Vendetta Trail

by Robert Vaughan

  “Pour Mr. Hawke a drink, Mike,” Big Callie said. “I think he’s earned it, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’d say that he truly has,” Mike said, reaching for the bourbon.

  “Nobody takes my gun! Nobody!” Ford’s loud, shrill voice shouted from just inside the door.

  “Look out, he’s got a shotgun!” one of the saloon patrons warned.

  Hawke turned toward the door just in time to see the enormous muzzle flash of a double-barreled Greener.

  Big Callie took the full load, grunting in pain and surprise as the buckshot opened up her chest. Blood sprayed from her like a fountain, and her corpulent body was slammed back against the bar. She slid down to the floor.

  Ford pulled the trigger on the second barrel, but even as he did so, Hawke was firing at him. Ford’s second load smashed into the piano at the back of the room.

  Hawke fired only once, but his bullet caught Ford between the eyes and the young gunman pitched backward, falling through the swinging doors before crashing onto the boardwalk out front. The smoke of three gun discharges hung in the air, the acrid bite burning the nostrils of the shocked spectators. The strings of the piano continued to hum in resonant vibration.

  “Big Callie?” Gary said, getting up quickly from the floor where he had dived at Ford’s opening barrage. He hurried over to examine her. “Oh, my God, Big Callie’s been shot!”

  Hawke stood for a moment longer with the smoking gun in his hand, then he dropped down on one knee to look at Big Callie. Putting his hand on her neck, he felt for a pulse but knew, even as he was doing so, that it was a waste of time. She was dead. He didn’t have to tell anyone—everyone knew—and they moved toward her to look down in shocked silence.

  Ford’s body lay sprawled and unlamented on his back on the boardwalk in front of the saloon.

  “What do we do now?” Billy asked.

  “Somebody should get the sheriff, I reckon,” Jimmy replied.

  “What do we need him for? The one that killed her is already dead.”

  “Yes, but the sheriff needs to be told, don’t you think?”

  “Mr. Hawke, I expect you’d better get on out of town now,” Mike said quietly.

  “This was self-defense. I’ll face the sheriff, even the court if I have to,” Hawke said.

  Mike shook his head. “No, sir, you don’t want to do that. Not in this county. Ford’s pa is Asa Fargo. He’s the biggest rancher in the county, and even with everyone in here testifying that it was self-defense, I wouldn’t feel all that good about your chances in a court of law.”

  Hawke looked toward the piano and saw a large, gaping hole in the soundboard cover. Several strings had been cut in two by the shot and were now protruding through the hole.

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” Hawke said. He ran his hand through his hair. “Doesn’t look there’s much to keep me here now anyway.”

  It didn’t take Hawke long to leave, once he made up his mind. It was his habit to travel light, carrying just what he could get in his saddlebags. He was saddled and out of town within a few minutes.

  What nobody in the town realized, though, was that Hawke stopped just outside of town and camped on a hill that overlooked the cemetery. It might not be safe for him to attend Big Callie’s funeral, but he intended to stay around until he saw her buried.

  The next day dawned with a threat of rain that had still not been realized by midmorning when a small handful of people arrived at the cemetery. Hawke recognized a couple of them, and knew them to be cowboys who worked on the Fargo Ranch.

  Although they made no demonstration of anger, or even sorrow over Ford’s death, they did stand by respectfully as Ford’s coffin was lowered into the ground.

  Ford’s father stood alone over the grave for a long moment. Hawke saw the sheriff ride up, dismount, and walk over to talk to him.

  Hawke was too far away to hear what the sheriff was saying, but from the intense way they were talking, he got the idea that the sheriff might have been telling him the truth about what happened.

  The sheriff ended his conversation by putting his hand on Fargo’s shoulder. Fargo pinched the bridge of his nose, then nodded. Even though he had not been able to hear what was going on, Hawke realized at that moment that Fargo had accepted the sheriff’s explanation and would not be coming after him.

  Hawke was glad. He wasn’t frightened of the old man. He just didn’t want to kill him.

  Not long after Ford Fargo was buried, Big Callie’s funeral cortege arrived. Unlike the few who had come to watch Ford be put in the ground, nearly the entire town turned out for Big Callie’s burial.

  Hawke was too far away to hear the preacher, though every now and then a word or phrase would come up to him.

  “Good woman. Friend to all. Lady of New Orleans.”

  The rain clouds delivered on their threat before the funeral was over and the rain sent many scurrying back to shelter. Finally the only people left were the two gravediggers who were closing Big Callie’s grave. Hawke put on his slicker and stood under the tree, watching, until the last shovel of dirt had closed the grave.

  Then, swinging into the saddle, he started riding southeast.

  “All right, Miss Callie,” he said aloud. “I think I’ll just take a look at this New Orleans of yours.”

  Chapter 2

  BECAUSE HE WAS IN NO PARTICULAR HURRY, MASON Hawke was taking the time to enjoy the beauty of the gentle Ozark Mountains. He rode alongside a wild and rushing stream whose surface frothed white when tumbling over the rocks, but was clear and silver when running free. As he rode, the path began to climb, and he crossed another creek, then mounted a wide, flat ridge. Cardinals and bluebirds flitted among the dogwood trees, while monarch butterflies floated just above a field of daisies. The hills were dappled green and brown in close, blue and purple as they marched off into the distance. Here and there a large jut of rock would lift itself from the verdant growth around it, showing the remains of the cataclysmic fault that had created the Ozark range at the dawn of the ages.

  When Hawke made camp that evening, a squirrel came out onto a fallen log, chattering noisily as it scampered about trying to find and unearth some long-ago buried nugget. Hawke watched the squirrel for a few minutes, then he shot it.

  “Sorry, squirrel,” he said. “But I’m getting tired of beans without meat.”

  He skinned, cleaned, and then spitted the game, cooking it over an open fire. He watched the meat brown as his stomach growled with hunger. The squirrel was barely cooked before he took it off the skewer and began eating it ravenously, not even waiting for it to cool. When it was gone he broke open the bones and sucked out the marrow.

  After his meal, he took inventory of his cheroots, counted four of them, cut each of them in half, then enjoyed a smoke. When his smoke was finished he let the song of a whip-poor-will put him to sleep.

  At dawn the next day the notches of the eastern hills were touched with the dove-gray of early morning. Shortly thereafter, the rising sun spread a golden fire over the mountaintops, then filled the sky with light and color, waking all the creatures below.

  Hawke rolled out of his blanket and began digging through his saddlebag for coffee, but found none. Without coffee he had to make do with a tea made from boiled sassafras roots and sweetened with wild honey. He would have enjoyed a biscuit with his tea, but he had no flour. He had very few beans left and was nearly out of salt. The bacon had been used up a long time ago.

  He took out half a cheroot, then lit it with a burning stick from the fire. After that he found a mossy rock protruding from the side of a hollow and went over to sit down and contemplate his next move.

  It was clear that he was going to have to go into town to replenish his supplies. The question was: Did he have enough money to do so or was he going to have to take a job for a while?

  He emptied his billfold and turned his pocket out onto the rock. He counted six dollars, clearly not enough to last him all the way to New O
rleans. He was going to have to find work somewhere, playing the piano if possible, though he had let his funds get so low that he would be willing to take a somewhat more physical job if it became necessary.

  Four days later he came across a railroad and began following it south.

  Toward midday he heard the high, keening sound of a steam-powered saw and knew that he was close to a town. As he came closer, he smelled meat cooking and bread baking. His stomach churned as those aromas reminded him of just how hungry he really was.

  Finally he saw a church steeple rising through the trees, a tall spire, topped by a brass-plated cross that glistened in the high-noon sun. When he reached a road that was running parallel to the railroad tracks, he moved onto it and followed it the rest of the way into the settlement.

  The town impressed him with its bustling activity. In addition to the working sawmill, there were several other examples of commerce: freight wagons lumbering down the street, carpenters erecting a new building, and a white apron-wearing store clerk who was sweeping the boardwalk in front of his place of employment.

  Well-maintained boardwalks ran the length of the town on either side of the street. At the end of each block, planks were laid across the road to allow pedestrians to cross to the other side without having to walk in the dirt or mud. Hawke stopped his horse and waited patiently at one of the intersections while he watched a woman cross on a plank, holding her skirt up above her ankles, daintily, to keep the hem from soiling. She nodded her appreciation to him as she stepped up onto the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street.

  When the woman had successfully negotiated the street, Hawke clucked at his horse, and it stepped across the plank, then headed toward the livery, a little farther down.

  A lively game of horseshoes was in effect in an open lot alongside the livery, and one of the players threw a ringer, evidenced by the clanging sound of the horseshoe hanging onto the stob. The ringer was followed by an equal round of cheers and groans.

  Hawke dismounted in front of the livery stable.

  A boy, no older than fourteen, came toward him.

  “Take your horse, mister?” the boy asked.

  “Yes, thanks,” Hawke said as he removed his saddlebags, then snaked the Winchester out of its sheath. “Take his saddle off and give him a rubdown,” he added, flipping a nickel toward the boy.

  “Yes, sir!” the boy replied with a big smile, catching the nickel in midair.

  An old man got up from the barrel he had been sitting on and walked, with a limp, over to Hawke. “How long will you be stayin’?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Hawke said.

  “It’ll cost you fifteen cents a night,” he said, nodding toward the horse. He pulled out a red handkerchief, blew his nose, then stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket. “Or you can stay for a whole week for seventy-five cents. You save money that way.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be staying,” Hawke said. “So we’ll take it one night at a time. Does the fifteen cents include feeding him?”

  “Hay, only. Oats’ll cost you five cents extra.”

  Hawke gave him a silver dollar. “Give me eighty cents back and give ’im oats tonight. He’s been ridden pretty hard for the last several weeks,” Hawke said. “If I need to leave him in tomorrow, I’ll be back.”

  “If you ain’t paid for another night by four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, he’ll be turned out,” the old man warned.

  “Sounds fair to me,” Hawke said.

  The old man gave him his change.

  “By the way, where am I?” Hawke asked.

  “Brown’s Livery.”

  “No, I mean what is this town?”

  “This here is West Plains, Missouri,” the man said.

  “Thanks. Seems like a nice, industrious town.”

  “We like it.”

  Suddenly several gunshots interrupted their conversation, and though they began echoing back from the surrounding hills, Hawke was able to discern where the initial shots came from. He looked quickly toward the opposite end of the street, where he saw two men backing out of a building. A sign, protruding over the boardwalk from the front of the building, identified it as the Bank of West Plains.

  The two men were shooting back into the bank, whether at specific targets or just to provide cover for themselves, Hawke didn’t know.

  “Bank robbery!” someone called. “They’re holdin’ up the bank!”

  The town-crier-like announcement wasn’t really needed. Everyone on the street, from the sweeping store clerk, to the men loading a freight wagon, to those playing horseshoes, knew what was going on.

  “Get the hell out of the way! Get off the street if you don’t want to get shot!” one of the bank robbers shouted loudly, and he punctuated his shout by firing a couple of shots down the street. The shots had the effect he wanted, because everyone scattered.

  A third man suddenly appeared from the alley that ran between the bank and the neighboring apothecary. He was riding one horse and leading two others. Leaning down, he handed the reins to the two bank robbers and, quickly, they climbed into the saddles. Mounted now, they started shooting up the town in order to keep people off the street.

  Most of the townspeople had cleared out of the way, but looking across the street, Hawke saw the woman who had crossed on the planking in front of him a moment earlier. She was still exposed, standing on the boardwalk in front of the millinery, absolutely frozen in fear.

  “That woman needs to get out of the way,” Hawke said.

  “Oh my God, that’s Emma!” the old man at the livery shouted. He pointed at the young woman. “That’s my daughter!”

  The window of the millinery shop shattered as a bullet hit it. Great shards of glass came crashing down onto the boardwalk around her. She let out a scream of fear, but was still too frightened to move.

  Dropping his saddlebags, but holding on to his rifle, Hawke ran out into the street toward the woman, shouting at her as he did so.

  “Go inside, miss!” he shouted. He was waving with his hand, indicating she should leave. “Go inside and get down!”

  Hawke’s immediate goal was to get the woman to safety, but by his action he had put himself in the path of the robbers’ escape route. That made him a target and he heard a bullet whiz by his ear.

  A second bullet kicked up dirt in the street very near him.

  Turning toward the bank robbers, Hawke saw all three of them bearing down on him. Muzzle flashes and puffs of smoke from their pistols showed that all three were firing right at him, an indication underscored by the bullets that buzzed by his head like an angry swarm of bees.

  Raising his Winchester to his shoulder, Hawke jacked a shell into the chamber, aimed at the one in the middle, and fired. Those who were watching from various vantage points around town saw a puff of dust and a mist of blood fly up from the impact of the bullet. Then, even as that robber was tumbling from his saddle, Hawke snapped the lever down and back up and fired a second time. A second robber fell as well, but this one didn’t fall as cleanly as the first, because his foot got hung up in the stirrup and he was being dragged through the dirt.

  Like a toreador avoiding the charge of a bull, Hawke stepped adroitly aside as the two horses pounded by: one empty and the other dragging its rider, who was now screaming at his mount to stop.

  The third robber, as if just now realizing that he was alone, reined in his own horse, tossed his gun down, and threw both arms into the air.

  “No, no!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot, don’t shoot! I quit, I quit!”

  With the third bank robber’s surrender, nearly a dozen armed men of the town came running out into the street with their guns aimed at the one remaining robber.

  “Get down from there, mister,” one of the men shouted in an authoritative voice. His authority, Hawke saw, came from the badge he was wearing on his vest.

  Hawke hurried over to the woman.

  “Miss, are you all right?” he asked
. “Were you hit?”

  “No, I’m…I’m fine,” she answered in a weak and trembling voice.

  The man at the livery was the first on the scene, arriving almost immediately after Hawke. He put his arms around his daughter and pulled her to him.

  The next person on the scene was one of the horseshoe players. “Mister…that’s about the bravest thing I ever seen,” the horseshoe player said to Hawke. “I mean, the way you stood out there in the middle of the street and faced them three fellas down like that.”

  “I really didn’t have much choice,” Hawke replied. “I suddenly found myself trapped out in the middle of the street with nowhere else to go.”

  “The only reason you was trapped there was because you was comin’ over here to save my daughter,” the liveryman said. He stuck his hand in his pocket and took out the silver dollar Hawke had just given him. “Here, take your money back. It’s no good with me. Your horse can stay as long as he wants. And he’ll be eatin’ oats too.”

  “I appreciate that,” Hawke said as he reached into his pocket to pull out the change the liveryman had given him. “No, sir, you can keep that too,” the liveryman said.

  Many of the other townspeople began arriving then, and they congregated on the boardwalk in front of the millinery shop.

  “How’s your daughter, Fred?” one of them asked.

  “She’s fine, thanks to this man,” Fred said, indicating Hawke.

  “Yeah, I seen him standing out there in the middle of the road, firin’ that rifle like he was wielding Gideon’s sword or somethin’,” the local said.

  The man Hawke had seen wearing the badge stepped up to speak to Hawke. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Sheriff Peach,” he said. “And, mister, I want to thank you for what you done. You not only saved Miss Brown, you probably saved several others by stoppin’ those men before they could shoot up the whole town. Not only that, you got the bank’s money back. The whole town owes you for that.”

  Two men came up from the far end of the street then, bringing back the robber who had been dragged off by his horse. The robber was walking between them, unsteadily, but obviously not seriously wounded. There was a bullet hole in his shoulder, as evidenced by the black hole and stain of blood on his shirt sleeve.