Ride the High Lines (An Ash Colter Western Book 2)

by Ben Bridges

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  By the same author

  Ride the High Lines

  Ash Colter’s speed with a gun had turned him into the man they called ‘The Gunsmoke Legend’. But it was a reputation he didn’t want. So he put his gun away and rode south, figuring to buy some land and raise horses. To do that he needed money, and to earn that money he agreed to undertake one last, dangerous assignment – to track down the notorious outlaw John Kidd.

  Backed by an oddly assorted posse, Colter was soon riding the high lines in his pursuit of the outlaw and his gang. One bloody confrontation piled atop another. But in the end, Colter had to face the unsettling fact that he had more in common with Kidd than he might otherwise have guessed.

  RIDE THE HIGH LINES

  First Published by Robert Hale Limited in 1995, under the pseudonym ‘Matt Logan’

  Copyright © 1995, 2012 by David Whitehead

  First Kindle Edition: May 2012

  This Revised Kindle Edition: April 2013

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Our cover depicts a detail from Approaching the Rustlers, painted by Andy Thomas, and used by permission.

  Andy Thomas Artist, Carthage Missouri

  Andy is known for his action westerns and storytelling paintings and documenting historical events through history.

  This is a Bookends Book

  Chapter One

  Once the drink finally took hold of him, my friend Jack Page would often declare, ‘Half of what they say about me is lies … and the other half just isn’t true!’

  Sometimes he would throw his head back and laugh about it, for he could be a man of great humor when he chose to be. But at other times I would see his handsome face darken and his brows meet and his lips press so tightly together that the blood would squeeze from them, and I would realize that it was also a source of great frustration to him.

  As his companion for some ten years, I think I understood that frustration. For all his faults — and there were plenty of those — Jack truly was a remarkable man, as history has since confirmed. He was the kind of person we all aspire to be; larger than life and — superficially, at least — the embodiment of all that is good.

  In his time, Jack had been a sharpshooter, a stagecoach driver, a guide, a lawman, and he excelled at every profession he chose to follow. As his reputation grew, however, he also became an actor, and the role he was forced to play again and again was that of Jack Page … the public’s perception of Jack Page, that was.

  Too late, Jack found that he was living his life not for himself, but rather for his adoring public, a public that accepted all the lies avidly and without question, and yet would not countenance the simple fact that he was, above all else, just a man.

  Yes, I flatter myself to think that I understood my complex partner, and I have written at great length elsewhere of those heady years we spent in each other’s company. In that previous account I tried to set straight all of the other misconceptions that had grown up around him, for never have I known another man who had so many falsehoods and fabrications and downright lies written about him.

  Unless, of course, I include myself.

  Of necessity I recalled much of my own personal history in that earlier memoir; so, mindful of repetition, I will merely summarize it here.

  My name is Ash Colter, and I was born on a small farm in Iowa in 1848. My formative years were largely unremarkable, and eventually I grew into a tall, softly spoken boy with sky-blue eyes and a retiring personality.

  Before I was much past my seventeenth birthday, however, I was left all alone in the world, my father having been killed at Vicksburg in the summer of 1863, and my mother having contracted some form of lung fever that killed her within a month of war’s end.

  Since my mother had taken us both away from the farm shortly after my father died, I led a fairly nomadic childhood. But eventually I came into the employ of the celebrated Overland Mail Company, and was able to set down roots as a chore boy and stable-hand at the Snake River stagecoach station in the great state of Nebraska.

  It was here, in 1867, that I first met Jack Page — ‘Hair Trigger Jack’, as people took to calling him many years later, when they finally began to tire of his killing ways. But that is neither here nor there, for Jack does not really feature in this narrative, save that it was under his tutelage that I learned to use a gun, and went from chore boy to scout, from Indian-fighter to United States Marshal and, finally, to town-tamer.

  I recounted all of this in that earlier book, which my publisher saw fit to issue under the title Gunsmoke Legend. I did not, however, include any references to my subsequent encounters with the outlaw John Kidd.

  To be frank, I have conflicting views on that period of my life, and would as soon put it behind me altogether. But my wife tells me that I should do for John what I did for Jack; that is, to present a true account of the facts and thus set straight all of those lies and half-truths that have proliferated since he left these shores all those years ago.

  There is, however, another reason for once again setting pen to paper, and I cannot think of it even now without turning my eyes up to the frame hanging over the desk here in my den.

  The frame contains that rarest of all examples of United States paper currency, the ten thousand dollar bill.

  Not one day has passed in all the years since I first put it up there that I have not looked at it and remembered the circumstances of how it came into my possession and — yes — that I have actually smiled at some of the memories it recalls to mind.

  This is my other reason for writing the history you now have before you. Purely and simply because I owe it to John Kidd.

  Here, then, is my story.

  His story.

  Our story.

  It began shortly after I resigned my position as deputy marshal of Yellow Creek, that wild and woolly gold town up in the Black Hills country of what we used to call Dakota Territory. Those were violent, unsettled times, and I can say with some confidence that everything you may have read about the place is probably true. It was a latter-day Sodom, and the greed and brutality I witnessed there turned my stomach so much that in the end, I could hardly leave it quickly enough.

  You must realize from the outset that I had fallen into my footloose, gun-swift life entirely by chance. It had never been my desire to ride and kill for a living. I had spent so much of my life with no place to truly call home that all I really craved now was peace, a few acres of land, a wife and, perhaps, a family.

  It took my stay in Yellow Creek to realize that I had worn my double-action Adams .442 long enough, and now I determined that the time had come to renounce the gun and make a new life for myself elsewhere.

  I knew, however, that if I were to become a man of land and property, I must have money. My salary as deputy marshal of Yellow Creek had been generous, to say the least — two hundred and fifty dollars a month, plus fifty per cent of whatever fines I could collect —
but it was nowhere near enough for my purpose, which was to ride south and buy up some good, grass-rich land and establish a horse ranch. I would have to earn some more money before I could truly call myself my own man.

  Not so very long before, I had received the offer of a job from a Mr. Simon Black, who was then president of the Cattlemen’s Association of Colorado. Although he had not specified its nature, I could guess from the salary he was offering that it would be no easy task. Still, with no more promising avenue open to me, I wired back a response, saying that I would be pleased to at least meet him, and gave him an approximate date for my arrival at Fort Wray, where the Association had its headquarters.

  I left the wiles and vices of Yellow Creek behind me in the autumn of 1877, hoping also that I would be leaving all of the violence of that previous existence there as well.

  I wasn’t.

  I will not trouble you with a detailed account of my journey, save to say that it was long and arduous, covering as it did some two hundred miles, down across the hilly terrain of western Nebraska and thence onto the fine, open range country of northeastern Colorado.

  By the time I began my final push to Fort Wray, autumn was already giving way to winter. The days were growing shorter and duller, and low cloud was piling in from the north to blot out the sun so that each succeeding day was gray, windswept and chilly.

  I reached my destination on a brisk October afternoon and turned my dun-colored mustang into one of the livery stables that could always be found on the outskirts of such a town.

  Fort Wray itself had started life as a civilian post, and had remained thus until the Army took it over just after the war. It was a durable edifice of log and adobe construction that overlooked the swift-flowing South Platte River. The town of the same name had spread out from the fort into a somewhat haphazard metropolis served admirably by both the Union Pacific railroad and Wells Fargo.

  With my horse stabled, I hung my saddlebags over one shoulder and went in search of a hotel. It occurred to me then, as I walked through streets of brick and timber, past off-duty soldiers, businessmen, cowboys and women, that all I possessed was in those saddlebags. Everything I had amassed over the nine and twenty years of my life.

  It came to me in a moment of self-pity that I did not have much to show for myself. I was almost thirty — a span which, in those days was considered middle-aged — and yet I had no real friends, no family, no acquaintances even, and precious few prospects.

  I had money in the bank, of course, and also my horse. But it was a poor show, and no denying.

  I found a hotel and paid for a room. The desk clerk gave me a register to sign, and when he saw my name he whistled, studied me closer and finally summoned up the courage to ask if I was the Ash Colter.

  I should have anticipated such a question, for it is not conceit to say that my own reputation had grown alongside that of my more famous companion, merely a statement of fact.

  ‘I am an Ash Colter,’ I replied, my tone making plain the fact that I had no wish to pursue the topic any further.

  After that I was given a key, and I took my luggage — such as it was — up to my room. Now that I was here, my most immediate duty was to locate the whereabouts of this Simon Black and let him know that I had finally arrived. I went back downstairs and asked for directions to his office. The clerk still hadn’t recovered from the shock of having the Ash Colter staying at his hotel, and he treated me with all the deference another man might bestow upon a saint.

  I had seen such a paradoxical reaction many times before, of course, and yet I still could not understand it. To my mind, a man who made his way with a gun, a man who killed or wounded or clubbed other men in order to enforce justice or, sometimes, simply his own will, was to be reviled. I had always been of the opinion that there must be better, less violent ways to uphold the law or win arguments. And yet both my erstwhile companion and I — who had killed or wounded or clubbed other men with hideous regularity in the course of our adventures — had always been treated with the utmost respect; more, in fact, as if we were visiting gods.

  But I digress.

  Once I had my directions, I stepped back out into the street. The wind was raw and blustery. It sliced through the thin material of my black suit like the sharpest Comanche skinning knife. With hunched shoulders, and my left hand clapped atop my hat to hold it in place, I set off in search of my destination.

  The Cattlemen’s Association conducted its business from a suite of offices above the premises of the local newspaper, the Fort Wray Advocate, and was situated in the central, commercial district of the town. I reached it by means of a flight of stairs affixed to the side of the building, knocked at the door I found at the top, then went inside.

  A clerk, who had been poring over a stack of papers behind a huge desk, recognized my name when I spoke it, and said that while he knew something of the nature of the job for which I had been summoned, there was no-one in authority presently available to see me and explain it further. In the end we left it that he would contact me at my hotel when he had arranged a time for Mr. Black to see me.

  I left the office, closed the door behind me, descended the staircase and paused for a moment on the busy street to button my jacket against what I could sense was a coming squall.

  It was then that I noticed a man standing on the opposite sidewalk, watching me.

  At first I gave him only a cursory glance, for I was not completely sure that I was, in fact, the sole object of his scrutiny. I was mildly surprised when he made no attempt to look away or otherwise disguise his appraisal, however, and that made me study him closer.

  He was younger than me, as near as I could judge; still in his early twenties. He wore a big black hat tilted low over one ear and forward, so that the brim threw a shadow down over his face. The hat was a beauty, as I recall, an eye-catching Buckeye Stetson. But the rest of his apparel — a plain hunting shirt beneath a short brown jacket, the ubiquitous cuffed Levis and spur-hung boots — was less remarkable. Only his sidearm, which he wore braced against his right hipbone in a knotted-down shell-belt, was worthy of further comment, for it was as well-kept as the hat, and the care that had been lavished on the weapon stirred more than a little disquiet within me.

  Something in the fellow’s basic manner — his belligerent stance, perhaps, or the brazen, and some might say impudent way in which he sized me up — also worried me, for I had spent enough years plying my rough trade to recognize a troublemaker when I saw one.

  For a moment we just looked at each other as wagon traffic rattled by between us. I did not know him. He was not familiar to me at all, and I was certain we had never met before, no matter how briefly.

  Putting him from my mind, I set off along the street. I had reached the end of my journey, made my presence in town known to my potential employer, and now I decided to find a restaurant and have something to eat. As you can imagine, I had grown heartily sick of my own feeble attempts at cooking whilst on the trail, and now I was looking forward to enjoying the more accomplished labors of another.

  I did not know Fort Wray, so I just started off in the direction of the sinking sun and soon came to a section of the town that had long-since been given over to the pleasures of the constant, if transient, cowboy community. Before long I could not easily count the number of saloons and gaming houses that lined both sides of the muddy thoroughfare. A veritable forest of gaily-painted shingles assailed my eyes: MUSIC HALL, KENO, RAMSEY’S OPERA HOUSE, BILLIARDS, SILVER MOON SALOON — it was a world within a world, and because it offered anonymity, I liked it there.

  I found an eatery that looked to be well patronized and went inside. I ordered a meal and, as I sat waiting for it to arrive, remembered the parallel I had drawn earlier, about the way Jack and I had always been treated more as gods.

  It was true. And, in a way, perhaps we were gods. After all, did we not have the power over life and death, however unwelcome and frankly abhorrent I myself might find it?

>   All of my life I had wanted only to set a good example, not a murderous one. And yet Fate had seen fit to set me on a course I was determined to change.

  I thought about every act of violence and suffering I had been forced to witness in the previous ten years. It was something I did often, something I could not help doing. Every single act of barbarism had killed something inside me, too, had left me feeling tainted. But as of now, all that was in the past.

  The food came and it was good. I cleaned my plate, paid my tab and left the restaurant half an hour later. In the distance the sky had turned an ominous slate gray, and heavy clouds seemed to boil as they gathered and marched doggedly on towards the town in their path.

  I had gone no more than five or six yards when suddenly I heard a voice call my name, and someone grabbed hold of my sleeve and tugged me around. Caught unawares, I had no option but to turn and face my aggressor.

  As I completed my pivot, I was in no way surprised to find the tall, belligerent-looking man who had been watching me earlier. At once I was on my guard, for there was something about the fellow that reeked of trouble, quite apart from the bullish way he had accosted me.

  I got a better look at the face under the stiff, curled brim of his black Buckeye. His cheeks were full and his nose was small but of the type some call Roman. A heavy moustache obscured his upper lip and curled down to below the corners of his somewhat pouting mouth, and below the mouth his face just slid straight down into his neck, with hardly any chin to speak of.

  He gave me his bleak appraisal again. The thumb of his left hand was hooked into his shell-belt, and his right hung loose at his side, his wrist constantly brushing against the grips of his Colt.

  At last he said, ‘You’re Colter? Ash Colter?’

  I had a very bad feeling about him, but knew better than to show it. Trying to sound reasonable and even friendly, I said, ‘I’m Colter.’

  ‘Jack Page’s partner?’ he pressed, as if he wanted to be absolutely sure of my identity.