Hanging in Wild Wind

by Ralph Cotton

  “Congratulations, Detective,” Sam said, but he noted that Longworth wasn’t smiling about his good fortune.

  “It helped that Tommy Tinkens had just come to Shelly and me and told us about a strongbox full of Western Railways’ money lying hidden under the ore samples in the freight wagon.”

  Sam just stared at him for a second, then said, “That was a piece of luck.”

  “I’ll say,” Longworth said, lowering his voice a little. “I acted as if I knew it was there all along. Hollister couldn’t praise me enough. That’s when he put me in charge here.”

  “Good for you,” said Sam. He stared at Longworth for a moment, then said, “But this is not what you want to talk to me about, is it?”

  “No, it’s not,” said Longworth. He let out a breath and said in a shaky voice, “It’s about the prisoners, Ranger. The judge hanged them, every one. He said they were all involved . . . they were all guilty.”

  The ranger sat staring, stunned, unable to speak for a second. Then he swallowed a dry knot in his throat and said, “Every one of them? Even Kitty Dellaros?”

  “Yes, Ranger, even Miss Dellaros,” Longworth said. “I hope I never have to see anything like that ever again.” He looked away. Then he looked up at the expression on the ranger’s face. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Sam didn’t reply. He sat staring at the rope marks on the timber along the front of the boardwalk. “He hanged them right there? No different than the lynch mob was going to do?”

  “Yes,” said Longworth. “He said this was different. Said it was official, so that made it more civilized.” He paused, then added, “He also had some chairs set up, and had them shoved off the chair instead of drawing them up by hand and strangling them, the way the lynch mob was going to do.”

  Sam still didn’t answer. He looked back and forth along the dirt street and said, “I told Kitty that she had nothing to worry about—that Lawrence Olin wasn’t a hanging judge.”

  “She said you told her that,” Longworth said quietly. “Shelly talked to her some. . . . You know, to help settle her down at the end.”

  Sam just stared at him.

  “She asked Shelly to tell you that it was okay; she never would have been a good seamstress anyway.” He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the tin locket and handed it up to the ranger. “She said she wanted you to have this. It’s what Shelly calls an orphan locket. She was given one just like it when the orphan train brought her out here. She said they put a child’s own picture in it and would say, ‘This is so you never forget who you are.’”

  Sam took the locket, gripped in tight in his gloved hand and gave a sigh, his eyes closed for a moment. “Why did the judge do this?” he asked no one in particular, shaking his bowed head.

  “Hollister pressed him into doing it, Ranger,” Longworth said. “I work for Western Railways, but I’m not a fool. I see how they are. They are powerful and they are mean-spirited. They get what they want, and they trample who they want, in the name of progress.”

  Sam looked off toward the hotel, where the fancy two-horse buggy sat at the iron hitch rail. “Is that Hollister’s rig?”

  “Yes,” said Longworth. “He said Western Railways is the law here now, and that I’m the man wearing the badge for them. You can go talk with him, if you think you should. But I think it’s best if I’m there with you.”

  “No, I don’t want to talk to him,” Sam said. He pictured the triangle of law Judge Olin had talked about and drawn in the air with a spoon. “That’s a level of law I expect I don’t yet understand.”

  “Me neither,” said Longworth. He paused, then said, “But we’re both young. We’re still learning.”

  “Yeah,” the ranger said, “learning something new every day. . . .” He touched his hat brim and started to turn the big stallion.

  “Wait, Ranger,” said Longworth, standing in the dirt street, still holding the reins of the two horses. “Spend the night at the hotel—get some rest. You can leave early in the morning.”

  “Tonight’s a good night for me to be out under the stars,” Sam said. He gave the stallion a touch of his boot heels. “Take us on, Black Pot,” he said, and he rode away toward the darkening badlands.

  Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack is back!

  Don’t miss a page of action from America’s most

  exciting Western author, Ralph Cotton.

  BLACK VALLEY RIDERS

  Coming from Signet in November 2010

  The Cuban, Dee Sandoval, sat perched high atop a towering pine overlooking the small badlands mining town of Minton Hill, which lay a good thousand yards east of him. But from this height, through his brass-trimmed naval telescope, he had an unobstructed view of the dirt street and the familiar faces of the three riders entering the settlement at a loose gallop.

  On the rocky ground below, the older man, Cadden Thorn, sat on his horse, staring up at him. When Thorn saw Sandoval lower the battered telescope, he called up to him, “Are those our targets, Sandy?” A long, scimitar-style Mameluke sword hung from a metal clip down the left side of his saddle horn.

  “Yes, it is them,” Sandoval called down to him in English as good as any Thorn was used to hearing. “There is one rider following them, less than a mile behind.” He swung a big Swiss rifle from his shoulder by its strap and began to make adjustments on its raised sights as he judged the wind, the sway of the pine and the slant of the afternoon sunlight.

  “I had a hunch there would be someone on their trail,” Thorn said. Uncrossing his wrists from his saddle horn and adjusting the reins in his hands, he murmured to himself, “A lawman, I have no doubt.”

  “Yes,” said Sandoval. “It’s the ranger—the one who wears the gray sombrero.”

  “The ranger, of course,” Thorn said under his breath. He paused only for a second, then called up to Sandoval in a resolved tone, “He’ll have to be reckoned with.” He turned his horse to the thin trail reaching down the hillside to the main trail. “You know what to do. Carry on.”

  Without looking down from his swaying perch Sandoval only nodded as he wrapped his left forearm into the leather rifle strap and raised the butt to the curve of his right shoulder. Yes . . . I know what to do, he reminded himself. He relaxed against the trunk of the pine and let his body take on the tree’s back-and-forth rhythm. He squatted deep on his right leg, his knee almost to his chin, his left leg hanging loose down past the bough beneath him, in order to serve as a counterbalance when the recoil of the big rifle punched his shoulder.

  He had learned this type of shooting by wrapping a safety rope around the mast of a ship and tying off before making his shots. But not these days. Tying off was for beginners. He knew the rifle and its recoil—how to rock back with it just enough and not let it unseat him. This weapon had become a part of him over the past year. It was not his first long-range rifle.

  He had equally given service to the Spencer tin-plated carbine and the Springfield Trapdoor rifle over the years. But he had come to know the feel and force of the big Swiss Husqvarna precision rifle like he knew his own heartbeat.

  Beneath him, the Cuban rifleman caught a peripheral glance of Thorn riding down the steep hillside and out across a rocky stretch of flatlands leading toward town. Sandoval pinned the rifle against the tree trunk with his knee and raised the telescope to his eye for another look before he began shooting.

  Young Arizona Ranger Samuel Burrack saw the rise of trail dust coming toward Minton Hill from the west, beneath a line of hills on the other side of the sandy flatlands. It could be anyone, he told himself, letting the big Appaloosa stallion pull the trail beneath them at a fast, strong pace. Taking on a gang the size of the Black Valley Riders had him looking over his shoulder a little more than usual.

  A gang that size is capable of anything, he thought, riding on. A haze of dust still loomed in the evening air from the three riders who had stirred it up only moments before him. As he neared the edge of town, Sam slowed the stallion to a
walk, patting its sweaty withers and whispering down to it “Easy, Black Pot. You got us here. We’re in no hurry now.”

  The stallion chuffed and cantered down, slinging its wet mane back and forth.

  The ranger eyed the wide dirt street ahead of him and realized what a perfect setup this would be for an ambush: late afternoon, the empty street, a town of working men resting from the heat of the day before venturing out to the cantinas and gambling parlors.

  He saw no sign of the three men’s horses at the hitch rails along the street. He might not have been on the job long, but he could recognize when things weren’t quite right. And this was one of those times, he knew. Yet in spite of a nagging feeling in the pit of his stomach, he proceeded, keeping the stallion at a walk rather then stopping altogether and tipping his hand.

  In preparation he slid his Winchester rifle from its saddle boot and carried it in his left hand, his thumb over the hammer, his finger inside the trigger guard. Let the play begin, he told himself, feeling the prickly sensation of being watched down the length of a gun barrel as he glanced along either side of the street.

  It was almost a sense of relief when he saw two of the three men step out of an alleyway and move to the middle of the street, facing him. But the appearance of only two of them presented a whole new situation. Where was the third? He stopped the stallion, swung down from his saddle and swatted his gloved hand on the animal’s wet rump, sending it out of the street. The big Appaloosa loped into a nearby alleyway, turned and stood staring out at him through its dark eyes.

  “Step away from me, Riley,” one of the gunmen, a wild Wyoming outlaw named Virgil Bates, whispered to the other, a West Texan killer named Bertram Riley. “Let’s get him standing still, talking, while our shooter draws a good bead on him.”

  “You’ve got it,” answered Riley. “I can’t wait to see his brains hit the dirt, this sumbitch.” He spit in the ranger’s direction and sidestepped across the street. “I’ve never been dogged so long, nor so hard, in my life.”

  “Then pay attention,” said Bates. “It’s time we stuck this ranger under ground.”

  From the middle of the street, the young ranger watched as the two eased forward like two stalking wolves, their hands poised beside their holstered Colts.

  “You are a case to beat all others, boy-o, you know that?” Virgil Bates called out to the ranger. He stopped forty feet away and planted his feet firmly. “I can’t tell you how many times I have wanted to stop and choke you to death with my bare hands this past week.”

  “You are one annoying little law dog, Ranger,” said Riley, also stopping, standing with twenty feet between him and his partner.

  Sam could not shake the feeling that he was being sighted down on at that very moment. But he had a job to do. He stopped and planted his feet shoulder width apart. Ignoring their taunting, he called out to them in an officious tone, “Virgil Bates and Bertram Riley, you are both under arrest for murder, robbery and arson. Loosen your gun belts and let them fall to the ground.”

  The two killers chuckled. “Hear that, Riley?” said Bates. “He wants us to drop our gun belts in the dirt, like common saddle tramps.”

  “I heard it,” said Riley. He called out to the ranger, “We’d get our nice clean guns all dirty if we did like you said, boy. Did you even consider that before you asked?”

  “I didn’t ask,” Sam said calmly, but with iron in his voice. “I’m taking you both in to stand before the territorial judge.”

  As he spoke, his right hand went matter-of-factly around the big Colt on his hip and raised it deftly from the holster, as if he’d only brought it up to show it to them. Then his thumb pulled back the hammer with a resolved click. In his left hand, the barrel of his rifle tipped upward slowly at the same time, making the same sound as his left thumb cocked it.

  “I’ll be damned . . . ,” Bates murmured.

  Both outlaws gave a strange dumbfounded look, seeing the two open gun bores staring at them, both hammers back, ready to fire. Somehow the two gunmen had allowed this pup of a ranger to get the drop on them. It was that simple and smooth—no warning, no threat. All in clear view, as easily as if he’d drawn a pipe from his pocket.

  “You ain’t taking me no-damn-where,” Riley shouted, angered that he’d been caught off guard even with his eyes on the serious young man. “You’ve been wanting to take a bite out of the Black Valley Riders. Here I am!” He stepped forward; his hand went for his gun. But even as he made his play, his eyes took a fast glance upward along the roofline.

  From that roofline, the ranger caught the flash of sunlight on a gun barrel as he pulled the trigger on his own Colt and felt it buck in his hand.

  Here it comes—ambush. . . .

  His shot hit Riley dead center and sent him spinning backward as the gunman’s six-shooter slipped its holster and fell from his hand.

  There was no time to turn away from Bates long enough to deal with the hidden rifleman. The ranger fired his Winchester one-handed, and noted a look of satisfaction come over Bates’ face, as if the outlaw knew that even as he died, the ranger was dying with him.

  Bates staggered backward as the rifle bullet caught him squarely in his chest, and the ranger spun toward the roofline. He knew beyond hope that he was too late, yet he had to play it out. There stood the third man, Bobby Boy Parsons, who had stepped boldly out of the shadow of a roof facade, knowing he had the advantage—and making the best of it.

  The ranger made his move in spite of the futility of it. His hand snapped the big Colt upward, expecting Parsons’ rifle shot to hit him any second. He braced himself. But instead of seeing a blast of fire and smoke erupt from Parsons’ aimed gun barrel, he saw the gunman jerk straight up onto his toes and appear to hang suspended in thin air for a moment.

  Then Parsons’ head exploded silently in a bloody mist, and his body crumbled. He fell from the roof-top like a broken child’s toy as the sound of a distant gunshot caught up with itself and rolled like thunder across the badlands floor.

  Sam spun in the street, guns in hand, prepared for anything, not knowing what to expect.

  “Hold your fire, Ranger!” a voice called out.

  Turning toward the sound of the voice and a rumble of a horse’s hooves, he saw a single rider come rounding out of an alleyway at a fast gallop. Sam held his fire, but he remained poised and ready. The rider reined the horse less than ten feet from him, and the ranger couldn’t help but notice the Mameluke sword hanging from the man’s saddle horn.

  “Stand down, sir,” the man said, as if issuing an order. “We mean you no harm.”

  We . . . ? The ranger gave a quick look around.

  “I’m Cadden Thorn, bounty hunter,” said the rider, holding his empty hands chest high in a show of peace. He gestured toward the body of Bobby Parsons, most of the top of his skull missing, lying in the dirt where he’d fallen. “We’re claiming the bounty on Parsons. I charge you to give witness to his death.”

  We, again . . . Sam cut another glance along the street—empty, save for the curious heads of wary townsfolk beginning to poke forward from store doorways along the boardwalk.

  Seeing the ranger’s apprehension, the tall, lean, older bounty hunter said beneath a straight-trimmed graying mustache, “At ease, Ranger. If I meant you harm, you wouldn’t be upright at this moment.”

  The ranger didn’t like what he took to be a veiled threat, or at least a declaration that this bounty hunter had some sort of an advantage over him.

  “But I am upright, Mr. Thorn,” the ranger replied, cocking the Colt menacingly in his right hand. “If you want to remain upright yourself, you best explain what’s going on here.” As he spoke he gestured toward Parsons’ body in the dirt.

  The bounty hunter gave a tight smile of admiration, liking the way the young ranger handled himself. “Never back an inch, eh, Ranger?”

  “I’m not in the backing business, mister,” Sam said. He stared, awaiting an answer.

  “Well sp
oken, Ranger Burrack,” said Thorn, letting the ranger know that he realized who he was talking to. He gave a slight nod toward the hill line where the shot had come from, and said, “That was my man’s shot. He’s on his way here right now. We came here for these Black Valley Riders. Had you not killed those two, most likely we would have. As it turns out, we’re claiming the five-hundred-dollar bounty on Bobby Boy Parsons.” He paused, then added, “That is, if you have no objection.”

  Sam looked out and saw the rise of dust coming toward town from the hill line. He eased the hammer down on his Colt. Settling, he let out a breath and said, “No objections. The fact is, your man might have saved my life.”

  “Might have?” Thorn said wryly.

  Sam nodded. “All right, he did keep me from taking a bullet. . . . Obliged,” he said. He lowered the Colt into his holster without replacing the spent cartridges, but he kept his Winchester in hand, ready, but not at high guard.

  “Our pleasure, sir,” said Thorn. He touched two fingers to his hat brim, almost in a salute. Sam noted the small brass eagle that pinned the front of Thorn’s hat brim up against its battered crown. The eagle stood spread-winged, atop a globe and anchor.

  The Marine Corps emblem . . . , the ranger told himself.

  “That’s right, Ranger,” said Thorn, as if reading the ranger’s thoughts. “I’m Captain Cadden Thorn, United States Marines . . . emeritus, by choice, of course.” His right hand touched the handle of the sword in a sign of respect.

  “Of course,” said Sam. Now that he’d noted the eagle globe and anchor, Sam also noted the large military-style holster strapped across Thorn’s abdomen, its leather flap closed over the butt of a big Colt horse pistol.

  “Ranger Burrack!” the town sheriff called out from the boardwalk. “Pardon me for barging in if you two are not all finished shooting the living hell out of my town, but just what the blazes is going on here?”

  Sam turned to the boardwalk as the sheriff stepped down and walked forward. “Mr. Thorn, this is Sheriff Paul Braden,” Sam said. To the sheriff he said, “Sheriff Braden, this is Cadden Thorn, a bounty hunter trailing the same gang I’m after.”