The Loner: Rattlesnake Valley

by J. A. Johnstone

  “But they finally got him?” The Kid guessed.

  “That’s right.” Diana smiled. “HMS Scorpion, commanded by Captain Owen Starbird, sunk Malone’s ship and fished him and the other survivors from his crew out of the water.”

  “Your uncle?”

  She shook her head. “That’s right.”

  “The one who owns this Diamondback Ranch where you’re taking me?”

  “Actually, he only owns half of it. The other half is mine, but Uncle Owen has been running things ever since my father died and left the spread to us.”

  The Kid’s keen eyes habitually checked their surroundings again but didn’t see any sign of danger. Some birds flew overhead, but their pace was lazy. Nothing had spooked them.

  “Keep talking,” he told Diana.

  “Why? You don’t actually deserve an explanation, you know. It’s not like I owe you anything.”

  “Just call it curiosity,” The Kid said.

  “Downright nosiness, if you ask me.”

  The Kid smiled instead of getting offended at her comment. “I’ve been known to poke my nose where it doesn’t necessarily belong,” he admitted.

  “Well, don’t think that you’re going to get in the middle of this fracas. If you’re smart, you’ll mind your own business and get on out of Rattlesnake Valley as fast as you can.”

  “Then tell me what I’ll be running away from.”

  Diana sighed. “All right. My father was George Starbird. He was his father’s third son. Uncle Owen was the second. Do you know what that means?”

  “The law of primogeniture,” The Kid replied without hesitation. “Neither of them could inherit the family title and estate because they weren’t the firstborn son.”

  Diana’s eyes narrowed in surprise. Obviously, she hadn’t expected such a well-informed answer from him. “How do you know that?” she asked.

  “I’ve done some reading in my time,” The Kid answered vaguely, keeping his true background to himself as always. “I suppose that’s why your uncle went into the Royal Navy and your father immigrated to America. British nobility tends not to want those second and third sons hanging around and maybe doing something to embarrass the family.”

  “That’s exactly right. The two of them had to get out and make lives for themselves. My father could have gone into the military or the diplomatic service, but he decided that he wanted the adventure of coming to the United States. His family gave him enough money to get here.”

  “So he was a remittance man,” The Kid said.

  Diana shook her head again. “No, they didn’t keep paying him to stay out of sight and out of mind. They paid for his passage over here, and that was it. He wanted to come west, so he worked at odd jobs and finally saved enough to take a train from New York to Pittsburgh. From there he got a job on a steamship that carried freight up and down the Ohio River. That eventually got him to the Mississippi and a similar job there, and then he joined a wagon train heading for Santa Fe. He did a little bit of everything—fur trapping, packing for the army, prospecting, things like that—and during the war he left New Mexico Territory and came here to West Texas. It was a pretty wild place then.”

  The Kid nodded. “I’ve heard stories,” he said, without mentioning who he’d heard them from.

  “He had saved enough money to buy a small, failed ranch, here in what was already called Rattlesnake Valley. It was a different place then. The stream was dry most of the year, and even when there was water in it, there wasn’t enough to grow grass to support a herd of cattle. But my father had the idea that if there was a little water, there might be more at the source. He’d had some classes in the natural sciences before he left England and thought the streambed looked like it had once been larger. He traced the stream up into the mountains and found the springs that fed it. Sure enough, sometime in the past a rockslide had partially blocked the springs, so that only a small trickle of water was getting out through the rocks. He worked for months, by himself, clearing the slide, and finally the river was flowing again the way it once had. That was when the valley began to green up and started becoming the fine place to live and raise cattle that it is today.”

  Diana reached for the canteen hung on her saddle. While she was drinking, The Kid thought about what she had said and then asked, “How did he wind up owning all the range in the valley north of the river?”

  Diana smiled as she put the cap back on the canteen. “My father was a canny man, Mr. Morgan, and a stubborn one. He had a dream, and he came to believe that Rattlesnake Valley was where it would be fulfilled. With every penny he could scrape up, he bought more land before he got the river flowing again. It was a gamble, but he borrowed money, worked for other men, did anything and everything he could to acquire more range, because he believed it would be valuable someday. Then, suddenly, he was right. He became a rich man almost overnight when the wilderness began to bloom.”

  The Kid nodded. Some people would look at a man like George Starbird and think that he must have been lucky, that he didn’t really deserve the success he’d had. They would be jealous because they didn’t see—or chose not to see—the years of hard work and preparation that Starbird had put in before fortune ever smiled on him.

  “There was no settlement in the valley then,” Diana went on, “so he founded Bristol, naming it after a city near the place he had grown up in England.”

  “I reckon that’s how the river got its name, too.”

  She nodded. “That’s right. My father loved this country and was glad he came here, but he still had a lot of fondness for his homeland.”

  “Can’t blame a man for that,” The Kid said.

  “Starting up the town made Father even wealthier. He was still a young man, though, and he realized he was missing something.”

  “A wife,” The Kid guessed.

  “Exactly. One of the men who came to Bristol to start a store when it was nothing more than a cluster of tents and shacks had a daughter, and when my father met her, he knew she was the one he wanted.” Diana laughed softly. “Luckily for me, she felt the same way about him. They were married less than six months later, and in time, I came along.”

  “No brothers or sisters?” The Kid asked, then realized that maybe he was prying.

  Diana’s expression grew solemn. “No. A fever took her when I was less than two years old.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I never knew her,” she went on. “All I’ve seen are pictures of her…and the way my father’s eyes were always haunted by her loss.” Diana paused and looked off to the side of the trail, obviously struggling with her feelings for a moment before resuming. “But my father had a ranch to run and a daughter to raise, so he set about doing both of those things to the best of his ability.”

  “I had a feeling you were born and raised out here, from the way you ride and handle a rifle.”

  She laughed. “I was riding before I could walk, and shooting not long after that. My father didn’t raise me to be the son he never had, or anything like that, but he wanted to be sure I could take care of myself.” She paused again. “I can.”

  The Kid didn’t doubt it.

  He said, “I’m surprised he didn’t wind up owning the entire valley. Seems like it would have been easy enough for him to do.”

  “It would have,” Diana agreed, “but he didn’t want to. He said he had plenty of range for his own needs, and that if somebody else wanted to work hard and make something for themselves, they ought to have the chance. He didn’t try to stop anyone from coming into the valley and starting up small spreads south of the river, and he never hogged the water or anything like that. He was a good man, Mr. Morgan. If you want to boil everything down to its basics, that’s it right there. He was a good man.”

  “He sounds like it,” The Kid agreed. “But he wasn’t immortal, was he?”

  With a sad smile on her face, she shook her head. “No,” she said. “He wasn’t immortal.”

  “What hap
pened?”

  She looked over at him and said, “You really are curious, aren’t you?”

  “I mean no offense,” The Kid told her. “But you started this story, and I’d like to hear the end of it.”

  “I suppose I can’t blame you for that.” She looked off again. “It’s only been a couple of years, and it still hurts.” She drew in a breath. “My father knew how to handle horses as well as anybody I ever saw. But that didn’t help him one day when one of those damned snakes slithered right under the hooves of the horse he was riding, right outside the barn. It took them both by surprise. The horse went up in the air, my father came out of the saddle…He broke his neck when he landed. He lived for about eight hours before passing away that night.”

  The Kid let the silence stretch out for a moment before he said, “That’s a rough thing.”

  “It could have been worse. At least I got a chance to say good-bye to him. And he had a chance to tell me that he’d already sent for Uncle Owen to come and settle on Diamondback after he retired from the Royal Navy. It was supposed to be a surprise for me. Well, it was, all right.”

  Something about her tone of voice told The Kid that it hadn’t necessarily been a good surprise. He wondered how Diana and her uncle got along and if she resented him for inheriting half the ranch where she had grown up. She might feel that everything should have gone to her, but that had been George Starbird’s decision to make.

  “How does this tie in with Malone? He went to prison for being a pirate, I reckon.”

  “Of course he did. But he didn’t go to the gallows, because he and his men always spared the crews of the ships they captured. He was behind bars for eighteen years.” Diana laughed again, but the sound had an edge to it. “He was released not long after Uncle Owen retired from the Royal Navy.”

  “And he came here to settle the score for all those years he was locked up,” The Kid said as understanding dawned in him.

  Diana looked over at him. “That’s right, Mr. Morgan. Black Terence Malone came here to hoist the Jolly Roger over West Texas and destroy Owen Starbird.”

  Chapter 5

  The Kid looked at her and tried not to laugh at that Jolly Roger comment. It was obvious that she was dead serious in what she had just said. Thinking back over what had happened, he supposed she had a right to be. His chest still ached where Wolfram had landed that punch.

  “So Malone tracked your uncle to this valley, then came here and bought a ranch.”

  “The Bar SW, old Silas Wilmott’s place. Silas passed away about a year and a half ago. A few months after that, Malone showed up with title to the place. He had bought it from Silas’s heirs, who live up in Dallas.”

  “If he was legally released from prison in England, there’s nothing stopping him from doing something like that.”

  “I know. Uncle Owen told me not to worry about it. He said that Malone was just trying to make him nervous. But he brought some of his old crew of cutthroats with him, men like Wolfram and Greavy, and he hired more men whose hands didn’t get calluses from using a rope, if you know what I mean.”

  The Kid knew very well what she meant. He had seen the gunmen with Malone with his own eyes. A rancher hired men like that for only one reason—to fight.

  “Does he have any actual punchers?”

  Diana shrugged. “A few. Enough to handle the small herd that was left on the Bar SW. Of course, since Malone changed the brand to the Trident, his herd has grown some.”

  “Rustling?” The Kid guessed.

  “That’s what Uncle Owen and I believe. Our herds have shrunk steadily while Malone’s has been growing. You can draw your own conclusions.”

  “Has the law tried to do anything about it?”

  “Malone’s too slick. Nobody has been able to catch him breaking the law. Anyway, there’s just a single deputy sheriff in Bristol, sent down from the county seat to handle the whole valley. He can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “Has anything else odd been going on?”

  “Would you call having several Diamondback hands being bushwhacked odd?” Diana’s mouth tightened into a grim line. “Two of them are dead, and the others were wounded. The shootings always happened when one of our men was out on the range alone. The hands have stopped riding by themselves. They always go out in groups now, but that means we’re spread pretty thin. It hasn’t helped that some of our men have quit. You can’t blame them for leaving this part of the country, though. No one wants to get shot down from an ambush.”

  As she described it, it was a bad situation, all right. The Kid had heard Frank Morgan talk about similar setups. Even the biggest rancher could be brought low by rustlers chipping away at his herds and demoralizing his crew into quitting. From the sound of it, Owen Starbird had plenty of trouble on his plate.

  Starbird’s trouble was none of his business, though, The Kid told himself. He had felt an instinctive dislike for Malone, Greavy, and Wolfram, but that was no reason for him to hang around Rattlesnake Valley and involve himself in the dangerous conflicts going on there.

  He and Diana had reached a trail that veered off to the north from the main road. Diana turned her chestnut onto it, and The Kid rode alongside her on the buckskin. He had a hunch this trail led to the headquarters of Diamondback.

  A few minutes later, they came to the river. The stream spread out about sixty feet wide between grassy banks, and it was shallow enough that The Kid could see the gravel bed. The water jumped and bubbled around some rocks that jutted up fifty yards downstream. The Severn was a nice little river, and since it was spring fed, it had a good steady flow. The Kid and Diana forded it with ease, then continued northward.

  “How does Malone get away with trying to block off the trail into the valley?” The Kid asked.

  “In the time he’s been here, he’s bought some other small spreads and expanded his ranch. The trail cuts through part of his range, and he takes that to mean that he controls the entire length of it.”

  “There’s no legal basis for that. Folks out here always have a right of free passage.”

  “Traditionally, maybe. I suppose if he wanted to, he could fence off just the part of the trail that’s on his land and charge a toll to use it. That’s what Uncle Owen thinks, anyway. But Malone’s not really interested in doing that. He just wants to intimidate everyone in the valley and make sure that they’re too scared to stand up to him while he goes after Diamondback. There were a couple of small ranchers who spoke out against Malone, and they wound up with their barns being burned down in the middle of the night and their houses shot up. It’s just pure luck no one has been killed except for a couple of our men.”

  “Sounds to me like Malone’s just running roughshod over folks around here.”

  “That’s what he’s doing, Mr. Morgan. That’s exactly what he’s doing. And so far, Uncle Owen and I are really the only ones who are trying to fight him.”

  The Kid looked around. They were passing through gently rolling hills dotted with stands of trees and an occasional rocky outcropping. It was good range, he thought, and well worth fighting for. He could understand why Diana and her uncle would stand up to Malone and his reign of terror. They needed help, though, from the other people in the valley, and evidently they weren’t getting it.

  “What were you doing riding alone up there around the pass?” he asked her.

  She bristled at the question. “I told you, I can take care of myself. I don’t let Malone dictate where I can ride.”

  “Yeah, I sort of felt the same way when I saw that skull and crossbones in the trail,” The Kid drawled.

  Diana glared at him for a second, then shrugged. “I’d ridden up there to check on an old Indian who lives in the mountains. He befriended my father years ago when my father first came to the valley. That was another thing my father asked me to do while he was dying—to look after his old friend.”

  “That’s an admirable thing to do,” The Kid said. “Maybe you should take some guards with
you next time, though.”

  Diana shook her head. “That’s not necessary. Malone won’t hurt me.”

  “How do you know that? Seems to me like hurting you would be a good way for him to get back at your uncle.”

  “No, he has something even more diabolical than that in mind. He wants to marry me.”

  The Kid grunted. “Yeah, marrying somebody, that’s pretty diabolical, all right.”

  Diana surprised him again by blushing. He watched the pink flush spread prettily over her face as she said, “When Malone first showed up, he rode over to our ranch by himself. He said he’d heard about me in town and decided to come courting. He announced then and there that he intended to marry me and combine Diamondback and Trident.” She sighed. “I wish Uncle Owen had gone ahead and shot him, right then and there. Ever since then, every time Malone catches me alone, he…he tries to…seduce me.”

  She was lucky he hadn’t done worse than that, The Kid thought. A man like Malone was used to taking what he wanted, whether it was money or power or land…or a woman.

  “That’s another good reason you shouldn’t ride out alone,” The Kid told her.

  “You’re not my father or my uncle, Mr. Morgan,” she shot back. “In fact, a couple of hours ago I had never even laid eyes on you. So I don’t much like the idea of you telling me what to do.”

  The Kid shook his head. “Just offering an opinion, that’s all. You’re free to take it for what it’s worth, or not.”

  They rode along in tense silence for a few more minutes, then topped a rise and looked at a big, whitewashed, two-story house surrounded by cottonwoods and flanked by barns, corrals, a bunkhouse, and other outbuildings.

  “That’s it,” Diana said with a nod. “Diamondback.”

  “Looks like a fine spread,” The Kid said.

  “It is. The finest in this part of Texas. That’s why Uncle Owen and I are damned if we’ll let Black Terence Malone buffalo us!”