The old Spanish Conquistadors called them Llano Estacado, the Staked Plains. It was a name that caught on and still appears on today’s maps of Texas. It still looks much the same if you discount the roads that crisscross the area.
But, when Yancey Bannerman rode on the Llano that blistering summer’s day in the late 1870s, it was still a green place, where buffalo grazed on the lush grass. Wildlife was in profusion and the sky was big and blue, and like hammered brass around the fireball of the sun. Mountain ranges thrust up, some jagged-toothed peaks, some rounded like a woman, all virgin territory in this part of the Staked Plains: unsettled, dangerous.
Dangerous, not because of wild animals and other predators, but because there was a man ahead of Yancey somewhere, a man who called himself Carlsen and who was on his way to Bent’s Junction, in the south of the Llano, to pick up some papers that Yancey was mighty interested in. He was even more interested in the man known as ‘Onslow’ who would be handing the papers over to the courier, Carlsen.
It had been a long, hard trail and Carlsen had seen Yancey’s cover blown wide open back in San Amaro. It was one of the penalties of having travelled widely throughout the West. When a man was as amiable as Yancey, he made plenty of friends and one of the hazards of being the top ‘Enforcer’ in Governor Dukes’ elite corps of undercover trouble-busters, was that some of these friends could turn up at the wrong time and innocently hail him by his correct name in recognition. When a man was working hard on a case and doing just fine, getting himself accepted by the quarry, it was about the worst thing that could happen to an Enforcer. There was little to be done about it; a man could cover all he wanted, but once his correct name had been uttered, then men he was trying to convince he was someone else would never forget it; they would run their own checks and, sooner or later, they had to come up with the truth. And a man in Yancey’s job had to be mighty smart and mighty tough to come out of such a situation alive.
The fact that Yancey had been operating now as Dukes’ top man in Texas for close on two years was a tribute to his prowess with gun and fists.
In San Amaro, there had been nothing he could do about the stage driver at the depot who recognized him from a few years back when Yancey had done a stint as shotgun guard on the same stage line. He had yelled Yancey’s name enthusiastically, when Carlsen had been collecting his baggage from the rear of the coach. They had travelled up from Stanmore Plains together and Yancey had said his name was Regan and he was a cattle agent. But the driver had given him his full name, at the depot, saying how lucky he was the relief man, and happened to be on hand when Yancey arrived. They just had time for a couple of beers before the stage was due to pull out again ... There hadn’t been much Yancey could do, and during the short time it had taken to down two beers with the driver, Carlsen had hired himself a horse and pulled out …
He had covered his tracks well and Yancey had had a tough job finding them, scouting for hours before he finally picked them up. Once he found the trail he knew there was only one place Carlsen could be heading for: Bent’s Junction on the Llano Estacado and the rendezvous with ‘Onslow’.
The trail was easy-riding, but Yancey had no illusions: once he reached the Plains and those ranges, he would have to ride warily, scan every inch of trail and the surrounding countryside.
For Carlsen couldn’t afford to lead Yancey to ‘Onslow’. Up until the time he had quit San Amaro, Carlsen likely hadn’t suspected Yancey and he sure wouldn’t be reckoning on the Enforcer even knowing the name ‘Onslow’, but once he realized Yancey was hot on his trail, he would know Yancey was better informed than he figured and he would have to do something about stopping him.
Ambush was the obvious way.
Even though Yancey was expecting it and on the lookout, he was still caught unawares. The rifle whipcracked, sounding a long way off, so far off, in fact, that at the same instant that he heard the shot, the bullet clipped his left ear-lobe and warm blood sprayed down his neck and spotted the shoulder of his shirt. He had the presence of mind not only to throw himself out of the saddle, but to make it look as if he had been badly hit. He rolled and somersaulted completely, landing behind a cluster of low boulders. A bullet ricocheted from the rock above his head and dust stung his cheek. Another shot cracked between his arm and his body. He jerked and spun away as if hit, using the movement to get his body out of sight behind a larger rock. Carlsen sure could shoot!
He heard the rifle crack twice more in swift succession, and he frowned, wondering what the man could be shooting at now, and almost immediately he heard the piercing whinny of his horse. There was a threshing out there on the other side of the boulders and then a solid thud and the odor of dry dust in the air as a misty, yellow cloud drifted across his shelter. He heard the horse’s hoofs drumming several times and then the animal was still.
Yancey cursed himself for a fool. He had ridden right into it. Now he was afoot and only had his six-gun. He wasn’t worried about the ear wound. It was bleeding plenty and he smeared some of the blood over one side of his face and jaw to make his wound look worse. He didn’t dare move; right now, with some luck, Carlsen would figure he had nailed him, but he wouldn’t show himself for a spell. The man would watch those rocks for the slightest sign of life and he would watch for a long time before slowly making his way down to be sure that Yancey was dead.
Yancey was confident that, for the moment, he was out of sight of Carlsen, but he couldn’t risk any undue movements, in case the drygulcher had climbed high enough to see over the rocks to where he lay. But he slid his right hand down his body to the butt of his six-gun and eased it out of leather. He was able to drag it out and, by arching his body slightly, slide it half underneath him so that part of his body and his forearm concealed it. He eased the hammer back to full cock and kept his finger on the edge of the trigger guard. He didn’t touch the trigger itself in case the hammer tripped and the gun exploded. If it went off in this position, he would blow himself wide open.
He made no further movement after getting the gun out and into position. His bloody ear was uppermost as was the smeared jaw and neck. A quick glance at it might give the impression that he had been hit in the face and his jawbone had been blown away. He knew that Carlsen was a very careful man and he might well pump a couple of shots into Yancey’s body to make absolutely certain before coming too close. His only hope was that he was so close to the rocks that Carlsen would have to stand atop them before he could get a clear shot at him. And when he got that close, he would only be feet away, and above. A swift roll onto his side, sweeping the cocked gun up, taking the tension of the hammer while he depressed the trigger, and then releasing the spur and his lead would strike home and travel up at a very steep angle, destroying internal organs, likely lifting Carlsen clear off his feet, giving Yancey the best possible chance of coming out of this alive.
But if Carlsen worked his way around so as to come up from behind, he would have plenty of chance to settle down, take deliberate aim and plant a fatal shot into Yancey’s body before approaching closer. With birds chattering in the trees around him, Yancey couldn’t pick up any quiet footsteps and he silently cursed the wildlife for blanketing the sounds he needed to hear. He had to know which way Carlsen would approach. Yancey would have only one chance, time for a single shot and it had to be placed right or he would never hear the sound of the rifle shot that would plunge him into eternity...
Goddamn birds! he thought savagely. Twittering and chirping and chattering endlessly with scarcely a pause. He tried opening an eye part way: it was dangerous, for, if Carlsen was coming from the front and above, he could well spot the movement. But it was a chance he had to take. All he could see was hot blue sky through the thicket of his eyelashes and the whirling dots of screeching birds frantically wheeling above up there, swooping, spinning away, their cries piercing. He daren’t move his head but he had to do something to locate Carlsen and he had to do it quickly. Sweat was pouring down his face, stinging his eyes, tickling his nostrils. If only those blasted birds would ... The birds! They weren’t just chattering and chirping now, flitting from branch to branch; they were fleeing in wild flight, screeching alarm at something that had disturbed them!
By Godfrey, it had to be Carlsen! Coming down the slope through the brush, working his way around behind him. And his passage, careful though it was, had been sufficient to disturb the birds. He strained his ears, searching through the screeching sounds, not for footsteps any longer, but for a far more lethal noise: the cold, metallic click of a rifle hammer coming back to full cock.
Then came a faint change in the overall noise, a momentary ‘solid’ sound, nothing so clear as a hammer clicking to full cock, but that’s what it had to be. And now came the moment of truth: he could still be right or wrong, for there was no way he could tell from which direction that sound had come. And there was little time to think about it. He had to take his chances...
Yancey rolled away from the rocks, wrenching his body muscles as he brought up the six-gun, the hammer spur starting to slide from under his thumb even before the barrel had snapped into line. He had one thought: he had picked right. Carlsen was in the brush, crouched, sighting carefully down the barrel of his rifle, and then, as he fired, the rifle muzzle jetted flame and smoke and there was a searing pain flashing across the top of his head.
He grunted as he was knocked back and down, and his vision seemed to flare, blotting out everything momentarily, and then he could see again and Carlsen was staggering, hit, but not fatally, bringing up his rifle for another shot. Yancey squirmed around, gripping his Colt with both hands now, aligning the muzzle on Carlsen’s big body and squeezing off his second shot just as the drygulcher got his rifle to his shoulder. The rifle roared but the barrel was pointing skywards as Carlsen went over backwards, sat down with a thud, wide-eyed, as he coughed and blood sprayed over his chin. He coughed again as he toppled sideways and then his body snaked convulsively as he tried to get up again but flopped forward onto his face and slowly straightened out in the dust.
Yancey’s eyes were giving him trouble. He was still seeing things as if he was looking at them against a glaring sun and there was an extra image. His head ached like nothing he had experienced before and his ears felt as if they were bursting from the inside. Blood flowed down across his forehead and dripped from his right eyebrow. He wiped the back of a hand across it, used one of the rocks to lever himself upright. He swayed as the world tilted and shook under his feet, planting his boots wide. He started forward unsteadily and looked down at Carlsen. The man was dead but to make sure, he shot him through the head. He couldn’t take any chance that he might leave him alive along his back trail!
The Enforcer had to sit down. He took out a kerchief, soaked it in tepid water from the canteen taken from his dead horse and held it against the scalp crease. It felt pretty deep and the slightest pressure on the wound hurt like hell. Just a half inch lower, he calculated, and he would have had the top of his head blown off. It had been as close as that. He sat there, the pain throbbing through him, waiting for his vision to settle down. As soon as it did, he would bury Carlsen, catch the man’s horse and start out on the long trail south to Bent’s Junction. According to his information, Carlsen was a new courier and unknown to Onslow. With a little luck he might be able to pass himself off as Carlsen and pick up those papers ... and find out just who the hell this Onslow was.
But first, his head had to stop throbbing and the wound would have to stop bleeding.
~*~
Cato had lost the trail outside of Buffalo Horn, a town on the southern edge of the Staked Plains. Not that he had been following actual physical tracks, but rather he had been going by sightings of the men he sought, the Roy Treece bunch. Treece was an outlaw from way back, one who had graduated through armed holdups of isolated ranches to express offices, banks and, finally, his specialty, trains. Treece was probably the slickest and most-wanted train robber since the James boys had their run. He was wanted in seven states and right now he was wanted most of all in Texas, by Governor Dukes himself.
A couple of months back, the Treece gang had held up a train outside of San Angelo and robbed the express car, leaving a pile of bodies. They had taken all the mailbags as well as the strongbox and amongst that mail had been some sealed government bags containing important papers that Dukes wanted back. With Yancey involved in other work, Dukes had pulled in his other top man, Johnny Cato, and turned him loose to get Treece. Alive. He not only wanted to know where those mailbags were, he wanted to know why Treece had chosen to take them at that particular time when, until then, he had concentrated solely on gold and cold cash. Dukes suspected that someone had leaked information or given Treece the express job of stealing those bags in which were the secret papers.
The trail had been long and violent, Cato cutting down four members of the gang in one memorable gunfight in Fort Conchos, his Manstopper thundering, the underslung shot barrel cutting one man almost in two. The eight .45 cartridges that the over-sized cylinder held had given him an edge and when the gunsmoke had finally cleared in the heat-pulsing street, the four outlaws lay dead and bloody in the dust.
Along the trail to Odessa, they had tried to bushwhack him. They had got his mount and figured he would be easy meat then. Once more the Manstopper came into its own and Cato used all but one of his stock of shot shells to finish the three men Treece had sent to get him. With seven of his gang down to the one man, Roy Treece, tough as he was, figured it was time to get out of that neck of the woods and, with the five remaining members, he cut out across the Staked Plains. Cato knew roughly where he would be heading: to the southern corner, his old stamping grounds. And when he lost all trace of the outlaws around Buffalo Horn, a town right on the very edge of this area, he knew he had been right.
Treece had had his start in this area years ago and he had a lot of friends who would hide him out. Cato knew it wasn’t going to be easy to flush him and his men from around here, but he was equally certain that Treece was through running and had gone to ground. Best thing was to get help from a local, someone who knew the country, knew Treece’s old friends, his possible hiding places. So Cato hauled his mount to the left and headed into Buffalo Horn where he looked up Sheriff Arnie Watts, a lean, dried-out man with brittle eyes and longhorn mustache, which he kept stroking as he talked. It was stained brown from the tobacco that Watts chewed. He spat a stream of juice into the copper spittoon near Cato’s feet as the Enforcer stood by the battered desk, holding out his identification card for the sheriff to read. Watts squinted and his lips moved slowly as he spelled out the words. He arched bushy eyebrows as he looked up at Cato. His purpled lips pursed in a soft whistle.
“Governor’s Enforcer, huh? Well, now I guess that makes you a mighty important man, eh, Mr. Cato? I’m sure gonna bust a gut to give you all the help you want.” He winked. “And I hope you recollect that when you’re back in Austin writin’ up your report for Governor Dukes.”
Cato looked hard at the man. “This is no joshin’ matter, Watts ... I want Treece bad.”
The sheriff looked innocent. “Hell, man, I wasn’t joshin’! I mean it: you ask for all the help you need and I’ll bust my britches to see you get it. I sure don’t want Roy Treece loose in my territory.”
Cato studied the man’s face. He seemed to be serious and yet there was a kind of sardonic lift to his voice, as if he was laughing at some private joke while he swore to give Cato all the co-operation he needed. But Watts was a man with a good reputation as a lawman; Cato figured he was likely entitled to some fun at his expense, so long as it didn’t affect the outcome.
“Well, Watts, I want a posse ... a strong one. Men who’re prepared to ride days, weeks maybe, and tough enough to sleep in the saddle and then climb down right smack into the middle of a gunfight and come out smilin’ ...”
Watts pursed his lips again. “I could get such men. But they wouldn’t do it for nothin’. We ain’t got what you might call a surplus of ‘civic-minded’ citizens round these parts. They’d want pay.”
“Fair enough. Treece and his bunch have a bounty on their heads. Dunno what it is exactly, but it’s around ten thousand dollars total. Dukes is adding another five thousand for this job. The posse, far as I’m concerned, can split the lot. You, as leader, can take a leader’s share, but the rest is to be divided equally.”
Watts whistled again. “Man, you’ve got your posse!”
“One thing,” Cato said as the sheriff stood and squirted a long stream of tobacco juice into the spittoon. “Treece has got to be taken alive.”
Watts frowned. “Alive? Hell, you go in against Roy Treece, Cato, and he ain’t gonna give anyone—not anyone—a chance to take him back and slip a noose round his neck. He’s always swore he’ll never hang, that he’ll die by a bullet.”
“I want him alive,” Cato said flatly. “You make sure the others know that, too, Sheriff. Roy Treece has got to be taken alive.”
“You’re callin’ ’em,” Watts said with a sigh, but it was clear that he didn’t hold out much hope of bringing in the outlaw still breathing.