CHAPTER TWO
“Damn you, Caine! You make a habit of waking a man at the crack of dawn?” Clint Cooley yelled from behind the closed door of his cabin.
“It’s almost three in the afternoon, Clint,” Dan Caine said.
“Like I said, the crack of dawn,” Cooley said. “I should come out there and shoot you down like a mad dog . . . like a . . . a rabid wolf.”
“I need you, Clint,” Caine said. “Big doings coming down.”
“Then why the hell do you need me, lawman? Speak, thou apparition.”
“Tom Calthrop is dead, murdered, him and his whole family, and young Jenny’s been took,” Caine said. “And as of a few minutes ago I’m no longer a lawman.”
A long pause and Cooley said, “How do you know about the Calthrops?”
“Because I buried them today,” Caine said.
A bolt slammed open and a tall, well-built man, dressed only in his underwear, stood framed in the doorway. “I knew Tom Calthrop, and I liked him,” Cooley said. “What do you want from me, Dan?”
“Ride with me. Help me find his killers.”
“What about Hurd?”
“He won’t leave Thunder Creek.”
“He’s afraid of his damned shadow. He has the backbone of a maggot.”
Caine let that pass without comment and said, “Ten minutes, Clint. Don’t wear your fancy dressed-up-for-the-poker-tables-in-New-Orleans duds. It could be a rough trail.”
The gambler eyed Caine from scuffed boots to battered hat, taking in his canvas pants, blue shirt, army suspenders, and the washed-out red bandana tied loosely around his neck, a blue Colt in its holster worn high, horseman style.
“Dan Caine, when I want sartorial advice from you, and that will be never, I’ll ask for it,” Cooley said. “Now bring me a cup of coffee, will you?” He glanced at the blue sky and shook his head. “My God . . . the crack of dawn.”
“Not for the Calthrops,” Caine said.
“No,” Cooley said, his handsome face suddenly serious. “Not for the Calthrops.”
* * *
Dan Caine walked from Cooley’s shack in the direction of the general store, smiled, and touched his hat to the local belle, Estella Sweet, the blacksmith’s daughter. She was seventeen years old that year, a slender, elegant girl with wavy blonde hair that fell over her shoulders in a golden cascade. Some said, out of her father’s hearing, that it was high time she was wedded and bedded, but Estella showed no inclination to partake of holy matrimony or of mattress time either. It should be mentioned here, because historians of the more sensational kind always draw attention to it, that the girl had prodigiously large breasts. But she bore them proudly, her scarlet, front-laced corset jutting aggressively ahead of her like the figurehead on a man o’ war. Under the corset Estella wore a light gray shirt in a railroad stripe, and a front-bustled skirt of the same color fell to the top of her high-heeled ankle boots. She wore a flat-brimmed, high-crowned hat, and her blue eyes were protected from the sun by a pair of round dark glasses with a brass frame. Around her neck, poised above her cleavage, hung a small silver pocket watch with a white face and black Roman numerals.
For the cowboys who came into town on Friday nights Estella was one of the sights to see. But it was very much lookee but no touchee, because blacksmith Mike Sweet was a powerfully strong man, hard, dangerous, and profane, very protective of his pretty daughter, and with no great liking for the cattlemen who provided 90 percent of his livelihood.
With an outstretched hand, Estella stopped Dan and said, “Holt Peters over to the general store told me about the Calthrops. Dan, who could’ve done such a terrible thing?”
“I don’t know, Estella,” Caine said, seeing a distorted version of himself in the girl’s dark glasses. “It might have been a man called Clay Kyle and his boys, but that’s far from sure. I aim to find out.”
“You and Sheriff Hurd are going after them . . . the killers I mean,” the girl said.
“I’m going after them,” Dan said. “Sheriff Hurd doesn’t want to leave the town without a lawman. Don’t worry, I’ll bring Jenny Calthrop back safe and sound.”
“Jenny’s been my friend since, well, forever . . . since we were both children,” Estella said. She smiled. “And I never minded it a bit when folks said she was the prettiest girl in Concho County.”
Dan grinned and said, “When it comes down to who’s the prettiest gal between you and Jenny, I’d say it’s a tie. You’re both as pretty as a field of bluebonnets.”
Estella’s uncertain smile slowly faded. “Find her, Dan. Bring her home.”
Dan said, “Clint Cooley, Holt Peters, and Frank Halder have all volunteered to join my posse. And maybe old Fish Lee if he can rustle up a horse. Oh, and the Kiowa.”
Estella frowned as though she was about to say something, changed her mind, and said, “Then do be careful, Dan. And make sure Frank Halder remembers to wear his spectacles. He forgets them all the time.”
Dan Caine’s answer to that was a smile and a nod, but Estella Sweet wasn’t quite done with him. “You could always get some cowboys to join you,” she said. “The ranchers hereabouts set store by Tom Calthrop.”
“I thought about it, but the fall gather is coming up, and the ranchers want their punchers to stick close to the home range. Besides, I don’t have time. We’re pulling out now while there’s still a few hours of daylight. The Kiowa can track in the dark, but he’s not keen on it.”
“Then good luck, Dan,” the girl said. She laid a slim hand on Dan’s shoulder. “I think you’re going to need it.”
* * *
Holt Peters, an orphaned boy around sixteen years of age, and Frank Halder, short, fat, and myopic, were in Doan’s General Store when Dan Caine stepped inside.
“Howdy, Dan,” said Pete Doan, a middle-aged man with sunken cheeks, hollow temples, and gray eyes tired out from constant pain. “Sheriff Hurd raising his posse to run down those killers?”
“Not Hurd, just me,” Dan said. He answered the question on Doan’s face. “Somebody has to stay in town and look after things.”
“Is that so?” the storekeeper said, not liking what he’d just heard. “I’m the mayor of this burg, and I say there isn’t much to look after in Thunder Creek.”
“Sheriff Hurd doesn’t see it that way,” Dan said. Then, “Holt and Frank, you listen up. I’m no longer a deputy, so this posse isn’t legal. Sheriff Hurd says I’m a vigilante, and I guess that applies to anybody who rides with me.”
“I’ll stick, Mr. Caine,” said Holt Peters, a tall, good-looking boy, a blue-eyed towhead who’d outgrown all his duds and was wearing Pete Doan’s threadbare castoffs.
“Me too,” Halder said, blinking behind his spectacles like a plump owl. He was a year older than Peters and a head shorter.
Doan looked skeptically at Dan. “Who else have you got?”
“So far, Clint Cooley and the Kiowa.”
“That’s it?”
“So far.”
“What do you mean, so far? Where are you going to get anybody else?”
Dan Caine smiled. “How about you, Pete?”
Doan took the question in stride. “I’ve got a cancer growing inside me, and I haven’t sat a horse in twenty years. All I’d do is slow you up.”
“Pity. I’d sure like to have along a man who fought Apaches back when.”
“When I was a Ranger, I fit the Comanche, not Apaches,” Doan said. “It was a long time ago and something I wouldn’t want to do ever again.”
Dan nodded. “I can understand that.”
“I reckon you’ll understand it better if you catch up to the killers who massacred the Calthrop family,” Doan said. “A sight of my bad experiences were written in blood and lead.” His eyes opened and closed several times as though blinking away remembered images, then he said, “I’ve loaned each of these two . . . vigilantes . . . a .32-20 Winchester and a box of shells each. The rifles are old, but they still shoot. What else do you need? Supplies? You’ll need supplies.”
“Yeah, I do, but I’m a little short of the ready at the moment,” Dan said. “I’ll need to talk to you about that.”
Doan, a normally sour man, managed a thin smile. “Coffee, cornmeal, dried apples, bacon, and a pan to fry it in. Tobacco? You got tobacco?”
“Truth is, I’m kinda low on the makings,” Dan said.
“And tobacco. I’ll sack up the stuff, and you can pay me when you get back,” Doan said. “Bring back Jenny Calthrop, and you don’t have to pay anything at all.”
“And a cup of coffee for Clint Cooley,” Dan said. “Add it to my bill, Pete.”
“Coffee is on the house,” Doan said. “The pot’s on the stove.”