The Violent Land

by William W. Johnstone

  “Jack Newton at the Rafter Nine was the only fella around here with a big enough spread to stand up to Kane,” Wynn continued. “The rest of us are just little greasy-sack outfits. But with no water and his grass dyin’ and his herd almost wiped out already, there was nothin’ he could do. He pulled up stakes and left. I’m surprised he sold the place to somebody, knowing how bad off it is. Doesn’t seem like something Jack would do.”

  “Maybe he died and his heirs did it,” Matt suggested. “They could have wanted to get something out of the ranch, even if it meant taking advantage of somebody else.”

  “I reckon that could be,” Wynn said with a nod. “Jack’s wife always struck me as a hard-hearted sort, even if that ain’t a gentlemanly thing to say.”

  Smoke turned as hoofbeats sounded outside.

  “Must be Preacher and the baron,” he said.

  “Baron?” Wynn repeated in surprise.

  “Baron Friedrich von Hoffman,” Smoke explained. “He’s a German aristocrat.”

  He left it at that, not explaining the troubles that had brought von Hoffman and his group here. That was the baron’s business, and it was up to him to explain it to his new neighbors if he wanted to.

  It would probably be a good idea to warn Wynn Courtland and the others about Klaus Berger, though. There was no telling what Berger might do, and the folks around here already had enough trouble with Jethro Kane and his hired guns, from the sound of what Smoke and Matt had been told.

  “And that’s the unlucky fella who bought the Rafter Nine?” Wynn asked.

  “Yep,” Smoke said. “And I reckon we’d better go tell him just what it is he’s bought for himself.”

  The baron’s eyes were wide with disbelief.

  “This cannot be,” he said. “It simply cannot.”

  “We’ll have to see for ourselves,” Smoke said, “but I believe what those fellas told us. They don’t have any reason to lie about it.”

  “But I was assured that the Rafter Nine had the potential to be one of the finest ranches in Wyoming!”

  “Maybe it would, if it had any water,” Matt said. “But without any water on the range ...”

  Erica stood nearby, listening as the men talked beside the lead wagon that was now parked in front of the Hawk Creek Station trading post. She let out a little moan of despair.

  “All for nothing,” she said. “We came all this way, and there is nothing here for us... .”

  “Stop that,” her cousin snapped as he turned sharply toward her. “I don’t believe this. Everything will be fine.”

  Not wanting to believe something didn’t mean that it wasn’t so, Smoke thought. He hadn’t wanted to believe it when he first heard that his pa was dead, either, or his older brother Luke, or his first wife, Nicole, and their infant son, Arthur. Part of him had cried out in denial of those tragedies, but that hadn’t changed the awful facts.

  “We can head on out there and take a look,” Smoke said. “Maybe things won’t be as bad as they seem.”

  He wasn’t trying to hold out any false hope to the immigrants, but he wasn’t the sort of man to give up until he had seen the lay of the land with his own eyes. Even then, giving up didn’t come natural to him. If somebody was willing to work hard enough, and fight hard enough if need be, almost anything was possible.

  Wynn, Hank, and Dusty had followed Smoke and Matt out onto the porch of the trading post. Wynn said now, “We’d be glad to take you and your friends out to the Rafter Nine so you can take a look-see at the place, Mr. Jensen.”

  “We’d be obliged, Wynn. And call me Smoke.”

  He introduced the three men to the baron, who shook hands with them rather perfunctorily.

  “Is there enough time left to get out to the ranch today?” Matt asked.

  “Should be,” Wynn replied, “if we go on pretty soon.”

  “There’s nothing keeping us here,” Smoke said. “You might want to pick up some supplies, Baron, but you can send somebody in to do that later.”

  Von Hoffman nodded, still looking a little stunned.

  “Yes,” he said. “We’ll do that.” He turned and called, “Everyone back on the wagons!”

  Most of the immigrants hadn’t heard the bad news yet, but Smoke could see their weariness anyway as they climbed back onto the wagon seats. They had come a long way, and some of them had to be wondering if their journey was ever going to be over.

  It would be soon, Smoke thought, but probably not in the way they had hoped it would be.

  There was no need for a scout now, since they had the three cowboys to guide the wagon train. Smoke, Matt, and Preacher rode with them in front of the column.

  “So that fella’s a real, honest-to-gosh European baron, eh?” Dusty Barnes asked.

  “Yep,” Smoke said.

  “Can’t you tell from the high an’ mighty way he acts?” Preacher added.

  “Well, he ain’t much like the fellas around here, that’s for sure,” Dusty agreed.

  Since von Hoffman was riding back alongside the lead wagon, Smoke thought this might be a good time to tell their three new friends about Klaus Berger.

  “It’s not my place to go into the whys and wherefores of it,” he began, “but the baron’s got some bad men gunning for him. Most of them are just hired pistoleros, but their leader is a man called Klaus Berger. He’s not an albino, but next thing to it. Long, pale hair and really dark eyes. Any of you boys seen somebody like that in these parts lately?”

  The three cowboys looked genuinely baffled. Wynn shook his head and said, “That don’t sound like anybody I’ve ever seen, let alone lately.”

  “Klaus Berger,” Hank repeated. “He sounds like a furriner, too.”

  “He’s German, like the baron,” Smoke explained. “But he speaks good English. I’m told that if you ever see or hear him, you’ll never forget him.”

  “What do we do if we see him?” Wynn asked.

  “Watch your back,” Smoke advised. “And I’d take it as a personal favor if you’d let one of us know.”

  “We can do that,” Dusty said. “So this is a really bad hombre, huh?”

  “Really bad,” Smoke agreed.

  “And that’s got something to do with why the baron can’t go back home, I’ll bet,” Wynn said. “I don’t go pokin’ my nose in another fella’s business, but it’s good to know when there might be a lobo wolf roamin’ around the vicinity.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Smoke said. “That’s why I told you about Berger.”

  “We’re obliged for that.” They had reached the top of a low, rolling hill. Wynn reined in and pointed. “We’ve been on Rafter Nine range for a while now. There’s the ranch headquarters.”

  Smoke brought his horse to a stop, too, as did the others. While they waited for the wagons to catch up, Smoke studied the layout in the little valley spread before them.

  It wasn’t too promising. There was a good-sized ranch house built out of logs, but it showed signs of abandonment. Some of the windows were broken out, and the front door hung open and crooked on its hinges. That meant varmints had gotten inside and the place would probably need a lot of cleaning to make it livable again.

  There were several outbuildings, including a barn and a bunkhouse, but they, too, were in disrepair. Some of the fence rails had fallen down around the big corral. The vanes of a windmill behind the house turned slowly in the breeze, but Smoke could hear them screeching even from up here on the hilltop. The apparatus was badly in need of oiling.

  “Looks like it could be a nice place with some work,” Matt commented.

  Preacher said, “Yeah, but is it worth it to fix it up if there ain’t no water on the spread?”

  “Does that well work?” Smoke asked.

  “The last I heard, before Jack Newton pulled out, it did,” Wynn said. “But it just provides water for the ranch headquarters. There’s not enough to irrigate the whole spread, if that’s what you’re thinkin’, Smoke.”

  “It’
s not,” Smoke said. “Just wanted to make sure these folks would have water if they decide to camp here for a while.”

  “Yeah, they’d be all right. But like Preacher says, what’s the point?”

  “That’s not up to us to decide.” Smoke turned his horse and waved Baron von Hoffman forward. The baron trotted his mount up to join them.

  His hard-planed face grew even more grim as he looked down at the desolate ranch headquarters.

  “Is that ... ?” he began.

  “It is,” Smoke said. No point in sugar-coating it. “That’s your new home, Baron.”

  BOOK THREE

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The inside of the house was as bad as Smoke feared it would be. Wolves and smaller critters had been in there, and the floor was covered with their droppings. Pieces of furniture that had been left behind by the Newton family had been shredded. Owls were nesting in the rafters. Erica was horrified as she looked around the place. Smoke imagined it was a far cry from the luxury she was accustomed to back in Germany.

  “The servants will soon put things in order,” von Hoffman said with a heartiness that sounded false to Smoke’s ears. “We’ve been living in the wagons for weeks now. We can continue living in them for a while.”

  He had a point there, Smoke thought. At least the immigrants wouldn’t be without shelter while they tried to get this place cleaned up.

  Wynn, Hank, and Dusty had headed for their ranches, but not before explaining to Smoke, Matt, and Preacher how to find the half-dozen waterholes on the spread. Or where the waterholes had been, rather, since they had all dried up. Smoke figured they would take a look at the places tomorrow, since it was getting late in the afternoon now.

  “Let’s go see if that pump works,” he said to Matt.

  They walked behind the ranch house to the windmill. Matt said, “Looks like the baron got snookered, all right. Whatever he paid for this outfit, it was too much.”

  “Maybe not,” Smoke said. “Structurally, the house looks sound enough, and so do the barn and the other outbuildings. They just need some repair work done on them, that’s all, and there are several carpenters among the folks who came with him, the baron said.”

  “Oh, sure, they can do that,” Matt agreed, “but what’s the point if they can’t raise any stock to make a living? And you can’t raise stock without water and grass. You know that, Smoke.”

  “Yeah, I know.” They had reached the pump. Smoke took hold of the handle and tried to work it. The mechanism was rusty and stubborn, but it was no match for the strength of Smoke Jensen. In a few minutes, he had the handle moving up and down relatively smoothly.

  Matt put his ear close to the pipe attached to the pump and listened. After a moment, he smiled.

  “I heard something gurgling,” he said. “Keep pumping, Smoke.”

  After a moment, water began to trickle from the pipe. It was slow and muddy at first, but as Smoke continued working the handle, the water flowed faster and began to clear. It wasn’t long before he had a steady stream coming from the pipe to splash on the ground. Matt cupped his hand under the flow and brought it to his mouth to taste the water.

  “It’s good,” he announced. “That’s a break for the baron, anyway.”

  “I’ll climb up there and oil that windmill tomorrow,” Smoke said. “It’ll work even better then.”

  They went back to the house to report that the well still worked and found that Erica had retreated to the wagon after looking around the house.

  “She’s very upset,” von Hoffman said with a frown. “I tried to tell her that everything will be all right, but I don’t think she believed me.”

  “I’ll go talk to her,” Matt said.

  The baron’s frown turned into a scowl. He still didn’t like the idea of Matt paying too much attention to his cousin, Smoke knew. But as upset as she was now, he would probably be glad for anybody to comfort her and calm her down.

  As Matt approached the wagon, he heard Erica sobbing inside the vehicle.

  He heard something else that gave him pause: someone talking quietly in German.

  Dieter.

  Matt stopped before he got too close. A grimace tugged at the corners of his mouth. He had forgotten about Dieter. The young man had been inside the wagon, still recovering from his wounds, when Erica climbed in all upset about what they had found on the Rafter 9. That had given Dieter the perfect opportunity to step in and comfort her.

  Not that Matt could blame him. Dieter had a good heart. He probably wasn’t even thinking about anything other than trying to make Erica feel better. With a shake of his head, Matt started to turn away from the wagon.

  That was when he saw a flash of something from the corner of his eye. He glanced in the direction of the more rugged hills to the north of the ranch headquarters and saw it again. The sun was reflecting off something up there, either glass or metal.

  The glint was too far away for somebody to be aiming a rifle at him. That meant more than likely the reflection came from a telescope or a pair of field glasses.

  Somebody could be watching the ranch. Spying to see when the baron and his followers arrived.

  There had been only a tiny hitch in Matt’s movements as he spotted the reflection, maybe not enough to be visible from that distance even with the amplification of a telescope or field glasses. He kept going, walking over to where Preacher stood talking to the blacksmith Rudolph Wolff and several other men.

  The keen-eyed old mountain man noticed right away that something was bothering Matt.

  “What’s put a burr under your saddle?” Preacher asked.

  Other than Dieter getting first crack at comforting Erica? Matt thought. But this new development allowed him to put that out of his mind.

  “Looks like somebody’s up in the hills spying on us,” he said. “Don’t look in that direction. Whoever it is, we don’t want him to know that we’ve spotted him.”

  “You reckon it’s Berger?”

  “Could be. Or it could be one of those gunnies who works for Jethro Kane.”

  During the ride out to the ranch from Hawk Creek Station, Smoke and Matt had told Preacher about killing Tyrone Wilkes and Conn Wheeler, as well as explaining how the gunmen had worked for the local would-be range boss Jethro Kane. Preacher agreed that Kane’s men were bound to come gunning for them sooner or later.

  Nor would it help von Hoffman and the other immigrants for Smoke and Matt to leave the Rafter 9, because Kane would want to run off all of them in order to solidify his grip on the area. He just didn’t have a personal grudge against them, the way he did against Smoke and Matt.

  “Sounds like you and me ought to take a little ride,” Preacher suggested. “We could start back toward the tradin’ post, then loop around once we’re out of sight and head up into them hills.”

  “So we can find out just who it is that’s skulking around.” Matt nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. We’d better tell Smoke what we’re doing, though.”

  Smoke had come out of the ranch house with the baron. Matt and Preacher walked over to join them.

  “Somebody with a spyglass up in the hills,” Matt said, knowing that he didn’t have to warn Smoke not to look up there. “Preacher and I figured we’d go find out who it is.”

  “It must be Klaus or one of his men,” von Hoffman said.

  Smoke shook his head.

  “Not necessarily,” he said. “It could be Kane’s men.”

  “We thought of the same thing,” Matt said with a nod. “Either way, it wouldn’t hurt to know.”

  “You’re right about that,” Smoke agreed. “Just don’t get yourself killed or caught.” He paused before adding, “I’ve got a hunch that before this is over, we’re going to need every gun we’ve got.”

  The sun was lowering toward the horizon as Matt and Preacher mounted up and headed over the hill to the south on the trail toward Hawk Creek Station. They had ridden about a mile when they swung back to the east.

  Th
ere were enough ridges and gullies for them to avoid being skylighted as they circled toward the hills where Matt had spotted the sun reflecting off something. The possibility remained that what he had seen was totally innocuous and not connected to the baron and his party of immigrants ... but Matt’s instincts told him that wasn’t the case, and Smoke and Preacher agreed with him.

  Matt didn’t know this area, but Preacher had been here before. He pointed to a broad stretch of flats and said, “A bunch of redskins chased me across there once, more’n forty years ago. They was mad as they could be at me.”

  “They probably had good reason to be,” Matt said. “You must’ve gotten away from them, since you still have your hair.”

  “Yeah, that ugly ol’ gray of mine I called Horse outrun ’em. He could get up and go when he wanted to.”

  “How many horses have you had over the years that you called Horse?”

  Preacher frowned.

  “I don’t know, and what the hell does it matter, anyway? Horse is a perfectly good name for a horse!”

  “And what did you call your dogs?”

  “Called ’em Dog, as you durned sure know already. You gonna argue that Dog ain’t a good name for a dog?”

  “I’m not arguing about anything,” Matt said. “Just saying that it’s a mite unusual.”

  “A man ought to be consistent,” Preacher declared.

  “Well, you certainly are. According to Smoke, you haven’t changed in the past twenty years except to get a little older and scragglier.”

  “Scragglier, is it?” Preacher combed his fingers through his tangled white beard. “I think I’m still a fine figure of a man—”

  Matt reined in and held up a hand. They were riding along the base of a ridge. He pointed up with a thumb and whispered, “Somebody up there.”

  That was true. Hoofbeats sounded clearly in the late afternoon air as several men rode along the top of the ridge. Matt and Preacher crowded their horses closer against the steep slope and waited.