Land Grabbers

by Paul Lederer

  ‘I’m thinking that I wish to hell that I was a man who had had a great deal of military experience. Frankly, this not only worries me, it scares me. I don’t like being responsible for those young men – for any of them.’

  ‘You’ll do fine,’ Trish said warmly.

  I almost believed her.

  ‘You’ve given everyone orders except me,’ Trish commented, fixing her dark blue eyes on me. ‘What do you want me to do, Giles?’

  ‘Saddle a horse and ride. Get out of here, Trish. There will be too many guns and too much blood. I don’t want you here.’

  ‘Uh-uh,’ she responded. ‘No, Giles. You asked everyone else to stay and fight for their land. Why should I be the exception? I’m willing to fight, too. I owe it to my father’s memory. I’m in this with you to the bitter end.’

  SIX

  We could see their dust. Studying them through the field glasses that Charles Webb had brought along, I could make out the horses, small as ants and the wagons they were pulling. Hammond Cole’s soldiers, flanked out on either side of the trail, moved slowly toward Canoga, their horses obviously desert-weary.

  ‘I counted twenty-two men,’ Charles said as I handed the binoculars back to him. His expression was grim but not fearful. He passed the field glasses to his brother, Oliver, who lay stretched out beside us as we studied the approaching enemy from the sun-heated ledge of stone. Below us was the road Cole must travel to reach the Canoga. I had noted that when first studying the map the Webb boys had drawn up for me.

  There were only two ways to reach Canoga, sheltered as it was on three sides by the broken hills. The first was across the naked desert, the route Trish and I had traveled; the second was up through the depths of the mile-long canyon. This was the trail the settlers used when they had to leave Canoga to conduct business or reach far-off Tucson to freight in supplies. Cole’s spies had certainly reported this to him after reconnoitering the valley.

  ‘How are we going to fight that many!’ Ollie asked with a soft whistle.

  ‘Maybe Dad and the others will believe us now and get together,’ Charles said. He looked hopefully to me. ‘Giles?’

  ‘We can only delay them,’ I said. ‘Try to hold them back until the cavalry from Fort Grant can reach us – or at least until the ranchers can arm themselves for the fight.’

  ‘Delay them?’ Charles’s face was blank, then as he peered down the long red-walled canyon the hint of a smile appeared. ‘Oh … I see!’

  ‘Somebody tell me,’ Ollie Webb said heatedly. ‘I don’t know what you two have in mind.’

  A part of the solution, although only a temporary one loomed beside and above us, an upthrusting monument of crumbling red rocks. Some of the stones were house-sized – these we could not hope to move without explosives, but others seemed so precariously balanced that with effort and the help of inertia, they could be sent rolling and tumbling from the canyon rim. Would this be enough to clog the road making passage impossible? Probably not, but certainly enough to halt the wagons, enough to make picking one’s way through on horseback slow and dangerous. Dangerous because once the landslide occurred the riders would become aware that there were men watching them through their gunsights from the rim above.

  ‘Pa would kill us,’ Ollie said dolefully. ‘You know how long it took to grade that road in the first place?’

  Charles and I ignored the complaint. For his part Charles was already to his feet, circling the towering stack of boulders, searching for a weak spot.

  ‘That won’t stop them, if they’re as determined as you say,’ Ollie complained. ‘After we block the trail – supposing we can – they’ll still be able to ride their horses through or around, won’t they?’ Sweat trickled from his forehead into his eyes.

  ‘Then we’ll be waiting to slow them down,’ I said. ‘With snipers up here, they won’t be eager to advance. After dark Cole may try it … but I wouldn’t want to ride that road in the dark.’

  ‘They can go around,’ Ollie pointed out, ‘circle back to the desert and ride in the back side of the valley – like you did.’

  ‘They can,’ I was forced to agree, ‘but that takes time, at least an entire day. Nothing we do can hold Cole back forever, but if this works, it may delay them long enough so that the soldiers from Camp Grant will have time to get here.’

  ‘You say that as if you’re sure they’ll come. That they’ll listen to Ned, believe some kid with a wild story, drop what they’re doing and come to our rescue.’ Ollie, I thought, was close to tears despite his nearness to manhood.

  ‘You see that outcropping just above where that broken piñon is rooted,’ Charlie Webb was saying as he strode up to us, dusting his jeans off. ‘The rocks underneath are ready to crumble away. It wouldn’t take much to get them rolling. Then, if the ledge follows, we can make us a hell of a mess down below.’

  ‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘let’s give it a try.’ Charlie was grinning, relishing the idea of starting a landslide to block off the road below. Ollie just looked miserable.

  Hammond Cole’s ‘cavalry’ was still far distant. The men were without recognizable features, the horses all the same shadowy color as they neared the mouth of the canyon where it fanned out on to the long sage-studded desert flats.

  ‘Maybe we should fire a few warning shots,’ Ollie suggested.

  ‘It’d be like throwing peas at them, Ollie. I doubt they’d even hear the reports. Wait. There’ll be plenty of time to shoot later.’

  He nodded mutely, standing there with his Winchester in hand, obviously stunned by the situation he had gotten himself into. Charles meanwhile had clambered up on to the face of the column of crumbling red stone and cinched his rope around the most likely looking one of the bunch – the keystone, or so we hoped. Returning, he played out his lariat and swung into his horse’s saddle, throwing a daily loop around his pommel.

  ‘Here goes nothing,’ he said cheerfully and he began backing his pony from the crumbling monument. I found myself holding my breath as the rope drew taut and the little chestnut horse braced itself with all four feet and struggled against the strain of the rope. I saw – thought I saw – some of the smaller, head-sized stones beneath and beside the boulder move as the horse continued to back. Charlie’s face was set grimly as he urged the horse to continue.

  When the slide began it was nothing like I had imagined. A dozen rocks the size of a kid’s ball trickled from beneath the boulder Charlie had lashed on to and tumbled over the rim, rolling and bouncing down the canyon walls. A trickle of red dust followed. Then the whole pile of rotten sandstone seemed to come apart at once as if someone had set off a dynamite charge.

  ‘Slip the line, Charlie!’ I yelled, and he looked at me blankly. Then his eyes opened wide as he saw the entire upper table of stone dip its head and cut loose. He managed to slip the dally knot and fling the rope aside as the boulder he had been tugging on jerked to one side, hesitated and then racketed down the canyon, splitting in two as it went. The rest of the red ledge followed and a mountain of stone, hundreds of tons of it, followed it into the maw of the canyon, sending clouds of red dust skyward.

  Ollie and I stood on the lip of the canyon rim, watching in awe as the mass of bounding, rolling, sliding stone thundered into its depths. Charlie slipped up beside us and croaked dryly: ‘If I’d been a few seconds slower. Me and my pony both—’

  I gripped his shoulder and grinned. ‘You weren’t, though.’

  We watched the rocks thunder downward, and through the veil of settling dust we could see that there was no way a wagon would pass that way; it would be tricky for a man on horseback, and once they knew there were snipers up there, they would soon give that up as well.

  ‘You did it, Charlie,’ I said appreciatively and he grinned.

  ‘I guess I did,’ he replied. ‘But, Giles – don’t ever let me pull such a fool stunt again!’

  The wind had begun to fuss a little and the fine red dust drifted southward. We could see that
the soldiers had pulled up. There was some kind of activity among them, ant-sized horsemen moving in confused circles.

  ‘Somebody’s got to go back to Trish’s place and tell them what has happened. Find out if any more men have stepped forward to volunteer to help us,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a job for you, Giles,’ Ollie replied.

  ‘I guess it is,’ I said, although I still hated to leave these two young men out here on their own. ‘Is there another way around?’ I asked Charles. ‘Or have we got them blocked for now?’

  ‘There’s an old Indian trail,’ he said, nodding toward the west. ‘But I doubt that even their spies found it. Besides, we can see anyone trying to loop that way.’

  ‘Not after dark,’ I commented, looking to the skies which were beginning to dull and color with the approach of sunset.

  ‘After dark I don’t think anyone can travel that road,’ Charlie said. ‘It was meant to be a footpath only. I wouldn’t want to take a horse up or down it even in daylight.’

  ‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘If they get within reasonable rifle range, you might want to pepper them with a few warning shots. It would be a miracle if you hit anything, but it will give them the idea. Just don’t burn up ammo needlessly.’

  I swung into the saddle of Trish’s buckskin horse. I had chosen the ornery cuss over the placid roan because he seemed tough and toughness was what I figured to require of a horse before this was ended.

  I followed the same trail the boys had shown me back to the settlement. I didn’t know the area well enough to take a chance on another route. The breeze was drifting through the upper reaches of the gnarled piñon pine trees I passed through as I circled the upper limit of the canyon and reached the wagon road into Canoga. For the first mile the land was rocky, studded with yucca and tightly growing manzanita in the washes, but eventually I reached the flats where the ground water encouraged buffalo grass and wild oats to grow. I saw them coming before they could have seen me with the ball of the low red sun at my back and I drew up, waiting cautiously.

  When they were nearer enough to recognize I lifted a hand and called out. Gus Staley and Harold Kendrick, wearing coats, carrying rifles, reined in alongside me.

  ‘Where you fellows riding to?’ I asked.

  ‘We figured you could use some help out here,’ Kendrick said.

  ‘We could. How’d you know there was trouble?’

  ‘Couldn’t miss that,’ Kendrick said, waving an arm toward the southern sky where traces of the red cloud the landslide had caused still hung in the evening air.

  ‘I appreciate your coming,’ I said honestly. ‘I didn’t feel too good about leaving the two Webb boys back there on their own. They figured that it was up to me to return to Canoga and see if I could muster some more men.’

  ‘I doubt that will happen,’ Kendrick said, turning his head to spit. ‘Barney Webb will likely be looking to bash your head in for you.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked in surprise.

  ‘You sent his three boys off. He wants those boys at home, working from dawn to dusk, not off playing soldier.’

  ‘I didn’t force them to come along,’ I said. ‘They just seemed to have a better understanding of circumstances than their father.’

  ‘Barney’s plumb mean when he’s mad,’ Gus Staley said.

  ‘That can’t be helped. I’m trying to save his land for him, for all of you. I’m not getting much in the way of thanks.’

  ‘Why?’ Staley asked laconically. ‘Why are you doing it, Clanahan?’

  ‘You know why, Gus,’ Harold Kendrick said with a faint smile. I knew they were referring to Trish, but chose to ignore the implication.

  I went on: ‘If Barney Webb would take the trouble to ride out here, I could show him the proof of what we’ve been saying. We’ve an army of land grabbers cut off in the canyon.’

  ‘That wouldn’t matter to Webb. He doesn’t believe anything he doesn’t want to,’ Kendrick said. ‘Harold and me got to talking about matters after we left Trish Connely’s house. It was Webb and Wes King who got us to disbelieving that young fellow, Brad Champion, when he warned us. Well, we figured that maybe Barney was right back then. But when a second man comes to tell the same tale, you’ve got to rearrange your thinking some.’

  ‘There’s a few of the other men who are leaning the same way,’ Gus Staley said. ‘Think we can hold off this so-called army if we all were to get together?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘But it beats loading your wagons and pulling off the land without a fight, doesn’t it?’ The buckskin horse shifted its feet impatiently under me. The land was purpling, darkness settling rapidly. ‘I’d better let you boys go along,’ I said, ‘but before you do, tell me: what in the hell is the matter with Barney Webb?’

  ‘Want me to tell him, Gus? It’s like this,’ Harold Kendrick said, leaning forward in the saddle, his hands crossed on the pommel. ‘Barney Webb and Wes King were late-comers to Canoga. The rest of us had been living on our homesteads for almost a year. There really wasn’t any land worth a damn that hadn’t been filed on already.

  ‘Barney Webb had a wife and three boys with him and we figured, well – we’ve been lucky to find this valley, and these folks have nothing. We told Webb and King that we would be willing to shave a little off our property so that they could try to make a start up here. Told them, though, that it wasn’t going to be the best land, the easiest to till or having the best water.’

  Kendrick went on. ‘They shook our hands, said that it was big of us, that whatever we could work out they would be satisfied and grateful.’

  ‘They ain’t been neither one since,’ Gus Staley grumbled.

  ‘I see,’ I said thoughtfully, wondering at the implications of what I had heard. The wind was cool on my back now and the trail was darkening rapidly.

  ‘We’d better be going now, Clanahan. Take some well-meant advice. Watch yourself around Barney Webb. And Wes King.’

  ‘Did you give Brad Champion the same advice?’ I asked, and they looked through me, not at me before they started their ponies ahead, following the canyon trail up toward the piney ridge.

  I rode past three or four small ranches as the sky went to blue-black and the stars began to blink on. Within a mile of Trish’s house I came across three more men riding west. Their leader was a rough-looking, whiskered man named DeFord, a lanky scarecrow of a rancher called Dee Cobbold and a third man who never offered his name.

  ‘After listening to Gus Staley and Kendrick, we figured it was time to help out,’ DeFord told me as the four of us briefly reined up at the side of the road. ‘There’s a few more men waiting at the Connely ranch to talk to you. Nobody really knows what to do, but there’s more of us willing to try whatever it takes.’

  That lifted my spirits some. As I approached Trish’s house, I could see that DeFord had been telling the truth. Not a few horses, but as many as ten stood tethered to the hitchrail and beneath the oak trees. I rode directly to the house, swung down and started toward the door without seeing to my horse first. Something I never did, but these were extraordinary times. The door was closed, but it swung open as I stepped up on to the porch.

  The first man I saw, framed in the doorway, his thick features twisted with anger, was Barney Webb.

  ‘Webb—’ I began, but he didn’t want to hear what I had to tell him.

  ‘You rotten bastard!’ he bellowed. ‘What are you trying to do to me? Sneaking around behind my back and dragging my three sons into your problems?’

  I would have told him, but never got the chance. With his last words, Webb stepped out to meet me and I saw his heavy fist arcing through the air but could not duck quickly enough to get out of its way. His blow struck against the side of my skull, a glancing strike above my ear. It wasn’t enough to take me down, but plenty enough to start my head spinning. There were colored pinwheels behind my eyes as I crouched, raised my hands in front of my face to ward him off and stepped back away from his onsla
ught. Webb wasn’t finished with me yet. He had only begun.

  I backed into a pole upright and took a heavy blow to my ribs. Cursing, I jabbed back with my left, trying to get the hulking rancher off of me. I did manage to slip one good shot in past his raised fists and saw with satisfaction that I had cracked his nose hard enough to start the blood flowing from his nostrils. That didn’t slow him down either, but only enraged him further. I tried to back away as I continued to jab at the big man’s face, but my bootheel hit the edge of the porch and I tripped, stumbling into the yard where the light from within the cabin lit a patch of earth about the side of a prize-fighting ring. Behind Webb now I could see a crowd of men gathered, a few of them cheering him on, others watching soberly.

  Webb came at me steadily, plodding ahead, winging lefts and rights, some of which I was able to block, some of which landed on my shoulders, head and neck with stunning force. Continuing to back away I jabbed sharply, looping one right-hand shot over his guard to land above his left eye. It did little damage and did nothing to slow him down.

  He swung at me again, missing, and I kicked him on the kneecap as hard as I could. Groaning, Webb staggered slightly, involuntarily bent forward to clutch his damaged knee and I swung an upper-cut with everything I had in me, catching him on the point of his shovel-shaped jaw. It felt like I had shattered every bone in my hand, but Webb got even worse. His eyes rolled up in his head, his arms went limp and he stood there bobbing apelike for a moment before falling forward to land on his face against the hard-packed earth of the ranch yard.

  Panting I leaned over him, fists still clenched, but he did not rise or even twitch. Rubbing my right hand, I stepped over him and returned to the porch. No one said anything, no one tried to stop me as I entered the house, looked around.…

  And saw Jake Shockley sitting in Trish’s chair, studying me with glittering, hate-filled eyes.

  SEVEN

  The moment was incomprehensible. I thought I must have taken one too many punches. There, in Trish’s living room sat Jake Shockley, and standing around the room I recognized Curt and the man called Vallejo from Campo del Bianca, among the other tough-looking strangers.