‘Who all’s here?’ Sam asked.
Hiram Spalding looked around the oversized front room of his sprawling ranch house. It was tightly crowded in spite of its size. Every chair was filled. Every bit of space was filled with someone sitting on the floor or leaning against the wall. Even the rest of the floor was mostly filled with men sitting cross-legged. Some chewed on match stubs, a few held steaming mugs of coffee. All eyes kept focusing on Sam, even before he spoke.
‘Most of the boys from my ranch and several others,’ Hiram responded. ‘Half a dozen are homesteaders.’
‘Rattle off all our names, then see if he can remember ’em all,’ suggested Ty Henley. As he spoke, he point a finger at Sam. It looked like a sliver jutting from the end of an arm that neared the size of a rail-road tie.
A burst of laughter rippled around the room, relaxing the atmosphere.
‘I might have a problem with that,’ Sam rejoined. ‘I can’t remember my own name, some days.’
‘Let’s get down to business.’ The strident voice of ‘Boiling Bob’ Blanchard slapped against the budding levity and squelched it instantly. ‘I gotta get up and get some work done in the morning. I ain’t got time to sit around jawin’ all night.’
Rita Blanchard frowned and spoke softly into her husband’s ear. He fell silent, but his face reflected a roiling impatience, nonetheless.
‘I ’spect we’d just as well get to what I asked you all here for,’ Hiram conceded. ‘We seem to have us a problem with Russell’s outfit wantin’ to take over and run the rest of us out of the country.’
‘You’re big enough he ain’t gonna run over you,’ the soft voice of Lafe Sorenson replied.
‘Not for now, anyway,’ Hiram acknowledged. ‘But that ain’t true for any of the rest of you. And if he picks your outfits off, one at a time, he’ll be big enough to take me on as well. Besides, I’m too much of a neighbor to just sit by and watch it happen to any of you.’
‘What’s Russell doin’ up there on Spring Crick?’ another homesteader asked. ‘I see a cloud o’ dust up there pertneart every day for over a month. He bustin’ sod or somethin’?’
It was Sam who responded. ‘He’s building a big dam across the whole draw, to dam up Spring Crick.’
Deathly silence fell across the room. Ty Henley spoke first. ‘That’d put me outa business. I’m on Spring Crick, just a couple miles down from the Bond place.’
‘Me too, about six miles farther down,’ another homesteader joined in. ‘Without that crick, I got no live water on my place.’
‘Ain’t that on government range?’ another probed.
Sam nodded. ‘Yeah, it’s government range. Russell runs cattle on it, but he’s got no title to it.’
‘Then how can he put a dam there?’
‘ ’Cause he can, and who’s gonna stop him?’
‘Somebody better put a stop to it.’
‘There’s enough of us, we could ride over there and offer to let him stop what he’s doin’, or get tarred and feathered and rode outa the country on a rail.’
‘He’s got a bunch of gun hands hired. We might outnumber ’em, but I ain’t sure we’d win against ’em.’
‘We could try.’
‘That’d cause a range war, sure’s anything.’
‘But if we don’t do somethin’, he can do the same thing with Clear Crick and Cottonwood Crick, and then we’re all outa business.’
The conversations ran around in circles for several minutes, offering no solutions, but pretty clearly defining the issues and problems. When it had gone on long enough, Sam spoke up.
‘I can deal with the dam. Oz, Bart, Eddie, and I will do that. But what happens afterward is where we need to be united.’
‘How you gonna deal with a dam?’ Boiling Bob interrupted, his voice dripping with skepticism. ‘You can’t go over there and start shoveling. I seen that thing they’re buildin’. It’d be like movin’ a mountain to get it outa there.’
‘I’ll take care of that part,’ Sam assured him. ‘But when I do, Russell’s gonna come bustin’ over here with every gun he’s got. If we stick together, we can take care of him and his gunslingers all at one time. If we don’t, he’ll run us all outa the country, one at a time.’
‘Or kill us all, one at a time,’ Lafe Sorenson said softly. Then he added, ‘Just like he did Ralph Bond. And Tennessee Sneed. And Dick Coggins.’
‘And Al Tenner,’ another voice added.
Silence fell across the room, as the assembled group remembered those of their neighbors who had met sudden and suspicious deaths.
‘So we obviously gotta do somethin’,’ Ty Henley summarized the collective mindset. ‘I guess it’s up to you to tell us what.’
Sam nodded. ‘The night of the fifteenth – that’s almost two weeks away – I’ll sorta make the dam disappear. By sunup, I’m bettin’ Russell and his whole outfit’ll head straight for Kate Bond’s place, hell-for-leather. If all of you are already set up a ways ahead of there, well hidden until my signal, and all in the right place, we can have his whole outfit surrounded and out-gunned. When they see the setup, they’ll give it up. Hopefully we can do it without havin’ to fire a shot.’
‘You’re dreamin’,’ Boiling Bob retorted. ‘Them’s professional gunfighters.’
‘That’s exactly why Sam’s right,’ Lafe Sorenson responded instantly. ‘If they were all hotheaded cowboys, they might try to shoot their way out. Professional gunfighters know better than to buck the odds when the deck’s stacked too heavy against ’em. They’ll back down quick.’
A few seconds of silence followed, then voices exploded from all corners of the room, some enthusiastically in favor of the plan, some hesitantly so, some flatly opposed.
‘Why don’t we just let the law handle it?’ Sonia Sorenson asked.
Her question silenced the room until her own husband responded. ‘The only thing the law could do is either raise a posse and face Russell head-on, on his own ground, or call in the army. Facing him on his own ground would be an all-out gun battle, and a lot of people would get killed. Calling in the army would take months to get authorized, as long as nobody’s under siege or anything. By then, I’ll be dried out, along with all of you that live on Spring Crick, and Russell will already be workin’ on the next crick.’
Another long silence ensued. It was, again, Lafe Sorenson who said, ‘When do you want us at your place?’
His wife, Sonia, visibly gasped when he said it. She stared at him as if she had just been, somehow, betrayed, but she said nothing. She pressed her lips into a thin line and stared at the floor. Lafe did his best to ignore her reaction.
‘He ain’t gonna ignore that when he gets home,’ Sam thought.
Aloud he said, ‘We’ll need everybody’s help a few nights before. Then the night we take care of the dam, we’ll get set up before daylight where the road goes through that cut about a mile south of the Bond place. Even if they decide to hit here, or one of the other places first, they’ll almost sure come that way.’
‘Are you gonna be there?’
‘I’ll be there,’ Sam promised, ‘before any of the festivities begin.’
Silent nods from most of the men present signified their commitment. Sam didn’t know these men, but he knew a hundred like them, spread across the rough and ready west. He knew that nod of agreement was more dependable and binding than any piece of paper sworn in a court of law.
That the matter was settled was indicated almost immediately, when one of Spalding’s hands said, ‘Hey, Ty! Let’s see you arm wrestle Bart.’
A dozen voices immediately offered enthusiastic support for the idea. As if he had been awaiting the moment, Eduardo carried a small table in and set it in the middle of the room. It was no sooner in place than two chairs were placed across from each other.
Bart looked at Ty. Ty shrugged and rose to his feet. He was every bit as tall as Bart, and boasted shoulders at least as broad. His hands appeared bigger than Bart’s, but other than that the two appeared evenly matched.
At once quiet bets were placed between friends all around the room. Bart and Ty sat down facing each other and placed their elbows on the table. When they had their hands gripped together in a way that suited both, they nodded. Hiram stood with his hand atop theirs for a moment, then jerked his hand away. ‘Go!’ he said.
Instantly each man strained against the grip of the other, hoping a slightly quicker reaction time would provide a quick win. It worked for neither. For each, it was like trying to push the trunk of a tree over. Muscles bulged. Faces reddened. Ty’s shirt sleeve ripped abruptly, unable to stretch far enough to house the giant muscle within it. The eyes of both men bulged with the effort. Jaw muscles bunched as teeth gritted. They strained against each other in silence, exerting every ounce of their immense strength. Their knotted fists failed to move in either direction.
Every eye in the room was riveted on those two knotted fists. Unseen, Camilla Spalding slipped up behind Bart. She suddenly poked him with an index finger in both ribs, and yelled, ‘Boo!’
Bart yelled as if he’d been struck by a rattlesnake. He leaped from the chair, sending it flying backward. It narrowly missed Camilla as she swiftly sidestepped, knowing exactly the reaction her brother would have.
Bart turned menacingly toward his little sister. She saucily stuck her tongue out at him, then turned and ran.
A delayed roar of laughter erupted as the assembled group realized what had happened. Hiram shook his head ruefully. He addressed his wife. ‘Eva, would you do something with that daughter of yours?’
‘My daughter?’ Eva retorted. ‘She gets that from your side of the family, not from mine.’
The retort stirred a second round of laughter. One man’s call for the two to resume their contest went unanswered and unheeded. The moment of levity passed and all bets were considered canceled. Each one remembered the reason for their being there. Conversations were muted and few as they all filed from the room and mounted their horses for the ride home.