They mounted up and rode away together into the storm.

  Afterword

  The western writer Karl May probably did more to promote the splendor and excitement of the West to non-Americans than anyone except Buffalo Bill Cody, king of the scouts, the arena show, and the dime novel. Yet not many fans of the genre, perhaps excluding specialist scholars, know of him.

  Surely it is because Karl May was born in Saxony in 1842, wrote only in German, and visited America just once—four years before his death in 1912. By that time he had written seventy-four volumes, forty of them set in “the American Wild West.”

  May was decidedly an odd bird for this sort of missionary work. He knew about the West only through reading—some of which was done in prison. May was jailed four times in his early life, for assorted thefts and swindles. During his longest sentence, four years, he ran a prison library.

  May’s youth was hard. He was afflicted with spells of near-blindness. He came from what we would call a dysfunctional family. Of thirteen brothers and sisters, nine died.

  When old enough, he entered a preparatory school for teachers. He was expelled for stealing. It didn’t seem to teach him a lesson; other crimes—other incarcerations—followed.

  But reading somehow turned him around, much as it turns around quite a few convict-writers. In 1875 Karl May published the first of his westerns.

  His white hero had different names in different stories: Old Surehand; Old Firehand; Old Shatterhand. He was a Westmänner (Westman)—not a native frontiersman but a strong, suave, cultured European who quickly adapted to the rigors and perils of the West by means of intelligence and physical strength. Old Shatterhand possessed a “mighty fist” useful for dispatch of villains. But he also carried firepower, in the form of a fantastic repeating rifle customcrafted by the “legendary” gunsmith, Mr. Henry of St. Louis. This Henrystutzen (Henry carbine) with its revolving chamber holding twenty-five rounds is not to be confused with the more familiar Henrys; there is no connection beyond the name.

  Partnered with May’s Surehand/Shatterhand character was a young Indian, first introduced to readers around 1892. Winnetou is a consistently brave and brainy Apache chief educated by a Christian tutor, hence receptive to the “civilized” ways of Europe, and the white man with whom he adventures.

  The two heroes wandered all over the map of the West, meeting again and again by remarkable coincidence, and removing an untold number of malefactors. In one historical quarterly, a scholar did a body count of four representative May novels totaling 2,300 pages. The number of persons going to their rewards was 2,012. They were dispatched by shooting, scalping, knifing, drowning, poisoning—and sixty-one were put down by the “mighty fist” previously cited.

  May had a fair grasp of Western geography, except in one respect. In addition to familiar settings of mountains and deserts, he repeatedly used “an impenetrable cactus forest”—exact location unspecified.

  May’s works have been translated into many languages but seldom, if at all, into English. Yet they’ve sold upwards of fifty million copies, and continue to sell. You find long shelves of May in almost every bookshop in Germany, just as you find long shelves of L’Amour throughout the United States.

  At least thirty films have been made from May’s novels. An entire publishing house devoted to them was founded in 1913. At summer encampments similar to those of American Civil War reenactors, mild-mannered fans gather in costume to act out the exploits of their two heroes. Now doctoral diss
ertations are being written about Karl May.

  So it seemed fitting, and an enjoyable challenge, to pay respects to him with a story about a couple of Westerners who battle a decidedly rotten crew from a fur trust. The story takes place in what May sometimes called the Stony Mountains.

  I have used variations of the names of his two leading characters, and kept the marvelous repeating Henry (reduced to an arbitrary five shots). Those are the only resemblances. Ironhand is not a “blond Teutonic superman who speaks a dozen languages fluently and lards his conversations with little sermons about God and Christianity.” Manitow is neither a chief nor an Apache. My intent was to create un hommage to an important figure in the literature of the West, not to write a pastiche of May’s work, which I can’t translate very well anyway with my rudimentary German. I wanted a story bathed in a diffuse pastel-colored mist, like a legend. A story not overly realistic. In short, the kind of Western story someone might have written from afar.

  One other note: The hymn Mr. Jaggers sings is reverse anachronism; it was composed years after the period of the story. But in context, the lyrics proved irresistible.

  Evan Hunter is one of popular fiction’s modern masters. As Ed McBain, he created the 87th Precinct, one of the most popular mystery series of all time; and as Hunter he has written many novels that have captured wide public acclaim, including The Blackboard Jungle and Last Summer. His Westerns contain many elements of his mysteries, including ruthless criminals and hard-bitten lawmen. “The Killing at Triple Tree” is one of his best.

  The Killing at Triple Tree

  Evan Hunter

  I saw the rider appear over the brow of the hill, coming at a fast gallop. He loomed black against the scrub oak lining the trail, dropped into a small gulley, and splashed across the narrow creek. I lost sight of him behind an outcropping of gray boulders, and when he appeared again it was right between the ears of the sorrel I was riding, like a target resting on the notched sight of a rifle.