Hell Hath No Fury

by Charles G. West

  “He ain’t goin’ away!” Clint agonized. “He’s gonna wait us out till he gets a clean shot. We jumped right in his trap. He’s got us pinned down till dark, and it’s a long time till dark. Reckon what Mama and Lorena are thinkin’? Maybe if they get Jake fixed up, he’ll be back to help us.”

  “I ain’t countin’ on it,” Barfield said. He tried to think what he would do if the roles were reversed. “Hell, he ain’t gonna set up there on that hill all day long. We’ll wait him out a little longer, then see if he don’t hightail it for the other side of the mountains. He’s just set on givin’ them time to move them cows over the mountains.” With little choice, they resigned themselves to wait, even if they had to wait until nightfall to slip out. After approximately thirty additional minutes passed, Barfield asked, “What did you say?”

  “I said, ‘Give me the slightest reason and I’ll send you straight to hell, both of you.’” Both father and son froze, stunned by the voice that seemed to come from right over them. They both looked up to see Hawk standing at the end of the gully, his rifle pointed at them. Clint started to raise his rifle, but stopped abruptly when Hawk warned, “Don’t even think about it.” Motioning with his Winchester, he said, “Pick those rifles up by the barrel and toss ’em up outta that gully.”

  “We do that and you’ll shoot us down,” Barfield complained.

  “I’ll shoot you down if you don’t,” Hawk answered him. “Now, do like I told you and you won’t get shot.” Barfield reluctantly did as he was told, grasping his rifle by the barrel and tossing it up over the rim of the trench. Thinking Hawk was distracted while watching his father surrender his weapon, Clint suddenly raised his rifle to his shoulder. The slug from Hawk’s Winchester caught him in the left shoulder before he had time to aim. The force of the bullet’s impact spun him around, causing him to sit down hard on the ground. Hawk cranked a new cartridge in the chamber. “Pick his rifle up by the barrel and toss it outta that gully,” Hawk instructed calmly. Barfield acted quickly to follow his order.

  “You gonna just shoot us down in cold blood?” Barfield complained.

  “If I was plannin’ to do that,” Hawk calmly answered, “you’d both be dead already.” He motioned for them to climb up out of the gully. “I told you you wouldn’t get hurt if you did like I told you. Your boys are kinda hardheaded, though, ain’t they?” He moved quickly over to pick up the rifle. “Now you’ve got both sons each with a bullet in his shoulder. I advise you to forget about killin’ anybody, go home, and tend to your wounds. But one thing you need to understand, your days of raidin’ Triple-P cattle are over. If we have any more cattle missin’, we ain’t gonna bother tryin’ to find out who’s rustlin’ ’em. We’ll figure it’s you and we won’t come thinkin’ about shoulder wounds. Whether you clear out of here or stay, makes no difference to the Triple-P. You won’t be bothered by us unless we start missin’ stock again.” He walked over and picked up their rifles. “I’ll leave these up the hill a ways. They won’t be too hard to find after I’m gone. Right now, I expect you’d best walk back to your cabin and take care of that boy’s shoulder.”

  Barfield was confused. Clint lay in the bottom of the gully holding his shoulder, moaning in pain, looking to his father for help. No longer certain Hawk was going to kill them, the old man asked a question. “You tellin’ me you ain’t comin’ back here with some of them other ranchers to run us out of our home?”

  “The Triple-P’s not interested in startin’ a range war. Like I said, if you stay on your side of the mountains and we don’t lose any more cows, then we’ll let you be. But if you don’t think you can stay here and work an honest ranch, you’d best leave, ’cause if we have to come back here lookin’ for our cows, we’ll clean this rat’s nest out for good.”

  “That might not be as easy as you make it out,” Barfield said, feeling some sense of his defiance return.

  Hawk brought his rifle up to bear on him. “Maybe I’d best just go ahead and take care of this now,” he threatened.

  “No!” Barfield exclaimed. “Hold on, you win! I’m goin’! We won’t bother your cows no more. Just let me take care of my boy before he bleeds to death.” He reached down to help Clint get on his feet.

  Hawk watched them carefully as they climbed out of the gully and started walking back down toward the cabin. We’ll see about that, he thought, knowing there was little chance this brief encounter was enough to put Barfield on the straight and narrow path to honesty. But it was something to hope for, maybe for a while, anyway. However it turned out, it would be left to Monroe and Thomas and their men to handle it in the future. He didn’t anticipate being here this long to begin with. That brought thoughts of Roy Nestor to mind as he walked back up the slope. After this amount of time, Nestor could be a hell of a long way from that ambush on the river, in any direction. As he agreed to do, however, he would nose around on the chance he could find some trace of him. But that would have to wait until he returned to Helena. “Needle in a haystack,” he mumbled, then whistled. In a few moments, Rascal appeared at the edge of the pines across the clearing and trotted toward him.

  * * *

  “Well, if this ain’t a fine sight,” Lorena Barfield announced sarcastically as she looked out the window to see her father leading his and Clint’s horse with her brother sitting in the saddle. When her mother moved up beside her, Lorena continued, “Look at that, Clint got shot, too!” She promptly went to the door to find out what happened. Her mother remained at the window a few moments more before releasing a tired sigh and turning to look at her younger son, sitting on a pallet leaning back against the wall. She could hear her daughter outside, greeting the returning men.

  “Look at you,” Lorena said to Clint. “I just got done pickin’ a slug outta Jake’s shoulder.” She looked back at her father. “I reckon them three that came ridin’ in here like they was gonna run us out are dead.” She waited for his answer.

  “I reckon not,” Barfield replied. He tied the horses at the corner of the porch next to Jake’s horse. “They’ve gone.” He was in no mood to explain his failure to anyone, especially his daughter, who was always quick to criticize. It was bad enough that he had led his sons into a trap, getting them both shot. But there was no way to silence her, beyond putting a bullet in her skull.

  Not at all satisfied with the non-report, Lorena pressed. “You ran ’em off, right—without any of our cows?”

  “No, damn it!” Barfield barked. “They got away with thirty head or more. There weren’t no way we could stop ’em. They ambushed us. We never stood a chance.” He turned away from her to help Clint climb down from the saddle.

  “It wasn’t but one of ’em,” Clint muttered, “that spooky-lookin’ jasper with the feather in his hat. He pinned us down where we couldn’t do nothin’.”

  With a deep frown of disgust, Lorena said, “I shoulda gone with you, I swear. One of you coulda stayed here and helped Ma with the cookin’.” She shook her head in a stern sign of her disapproval. “One man, I swear.”

  “That’s about enough outta you,” Barfield scolded. “I’m tired of you runnin’ off at the mouth. I thought about throwin’ you in the creek when your mama squeezed out a damn girl. I shoulda done it.”

  Long indifferent to her father’s threats and insults, Lorena smirked and said, “I’da come back to haunt you every day of your life.” Since a small child, she had demonstrated a defiant nature and a competitive attitude with her two younger brothers. The only soft spot in her armor were her feelings for her mother. Since Pearl Barfield never showed the backbone to stand up to her husband, her daughter felt it her responsibility to do it for her. It often led to heated face-offs, just short of physical violence. “Come on, Clint,” she said, abruptly breaking off the argument with her father. “Set yourself down at the table and I’ll dig that bullet outta your shoulder.” Knowing it useless to protest, Clint sat down and prepared to withstand his sister’s none-too-gentle surgical manner.

  Du
ring the removal of Hawk’s bullet, Clint related the happenings of the past couple of hours that caused him, Jake, and her father to have been completely helpless against one lone man with a rifle. “Yeah, but it was still just one man against three of you,” Lorena protested.

  Clint insisted that this one man was different from any man he had ever run into. “I ain’t ever seen anybody handle a rifle like he did. He was as handy with that Winchester as most men would be with a handgun.”

  “He must notta been as good as you say he was,” she said, still skeptical, “or you and Jake would both be dead. Hell, he missed both of you with a wound in your shoulder. If he was so good with it, he’da nailed you dead center in your chest.”

  “I don’t know ’bout that,” Clint insisted. “I think he wasn’t goin’ for a kill shot.” He told her then what the man with the feather had said about letting them alone as long as the cattle rustling stopped on the Triple-P. “He had me and Pa where there weren’t nothin’ we could do, standin’ over us with his rifle and us with no guns. It he had wanted to kill us, there wasn’t nothin’ stoppin’ him.”

  She looked up at her father, who was watching her doctoring. “You believe what he said about just lettin’ us be as long as we don’t mess with his cattle? That don’t make sense to me.”

  “No,” Barfield said. “I’ve been thinkin’ about that and it strikes me now that he’s just wantin’ to make us sit tight while they round up some of the other ranchers. Then one fine day they’ll all ride in here, kill every one of us, and divide up our cattle. That’s what I think.”

  Lorena paused to give that some thought. “Well, that’s one way of lookin’ at it, I reckon. Whatever they’ve got in mind sure as hell ain’t gonna be to our likin’. The question now is, what are we gonna do about it? We can’t sit around here waitin’ for a gang of men to come ridin’ in and shoot the place up.”

  CHAPTER 11

  When Hawk got back to the Triple-P ranch, he found Monroe and Thomas still examining the brands on the cattle they had driven back. Eager to hear Hawk’s report, they walked to meet him as he pulled the buckskin to a stop. “We heard the shooting,” Monroe said. “Wondered if you were in any trouble.”

  Hawk gave an accounting of everything that happened after they left, including the part where he told Barfield they would be left alone if they ceased their poaching of Triple-P cattle. When Monroe asked if he really thought Barfield would stay on, Hawk responded, “I doubt if a man like Barfield has any notion about tryin’ to make an honest livin’. He’s gonna start up again, or move on. I figured I’d give him a chance to pack up and go someplace else to try his game. I put a bullet in the shoulder of both his boys, so he might have to wait awhile before he can think about tryin’ to get even.” He shrugged and explained, “I didn’t go to put a bullet in that second boy’s shoulder, but he made a move to take a shot at me.”

  They went on to discuss the best plan to protect themselves from any possible raids in retaliation for the damage Barfield suffered. There wasn’t much they could do except to keep a wary eye out when going about the business of running the ranch, that and a night guard every night. It was unnecessary to explain, but Monroe told Hawk he was going to have to stay on the ranch until this thing with the Barfields was settled one way or another. “How ’bout if I keep you on the payroll, same as Bob and Pete and the other men?”

  “That would be fine with me,” Hawk replied. “But I oughta warn you, I don’t know much about raising cattle and I ain’t ever had any burnin’ desire to learn.”

  His statement brought a laugh from Monroe. “I didn’t think you did. It’s that rifle of yours I’d be hirin’.”

  “I ain’t ever been hired out as a gunman, either, but I’ll try to help you keep an eye on the place.” He shook his head in wonder, thinking about how involved things had become since the simple proposition of finding out what had happened to Monroe’s brother Jamie. With that settled, he asked about the cattle they had driven back from Barfield’s.

  “Three were our brand obviously altered,” Thomas piped up. “The rest were RPB, so I reckon that officially makes us cattle rustlers, too.”

  “Maybe just traders,” Hawk suggested, “swappin’ out some of their cows for the ones of yours still on their side of the mountains.”

  “That sounds fair to me,” Monroe said. “Let’s go to the house and get something to eat. Rustling cattle makes me hungry and Lily said she was gonna be ringing the dinner bell as soon as the biscuits were done.”

  “I reckon I’d best take care of my horse first,” Hawk said, and turned toward the barn.

  Before he had taken two steps, Monroe reminded him, “When you get through with your horse, you know we expect you to come to the house for supper, right?” He knew it was necessary to tell him, otherwise, he would more than likely go to the bunkhouse to eat with the hired hands.

  * * *

  “Why do you wear that feather in your hat?” Eight-year-old Tommy Pratt asked when Hawk came in and removed his hat before seating himself at the table. “Are you an Indian like Lily?”

  “Nope,” Hawk replied. “I reckon I’ve spent enough time with ’em to think like one sometimes.”

  “Tommy,” Dora scolded, “let Mr. Hawk eat his supper in peace. Don’t bother him with your questions.”

  Hawk smiled at her. “It’s no trouble, ma’am. I don’t mind tellin’ the boy why I wear the feather in my hat.” He turned back to Tommy and said, “It was one powerful cold day up in the Beartooth Mountains . . .” To Tommy’s rapt attention, he went on to tell him of a time when he was trying to make his way back to his camp when he was stopped by an avalanche of snow. It was so deep that it blocked his way through the one pass he was familiar with. In the process of trying to find away around it, he became hopelessly lost. Pushing on, he began to fear he might freeze to death when a red-tailed hawk suddenly appeared to circle over a rocky ledge a short distance off to his right. There didn’t seem to be a trail up over the ledge, but somehow he felt the hawk was trying to tell him to follow him. Since he was totally lost and getting colder by the minute, he decided to trust the hawk. “That hawk led me for miles. I’d lose track of him every once in a while, then when I thought I’d just been a fool, he’d pop up again. I followed that hawk all the way around that mountain before he disappeared for good. Well, I kept goin’ the way he had been leadin’ me till I came to a fork in the trail—one went left, one went right. But there was no hawk to lead me down one or the other. I figured I was lost for good then, but I looked up ahead and saw something lyin’ on the snow on the trail to the right. It was one hawk feather, the one I wear in my hat. He was tellin’ me which fork to take.”

  Totally fascinated by then, Tommy asked, “Did it take you back to your camp?”

  “Sure did,” Hawk said, and glanced up to discover he had captured the attention of the adults as well, especially the women. Lily, who nodded her head solemnly as the tale unwound, was well attuned to dreams and the Salish belief in the closeness between man and the animals. “I reckon we’d best get after this fine supper the ladies have fixed before it gets cold,” Hawk concluded.

  After supper was finished, Monroe and Thomas wrote a “duty roster” to give to their men, to establish a nightly guard detail. Counting Hawk, who volunteered to take the first night, they had enough men so that each man would be on duty every eight days. “That’s not too much to ask,” Monroe said, “night-hawking every eight days.”

  “I reckon, since I’ve got the first night’s watch, I’d best saddle up one of your horses. I think Rascal might need a rest.” He got up from the table, picked up his hat, and walked through the kitchen, where the women already had a good start on cleaning up the supper dishes. “That was a really fine supper, ma’am,” he said to Dora.

  “Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Dora replied. “I have to give Rachel and Lily a great deal of the credit, though.” He started to leave, then hesitated. She took the opportunity to co
mment, “That was quite an interesting story about that feather in your hat. It sure kept Tommy quiet for a long time.”

  Suddenly embarrassed, Hawk replied. “Yes, ma’am.” Still lingering, he glanced at Rachel, who smiled at him. Then lowering his voice, he turned back to Dora. “I reckon I owe you an apology,” he said, bringing a puzzled expression to her face. “I made up that story as I went along. I figured a youngster Tommy’s age would rather hear a little magic about that feather than the fact that I just found it beside a game trail one time when I was huntin’. I thought it was pretty, I reckon. And my name’s Hawk, so I stuck it in my hatband and I just never bothered to pull it out.”

  Dora shook her head slowly, then laughed delightedly. “Mr. Hawk,” she chortled. “You surprise me. Do you have children of your own?”

  “Oh no, ma’am, I ain’t ever been married,” he quickly replied.

  “Well, you don’t look that old to me. You’ve still got time to find the right girl.”

  He chuckled at the thought. “I reckon she’d have to love to hunt and fish. Anyway, I thought I oughta tell you I made that story up.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “And don’t tell Tommy. You’re right, you gave him something special to keep.” She watched him until he was out the back door, then turned to Rachel. “He’s an interesting man.”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Rachel replied, thinking of that dark night near the Blackfoot River when she first met the man called Hawk and the fight to the death he had with Kills Two Bears.

  Hawk threw his saddle on a dark sorrel he selected from the horse herd after a silent apology to Rascal. Your hide’s too light for night-hawkin’, anyway, he thought. As he had told Monroe, he planned to concentrate his time between the two most commonly used paths the cattle had created to the grassy slopes of the Sapphire Mountains. He figured if Barfield had any trouble in mind, he would most likely come down that way. It would be a night when his vigilance was unnecessary, however, for things were not going well at Barfield’s cabin.