Shadow of the Gun

by West, Joseph A. ; Compton, Ralph

  “Your name means nothing to me,” McBride said pleasantly. “I’m a range detective and I’m here to talk to your father.” Then, carefully taking the sting out of it before he spoke, he added, “I’m afraid you’re squatting on my employer Mr. Brennan’s property and you must pack up and move on.” He hesitated a heartbeat. “Now.”

  “This here is open range,” Mordecai said, taking an aggressive step toward McBride. “And we’ve claimed it. Now, turn around that poor excuse for a horse and get the hell out of here.”

  The other brothers had spread out, ready to back their brother’s play. McBride saw the move and his spiking belly told him he didn’t like any part of it.

  He managed to keep his voice level and reasonable. “I think we should let your father decide. I’m sure he doesn’t want any trouble with the law.”

  “Law!” Mordecai spat in McBride’s direction. “You ain’t the law.”

  His eyes wary, his voice surprisingly weak, Brennan said, “Mordecai, we’ll talk to Tom. If he gets off my range, no law need be involved.”

  If it came down to it, would Brennan stand? The man looked scared.

  McBride had no time to answer his own question. He was listening to Mordecai again.

  “Pa’s going nowhere.” He was tense and ready, the Apache in him rapidly coming to the fore. “He fell off his horse a month back and he’s a dead man”—with the flat of his hand the man made a downward, sweeping gesture from his waist—“from there to his toes.”

  “He’s paralyzed?” McBride asked.

  “His back’s broke,” Mordecai said.

  Brennan shook his head and found his voice and his courage again now that the invincible myth he’d built around Mordecai in his mind had solidified into a skinny half-breed no taller than the top rail of a corral fence. “The state of your pa’s health is no concern of mine,” he said, making his mistake. “Now, load him into the wagon over yonder and get off my land.”

  McBride saw it then—a hundred different kinds of hell in Mordecai Rivers’ eyes.

  The man was all through talking.

  He was going to draw.

  Chapter 2

  The combination of an ornery mount and John McBride’s poor horsemanship saved his life.

  As Mordecai’s hand streaked for his gun, the mustang became alarmed and reared, throwing McBride over the back of the saddle. He hit the ground hard, raising dust, and rolled, aware of the angry statement of Brennan’s rifle. The mustang bolted and Mordecai took a step out of the animal’s way. His Colt came up to shoulder height, his eyes seeking McBride.

  Brennan fired again. McBride heard a scream followed by the rancher’s triumphant yell. But Mordecai had McBride spotted. He grinned as his gun leveled.

  “Hell, I’m throwing this away!” The panicked thought flashed through McBride’s brain.

  He drew the Smith & Wesson, got on one knee and held the revolver at arm’s length, sighting, as his police instructors had taught him. Mordecai fired, his bullet throwing up a startled exclamation point of danger an inch in front of McBride’s bent leg. The breed fired again, and McBride felt the slug clip an arc from his left ear.

  Cursing, McBride squeezed the trigger and a sudden scarlet flower blossomed on Mordecai’s chest. The man roared his rage, took a step back, his gun lowering as if all at once it had become too heavy for him.

  McBride shot again, the self-cocker bucking in his hand. Hit a second time, Mordecai dropped to his knees. But he was half Apache, game as they come and hard to kill. He gritted his teeth and his Colt came up fast, his green eyes on McBride, filled with pain, shock and an insane hatred.

  Brennan’s Winchester bellowed. Mordecai’s head erupted into a crimson fan of blood and brain and he fell backward, the look of rabid venom frozen forever in his dead eyes.

  “Got the son of a bitch!” Brennan swung out of the saddle, grinning from ear to ear. “An’ I drilled the other two. Head shots, McBride, both of them.”

  McBride rose to his feet. Through a sullen mist of shifting gray gun smoke he watched the rancher lever his rifle.

  Brennan’s cold eyes slanted to the cabin. “Now I’m going to kill Deer Creek Tom, make a clean sweep. That thieving, white trash squaw-man has already lived too long.”

  A sickness in him, McBride’s gaze swept the three dead men. All were young, too young to have died in the dust for a worthless patch of scrawny range in the middle of nowhere.

  “Let it be, Brennan,” he said wearily. “The old man’s paralyzed and he’ll probably die soon enough.”

  “The hell with that, McBride. He’s nesting on my ground and he has to take his medicine. I’m paying you to do a job—now let’s finish it.”

  The futility of arguing showed in McBride’s face. The blood madness was riding Brennan and he wouldn’t let it go. His eyes moved to the cabin, its single window staring blankly at the carnage outside. Brennan moved into his line of sight, striding purposefully toward the door, the Winchester slanted across his chest.

  McBride saw the burlap curtain in the window twitch a warning and he screamed, “Brennan! No!”

  The rancher was just outside the door. Inside the cabin a shotgun blasted and buckshot tore through the thin wood, ripping the door off its rawhide hinges. Hit hard, Brennan shrieked and fell, the front of his shirt splashed with blood.

  “Damn you! Damn you all to hell!” McBride yelled.

  He ran to the door and took a single step inside. Tom Rivers, gray-haired and wild-eyed, was sitting up in his bunk, snapping shut a 10-gauge Greener on a pair of fresh shells.

  The old man’s glance met McBride’s and he swung the scattergun in his direction. Quickly McBride fired, fired again. Hit twice, Rivers slammed back on the bunk, his toothless mouth an O of surprise at the manner and time of his dying.

  McBride heard rapidly shuffling feet to his right. He turned and saw a raised axe poised above his head. Away from the doorway, the cabin was dark and he saw only the shadowy outline of a figure. Instinctively he took a step back, triggering the Smith at the same time. In the gun flash he caught a momentary glimpse of a fat woman falling away from him. The axe thudded to the dirt floor, followed immediately by the heavier thump of a body.

  His ears ringing, the acrid smell of smoke in his nostrils, McBride felt around the cabin and found an oil lamp. He thumbed a match into flame, lit the lamp and in its eerie orange glow saw what he feared he would see.

  A plump woman lay on her back on the floor, her dead, open eyes staring fixedly at McBride. Her black, braided hair showed strands of gray and her greasy buckskin dress had ridden up over her naked hips. McBride’s bullet had struck her in the throat and the Apache woman had been dead when she hit the ground.

  Bending, McBride pulled down the woman’s dress, guiltily ashamed at seeing her nakedness.

  Deer Creek Tom was dead and so was Cliff Brennan, and their feud was already forgotten. Dead men need no range, just six feet of ground.

  In less than a couple of minutes six people had met violent deaths and he was responsible for three of them, one a woman. He rounded up his mustang and led it back to the cabin, his conscience nagging at him. Right then and there he decided that the profession of range detective was not for him.

  There had been too much killing, too much blood throwing a dark, ominous shadow over his short time in the West. Already he was a named man, carrying the status of gunfighter, and such a title was a heavy burden. He had the five hundred dollars Brennan had paid him and it came to McBride then that it could be enough to buy a store in some small town. He fancied that he might prosper in the hardware business.

  Or he could take Inspector Thomas Byrnes up on his offer to return to New York and be reinstated as a detective sergeant of police.

  But as soon as he considered that option, he dismissed it. Despite the violence, despite the killing, the western land had a hold on him. She was a beautiful enchantress, wooing him with tall, pine-covered mountains, blue lakes and vast plains where a
man could ride from sun to sun forever, and each morning the air smelled clean and new.

  There could be no going back to the city with its stone canyons, teeming, filthy alleys and their warrens of slums overlaid by the stench of crowded, desperate humanity.

  McBride was now part of the West and he told himself that he would never leave. To think otherwise was both foolish and futile.

  He stopped outside the cabin, the warm sun on his shoulders. The stiff celluloid collar and strangling tie had not done what he’d hoped, and now he removed them. Then he took off his coat, slung it behind the saddle and rolled up his sleeves.

  There was burying to be done.

  Chapter 3

  John McBride rode through the foothills of the Guadalupe Mountains at the point where the peaks plunge like an arrowhead from New Mexico into north Texas. To the west lay the massive stone rampart of Martine Ridge and beyond soared the fractured backbone of the Brokeoff Mountains.

  McBride sat his mustang at the crest of a shallow rise and studied the bleak landscape around him. At first glance the mesquite and piñon-covered hills offered nothing by way of shelter from a keening fall wind and the coming of night. White clouds spread like coral branches across a denim blue sea of sky, but to the north other, more ominous thunderheads were gathering above the mountains, building high like thick black smoke.

  McBride had come from that direction, and he had no desire to go back. For the most part he’d ridden well shy of the forbidding Guadalupe range. He’d followed the southward course of Piñon Creek before he’d lost his way and swung east into Big Dog Canyon—only to find his path blocked by a massive barrier of rock that he’d later learn was the Guadalupe Ridge.

  Now McBride studied the ridge, estimating that it rose seven or eight thousand feet above the flat. He was looking for a switchback trail that might take him across the steep side and down into Texas. He saw nothing but outcroppings of bare rock, brush and swaths of red and yellow aspen. Above the aspen line the ridge grew steeper still, and toward its crest grew stands of spruce and fir, casting long shadows on the broken ground.

  McBride swore softly as frustration ate at him. There was no way over the ridge, so he’d have to retrace his steps back along the canyon, turn south again and ride across the brush flats to the Texas border.

  He sighed deep and long and the mustang tossed its head in sympathy, its bit chiming in the silence. The air smelled of pine and the raw iron tang of the approaching winter. He shivered inside the thin cloth of his new suit coat. He turned in the saddle, worked a blanket out of his bedroll and wrapped it around his shoulders. The rough wool brought him some warmth but did little to improve his foul mood.

  McBride swung his horse off the rise and rode closer to the foothills. He had to find a place to camp before the threatening clouds were right overhead dropping rain or snow—he could not guess which.

  A fire, hot coffee, some fried salt pork and then sleep—if he could find shelter for the night.

  McBride gloomily began to scout the hard, unforgiving land around him, a tall man astride a small horse; a man who had not the slightest inkling that at that moment he was lucky to be alive. Not three miles away a raiding party of seven Mescalero Apaches had cut his trail just east of the northern slope of the Martine Ridge.

  Unlike McBride, the Apaches knew with certainty the gathering clouds heralded rain and they decided to hole up for the night. After all, there was no hurry. They knew the man on the shod horse was trapped. Tomorrow they would kill him at their leisure.

  After an hour, McBride’s search was rewarded. He rode into a narrow, grass-covered arroyo that ended at a slab of solid gray rock. A few stunted junipers and piñon grew around the base of the wall, enough to offer some slender protection from rain or snow. A thin stream of water cascaded from a cleft in the rock and splashed into a hollowed-out basin of sandstone, forming a shallow pool several yards across. The runoff seeped over the rim of the basin and lost itself in the surrounding muddy ground.

  McBride decided, given the circumstances, it was as good a place as any. As he unsaddled the mustang, he realized he’d found the arroyo not a minute too soon. Already he could hear the rumble of thunder in the distance and the sky was turning black.

  As the horse drank from the rock tank, McBride found a spot at the bottom of the stone wall protected from wind and rain by a wide overhang. There he would build his fire.

  Wood was plentiful around the base of the trees and McBride gathered an armful and carried it to the wall. Then he found some dry tinder, pulled his blanket closer around him against the increasing cold and set about starting a blaze.

  Having been born and bred in the slums of New York, McBride had little expertise when it came to making campfires. On his long ride down from the Zuni Plateau country he’d more often than not eaten cold rations, wishful for hot coffee, staring morose and defeated at a few charred twigs marking yet another failed fire at his feet.

  He was determined not to fail this time.

  Carefully, McBride thumbed a match into flame and poked it into the small pile of dead leaves and sticks against the rock wall. For an instant, a feeble flare of flame fluttered like an orange moth in the guttering wind, then promptly died. He swore softly but vehemently and tried again. This time the match was snuffed out by the wind before he even got it close to the kindling.

  Irritated, he muttered angrily to himself as he pushed his scuffed plug hat back on his head and bent over the twigs. The match burned away in his fingers, scorching him painfully, but failed to ignite even a feeble blaze. Squatting back on his heels, McBride took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm himself. All right, John, if at first you don’t succeed…

  He thumbed another match alight….

  And met with no more success than he’d done in his earlier attempts.

  Angry with himself, with the glowering clouds, with the spiteful wind, with the contrary notions of matches, leaves and twigs, McBride bent low, opened his arms wide and spread his blanket around the kindling, shielding it from the icy wind.

  His face only inches from the kindling, he fumbled for another lucifer and brought it into the tent he’d made around the base of the rock wall. He bent lower, the match in front of him, and carefully thumbed it into life. The match flared. Too close! He smelled burning as his mustache caught fire. McBride howled and sprang to his feet, throwing off the blanket. He swatted at his smoking top lip, cursing a blue streak, his elastic-sided boots dancing a demented jig.

  That’s when he turned and saw a man sitting on his horse, staring at him, his eyes puzzled.

  Satisfied that his mustache was no longer on fire, McBride turned to the rider, moving his hand to the Smith & Wesson .38 in the shoulder holster under his left arm.

  The man had a brass-framed Henry rifle across his saddle horn, but he made no move to raise the gun. Instead he said, his voice edged with what could have been genuine wonder, “Pilgrim, what in hell are you doing?”

  Stung, McBride snapped, “Lighting a fire, if it’s any business of yours.”

  “In your mustache?”

  “That was an accident. The match was too close to my face and…” McBride stopped. “Why the hell am I explaining myself to you?”

  “Beats me,” the man said, smiling. “But I reckon it’s just as well you never got your fire lit, sonny. The Apaches are out, playing hob from the Rio Grande to the Mogollon Rim and points east and west. I heard tell over to the San Carlos in the Arizona territory there’s only old men and women left an’ that two regiments of black cavalry out of Fort Grant and Fort Thomas are already in the field with rations for sixty days.” The man leaned forward in the saddle. “Hell, boy, when your smoke climbed that rock wall yonder and drifted in the wind, you’d have had every renegade buck within a ten-mile after your hair.”

  Despite his run-in with the Rivers brothers, all McBride knew about Apaches he’d learned from the dime magazines he’d read back in New York. Apparently the feathered f
iends swooped down on defenseless wagon trains, brandishing their dreaded tomahawks, sparing neither man, woman, child nor clergy. McBride had read that the painted savages had undone many a blushing maiden and scores of stalwart frontiersmen had met a dreadful end at their bloodstained hands.

  “I haven’t seen any Apaches,” he said, remembering. “Well, I met a half one a while back.”

  “I reckon if you’d met a whole one, you’d already be dead.” The old man looked at McBride for a long time. He said finally, “This is your camp, pilgrim. Mind if I light an’ set?”

  “Name’s John McBride and I’m not on pilgrimage to anywhere.” He hesitated a moment, breathed out wearily and said, “Sure, light and set if you want. That is if cold coffee and raw salt pork suits your appetite.”

  The man nodded and swung out of the saddle with an easy elegance that belied his age, an ability McBride, a poor horseman, found himself envying.

  “Name’s Clarence Miller,” the man said, sticking out his hand. McBride took it. “But most folks call me Bear on account of how one winter up in the Tetons I hibernated in a holler log alongside an old she bear. Worst winter I ever spent. That old grizz growled and fretted the whole time, all riled up at me being there. I didn’t get a wink o’ sleep for a three-month an’ when I crawled out of the log come spring, I was just as tired as I was when I crawled in.” There was a silence before Bear said, “Boy, if’n you ever want to hibernate away the snow months, find yourself a cougar cave. Most times a female big cat will let you catch some shut-eye, even if she don’t like you much. So will a wolf, but she’s more unpredictable, like.”

  “A thing to remember,” McBride said. He had some doubts about the old man’s story but didn’t let it show. Now he studied him. Bear was about the same height as himself, four inches above six feet, but where McBride was heavily muscled in the arms and shoulders, the old man was wiry, skinny as a whip. His gray hair, arranged into two Cheyenne braids, hung to his shoulders and the fringes adorning the chest and sleeves of his beaded buckskin shirt were a yard long. He wore yellow-striped cavalry pants tucked into knee-high boots and a holstered, well-used Colt hung from the cartridge belt around his waist. Like McBride, he wore a full dragoon mustache but no beard. His black eyes were as bright as a bird’s, lively and intelligent.