Montana Abbott 6, page 1
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Montana had bought some grazing land on the wide-open plains of his home state. All he needed now was to find a herd of good beef cattle – short of horn, heavy with meat –and settle in for the good life of a ranching man. So with a poke of gold in his saddle bags, Montana headed out across the barren, sunbaked tableland—toward the lush, green valleys of the West.
But he hadn’t gotten far before he was staring down the muzzle of a forty-five centered on his chest at point-blank range. It was the gun of a hardcase outlaw, a desperate man with enemies at his back, and he needed Montana’s horse for the long trail ahead.
That was only the start of his troubles—for Montana was heading into land claimed by one of the most ruthless cattle barons in the whole western Territory. Before he knew it, Montana was being stalked by a hard-bitten crew of killers. And now that he’d lost his horse, it was a sure bet he’d lose his life.
MONTANA ABBOTT 6: EAST TO MONTANA
By Al Cody
First Published by in 1974
Copyright © 1974, 2021 by Running Dog Publishing, LLC
This Electronic Edition: December 2021
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
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This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book / Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Cover Art by Gordon Crabb
Editor: Mike Stotter
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For Peter
Chapter One
“HOLD EVERYTHING, FRIEND—reachin’ high, that is! And keep your hands well away from that gun you’re wearin’, just so there’ll be no occasion for this one of mine to go off.”
The command was blurted by a down-at-the-heels individual who stepped suddenly from behind a clump of brush where it crowded the narrowing, descending trail. The words, delivered in a high falsetto, bespoke nervousness and a jumpy trigger finger. As though understanding the order, Montana Abbott’s horse stopped instantly, and Montana prudently obeyed, finding the round muzzle of a forty-five centering on his chest at point-blank range.
Montana’s heart skipped a beat, then, as though to make up for the omission, beat faster. This was the sort of thing which, even with repetition, one never quite got used to.
“That’s fine, friend—just keep ’em so,” the gunman approved, and his tongue ran uncertainly over dry lips. “Wouldn’t want to have no mistakes,” he went on, “nor for anything untoward to happen. That would be just too bad, while we’re havin’ a friendly little discussion. Nope, sure wouldn’t want that.”
Leaning forward suddenly, his free hand extracted Montana’s gun from its holster, and he made the transfer to his own belt. His glance ranged calculatingly to the extra pair of horses behind—a hammer-headed bay with a coldly roving eye, which carried the pack, and a brindle which served as an extra mount.
“Friendly?” Montana repeated, on a note of doubt. His breath had evened, and he had the outward placidity of a sleeping silvertip.
A brief and wholly mirthless smile twisted the gunman’s mouth, but his rejoinder came positively, even while he writhed about to dart a suspicious glance toward the widening valley which could be glimpsed from a turn in the trail below.
“Were I as bloodthirsty as I perhaps appear, I could have shot you with never a word of warning,” he pointed out. “Necessity spurs me to this action, much as I dislike it, but I am no thief—despite what some may say! In proof of which I propose a trade, since a fair exchange is no robbery.”
He drew back, motioning with a wave of the gun barrel.
“If you will kindly dismount, step down, please—carefully, friend, carefully—we will swap horses. If you will look back and down-trail, you will see mine, making the most of his opportunity to stuff himself, but a good animal, sound of wind and limb, aside from a temporary handicap. Not far back a stone turned under his hoof, so that he is temporarily lame. That is a condition which will pass, but not fast enough for my needs. I confess to being in haste.”
Beneath the flood of words his meaning was clear. He was being pursued by someone who regarded him as a thief and who would probably shoot on sight. A fast horse, not slowed by lameness, was necessary for survival.
“Since you have an extra animal, you will not be unduly discommoded,” he went on, careful to keep a safe distance between himself and Abbott. “Were I indeed a thief, I would be tempted to take both animals, but that would be robbery.” His sigh of renunciation belied the profession of principle. In a headlong flight for life, to be forced either to lead or drive an extra horse would be a handicap.
Abbott studied the other cayuse, grazing with dragging bridle reins a short distance back and down the slope. It was grayish with darker spots, unusual and distinctive. In size and build it matched his own pony, and he could not detect any sign of lameness as it moved.
The trader’s glance strayed in turn to the pack horse and the bulky load which it carried, a burden in need of adjusting and tightening. For the last half-hour or more they had been steadily descending, dropping down from the high barren tablelands of central Oregon. This was an ancient game trail which wound and twisted, occasionally narrowing, sometimes sharply crowded by an out jutting of the hill or a massive boulder. Apparently the pack had scraped against such an obstruction, loosening and shifting.
The dislocation revealed the corner of a red and black checkered blanket, which the gunman eyed covetously. Keeping a wary eye on Montana, he crossed for a closer look.
“You come well equipped with the necessities of the trail, friend,” he observed, “whereas I have a lack, due to having set out somewhat hastily. And with the summer waning and uplands ahead of me, the nights will become increasingly cold. I need such a blanket.”
Seizing the edge, he tugged and jerked, and gradually it loosened, then pulled free. The resultant easing of tightly drawn ropes allowed the pack to slip and sag a little more. Folding the blanket, he tied it behind the saddle which Abbott had just left.
“You are thinking, friend, that I am reneging on my promise, seizing additional booty, or even stealing.” He sighed. “Not so. The horse and saddle I consider a fair exchange. The gun I regret, but as a fair-minded man you will understand the necessity of my keeping it. This should compensate you for both gun and blanket.”
In appearance he was a saddle tramp or worse, but that was belied by his diction and choice of words. He felt in a pocket and drew out a greenback, closely folded. This he tossed across, and Abbott caught it and shoved it into a pocket of his own. As it partly unfolded, he saw that it was for twenty dollars and modified his initial judgment. The gunman, whether or not he was thief or outlaw, was holding to his professed standards.
“I think that evens it, so, with our transaction completed, I’ll be riding,” he added, suddenly brisk. “As a friendly word of caution, I advise that you keep on without tarrying. And my thanks to you.”
Again he paused, snatching up a pair of saddlebags from the shelter of the brush, slinging them in place behind the saddle and fastening them. Then he mounted, a firm hand on the reins. Abbott’s big animal, normally inclined to resent any other rider, humped uncertainly, then, submitting to the mastery of the reins, swung about and headed back up the trail.
Montana’s extra horse and the pack animal moved uneasily, since they were trained to follow the lead animal. At Abbott’s word of command they came on. By the time he reached the spotted cayuse and gathered up the reins, the trader with his new mount was out of sight.
Philosophically, Montana accepted the situation. He had learned long before not to argue with a man who had the drop, especially one who was so gun- handy; not, at least, unless it was a matter of life and death.
And on balance, he seemed to have come out of this with no real loss—at least up to now.
His new mount moved resignedly, though with no trace of a limp. Sweat had caked it, not only around saddle and withers, but at every point. It had partly dried because of the breather it had enjoyed under the hot sun of late summer. For some time it had been climbing, undoubtedly pushed hard by a man apprehensive of pursuit; and overburdened, for those saddle-bags had made the trader strain and grunt to swing them up.
Montana was thoughtful. That the bags might contain a poke of gold, even as did his own pack, was within the realm of reasonable speculation. The gold country of Northern California was not so far way, and the trader’s admission that he might be deemed a thief by some was interesting.
Probably his flight, ahead of pursuit, had been long. Within a very few minutes Montana realized that the spotted horse was not merely tired but close to exhaustion. Its reserves had been spent, leaving it in no condition for a sudden run if that should be required. That could be at least a part of the reason behind the trade.
Too old a campaigner to take unnecessary chances, Montana weighed the odds. It would be only prudent to shift saddles and mounts, and to rearm himself with the extra gun which he carried stowed in the recesses of the pack. But here the trail descend
The narrow, twisting trail was not to his liking as a place to make a transfer. Surprise was too easy. He’d stop as soon as he reached an open space to set the pack to rights, get the gun and shift mounts.
Again he was surprised, this time more pleasantly. The valley below widened suddenly, flattening as it opened. The distant green of brush and trees indicated a creek or perhaps a river, the sun touching it to silver. The other horses scented it, snorting eagerly, breaking into a trot, getting ahead of his faltering mount with a rush. Catching some of their enthusiasm, it tried to quicken its pace.
After long days across a barren, sunbaked tableland, their need for water was easy to understand. It had been a long haul since sunup. With his regular mount, Montana could have controlled the others, but for the moment he had to let them run.
There was a new look to the country, a richer, greener range. Along the widening valley roamed a sweep of easy hills, their own valleys lush with grass. At long last he was reaching the country he’d come seeking.
On the tablelands the water-holes had been scant and far apart. This was a better watered land, and here the rivers ran north. In due course they would make a juncture with the surging westward flow of the Columbia. Along the still distant river he had a glimpse of white water.
Erect but easy in the saddle, William Montana^ Abbott was a big man, his solid frame belied by a lean and hungry look, the heritage of starving months in a prisoner of war camp. Those days of strife were long gone, their memory dimming, even as Oregon was a long way from the valley of the Shenandoah, or even from Montana Territory and the choice parcel of range which he had selected for his own. It was a land of hill and valley, timber and grass; ranch - land which, to his mind, was as near as a man might come to earthly paradise.
It was that spread of grass, knee-high at mid-season, on virgin sod and no longer grazed by the buffalo, which had brought him to Oregon. Peace, in the wake of war, had proved equally turbulent at times, but on the whole it had been good to him. Some of his ventures had proved thankless, but others had yielded material riches as well as riches of the soul. Gold – which he had never craved for its own sake – had accumulated to a reasonable degree.
A part of the hoard he’d spent for the ranch of his dreams. Unlike many who aspired to become cattle barons. Montana preferred what they regarded as the harder way, but which was safer and more reasonable: to buy land and pay for it, rather than move on, claiming squatter’s rights, to be held by a gun crew against all challenges.
Such land, cheaply stocked with maverick longhorns driven up from Texas, could fulfill dreams, but Montana doubted the permanence of such an arrangement. Already, land-hungry men of another ilk, homesteaders, were crowding into the empty spaces west of the big river, overflowing plains and mountains which only a decade earlier had appeared so measureless as to endure forever in pristine wildness. With a surer vision than most, Montana foresaw that they would soon swarm everywhere, even to the remote valley which he now held by title guaranteed by the government.
Title to the land was half the battle. The other part found him equally unorthodox in his planning. Having trailed herds north from Texas, he could do so again, and he wouldn’t be particularly adverse to taking his chances with the risks presented by Red Cloud and his x Sioux. The angry chief had decreed that the lands along the Yellowstone, territory pledged to him and his people by treaty, should remain theirs.
Since the Big White Father in that remote and shadowy land far to the east was both indifferent and impotent when it came to protecting the red man’s rights to the lands which had been pledged, Red Cloud was using force, to good effect. His warriors athwart the trail might present problems with Texas cattle, but there was no need to risk trouble. More sympathetic than otherwise with the Sioux and their cause, Montana had no wish to challenge them.
Always with an unsatisfied appetite, one more heritage of semi-starvation, he’d eaten plenty of steaks and roasts from Texas steers, yet always with a certain wryness. Longhorns were what their name implied. They ran more to horn and bone and the racy leanness of wild beasts than to the sleek fatness of beef animals.
Properly fattened on the succulent grasses of Montana, longhorns might in time be bred to a standard approaching the best. But that would be a slow process. With still another poke of gold ready for his use, Montana was headed west, sometimes skirting the trail of the Forty-Niners, often choosing one of his own.
His destination had been a part of Oregon largely overlooked or disdained by earlier comers, but now beginning to be appreciated and claimed; range where good beef cattle were being raised.
For the most part these were probably descended from pilfered herds which not long before had belonged to the sons of the Spanish dons, the great landowners of California. Like the Indians of the plains, they had made the same mistakes in dealing with the onsweeping horde of land-grabbers.
The mistake of Californio and Indian had lain in underestimating the force and numbers of the driving, wire-hard, land-hungry breed, and in assuming that they would respond to hospitality in a neighborly fashion, respecting prior rights, abiding by treaties.
For both groups, it had been a belated but rude awakening. If the majority of white Americans were honest, still among them was a bitter sprinkle of ruthless outlaws, beyond control by better intentioned neighbors or a thinly stretched, all but impotent law.
Here, whatever their antecedents, were fine beef cattle, short of horn, heavy with meat. It was a country for good cattle. And he had the gold to buy and pay for a herd.
Once he had them, he’d hire a crew and drive east to his own land. In addition to what he considered the best spread, he’d have some of the finest stock in Montana.
He had made an easy jogging journey west, riding the two ponies in turn, leading or herding the placid pack-horse. Until today he had run into no trouble, encountered no adventures. None among the wayfarers he had met, including the trader, had suspected that a rich poke of gold was concealed among the duffle which the pack pony transported.
He found this widening land more to his liking than the crowded confines of the descending trail. Now he could see for a quarter of a mile or better in any direction, and he breathed easier, though with the awareness that whoever had been pursuing the trader could be close, and the sharper certainty that a rifle carried a long reach.
The river was farther away than it had looked, and the laden pack pony, its initial enthusiasm waning, slowed to a walk. The other saddle horse, trained to run with it, slowed also. In that instant it happened.
It was a sound which Montana had heard before, sometimes in the heat of battle, again in lonely places akin to this, when bushwhackers fired without warning—a small, hurting chuck of tearing lead, burying itself in flesh.
The spotted pony staggered and shuddered, and as the report of the rifle reached his ears, Abbott felt the stricken animal going down, mortally wounded. His hunch as to the real reason for the trade was grimly confirmed.
Chapter Two
TENSING, THEN WITH muscles released as though by the pressure of that distant trigger, Montana jerked his feet loose from the stirrups, flinging himself off in a wild sprawl at the side. He was barely in time to avoid being pinned down by the collapsing pony, an outreaching hoof grazing his hip, pounding down with the force of a hammer stroke.
His secondary reaction was even more critical, a wild impulse to scramble up and run, even to crawl on hands and knees. The world seemed to gyrate dizzily, and with an effort he controlled himself, resisting panic. To force himself to lie as he had fallen, half expecting more bullets to come at him, he clutched at the grass and tried to flatten himself into it. There was nowhere to go, no cover anywhere within reach, no weapon of his own with which to defend himself or fight.
If he was to have a chance, it lay in playing possum, in making the gunman believe that he was dead or seriously hurt and no longer to be feared. Movement would probably bring an added fusillade of shots.
