“You’re thinkin’ about Micah’s gang, ain’t you?”
“Tell me you’re not?” Buckhorn said right back to the ranger.
Menlo heaved a sigh.
“Well, we know they’re out there. The way things have all of a sudden blown up on Micah, it wouldn’t seem outta line if he wanted his full force around him.”
“Which means,” said Buckhorn, “if they’re on the way back here, we’re not exactly sitting pretty.”
“Makin’ a good case—on top of needin’ to get that boy in there to a doctor—for hightailin’ it out of here.”
“Except for the risk of maybe running smack into who we’d be looking to hightail it away from. They catch up with us out in the open, we’d be sitting even less pretty.”
Menlo gave him a sidelong glance.
“So what are you saying? Hole up here for a spell until we see what rolls in with the tide? Maybe send a rider out for the doctor and some backup of our own?”
Buckhorn tipped his head to indicate Obie’s cabin.
“Could do worse than to fort up in Obie’s place. It’s sturdy and small enough for us to effectively guard all sides. Got a pretty good-sized open area around it, an unprotected killing field that anybody wanting to get at us would have to cross.”
“Jesus.” Menlo’s expression turned sour. “You make it sound like we’re preparin’ for a battle.”
Buckhorn gave him a look and said, “Micah returns and comes boiling in with a couple dozen men, what would you call it?”
Before the ranger could reply, Obie poked his head out the front door and said, “You gents oughta come in here and have a listen to this.”
Inside, they had cut Jeff’s bonds, stripped away his bloody shirt, and moved him to an easy chair in the parlor where his various wounds were being administered to. He’d regained a semblance of consciousness and was trying to talk through split, swollen lips, and broken teeth.
“McKeever gone for . . . Kelso . . . and gang . . . Micah wants them to attack . . . kill . . . Big Dan and all of us . . . blame it all on Riley.”
“So that explains why McKeever was already gone and Micah was by himself when he took off,” said Menlo.
“Anybody know the name Kelso?” asked Buckhorn.
“There was a Bray Kelso hangin’ around these parts a while back,” said Tolliver. “He struck me as a bad hombre and we kept a close eye on him whenever he came to town. But I could never turn up any papers on him that gave me legitimate cause to run him off. He eventually solved that himself by driftin’ on . . . or so I thought. Maybe he’s the same Kelso runnin’ Micah’s gang.”
“Bray Kelso. Yeah, I’ve heard that name here and there,” allowed Menlo. “But, like you say, not any time lately.”
“Seems like I overheard Micah mention the name Bray once or twice over the past months. But I never knew who it was or what it was in regard to,” added Pamela.
“Well, if Micah’s gang is on its way here with killin’ in mind,” pointed out Buckhorn, “it doesn’t really matter if Kelso’s leading them or even who he is. The thing is, we got a lapful of trouble on the way.”
“It may be even worse than that,” spoke up Joey.
All eyes swung her way.
“It’s what I came here to tell y’all about, but haven’t had the chance yet,” she explained. Her gaze settled on Buckhorn. “My uncle and his men are on the way here, too. He’s got blood in his eye for you, Buckhorn—for crossing him the way you did. And he means to take Jeffrey back, too.”
“My God,” breathed Pamela. “I can’t believe all of this is happening!”
“Uncle Dan sent me away, told me to go back home,” Joey further explained. “But I came here to warn you instead.”
“Well, we’re grateful for that,” said Buckhorn. “It gives us a chance to adjust our plans accordingly.”
“Lettin’ the two gangs shoot it out ain’t necessarily a bad thing,” Tolliver suggested.
“It depends on who gets here first,” said Joey. “If it’s Micah’s bunch and then my uncle shows up and rides right into the teeth of their gunfire, you’ll have to excuse me if I do find that a bad thing!”
“Joey’s right,” Buckhorn said. “Big Dan is only out to get even with a couple of us. Micah’s outfit is coming on a flat-out killing spree. Picking a side between the two seems pretty clear to me.”
In a rather odd, somewhat faraway tone, Pamela said, “If I hadn’t let Micah mislead me so badly, Dan Riley wouldn’t be looking to get even with anyone.”
“But he is, all the same. At least at the outset of when he shows up, he will be,” said Tolliver. “That puts us in the middle of a bad situation, no matter how you slice it. I say we need to get the hell out of here.”
“Jeffrey’s in no condition to be moved, especially not in a rush,” Pamela was quick to respond.
“And if we did try riding out,” Buckhorn said, “we’d risk running smack into what we were hoping to get away from. Me and Menlo already hashed this over. We propose sticking right here and forting up. And now that we know both gangs are on their way and will likely be blasting hell outta one another, that makes even more sense.”
“All I know is that I need to ride back and warn my uncle,” said Joey.
“I just told you that riding out isn’t a smart idea for anybody,” Buckhorn insisted. “Besides, you lost your horse.”
“We’re wastin’ too much time yappin’, you ask me,” said Obie. “If we’re gonna fort up and get set proper, which I agree is the best idea, then we need to get that took care of pronto, before we get visitors. Strikes me that the most suitable place to do that is my cabin rather than all the space we’d have to try and cover here.”
Buckhorn flashed him a grin.
“Don’t let it build your hopes too high, but now you’re startin’ to think like me.”
Obie made a face.
“Paugh! That’s a disgustifyin’ thing to tell a body.”
* * *
Relocating to Obie’s cabin went quickly and orderly. Buckhorn and Tolliver picked up Jeff’s easy chair with him in it and carried the whole works over with minimal disturbance to the victim. The others brought guns, ammo, canteens, other containers of water, and various other items in the way of supplies.
The men locked up in the bunkhouse had to be dealt with, too. Buckhorn still didn’t trust them, but if they weren’t part of Micah’s gang, there was a chance they’d be ruthlessly slaughtered when the killers showed up. He wasn’t going to abandon them to that fate, so he and Menlo went to the bunkhouse, where the ranger unlocked the handcuffs while Buckhorn covered the men.
“You fellas get your horses and light a shuck out of here,” he told them when they were free. “You’re not getting your guns back, though, and if I see any of you with Micah’s bunch later, I’ll take special care to gut-shoot you so you’ll be a long, hard time dying.”
“What I’d suggest,” said Menlo, “is headin’ for the hills until all this is over.”
“Is that an order, Ranger?” asked one of the men.
“Yeah, make it an order.”
The man looked at the others, nodded, and said, “I reckon we ought to take off for the tall and uncut, then.”
The others agreed, and as soon as they could throw saddles on horses, that was what they did.
Lagging slightly behind the rest of the group on the last trip from the main house with supplies, Pamela caught everybody by surprise when she suddenly bolted and ran to the horses still tied at the hitch rail. She quickly loosened Sarge’s reins and swung into his saddle.
As she wheeled the big gray around, Tolliver ran out from the front of the cabin, shouting, “Pamela! What on earth are you doing?”
“This is my fight yet everyone else has been taking all the risks for me,” she called in return. “Joey was right about needing to warn Big Dan, and it’s time I held up my end. Take care of my boy—I’ll be back!”
With that, she touched her
heels to Sarge and they thundered off, horse and rider flowing smoothly together.
Standing beside Buckhorn, Obie said in a hushed, somewhat awed tone, “Look at her go. Told you she could ride like the wind when she took a mind to. And that’s the first time in near two years I heard her say Big Dan and not cuss the Riley name when she spoke it at all. Maybe there’s still a chance for those decent times to return to the Circle D after all, Powder-burner.”
CHAPTER 43
Maybe conditions at the Circle D could return to the way Obie longed for. But there remained some bad business that had to be settled first.
In case any among those now forted up in the handyman’s cabin hoped to avoid that unpleasant detail, they found out it wasn’t going to happen when Micah showed up again less than a half hour after he’d ridden away with his tail tucked between his legs. Thanks to the two dozen grim-faced, heavily armed men thundering in behind him, his tail was no longer tucked, but appeared quite high and feisty.
Riding to Micah’s left and back just slightly was Bud McKeever. On the other side, similarly positioned, was a blue-jawed specimen marked with the stamp of a hardcase. He had a milky left eye and a ragged whitish scar running down from the center of a whiskered cleft chin, reaching like a pitchfork of lightning until it disappeared behind the right-side collar of his shirt. One glance was all it took for Buckhorn to know that he was looking at Bray Kelso.
The riders fanned out to four or five abreast and slowed their horses to a cautious walk as they moved between the outbuildings and corrals and approached the main house. Most of them had rifles prominently displayed, shoulder stocks resting on hips, barrels jutting up and out at forty-five degree angles. Those not showing rifles, like the three in front, held their gun hands poised close and ready over their sidearms.
When they’d drawn close to the house, Micah checked the horse he was riding and raised an arm to signal for the others to halt as well. His eyes, narrow and sullen, swept back and forth across the width of the house. The bodies of Dave and Hank still lay off at one end of the porch, where they’d fallen when gunned down by Buckhorn. The house seemed as dead and silent as they were. There was no sign of movement through any of the windows, no sound of any kind seeping outward.
“Mother!” Micah called out. “Are you in there?”
The house responded only with continued silence.
Micah called again. “It’s foolish to try and hide, Mother. I know you’re around somewhere; you couldn’t have all fled in the short time I was away. You might as well get it over with. Come out and face the music!”
More silence.
“Damn it, this is nonsense! Where’s your big, bad hired gun? Where’s the sheriff or that representative of the mighty Texas Rangers? Is the whole bunch gonna keep tryin’ to hide like scared little schoolgirls?”
After another stretch of silence, Kelso drew his gun and said, “Maybe we oughta give ’em some incentive to come on out of there.”
Micah considered for a moment, then nodded and drew his gun, too.
“Maybe we oughta at that.”
“You mean blast the hell out of your own house?” asked McKeever.
Micah’s expression was flat and cold as he replied, “This place has never felt like a home to me—just somewhere I could come to when I had nowhere better to go.”
So saying, he set it off. A blistering volley of shots, joined in by Kelso and McKeever, that blew out windows and tore randomly, recklessly through the inside of the house. As soon as their guns were emptied, the trio began reloading. But, through the haze of bluish smoke and dust kicked up by the smashing bullets, the house remained stubbornly silent.
“Want me to go in and have a look?” said Kelso. “I think maybe the joint is empty.”
“Go ahead. Watch yourself.”
Not bothering to dismount, Kelso nudged his horse forward. While he was doing that, Micah twisted in his saddle and called to those in the group behind him, “Some of you men back there, peel off and check out the bunkhouse and grub shack. The sheds and barns, too. Be careful.”
A handful of the men began doing as instructed.
By then, Kelso had prodded his horse up onto the front porch and, ducking low in the saddle so he could clear the top of the doorway, right on into the house. They could hear him bulling around in there, the horse’s hooves clumping loudly on the floor, furniture and lamps and so forth being knocked aside, some of it crashing into wreckage.
After a few minutes, Kelso reappeared. He gigged his horse down off the porch. He was busily chewing something and in one hand he held two thick, crisp strips of bacon.
“Ain’t nobody in there that I can see,” he announced. “But, man, there’s a whole table of food gone cold and left for waste. And what a shame that is if it’s all as tasty as this bacon.”
“They’ve got to be around here somewhere,” Micah said.
“Well, if the cook is still around,” said Kelso single-mindedly, “I vote we consider keepin’ her alive for when you take over everything. Be worth it for the cookin’ and if she happens to look like anything on top of that, well . . .”
“Get your mind off food and out of the gutter,” Micah snapped. “The old German lady who cooked that bacon and the rest is nearly as wide as she is tall and about seventy years old.”
“So what?” Kelso took another bite of bacon. “I got nothin’ against fat gals. And sometimes those older babes really know how to—”
“Knock it off, I said.”
As he continued looking around, Micah’s eyes raked across Obie’s cabin. He did a double take, returning his gaze to the structure and locking it there. And all of a sudden he knew with crystal-clear certainty where their quarry was.
* * *
Buckhorn calmly sighted his commandeered Yellowboy through a cabin window that he’d already broken the glass out of.
“One stroke of this trigger, I can send Micah straight where he belongs—to hell.”
“You can’t do that,” Joey was quick to protest.
Tolliver backed her up, saying, “Gunnin’ him out in the open like that, basically the same as cold blood, would make us just as bad as him.”
Buckhorn turned his head to look at them, not surprised by their reaction but at the same time not understanding it.
“If I’m the one who pulled the trigger, wouldn’t be no ‘us’ to it. It’d be strictly me,” he told them. “And, no matter what else, the main thing is that it would make us a hell of a lot better off if I cut down Micah and one or both of those right beside him before they knew what hit ’em.”
There was some empathy in Menlo’s tone when he said, “I can’t stop you. But it ain’t the ranger way, son.”
When Buckhorn’s gaze fell on Obie, the oldster didn’t say anything but the same conflict was also evident on his face.
There was a time when these kinds of reactions from others, even though predictable and expected, wouldn’t have made any difference. Buckhorn would have said to hell with them and gone ahead and done things his way.
But those days and the way he’d gone about things back then were past. Mostly. And the slim chance at redemption Buckhorn figured he might still have a shot at was enough to make him reconsider moments like this.
All of which became a moot point in this particular instance when Micah suddenly sensed those present in the cabin. Looking back out the window, Buckhorn was quick to see the realization and the shift in attention that ran through the rest of the body of men out there.
“Well, in just a minute or two I calculate that it’s gonna be a matter of returning fire. I hope you won’t object to me doing that much.”
* * *
With some quickly barked commands and a good deal of arm-waving, Micah got the men backing him to spread out in a different pattern, all now focused directly on the handyman’s cabin. Several of them dismounted and scurried in behind corral fencing and feed bunks.
Micah, McKeever, and Kelso stayed on their m
ounts, swinging them to face the cabin and then advancing a few yards toward same.
“All right, your little maneuver threw us off for a minute or two,” Micah called. “But everything is plain enough now. And it ought to be plain enough to you that you don’t have a chance if you try to make a fight of it. My men will blast you to shreds. All I want is my brother and that stinkin’ half-breed. Give them up, I’ll let the rest of you live!”
Ranger Menlo cracked open the front door of the cabin and responded, saying, “And we’re supposed to believe that?”
“What you can believe for damn certain is that you’ll die if you don’t cooperate,” Micah told him.
“We’ve sent a rider to town to bring back reinforcements and to wire ranger headquarters with your name and what you’ve been up to in these parts,” Menlo claimed. “You kill me, not to mention these other folks, you won’t be able to run fast enough or far enough to escape the full wrath of the rest of the rangers. Your best bet is to give up and opt for a fair trial. Maybe you won’t swing. If you insist in makin’ a fight of it, we can hold out until help from town gets here. In the meantime, there’ll be no negotiatin’ with the likes of you!”
“Now who’s tryin’ to get who to swallow a load of hogwash?” Micah said with a sneer. “You’re a damned liar, Ranger, and you’ll die with that dishonor to your badge.”
“I’ve talked all I aim to with scum like you.” The anger was building hot in Menlo and it was evident in his voice. “I’ll give you to the count of three to either clear out or commence the fight. One—”
“Wait a minute! I want to talk to my mother.”
This time it was Buckhorn who replied. “She doesn’t want to talk to scum like you. But I’ve got a .45 caliber message from her that I’ll be happy to deliver as a free-of-charge bonus to what she’s already paying me. You sure you want to hear it?”
Micah’s face flushed purple-red with rage.
“You go to hell, you interferin’ bastard. You want to talk bonuses? I’ve got one right here for you—” As he said this he was ripping the gun from the holster on his hip, so much anger surging in him that his words came out a high-pitched shriek. “And I hope your black soul chokes on it!”
Paid in Blood Page 27
