Blood and Gold

by Joseph A. West

  Well, that tipped over the outhouse sure enough.

  Luke’s smile slipped and he said, “I’m sorely disappointed in you, boy.”

  And he went for his gun.

  I don’t remember drawing. But suddenly the Colt was in my hand and I realized with a jolt of surprise, I was faster, a lot faster, than Luke. I fired and saw my bullet take him square in the chest, his own shot following a split second later, but flying wild.

  Kennedy had his gun out and we both fired at the same time. I felt his bullet burn across my left thigh, and I hit too high, taking him in the shoulder.

  My ears ringing from the sound of gunfire, I stepped out of my own powder smoke and saw Luke lying on his back, the rain battering down on his face. He was dead as he was ever going to be.

  Kennedy was half bent over, groaning. He was out of the fight, his shattered right shoulder a bloody mess, gun dangling loose from a scarlet-streaked hand.

  The man’s face was deathly white under his tan and he snarled a vile oath. “Damn you, boy, I never pegged you for a gunfighter.”

  “There’s much you don’t know about me, Clem,” I replied, trying my hardest to make what I hoped was a grown man’s reply. “You should have steered well clear of me.” I nodded toward Luke’s body. “Ride on out of here and take that with you.”

  “Hard talk, Dusty,” Kennedy said. “Mighty mean and hard.”

  “You dealt the cards, Clem,” I said. “I’m just playing out the hand you gave me.”

  “You think you being a gunfighter an’ all will help you get that money to Texas?” Kennedy asked, his eyes ugly.

  “Clem, I’m no gunfighter,” I said. “Before today, I’d never killed a man and right now the fact that I have is troubling me plenty.”

  “Well, you practice with that Colt, boy. There will be others after me and they won’t be near as trusting an’ friendly as me and Luke was.” Kennedy gasped in pain as he straightened. “No man should have thirty thousand dollars all to his ownself when poor folks are hurting.”

  “The money isn’t mine,” I said. “And it isn’t yours either.”

  “You’ll never make it back across the Red, Dusty,” Kennedy said. “Luke Butler was a named man and he had friends.”

  I nodded. “Maybe so, but I reckon I’ll take my chances.”

  Later, after he’d caught up his horses, I stood in the rain and watched Kennedy ride away, Luke Butler’s body draped facedown across the saddle of his buckskin.

  Kennedy glanced over his shoulder once, with eyes that burned hot with hate, like he wanted to remember me for all time. Then he turned back and I watched him go until he was swallowed up by the hills and the shifting steel curtain of the rain.

  It was still not yet one, but the afternoon had turned cheerless and dark. The clouds and hills had merged into a gloomy, uniform gray, so there was no telling where the land ended and the sky began. Off to my left, a jay fluttered among the branches of a cedar growing at the base of a low mesa, sending down a shower of water. The branches shook again for a few moments as the bird sought a new perch and then the tree returned to stillness.

  The bullet that had burned across my thigh had not broken the skin, but my leg felt numb and sore as I scouted the area for a few minutes, saw no one and returned to the shelter of the cave. I teased the fire into flame and put the coffee back on to heat.

  When I sat and rolled a smoke I was surprised that my hands were steady. I lit the cigarette with a brand from the fire and set to studying on what had happened.

  Clem Kennedy had called me a gunfighter and that was a label I did not want to wear. Back in Dodge, I’d seen the named shootist Buck Fletcher kill a man in the Long Branch. After the smoke cleared, I’d looked into Fletcher’s eyes and seen only despair and something else . . . hopelessness maybe, like he knew he was a man caught in a trap of his own making and there was no way out.

  I didn’t want to end up like that. I wanted a place of my own with a wife and kids, smoke from our cabin tying bows in the air, the white laundry fluttering on the wash line and an ugly spotted dog sleeping on the stoop.

  Gunfighter.

  I’d killed Luke Butler, a gunman of reputation, and where Western men gathered, that was a fact that would be noted and talked about.

  Clem had been right. Others would come. Most would be motivated by the lure of easy money, but there would be a few with a completely different agenda. Those would be wild ones and they’d test me with their own lives to see how I stacked up, how I ranked in the gunfighter hierarchy.

  I poured coffee into my cup and drank it strong and scalding hot.

  My heart was heavy as lead, my spirits troubled, and beyond the shelter of the cave roof the raking rain rattled relentlessly as it continued to fall.

  Then I heard the flat boom of a rifle shot. And another.

  Chapter 2

  I’d no way of knowing what those shots meant, but I didn’t want to just sit there and let trouble come to me a second time.

  Rising, I tightened the girth on the paint, then swung into the saddle. I’d forgotten the saddlebags!

  I stepped down, threw them onto the back of the saddle and mounted again.

  An eighteen year old makes his share of mistakes, and as things turned out, I’d sure roped the wrong steer by taking along those saddlebags. But that was something I wouldn’t discover until later, when it was way too late.

  The shots had come from the north, and I swung around the base of the hill and rode up a wide gully, splashing across a deep, swift-running creek with tall cottonwoods the color of smoke growing on both its banks.

  After I cleared the creek, the gully widened out, hemmed in by a series of low red sandstone mesas, their bases thick with cedar and juniper.

  I followed the gully for a couple miles, riding tense and alert, my 44.40 Winchester across the saddle horn. There was no sound but the rustle of the wind through the grass and the steady, hissing counterpoint of the driving rain.

  The day had gotten grayer still, and I saw no sign of life anywhere.

  But when a man rides wild country, it’s wise for him to pay attention to his horse. As I rode into a grassy valley dotted here and there with cedar and clumps of sagebrush and bunch grass, the paint’s ears pricked forward and his head came up real fast. He snorted, and the bit in his mouth jangled.

  I leaned over and patted the paint’s neck, whispering to him to take it easy. This seemed to calm him down some, but he was still up on his toes, dancing nervously to his left, his head tossing, not liking what he smelled in the wind.

  I fought the horse for a few moments and finally got him turned and urged him deeper into the valley. About half a mile ahead, a steep-sided bluff jutted like a redbrick wall into the valley floor and from where I was I couldn’t see what lay beyond.

  My hat did little to shield my face from the rain, and water kept running into my eyes. I wiped the oilskin sleeve of my slicker across my face and peered ahead.

  Nothing moved.

  The land was empty and bleak and it seemed whoever had fired those two shots was long gone.

  A hunter, I thought, trying to convince myself that was the case. But who would hunt in a pounding rain when all the animals were taking shelter?

  I had no answer for that and decided to let it go. It was time I got back to the cave, picked up my bits and pieces and hit the trail south, away from these silent, threatening hills.

  All things considered, I’d be real glad when I got back to Texas and handed Ma Prather her money. After that, I could live a normal life again and start seriously courting pretty Sally Coleman with an eye to making her my wife.

  I was in the act of swinging my horse around when something caught my eye, just a flicker of movement at the base of the bluff. I stood in the stirrups and studied the area—and saw a horse walk slowly from the bluff then stop and begin to graze.

  It was a big, rangy buckskin and it could only be Luke Butler’s horse. But where was the bandit’s body?


  Curiosity has always been one of my failings, and now like a complete fool I gave in to it.

  I rode toward the horse, keeping my rifle close to hand. For the first time I saw where the wet grass had been trampled flat by the passage of Kennedy’s mount and the dead man’s buckskin. As far as I could make out, the tracks led to the edge of the bluff, then swung wide around its slanting base.

  The rain was even heavier now, fair hammering down, and I reckoned the creeks that cut between the hills would soon flood their banks. The branches of the red cedars were heavy with water, drooping for lornly almost to the ground, and fast-running rivulets poured down the rusty sides of the surrounding buttes and mesas, bringing with them white streaks of gypsum.

  The buckskin raised his head when he saw me coming, studied me for a few moments, then, unconcerned, went back to his grazing.

  Where was Butler’s body? And where was Clem Kennedy?

  That second question was soon answered.

  Kennedy lay half-hidden in the grass about fifty yards from the bluff. He was lying on his back, his eyes wide-open, a soundless scream frozen on his gaping mouth, teeth long and yellow against the stark gray of his face.

  I swung out of the saddle and kneeled beside the man’s body. Kennedy had been shot three times, once by me, and twice more by a person—or persons—unknown. One shot had merely grazed his neck, but the second, deadlier bullet had crashed smack into the middle of his forehead.

  I stood and looked around. There was no sign of Kennedy’s horse or anything else for that matter, just the grazing buckskin, the hills and the gray clouds and the streaming rain.

  Clem Kennedy was an ill-natured man who had made his share of enemies. But why kill him all the way out here, in the middle of nowhere in a pounding rainstorm?

  Unless . . .

  Had his killer heard the gunshots from back at the cave and believed Kennedy had already robbed me of the money I was carrying? That was a real possibility. And since the bushwhacker hadn’t found the saddlebags on Kennedy’s horse, he must know I still had them.

  I held my Winchester in both hands at the high port as I prepared to walk back to my paint, the hairs at the back of my neck rising.

  Was the killer still here? And was I already in his sights?

  I had no time to answer that question . . . because I’d not taken three steps when the sky fell on me.

  Chapter 3

  I didn’t hear the report of the rifle, but I felt the smashing impact of the heavy bullet that crashed against my head and felled me to the ground.

  I lay there stunned, unable to move. The shot had paralyzed me. I couldn’t feel my arms and legs but I tasted the smoky tang of blood mixed with rain as blood ran down my face and into my mouth.

  My eyes were just half-open slits, but they were open wide enough for me to see four men leave the base of the bluff and walk toward me. As they got closer, I saw a tall man, long yellow hair spilling over his shoulders from under his hat, leave the others and sprint toward me.

  “Yee-ha!” the man yelled, grinning from ear to ear, punching into the air. “Lookee here, boys! I nailed him right through the head.”

  Despite the scarlet haze of blood pouring into my eyes, I made out the .50-90 Sharps rifle the man was carrying, some kind of brass telescopic sight running the entire length of the barrel.

  “Lafe, does he have the money?” another man asked.

  “Hell, he wouldn’t be carrying it on him,” the yellow-haired man said. “Search them saddlebags on the paint.”

  There was a few moments’ silence; then I heard a man’s exultant yell: “It’s here, Lafe! Every damn cent of it.”

  “Lemme see that,” Lafe said.

  Through stinging eyes that I could barely hold open, I saw the four men gather around the saddlebags.

  “Hell,” Lafe whispered, “I ain’t seen that much money in all my born days.” He threw the saddlebags over his shoulder. “Right, let’s get out of here. And I want that paint. Hell, he must go sixteen hands if he’s an inch.”

  Only money, a lot of it, would have brought these men into the wild hill country. So far the trail I had taken from Dodge had led to blood and death . . . and unless they killed me, I vowed this wouldn’t be the end of it.

  Footsteps swished through the wet grass as the bandits walked away. But then the man called Lafe came back and kicked me viciously, his boot thudding into my ribs once . . . twice . . . three times. . . . Then the shocking, blinding pain made me lose count.

  “Hey, Lafe, how come you’re kicking a dead man?” somebody yelled.

  I heard Lafe laugh, a loud, cruel bellow. “For making me stay out here in the damn rain,” he yelled. “That’s how come.”

  And he giggled and kicked me again.

  Then I knew nothing but darkness and with it came a merciful end to pain.

  I woke to a throbbing agony in my head and each gasping breath raked my chest like a red-hot knife blade.

  Rain battered at my upturned face and from somewhere far off I heard the angry rumble of thunder. I clenched and unclenched my fists, and to my relief, the feeling slowly returned to my fingers. After a few minutes I was able to move my legs, and I struggled into a sitting position.

  My horse was gone, and with it the saddlebags and Simon Prather’s money.

  But I had no time to contemplate the disaster that had befallen me. I had to get to the buckskin and go after those robbers.

  The rain was still painting the sides of the surrounding buttes and mesas bloodred, and the sentinel trees stood soaked and silent. The wind had dropped some, but the rumble of thunder was much closer and every now and then as the sky banged and flashed white, the buckskin raised his head and stood stiff-legged in alarm.

  The horse was getting spooked and I was in no shape to be chasing him down.

  I couldn’t tell how badly hurt I was. My head ached and when I put fingers to the right side of my scalp they came away stained with blood.

  The men who had bushwhacked me had taken my horse, but they’d left my guns, and I figured, with the arrogance of youth, that they’d made a big mistake.

  That I was too sore wounded to follow them never even entered my head. And that was my mistake.

  Slowly I fetched up to my feet, and immediately the land around me spun like a weather vane in a whirl-wind, then lurched right and left, so that I figured the mesas were standing on end and the trees were dancing. Nauseous, I sank to my knees and was violently sick, retching up all the coffee I’d drunk a short time before.

  I didn’t need anybody to tell me right then that I was as weak as a two-day-old kittlin’ and in a whole heap of trouble.

  Off to my left, a lean coyote stepped out of the trees again and looked at me with keen interest, every now and then tossing his head as he licked his chops. To him, I was just a poor, wounded creature that might die pretty soon and provide an easy meal or three.

  I directed all my pent-up anger and despair at that coyote, yelling at him to stay the hell away from me and go find himself a rabbit to kill.

  Of course, all my hooting and hollering did nothing to ease the mind of the buckskin and he trotted maybe fifty yards closer to the base of the bluff, stirrups bouncing, figuring me for a crazy man.

  I guess the coyote studied on things some and reckoned I was still mighty spry because he slipped back into the trees and was gone like a puff of smoke.

  Desperately I tried to concentrate, summoning up whatever little strength I still possessed.

  Somehow, I had to make it to the buckskin.

  Fury drove me. I swore to myself that when I caught up with the long-haired man called Lafe, there would be a new face in hell for breakfast in the morning.

  Slowly, painfully, I crawled on my hands and knees toward the grazing buckskin.

  As I inched closer, he’d raise his head now and then to look at me, trot away a couple of steps to maintain the same distance between us, then go back to his grazing.

 
Thunder rolled across the iron sky and lightning forked among the hills around me, plunging again and again into the wet earth with skeletal fingers. A lone cedar growing on the gradual slope of a hill just beyond the bluff suddenly took a direct hit. A deafening crack, accompanied by a searing flash of light, and the tree seemed to explode, branches scattering into the air every which way. Fire spurted as the blasted cedar lurched on its side, the flames dying immediately in the teeming rain.

  All this was way too much for the jittery buckskin.

  The horse turned in my direction, arched his back, then took off, galloping across the distance between us. Neck stretched out, his eyes rolling white, the buckskin pounded past, his kicking hooves beating on the wet grass like the cadenced thump of a muffled drum.

  “Hold up there, boy!” I yelled, in a totally futile effort.

  The buckskin was gone, splitting the wind and skinning the ground, and soon he was lost to sight among the crowding grayness of the rain-lashed hills.

  Me, I knew I had to go after the horse.

  I rose to my feet, staggered a few steps, then stumbled, stretching my length on the grass. I rose again, fell again, got to my knees and looked around.

  The land was spinning wildly and the pain in my head was a living thing, eating all the life out of me. I tried to struggle to my feet, crashed hard onto my back and mercifully knew no more.

  I woke to a dark face bisected by a huge walrus mustache looking down into mine. Guttering firelight revealed concern and a hint of amusement in the black eyes, and I saw the flash of white teeth as the face split into a smile.

  “Ah,” the man said, “young Lazarus awakes.”

  Another robber!

  I grabbed for my Colt but it wasn’t there. The black man had followed my movement and now his smile widened. “Is that how you thank a man who just saved your life? Gun him?”

  Then, reading the panic in my eyes, he said, “Your Colt is close by, young feller, and so is your rifle. And I brung in your horse.”