The Man from Yesterday

by Wayne D. Overholser

  First Skyhorse Publishing edition published 2015 by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency

  Copyright © 1956 by Literary Enterprises, Inc.

  Copyright © renewed 1984 by Wayne D. Overholser

  Copyright © 2010 by the Estate of Wayne D. Overholser for restored material.

  The Man from Yesterday by Wayne D. Overholser first appeared as a four-part serial in Ranch Romances (1st November: 11/2/56–2nd December: 12/14/56).

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Brian Peterson

  Print ISBN: 978-1-62087-832-3

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63220-039-6

  Printed in the United States of America

  Prologue

  Neal Clark rode in to Cascade City shortly before noon, his Winchester in the boot. He would have gone directly to Olly Earl’s hardware store if his father hadn’t appeared on the porch of Quinn’s Mercantile and motioned to him.

  Sam Clark created a multitude of conflicting emotions in the hearts of everyone who knew him, including his son. He was a big-chested, square-headed man, a driver, the kind of person who dominated everyone around him. In the twelve years he had lived on the Deschutes, he had built the Circle C into the biggest outfit on the upper river. That was typical of everything he did.

  But there was the other side of his father that Neal knew well. He was a dreamer—some said a visionary. From the first day he had come to the upper Deschutes he had prophesied great things for the country: a railroad, sawmills, irrigation projects, and everything that went into these developments. If anyone else had talked that way, folks would have said he was crazy, but no one had the temerity to venture such an opinion of Sam Clark.

  As Neal reined his horse toward the Mercantile, he wondered what was in his father’s mind now. It would be something big. He was sure of that. Maybe something wild as well as big. Neal, nineteen and a little short of patience, often wished his father would be satisfied to stay at home and run the Circle C, but he knew that was like wishing for the moon.

  “What fetches you to town?” Sam asked.

  He stood with his big legs spread, hands shoved under his waistband, his elegant white Stetson tipped back on his forehead. The question irritated Neal because if his father didn’t stay home where he belonged, he had no right to question his son’s going and coming. At least that was the way it struck Neal, but he didn’t let his irritation show. No one did with Sam Clark.

  Neal patted the stock of his Winchester. “I want Olly to take a look at my rifle.” He jerked his head in the direction of Olly Earl’s hardware store. “I missed an easy shot at a buck this morning. Must be something wrong with the sights.”

  Sam nodded as if he considered that a pretty piddling excuse for riding into town when he should be working. “I’m glad I saw you. Save me a ride to the ranch. I’m going to Prineville this afternoon and I don’t know when I’ll be home.” He stepped off the porch and walked to the hitch rail. “Neal, I’m going to run for the legislature this fall. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while. You can manage, can’t you?”

  Neal nodded, refusing to let his feelings show in his face. This was typical of his father, always seeking something he didn’t have when he already had more than enough to make most men satisfied. Actually this new activity wouldn’t make much difference regardless of what it entailed because Neal had been rodding the Circle C for more than a year.

  “Good luck,” Neal said. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  “I won’t have any trouble being elected,” Sam said, his tone briskly confident. “I’ll see you in a few days.”

  He turned and walked back into the Mercantile. Neal rode on down the street to the hardware store. Funny thing about his father who was always working on some project of community betterment, always trying to help someone, yet there was a question in Neal’s mind whether his father honestly wanted to give help as much as he wanted to advance his own career. Neal was ashamed of the thought, but he had grounds for thinking it. One thing was sure. Sam Clark was the best-known man on the upper river, and he probably would be elected.

  Neal dismounted and tied, then pulled the Winchester from the boot and went into the store. Olly Earl wasn’t in sight, so Neal laid the rifle on the counter. Three men rode past the hardware store. Neal glanced at them casually, saw they were strangers, and paid no more attention to them.

  He rolled a cigarette and smoked it, wondering if the time would ever come when he was entirely free. Sometimes he doubted his strength, not sure he had a will of his own. Well, that was the price he paid for being his father’s son. Apparently it never entered Sam Clark’s mind that Neal wanted to do anything except rod the Circle C. It actually was the only thing he wanted to do, but the point was he never had an opportunity to make a choice.

  He finished the cigarette and, going to the door, flipped the stub into the street. The three strangers had stopped in front of the bank. Two had gone inside; one remained in front with the horses. Neal stared at the horses, wondering why strangers would go directly to the bank. But maybe they weren’t strangers. He didn’t know everybody along the Deschutes.

  He swung back into the store, his mind turning to Jane Carver. He’d been in love with her for a long time, or so it seemed. She was two years younger than he was, too young, maybe, to get married. Or was she? Was he too young? How did a man know about things like that?

  He shook his head, his thoughts going sour. Their ages were no problem, but there was a problem and he might as well face it. What would it do to Jane to move to the Circle C and live exactly the way Sam Clark told her to live?

  That was the nub of it, all right. Neal would do the work of running the ranch, but the decisions would be his father’s, even down to moving a piece of furniture inside the house. That was the way Sam Clark was made. If Neal took Jane out there, they’d have to accept it as long as Sam was alive.

  Suddenly impatient, Neal walked into the back room, calling: “Olly!”

  Earl came in from the loading platform. He said: “I didn’t know you were here, Neal. I was helping unload some barbed wire.” Earl took off his gloves, laid them on a nail keg, and threaded his way through the crated machinery and barrels to where Neal stood. He asked: “What’ll you have, son?”

  Neal stepped back into the store. “I want you to take a look at my Winchester. The sights aren’t right. I had a good chance at a buck and missed him clean.”

  “Hell, you just had a dose of buck fever,” Earl said. He walked behind the counter and, picking up the rifle, put it to his shoulder and sighted down the barrel. “Loaded?”

  “Sure it’s loaded.”

  “Well, can’t tell nothing without shooting it,” Earl said. “Let’s sashay down to the river. Isn’t this the gun I sold you last spring?”

  Neal
nodded. “I haven’t used it much. I was used to Dad’s old. . .”

  A shot sounded from the street. A .45, Neal thought, and remembered the strangers who had been in front of the bank. He jerked the Winchester from Earl’s hands and ran into the street as a second shot shattered the noon silence. Two men raced out of the bank carrying partly filled gunny sacks.

  Someone across the street yelled: “Hold-up! Hold-up!”

  The one with the horses, so slender that he must have been a kid younger than Neal, threw a shot at the man who had yelled. Neal didn’t have time to think about what should be done, no time to make a decision or consider that these men were human beings. They weren’t as far as Neal was concerned. They were wolves who had probably murdered the banker, Tom Rollinson, and his cashier, young Henry Abel.

  Neal threw the Winchester to his shoulder and cut loose. The first man had reached his horse and was lifting a foot to the stirrup when Neal’s bullet hit him. He went down in a rolling fall, his horse bucking along the street.

  The second man didn’t reach his horse. Neal’s next shot cut him down as cleanly as if he’d been yanked off his feet by a rope. The third one, the kid, didn’t wait to see what happened. He was in the saddle and hightailing out of town by the time Neal had squeezed off his second shot.

  Olly Earl appeared beside Neal, a rifle in his hand. Both of them fired at the fleeing bandit, but he got away. He was riding hard, leaning low on his horse’s neck, and, as far as Neal could tell, he hadn’t been hit.

  Earl threw down his gun in disgust. “We missed him clean,” he said bitterly, “but, hell, that rifle of yours is shooting all right. We don’t need to try it out.”

  They ran up the street toward the bank as men rushed out of stores and saloons and the livery stable, with Sam Clark in the lead. Doc Santee left his office on the run, his black bag in his hand. Neal and Olly Earl were the first to reach the fallen men. Neal was still carrying his gun. Doc Santee rushed past them into the bank, Sam Clark a step behind.

  Earl knelt beside the outlaws. “Dead.” He looked up at Neal. “Son, that was shooting. You got this big bastard through the guts and the other one through the heart.” Earl rose. “Where’s the sheriff?”

  “He’s at the M Bar,” the liveryman said. “Went out first thing this morning. Said he’d be back by noon.”

  “Drag ’em over there against the wall and set ’em up,” Earl said. “I’m going to take their pictures.”

  Doc Santee and Sam Clark came out of the bank carrying Henry Abel. Sam said: “Tom’s dead. Henry’s got a slug in the side. Give us a hand, somebody. Pick up that money and take it inside.”

  Through all of this Neal stood motionlessly, struggling for each breath. He had killed two men. His mind gripped that fact but could go no further. He stared at the dead men as they were carried to the front wall of the bank and placed against it in a sitting position. Olly Earl returned with his camera and took their pictures, hats off, mouths sagging open, blood oozing from the corners of their lips.

  Suddenly Neal was sick. He whirled and ran into a vacant lot next to the bank. There he retched until he was so weak he couldn’t stand. Later, he didn’t know how much later, Olly Earl came to him and said: “You got no cause to feel bad about what you did. They murdered Tom Rollinson in cold blood and intended to kill Henry. Just bad shooting or they would have.”

  Neal leaned against the wall, wiping his face with a bandanna. He looked at Earl. “Maybe I got no cause to, Olly, but I never killed a man before. Did you?”

  “No,” Earl admitted. “Chances are I’d feel just like you if I had. Come on, let’s go get a drink.”

  Neal went with him to O’Hara’s saloon and had a drink. The bodies had been taken to Santee’s back room. Several men, Quinn and O’Hara and others, came to Neal and shook his hand and told him that all three of the outlaws would have got away if he hadn’t done some mighty good shooting, but their words didn’t make Neal feel any better, even with the whiskey in him.

  “Who were they?” Neal asked.

  Nobody knew, but Olly Earl said: “The big one’s a middle-aged gent, the other one’s young. Maybe in his early twenties. Father and son, I’d guess. The one that got away is probably another son.”

  The sheriff, Joe Rolfe, rode into town a few minutes later and took a look at the bodies, but he didn’t know them. He picked a small posse and started into the high desert after the boy who had escaped. They returned two days later, tired, dirty, and hungry, with Rolfe shaking his head.

  “He must have crawled under a juniper and died,” Rolfe said. “We didn’t find his horse or nothing. We did pick up his trail a time or two on the other side of Horse Ridge, then lost it. The high desert just swallowed him.”

  But Neal didn’t think the boy was dead. He rode to town every day for two weeks, asking Rolfe if he’d learned anything. Finally Rolfe was able to identify the outlaws Neal had killed by sending the pictures to other sheriffs in the state.

  “It was the Shelly gang,” Rolfe said. “They’ve been in a lot of trouble in Lane and Douglas Counties. Came from the hills around Yoncalla. The sheriff in Eugene says the old one was Buck Shelly and the young one his oldest boy named Luke. The kid holding the horses was probably a younger son named Ed.”

  “If Ed isn’t dead,” Neal said, “he’ll be back.”

  The old sheriff gave Neal a sharp look. “Son, don’t fret yourself about it. I don’t think he is alive. You or Olly probably plugged him, and he died of his wounds. But, hell, even if he did make it, he won’t be back.”

  Neal rode home, finding no comfort in Joe Rolfe’s words. The sheriff was like Olly Earl, coming around the corner of the bank right after the shooting and telling Neal not to feel bad, then admitting he’d never killed a man. Joe Rolfe could talk until he wore his tongue off at the roots, but the fact was he hadn’t killed Ed Shelly’s father and brother.

  That night Sam Clark showed up at the Circle C. He hadn’t been home since the hold-up. The first thing he said was: “I’m taking the bank over, Neal. Somebody’s got to run it because this community needs a bank, and I’m the only one who can. I’ve been a stockholder for quite a while, and I know something about the business. Henry Abel’s going to make it. He’s a smart banker. We won’t have any trouble.”

  Politics and now the bank. Neal turned away, nervous and irritable. He didn’t trust himself to speak. He walked to a window and stared at the bare dirt yard. No grass. No flowers. No foofaraw of any kind because Sam wouldn’t stand for it. A strange combination, his father. Standing there, he guessed what was coming before Sam got the words said.

  “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to our affairs.” Sam Clark crossed the big living room of the ranch house and placed a hand on Neal’s shoulder. “You’re going to learn the banking business. Henry Abel will teach you. Oh, not right now. I’ve got to learn it first. You’ll be getting married one of these days and bringing Jane out here to live, but ranch life isn’t good for a woman. I’ll buy a house in town and you can take over the bank. No hurry, mind you. It’ll take a little time to find the right man here.”

  Neal didn’t say anything. He’d always done what his father wanted him to. He had no power to resist. No one did. Sam Clark was like a steamroller. If you argued or resisted, he simply overpowered you and flattened you out and went right on. Now Sam walked away, the idea never occurring to him that Neal might object to having his life managed for him, or that he might prefer running a ranch instead of a bank.

  But his father was wrong on one thing, Neal thought. There would be no marriage for a while, not until he knew for sure what had happened to Ed Shelly.

  * * * * *

  The days passed and no word of any kind came, and when Neal kept asking the sheriff, the old man lost his temper.

  “Damn it, can’t you forget that ornery devil?” Rolfe said. “I tell you he’s dead.”

  So Neal rode home, his troubled mind finding no comfort. A week later he received a l
etter postmarked Salt Lake City. The address and letter were printed in pencil and so was the letter.

  Someday I’ll be back and settle up with you for killing my father and brother.

  Ed Shelly

  Neal stared at the sheet of paper for a long time, not really surprised, for it was about what he had expected. He had never believed young Shelly was dead. He took the note to Joe Rolfe, who shook his head in disgust.

  “Some crank,” said the sheriff. “Hell, boy, people all over the country read about the hold-up and the killing. For God’s sake, Neal . . . forget it. You’ll never see or hear of Ed Shelly again.”

  Neal rode home, jumpy and nervous and wondering if Ed Shelly was hiding behind each pine or lava outcropping that he passed. Maybe Rolfe was right, but that didn’t help. Nothing would help, Neal thought, until he knew for sure that Ed Shelly was dead.

  Chapter One

  Neal woke at dawn on a chill April morning, trembling and weak and wet with sweat. He’d had the nightmare again. He wondered how many times he’d had it since he’d shot Buck Shelly and his son Luke eight years ago. But the nightmares hadn’t started right after the killings. He remembered now. That warning note he’d received from Ed Shelly. The first nightmare. The night after he’d had the note. Yes, that was it. He couldn’t forget.

  Slowly the trembling passed. He turned his head to look at his wife Jane. She was beautiful. Even in the thin gray light she was beautiful, although he could not see her features distinctly. She was beautiful because he loved her, he guessed. It was equally true with his five-year-old daughter Laurie.

  He could not imagine living without Jane and Laurie. That was why the nightmare lingered in his mind with frightening sharpness. It was never quite the same, yet there was always one element that did not vary. Sometimes he arrived home to find that Jane had been murdered. Or that Laurie had been kidnapped. Or he was shot in the back as he walked into the house.

  But there was always this faceless man who had done these things. Neal was never able to catch him. He couldn’t even describe him because he was invariably a shadowy figure Neal had not seen distinctly, but the knowledge was always in Neal that the man was Ed Shelly. He never discovered how he knew, but he never doubted that he did know.