Ralph Compton Vengeance Rider, page 3
The old prospector nodded. “So be it. I heard tell the last time I was in Deadwood that Buck Fletcher had himself a wife and a young ‘un and a spread up on the bend of the Two-Bit.”
“You heard right,” Fletcher said, only mildly interested in what the old man was saying.
“All the talk in the saloons was how you’d hung up your guns and had bred a racehoss so fast he could run from sunup to sundown in less than half an hour.”
The drowsiness left Fletcher instantly and he leaned forward with a start. “What do you know about the horse?”
Higgins shrugged. “Only this—I think I saw him two days ago.”
“Where?”
“South of here. A big, lanky bay with a white star on his forehead. Steps real high an’ lively, ain’t that right?”
“That sounds like Star Dancer,” Fletcher said, excitement building in him. “Where did you see him?”
“Right near Harney Peak, north of the Cheyenne. There were six men with him, mean ones.”
“Salty, how did you come across them? It seems to me they wouldn’t be keen to welcome strangers.”
“I’m a coffee-drinking man,” Salty said. “But I never seem to have any, maybe because I drink it up so fast. I smelled their coffee, just like I smelled yours, and walked into their camp.” The old prospector smiled. “I wasn’t exactly told to make myself to home, but they didn’t shoot me either.”
“Recognize any of them?” Fletcher asked.
“Sure thing. I knew Bosco Tracy right off, him and his no-account brothers Luke and Earl. Two others I’d never seen afore, but the other one I recognized.” The old man leaned over and spat. “He was Port Austin.”
Fletcher eased back against the wall, his fingers going to his shirt pocket for the makings, remembering things he’d been told.
The Tracy brothers were mean all the way through, cold-blooded killers who would cut any man, woman or child in half with a shotgun for fifty dollars. But for sheer badness they didn’t hold a patch to Port Austin.
A few years back Austin had come up the Chisholm Trail with a herd from Texas to Abilene; then, after brushing off the dust of the long miles, decided honest work was about as welcome as a wart on a whore’s butt. To make his point, he robbed a general store in Hays and made his getaway by outdrawing and killing a deputy sheriff. A month later he killed Quirt Lawson, the lightning-fast Newton gunfighter who was said to have six dead men to his credit.
On Christmas Eve ‘79, angry at the inflated Festive Season price a young soiled dove tried to charge him in a brothel in Wichita, Austin stabbed the woman to death and later decorated the bridle of his horse with her long, red hair.
In the months that followed, he robbed banks all over Kansas and beyond, but he really didn’t come into his own until he hooked up with the Tracy boys.
The last Fletcher heard, Port Austin had carved eight notches on his gun butt, and the number had probably grown since. He was poison mean and fast as a rattlesnake with his Colt. Fear didn’t enter into this thinking, but neither did mercy or compassion or any other human emotion.
Austin was a born killer with ice in his veins and he thought no more of shooting another human being than he would a rat. If evil truly existed, shackling the mind and perverting the conscience, then its personification was Port Austin.
Higgins raised an eyebrow. “Now you’re doing some thinking your ownself, Buck.”
Fletcher nodded, his face revealing an uncertainty not unmixed with a measure of apprehension. “I was studying some on Port Austin.”
The old man nodded. “He’s a handful all right. They said he’s the best with a Colt’s gun as ever was.”
Letting that remark slide, Fletcher asked: “Salty, did they tell you where they were taking the horse?”
The old man shook his head. “Not directly. But, like I said, I’m a studying man and I keep my ears open. If a feller just sets quiet and listens, he can learn a thing or two.”
“What did you learn?”
The prospector extended his cup and Fletcher filled it. “I heard them cussin’ and discussin’ about how they’d staked out your ranch for three, four days afore they killed your hired hand. Bosco said it was just as well, because he was getting a tad impatient and favored just riding in there and taking the horse. Ol’ Port, he said he’d gun all he found in the cabin so there was no witnesses.”
Fletcher swallowed hard. During the past days he’d been spending a lot of time on the range, and if Bosco Tracy and Austin had found Savannah and Ginny alone, he would have murdered them both without giving it a second thought.
A coldness in his belly, a stunned note of disbelief in his voice, he asked: “They knew it was my horse, Buck Fletcher’s horse?”
Higgins nodded. “Sure they knew, but they didn’t give a damn. Buck, you’ve been out of the limelight for nigh on ten years. Folks forget what you were an’ what you done in the olden days. Bosco and Port Austin and the others are a different generation. Hell, them boys have read the dime novels and filled their heads with all kinds of rattlebrained fancies. They hang their guns low on their thighs and strut around and think themselves . . .” The old man stopped and motioned to the south with the stem of his pipe. “Here, what was the name of that youngster who caused all the trouble down there to Lincoln County in the New Mexico Territory a few years back?”
Fletcher thought for a few moments then replied: “William Bonney, as I recollect. The newspapers called him Billy the Kid. Or he did.”
Higgins nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. Well, Bosco and Port Austin and them, they think themselves to be just like Billy the Kid. They want to get their names in the newspapers and become known as famous bad men.”
His mouth tightening into a grim line, Fletcher said: “All that newspaper ink didn’t do Bonney much good. He’s dead.”
Higgins shrugged. “I guess Bosco and Port figure that won’t happen to them. Or maybe they just don’t give a damn. Boys like that want to live fast and wild. That’s why they stole your hoss, to get money for women and whiskey, two things that’s a big part of living.” The old prospector smiled in his beard. “For any man.”
Fletcher’s ego was badly bruised, even as he told himself that his gunfighter days were long gone and that a man’s sense of self-importance just laid out the perimeters of his own limitations.
But, looking at Salty Higgins with unhappy eyes, a bitterness rising in him, he asked: “I guess my being over-the-hill and all, they figured I wouldn’t come after them?”
The old prospector grinned. “Hell, Buck, they knew from the git-go you’d come after them. But like I tole you, they don’t give a damn. There ain’t a single one of those boys who don’t figure he could take you in a gunfight.”
“Are they that good?”
Higgins shrugged. “I don’t know, except for Port an’ maybe ol’ Bosco his ownself. But the rest sure reckon they are.”
Fletcher rolled a smoke. The south wind was stirring again, making the flames dance. The glow painted red the hard planes of his face, giving him the expressionless, wooden look of a cigar store Indian.
Picking up a burning brand from the fire, Fletcher lit his cigarette, his great, beaked nose and high cheekbones flaring orange for an instant.
“Where will they try to sell the horse, Salty?” he asked finally, tossing the twig back into the flames.
“Not around here, that much I know.”
“Where then?”
“Arizony. They said they were selling the hoss to a gambling gent down there.”
“Long ways to take a horse.”
Higgins nodded. “Maybe so, but I heard tell that Texas John Slaughter is organizing a big hoss race on the Fourth of July down at his ranch in Cochise County in the Territory. They say the purse is ten thousand dollars, winner take all. Maybe the sporting gent plans to enter your hoss in the race and bet heavy on him on the side.”
The old man smiled. “If that’s the case, he’s taking a chance. I don’t know if your Star Dancer is as fast as they say, but ol’ Texas John has an American stud he calls Big Boy an’ folks tell me that sorrel can’t be beat by anything on four legs.”
All this Fletcher already knew. Slaughter was charging five hundred dollars to enter a horse in the race—the twenty-five double eagles that now weighed heavy in his money belt.
Higgins shrewd old face lit up as a thought hit him. “Buck, was you thinking of entering your hoss in ol’ John’s race your ownself?”
Fletcher nodded. “Thinking about it.” He decided not to mention Ginny, since that might elicit sympathy or, worse, pity, a thing his already battered ego could not abide. “I figured to use the prize money to buy another Hereford bull and maybe make some improvements at my ranch,” he said, skirting the truth to head off the old man’s questions.
Higgins nodded. “Ten thousand is a lot of money.”
Fletcher pitched his half-smoked cigarette into the fire. “Salty, I don’t suppose Bosco mentioned the name of the gambling gent?”
The old man shook his head. “If he did, it was out of my hearing.”
“If I find out who he is, that gambler and me will have words,” Fletcher said, his eyes glittering hard in the firelight.
“Buck,” Higgins said, a slight smile on his lips, “something tells me I’d hate to be in that sporting gent’s shoes when you catch up to him.”
Fletcher rose to his feet, stretched and yawned, and said: “I got to find my blankets, Salty. I want to be on the trail come sunup.”
The old man, with considerably less ease than that just shown by Fletcher, also stood, his joints creaking. “Wait, Buck, I got something to give you.”
Higgins reached behind his head and untied the rawhide thong of the necklace he wore around his neck.
“I want you to have this, Buck,” the old man said. “It was give to me by an Apache woman a few years back.” The necklace gleamed in the firelight as Higgins held it out to Fletcher. “The beads are red jasper and turquoise, and the Apaches say wearing it will bring you closer to the Great Spirit and he will send you luck.”
Fletcher shook his head. “Salty, I can’t take this. You don’t owe me a thing.”
Higgins reached out, took Fletcher’s hand and laid the necklace in his palm. “Call it my way of helping you get your hoss back, Buck. See, I know the real reason you need that ten thousand and it ain’t for no Hereford bull. On account of how I’m a listening man, I heard about your daughter my ownself back to Deadwood a spell ago. I’m too old and stiff to ride with you, but, small as it is, this is help I can give.”
It was not in Fletcher’s nature to deeply hurt a man, and to turn down the old prospector’s gift would be to wound him terribly.
When a man drinks at a stream, he should always remember the source, and this Fletcher did now. He tied the necklace around his neck and said: “Thank you kindly, Salty. I’m not likely to forget who gave me this.”
Pleased, Higgins smiled. “Now I got to turn in my ownself.” He slapped his leg. “And, dang it all, I’ll have me some coffee in the morning.”
Within minutes both men slept, and around them the quiet hills were silvered by the moonlight, their chasms and arroyos in deep blue shadow. The pines stirred in the faint southern breeze and the buffalo grass rippled like waves on an inland sea. The campfire guttered down until there was only a dull, crimson glow at the center of a pyramid of gray ash and black-charred wood. At around two in the morning rose a last, frail wisp of smoke, at once taken by the wind to disappear like a ghost.
Fletcher and Higgins slept on. Once, toward daybreak, Fletcher stirred and called out in his sleep, dreaming of men and guns, and running among them, lost in the flame-streaked powder smoke, Savannah and Ginny begging him to help them.
Wildly, he reached out a hand . . . and felt only the big, calloused paw of Salty Higgins.
“Well, howdy-do your ownself,” the old prospector said. “I must say, that’s a right friendly way to greet a man in the morning.”
Fletcher jerked his hand away like he’d touched something red-hot and opened his eyes. Higgins was looking at him, a wide grin stretching from ear to ear.
“I was dreaming,” Fletcher said. “I do that sometimes.”
Higgins nodded. “It’s good for a man to dream. It’s kinda like hitching your wagon to a star and traveling wherever you please.”
Fletcher rose to a sitting position, put on his hat, and then his fingers automatically reached for the tobacco sack in his shirt pocket.
“Coffee’s almost biled,” the old prospector said. “An’ it’s nearly sunup.”
Half an hour later, as the night brightened into morning, Fletcher took his leave of Salty Higgins and followed the horse tracks south.
Ahead of him lay the bend of the Cheyenne, to his east the Badlands—and in between a world of danger.
Fletcher rode alert in the saddle, Colts loose in their holsters. His gunfighter’s instincts had been dulled by the years, but once again were being honed to a razor-sharp edge.
There was some kind of showdown coming . . . and the coldness in his belly from the knowing of it was just as certain as the warmth of the rising sun on his face.
Three
At noon, Fletcher stopped at French Creek, a few miles north of the Cheyenne, in a grove of mixed willow and Cottonwood. The trees grew on each side of a stream branching off the shallowest part of the creek, the willows trailing their branches in the water.
Steep hills rose on each side of the grove, the slopes covered mostly in spruce, their crests rawboned pillars of gray rock like the battered towers of an ancient citadel.
The day was hot, but among the trees it was much cooler and the stream made a pleasant bubbling sound as it ran over a bed of sand and pebbles.
Fletcher gathered enough dry sticks to light a small fire, then filled his coffeepot from the stream and placed it on the coals. That done, he stripped the saddle from the buckskin and let him graze on the lush, plentiful grass growing along the bank.
Fletcher calculated that the thick canopy of leaves overhead would shield him from the aim of any rifleman hidden higher up the slopes of the surrounding hills, and the trees would slow anyone coming at him head-on, either on horseback or on foot.
He smoked a cigarette and drank coffee, then stretched out under a tree, tipping his hat over his eyes. He dozed off and on for an hour, rose and threw the dregs of the coffee on the fire.
Suddenly Fletcher dropped the pot and yanked the Colt from his crossdraw holster. He swung around as he did so, as though drawing down on somebody creeping up behind him. He reholstered the gun, drew again. And again. And again.
His frustration growing, Fletcher finally shoved the Colt back into the leather. He shook his head slowly, his face gloomy. Unlike riding a horse, a thing a man learns and, once learned, never forgets, the ability to draw a gun fast and shoot accurately is a perishable skill.
To remain quick and smooth on the draw, a man needs constant practice, and Fletcher had not picked up a Colt in a decade. Now, at forty, his years were catching up with him, blunting his reflexes. Right now he was as slow as an old hound dog in August, no match for the young, Colt-slick Port Austin. And maybe even Bosco Tracy, a man known to be fast and accurate with a gun, could shade him.
It was a worrisome thing, and the knowledge of it flooded Buck Fletcher with doubt and filled him with rapidly building unease.
He took time to roll a cigarette, drew the smoke deep into his lungs, his hands just a mite unsteady, and thought the thing through.
Finally, as the cigarette burned, forgotten, down to his fingers, he had made up his mind. He would stand up and take the hits and keep on shooting back as long as his legs supported him.
His decision was a consolation of sorts, yet no consolation at all.
Maybe, Fletcher reflected, a small, wry smile playing around his lips, he needed a miracle. But miracles are not made in heaven. Men who use the courage and intelligence God gave them create their own miracles, and this Fletcher knew.
So be it. If a miracle was needed, he would shape his own.
He ground out the cigarette under his boot heel and quickly saddled the buckskin. He took to the trail again, the sun now slanting over his right shoulder. After three miles the horse tracks of the outlaws veered off to the west, sloping up toward a line of yellow aspen growing along the bases of several high, hump-backed hills.
Fletcher followed the tracks until they vanished among flat slabs of granite and tufted grama grass littering the lower slopes. To his left, a line of massive, tumbled boulders stretched away to the south until they were lost to sight over the brow of a hill just ahead of him. Squirrels and jays rustled in the branches of the aspen, and the ground between their slender trunks was covered in a carpet of bluebells, harebells and tiny, pink, wild roses.
Fletcher took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow with his forearm. He could no longer see the tracks. Had this been a deliberate move on Bosco Tracy’s part to throw him off the trail?
He shook his head, dismissing the thought as quickly as it had come to him. If the outlaw took his pursuit as lightly as Salty Higgins had said, why would he bother to cover his tracks?
Then why ride up this way? Certainly there was shade among the aspens, but their crowded trunks made it no place to take horses. In fact, the entire going here was a lot rougher and slower than down in the flat basin country.
What was Tracy up to?
Suddenly uneasy, Fletcher settled his hat back on his head, then stood in the stirrups, his great beak of a nose lifted as he read an odd message in the wind. There, he smelled it again . . . a fleeting, elusive whiff drifting past, tattered by the breeze.
But Fletcher now recognized the odor. It was wood smoke.
Could it be that Bosco, Austin and the others were close by, waiting for him?
Fletcher reached down and slid his Winchester from the boot under his left knee—just as a rifle shot hammered from the aspens, the thundering echoes rebounding among the surrounding hills like great boulders being thrown down an iron canyon.
