Johnny McCabe (The McCabes Book 6)

by Brad Dennison

  Matt nodded. “That was incredible shooting you did, today. I find myself saying that a lot. But you saved his life.”

  “You did a good thing, too. I saw you ride that rock slide. If you hadn’t, Cooper’s horse might have kept on dragging him along.”

  Cooper was hit with a bout of coughing, then it died down.

  Matt said, “Doesn’t sound good. He’s got fluid in his lungs.”

  “We’ll do what we can, but it’s in God’s hands.”

  “I suppose most things are.”

  Johnny grinned. “Now you’re starting to sound like Ma.”

  “Never a bad thing.”

  “It sure ain’t.”

  78

  The travois had a tendency to swing a bit as the horses walked along.

  “Keep it slow, boys,” Johnny said.

  Johnny noticed Cooper’s eyes were open, so he held up a hand for the travois riders to stop.

  Johnny said to him, “How you doing, old hoss?”

  Cooper grinned a little. “Been better.”

  Cooper was pale, and his face was gaunt. The one eye Cooper could open had a haunted look. Johnny had seen the look when he was with the Texas Rangers. A man who took a bullet and was dying, and was beyond the point where he could be saved.

  Cooper said, “That stallion. What happened to him?”

  He didn’t remember the conversation the night before. Not good, Johnny thought.

  Johnny said, “Had to be put down to save your life.”

  Cooper shook his head. “That’s a shame. That was an incredible horse.”

  Then Cooper was unconscious again.

  Johnny motioned for the riders to continue on.

  Quint had ridden up beside Johnny. Quint said, “He looks like men I’ve seen who’ve lost a lot of blood.”

  Johnny nodded. “I think he’s bleeding inside.”

  “That old doctor better get here soon, or it’ll be too late.”

  Johnny saw Corry riding into view, through a stand of thick pines.

  “Come on. Corry’s checking in.”

  Corry had dismounted and was loosening the cinch. “There’s a long narrow draw coming up. It’ll be too steep for the travois. We’ll have to go around it.”

  Johnny said, “How much time will we lose?”

  “A couple hours. Maybe more. But it can’t be helped.”

  The ravine was a quarter mile ahead, and at the speed they were going, it took them nearly fifteen minutes to reach it. The ridge fell away sharply with rocks and sharp pieces of bedrock jutting out. And in the middle of it all it looked like God himself and taken a huge trowel and just cut a swath through it.

  Joe rode up beside Johnny and Quint.

  He said, “It’s like Corry said. No way you can get the travois down there.”

  Quint looked off to their right. “The land is less steep over there, on that side of the ridge. Even still, we’ll have to go down the slope diagonal-like, so the travois isn’t tipped too much. Like Corry said, a good two hours.”

  Johnny went back to the travois. “I think we should rest the horses a little before we start down the slope.”

  From here, they couldn’t see the ravine.

  Matt said, “Is it as bad as Corry says?”

  Johnny nodded.

  One of the riders was a man named Hardy. Older than most of the riders, but not quite gray, yet. He was in a floppy hat, with a bandana around his neck.

  He said, “So that’ll add two more hours to our ride. Can he make it?”

  Johnny’s gaze fell on Cooper. The man was very still, and his eyes were shut. He looked downright gray.

  Johnny swung out of the saddle and left Bravo’s reins trailing, and walked over to the travois. Didn’t look like Cooper was breathing at all. Johnny reached a hand to Cooper’s neck, trying to find a pulse. There was none. He then pressed fingers into Cooper’s wrist. None there, either.

  Johnny let out a load of air he didn’t even realized he was holding. He felt a weight of defeat fall onto his shoulders, like it was trying to push him right into the ground.

  “Won’t matter, boys,” Johnny said. “Cooper’s come as far as he’s going to.”

  Johnny and the boys wrapped Cooper’s body in a blanket. The boys were all emotionally exhausted watching the life of a man they admired dwindle away, so Johnny decided they would travel no more that day.

  He said, “We’ll make camp right here.”

  Quint didn’t cry. But he stood with the stoic sort of stillness Johnny had seen in many a strong man, when confronting something hurtful.

  Quint said, “The man was like a brother to me.”

  Corry was young and tried to be stoic like Quint. But he couldn’t quite manage it. A tear escaped, and he wiped it away.

  “Mister Cooper was like a father to me,” he said.

  Johnny put an arm around the boy’s shoulder.

  Matt said, “It’s a sign of the kind of man True Cooper was, that his passing so hurts the men around him.”

  Later in the day, Johnny went out hunting on one of the spare horses the men had brought with them mustanging.

  He rode down the slope they would have taken with the travois had Cooper not died. He was surrounded by tall ponderosa pines, but at the base of the hill he emerged into a grassy clearing. Toward the middle of the clearing was a tangle of bushes and vines and some reeds. Johnny figured they were probably growing around a small body of water.

  Might be a good place to find some tracks, he thought. Or find a good, concealed spot and wait to see what might come on in for some water.

  He heard a rustle from inside the bushes. It had been a big noise, but he knew it didn’t mean it was necessarily made by a big animal. He had seen more than one squirrel or bird make more noise than a deer. But just in case, he thought he would wait a bit and see what emerged from the bushes.

  He decided to dismount. Had he been on Bravo, he would have remained in the saddle, because of Bravo’s knack of knowing when to remain still. But this was a cutting horse Johnny had never ridden before, so he pulled his rifle from the scabbard and swung down to the ground.

  He cocked the rifle and then released the rear trigger. He then brought the rifle to his shoulder and waited. A Hawken was perhaps the best rifle made for accuracy and distance, he was finding, but it wasn’t designed for snapping off a quick shot.

  A deer lifted its head from the bushes. It was a mule deer, with a tawny hide and huge antlers. Johnny thought he saw ten points.

  He fired the rifle and the deer lowered its head back into the bushes. Johnny thought he had placed his bullet between the eyes.

  He started for the bushes, switching the empty rifle to his left hand. If the deer was still alive, he would finish it off with a pistol.

  He had covered half the distance to the bushes when the deer raised its head again.

  Dang! I missed!

  He really thought he had gotten the deer.

  He hadn’t yet reloaded his rifle, but he was much closer now, less than a hundred feet, so he drew his right-hand revolver like he was drawing on a man. Moving in one fluid motion, cocking the gun as he moved, and bringing the gun out to full extension. He fired and the deer lowered its head again.

  He started running toward the bushes. He couldn’t have missed twice. Not that he meant to be cocky, it was just that he had made trickier shots. Even just the day before, when he shot the mad stallion.

  He pushed through the tall bushes and grass, and on the ground in front of a small water hole were two bucks. Both were lying dead in the grass. One had a ten point rack and the other eight points.

  How often do you see this? Johnny asked himself. Two bucks together. The men were certainly going to feast tonight.

  79

  The mood of the men lightened up when they saw Johnny walking into camp, leading his horse and with two bucks draped across the back.

  As it grew dark, the men cut spits and began to roast venison over a fire. Lau
ghter erupted, and they began to celebrate the life of True Cooper rather than to grieve his passing.

  Quint got out a whiskey flask and began to tell stories of him and Cooper. Some of the stories involved outrageous things that happened while they were working on the ranch. Most of them involved even more outrageous things that happened in the Greenville saloons. Johnny didn’t know how much of it was exaggeration, but the whiskey flask was being handed around and the men were smiling and laughing.

  Johnny stood by the fire with a cup of coffee in one hand. He looked over at the travois and at the figure wrapped in blankets.

  He said, “I wish I had known you longer, True Cooper.”

  The fire was dancing high, and Johnny could hear the howl of a wolf from somewhere out in the darkness. A chorus of howls joined it.

  Then he saw the riders emerging from the darkness into the circle of firelight. Three of them. One was Evans. Another was a man with a wide hat and a gun at his side. He had some age on him, but he sat tall in the saddle. The third was a man with a gnarled, hunched over way of riding. He was in a jacket and string tie, and a narrow-brimmed hat.

  They reined up.

  Johnny said, “Evans. You made good time. Better’n I would have thought.”

  The man with the wide hat swung out of the saddle and said, “You must be Johnny Reynolds. Evans has told me about you.”

  Johnny nodded.

  “I’m Frank McCarty. Owner of the Bar M.” He extended his hand and Johnny shook it. The grip was firm, just like the man’s gaze.

  “I’m right pleased to meet you, sir.”

  “How’s Cooper?”

  “I’m sorry to say he passed on this afternoon.” Johnny looked back at Quint and the men. “We’re having a sort of early wake for Cooper. The men needed it.”

  “I fully understand. I knew Cooper a long time, and I think he’d be pleased,” McCarty said. “I don’t generally allow drinking on the job, but I think it’s all right in this case.”

  Then he indicated the man with him and said, “This here is Doctor Marker.”

  “Looks like I came all the way for nothing,” the doctor said. He didn’t extend his hand. “The last place I want to spend the night is in a cow camp.”

  Johnny realized the man was younger than he had first thought. Maybe mid-forties. But he had an old way about him.

  He reminded Johnny somehow of a scavenger bird. Eyes that were small and yet intense, and a hawk-like nose. A face that was gaunt and with sunken-in cheeks. His fingers were long and narrow.

  Corry came over. “Johnny, them wolves sound closer than I like. Maybe we should move the horses closer to the fire.”

  Johnny nodded. “Grab Matt and Hardy to help you.”

  Corry nodded and headed off.

  McCarty said, “Evans has told me about you. Once we’ve gone and buried Cooper all proper-like, I want to talk to you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  McCarty slapped Johnny’s shoulder. “But for right now, let’s go have a taste of that whiskey.”

  McCarty slapped Quint on the shoulder too, and said, “Hand that flask over.”

  McCarty took a pull from it, and then he said, “Have I ever told you boys how I met Cooper?”

  A chorus of no and no, sir rose up. McCarty launched into the story.

  After a time, Quint got up and wandered over to Johnny.

  He said, “I’m glad you’re here. Cooper was a natural leader. Men just seemed to gather around him. You’ve got those same qualities. With Cooper gone, somehow the empty spot seems a little less empty with a man like him standing here.”

  Johnny nodded. “My mother always said, God puts us where we’re needed.”

  “Sounds like a wise lady.”

  The doctor checked Joe’s ankle and announced it was just a sprain and it should remain in a splint for a few days. Then the doctor went to the edge of the camp and found a fallen log to sit on. He remained there, looking off into the night, but Johnny realized it wasn’t that the man saw something out there worth looking at. He was just looking away from the men. He was sitting with his back erect and his hands folded in his lap.

  Johnny said to Quint, “What’s the story with the doctor?”

  “Him?” Quint said. “Walks around town like he’s got a rod shoved up his butt. Not a bad doctor, but no one you want to sit and talk with. Holds hisself above everyone else. Got a right purty daughter, though. Lookin’ at her, you’d never know she was related to him.”

  After a bit, Johnny decided to walk over to the doctor. No reason not to be neighborly, he thought.

  Johnny said, “It’s too bad you had to ride all the way out here for nothing. But it shows you’re a doctor who cares.”

  “Frank McCarty better realize I still intend to be paid. I am not going to go gallivanting about the countryside and spend the night with a bunch of hooligan cowboys for free. That man you work for, he’s got the money, and he’s going to part with some of it.”

  Johnny said to himself, Okay, that went well. And he wandered his way back to the fire.

  He did find it amusing, though that the doctor assumed he worked for Frank McCarty. Maybe it was because of the position of leadership Johnny had somehow fallen into with the men.

  Johnny hoped there was another doctor in Greenville, because he wanted nothing to do with this man at all. He didn’t care how pretty the man’s daughter turned out to be.

  80

  True Cooper was buried in a cemetery outside of a Methodist church in Greenville. McCarty had bought a plot for Cooper, and he was paying for a headstone to be engraved and set up.

  At the graveside ceremony, once the preacher had finished speaking and led them all in prayer, Frank McCarty walked up to the open grave for a final look at the casket. Johnny walked up to stand beside him.

  Johnny said, “I didn’t know him long, but I knew right off he was a good man.”

  McCarty nodded. “Cooper was with me the longest of any of my men. Even longer than Quint. He was like family to me. He was the brother I never had.”

  Johnny and his brothers had little money with them, but they had decided to spend that money on baths and haircuts. Except for Joe. He partook of the bath, but decided against the shave or haircut.

  He said, “Long Indian hair and a beard are the way I am. Folk’ll just have to get used to it.”

  There was also a Chinese laundry in town, and Johnny stood beside McCarty in clean clothes, with his hair cut short and with his jaw clean-shaven. After those expenses and a few beers at one of the saloons, they didn’t have enough left for a hotel room, so they were camping by a brook outside of town. But they were doing it in clean clothes and they no longer had to avoid standing downwind of each other.

  McCarty said, “True was a simple man. Not complicated. He was straight-forward. The kind of man who said what he meant and nothing else. He was of stout heart. He was more than simply ramrod of the Bar M. He was part of its life blood.”

  A few upright chairs had been brought out from the ranch. McCarty’s wife was sitting beside him, and next her was their daughter Verna.

  Verna was about the age of Becky back home, and she was stealing glances at Johnny in a way that made him uncomfortable. Not that a man didn’t want to be looked at by a pretty girl, and Verna was indeed pretty, but there was something about her that made him wary. Something he couldn’t quite define.

  All of the cowhands from the McCarty ranch were at the burial. There was also the blacksmith and wrangler, a man with hard muscles that made his sleeves pull tight. He had been introduced to Johnny as Moses Timmons.

  Standing beside Timmons was his son. Maybe a few years older than Johnny, and he stood as tall as his father. He moved with the presence strong men often have, but his frame was much narrower than his father’s. Where his father had pronounced cheekbones, the boy’s looked hollow. He had dark hair that grew like a wild bush.

  While Verna kept looking toward Johnny and throwing him a smile if h
e looked her way, the Timmons boy couldn’t keep his eyes from Verna.

  Johnny wondered why everywhere he went, things had to be so complicated. For the first time, he found himself missing the simplicity of his time with the Texas Rangers. They chased after raiders and renegades. Shot it out with them, then it was on to a saloon. Tequila and women. Work hard, play hard. Nothing complicated. No hidden agendas.

  He had found himself caught up in all the twisting tangles of family politics at the Broken Spur. He decided that if he were to take a job at the Bar M—and no job had been offered yet—he would keep away from Verna and the Timmons boy. He would deal with Frank McCarty, only.

  McCarty said to Johnny, “Hardy and Quint have talked to me at length about all you did for them out there. All you did for Cooper. It means a lot to me.”

  “I did what I could.”

  “Walk with me. I’d like to talk with you in private. One of the men can take Mrs. McCarty and Verna home.”

  Johnny noticed Corry and Quint nearby. They were facing toward the grave, each with his hat in hand.

  Johnny called them over. “Could you boys escort the women back to the ranch? Mr. McCarty will be joining you shortly.”

  Quint nodded, and Corry said, “Sure can, Boss.”

  Johnny and McCarty began strolling away from the crowd.

  McCarty said, “How old are you, boy?”

  “Not quite twenty-two, sir.”

  “I would have guessed you to be older. You don’t seem reckless or rash, like most men of that age.”

  Johnny grinned. “I’ve had my moments, sir.”

  McCarty grinned, also. “As have we all.”

  McCarty drew a breath and said, “I take it you have some leadership experience.”

  Johnny nodded. “I was ramrod of the Broken Spur, in Texas.”

  “Breaker Grant’s place?”