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

by Ben Bridges

  Someone out ahead must have looked back and seen us coming, for suddenly there came a wink of flame, a puff of smoke, and finally the crack of a gunshot. Winch put his pony on a course that took him away from me, and the rest of the men followed his example so that we now rode fanned out in a line, racing doggedly on after our quarry.

  The land beneath us started to rise. We lost Kidd and his men beyond a grassy knoll. When we topped out, I saw a line of trees no more than a quarter of a mile ahead, with a body of water sparkling and winking beyond and between the boughs and boles of firs, aspen and spruce that could only be the Arikaree.

  The trees seemed to swallow the outlaws, and instinctively I raised my gun-arm to slow the pace.

  Now that they had cover, they would be infinitely more dangerous than before. And sure enough, within a very short space of time there came the deep, deadly boom of a long gun that made disturbed birds rise up from the timber in a fluttering, squawking mist.

  At least one of them had dismounted in the bosque, with the intent to provide some sort of rearguard action for his companions.

  Like an officer in the cavalry, I indicated that my men should swing to the left, where a slight rise would give us some cover behind which to consider our next move. But time was not on our side — the longer we were forced to delay, the more distance Kidd and his men would put between us.

  We sat our heaving horses for a moment. Then, just as I opened my mouth to start issuing orders, Winch said, ‘You’uns stay right here, cap’n. I’ll signal you when I’m through.’

  He left his saddle as effortlessly as before and tugged a New Model Sharps carbine from its boot.

  ‘What’re you plannin’, Lem?’ asked Henry Morse.

  His response was a broad grin that made his whiskery cheeks rise up and crowd his eyes down to slits. ‘To blow yonder bushwhacker loose from his drawers,’ he replied with some glee.

  I said, ‘Lem — ’ But it was too late — he was already gone.

  This time I tried to watch him go, but again the land just seemed to absorb him. One minute he was there, the next he was not. Even after all these years, I can find no better way to describe it.

  The rest of us dismounted, took out our rifles and bellied up to the brow of the low hill. There I scanned the distant trees, wishing I had John Horan’s telescopic sight with me. For ten long minutes we hunkered there and waited, and cursed the waiting.

  Then there was a brief volley of gunfire that made more roosting birds rise up into the graying sky. The shots rolled out across the high plains.

  Two or three more shots jumbled together to form one messy, violent barrage. As the echoes died, I thought I heard a man loose off a throaty yell, but the distance was too great and I wasn’t sure.

  I hated the inactivity. I wanted to continue and conclude the chase. It was stupid, I know, stupid and immature, but I wanted to see John Kidd smile on the other side of his face when I gave him back that ten thousand dollar note and then took him in to Fort Wray.

  Another shot rolled across the wide open country, but this time I recognized the higher cough of a handgun. Another shot followed it, and then one more. Unless I was much mistaken, this was the signal Winch had promised us.

  We swung up into our saddles and came around the low hill at a run, bending forward so that the necks of our horses would give us some protection just in case it wasn’t Winch who had signaled.

  Henry Morse led Winch’s Roman-nosed pony. But we needn’t have worried. A big man in buckskins came striding out of the timber almost as soon as we came into sight, and it was surely our companion. He raised his Sharps high above his I head and waved it back and forth.

  Our horses ate up the ground and within moments we were drawing them down to a slithering, turf-tearing halt before the older man.

  Winch watched us come, standing hipshot and chewing on a fresh cube of cut-plug. He did not need me to ask him what had happened. His report came as brief and succinct as ever. ‘Left one man behind ’em, cap’n. I got ’im.’

  ‘Dead?’

  He slapped the brass butt-plate of his carbine.

  ‘You shoot a man with this baby,’ he said proudly, ‘an’ he stays shot.’

  I indicated the woods with a tilt of the jaw. ‘Let’s see him.’

  He tucked his carbine back into the boot, mounted his pony from the right, Indian fashion, and led us at a walk deeper into the timber. Song sparrows and larks accompanied our progress with sweet, natural music, and the river chuckled and gurgled lazily by a couple of hundred yards further on. Without warning he reined in and pointed. A man with one of the most openly cruel faces I had ever seen was sitting up against the bole of a Douglas fir with his head hanging to one side and his eyes open wide in shock. His hat had fallen off to reveal his thinning blond hair, and there was blood all over his chest. His horse was tethered some little distance away, and the man himself was still clutching his repeater, even in death.

  I looked at him for a long moment before I finally said, ‘The Butcher.’

  Henry Morse said, ‘Eh?’

  ‘The one they called the Butcher of Belleville. Ryan.’ I turned my attention back to Winch. ‘The others?’

  He hooked a thumb towards the Arikaree. ‘Found some tracks leadin’ into the river.’

  ‘Think they swum acrost, Lem?’ asked Yarbrough.

  Winch shrugged. ‘Across. Upriver. Downriver. Came out further along this side or th’other. Can’t say.’

  ‘Think you could pick up their tracks?’ I asked.

  He glanced up at the overcast beyond the canopy of twisted tree-limbs and spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. ‘Light’s failin’. Rain on the way.’ He looked back at me. ‘Lessen they’s a special saint that looks after man-trackers, I’d say we’ve lost ’em, cap’n.’

  Behind me Henry Morse swore softly and his saddle creaked as he shifted around a little. I crossed my hands on my saddle-horn. What were we going to do now? I wondered. We’d had our one chance to trap Kidd and it had come to naught.

  Or had it? We still had one admittedly tenuous link to Kidd back at the ranch —Kansas Bill Johnson.

  I directed Saul and Henry to load the body across his horse and told them that we were getting back before the rain started. When Saul asked if he should wrap the dead man in his blanket, I shook my head.

  ‘When we ride back in, I want Kansas Bill to see him just the way he looks right now,’ I said harshly. ‘There’s no more powerful inducement to get a man talking than the sight of a dead comrade.’

  I sounded confident as I said it, but deep down inside I wasn’t so sure. Once again, I had no choice in the matter save to wait and see, and hope that I would be proved correct.

  Chapter Five

  The sky darkened further as the clouds I had first seen balancing atop the far blue mountains came down onto the flats, and the rain itself caught up with us before we had gone half a mile. Hastily we untied and donned our slickers, then continued on our way.

  We must have looked a grim band when we finally rode back into Buckhalter’s yard forty minutes later, our high-stepping horses moving slowly and with their big heads down, the men and I all but lost beneath our crackling yellow oilskins, sitting slumped and huddled in wet saddles, with water dripping steadily from our hat-brims.

  It was sometime around midday, but already lamplight was showing at the windows of the main house. Glancing that way, I wondered how Ed Buckhalter was faring. I had seen wounds such as his many times before. I myself had been shot during a gunfight only a few months earlier.

  Though Buckhalter would be hurting worse than he’d ever thought possible, the pain would pass, and once the bullet was cut out of him, his body would begin the slow process of healing itself.

  We walked our horses into the barn and dismounted. Down at the far end, a closed lantern threw a dusky glow out across Bob Bancroft and, stretched out on a rough pallet of hay at his feet, Kansas Bill Johnson. Johnson was conscious, though
obviously in great discomfort and pain. He was craning his neck to get a better look at us. I passed my reins over to Winch and walked down there to join them, keeping my movements slow and deliberate in order to intimidate this Johnson in much the same way that he had tried to intimidate Buckhalter.

  The rain came down harder. It beat against the walls with a rattle like thunder and dripped through one or two holes in the roof in perforated silver lines. The horses shifted around, uneasy with the savagery of the storm, and the smell of blood and death.

  I did not immediately acknowledge the outlaw’s presence there on the floor, but instead concentrated my attention on Bancroft. ‘Has Horan gone?’ I asked softly.

  He nodded. ‘Cleared out just after you left,’ he replied. ‘Then Ruthie sent one of Buckhalter’s men for a doctor.’

  I looked at him in the lamplight and even though it was none of my affair I couldn’t help thinking, Oh, it’s Ruthie, is it? I said, ‘Buckhalter all right?’

  ‘Should be. They winged ’im, is all.’ He turned his bright, keen hazel eyes on all the activity behind me and said, ‘Any luck?’

  ‘We got Dave Ryan,’ I answered, and saw Johnson start beneath his grubby, threadbare blanket.

  Turning, I nodded to Yarbrough, who led the death-horse down to our end of the barn and then dutifully fetched out a knife and cut the pigging strings holding the dead man in place, just as we had prearranged.

  The body fell heavily from the saddle and landed on the dirt floor with a loose thud, then rolled so that it was stretched out on its back, glassy eyes staring, face flecked with blood, raindrops showing like tears on the cold, pale cheeks, caked blood and chewed flesh visible through the ripped chambray shirt.

  I was struck then by the realization that Dave Ryan had already ceased to be a person to me. Death had a way of doing that, of robbing a man’s identity from him. He was no longer a he to me, he had become an it.

  Kansas Bill’s sick-looking eyes were like two saucers as he identified his erstwhile companion. He was a tall, gangling man. It was hard to put an age to him, but he was around twenty eight or nine I supposed, with a thin, sallow face and whiskers and long, fuzzy sideburns a shade lighter than the chestnut of his long, matted hair.

  I looked into his face. It wasn’t hard to see that the sight of Ryan’s corpse had rattled him. I knelt, the better to address him, and when he looked back at me I saw something guarded come into his eyes and I knew that this was going to be anything but easy.

  ‘You and your friends have got a hideout somewhere in these parts,’ I said. ‘I want to know where it is.’

  Despite the pain of his hip-wound, he forced a chuckle, worked up some spit and let it go in a stream off to one side. ‘You can go to hell!’

  Patiently I came at it from a different direction. ‘Tell me about the rustling, Bill.’

  ‘What rustlin’?’ he croaked guilelessly.

  ‘Come on now, Bill. Let’s not beat around the brush. I know your reputation — blackmail, robbery, rustling, murder. You’re hell-bent for a hang rope, my friend. Unless … ’

  He read my mind. ‘If you think I’d sell my pals down the river, you don’t know me a-tall, mister.’

  ‘You’ll tell me everything I want to know,’ I said, trapping his feverish eyes with my own. ‘And you’d better tell me fast, because we haven’t got the time to wait for you to see sense.’

  Again he rasped, ‘Go to hell!’

  I sighed. ‘I’ll get it all out of you sooner or later, Bill. Why don’t you make it easy on yourself?’

  ‘Easy on you is what you mean!’

  I tutted. ‘Now just you think for a moment. There’s not a court in the land that won’t show clemency to a man who shows remorse and cooperates with the law. You give me what I want and you have my word that I’ll speak up for you at your trial.’

  He was disparaging. ‘An’ what’ll that get me? Life, ’stead of hangin’? You’d hafta do a whole lot better’n that, mister!’

  I straightened up again. This was getting us nowhere. But the slurring of his voice had given me an idea. ‘You’re tired,’ I said. ‘And that’s too bad, because you’re not going to get any rest until you tell us what we want to know.’ I fixed Bancroft with a stern eye. ‘Wake him up every time he looks like dozing off .’

  Bancroft looked sharply at me. He opened his mouth to speak but I talked him down. ‘Do it, Bob,’ I said, and turning to face the others, I told them to do the same thing when it came their turn to watch our prisoner.

  Johnson stammered, ‘H-hey now … ’

  Glancing over my shoulder I said, ‘It doesn’t have to come to that, if you cooperate.’

  ‘Damn you, you son-of-a-bitch. You’ll get nothin’ outta me!’

  I shrugged. ‘We’ll see.’

  I hated to do it, of course. I took no pleasure in making this man’s situation any worse than it already was, no matter what he might have done in the past to deserve it. But it was as I had told him — time was at a premium, and he was our only lead to John Kidd. We needed all the information he could give us, because without it we could scour this country for a year or more and still never find our man.

  I saw Saul Yarbrough pondering what I had said. At last he spoke up, lifting his voice to be heard above the downpour. ‘I don’t cotton much to breakin’ a man’s spirit like that, Mr. Colter.’

  I wanted to say to him, And you think I do? Instead I said, ‘All he’s got to do is tell us what we want to know.’

  ‘I’d as soon have no part in it.’

  My breath came out in a hiss. ‘Well, that’s up to you. You can always quit.’ But I didn’t want him to, so I added in a more conciliatory tone, ‘Sometimes we have to do things we don’t care for. That’s life.’

  I went over to my horse, off-saddled, wiped him down and turned him into a stall, Around us the storm struck at the barn and when the wind picked up it made the weathered boards creak. The men never once took their eyes off me. Perhaps they were hoping that I would relent. But how could I?

  We had to have that information, at practically any cost.

  I tossed my horse a couple of forkfuls of good grass hay and finally said, ‘You be all right with it, Bob?’

  He held back a moment before responding. It was in none of our natures to commit what amounted to an act of torture upon another man. But at last he nodded. ‘It’s got to be done, I reckon.’

  I nodded brusquely, then pulled my slicker tighter around me and headed out into the rain, figuring to see how Ed Buckhalter was doing.

  I hoped that Bill Johnson would see sense. Either that, or he would be too weak a man to hold out for very long. But somehow he held out for forty eight hours.

  Two full days.

  And in such pain, too.

  My God.

  One of Buckhalter’s men fetched a doctor out from Fort Wray. The doctor operated first on Buckhalter, and then on our prisoner. For a time there was nothing we could do but let him rest, despite what I had said to the contrary. But as soon as his morphine-induced narcosis wore off, we set about our onerous task of depriving him of his sleep.

  I took my share at it, and I hated it every bit as much as did my companions. There in the cold gloom at the back of the barn I watched him moan and whine beneath his blanket, begging for rest.

  His dark eyes sank deeper into his skull and turned wild. It was then, when we felt that he might be about to break, that I or one of the others would lean forward and almost beg him in return to cooperate and tell us all he knew. But every time he would simply curse us and then fall quiet for a while.

  It was exhausting just to watch him fighting so hard to hold out against the inevitable. I came out of the barn after my first shift feeling twice my age, for it was a wretched, soul-destroying chore I had brought about. But finally he broke — he broke and when he did it was like watching a dam burst, because he told us everything we wanted to hear and more besides.

  He told us that the rustled stock
was held in a small box canyon about fifty miles east of the Buckhalter place. Kidd kept a couple of men there who were skilled in the art of altering brands — brand-blotchers, as we called them back then. From there the cattle were pushed southeast into Kansas in a series of small, manageable herds. There was a man in the Smoky Hills country who bought everything Kidd could bring him. Kidd even owned one of the small ranches along the trail, and paid hush-money to various of his neighbors in order to keep the operation a secret.

  Once I had it all, I turned to Winch and asked him if he knew the box canyon Johnson had mentioned. He paused in his tobacco chewing for a moment and pulled at one of his pendulous ear lobes. ‘Iffen it’s there, I c’n find it,’ he allowed.

  I nodded. ‘All right. Saul, we’ll need provisions. Go see what Miss Buckhalter can spare us. Henry, go with him. Bob — you’d better stay behind and keep an eye on Johnson.’

  I could see in his eyes that he hated to miss out on whatever action might be coming, but when he still said nothing and just accepted his orders with a curt nod, I revised my opinion of him again, although sourly I wondered if I were misunderstanding his motives, that in reality he was secretly pleased to have the opportunity of spending more time with Ruth Buckhalter … his ‘Ruthie’.

  ‘How long do you s’pose you’re gonna be gone?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t say, at this stage. If Kidd’s already flown the coop, we’ll go after him.’ I thought about it for a moment, then pointed to Johnson, who was already drifting off into a long-postponed slumber. ‘The doctor says he shouldn’t be moved for about a week. If we’re not back by then, and this business done with, I want you to take him into town and get him locked up. The minute we catch Kidd, I’ll wire you care of the Cattlemen’s Association and let you know.’

  I set about readying my horse for travel, all too aware that, while I had revised my opinion of Bancroft, my men had revised their opinion of me.

  There was no doubt that I had lost my standing with them because of the repulsive treatment I had prescribed for Johnson. And to make the matter worse, Ruth had also turned distinctly chilly towards me, once she had come to learn of it.