Born in Michigan, Dan Cushman has lived most of his long life in Montana and intimately knows the state and its history, as he demonstrates in “Killers’ Country!”, a stirring action tale of a range war in the eastern Montana cattle country. He began contributing to the Western and pulp magazines in the late forties, and in 1951 turned to the writing of Western novels such as The Ripper from Rawhide and paperback adventure novels such as Savage Interlude and Timberjack. But it was his novel Stay Away, Joe, published in 1953, a hilarious yet moving story about a group of Native Americans in his adopted state that brought him his greatest success as a bestseller and book club selection and later, as an adapted musical, Whoop-Up. Several of Cushman’s other novels have Montana settings, among them The Old Copper Collar; The Silver Mountain, winner of the 1957 Spur Award for Best Novel; and Rusty Irons.
1. First Blood for the Sagers
It was before dawn when the eight men rode from Colton’s place, and still only midmorning when they topped the ridge beyond Squawblanket Springs and caught their first sight of the town of Maverly.
There Hooks Colton brought his horse around with a hard twist of the brutal, half-breed bit he always used, and sat with his heavy legs ramrodding the stirrups. He rolled a cigarette while his narrow, pale gray eyes roved the limitless sage flats broken by the bright-shining roofs of Maverly and the long line of the Northern Pacific railroad.
His brother, Lester Colton, a dirty, red-whiskered man, rode up beside him and said, “Train smoke.”
The smoke was far away, a smudge blending with gray clay hills.
Hooks said, “That’s the local freight. Leaves Maverly about seven. Passenger train won’t be ’long till two-fifteen.”
“Think he’ll really have the guts to come back?”
“He’s got guts enough. All them Sagers got guts.”
Hooks was about thirty, so raw-boned and powerful it set him apart from his five brothers, big and hard-muscled though they were. This morning they were especially rough-looking and taciturn, each with a Winchester in his saddle scabbard and a Colt at his hip. Besides Hooks and his five brothers, there was his stepbrother Babe, and a little sharp-faced puncher by the name of Wiley Gray.
Hooks said, “Yes, I expect he’ll be on it. Unless he knows us Coltons are meeting him.” His lips twisted down when he said that, and he turned to let his eyes rest on Babe. Babe was about seventeen, big as a Colton, but with a broader, more even-featured face. “How about it, Babe? You think Tom Sager will know we’re riding to meet him?”
Babe had uncontrollable fear of Hooks Colton, and he raised his voice a trifle too much in an effort to hide it, “Why ask me?”
“You know why. Because you been hanging around Lily Sager.” There was a raw, challenging quality in Hooks’s voice. He was both handsome and predatory, and the voice fit him. Women had always fancied Hooks, and it had cut his pride when first Miss Grahame, the schoolteacher, and then fifteen-year-old Lily Sager had shown a preference for Babe. Hooks knew that Babe was scared of him, and he said, “Listen, kid, you lie to me and I’ll slap it back down your throat. Paw ain’t here for you to hide behind today. We all know you been sneaking over there in the coulee to see Lily Sager.”
Babe wanted to stand up to him. He wasn’t a coward. He could climb on a bronc that Hooks would be scared to get in the same corral with, yet when he faced Hooks he turned gutless. It had been like that ever since he’d watched Hooks kill that Flying W rep six years ago. The rep had gone for his gun first, but Hooks just reared back, with that big arm coming up, jerking the gun, firing. A single, inescapable second of time. Sometimes in the middle of the night Babe would still wake up and remember that rep, bullet-hit and falling with that awful, shocked expression in his eyes.
Hooks gave him a contemptuous look and turned his shoulder, and Lester said, “You been seeing her, Babe?”
“Maybe I have and maybe I haven’t.” His heart knocked at his ribs and sweat felt clammy along his hairline. It made his answer come back more violently than he’d intended.
Lester rubbed his tobacco-spattered whiskers and said, “Don’t let that lip run away with you. I don’t give a damn about the girl. I don’t give a damn if you do beat Hooks’s speed. But if you tipped her off that we’re going down to meet her brother …”
“I never told her anything. If you don’t trust me, then why’d you tell me anything? Why—”
“We trust you. You’re here, and you’re alive. That’s proof we trust you.”
Hooks had turned again, and his predatory eyes were this time fixed on Lester. “What d’you mean, beat my speed? If I really wanted a woman do you think I’d let that apple-cheeked—”
“All right, let it lie. So you never got turned down by the teacher, and you never called on Lily Sager. We got enough fighting cut out for us today. Let’s drift in there to Maverly and have a look around. You can’t tell about that damned Dad Sager. He get an idea we’re greeting his boy home from the pen he’ll likely have half the rustlers from the breaks backing him.”
The Coltons had been trying to get hold of the Old Fort fields ever since the big blizzard of ’87. They’d pushed the Sagers to the edge of the badlands by overgrazing the range until it looked like it had been sheeped off. They’d branded Sager calves and the Sagers had branded theirs. Finally, young Tom Sager had gone too far and had taken to slapping his iron on calves from the Flying R and the 88 and had ended up in Deer Lodge with a four-year sentence, which now had been commuted to two. It hadn’t helped the Coltons that he was in jail. Old Rufe wanted to buy, and the meadows were in Tom’s name, and when he wrote, Tom hadn’t answered his letters. But today he was coming home, and old Rufe, his back bent like a Blackfoot bow from kidney stones, had sent his boys in to greet him.
As they were heading down toward Six-Mile Creek, young Delbert Colton dropped back and rode beside Babe. Delbert had a nasal obstruction that made his mouth hang open and had won him the name Fishface. He was Babe’s age, give or take a couple of months, and they’d grown up together since the day old Rufe married Babe’s widowed mother and took her away from her job as waitress in the depot beanery at Miles City. Fishface had always been a sneak, the only one in the Colton family.
Now Fishface grinned and said, “You better leave Hooks’s girl alone. He might let you chase around with that Grahame woman, but if you try fooling around—”
“Keep quiet about Miss Grahame.”
“Look here, now—”
“I said to keep quiet about Miss Grahame.”
Andy Colton, who was next younger than Hooks, overheard them and said, “You better look out for him today, Fish. He sounds like he’s drunk cougar milk.”
The sun, rising higher, became hot and reflected off the whitish gumbo earth into their faces. Sage grew high. It slapped their stirrups and gave off a suffocating, dusty odor. It was close to noon when they rode through the outskirt shacks of Maverly.
The town was warped and unpainted. It boasted one tree—a box elder in the yard of the railroad sectionhouse. It had been long since the last rain, and Main Street was a strip of dust between platform sidewalks and false-fronted buildings.
Babe looked over at Andy, who was riding beside him and said, “What if Tom Sager won’t sell?”
“He will.”
“But what if he don’t?”
“Why, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll give him what he really had coming when he started running our brands three years ago.”
“He served his time.”
“He served two years in a stone house letting tax money feed him. What a rustler needs is ten minutes on the end of a stiff rope. What’s wrong, Babe? You sound like you might be backin’ Sager’s hand.”
“It’s just I don’t think it’ll do us any good to gun him down.”
“Maybe. And it won’t do him any good either.”
“You can’t just ride up and shoot him.”
Lester turned and said, “We’ll let him eat first.” Lester was the oldest of the bunch, and he had a slouched, easy-seeming manner that made his underlying cruelty a little worse when he chose to show it. “Why can’t we just ride up and shoot him? Who’s here to stop us? Walt Baker? I’ll lay dollars against buffalo chips he lights out for the deep coulees half an hour after we hit town. Walt didn’t get elected sheriff for any reason except he needed the pay. He’s hell on an Injun kid that steals a five-dollar saddle, but he won’t stand between the Coltons and anybody.”
A wagon freight outfit was loading up at the railway warehouse, and heavy-booted mule drivers mingled with the cowboys in town. A buckboard with a team of bay broncs was tied to the hitch rack in front of the J-B Mercantile. They wore Sager’s Lazy S horse brand.
Sager was a widower with only the two children, but he was an early settler with friends in the country, and he stood well with the rustlers and wolfers down in the breaks. The prospect that he might have come with a few guns backing him made the Coltons a trifle wary.
THE COLTONS PASSED the Sager buckboard silent and set-jawed, pretending not to notice. Hooks said something and swung down at the hitch rack in front of the Lone Cabin saloon.
The others followed him, limped around on stiffened legs to get the feel of the ground after so many hours in the saddle. Babe stood at the rack with his gaze traveling automatically to the mercantile’s front door. He could see the outline of a girl just beyond the screen, and he knew it was Lily Sager.
Fishface noticed him and nudged
Hooks, saying, “Guess who he seen!” Hooks glanced at the door, and back at Babe. His face was big-boned and hollow in the cheeks. Grayish under his tan. He’d always wanted Lily. He’d wanted her worse than anything else in his existence.
But Hooks kept control of himself. He turned and stepped to the sidewalk. He hitched his sagging gun belt. His Levi’s were wrinkled, and they stuck to the insides of his stud-horse legs. He shot another glance at the girl and clumped across to the Lone Cabin’s swinging doors.
Lily Sager had been watching him, and she must have thought he was out of sight, for now she stepped outside. She was a pretty kid, deeply tanned, slim and supple as a boy from riding. She usually wore boots and pants and kept her hair in a knot under her sombrero, but today she had on a dress, slippers, and a mail-order white bonnet. Her hair was combed in curls that fell to her shoulders.
She said, “Babe!”
Babe finished tying his bronc and cut across to the mercantile’s high platform walk. He knew all the Coltons were watching him—that everybody along the street was watching him—but he managed to look casual enough and walk with a good jingle of his star-roweled spurs.
Lily was biting down on her underlip, and he could see the rapid beat of an artery in her throat. She was scared. He never remembered seeing her scared before.
She said, “Babe, what are you going to do?” Then she changed it, saying, “What are they going to do?”
“Meet the train.”
“They came to get Tommy. They came to kill him.”
“They’re here to get those Old Fort fields. Won’t he sell?”
“You know how Tommy is. He hates the Coltons. He even hates you. He wouldn’t sell for all the money in Powder River County.”
“I don’t know what to say, Lily. You know I can’t do anything about those fellows. Not when they’re on the prod. Why don’t you send a telegram to him in Iron City? Tell him to get off—”
“He wouldn’t leave the train because of the Coltons. You know he wouldn’t.”
He had his Stetson off, turning it around in his hands. “I don’t know what to say, Lily.”
“Then they plan on gunning him down?”
“I don’t know. It depends on … things. Depends on what Tom does. You and your dad come in alone?”
She hesitated, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that there was something she didn’t want to tell him because he was a Colton. Then she said, “Blackfoot Charley came on horseback. I don’t know where he is.”
Hooks had gone inside the saloon, but the rest of the Coltons were in a tight, hard-eyed knot at the door, watching him.
“I got to go,” he said. “You see how it is.”
“Yes, I see.”
He left with the warm impression of her hand in his. Her last words stuck with him. She saw. He wondered if she’d seen how yellow-gutted he was when it came to Hooks Colton.
THE INTERIOR OF the Lone Cabin was dim and damp after the bright heat of outside. It smelled of stale beer. Hooks was at the bar, his heel notched on the rail, and one elbow propped. He kept his eyes on Babe all the way across the room. His thumb was hooked in his pants band, just above his .45. For a sick moment Babe thought maybe he’d force things to a showdown right then. It was unreasonable, but Babe knew he was more scared of Hooks than he was of dying. He had a .45 of his own, practically a twin of the one Hooks carried, and he knew how to draw it and shoot it, but still he was physically incapable of facing the man.
Lester—lean, unkempt, and four years the eldest of the Colton boys, came up beside Hooks and jolted him with his shoulder, saying, “Have a drink.”
Hooks pushed away and kept his eyes on Babe. “What were you telling her?”
Babe’s throat was tight, and his voice had a strange sound to his ears as he answered, “I told her I was in town.”
Wiley Gray and a couple of the Colton boys laughed.
Hooks said, “You think you’re a pretty smart button since you learned all that stuff from the books the schoolteacher lent you. You think you’re one step above us Coltons. You think because old Rufe was damned fool enough to sign over a fourth of his property to that biscuit-shootin’ mother of yours you can fall into—”
“Keep still about Ma!” She’d been dead for three years, but the Coltons never got over hating her. He was still scared of Hooks, and he thought Hooks was going to kill him, but he raised his voice and said, “You mention my mother again—”
Lester Colton said, “Shut up!” and rammed him so hard he staggered and had to grab the edge of the bar to keep from going down. Hooks moved a step clear of the bar with his right hand hanging down, its back forward, just like that day he shot the flying W rep.
Babe pulled himself up. He came with a lunge, and Lester hit him. His fist traveled no more than eighteen inches but it struck like a sledge. Babe was down with the slivery floor beneath his hands.
Lester said, “Live a while, kid. Live a while. Wait till we settle with Sager, then you go ahead and get shot if you want to.”
BABE STOOD UP. All the Coltons except Hooks were grinning at him. There was a bottle and empty glass on the bar. He poured one and downed it. He remained dizzy for a while, but the liquor helped bring him around He saw Hooks and Lester walking out the door.
“Maybe you should’ve stayed home,” Fishface said.
“You go to hell!”
“You see?” Andy said. “A bust on the jaw don’t stop that one. He’s been drinkin’ cougar’s milk.”
Jeef Colton looked at his watch. “Train due at two-fifteen?” he asked the bartender.
“Two o’clock sharp. They changed it.”
“We got an hour and a half. Let’s put the nose bag on.”
Babe went with Clint, Jeef, and Wiley Gray to a Chinese café. They never had fresh pork and eggs except when they came to town, so that’s what they ordered. When they went outside forty-five minutes later, a saloon tramp named Dod Price got hold of Jeef’s shirt and said, “Guess who pulled out? The sheriff. Walt Baker.”
“Left town?”
“Sure. Said he had a hurry-up call in Johnnytown. Somebody shot. I’ll lay dollars he ain’t headed toward a shootin’, but away from one.”
Jeef laughed and gave him four bits for a drink. Jeef was twenty and proud of being one of the tough Coltons.
Andy saw them a few minutes later and came from a saloon. “Walt Baker just lit out,” he said.
“I know,” Clint said. “You better lay off tanglefoot till we’re through with Sager, or Hooks will get mean again.”
“To hell with Hooks.” Andy looked at Babe. “Ain’t that what you say? To hell with him.” His lips twisted down in a nasty smile. “What do you want to take all that for? Show him you’re not scared of him. You ain’t, are you?”
“No, I’m not scared of him!”
“I’ll tell him you said so.” They were all grinning now. “Won’t we, boys? We’ll tell him he said so.”
The buckboard was no longer in front of the mercantile. Jeef asked if the Sagers had pulled out, and Andy said no, they’d driven to the Climax stable.
Babe looked at his dollar watch when it was 1:22; and again when it was 1:35.
They went back to the Lone Cabin. A freight wagon with a six-mule team was tied to the hitch rack, and some drivers were inside, drinking and talking loud. They quieted when the Coltons came in. Babe had the feeling that the whole town was keyed like a set trap, waiting for the train to arrive.
He looked at his watch again, but less than three minutes had passed. Lester Colton walked in.
“Where’s Hooks?” Andy asked.
“Up at the depot,” Lester said, and poured himself a drink. “Saw Dad Sager. Talked to him.”
“What’d he say?”
“Nothing. Just stood there, looking mean and stubborn. I told him we weren’t wanting to get rough. Told him we wanted to buy. Would pay five thousand. He said he didn’t own the Old Fort fields. Said Tommy did. I said, ‘Will Tommy sell?’ He said, ‘Wait and talk to him,’ and I said, ‘We damned well intend to.’ ”
“Who’ll talk to him—Hooks?”
“Me.” Lester finished his drink, hitched his Colt and said, “All right, let’s drift. It’s about time.”
TRAIN SMOKE MADE a dark smudge in the west. They turned a corner at the brick-fronted bank and caught sight of the depot. Lily was there, her dress looking very bright in the afternoon sun. Dad Sager was with her. He’d married when he was past forty, and now he looked more like he should be her grandfather. Dad wasn’t very big, and he had a brace of .45s strapped on. It looked funny to see him weighted down like that. Babe knew he intended to give one of the guns to Tom as soon as he got off the train. The buckboard wasn’t there. Dad didn’t intend to leave immediately. He’d been a big rancher when the Coltons were still living in a dugout shanty, and it wouldn’t be his style to let them run him out of town.
A moment later he saw Hooks. He was at the far end of the platform, slouched with an elbow on the rail.
Lester spat tobacco juice and said, “There won’t be trouble, but spread out, just in case. Andy, you keep the boys down here. I’ll get over by the freight shed door. That’s where the passengers will get off.”
The train appeared, distorted by a heat wave until it looked a hundred feet high. At a quarter-mile it shrank to perspective, and rolled in, came to a rumbling stop. Nervous from apprehension though he was, Babe still thought of when he was little, and his mother hashed in the depot beanery at Miles. Always met the trains.
Lily Sager ran along the still-moving coaches and was these to meet her brother when he climbed down with a cheap black suitcase in his hand. He was about twenty-two, taller than his dad. A hardness had replaced some of the hell-and-be-damned good looks that had made him the darling of half the women in the houses across the tracks at the time he was taken away.
He dropped his suitcase and lifted Lily off her feet. Then he put her down and beat his father on the back. They were still at it when Lester slouched up, dribbled some tobacco juice, and spoke to him.
Babe couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they talked for a quarter minute and Lester turned away. “We made a long ride to settle this, Tom. You think about it,” Lester said.
The Coltons drifted back toward town. Hooks caught up with Lester and said, “What the hell? I didn’t ride twenty-five miles just to chippy around with that jailbird! What the hell goes?”
“Let him talk it over with the old man. The papers are in the bank vault and he’ll have to get ’em before we can close the deal. I ain’t lettin’ him leave town.”
There was still trouble brewing, and everyone knew it. Men stood around the fronts of buildings, watching. Some of the freight outfits were loaded and ready to hit the road toward Musselshell but none of the drivers budged.
The Sagers went inside the Territorial House, Maverly’s big, ramshackle hotel. About forty minutes later Wiley Gray came around to where the Coltons were loafing with their backs against the iron rails that protected the big front windows of the mercantile and said, “They’re havin’ grub.”
Lester said, “About through?”
“Down to apple pie.”
“I’ll go over and meet ’em.” Hooks started to go along but Lester said, “I can handle that brand-runner alone.”
Lester, the eldest, had always fancied himself as top man among the Coltons. He carried a couple of notches in his .45, and he also fancied himself as a gunman. He’d loosened his gun belt a few holes on his arrival, but the holster wasn’t tied down, and it swung back and forth, cuffing his lean right flank as he crossed the street. He had an ambling walk, a way of seeming to stumble every three or four steps. He took the high step to the platform in front of the Territorial and craned his neck to see through the windows. Just then Tom Sager came out.
Tom had evidently been watching for him. He had one of his father’s guns thrust through his belt of braided natural tan and black leather thongs. Prison-braid belt.
Their first words didn’t reach across the street, but Babe heard Lester shout, “Well, make up your mind! I’ll give you just exactly ten minutes.”
Lester spun and jumped down from the platform. He was at midstreet, taking long strides, when Tom came to the edge and said, “I don’t need that long. You can have your answer now. You can go to hell.”
Lester turned with his right arm long and loose. He drew with a high, upward jerk of his shoulder, but Tom Sager was a trifle ahead of him. He crouched so the gun barrel in the band of his pants was horizontal. He drew with a straight back movement and fired.
THE BULLET HIT Lester when he had his gun half-lifted. It came at an angle downward from the platform walk. It hit him low in the chest and went all the way through, cuffing a puff of dust near the hitch rack of the Lone Cabin saloon.
It knocked Lester back. He caught himself, lunged, turned halfway around. He fired wildly, straight down the street. Then he folded and fell, with his sweat-stained hat under him and his face in the dirt.
One of the Coltons fired a long-range shot at Tom Sager. It cut slivers from a window casing and shattered glass. Tom fired one shot in return, then Dad grabbed him by the arm, and both of them started away on the run.
The Coltons were all trying to get forward, but the scattering crowd blocked their way. Tom and Dad headed across a side street toward Whal’s blacksmith shop.
Hooks shouted, “Andy, you and Jeef get around behind. We’ll smoke ’em out of there.”
Babe found himself half-toppled over a hitch rack. A freight team tied to it was fighting back, terrified by the shooting, threatening to break loose. The thought occurred to him that the blacksmith shop would end by being a death trap if Andy and Jeef got them from behind. In that case, they were cooked.
He drew his jackknife and cut the tie rope. In another couple of seconds the team was stampeding down the street with the tandem freight wagons careening and banging behind them.
Andy and Jeff had to dive head foremost out of the way. The rear wagon overturned with a splintering smash. The six-mule team dragged it for thirty yards before its drawbar gave way. The Sagers were gone from the blacksmith shop by then. They headed on, among shacks and sheds, up the knoll topped by the Climax livery barn.
The Coltons cut loose on them from better than a hundred yards. It was long-range for their six-shooters. Not one of them had thought to get his Winchester from his scabbard. When they tried to get close, they were driven back by .30-30 bullets.
Lily was still at the hotel, but there were more than two guns up there. Babe remembered she’d said Blackfoot Charley was in town. He was a wolfer, and some said a horse-rustler, from out in the breaks.
The shooting was furious for several minutes. Jeef tried to circle the barn and come up close in the cover of some wrecked wagons and took a slug in the arm. Shock put him flat on his face and Babe thought he was mortally wounded. He holstered his six-shooter and crawled up the knoll after him.
“Get the hell away from me,” Jeef said through his teeth. “I’m goin’ up there and—”
Babe got him down and used his jackknife to remove the sleeve from his shirt. The bullet had cut upward, following muscle without shattering the bone. He was bleeding badly and it took a tight bandage to stop it.
When he was finished, Jeef wasn’t so anxious to crawl onto the barn. He lay on his side and cursed through his teeth, calling Tom Sager every vile thing he could lay his tongue to.
“You see how he went for his gun? Lester’s back turned and he was already reaching for his gun. Dirty yella-gut …”
The shooting settled down. Some of the Coltons came up with Winchesters. There was no way to get close, though. Not in the daylight.
After half an hour a posse of townsmen came up on the Coltons from behind. The jailer, Sy Blaney, aimed a sawed-off shotgun at Hooks and shouted, “Toss that rifle aside. All o’ you!”
Hooks said, “If you think we’re going to let that cow thief get out of town after him killin’ Lester—”
“You can’t fight the whole country,” Blaney said. He was scared of the Coltons, but he had twenty men at his back. “There was a killin’ here, I’ll grant, but it’s a wonder some woman or kid ain’t shot already the way that stuff’s whistlin’ around.” He jerked the shotgun at the stable, “It’s the sheriff’s job to bring them in.”
“Baker’s not here.”
Lyle Stone, part-owner of the Musselshell Wagon-Freight Line said, “No, Baker’s not here. You saw to that. You Coltons may be running things in the hills, but you’re not running things in Maverly.”
Hooks’ lip curled. One side of his face was soot-grimed from black powdersmoke that had squirted from the worn mechanism of his gun. He was bleeding from a glancing slug of lead, and it left him a grim and savage sight. “What are you going to do, Lyle? Run us out of town?”
“You be to hell and gone out of Maverly by sundown!”
He hooked his thumb at the barn. “How about them?”
“They’ll be out of town, too.”
2. The Warriors Gather
It was after midnight when the Coltons, on their way home, stopped at Squawblanket Springs. By then Jeef’s arm was bothering him, so he had a hard time staying in the saddle. They found an old kettle at an abandoned shanty, and put water on a sagebrush fire.
“Should o’ waited in Maverly till the doc showed,” Wiley Gray said.
Jeef’s arm was swollen till he couldn’t close his fingers, but he had enough left to manage a swagger and say, “I don’t need no sawbones for that scratch. If I’d had my way we’d have followed them Sagers and gunned ’em down.”
Hooks looked down at him with the sagebrush fire underlighting his face, accentuating lean lines of it. “Sure, kid. We’ll get ’em. We’ll pay ’em back for Lester. But we got time. We’ll let the country quiet down a little.”
Wiley Gray tore a strip off his Injun-weave saddle blanket, soaked it in boiling water, fished it, and held it to drain on the point of his knife. When it was cool enough to touch without scalding, he wrapped it around Jeef’s bullet-ripped arm. The pain of it made Jeef bare his teeth and stiffen the tendons of his neck, but he took it without a sound.
Wiley said again, “We should have waited for the doc. Get jaundice in one o’ these and it’ll finish you.”
Babe was hunkered, feeding twigs into the fire. He knew Hooks was watching him.
After a while, Hooks said in a voice that seemed casual, “Babe, where were you standin’ when Lester got it?”
“Between Jeef and Clint.”
Hooks said to his brothers, “Was he?”
“Yeah,” Jeef said through teeth gritted from pain.
Hooks said to Babe, “From where you were, you ought to seen how that freight outfit got loose.”
Babe shook his head. He couldn’t trust his voice to answer. He was certain none of the Coltons had seen him cut the team loose. Hooks was guessing. If he knew he wouldn’t fool around with questions.
Hooks said, “I went around and found the team at the freight shed. The tie rope wasn’t broken—it had been cut.”
Babe knew he was lying. He’d left them for twenty minutes or so late in the afternoon, but he’d gone to Garver’s furniture store to pick out a coffin. Babe glanced around. All except Jeef were watching him, a circle of grim faces, turned coppery by firelight. They’d kill him if they knew. He had the awful feeling that they could read his thoughts through his eyeballs. He managed to laugh. He broke a twig and poked it under the kettle. His hand shook so violently the twig scattered sparks. Andy saw it and twisted a smile from one side of his mouth.
“What’s wrong, kid?”
He cried, “Stop bullyraggin’ me!” Sweat ran down his cheeks and mixed with the quarter inch of fuzz, which, at seventeen, was all the whiskers he was man enough to grow.
Andy said, “Yeah, quit it or he’ll run and squeal to Rufe and you know how he gets. He’ll have another visitation.”
Andy was referring to his father, who’d come out of a fever with the conviction that he’d been visited by Babe’s dead mother, with the result that he sat right down and signed over the fourth interest of his estate he’d promised in case she died before he did. Up until then it hadn’t been too bad living with the Colton boys. Now they were on him, trying to make it so tough he’d quit the country.
Hooks said, “Notice you haven’t got your gun on.” Babe had taken it off and hooked it over the saddle horn on dismounting. Hooks laughed, spat in the fire, and turned away.
THE SUN WAS up, shining hot on the Colton home ranch when they sighted it from a pine-studded ridge. Rufe hobbled out on his diamond-willow cane to meet them. He was still a big man, though shrunken by his sickness of the last three years.
“Where’s Lester?” he shouted when they were still two hundred yards away. “What happened? Did that rustler come in on the cars? Did he sign it over?”
Hooks rode ahead and swung down in front of his father before answering, “He came, he didn’t sign anything over, and Lester’s dead.”
The news hit the old man hard, and he seemed to be ready to cave in right there. Then he commenced swinging his diamond willow cane and screaming, “Lester killed? You mean he got shot? You trying’ to tell me that dirty rustler killed him?” He was getting his answer each time from Hooks’s expression. “Is that what you mean? No rustler’s going to gun a Colton down.” The others were there by that time, and he looked around at their faces. “What did you do? You don’t mean you let ’em shoot your brother down without—”
“Yes, that’s what I mean!” Hooks shouted in the old man’s face so violently he fell back a step. “Lester bulled into it alone, and he got himself outdrawn. We went for ’em, but they holed up in the livery barn.”
“And you let ’em get out of town.”
“Yes, they got out of town. Stone had his regulators out. We couldn’t fight ’em all. But we’ll get ’em, Pa. We’ll get them Sagers. And we’ll get the Old Fort fields, too.”
Rufe Colton had been after those flats that ran east and west from Old Fort Ludloe since the blizzard of ’87. In the spring of that year, when every breeze carried the stink of longhorn carcasses, Rufe had stood in the front door of the bunkhouse and announced to his boys that Montana would never be worth a hoot in hell as a cattle country unless a man was able to cut hay for the tough winters. With that in mind he’d ridden down from his hills and observed the level ground near the Old Fort. It had always been better than average grass, and the water of Elk Creek would make it grow deep as the belly of a horse. However, the land was military reserve, held on lease by the Sagers, and with it went the first water rights on Elk Creek.
Once Rufe got an idea he wasn’t one to lay it aside, and for four years the chief thing he did was scheme to get those fields away from the Sagers. He was still at it, and that night, after the boys got some sleep, he held a meeting at the house.
Rufe opened the meeting by saying that Hooks was right in coming home instead of riding over to get the Sagers. After all, it had been an open gunfight. The thing to do was not go for the Sagers and risk getting the whole country down on them, but make the Sagers go for them. Furthermore, Rufe had schemed out a surefire way. The Sagers depended on Elk Creek for water, and he proposed to divert it along the old placer ditch and dump it down Shawnegan Coulee to the badlands.
Babe hadn’t been at the meeting. He was sent out on the hooligan wagon with Jim Skinner, and spent the next three weeks at the Alkali Coulee line camp. Coming home, he crossed the deep gorge of Shawnegan Coulee and found eight inches of roily water rushing along its bottom. That night when he reached the home ranch there was another meeting in progress.
He walked up from the corrals and heard old Rufe through open door and windows shouting and beating his diamond willow cane on the floor. “I tell you, that’s just a good way to get the whole range down on us! Listen here to me, every damn one of you—”
“Dad!” Clint Colton said, and the old man stopped. Clint had heard the jingle of Babe’s spurs.
Babe walked through the door, into the lamplight, and said, “Hello.” The Coltons were sitting around with their chairs tilted against the wall, boot heels notched in the rungs. Nobody spoke for a few seconds, then Rufe said, “Hello, Babe. How’s things with them steers on the Arrow Range?”
“Eighteen head down with the bluebelly. Rest all right, except the Tip Top outfit has been pushing in across those benches at the northwest.”
Usually a piece of news like that was enough to send Rufe into a screaming, cane-beating rage, but he didn’t even flinch tonight.
He said, “We been talkin’ about—”
Hooks barked, “It don’t concern him, Pa. I say if you have a man’s job, leave the kids out of it.”
Rufe thought and said, “You et? Well then get the hell down to the cookhouse and quit snooping around.”
Babe sat at the cookhouse table while the Chinaman, Ho Chu, fried steak for him. He ate as fast as he could, went out, circled some sheds to the house, and listened from the shadow of a box elder tree. Whole sentences reached him there, depending on who was talking, but the conversation was too far along and he couldn’t tell just what they were planning to do.
After a while, Fishface came out and looked around. He stood for the better part of a minute, long and gangling, smoking a cigarette. Then he tossed it away and started on the roundabout path to the cookhouse. By hurrying, Babe cut back behind the sheds and was seated on the bench, rolling a cigarette, when Fishface came up.
“Oh.” It was a blow to Fishface’s crafty mind to see him there.
“Looking for me?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t know quite what to say. “You happen to run across that salt-and-pepper bronc of mine over on the Arrow?”
Babe shook his head. Fishface still hesitated. Something had made him suspicious, and finding Babe there hadn’t completely satisfied him. He looked through the grease-clotted screen at Ho Chu who was inside, digging ashes from the stove hopper. He might have asked the Chinese and found out that Babe had been gone and come back. He didn’t, though. He left, and Babe could hear his spurs as they tinkled all the way to the house.
AFTER GRUB PILE next morning Babe said he was going to the Toston Flats in search of his gray long-horse, but instead, once the home ranch was out of sight, he took the wagon road down Elk Creek to the Old Fort flats, arriving shortly past noon.
He had an idea that Hooks Colton had someone spying on the Sager ranch, and it was a problem how he’d find Lily Sager without going there. He decided to wait awhile. There was a well at the old fort from which he managed to scoop half a bucket of water. The water was cold, and good despite the slight flavor of alkali. He drank, watered his horse, and dipped another bucket to rinse sweat and dirt off his face. He stood, letting the breeze dry him off, and saw a rider come into view over the rim of Elk Creek about three miles away. Ten minutes later the man was close enough so Babe recognized him. It was Blackfoot Charley, the wolfer who’d been backing the Sagers that day at Maverly.
Babe stepped out and called him by name, and Charley, who was about to pass the fort buildings on the south, drew up, bent over to get his Winchester from the scabbard, and, holding it across the pommel, jogged over. He was a quarter-breed, a dirty old man with ragged hair and whiskers. He used long stirrups, and rode with the long-legged spraddle of one who’s accustomed to riding bareback. When he was close enough to recognize Babe he put the rifle back, spat tobacco juice, and called, “Babe, if Tom Sager saw you on his range he’d be minded to cut you down. They gettin’ ready for a ruckus over this water.”
“Put ’em in a bad way?”
“Sure did. Ain’t been a dribble down the crick bottom in eight-nine days. Now the potholes are dryin’ up. Dad drove four hundred head down to Emory Springs in the breaks, but they’ll have the coulee bottoms et off in a week. You’re damn right it puts ’em in a bad way, but don’t say a word that I’m tellin’ you.”
“I wouldn’t carry stories to the Coltons or the Sagers, either one.”
“I know that or else I wouldn’t have told you. Why in the hell don’t you get out from between this ruckus? If I was a young puncher I’d make for the Milk River country.”
Babe shrugged his shoulders and laughed. He was thinking that was just what the Coltons wanted.
Charley said, “Coltons tryin’ to get Tom and his dad to start something, ain’t they?”
Babe didn’t answer that. He said, “I’m going to take a sleep here at the fort. If you happen to see Lily …”
“Yeah, I might happen to see her.”
Babe kept out of sight among the roofless log walls through the long hours of the afternoon, sunset, twilight. It was almost dark and he’d given up hope of seeing her when his bronc stopped cropping grass and upped his head. Babe walked out and saw a rider silhouetted against the sky. It was Lily.
She saw him, rode up, and swung down in her precise, small-booted manner before saying a word. She was dressed in Levi’s, a blue shirt open at the throat; a Stetson was on the back of her head with her hair knotted beneath it. She looked like a boy except when she turned and one could see the developing curve of her body.
She walked up and said, “Babe! I was scared you wouldn’t wait around.”
The quality of her voice was always a shock to him. Not once a month did he talk to a woman. She was quite close, with one hand lifted as though to lay it on his breast. He was aware of a faint perfume—the odor of the store-soap she used. He said her name, and she answered, “Yes?”
THERE WAS SOMETHING eager in her tone. A thought came that made him weak and sweaty. For a moment he forgot all about the fight brewing between Coltons and Sagers. Out on the lonesome prairie, or sleeping on the floor of the line shack, he’d dreamed of such a meeting with her and the things he’d say. But now he couldn’t force himself, and when he felt that he had to say something it was, “Pretty tough on your dad, getting the creek shut off.”
“We’ll get water!” The fierceness of her response was a surprise to him.
“What’s he going to do?”
“Don’t worry about us. Tommy will see to it that the Coltons get back as good as they give.”
“Lily, that’s why I came to you. I’m not a spy, riding here behind the Coltons’ backs, but I don’t want a lot of killing, either. They want him to start this trouble.”
Her head was high, and she said, “Tommy’s no fool! He knows all about the Coltons waiting to bushwhack him when he tries to get at the dam. But don’t think he won’t do anything.”
She was proud of Tom. He’d done as much to break their father as the big blizzard had, but he had a dash that appealed to women.
She said, “You don’t believe me, do you? Well listen, and—”
“You better keep it to yourself. I’m a Colton. For all you know I might carry it back home.”
She laid her hand on his arm and said, “Oh, Babe! I know you wouldn’t do that.”
He cried. “You don’t know any such thing. They get an idea I know something they’d kick my ribs in to find out. Maybe I’d tell. I don’t want to know what plan he’s got up his sleeve. But I’ll tell you this, if he starts anything the Coltons will be waiting for him. Once he makes a move, all hell will break loose.”
Her voice and the tilt of her head were challenging. “Maybe we can raise a little of that ourselves. Don’t think it’ll be just Dad and Tommy. We’ll have some men to back us, too.”
“Sure, McGruder and the Henry boys and Blackfoot Charley from down in the breaks. If you Sagers start throwing in with that bunch of horse-rustlers the whole country will be down on you and Hooks can do what he likes.”
She said bitterly, “I suppose you want us to give up.”
“Old Rufe is sick of the business, too. You Sagers are one up on them now, with Lester in his grave, so why don’t you go ahead and sell your lease on these fields? Get your price. Make it ten thousand. He might go for that, and the fields aren’t worth any such amount to you.”
“If you think we’d ever sell to the Coltons!” Anger brought her to the verge of tears. “You own a fourth of that spread, don’t you? Is that why you’re here?”
“Lily, you know it isn’t.”
She started away and he seized her by the arms. She had a wiry, rapid strength and almost slipped away.
She sobbed, “Let me go!”
“I came because of you. And on account of me, too, if you want to know it. I don’t know what would happen if this broke out in a range war. I’d have to choose sides or leave the country.”
She stopped struggling and looked up with her face so close he could feel her warm breath on his neck. “Which side would it be?”
“Yours, of course.” The thought came to him of riding with the Sagers against Hooks. It was all right to brag about it when Hooks wasn’t there, but down inside he wondered if he’d have the guts. Maybe Blackfoot Charley was right. Maybe he ought to drift to the Milk River country. Drift with his tail between his legs. He said to her. “Talk to Tom—to your dad. Try to keep him from tearing this thing wide open. It’s a last chance!”
“All right.” The fight had burned out of her now. “I’ll do what I can.”
He said good-bye to her a few minutes later and watched her ride away in the early darkness. He saddled and let his bronc take it at an easy wolf trot toward the brush of Elk Creek. Before dropping down to the wagon road he turned and sat for a while, watching for another sight of her, but the moon wasn’t up, and all he could see were the elongated, dark shapes of the Old Fort buildings, and, miles away, the bird-track gullies where the badlands commenced encroaching on the prairie rim.
A LIGHT APPEARED near one of the buildings. It was dim, elusive, so even while watching it he wasn’t quite sure it was there. Like the ghost fire sometimes given off by rotting wood in the beaver ponds back in the hills. It went out, and with a sick jolt it occurred to him that the light had come from a match in someone’s cupped hands.
He thought of Hooks. He could have followed him from the ranch, lain all day by the creek, and approached under the cover of night. But that wouldn’t be Hooks’s style. Besides, Hooks wouldn’t let him ride off. Fishface. Yes, it would be Fishface. He’d been suspicious the night before, and he’d been sitting on the corral fence that morning, watching as Babe had ridden away.
Babe wheeled his horse and rode slowly back toward the fort. He kept feeling his gun butt. He didn’t know what he’d do if he caught up with him. He wondered how much he’d heard. He couldn’t even remember just what had been said. He knew he hadn’t given away any secrets except that the Coltons wanted them to attack, and he hadn’t been very loud in saying that. It wasn’t what Fishface heard, but what he’d say he heard.
He was a quarter way back to the fort when he glimpsed a rider heading south toward the hills at a good gallop. He turned and rode parallel with the man’s course until he reached the hills. There he slanted over, hoping to intercept him at Dogtown Coulee, but the maneuver wasn’t successful. After a half-hour wait he rode back to the home ranch.
He turned his horse in the corral, went in the barn, lit a lantern, and found Fish’s saddle. The cinch was still damp—cold to the touch. It hadn’t been there more than an hour. He walked on the bunkhouse, climbed in his bunk, and lay back with no thought of sleep. Next thing he realized someone yelled, “Go get it or starve!” and the cookhouse bell was banging.
He was scrubbing when Hooks walked up and said, “Find that long-horse?”
“No.” He pretended his eyes were full of soap so he’d have time to think. There was no use of lying—Hooks knew. He rubbed dry and looked up to meet Hooks’s quartz-hard eyes. “Didn’t hunt for him.”
“What did you hunt for?”
“I rode down toward the fort and saw Lily.”
Hooks laughed with a hard twist of his mouth and said, “You got your guts.”
No more was said about it. After breakfast Rufe sent him to the mailbox, eight miles away on the Middlefork stage road. When he got back all the Coltons except Rufe and Fishface had gone somewhere. The following night he was sitting in the bunkhouse, bending close to read a book in the light of a bacon-grease-dip, when Hooks came in, stiff-legged from hard riding.
“Hello, Babe,” he said in a velvety voice. “Never thought of it till now, but I forgot to give you a birthday present.”
He had something rolled up in his hand. Babe could feel the skin of his forehead draw tight from shock as he realized what it was. It was a belt—the prison-braid black and cream belt that Tommy Sager had been wearing in his black serge trousers that day he got off the train at Maverly.
Still smiling, Hooks tossed it to him. Then he clumped off in his stiff-tired manner to the dark, bunk-lined depths of the room.
3. The Back–shooter
The air now seemed suffocating. Babe blew out the grease-dip, and went outside. The night was cool, as it always was there in the hills no matter how hot the day, but sweat streaked down his cheeks. There was no doubt in his mind that Hooks had killed Tom Sager. He wondered if something Lily said that night had tipped him off.
He stood in the dark barn until thoughts became sorted in his mind. He knew he couldn’t go on living with the Coltons. He had his choice of joining the Sagers or quitting the country.
He took his saddle down from the peg, then he put it back. There were some things he’d have to get at the bunkhouse. He’d wait until tomorrow.
He went back inside, lay down in his bunk. He could hear the heavy breathing sounds of men. In the blackness he had the feeling that Hooks Colton was lying, his eyes wide, listening.
The belt was gone from the table when he got up. Hooks sat in the house, eating. He didn’t say anything when Babe came in. Babe put off packing his war bag, then, about midmorning, Andy and Clint came in, galloping hard, and had a talk with Hooks down by the corrals. Ho Chu saw them and put the skillet on, but they roped fresh horses and set off without eating, and Hooks went with them.
Babe had a hunch that things were getting ready to pop. He decided to wait awhile. He saddled and rode southwestward, through the hill notch where they’d disappeared. He saw no sign of the Coltons and made a wide swing to the north until he looked down on the soda-white flats where Wolf Creek sank away after leaving the hills. There for the first time he saw riders—five men in single file heading eastward through fields of sage belly-deep to their mounts. They were miles off, and he couldn’t tell who they were. Men from the 88, maybe, riding to town.
He returned to the home ranch as the sun sank, brownish-red from a grass fire.
At midnight Clint Colton and a cowboy named Will Roberts rode in and hitched up in the spring wagon. Jeef had been shot through both shoulders and they were going to bring him in from the Lone Tree Springs. The grass fire had been at Beaver Meadows and it had burned a strip half a mile wide and three long.
Clint said, “Always Jeef that gets it. Never satisfied but what he’s double-brave. He’ll be double-brave one o’ these times with a ton of dirt on his chest.”
They brought Jeef in and he lay on his stomach in the cookhouse while Wiley Gray cleaned out the wound and bandaged it. It was painful, but not necessarily serious. The bullet, fired from long range, had struck him across the right shoulder, shattered the bone and glanced downward across his back, missed his spine and came out near his left armpit without touching the big vein or artery.
“Dirty rustler outfit!” Jeef saying. “I’m going down there and blast the insides out of that dirty rustler outfit.”
Wiley said, “Not for three or four weeks you won’t.”
Hooks said, “We’ll get ’em, Jeef. We’ll get ’em before any four weeks are up.”
Babe had put the facts together and assumed someone had fired the meadows, the Colton winter range, and laid an ambush when the boys rode to fight it, but he heard them talking and learned the fire had been accidentally set by some Gros Ventres who were digging camas roots, while Jeef had been shot many miles to the north while he was riding the brush of Red Willow Creek.
NEXT EVENING, JUST before dark, Sheriff Walt Baker and Jim Conover, his deputy, rode up on the Elk Creek road.
Baker was a good-looking, tall man of forty, once foreman of the War-bonnet, which had been bankrupted by the hard winter of ’87; Conover was a short, blunt man ten years his senior who had been deputy under one sheriff after another ever since the county was organized twelve years before.
Hooks strode down the slope from the big house to meet them. He called them by name and shouted, “Hey, Fish, tell Ho to put on the skillet.” Then, as Baker swung to the ground, “You come to see about Jeef?”
“What about him?”
“Somebody tried to drygulch him down on the Red Willow. He’s got a broke shoulder, and maybe he’ll die if the poison sets in.” Conover cursed and looked sympathetic. Hooks went on with a saw-edge quality in his voice, “First Lester and now Jeef. How long do you think us Coltons are going to take this, Sheriff?”
“I’m doing what I can. You know how it is with me. A county the size of Ioway, and three men to cover it.” He looked in Hooks’s face and said, “You hear about Tom Sager?”
“What about him?”
“Somebody killed him.”
He stood back, looking surprised. Then he snorted breath from his nostrils. “I’ll have to get back to my black suit.”
Old Rufe hobbled down in time to overhear him. “Why you come here? You think we drygulched him? That what you think?”
“I’m going every place. Damn it, Tom gets killed, you Coltons ought to know the first thing folks’ll say.”
Andy grinned and said, “Where’d you find the dirty rustler?”
“By those alkali sinks where Wolf Crick comes out.”
Babe had been looking down on the sinks that afternoon.
Andy asked, “Was he shot?”
“Yes.”
Babe said, “Shot in the back!” A cold anger had settled in him. Anger, and a hatred of Hooks Colton that for a second overrode his fear, and made him say it. The words struck Hooks and made his shoulder muscles bulge to fill the sun-bleached fabric of his shirt. He started to swing around with his right arm long as though to reach for the gun at his hip, but he stopped himself tense and furious, without his eyes once resting on Babe, without saying a word.
“Why, yes,” Baker said, “he was shot in the back. A .30-30, I’d say, but there was no way of being sure because the bullet went all the way through. Somebody took the belt off his pants. Like an Injun countin’ coup.”
Babe couldn’t trust himself among the Coltons. He walked to the bunkhouse and sat on the split-pine bench out front. Against lamplight from the cookhouse he could see Hooks Colton. He was thinking Hooks didn’t follow Tom out of Maverly that day because he was scared. He didn’t have the guts to face Tom. He waited on his belly with a rifle and shot him in the back.
He went inside the bunkhouse, lighted the grease-dip, went to his bunk, filled his war sack, and made a blanket roll around it. He carried it on his shoulder to the barn and went back for his Winchester and his new Colt .45, silver-mounted, which he’d won in the keno lottery at Miles City the autumn before.
He stopped in the door of the barn with the Winchester in his hands, swung the lever down, and by moonlight saw the brassy glint of cartridge ready to go in the chamber. Hooks was inside the cookhouse, his head and shoulder visible through the window. It was about a hundred paces. Without levering the cartridge in, he lifted the gun and took aim. Hooks’s faded blue shirt looked white by lamplight and made a perfect target against the knife-edge front sight. It would be easy—too easy.
HE DIDN’T CATCH his horse. He stood in the barn, and was still watching when Walt Baker and his deputy mounted and rode away down the wagon road. Baker wouldn’t stay in the country. Now he’d made the motions of doing his duty it was a safe bet he’d get as far away as he decently could.
Hooks came out, called “Andy!” and walked toward the house.
This was the chance Babe had waited for. Now he could catch a horse and leave without being noticed. He put it off. He watched and saw their shadows passing in front of the windows as they seated themselves—the Coltons and the picked punchers of their rough-tough crew. He left his war bag and saddle in a box stall, with his Winchester leaning against them, and walked up the rise of ground, around the oat sheds to the box elder tree. They were talking inside, but quietly, and only a mutter of voices reached him.
He crept forward, found concealment beneath the pole-roofed awning that ran along that side of the house, remained crouched for a minute with one shoulder against the log wall.
Someone said, “I’m not waiting for that,” and came through the door. The sound of boots and spurs seemed right atop him. Shadows loomed big. Clint Colton, Roberts, and a breed by the name of Joe Plain. They didn’t look his way. They passed and were so close he caught the tepee smoke odor of Joe’s gauntlet gloves.
“… No pinto for that kind of a job,” he heard Clint say while their boots crunched down the path. “I’ll take that big black… .”
Joe Plain said, “Dapple’s hardest to see in the dark… .”
Babe took a deep breath. He could hear his pulse. He waited for it to slow down, conquered an impulse to run, and moved forward until he was stopped by lamplight flooding from an open window.
There he could hear Hooks talking in clipped, restrained syllables. “Clint’ll be at the claybanks by midnight. Well, maybe not. What time you got?”
A voice he recognized as Clayton Gotschall’s said, “Ten past nine.”
“Then say one-thirty. That’ll put ’em at Blackfoot Charley’s by three, and get McGruder on the way.”
Wiley Gray said, “If they catch McGruder alone. Never tell about them damn horse-rustlers. Might find six men in that shack.”
“We’ll gamble on that.”
Andy said, “That leaves Jinks Henry and the Sagers for us.”
“We’ll get Henry about when they get Blackfoot. Ought to put us at the Sagers by daybreak.”
“What about the girl?”
After four or five seconds Hooks said, “That’s up to her.”
Wiley Gray said, “I seen her shoot one time over at the Fourth of July picnic, and she can cut the eyes out of a snake.”
Hooks raised his raw, mean voice. “It’s up to her!”
Andy laughed and said, “Maybe we ought to send Babe.”
“That yellow pup?”
Babe scarcely noticed they were talking about him. All he could think of was Lily Sager. He knew how Hooks was. If he couldn’t have her, he’d rather see her dead. Hooks would kill her himself if it worked out so the others weren’t around to check him.
He moved back, one shoulder against the wall, step after step beneath the awning until he was at the lower edge of the house. There he felt safe to stand and start walking away, but someone was between him and the oat shed. Tall, gangling Fishface. He’d been placed there on watch.
Babe checked the impulse to leap out of sight. He stood perfectly rigid, knowing by the fellow’s slack manner that he hadn’t been seen. Fishface kept scraping at something with his boot toe. Then he turned and, seizing the opportunity, Babe crept to the box elder shadow, on up rising ground for fifty yards to some patchy buck brush that gave waist-high concealment.
He made a wide circle and came up to the corrals from the creek side in time to hear Clint and his men as they splashed across shallow water and up a rocky slope through a stiff tangle of serviceberry.
When they were gone he climbed over the corral rails, roped a big gelding, saddled him, and went inside for his war bag and Winchester. Suddenly, though the darkness was complete, he knew someone else was in the barn—was standing still, listening.
He made a guess and said, “Hello, Fish.”
He heard the man’s startled movement, and then his keyed-up voice, “Hello. What in hell you doing?”
Babe shifted his position and saw Fishface shadowed against the other door. Fish was retreating, bent a trifle, his right hand resting on the butt of his gun.
BABE WALKED TOWARD him. His boots were soundless in the cover of manure and rotted hay. They maintained the same distance apart, and when he was about to the door Fishface spoke.
“Why you saddlin’ the horse?”
“Why you think?”
“You were listenin’, weren’t you? I thought I saw—” He stopped; he suddenly realized he’d made a mistake in letting Babe know. They were alone here. Fishface didn’t have his brothers to back him.
Babe said, “You thought you saw me but you weren’t sure, so you came down to check up. Now what, Fish?”
“Nothing. I ain’t got nothin’ agin’ you. Honest, Babe—”
Fishface took two steps back while he was talking. That placed him just outside the door. He spun and took three long-legged leaps. He had his gun out. Moonlight struck it with a bluish gleam. He turned on his third step, and the gun exploded with a white flash that seemed to be right in Babe’s face, but the bullet flew high and ripped a board over the barn door.
Babe had already drawn. He hesitated a quarter-second, unable to distinguish man from shadow, then shot. The bullet struck Fishface and knocked him on his back.
He lay with arms outflung and his mouth open, front teeth prominent like a dead prairie dog’s, and Babe thought his bullet had hit him through the heart, but he was down from the shock of a wound through the fleshy part of his neck, and the shock left him suddenly. He twisted over, ran stumbling, dodging through the dark. The sound of gunfire brought men from the house. “Babe. He heard. He heard you. He’s saddled and ready to tell ’em. By the barn …”
Babe kept hearing him. He found his Winchester in the barn, started away, and came back for two boxes of shells in his war bag. He had to open the gate, lead his horse through. Someone saw him. A gun cut the darkness and the bullet seemed to scorch him.
The gelding was bucking when he reached the saddle. He managed to find the other stirrup and stayed for a couple of jumps until he could get the animal to running.
He was around the corral with gunfire still raking the dark. He rode through the creek and up a trail-narrow cleft along the dirt bank where serviceberry bushes tore at his clothes.
Clayton Gotschall, with a Winchester in his hands, ran around the corrals and took a snap shot at him. Babe had his own rifle out and fired a second later just as his horse, slowed by steepness, looked for footing, and the bullet was close enough to put Gotschall on his belly amid the slather of mud and manure by the creek.
He swung over the crest and down a steel dip into more brush. He cursed his luck. He’d been beaten out of his chance to warn the Sagers. He still might get there ahead of them but it would only be a few minutes, and not enough to make much difference when you considered the number of men the Coltons could throw at the place.
This trail was a tough one, through one dip after another, and every one of them clogged with thorns. After a mile he cut back to the wagon road.
4. The Victors
He stopped for a moment, heard a man shout in the distance, the clack of a hoof on stone. He turned down the wagon road, pushing the gelding hard, but not too hard.
The miles that took him out of the hills gave him time to think of his best course. Straight across at the end of the Old Fort fields lay Jinks Henry’s place. The Sager home ranch was sharply to his right, seven or eight miles farther along. Going to Jinks’s house first would take him only a mile or so out of his way, and he usually had a puncher working for him. With a little help they might hole up in the rimrocks a couple miles this side of the Sager place, stop the Coltons, and raise enough of a shooting row to let Dad and Lily know there was trouble afoot.
Halfway across the meadows he stopped and scanned the country behind of him. A file of riders had emerged on a hillside, silhouetted by moonlight. He counted six. He wondered who the extra ones were. Alderdyce, probably, and the pale-eyed fellow who’d just hired out—the one calling himself the Alberta Kid.
He had a good start. Ten or twelve minutes. The gelding wasn’t fast, but he could take the long going. It showed now as he drove hard across the remaining miles of flats, and down the coulee to Jinks Henry’s house.
A shepherd dog commenced barking when he was still a quarter-mile off. He could see a cluster of corrals, a horse shed, and the dark shack beyond, perched on a shelf above the coulee bottom.
The dog stopped barking, and that told him that his master was somewhere around. He pulled in and called, “Jinks! Where are you?” He rode on, warily. “Jinks, this is Babe. Babe Colton.” He saw movement by the house and the shine of a gun with its blue worn off. “Jinks, that you?”
“Yes, what’n hell do you want?” When he saw Babe coming straight across the coulee he slapped his rifle with his palm, making its lever rattle, and said, “Stop where y’are!”
Babe was close enough so he didn’t have to yell. He stopped in some mud that seeped from a spring on the coulee side and told him what the Coltons were up to.
“What do you want me to do?” Jinks said.
“You here alone?”
“Yes.”
Babe cursed through his teeth. “You want to help me head ’em off? They figured on coming here, but now they’ll go straight for the Sagers. Think the two of us can stand them off at the sandstone pillars?”
Jinks shuffled forward. He was barefooted, dressed only in shirt and underwear. He was about fifty, a veteran of the Civil War—a Union veteran, which didn’t add to his popularity in a country where two-thirds of the men had ridden up from Texas. He squinted at Babe’s face.
“You out to fight your brothers?”
“They’re not my brothers.”
“No, they sure as hell ain’t.” With a sudden decision he leaned his rifle against an old gold rocker and started for the house. “I got to get my boots and pants. Toss a saddle on that bay bronc.”
JINKS WAS DRESSED and down at the corrals before Babe had found the bridle. Jinks got it and fought the bronc all around the corral, wheezing and saying, “Easy boy—damn Injun bronc!” under his breath. “You jest take it easy!”
Babe would have headed back to the main trail, but Jinks said, “This way,” and took him up the steep side to a ridge bearing on its crest the rain-deepened channels of the old travois tracks where Indians once traveled between Fort Ludloe and Piperock Crossing on the river. “This looks like a long way around, but it’ll get us there sooner.”
They followed forking ridges to the sand-rock cliffs and pillars that overlooked the coulee about three miles above Sager’s home ranch. There, in a wild jumble of rock and juniper, they left their horses and clambered downward across sharp-edged boulders big as wagon boxes.
“There! Up-coulee!” Babe grabbed Jinks and pulled him down. Six men were in sight, coming down-coulee, easing their broncs warily.
He left Jinks and clambered along the broken slope towards them. He stopped, waited, levered a spent cartridge from his gun, felt the slight grab of lead as a fresh one went in. They were almost directly below at a range of one hundred and fifty yards when he aimed barely ahead of the lead horse and fired.
The bullet pounded dust that looked white as flour in the moonlight. Jinks cut loose a second later, and the six men scattered; three of them left their horses and dived to the first cover available; one broke toward the far wall at a gallop, and there, at far range, swung down and hunkered with his rifle behind a boulder; two others turned back the way they’d come and kept riding until they were a quarter-mile out of range and there stopped to appraise the situation. A bullet struck the rock by Babe’s cheek and left him temporarily blind from powdered fragments. He moved to new positions one after another and fired his gun dry.
Those two up at the coulee would stand watching. They might come around to the ridge and attack from behind. He loaded up and shot dry again. The gun was hot and its action stiff from the gumming corrosion of black powder. He spat on it and kept working it back and forth while he watched the two start a steep climb up the far side. They wouldn’t attack from behind. Their destination would be the Sager place.
He crawled back and found Jinks Henry. Jinks had his back to a boulder, looking at a wrist wound. “Got me with a sliver o’ lead,” he grumbled. He twisted and got his bandanna from his hip pocket. He wrapped it around and tried to pull it tight with his teeth.
Babe did it for him, and Jinks rolled back with his rifle over the edge of rock. He said, “Got one of ’em. Know who I think it was. Your old pal Hooks.”
Every mile of his ride that night Babe had been certain that he’d end by facing Hooks. He was sure that Hooks was one of those who’d ridden to Sager’s. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t glad. But he was. It was like walking down a corridor to die only to find freedom at the other end.
He said, “Then who rode toward Sager’s?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“Can you handle things here?”
“I’ll handle ’em. I’m harder to drag out than a badger out of a bar’l. What you got in mind?”
“I’m going on to the Sager place.”
“All right, but don’t do nothing foolish.”
BABE CRAWLED UPHILL among the rocks. His gelding was tied to a sagebrush. He got him free, led him fifty yards around the hill without drawing a shot. Then a gun drove him to cover, and the horse tore away and galloped back around the hill, head to one side, dragging bridle.
Babe had no chance of catching him without exposing himself, so, with his rifle across his thighs, he slid downhill from rock to rock, digging his boots and spurs to check his descent. He stopped by a rock reef, tried to skirt it, but that rifle had shifted position and put him to cover again.
It had been a mistake coming down. He had no choice but to retrace his course upward among the rocks. As he climbed, the sound of distant gunfire came to him. That was from the Sager place.
He abandoned caution, sprang to his feet, and ran along the steep sidehill while that rifle, now better than a hundred yards off, dug dirt around his boots. He found a little gully, slid down it through rock and sagebrush, and following it he reached the coulee bottom a quarter-mile below the pillars.
His boot heels kept turning on rocks and tufts of grass as he ran. He stopped to get his breath and kick his spurs off. A ruddy light appeared over one of the round-topped hills. It died and rose again higher than before. It marked the position of the Sager place. They’d set fire to one of the buildings. He ran harder though his Colt, loaded belt, and extra Winchester cartridges in his hip pocket all weighted him down. Flame under-lit the billowing smoke, and to his nostrils came the odor of burning hay and wood.
The coulee was pinched down between walls of sand rock, then it widened and he had a view of the ranch.
It was the house burning. Upset against it was a half-burned buggy. The buggy had been loaded with hay, set afire, and rolled down the incline from the barn.
Someone was still inside the house. Gunfire ripped back and forth between there and the barn. The ground steepened. It slowed Babe to a faltering trot as he ran toward the barn. The fire, which had been enclosed in the rear room of the house, started to run along the ridge pole.
A voice he recognized as Clayton Gotschall’s; “Hey, they’re runnin’ for the root cellar. Let’s go get them hounds!”
Sixty yards away he located Gotschall, on his belly behind a heap of aspen corral poles. Gotschall heard him and twisted around. He did it with a catlike motion, rising enough to get one knee under him. He brought his rifle up but he shot too soon and the bullet whipped air a couple feet to Babe’s left. Babe, still moving forward, fired from the waist.
The Winchester slug struck Gotschall in the midsection and doubled him like he’d been hit by a sledge. He took three dead man’s steps and collapsed, with head and knees hitting the ground at the same instant.
“Gotschall!” a man shouted from the barn loft, and the shock of his voice was like a knife in Babe’s middle. The voice belonged to Hooks Colton.
BABE KEPT GOING and half fell when he reached black shadow inside the barn. He got hold of something—it was a harness box—pulled himself to his feet. He fought air to his tortured lungs and got the dizziness of near-collapse from his brain.
Hooks! It was another man dead in the coulee. He should have gone gutless again. He was up against it now, the final showdown, the thing he always knew would come. It occurred to him that Hooks would probably kill him. It didn’t seem important. The shock and crash of fighting had done something to him.
He groped, touched a ladder. The ladder to the loft. He started to climb. The second step brought him to a glassless window, and even at that distance he could feel heat from the burning house. Flames lay a bright circle around it. A man was down on the ground. Shot through the legs, trying to drag forward. Dad Sager.
A second later, Lily ran into sight. She was barefooted, her hair down. She’d had time to pull on a pair of Levi’s and push the nightgown into the top of them. She had a rifle in one hand.
Lily reached her father, bent over him, got one arm under his shoulder, tried to lift him to his feet.
Hooks shouted her name. “Lily! Lily, come here!”
His voice seemed to be right over Babe’s head, only a few feet away.
Lily let go and reached back for her rifle. Hooks fired—his bullet, aimed downward, dug dirt under Dad Sager’s legs. Hooks laughed when he saw her lower the gun.
If Babe had any fear holding him, the sound of Hooks Colton killed it. His hatred of the man drove him forward, up the ladder. His Winchester clattered as he made the loft. Hooks heard him and cried, “Gotschall?”
Babe stood up, the rifle in his hands. He took one step. He could see nothing.
Hooks’s voice, a new edge in it. “Gotschall?”
Babe said, “No, Hooks. Not Gotschall. He’s dead.”
Hooks fired, but Babe had expected it and moved. The gun flash was less than a dozen yards away. Babe returned it, and sidestepped as he did so. There were four more explosions, two from each gun.
Then a ringing silence, the air still carrying the rock of close-held concussion. Both men on the move. Babe touched the wall with one shoulder. There were holes here and there where hay could be forked down to the mangers. He’d have to look out. He drew cartridges from his pocket, fed them through the spring opening of the magazine.
A board creaked. He stood without breathing. The sound was repeated again, again, each time changing position, and so he was able to get a rough impression of Hooks’s movement across the loft floor. It stopped for several seconds, and he was aware of a slight tremble. The floor had been released of weight. Hooks, a big man, had dropped below.
Babe heard the scuff of boots and knew he was running. He sprang to the ladder, laid down his Winchester, and dropped.
The Winchester still above, he laid his hand on his Colt, stepped into the central passage.
Hooks was running, back turned, silhouetted against the far door.
“Hooks!” Babe shouted.
HOOKS STOPPED AND spun around. He had his six-shooter in his hand. Babe drew with a half pivot and brought the gun up as he turned. He hesitated a fifth of a second, that brief instant a man needs to freeze on his target when it’s more than twenty paces away. Their guns exploded almost in unison.
Babe felt the whip of burnt powder as the bullet went past his cheek. Hooks was hit. He was knocked backward. He dropped his gun. It struck his heavy-muscled thigh. Thudded to the floor. His right boot heel flipped over and dumped him. By ruddy, reflected light Babe was aware of his shocked eyes, his sagging moth.
“I’m … hit!” he said in a raw whisper. Like he was telling it to himself. “Got me.” Then some focus came into his eyes. “What more you want?”
He was crouched, sitting on his heels, his hands far forward, fingers on the barn floor. He fell back, and with a dragging movement the fingers of his right hand found the gun, and he blazed wildly.
Babe fired twice, walking forward. One of the bullets knocked Hooks down, the other hit with a force that seemed to lift him an inch and drop him again.
Still, despite the awful shocking power of those .45 slugs, he managed to get to his knees, to his feet. He lurched into the firelight, a huge, stumbling, bent-over figure with both arms wrapped around his chest. There he fell, facedown, the toes of his boots together, heels out, his wicked, Mexican-roweled spurs making little pinpoint circles of reflection.
Babe kept walking and stood over him. Made sure he was dead. He had no feeling of sorrow, none of triumph. He just looked at him and knew he was dead.
Lily said his name. “Babe!” He turned and she was there, close enough to reach, to touch. She’d been there he didn’t know how long. Stood there while their bullets roared by.
He rammed his gun back in the holster. It seemed natural that she should be in his arms. Her cheeks glistened from tears. She pressed her head against his breast and said his name over and over.
He said, “Your dad!”
They ran together and found him sitting up, trying to tear a bandage for his leg. It was bleeding badly. Lily found a dish towel that had been hanging over the line, and, soaking full, it slowly checked the flow of blood.
Dawn was coming. House now a smoldering oblong of logs. Jinks Henry rode up with Blackfoot Charley and one of the McGruder boys.
Jinks said, “That was Alderdyce I got, and he wasn’t dead. So I guess Hooks got away after all.”
“He’s in the barn,” Babe said.
He looked in Babe’s eyes and said, “Oh.” He understood and let it drop there. Then he said, “Blackfoot and Mick, here, got stirred up before Clint’s bunch made a show. They came cross-country and scared off the ones we tackled. You think they’ll bounce back on us today, Babe?”
“They won’t,” he said.
Babe hitched a team to the buckboard and asked Blackfoot to help him with Hooks. It wasn’t easy looking at him, and he was glad when Blackfoot brought the tarp. All Babe’s hatred was gone. Gone, with sour feeling left behind.
Lily ran up to him and said, “Babe, you’re not going back there and—”
“Yes, I’m taking him home to Rufe. I stayed around to inherit my share of the place, so I guess I stayed around for this, too.”
“Babe, they’ll kill you up there.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll be back. Don’t you see? I have to face them today. They’ll understand. I’ll really be talking the Coltons’ own language today. I ought to know. I guess I’m sort of a Colton myself.”