CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ben Kane was angry, a scorching hatred that scalded his belly and brain like acid and for which there was only one cure. “We’ll wipe them out,” he said. “Kill them all lest some escape and their vile contagion spread to other places.”
“Boss, it’s got to look good to the Rangers,” Ansley Dryden, Kane’s foreman said. “We’re talking about a lot of people here.”
“You going soft on me, Anse?” Kane was looking for a fight, looking for somebody to blame for the presence of the Rathmores on range he considered his own.
Dryden shook his head. “Mr. Kane, that’s a helluva thing to say to me. I’ve done my share of killing for you in the past. I’ve shot and hung near two score men in my time—rustlers, nesters, and Indians—but we got to step careful. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Damn it, Anse, don’t give me problems. Give me answers,” Kane said.
Kane, Dryden, and Milton Barnett sat in the old rancher’s parlor, part of the sprawling stone house that had replaced the Rafter-K’s original two-room log cabin. Along with the two cowboys, Kane had included his personal bodyguard and sometime adviser, the Austin gunman Dave Sloan, a sour, taciturn man who was slowly wasting away from consumption and was as dangerous and unpredictable as a rabid wolf.
“What about you, Milt?” Kane said. “You saw the Rathmores up close when Jake Wise was murdered, or so you say. How do we destroy the nesters and square it with the Rangers?”
“Kill ’em all and then bring a mountain down on them,” Barnett said.
“Bring a mountain down on them,” Dryden repeated, scorn in his words. He’d set store by Wise, a top hand. “You’re one crazy peckerwood.”
“Wait, Anse. Maybe he’s crazy, maybe he isn’t,” Kane said. “Bring down a mountain . . . how?”
Barnett swallowed hard, then said, “Well, not a whole mountain. We drive them Rathmores into an arroyo carrying their dead and then bring the walls down on top of them with giant powder. Hell, the Rangers will never find them. Nobody will ever find them.”
“We could set it up beforehand,” Kane said. “Have the barrels placed so they’re ready to blow the minute the Rathmores are in the arroyo. Anse, what do you reckon?”
“It could work,” the foreman said. “Take some planning, but it could work. Destroy the evidence under tons of rubble.”
“White people lying in unmarked graves, now there’s a disturbing thought,” Kane said. “But who cares? The Rathmores aren’t really white. They’re scum.”
“Unmarked graves is all they deserve,” Barnett said. “They’d no need to kill Jake. Bushwhacked us and never gave us a chance.”
“Milt, you’re a smooth talker, but I’m not sure about you,” Kane said.
“Because of what happened to Jake?”
“Jake’s in his own unmarked grave by now,” Kane said. “That grieves me.”
Barnett shook his head. “Boss, it wasn’t my fault. There was nothing I could do. Jake went down with the first volley and then they came after me. There was a lot of them Rathmores. Too many for one man to handle.”
“Anse, take this man out and give him a job to do,” Kane said. “And study on that gunpowder idea. It has to work and it has to work soon, savvy?”
The big foreman nodded. “I’m on it, boss.”
As Dryden and Barnett stepped to the door, Kane said to Dave Sloan, “Dave, you stay here. We need to talk.”
After the punchers left, Kane said, “How are you feeling?”
“Coughing up my lungs and slowly dying a little more each day,” Sloan said. “When it gets real bad, I’ll blow my brains out.”
“I hope that day doesn’t come any time soon.” Kane was a hard man forged on the anvil of a merciless land and the hammer of a lifetime of violence but trying his best to be compassionate.
Sloan shrugged, unwilling to accept sympathy from anyone. “What do you want to talk about, Mr. Kane?”
“I want to talk about killing.” Kane smiled an evil old man smile. “On a grand scale.”
“How many of them Rathmores?” Sloan said.
“Forty . . . no more than fifty.”
“Including children?”
“Of course. The Rathmore trash breed like rabbits.”
“Pulling the trigger on young’uns gives me pause,” Sloan said.
“Nits make lice, Dave,” Kane said. “Tom Quick the mountain man said that when he was taken to task for killing Indian brats. Ol’ Tom knew what the hell he was talking about.”
Sloan was silent for a moment, thinking, and then he said, “All right. Let’s say ten fighting men at most. Mr. Kane, you’ve got enough gun hands to take care of them, especially if we hit them when they least expect it.”
“At night?”
“You read my mind.”
Kane said, “Huzzah, for the man from Austin! Kill the men and then drive the women and children into the arroyo and blow them to hell, huh?”
“No. Kill the men and bring the arroyo down on top of their bodies. The women and children can leave.”
“Damn it all, man. First chance they get, they’ll tell the Rangers,” Kane said. “We kill every last one of them, Dave. I ain’t gonna argue with you on that point. I want the whole Rathmore clan dead. They’ve been a thorn in my side for the last three years.”
Sloan was about to object, but the door slammed open, and Ansley Dryden rushed inside, his face like thunder. “Boss, you’d better come see this. Jake Wise ain’t in his grave. He’s come home . . . at least, some of him.”
Kane rose to his feet, his eyes wild. “They skun him?”
He read the answer to that question on his foreman’s face and ran outside.
* * *
The bloody skin of Wise’s upper body hung on a T-shaped frame that was tied upright to the saddle of his horse. A dozen punchers surrounded the grisly trophy, staring at it in horror.
“Boss, the horse come home by itself,” a young hand with a sparse beard said to Kane. “It brung Jake’s skin back.”
“Damn you, I can see what the horse brung back,” Kane said. “You men, don’t just stand there gaping. Bury that obscenity.” Then, loud enough so that everybody heard it plain, “The God-cursed Rathmores will pay for this. They’ll pay in blood.”
A murmur of approval ran through the punchers as a young man with unruly black hair said, “When do we ride, boss?”
“Real soon, Curley. I’ll give the word when the time comes. In the meantime, load up your guns and be ready.”
“Damn right,” Curley said, and another puncher grinned and slapped him on the back. Encouraged, the youngster said, “After what they done to Jake, I reckon them Rathmores ain’t even human.”
“No, they ain’t human. They’re animals, Curley,” the backslapper said. “They done the same thing to Jim Shaw, but that was afore your time. Jim was one of the nicest fellers you could ever hope to meet.”
He wasn’t. Jim Shaw was mean, nasty, and downright dangerous in drink, but the passage of time had conferred martyrdom on a man that until the day he died nobody had cared to remember.
Ben Kane bought into that sentiment. “I done right by ol’ Jim. I hung three of them Rathmores from the same cottonwood, and I’ll do right by Jake. We’ll come down on those savages like the wrath of God.”
That last brought a cheer.
Sensing the mood of his men, Kane declared a day off for every hand. “Plenty of whiskey for every man jack of you.”
Dave Sloan had earlier given him an additional piece of advice that Kane would not soon forget. “Keep them boys drunk between now and the attack on the Rathmores,” he’d said. “A likkered-up man kills easier.”