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Bent Feather sat his horse on a rise of ground where he could watch Road Runner, Coyote Eyes, and Yellow Hand, the three youngest Comanche warriors, sneak up on a calf that had strayed from its cow. Had he been the type to laugh he would have chuckled. But he was not. Seeing the silliness of their tracking the easy-to-kill calf only made him think of the days when a sea of buffalos had covered the rolling hills. The Indians had burned the grass each year to ensure that the tall grass that drew the buffalo could sway in the wind. And the buffalo had come.
He and other young braves, like Wind in the Long Grass, long before he became a medicine chief, used to ride fast horses into the herd to kill buffalo far larger that this calf would ever grow. They had faced real danger in a herd of stampeding buffalo, and great skill was needed to let loose an arrow from a short bow on a galloping horse. The arrow slamming into the shoulder with a thump, the buffalo running slower until, at last, it stumbled and fell.
But the buffalo were gone. The ever encroaching palefaces had seen to that.
Now his small band was low on both ammo and meat. He’d told the young braves to use arrows, not guns to kill the calf. He watched them with the patience of a father, though none of the young braves were his sons. His own sons had been killed in early skirmishes with the whites and Mexicans, one reason for the fire burning bright in his belly.
Coyote Eyes had the first bow shot at the calf, but missed. Road Runner moved in close and sent an arrow into the calf that went in at the shoulder and came out the other side. The calf dropped. The boys hopped off their horses, taking the haunches, the ribs, and the tongue.
Bent Feather heard the sound of hooves, those of shod horses. His head spun left.
“Hi-yi!” he called out loudly to the boys. They scrambled to gather what beef they could and climb onto their horses. Bent Feather waved them to head right. A low stand of trees there would give them quick shelter, then a dry creek bed run up into the hills where they could take cover or get to the other side and ride hard.
He reached for his Winchester, one he’d taken from the cold hands of a fallen cavalry rider some years ago. Only four or five shots remained. He wished he could have traded for more ammo with the comanchero, but that chance was gone.
The cowboy hats of the six riders fluttered as they barreled down the hill. Bent Feather wasn’t sure the boys would have time to get clear and out of the way. He levered a shell into the chamber and looked around. He told himself today was a good day to die. He readied himself to dig his heels into his horse and charge down there, delay the men at best, but let the members of his band get away.
The Comanche ponies were galloping hard off to the right, but the men below turned and started to round up the loose cattle still in the rolling hills. They ignored the downed and butchered calf.
Bent Feather relaxed, took in a deep breath. Still, he felt puzzled.
Then two riders came in from the far right, shooting as they rode. All of them, these two and the six below, looked like cowhands to Bent Feather. The shooting at each other was new.
The six riders turned their horses and started toward the two shooting riders. Then a rifle sounded from higher ground to Bent Feather’s left. The shot ricocheted off a hard rock. The next rifle shot sent up a furrow of dirt in front of the lead horseman of the six. They reined to a stop and looked toward the hills. Another rifle shot from yet another direction sent up dirt behind them. Aware that they were exposed to fire from both sides, all six horsemen turned their horses and lit out back the way they’d come.
The men below hadn’t spotted Bent Feather yet, so he slipped away. Just before he went into the trees where the boys had gotten away with the butchered beef, he turned back for a last look. The six men who had seemed after some cattle were gone. A lone rider was riding down toward the other two who sat their horses and waited. They weren’t shooting at each other.
Bent Eagle shrugged to himself. At least his band had food for the moment. Now if he could just get his hands on some ammo. He rode into the shadows of the trees and didn’t look back.
Lucas Brent turned to Gabe Bentley. “You think that’s the last of them for a spell.”
“No. Not by a dern sight.” Like Lucas, he was reloading his revolver from his belt.
The two of them watched the dust settle in the direction the six men had ridden. Above them, on the timber line of a hill, a horse emerged. The rider came slowly down the slope toward them.
When the rider got all the way to them, he reined up.
Lucas nodded and put away his six-shooter. “I appreciate the help, but you don’t have to feel like you’re some dang guardian angel. We can get along fine.”
“I guess that’s something you’ll find out one way or the other in time.” The man spoke with a voice that sounded rusty and crackling, as if little used. He held his reins lightly, had eyes that appeared to be in a permanent squint, snakelike eyes that darted and missed nothing.
Gabe stayed fixed on the man. He held his pistol loosely in his hand.
“I doubt even with your gun already out you could take him, Gabe.” Lucas grinned. “You two have met before, briefly. You might not recall. You’ve heard of Vin Thomas, ain’t ya?”
“He’s that fast?”
“Yeah. He’s ever bit that fast.”
“I’ve seen you draw too, mind you, and you’re a lightning bolt,” Gabe said. “Which of you is faster?”
“Don’t matter none. We don’t aim to ever find out.”
Gabe’s head swung from Lucas to Vin and back again. “You don’t look like brothers, don’t even share the name.”
“Just the same, we don’t draw down on each other, no matter which side of things we wind up on.”
“Yep.” Vin agreed. “Everybody makes choices and decisions, good ones or bad ones. You get the chance then to live by them. Lucas has made a few choices, as I have.”
“Can you fix them?” Gabe stared at Lucas. “The bad ones.”
“Sometimes.” Vin nodded. “Not always. But you, Gabe, have got yourself deep enough you’re gonna need a heap of fixin’.”
Gabe shrugged. “You didn’t see the sheriff up yonder where you were did you?”
“Who do you think that was shooting the other rifle down at those jaspers who just lit out?”
“He didn’t loop back and try to take me in. Now this! Does that mean he’s taking my side now?” Gabe asked.
“I wouldn’t bank on that. He’s a good enough shot he wouldn’t have missed if he’d been aiming hard with a rifle. He was just helping scoot Grintly’s men along.”
“Why would he mean to miss?”
Vin’s restless eyes never quit sweeping the tops of hills around them. Lucas always said Vin was the least likely person ever to get ambushed. Vin’s eyes swung back to Lucas. “Thing is about a man like Cawley, he was a mid-level Texas Ranger, and before that he was cavalry. He’s not apt to do a great deal of thinking on his own. He’d want orders. My bet is he’ll reach out to my friend Chance, Captain Chauncy Marberry, who heads the Texas Rangers in these parts. Thing is, Chance will probably explain, tactfully of course, that he knows for a plugged certainty that the governor took some recent campaign money, quite a right chunk of it, from a Brit named Sir Rodney Jollep. And Marberry gets his marching orders from the governor, so how do you think this’ll play out.”
“Not well for anyone in the middle, including Cawley,” Lucas said. “Us too, of course.”
“Cawley did say he had a lot to mull over on the long ride back to Bentley.” Vin’s horse took a restless step and he reached down to run a calming hand along its neck.
“A town that bears my name.” Gabe frowned. “Those folks are as tight with money as my father was.”
“The town bears your father’s name. His money may still be in the bank, and the deed to this spread is in his name, but you’re a long sight from prying any of that loose from them until your name gets cleared. I doubt you’ve done much lately to help with that.”
Gabe shrugged. Lucas looked away.
“How long’s this been going on?” Vin nodded toward where the six men had ridden off.
“They’ve just started to come after the cattle, try to rustle them to that new KXT spread before they get a blamed fence put up. A fence, mind you! Never thought I’d see this day coming. It’s been a free range the whole time I grew up on it.” Gabe glanced toward the partially butchered calf they could see from where they sat. “The Injuns steal a head or two, and I mostly look away ‘cause it’s less trouble than stirring them up when there’s more of them than me. But that blamed fool Grintly is after my whole herd.”
“The thing is,” Vin’s voice crackled, “Grintly has time on his side. And money. And the governor.”
“I have money. I just can’t get to it until I clear up a few things.” Gabe slid his gun into its holster. “I’ve got some hands on the way, coming in soon. Ones who’ve agreed to get by on their beans until I can pay them.”
“You must know some dern fools, then.” Vin stared off to where Grintly’s rustling crew was long gone. “Didn’t you go through one of these cattlemen wars before? Lost your brother and your father, didn’t you?”
“I’m not the one trying to gobble up the area. I’m just one them in the way of it. Now, I might just as well go carve some beef off that calf the Injuns killed before those black chickens that’re showing up make a mess of it. We been eating beans for way too long of a spell.” Gabe gave his horse a nudge and headed for the carcass.
The way Gabe sat and rode his horse confirmed he had grown up rich and feeling entitled. Lucas shook his head. Gabe had just what change in his pockets remained from robbing stages. Heck of thing that. If only his old man would have opened his purse strings to the boys more. But who’s to say the boys wouldn’t have just squandered that. They weren’t the brightest lads to climb into a saddle, and now Gabe was all that was left of what was once an over-proud family.
Before Lucas could cluck his horse into following, Vin held up a hand. “I’d be careful if I were you. This Grintly plays with a different deck than folks like us, a stacked one. Like as not he’s made himself more pals over there in Austin than just the governor. He might be a tough hombre to deal with.”
“I ‘spect he might understand a bullet, though,” Lucas said.
Vin nodded. “You might be right. But if you’re wrong, you’re dead wrong.”
“Heck, according to most accounts I been dead a dozen years ago or so by now.”
“Rider coming!”
Sarah heard Justin’s yell and grabbed the Winchester. She hurried out the front door.
“Looks like Sheriff Cawley,” Scamp called from where he’d climbed up to stand on the buggy Francis had rented from the livery. He held a hand above his eyes to shelter them from the sun.
“You should be wearing a hat,” Sara called to him. She saw Button running this way from the produce garden. “And tell Button to put on a bonnet. You’ll both be red as a dern Injun ‘fore the day’s out.”
Francis had been ambling along with a borrowed curry comb and empty bucket that had held some oats for his livery horse. He showed urgency by breaking into a faster walk. The bandage of white around his upper arm had seeped through with a dried spot of blood that Sara felt he prized as much as if he’d been in a real battle, not just been grazed by a measly lone arrow.
Sheriff Cawley rode up and reined his horse to stop short of Sara.
“Would you like to come in? I could warm up this morning’s coffee.” She looked up at him. He didn’t look in a hurry to dismount.
“I was just passing by. Thought I’d swing past, see how y’all were doing.”
“We had a visit from that Mister Grintly himself, if that’s what you mean.”
“What’d he want?”
“To buy this place. Hardly seems worth his while, with all the land he’s already got.”
“What’d you say?”
“That it’s not for sale.”
“How’d he take that?”
“Not with the grace you might expect from a man all the way from England. Francis here took the side arm off one of his men.”
Francis shrugged, as if that was no large thing. “We have it, if you need to take it along for any reason. We’re not thieves. He just seemed not to care about it at the moment.”
“Grintly left after that. But I ‘spect we haven’t heard the last of him,” Sara said. Cawley tilted his head and looked off at nothing. The brim of his hat left his eyes in dark shadow, but she thought he seemed to be thinking hard. “Have you changed your mind about things around here?”
“I’m still in the middle of deciding,” Cawley said. “But all the same, I suggest you keep the pistol, and you might just want to make sure you have plenty of bullets for it.”
Sheriff Cawley still had a fair piece to go if he was to get back to the town of Bentley before dark, but he didn’t nudge Lucifer into a gallop. Instead he maintained a steady canter and frowned at the land around him as he passed from the Bentley spread and rode along what used to be old man Kenedy’s ranch.
He felt in a foul mood. By rights, he ought to be taking Gabe Bentley along in irons, headed back to town for justice, if such a thing could be found there. Bentley was nobody to admire and defend, but odds were he’d just be strung up by the people in Grintly’s pocket and the serious land grabbing would begin. Still, Cawley could round up a posse and head back there. He gazed over the vast expanse of grass and hills around him and spoke out loud to Lucifer, “I sure don’t care much for the notion that all this land could belong to one man, and that a Brit who’s never seen or set foot in the state or the country. It just don’t feel right.”
The whole mess put him in no hurry to get back to town.
A few miles further he saw half a dozen cowhands along the KXT Ranch digging holes in the hard ground for cedar fence posts. As he drew closer, he could make out great heaps of the posts that stood nearby, along with coils of barbed wire. A couple more loads of the same rested in a wagon on the other side of the working men, next to their horses and a couple of mules in a makeshift rope corral for their remuda.
Leastwise these men had work, and some chuck at the wagon come evening, though they didn’t look all that happy about it. Like as not, when they’d spent their little bit in the saloon later, they’d be no richer than when they’d started. Thus the cycle went on, and only a few reaped any benefit worth a hoot.
As he drew closer he realized he’d been wrong about these men. They weren’t the usual hardscrabble lot who leap to do such chores. These all looked to be seasoned gunslingers and their mood at being made to do menial work hadn’t put any of them in a cheerful state of mind. These were men with smooth well-cared-for hands meant to draw and fire guns, not dig post holes and string barbed wire. The men had laid wooden posts along in a line for holes to be dug. The line went right across the road.
He reined in Lucifer. “Hey,” he yelled. “You can’t run a fence line right across the road!”
The men stopped their work and glared at him, some with a hint of eagerness at getting a break from work, perhaps to do a little practice with their six-shooters.
A big fellow wearing red suspenders over a formerly white undershirt tugged off his gloves, rubbed one hand across a large belly, and ambled closer to where Cawley sat his horse.
“We run fence where we’re told to run fence.” He took off a nearly formless felt hat, soaked through with sweat where a hat band might have once been. He had the reddish face of a bulldog, one that hadn’t had a lunch and doubted very much if he was going to get one. The man rubbed at the sweat on his forehead. “The property goes thataway and a fence’ll go thataway as well. Orders is orders.”
“Did Grintly make those orders?”
The man’s hand slid down toward his gun holster. The men behind him all quit working on the fence and lowered their tools, stood again with relaxed hands hanging at their sides. All of them hadn’t taken off their gun belts to work. One of them began to ease toward a Winchester that leaned against one of the already planted posts.
Cawley watched their eyes and hands at the same time. Years in the saddle as a Texas Ranger had made him as ready for a scrap as anyone, but these were seasoned gunfighters, not day workers, and being pressed into this sort of labor had made them surly and itching to do anything other than put up a fence. “You men really going to draw down on a sheriff?” He moved his vest so they could see the star pinned to his shirt.
The man moving toward the Winchester took another step. Cawley drew, fired, and hit the butt of the rifle, sending it scooting away from the post. The man froze in his steps. A couple of the hands that had been easing toward their pistols stopped where they were.
Cawley kept his gun drawn, the hammer back. He looked down at the foreman.
The man stared at the star on Cawley’s chest. “Well, why in blazes didn’t you say so?” His eyes moved and stayed fixed on the hole at the end of the gun’s barrel that pointed right at him, and his hand moved up and away from the gun at his side. He rubbed his belly. “I’m Hank Struthers. We all work for Grintly. This is his land now. Well, land he’s managing. Aren’t you supposed to be off rounding up Gabe Bentley for him?”
“I don’t work for Grintly. I work for all the citizens hereabout. “I want to know why you’re building a fence right across a road people use.”
“All I can tell you is I got orders.” Hank turned to the men behind him, shouted to cover his own dark mood. “You lot. Get back to work.”
The men went back to what they were doing, casting glances at Cawley from time to time, but keeping their hands busy and away from their guns. They may have heard that Cawley was a former Texas Ranger lieutenant and that naturally made him half bobcat and the other half rattlesnake, not to be trifled with, even though he was alone.
Cawley frowned, kept his gun out and handy. “You can’t just build a fence line across an existing road. How will people get through to get to and from town?”
“How people get around ain’t Mr. Grintly’s problem. Long as they don’t do it ‘cross his land.”
“People live around here who need the road.”
“Like I said, they’ll just have to go around.”
“The road is public land.”
“Not where it goes through this spread, the boss says.”
“We’ll see about that. I expect I need to have a talk with Mr. Grintly.”
“You just do that. I only do what he tells me to do.”
Hank, who appeared to be the men’s foreman, spun and headed back to where he’d been helping dig post holes. The other men kept busy at their work, didn’t even mutter or try anything when Cawley holstered his gun.
Crawly shook his head. He stayed on the road and crossed the marked-out future fence line. Blamed if that didn’t skin a mule. Just the other day he was stepping lively on behalf of the area’s newest leading citizens, Grintly. Now he was going to have to think hard about having anything to do with the man. A whole lot of trouble seemed to be rumbling this way like some dust-filled cyclone. It came from Grintly thinking that the only right way to do things was his own way. Soon there wouldn’t be anything left but one big sprawling ranch.
Only a while back the cowhands of the Kenedy spread were branding calves from the open range with that ranch’s Rocking K brand, a mark that could also readily be branded over with the Circle B of the Bentley spread, and from there the heated discussion was soon replaced with bullets. Now neither old man Kenedy nor old man Bentley were around to care a whoop anymore. All that was left of the Bentleys was Gabe out there who’d turned out a highwayman to get by.
Yeah, Cawley should have arrested Gabe. He hadn’t, for reasons aside from Lucas and Gabe having the drop on him. Could have looped back and tried to get the drop on them, but he hadn’t. He’d wondered why he’d been okay with it at the time, after chasing all the way to Houston after a rumored sighting of Gabe earlier. Maybe his change of mind was because that’s what Grintly wanted. He wanted Gabe brought in, and likely strung up, so he and his outfit could gobble up the Bentley spread. Cawley was going to have to stew some more on that, but he was starting to think he wanted to be less of a part of anything that served the wants of a man like Grintly.
He glanced back. The men were busy digging their holes and putting up fence. Cawley wouldn’t have drawn down on the likes of Lucas Brent the way he had back there. But these men stood in the shadow of Brent, or they wouldn’t be callousing up their hands doing that sort of fencing work. He’d seen that right off, the way he’d had to make many quick decisions before. Not that these men weren’t dangerous if they stood behind you or had already drawn. Cawley had seen through the current situation, but he knew there was likely to be a next time. He looked to the sun, reckoned the time, and gave Lucifer a nudge with his spurs and soon had the stallion up to a gallop.