The Loner 23, page 1
part #23 of The Loner Series
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Western Fiction!
On the surface, the range up ahead seemed quiet and peaceful, but it was anything but.
Jake Newell and his three shiftless sons were planning the biggest rustling job of their lives.
Bart Lomax was forcing the smaller ranchers off their land by any means possible because he wanted it all.
Les Ducane’s wife had been raped and murdered, and her killer was still at large.
And when Blake Durant found himself accused of the rape and murder, an old rival from the past seized the chance to find out once and for all which of them was faster with a gun …
After that there was only one certainty. That everything was about to blow sky high.
THE LONER 23: THE MEMORY TRAIL
By Sheldon B. Cole
First published by Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia
© 2019 by Piccadilly Publishing
First Electronic Edition: June 2023
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.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Table of Contents
Chapter One – Move On
Chapter Two – Even the Longest Day Ends
Chapter Three – String the Bastard Up!
Chapter Four – Beaten Trail
Chapter Five – Kill Trail!
Chapter Six – Rape!
Chapter Seven – Ride With the Devil
Chapter Eight – Now!
About the Author
Chapter One – Move On
STACEY BURNS WAITED for the rider to draw up in front of the house before she untied her apron and threw it onto the old couch. She brushed hair from her brow and made an attempt to smooth the wrinkles out of her faded cotton dress. Closing her eyes, she drew in a deep breath—then let it out in one long sigh. She could fight no longer. Even her son, Jim, wanted to push on, to make a new life elsewhere.
Her time had run out ...
Stacey walked through the doorway and into the harsh sunlight of the day.
“Yes?” she asked the rider.
Ben Percival reached into his pocket, brought out an envelope and flicked it towards her.
“Time’s up, Mrs. Burns. Mr. Lomax has been a very patient man. But he can’t wait any longer.”
“He needs—this—so badly?” Stacey asked him, pointing to the desolation around her.
A flicker of irritation moved into Percival’s gray eyes. “He loaned your husband money so you could keep this place going, and he gave you plenty of time to pay the loan back. It ain’t so much he needs this section, but,” he shrugged, “business is business. He don’t want no arguments.”
Stacey smiled sadly. “Arguments? From me?”
Percival scowled. “I ain’t here to discuss anything Mrs. Burns. I’m just carryin’ out my job. The papers explain everything clear enough—and they’ll stand up in any court in the country. Just be gone by Saturday.”
Stacey glanced at the envelope, took in a deep breath, then looked towards the old barn where her son was greasing the buckboard axles. They’d known for days that Percival would call to tell them that Bart Lomax had foreclosed. But the boy didn’t seem to care ...
Percival let his gaze wander over the clearing and back to the house. He knew that in a few days Lomax would send his men to burn the old place down. Within a month all evidence that a settler family had lived there would be erased. Another section of range would be opened up, and Lomax’s huge herd of cattle would be able to roam wide and free—except on the Ducane place. But that, too, was only a matter of time. Then Lomax would own it all.
Percival spared himself a smile. Bart Lomax had been smart, slowly but surely pushing all the settlers off—and only one shot fired. Lomax’s hired hand, Rick Jodel, had killed Tom Burns three months earlier in front of a dozen witnesses. Lomax had even won friends by allowing Tom’s widow to stay on for a while. Who could call him anything but generous ...?
“Saturday,” Percival said.
Stacey looked at him bleakly.
“The only good thing about it all is that I won’t have to look at you again.”
“Goes both ways,” he muttered, and hit his horse into a run.
Stacey watched him go, then opened the envelope and read the papers. She stared for a long time at the signature of her husband—and tears came into her eyes ...
She didn’t hear her son come down from the barn, but when she looked up he was standing a few yards away, gazing at her as she put the papers back in the envelope.
“That’s it then?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t ask for more time?”
“No.”
“It’s gotta be done then.”
He was a tall, muscular lad of seventeen, with his father’s blue eyes and ruddy complexion and his mother’s fine but strong features.
“Lomax won,” he said gravely.
“It was a fight we couldn’t ever win, Jim. I told your father that from the beginning. It was only his stubbornness that kept us here at all.”
“But it was his,” he said bitterly. “It was all he had.”
Stacey winced at his tone, and saw the fierce light in his eyes. He was so much like his father ...
“It was never worth dying for, Jim,” she said—but he’d turned away from her and was heading for the barn.
“Your father lost his temper,” Stacey called after him. “He got drunk and looked for a fight.”
“I won’t get drunk,” he shouted back.
Stacey’s hands flew to her mouth. Her shoulders slumped and tears flooded her eyes. Just like his father, she thought, knowing what he would do and what would happen. And when it did, there would be nothing at all left for her ...
She didn’t move as Jim mounted his horse and headed for the slopes.
Jake Newell bit the cork out of the whisky bottle and spat it at the wall. He drank greedily, then wiping his mouth with his sleeve, eyed his three sons in turn, finding nothing in them to relieve the bad mood he was in. It had been a bad year for old Jake. First off, Bart Lomax had hired a high-strutting, slick handed gun hand named Rick Jodel to protect his cattle empire. Jodel had quickly left no doubt in anyone’s mind that he considered the only good rustler was a dead one. And since old Jake Newell could think of no easier way to make a living than rustling cattle, this put him right up against the hired gunman.
In his younger days, Jake could have been tempted to shoot it out with Jodel—but the years had caught up with him. All he had now to fight with was cunning, and three whining and cowardly sons.
But even if Bart Lomax hadn’t spoiled things for Jake, Sheriff Bo Hemingway had. Jake was fully aware that Hemingway was yet another Lomax hireling. It seemed that everyone in Shale Creek was owned in some way or another by Bart Lomax.
Swigging whisky again, Jake paced up and down the old shack which was all that was left of the Martindale place now that Lomax had pushed Joe Martindale off and staked claim to his section. Set high on a ragged ridgeline, the shack was a target for every blast of wind and every scorch of heat a day could throw up. But it gave Jake a view of the country below for miles around and thus allowed him time to skitter off if Lomax and his bunch came snooping around.
Finally seating himself on the edge of a rickety table, Jake thumped his thigh with the bottom of the bottle. He was sick to the teeth of Shale Creek, and would just as soon be any place else, especially where he and his boys weren’t known. But he wouldn’t be driven out, especially when he didn’t have a single dollar to his name. He needed money, a lot of money, to establish himself elsewhere in the style to which he was accustomed.
“Only one thing we can do,” he said gruffly. “Just the one blasted thing and to hell with the consequences.”
His three sons exchanged worried glances. Of the three, Zac, the oldest, swarthy and sweat-greased and already showing the wear and tear of years of hard living looked the more deeply perturbed. Staring at the floor between his scuffed boots, he pulled anxiously on puffed, thick lips.
“What you got in mind, Pa?”
“Cattle,” Jake Newell said.
Zac’s head jerked up and deep worry moved into his glazed eyes.
“Cattle?” Zac said. “In these parts?”
“Where else, boy? Hell, who knows this country better’n us? Who knows where the fat beeves are and the right trails to drive them off?”
Zac gulped uneasily and wiped his greasy face with calloused hands. “Hemingway said—” he began.
“Hemingway!” snarled old Jake. “Who the hell cares about a damned tin-toter like him?”
“Lomax then,” Zac continued to argue. He knew exactly where his resistance would get him, but he considered the result of that would be far easier to take than getting involved in a range war with Bart Lomax, Sheriff Bo Hemingway and Lomax’s gun hands, Rick Jodel in particular.
“Lomax, Lomax, Lomax,” Jake shouted. “All I hear from you boys is Lomax this and Lomax that. Lomax is nothin’ but a belly-achin’ tinhorn. Strip him down you got nothin’ but blubber and stink.”
Zac rubbed his face again and chanced a look at his brothers. On his right, Jude, the youngest, his hair grease-slicked as always and his eyes near closed in protest against the sun glare burning up the rotting floorboards, was scratching dirt from one boot with the toe of the other and seemingly unaware that any argument was going on at all. Opposite Zac, Will, the middle son, aged twenty four, was huddled up, arms folded about his bony body as if somebody was standing over him with a whip and meaning to use it. When neither Will nor Jude offered any support to Zac at all, the oldest brother went strangely quiet.
Jake drank from the bottle again and swore on finding the level in the bottle dangerously low.
“Lomax cattle is what we’re after and what we’re goin’ to get. Maybe a hundred head, drive ’em right through that passage you found, Will, and right on down to Finch. We’ll get twenty dollars a head for ’em down there. And what’s a hundred head to Bart Lomax. He’s got so many he prob’ly wouldn’t even miss ’em.”
Zac’s mouth sagged and his eyes rolled in disbelief. “Hell, Pa, we ain’t never got more’n seven dollars a head for even the best steers in the past. And we only got thet after you badgered somethin’ bad for hours.”
Jake glared fiercely at his oldest son. “Twenty I said, and damn you twenty it’ll be. So you just shut down whinin’ at me and listen. Thet goes for you other two, sittin’ there lookin’ like your judgment day’s come, which so help me could be right. I’m about sick of the lot of you, takin’ everythin’ I got and givin’ nothin’ back.”
Jake strode to the door of the shack and stared sullenly out into the sunlight of mid-afternoon. He took another drink from the bottle and breathed more easily.
“What we got to work out is a diversion. Somehow we gotta keep Hemingway outa our hair. And the Lomax crew too. ’Specially Rick Jodel—he’s real mean. All we’d need is about two hours’ start, take them cattle, and drive ’em through that passage Will found. Then we can get to hell outa this god forsaken hole.”
Zac straightened, pulling his tattered shirt tight around his skeletal frame. He stared at his father’s back, relieved he didn’t have his father’s soul-searing stare fixed on him. But by hell, he told himself, he wasn’t going to tangle with Hemingway or Jodel. No way. Not this time.
He said, “Pa, the town’s closed up tight. We give Hemingway one eye-peep at any of us and he’ll get meaner than a rattler. As for the Bart Lomax range, you know he’s always got men on lookout for us—”
Jake wheeled, banging the bottle against the doorjamb, so that it fell from his fingers and crashed to the floor. The bottle didn’t break but as his precious whisky gurgled out the neck, his face went black with rage. Will quickly reached forward to right the bottle but as his fingers closed on the neck, Jake kicked his hand savagely away.
“Back off, damn you. Leave it be!”
Startled, Will jerked back, rubbing his hand and scowling. Jude shifted uneasily and watched the whisky soak into the floor before his father plucked the bottle up and wiped the neck clean on his shirt front. Zac merely pulled on his lips, scarcely able to breathe as he fretted about the hours to come.
“You scared, boy?” Jake threw at him.
Zac was that and made no effort to hide the fact. “We ain’t got a chance of pullin’ off what you suggest, Pa. What we should do is pack and ride on. Down past Finch there’s new towns croppin’ up and—”
“Past Finch!” Jake exploded. “And what about Shale Creek. This used to be our home, afore Bart Lomax came in buyin’ everythin’ up and chasin’ people off. We been here longer’n anybody, and I figure Lomax owes us.”
“Zac could be right, Pa,” Jude offered. “Would be best if we moved on.”
Jake hurled the bottle at him and only at the last moment did Jude shift to let the bottle go past and crash into the wall. This time the bottle broke and whisky ran down the boards.
Jake bellowed, “Thet’s what I get for all I’ve done for you whelps. I wasted a whole lifetime gettin’ the best for you, seein’ you was fed proper and given every chance to better yourselves. And in return what’ve you done for me?” Jake poked a long finger at Jude. “You, boy, got yourself jailed for stirrin’ up that ruckus in the saloon. Woulda rotted in a cell if I hadn’t got you out. He wheeled to glare at Zac who was rubbing his mouth and sulking, with no thought in his head at all of reprisal. “And my first born, messed up that stage robbery we’d planned and got yourself so badly shot up we had to abandon everythin’.”
Jude opened his mouth to speak but Zac’s quick glance silenced him. Jude merely sighed. He had heard it all before, many times, and never once had he been able to explain that every time they got into trouble, it was his father’s doing. There’d be no chance this time either to have his say.
Jake then confronted Will, his eyes gleaming with amusement. “And the woman-chaser, all slick and fancy, runnin’ down that skinny Ducane’s wife and beatin’ the hell outa her so she died. He’s still after the murderer, boy, and the way you is actin’ I’ve a mind to take you to ’im and drop you in his lap.”
The color drained from Will’s hawkish face. “Hell, Pa, I told you how it was, her scratchin’ and yellin’ and—”
“Skinny,” Jake bellowed. “Hardly strong enough to lift a bucket. Still don’t know how you could’a got outa there without leavin’ no sign. It’s about the only thing you done right in your whole life. Now, Will, what’s it to be?”
Will lowered his fear-filled gaze to the floor and mumbled. “I never said I wouldn’t ride with you, Pa, I never said thet at all.”
“And better not, damn you,” Jake snarled. He turned to the others. “You either. We take Lomax’s cattle. Got it?”
Jude nodded and after a moment’s delay Zac nodded grimly. Then Jake, suddenly happier with himself, walked across to the bunk and took a fresh bottle of whisky from under his pillow and bit out the cork. Seating himself, he stared moodily at the floor for a long time before he lifted the bottle to his lips and drank heavily.
Then he lowered the bottle, wiped his mouth dry on his sleeve and said clearly, “What we got to do is have us a diversion. So you just sit and think and come up with somethin’ thet’ll work. Go to it now.”
The boys sat and as the silence settled and their craving for drink grew stronger, they watched their father jealously, patiently biding their time before he drank himself to sleep.
Chapter Two – Even the Longest Day Ends
BLAKE DURANT WORKED his blue-black stallion, Sundown, across the most barren country he’d seen in years of drifting. The hot breeze which fanned his trail-tanned face, sent a wash of memories through his mind, and with the remembering came the loneliness which seldom left him. He looked over the sun-washed country and was reminded of another section he’d once known, a wasteland which had separated his own lush country from the Yerby Ranch. His mouth tightened and his stare narrowed. He’d ridden that stretch many times, heedless of the heat of the sun, the tearing blast of the wind, because at the end of the crossing, there was always Louise.
Instinctively his hand stole up to the golden bandanna around his neck and his mind went back to that late afternoon, with the shade from the poplars cooling her father’s front porch ... the crowd of people, silent, shocked ... her mother, collapsed in her father’s arms ... the cowhand who had brought the news. Everything was very distinct, sharp in detail, a scene that pained him more with each day that passed. Dead. Louise Yerby dead. Time had stopped ... Eternity had claimed her ...
Sundown shifted impatiently under Durant so he leaned forward and stroked the stallion’s sweat-slicked shoulder. The big black became quiet again, assured that everything was all right by the big man’s gentle touch.
They went on, through the heat and the wind, into a long rocky defile, then out into barren country again. There was a smell of desolation everywhere and no sound but his own saddle creak and the monotonous sounds of the horse’s hooves. Durant looked ahead, his steel-gray eyes mirroring the bitter memories of his past, and with a hint of pain in his hard, tough and otherwise expressionless face. Ahead there was nothing that could matter to him, only more lonely trails, more drifting ...
