When he started to come round, Cato had no idea where he was. It was dark. Familiar sounds began to filter into his mind through the roaring, pounding ache that throbbed all through his head and neck. There was a jolting that wrenched a sick moan from his lips.
That seemed to be a mistake. Someone nearby stirred and he heard a grating voice. Next instant, the world exploded again in shattering pain and he remembered nothing more until he struggled back to consciousness and barely tolerable agony.
There was no jolting, no sense of motion this time. He was lying stretched out on something hard. Instinct made him try to move his arms and legs, just a fraction of an inch, but sufficient to tell him that he wasn’t bound or manacled. It meant little to him at present, at least to his conscious thought, for his thinking processes were blanketed by the sheer agony of waking up. His head felt under pressure from the inside. His eardrums seemed near bursting. His eyes bulged in their sockets. His nose was clogged, likely with his own blood, and his mouth had the taste of a dust-bowl cow yard.
Then instinct took over and he stifled another moan that rose to his lips. He looked around slowly, lowering his eyelids to veil his eyes, it never hurt to make out a man was worse off than he actually was in situations like this.
Wherever he was, it was dark and freezing cold. He still had his new jacket on. He started to sit up, moaned loudly and sagged back holding his head in both hands. Nothing happened: no one struck him again; no one came bursting in with a gun; there was no sound in his prison except his own ragged breathing. Relieved, he thought again about that jacket. He had been naked in the tub, when he had been doused with icy water and then knocked out with the heavy wooden pail. So someone had dressed him: pretty roughly by the uncomfortable feel of his clothes. Likely they had only taken the trouble so he wouldn’t freeze, for he vaguely recalled the brief impression of travelling in the back of a buckboard to get here, wherever ‘here’ was.
Whoever his captors were they wanted him alive. And it had to have something to do with Senator Jonas Locke ...
Cato tensed. He heard footsteps outside, boots crushing gravel, the rattle of a bar being lifted from across a door, and rough voices. A door crashed open and lantern light washed into the room. Squinting, he could see he was in a log-walled room or cabin with a puncheon floor, a window hung with a square of ragged burlap. Only then, after he had taken in his surroundings, did he look at the man holding the lantern. He recognized him at once as the big hombre he had shot in the foot in Wildcat Falls. Then two men pushed past, dragging a third between them. Cato recognized the senator’s silver-streaked hair as he was flung bodily into the room and he saw that the hand of one man was heavily bandaged and recognized the second man who had tried to prod him back in town.
The one with the lantern limped into the cabin, dragging his wounded foot which was wrapped around with strips of burlap over bandages. He towered above Cato, looked down and saw the small Enforcer was conscious. His lips pulled back from his teeth as he leaned down, grabbed Cato’s jacket front and half-lifted the man off the floor. He began to shake the small man and Cato groaned as his head snapped back and forth on his shoulders.
Then he was suddenly released and the big man reeled across the room to thud against the wall, the lantern almost dropping from his hands. He glared at a fourth man who had entered, a wolf-lean man with hatchet face, big, tough-looking, unshaven. He was wearing leather gloves and he backhanded the wounded ranny across the mouth, leaving marks on his pasty flesh. The other men said nothing. Cato glanced towards the senator but the man was huddled up in shadow, silent, unmoving, and he couldn’t tell what his condition was.
“I’m Duane,” the hatchet-faced man said in a deep voice. “They call me Wolf Duane. You stuck your nose in my affairs and now you got to take what comes.”
“What’s it all about?” Cato grated.
“He’ll tell you,” Duane said, gesturing, but not looking at the prone senator.
“You know I represent the Governor of Texas?”
Duane’s thin lips twitched slightly. “I know all about you, Cato. Knew your rep as a gunsmith when you had a place in Laramie, Wyoming. ‘Colt’ Cato they used to call you. Seems you specialized in changin’ cap-and-ball Colts to cartridge-firin’ guns. Matter of fact, you did one for me, long time back, first cartridge pistol I ever had. Damn fine shooter. No, don’t try to recall it. My name wasn’t Duane then.”
“You’ve bitten off a mighty big hunk of trouble, mister, grabbin’ the senator and me.”
“Reckon not. This is my neck of the woods, my territory, Cato. I own ten thousand acres. I’m my own law hereabouts. Oh, there’s a county sheriff turns up in Wildcat Falls once in a spell, but he don’t give me any trouble. Knows better. No one gives me any trouble, Cato. And that includes the Governor of Texas.” He laughed harshly. “Governor? Hell, man, I’ve made trouble for the President himself!”
He turned abruptly with a curt gesture to the others to follow. As they went out, Cato saw that the man with the bandaged hand was toting Cato’s Manstopper about his waist. At the door, Duane paused and took the lantern from the hand of the man with the wounded foot. He set it down just inside the door, his eyes glittering as he glanced back at Cato.
“So you can see what you’re doin’,” he told him with a hard smile, and went out. The door slammed and Cato heard the heavy bar drop into place on the outside. Boots crunched away over gravel. He listened carefully. They were all walking normally. There was no limping, dragging step amongst them. He figured the man with the wounded foot had been left outside the door on guard.
Cato found out it was agony to move but, grunting, he crawled over to the lantern, dragged it closer to the senator. The man was breathing heavily, evenly, and was covered in a filthy blanket. There were dark spots on the gray home-spun and Cato squinted, holding the lantern closer. He sucked in his breath through his teeth.
Some of the spots were wet. And crimson. Tensed, the hand holding the lantern aloft shaking with the strain, He lifted the top of the blanket and pulled it back slowly. The senator’s body jerked and be gave a strangled groan of pain. His fingers clutched convulsively at the puncheon floor. Cato’s face twisted into a grimace as he threw the blanket aside.
The senator was naked to the waist and his back was a mass of raw flesh, crisscrossed weals that had torn his skin and left his upper body looking like a piece of quartered beef in a slaughterhouse.
Senator Jonas Locke had been flogged with a bull-whip. And the men who had wielded it must have been plumb loco with hate.
“Wolf Duane,” he murmured, sitting back on his hams as he lowered the lantern, watching the light ripple and glint from Senator Locke’s wounds.
~*~
“Yeah, he’s crazy, all right,” breathed Jonas Locke, leaning gingerly back into the corner that Cato had padded up with the blanket and some old potato sacks.
They had the lantern turned way down to conserve the oil, but kept putting out their hands to feel the warmth of the glass chimney. It was freezing in their cabin and, though Locke’s warmer clothing had been left in the cabin, his back was too raw to put it on. Duane had sent over some brine and cold water and a pot of hot coffee not long after he had left and Cato had doctored Locke as well as he could. Now, sharing the senator’s last battered cheroot, Cato drained his coffee mug and hunkered down near the white-faced politician.
Locke’s face was drawn, tinged with gray, deep lines of pain etched into the skin, the mouth curved down. He had been beaten and there were deep cuts over both eyes, one on his jaw, and his lips were split. Dried blood was caked around his nostrils.
“They drugged me in Cheyenne and hauled me all the way here,” he went on, voice dull with pain. “Beat the hell out of me at every chance, then, just after they brought you in, Duane stripped me to the waist, hauled me outside and tied me to a tree. Then he gave me fifty lashes with a blacksnake whip.” He shook his head slowly. “Plumb loco.”
“Sure looks mean as a snake, but there must be a hell of a lot of hate in the man over somethin’. Seems about the worst I ever did to him was sell him a Colt percussion pistol some years back, so he ain’t got much agin me. You’re a different story, senator.”
Locke nodded slowly. “You’re here simply because you came looking for me. Fellers you shot up in town, big hombre’s called Hog, other’s Slip. They found out from the hotel clerk you’d been askin’ after Wolf Duane. They were aimin’ to square with you anyway so figured they could do it better out here, seein’ as you were expectin’ someone to meet you in town. They figured it might be another lawman.”
There was a question in the senator’s voice and Cato nodded. “Yancey Bannerman. You know him. I sent him a wire before I left Cheyenne. But I’ve thought since he might not get it in time. He was down on the border and might not have gotten back to Austin yet.”
Locke sighed. “Well, let’s hope he does get it and comes here. But he won’t want to leave it too long or all he’ll find are our corpses. No, that’s not right. He won’t find any trace of us at all. Duane’ll kill us and dump our bodies somewhere they’ll never be located.”
Cato’s face was expressionless as he absorbed this information. He had been in many tight spots and always managed to get out; not always with a whole skin, but mostly so. This time ... well, he would have to know more before he could decide.
“What’s Duane got against you?”
“Like I told you, I used to be a U.S. marshal. I put him away for ten years in Yuma. After I led a raid on his camp and his two brothers got killed.”
Cato whistled softly. “Quite a score to settle with you, then.”
“Sure, but that’s not all. His name’s not Duane, but that doesn’t matter, we’ll call him that for convenience. He was always a killer; hired his gun to the highest bidder. He likes to kill. Not clean and fast. He won’t even bring down game meat with a clean shot. He’ll gut shoot it, or blow a leg off, then sit down and watch it die.”
Cato uttered an expression of disgust.
“That’s the kind of mad-dog we’re dealing with. He sold his gun to a bunch of rebel politicos about two years back and his job was to assassinate the President ...”
“Hell, I remember that! If the President hadn’t turned to take a gift from a little gal runnin’ alongside his carriage, the bullet would’ve got him. As it was, they say the hair won’t grow back over the bullet-burn just over his left ear.”
Locke nodded. “Duane was behind the gun and he got away, despite the biggest manhunt in U.S. history. He saw me in Madame Silver’s and thought I might recognize him, despite this new image he’s built for himself of tough cattleman from the backwoods of Colorado. There was the old grudge against me for sending him to prison, too. He couldn’t pass up the chance. And he was liquored-up, and that always makes him meaner.”
Cato scratched his head gingerly around the swellings. “Seems we got us some troubles.”
“I’m only sorry you’re in this, John. I know how you feel. But you got nothing to blame yourself for, John. I honestly figured there’d be no harm in us whoopin’ it up a little after all those formal hen-parties in Cheyenne.” He managed to give a fleeting smile. “It should’ve set us up, made us feel relaxed ... Now look at us!” He shook his head slowly. “You did damn well to trace me here, John. Duane hadn’t expected it and it threw him. Guess that’s why he dragged me out for the flogging.”
“Well, he’s got us and looks like he don’t aim to kill either of us quick. Wouldn’t’ve bothered to send in the brine or the coffee if he had. I reckon he’s got somethin’ special lined up for us. But we ain’t gonna stick around to see what it is.”
Locke looked at him swiftly, then frowned. He moved a hand around, indicating the heavy log walls. “I don’t see any way out, John. Even the ceiling has clapboards nailed to rafters with split shingles over them. Window’s got a heavy wooden shutter over the outside. Door opens out and is barred, anyway.”
“Where is this place? In relation to the rest of Duane’s spread?”
“The cabin? Back in some trees, away from the main ranch buildings. It’s something he keeps hidden away, I guess. But there’s little law up here, John. He more or less makes his own laws. He seems to be that powerful.”
Cato got to his feet picked up the lantern and walked slowly around their small prison. The floor was hard-packed earth, would take a heap of digging, and likely the log foundations went down a few feet, anyway. He held the lantern high and examined the ceiling. It, too, was solid, just as the senator had described it.
He set the lantern down, turned up the wick so that light washed over the heavy door, and then went across to examine it. Thick cedar planks were heavily nailed and screwed to cross bars. The latch looked like hand-wrought iron and, while it could probably be lifted out of its socket from the inside, there was still the heavy bar on the outside. There was an inch-wide gap between the heel of the door and the frame. A cold wind blew through and Cato stepped back to avoid it, but then, trying to ignore the freezing blast, put his face close to the crack again.
He heard footsteps outside on the gravel. The steps stopped.
“’Bout goddamn time you got here!” he heard Hog snarl. “My toes are froze solid!”
“Quit bellyachin’. Wolf’s had the cook brew you up some hot stew. It’s waitin’, so why don’t you get on back ’stead of standin’ around here, bitchin’ ’bout the cold.”
The second man was Slip and he laughed briefly as Hog spat a cuss at him. Cato heard the man’s dragging footsteps as he started away from the cabin, limping on his wounded foot.
Cato turned and walked back to where Jonas Locke sat, looking tired and drawn. The Enforcer sat down slowly and rubbed thoughtfully at the lumps on his scalp.
“Hey, Hog!” he heard Slip call. “Wolf’s gone into town. Wants you to relieve Charley on nighthawk at midnight!” He laughed derisively and Cato and Locke heard Hog’s distant cussing.
“At least we know it ain’t midnight yet,” Cato said. “Senator … you’ve been outside this cabin. You notice the door hinges at all?”
Locke shivered and pulled the blanket closer about him. “Hinges? Not really ...”
Cato looked disappointed. “I could make out three of ’em through the crack between the door heel and the frame. Just wondered what they’re made of ... Didn’t hear any squeakin’ when they brought you in ...”
Locke snapped his head up. “That’s right! I noticed that myself every time they came and went. Figure they must have the hinges well-oiled.”
“Or they could be leather. It’s common out on these backwoods’ places to use up your old saddle leather as hinges on doors of all kinds. Could explain why the door drags across the stoop, too.”
“I guess so. But it doesn’t help us, does it?”
“Say—how does that bar work? Is it a drop-bar that they lift right off each time and put back in iron brackets, either side of the door?”
Locke thought for a moment then shook his head. “No. It slides into a deep notch cut into the doorpost. But that post is a foot thick, John.”
“Doesn’t matter. Main thing is the bar doesn’t go all the way across the door, right?”
“That’s right. But I still don’t see ...”
“If those hinges are leather, Senator,” Cato said slowly, “we could get out of here.”
Locke was frowning. “I think I get your general drift. If the hinges are leather and there’s a wide gap between the door and the frame, I guess your idea is that the hinge leather could be cut through and then a push from inside would topple the door outwards. Is that what you’ve got in mind?”
“Exactly what I’m thinkin’, Senator.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, John. But there’s nothing sharp here you could use. They faring me food but I have to eat it with my fingers. Even the glass from that lantern chimney would be too fragile to hack through weathered saddle leather. That’s if you could reach it.”
Cato nodded. “Yeah, I know. What we want is a knife with a razor sharp blade, about three or four inches long ... like this.”
He fumbled at the heavy brass buckle on his belt and the surprised senator saw lantern light blaze off blued steel as the belt buckle came away from the leather when Cato pressed a stud. It slid a short, four-inch double-edged blade out of a stitched sheath in between the belt leather. Cato smiled faintly.
“Standard equipment for the Enforcers,” he said. “It’s gotten Yancey and me out of a few tight corners. With a little luck, it might work again.”
“But Slip will be on guard outside the door. No matter how quiet you are, he must surely hear that blade sawing through the leather hinges.”
“I reckon with that wind howlin’ outside, he won’t stand freezing his ass off outside the door. He’ll hunt up a nice cozy little shelter amongst the trees and hunker down there till he’s relieved. Sound of the wind’ll cover the knife work.” For the first time since the senator had regained consciousness, the pain in his eyes was replaced by a flicker of real hope.