Ralph Compton Outlaw Town

by Ralph Compton

  Suddenly Chancy knew. It wasn’t something being dragged. It was someone crawling.

  It was Krine.

  Stalking him.

  Chapter 73

  Chancy’s first impulse was to heave to his feet and run. Except that would draw more lead. Instead, he eased onto his side, which provoked more pounding in his head. It was difficult to concentrate. He strained his eyes searching for Krine but didn’t see him.

  The scraping had stopped again, which didn’t help.

  Chancy tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. He needed to change position. Krine might have some idea of where he was. Accordingly he inched to his right. Every movement brought more pain, and after only a few feet he stopped and sagged. He had no strength at all. His head wound must be worse than he thought. Or maybe it was the shock of being hit.

  Chancy moistened his mouth and wet his lips. He was about to cock the Remington, but didn’t. The click might give him away. He looked for the horses, but neither was near.

  Here he was, alone and hurt and pitted against a hard-as-nails killer who was incredibly quick and accurate.

  Chancy almost chuckled at the absurdity of it all. All he ever wanted was to cowboy, to tend cattle and not bother anyone and not have anyone impose on him. To have a simple life, where the worst that might happen was being gored by a longhorn or being thrown by a mustang.

  How did a man get into these fixes? Chancy asked himself. The answer was obvious. “Life.”

  The renewed sound of scraping brought Chancy out of himself. He jerked his head up, and paid for it with more agony. He peered into the dark until he thought his head would explode, but nothing. Krine was out there, but where? He was shocked when Krine gave him the answer.

  “Gantry? Are you still breathing?”

  Chancy didn’t respond. He pegged the voice as coming from thirty or forty feet to the west.

  “Did I get you or are you playing possum?”

  Chancy bit his lip. It was a trick. It had to be. An outlaw as crafty as Krine wouldn’t give himself away unless it was a ruse.

  “You can answer me, boy. I’m about done in. You caught me good with one of your shots.”

  Chancy doubted it. But even if it was true, the fact that Krine could crawl about, and talk, was proof he could shoot too.

  “I never thought it would be like this. Done in by a cowpoke, of all things. And one barely old enough to shave.”

  Chancy was older than that. He just looked young.

  “You’ve beaten me. I’m a goner. It won’t be long now and there will be just you.”

  Was it Chancy’s imagination, or did the voice come from a different spot each time? He realized Krine was quietly moving as he talked. To keep him distracted while Krine closed in?

  “You Texans. You die hard, and that’s a fact. Ives was a Texan. Did you know that? From down San Antonio way.”

  Chancy was sure now. The talk was to distract him. He crawled a few feet and flattened on his belly.

  “Come on, boy. Talk to me.”

  Chancy held his tongue.

  “All right. You think you’re so smart. But you’re not. I lied. I’m not done in. You hit me, but I’ll live. I can’t say the same for you. Make peace with your maker, boy. Your time has come.”

  A vague shape moved at the limit of Chancy’s vision. It had to be Krine. Chancy pointed the Remington but waited. He must be absolutely certain. If he missed, he would have given himself away. Krine would see his muzzle flash, and Krine was a better shot.

  Chancy broke out in a sweat. It felt as if a swarm of centipedes were crawling around inside him. He grew clammy and cold. But he didn’t move. He didn’t twitch. He would wait until hell froze over if he had to.

  The shape moved again. Not toward him, though. Krine was crawling to the north. Or maybe circling, trying to pinpoint where he was.

  Chancy debated with himself. If he waited too long, Krine would crawl out of sight. There might not be another chance. Against his better judgment, he slowly thumbed the hammer back. He braced for a shot, but none came. Holding his breath, he stroked the trigger.

  The night exploded with gunfire. Two, three, four shots. Lead smacked the ground close to Chancy. A slug whistled overhead.

  Then quiet fell.

  Chancy let out his breath. Wonder of wonders, he hadn’t been hit. He lay there a long time, perfectly still. The shape didn’t move again. A battle of nerves, he reckoned, and he’d be damned if he’d break before Krine did.

  A new sound reached him, that of someone struggling for each breath. Or pretending to. Krine wanted him to think he was hurt bad when he probably wasn’t.

  A single word came out of the night, a wet, bubbly sound, as if Krine were speaking underwater. “God.”

  Chancy raised his head. If Krine was faking, he was good.

  “Gantry?” The bubbling was worse.

  Chancy still didn’t reply.

  “Gantry? I’m dying.”

  Good for you, Chancy thought.

  “I don’t want to die alone.”

  Chancy would have laughed except Krine would hear.

  “I’m getting rid of my gun.”

  The shape moved and something arced and fell to the earth with a thump. Metal glinted dully.

  Every nerve screaming at him not to, Chancy crawled toward it. When he reached it, he blinked in surprise. It was the Starr.

  “Gantry?” Krine said again, weaker than before.

  Chancy rose into a crouch.

  “Gantry, I’m begging you.”

  Pointing the Remington, thinking he was the worst fool in all creation, Chancy edged forward.

  Artemis Krine was on his back, his right arm outflung, his left arm bent with his hand under him. His mouth and chin were dark with blood. He was staring at the sky, and gasping.

  “Serves you right,” Chancy said.

  Krine twisted his head. “You’ve done me in, boy. As green as you are. I can’t hardly believe it.”

  Chancy covered him, watching the arm under Krine’s back.

  “You must carry a four-leaf clover around, the luck you have. You should be a gambler.”

  “Die, already,” Chancy said.

  “What, you can’t spare a few words for the man you killed?” Krine gurgled. “It’s the decent thing to do.”

  “What do you know of decent?”

  “Not a lot. I always thought to be decent was to be weak.” Krine turned his body a little. “You want something in this world, you have to be strong. You have to take it.”

  “Quit playacting,” Chancy said.

  Krine stared, blood bubbling from his mouth.

  “You don’t have long. It’s now or never.”

  “I reckon so.”

  Chancy was ready when Krine jerked a derringer from behind his back. He shot Krine in the chest, cocked the Remington, shot him in the face, cocked the Remington, stepped up, jammed the muzzle to Krine’s forehead, and blew his brains out. “You made a mistake,” he said to the body. “Decent can be strong too when it has to be.”

  Suddenly so tired he could barely stand, Chancy shuffled a couple of steps. He thought about Missy Burke and looked up at the stars and said, “Thank you.”

  EPILOGUE

  Most herds arrived in Wichita without fanfare. But word had spread up the trail that some loco Texans and a bunch of women were bringing in fifteen hundred head, and people thronged to the cattle yard to witness the spectacle. It even made the front page of the Wichita Eagle under the banner headline

  SEEING IS BELIEVING!

  FIRST FEMALE DROVERS

  BRING HERD TO TOWN!

  Chancy Gantry oversaw the sale, deposited the money in the Wichita Bank, sent word to the Flying V, and with Missy Burke on his elbow, hunted up a parson and had him officiate the
ir “I do”s.

  In attendance at the hasty nuptials were Jelly Varnes, wearing his ivory-handled Colt, and Laverne Dodger, his empty sleeve pinned to his side. Ollie Teal, who had to use crutches, served as best man. The doves from Prosperity were maids of honor, and each and every one wept as the vows were exchanged, Della Neece sobbing so loudly the parson had to shush her.

  A month later there was another wedding. Ollie Teal and Margie Hampton tied the knot. By then Ollie had recuperated enough to get around without crutches. It was Margie who’d tended him on the long trail drive. She’d hovered at his side day and night, waited on him hand and foot. She’d changed his bandages, fed him, washed him. And whenever any of the other ladies offered to take her place, she’d shoo them off. “Ollie is mine to take care of,” she’d tell them. It got so that Ollie and she were inseparable. When they reached Wichita they took adjoining rooms for propriety’s sake, but no one was fooled.

  Chancy had never seen his pard so happy as the day Ollie said his vows. After the ceremony, at a small reception at a restaurant, Ollie took him aside and pumped his hand and said he was sorry but he had a new pard now.

  “That’s all right,” Chancy said. “I have one too.”

  Ollie glanced over at where Margie and Missy and the other ladies were laughing and eating. “And I owe it all to nails.”

  “How’s that again?” Chancy said.

  “If those owl-hoots hadn’t nailed me to that wall, I never would have needed nursing. And if Margie hadn’t nursed me, she’d never have taken a liking to me like she did, and been willing to be my wife.”

  “Life is full of surprises.”

  “I’ll say.” Ollie beamed happily. “My pa told me once not to let it upset me if I never got hitched. He said that women can be fussy when it comes to who they marry, and there might not be one willing to tie her star to the likes of me.” Ollie stopped, and his brow knit. “Say, how do you tie a star anyhow? They’re so far up in the sky, you can’t lasso one if you tried.”

  “It’s a figure of speech, I think they call it.”

  “Well, my pa was wrong. Margie says I’m just the kind of man she’s been looking for. I asked her if it was because I have a small nose and she’d mentioned once how she likes small noses better than big noses, but she said that wasn’t it.”

  “Not many ladies marry over noses,” Chancy said.

  “Margie said she’d marry me because I’m the only purely innocent man she ever met. What did she mean by that, do you reckon? I’m not more innocent than the next fella. I cuss sometimes. And I have bad thoughts now and then.”

  “You have a good heart, pard. That’s what she meant.”

  “All I know is I’ll do my best by her.”

  “That’s all any man can do.”

  Ollie lowered his voice. “Can I ask you a favor?”

  “Anything. Anytime,” Chancy said.

  “It’s about tying. Not stars, though. Diapers.”

  “Aren’t you getting ahead of yourself?”

  “Margie says she wants to have kids. Lots and lots of kids, was how she put it. I don’t know the first thing about it. Take diapers, for instance. If you tie a diaper too loose, it’ll fall off. If you tie it too tight, you’ll strangle the baby’s gut. It has to be just right, like that bear’s porridge.”

  “Oh, Ollie.”

  “What?”

  Ollie and Margie Teal went on to have nine children. They stayed in Wichita the rest of their days. Ollie worked as a store clerk and Margie as a seamstress. One night about five years after they were married, she asked him if he missed being a cowboy and Ollie replied that he didn’t miss it as much as he’d thought he would. When she asked why that was, he smiled and kissed her and said that she looked a lot better in a dress than a cow ever could.

  Laverne Dodger finished medical school and became a full-fledged sawbones. He hung his shingle out in Topeka and lived a long life devoted to relieving the suffering in others. Over two hundred people attended his funeral, and his tombstone was chiseled to read HERE LIES DOC DODGER, BELOVED HEALER AND FRIEND.

  Jelly Varnes returned to Texas. He stayed at the Flying V for several years, then drifted to the border country. A certain senorita was the lure. He met her on a trip to Dallas, where she was visiting a sister. He stayed in the border country for ten years but never married, and was involved in several shooting scrapes. The most notorious was an incident in a saloon in which he shot and killed three vaqueros.

  A Texas Ranger happened to be in the vicinity, and investigated the killings. He interviewed a number of witnesses. They all agreed the shooting was over a woman, apparently the same senorita. They also agreed that one of the vaqueros, “an hombre of vicious temperament,” as one witness put it, started the affray when he became “too friendly” with the senorita and she objected. When the vaquero slapped her, Jelly knocked him down. The vaquero rose and went for his six-shooter, and Jelly drew and shot him in the face before he cleared leather. Witnesses said the other two tried to unlimber their own revolvers, and that Jelly shot both “as quick as lightning.”

  Jelly didn’t stick around. Even though he could have claimed self-defense, he not only left the border country; he left Texas.

  Next he turned up working for John H. Slaughter in Arizona. He stayed at the Slaughter Ranch not quite five years, and left after yet another shooting.

  Jelly was in Galeyville when a drunk pistol-whipped a freighter who refused to drink with him. Jelly told the drunk to leave the man be, and the drunk went for his six-gun. They buried him in an unmarked grave.

  The next anyone heard the name Jelly Varnes was in California. An old man who went by that handle lived in a cabin on a bluff overlooking the ocean. He made the local newspaper when he saved two children being set on by a rabid dog. The old man had an ivory-handled Colt hidden under his shirt, and killed the dog with a shot to the head. He was arrested for carrying a concealed firearm but released after an uproar over the unfairness of it.

  The brother and sister took a liking to the old man, and treated him as the grandfather they’d never had. They brought him sweets and fruit, and he’d regale them with tales of the cattle years. He had a flair for storytelling, but he would only ever share his stories with them.

  When Jelly passed on, they were the only ones who stood by the hole as his coffin was lowered, and the girl placed flowers on his grave.

  As for Chancy Gantry, he and his wife moved to Salina, where they opened a dry goods store and ran it until they were old enough for rocking chairs. Missy bore them seven children and those seven gave them sixteen grandchildren.

  The family had a tradition that, come hell or high water, they got together once a year, on Independence Day. Missy wanted it to be on Thanksgiving, but Chancy pointed out that winter weather often struck by late November, and some of their brood had a long way to travel. In the summer the weather was better.

  For twenty wonderful years the family held those get-togethers, and Chancy was never happier as when he had everyone under one roof and all of them safe and well. He delighted in rocking his grandchildren on his knee and playing hide-and-seek.

  Chancy and Ollie paid each other visits now and then. They’d take a jug and sit in the shade of a tree and share their latest doings. Chancy noticed early on that Ollie always wore shirts with longer sleeves than usual, even in the hottest weather. He never asked why. He noticed too that when Ollie raised an arm, those sleeves never slid far enough to show Ollie’s scars.

  Ollie also refused to ever touch a hammer or nails. Any building that had to be done around his place, he hired it out. He wouldn’t even allow a hammer in his house.

  When Ollie eventually passed on, it was remarked by many that he was the most “beloved man in the county.”

  Finally, of the original outfit, only Chancy was left. One evening he and Missy stood in their yard watc
hing the sun set and admiring the spectacular colors.

  Missy, her hair now white but her smile still as bright, turned to Chancy and asked if he ever missed the old days.

  “When we got married and started our life together?”

  “Before that,” Missy said. “The Flying V. The trail drive. Prosperity.”

  “Have you been conked on the head?” Chancy joked.

  “We wouldn’t have met if not for that.”

  “I’d as soon forget it, thank you very much,” Chancy said. “Not the part where I met you. The rest of it. The killings and all.”

  Missy squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry I brought it up. But every now and then you get a look to your eyes. As if you’re remembering.”

  “The memories do bubble up now and then,” Chancy admitted.

  “You only did what you had to in order to protect people you cared about. Can any of us ever do more than that?”

  “I reckon not,” Chancy said.

  “Then smile for me, you lunkhead.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Chancy said, and did.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  PHANTOM HILL

  by Carlton Stowers.

  Available in March 2016 from Signet in paperback and e-book.

  Coy Jennings was limping almost as badly as his horse when, in the distance, he saw chimney smoke lazily climbing into the clear morning sky. From a small rise he could see a couple of clapboard buildings, a few small houses, and a lengthy row of tents. The wind carried the sounds of people hurrying about, dogs barking, a rooster crowing, and a blacksmith’s hammer making a steady clanging.

  Phantom Hill didn’t look like much of a town.

  “I reckon if we don’t fall flat on our faces,” he said to the hobbling bay, “we’re gonna make it.”

  The trip took far longer than Jennings had planned. What he had figured would be a two-day ride turned into more than a week, after his horse had startled a rattlesnake, which then had bitten him just above the hoof on his back leg. Coy hadn’t even bothered to kill the snake, instead dismounting immediately and cutting away a length of rein to tie above the small marks left by the rattler’s fangs. He’d quickly tethered his mount to a mesquite tree, taken out his knife, and begun cutting small X’s above the wound. Kneeling in front of the startled animal, he’d sucked the bloody poison from the leg. Once that was done, he’d made a small fire and boiled water to bathe the cuts. He’d then made a mushy plaster of tobacco and placed it on the leg, wrapping it tightly with a strip of cloth ripped from his shirt.