THE NEXT MORNING, Dick Gerber and Boyd Kinch rode along the wagon trail a mile southwest of Bullion Creek. Both men were leaning out from their saddles, scouring the ground with their eyes, looking for the boot tracks they’d lost in an arroyo about a hundred yards behind them.
“What the hell! Am I going blind?” Kinch bellowed in frustration. “I can track a snake across a flat rock!”
“Oh, hell,” Gerber replied, “let’s stop and have a smoke. I’m bone tired, and so’s my horse.”
“Shit!” Kinch barked, turning his head this way and that. “That damn rain wiped out everything.”
Gerber halted his horse and crawled out of the saddle. He loosened the cinch, giving his piebald a breather.
Turning to gaze around as he fished his tobacco makings from his shirt pocket, he froze, squinting his eyes northward, where the buttes were washed with morning pink. A horse and a gray box wagon were making then-way over a saddle, the driver flicking the reins over the back of the dun horse in the traces.
“Hey, someone’s comin’,” he said.
“Where?”
“There,” Gerber pointed as the wagon disappeared into the arroyo.
Several minutes later, it reappeared, approaching along the trail cut through the bluffs, dry wheel hubs screeching, the slats in the wagon bed clattering. The horse snorted and shook its head when it saw the two riders in its path.
Recognizing the driver, Gerber grinned. He winked at Kinch.
“Good day to you, Miss Carr,” Gerber said, lifting his hat and bowing lavishly. “What a sweet surprise so early in the mornin’.”
The girl hauled back on the reins. She was a slender but ample-bosomed young woman in a sand-colored hat and baggy, blue, man’s shirt and denim breeches. Tawny hair, dull and matted, fell over her shoulders, and her blue eyes were petulant. Pretty in a hard way, she frowned at the two men before her as though she’d just discovered an enormous pile of cow dung in her path.
“What the hell do you two want?”
“Why you, darlin’!” Gerber laughed.
“Get the hell out of my way, Dick, or I’ll blow you both out of your boots.”
Gerber chuckled and glanced at Kinch. Kinch smiled and shook his head.
“Now, that’s downright unneighborly,” Gerber told the girl.
“I’ll tell you what’s unneighborly,” the girl snapped. “What’s unneighborly is how you boys have been running Crosshatch beef onto Pretty Butte range.”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, darlin’,” Gerber said, feigning wide-eyed innocence.
“Bullshit,” the girl said, jerking a lock of hair from her eyes with a flick of her head. “Loomis has overstocked his own range, so he’s tryin’ to shove us out. Well, it ain’t gonna work. Any beef we find on our range is ours, pure and simple. If you don’t like it, you best keep your beef to home.”
Gerber tossed a glance at his partner, laughing. “What a waste, eh, pard?”
“What’s that?” Kinch said, lounging forward on his saddle, both hands resting on the horn.
“A girl that cuts a figure like this one here marryin’ ole Gregor Lang. Hell, he has to be at least fifty.”
“Big corncob up his tight Scotch ass, too,” Kinch agreed.
“Move your hammerheads out of my way!” the girl cried. “I have to get these supplies back to the ranch. I’m late the way it is.”
“You been to Little Missouri?” Kinch asked her.
“Where else would I have picked up this wagon load?”
“You seen a man along the trail?”
“What man?”
“A tall man—taller even than Kinch here. Might be wounded. He’s afoot, that’s for sure.”
The girl studied both men suspiciously. “What’s he doin’ out here without a horse?”
Gerber laughed. “His horse is dead. Shorty McClellan shot it out from under him with his Sharps.”
“What’d he do that for?”
“ ‘Cause the hombre killed Little Stu.”
The girl was shocked. “He killed Little Stu?”
“Shot him right through the brisket,” Kinch said.
“What’d he do that for?”
“ ‘Cause Little Stu was bein’ Little Stu,” Gerber said. “But the old man wants his hide just the same.”
The girl thought about this for several seconds, dully staring at the two men before her. “Well, I didn’t see him, but if I did, I’d o’ thanked him for ridding the world of that jasper Stuart Loomis. Now, I’d like to stay and chat with you boys, but like I said, I have to get movin’.”
Laughing delightedly, Gerber turned to Kinch. He swung back around, clipped the laugh, grabbed the girl’s right arm, and yanked her off the wagon seat. She screamed and hit the ground hard, losing her hat, her hair flying about her shoulders. The dun whinnied and shook its head.
“Girl, I like your sand!” Gerber said. He kicked her back down as she started to rise.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, you son of a bitch!”
Kinch tipped his head back and laughed.
Gerber said, “I don’t think it’s right, you goin’ to waste on Gregor Lang. Do you think that’s right, Kinch?”
“No, I don’t think that’s right at all, Dick.”
“Why, I bet this pretty little thing’s never even been kissed by a real man,” Gerber said as he removed his gloves.
The girl scuttled away from him on her hands and heels. “Leave me alone, you son of a bitch!”
Following her, Gerber tossed his gloves away and removed his hat, dropping it near the gloves. “Yessir, I think it’s time you been kissed by a real man.”
“No sense ole Gregor Lang havin’ all the fun,” Kinch said.
“Leave me alone, you bastards, or you’ll be sorry!”
She got her feet beneath her and was about to rise again. Laughing, Gerber again kicked her back down. “Yessir! I like her sand, Kinch.”
Kinch laughed. “Me, too, amigo.”
The Pretty Butte girl sprang to her feet and turned to run away. Before she’d taken two steps, Gerber grabbed her and threw her down. He fell on top of her and nuzzled her neck, his right hand tearing her shirt open, exposing a thin chemise and a good bit of cleavage.
“Look at those!” Kinch hooted.
As Gerber sank his teeth deep into the girl’s neck, she tried bringing her knee to his groin. Gerber held the knee down with his own, and gazed, red-faced, into her eyes. “Listen here, you little polecat, you’re gonna do us, and you’re gonna do us good, hear?”
She cursed and spat in his face. He ceased fumbling with her breasts and smacked her face with his clenched right fist. Her head whipped sideways, and her vision dimmed. The fight suddenly left her as she teetered on the edge of consciousness.
Taking advantage of her languor, Gerber crawled back on his knees, removed his gun belt, and flung it aside. He opened his pants and shoved them down his thighs. That done, with a goatish snarl, he grabbed at the girl’s denims, ripping them open and jerking them down her thighs.
A voice sounded behind him. “I see you boys are working hard.”
Gerber jerked his head around. Loomis and his foreman, Luther McConnell, sat their tail-swishing mounts beside Kinch, who regarded them cautiously. Distracted by Gerber and the girl, he hadn’t heard the two riders approach. Amused disdain narrowed Loomis’s eyes beneath the brim of his black sombrero.
Rushing with embarrassment, Kinch stood and worked his retreating member back into his underwear. He smiled sheepishly at his boss, pulling his pants up and buttoning his fly.
Loomis’s eyes turned hard. “I take it, since you two seem to have time for foolishness, that you found Prophet.”
Kinch cleared his throat. “Uh ... well... no, sir. We seen tracks over yonder—”
Loomis turned to him, and his voice was as taut as razor wire. “If you see tracks over yonder, then why in hell aren’t you over yonder?”
“Well, we seen her...” Kinch tried feebly.
“You saw this little tramp from the Pretty Butte country and figured you’d take yourselves a little break, that it?” Loomis swung his castigating gaze from Kinch to Gerber. “That it?”
Gerber said nothing. His heart was pounding, his face still flushed with embarrassment.
Seconds passed slowly, the breeze ruffling the sage, the girl grunting angrily as she righted her clothes.
Finally, Loomis’s voiced boomed like a shotgun. “Get on your goddamn mounts and show us those tracks!”
“Y-yes, Mr. Loomis.” Kinch truckled, grabbing his reins and mounting. “This way, sir!”
As he and the other men headed west, Loomis walked his horse over to the Pretty Butte girl. He gave his flat gaze to her. She was on her knees, holding a handkerchief to the bleeding bite marks in her neck.
“That’s what you get for trespassing on Crosshatch range. I ever see you on my land again, my men’ll do what they want to you.” He studied her dully. A wolfish shine entered his dark eyes. “Good Lord, you’re a piece of work! Why on earth do you dress like a man?”
She glared at him. “This ain’t your range. It’s open range, and the only decent wagon trail to town.”
Loomis nodded and turned his horse around. “You just heed what I say; next time things ain’t gonna go so easy for you.” With that, he gave his steeldust the spurs and galloped after the others, the thuds and dust lingering in the warming air behind him.
Layla Carr watched him dwindle with distance until the tableland consumed him, her heart still thumping with outrage.
It wasn’t the first time she’d been molested by Loomis riders, but it was the first time it had gone this far. She’d have to keep her Spencer closer to hand next time she rode to town. If they tried messing with her again, she’d show them what happened when you messed with Layla Carr.
Wouldn’t they be surprised when she brought her pa’s old carbine to bear and started pumping them full of holes!
Still grinding her teeth, she removed the handkerchief from her neck and inspected it. The blood had nearly stopped. She stuffed the handkerchief in her back pocket, stood, and brushed herself off.
Glancing again in the direction Loomis had gone, she cursed and turned toward the wagon. She found a length of string in the box, tied her shirt closed, and climbed onto the driver’s seat. Releasing the brake and flicking the reins over the horse’s back, she felt a faint smile tug at her lips.
Little Stu was dead, gunned down in the Pyramid Park Saloon.
Layla Carr did not normally take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but the demise of Stuart Loomis, or Little Stu as he’d been called behind his back, lightened her mood considerably.
One other man had come close to raping her, and that man had been Little Stu. He’d found her watering her horse at Little Cannon Ball Creek one summer afternoon, when she was only fourteen years old, and had groped and pawed her till she’d pulled a pocket gun. Apparently, he hadn’t expected a fourteen-year-old girl to be carrying a pocket gun, but she had been, and he’d fallen all over himself apologizing and scrambling onto his horse.
A farmer’s daughter over near Dickinson hadn’t been so lucky, and neither had several other girls Layla had heard about—savaged by Little Stu and his men.
“Guess you won’t be bothering any girls now, Little Stu,” Layla said, pulling her horse back onto the trail meandering through the scrub.
As she rode, her neck stung sharply, and her face throbbed where Gerber had punched her. When the wagon trail dipped down to the Little Missouri, she stopped the horse, climbed down from the wagon, and tied the reins to a cottonwood.
She walked to the milky brown water and knelt down. Wrinkling her nose against the river’s fetid, alkali odor, she soaked her handkerchief, wrung it out, and pressed it to her neck.
Behind her, someone groaned.