the Sky-Liners (1967) (10 page)

"What about it, Cagle?" Hawkes's tone was cold.

"Mr. Hawkes," Kyle Shore said, "this here is my deal. I rode into camp with him, we hired on together."

He turned to Cagle. "Larnie, when I ride, I ride for the brand. I may sell my gun, but it stays sold."

Briggs rode up to the edge of the firelight. "They're comin', Mr. Hawkes. They're all around us."

"You ain't got a chance!" Cagle said with a sneer in his voice. "You never had a chance."

"You've got one," Kyle Shore said. "You've got just one, Larnie, but you got to kill me to get it."

They looked at each other across the fire, and Shore said, "I never rode with no double-crosser, and never will. I figure you're my fault."

Cagle gave a laugh, but the laugh was a little shrill. "You? Why, you damn' fool, you never saw the day you - "

He dropped his hand, and he was fast. His gun cleared the holster and came up shooting. The first shot hit the dirt at Shore's feet and the second shot cut a notch from his hat brim.

Kyle Shore had drawn almost as fast, but his gun came up smoothly, and taking his time he shot ... just once.

Larnie Cagle took a teetering step forward, then fell on his face, dead before he touched the ground.

"Damn' fool," Shore said. "He surely fancied that fast draw. I told him he should take time. Make the first shot count. He wouldn't listen."

Out upon the plains there was a shot, then another. We ran for our horses, bunching them under the trees. Galloway dropped to one knee near a tree trunk and fired quickly at a racing horse, then again. Taking Judith by the hand, I pushed her down behind a big fallen tree. Then I knelt beside her, rifle up, hunting a target.

There was a flurry of hammering shots and then the pound of racing hoofs, and they were gone. When Black saw there was no surprise, he just lit up the night with a little rifle fire and rode off, figuring there'd be another day ... as there generally is.

Daylight took its time a-coming, and some of us waited by the fire nursing our coffee cups in chilly fingers, our shoulders hunched. Others dozed against a fallen log, and a few crawled back into their blankets and catnapped the last two hours away.

Me, I moved restlessly around camp, picking up fuel for the fire, contemplating what we'd best do next.

Evan Hawkes would be wanting to get the rest of his cattle back; but now that we had Judith again, it was our duty to carry her west to her pa.

There was a sight of work to do, and some of the cattle would be scratched or battered from horns or brush, and unless they were cared for we'd have blowflies settling on them. A cowhand's work is never done. He ropes and rides before sunup and rarely gets in for chow before the sun is down.

Judith, she slept - slept like a baby. But she worried me some, looking at her. She didn't look much like a little girl any more, and looking at a girl thataway can confuse a man's thinking.

My fingers touched my jaw. It had been some time since I'd shaved, and I'd best be about it before we got to riding westward again.

Kyle Shore wasn't talking. He was sitting there looking into the fire, his back to the long bundle we'd bury, come daybreak. I had Shore pegged now. He was a good, steady man, a fighter by trade, with no pretense to being a real gunman. He was no fast-draw artist, but his kind could kill a lot who thought they were.

Thinking about that, I went for coffee. It was hot, blacker than sin, and strong enough to float a horseshoe. It was cowboy's coffee.

Morning, noon, and night we worked our hearts out, rounding up the scattered herd, and when we had finished we still lacked a lot of having half of what Evan Hawkes had started with when he left Texas. The Fetchen outfit had made off with the rest of them.

After a week of riding and rounding them up we started west once more.

Judith was quiet. She pulled her weight around camp, helping the cook and generally making herself useful, and when she was on the range she showed that she not only could ride the rough string but that she could savvy cattle.

Much as I wanted to pay her no mind, it was getting so I couldn't do that. She was around camp, stirring pots, bending over the fire, and looking so pretty I wondered whether I'd been right in the head when I first put eyes on her back yonder in Tazewell.

Nonetheless, I kept my eyes off her as much as I could. I rode out from camp early, and avoided sitting nigh her when it was possible. Only it seemed we were always winding up sitting side by side. I never talked or said much. First off, I'm simply no hand with women. Galloway now, he had half the girls in the mountains breathing hard most of the time, but me, I was just big and quiet, and when I was seated by womenfolks all the words in me just lost themselves in the breaks of my mind. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't put a loop over even one sentence.

Besides, there was the land. A big, grand, wide country with every glance lost in the distance. There was a special feeling on the wind when it blew across those miles of grass, a wind so cool, so deep down inside you that every breath of it was like a drink of cool water. And we saw the tumbleweeds far out ahead of us, hundreds of them rolling south ahead of the wind, like the skirmish line of an army.

At first they made the cattle skittish, but they got used to them, as we did. I never knew where they came from, but for three days the wind blew cool out of the north and for three days they came in the hundreds, in the thousands.

Trees grew thicker along the streams, and the grass was better. From time to time we saw scattered buffalo, three or four together, and once a big old bull, alone on a hilltop, watching us pass. He followed us for two days, keeping his distance - wanting company I suppose.

Twice we saw burned-out wagons, places where Indians had rounded up some settlers. Nobody would ever know who they were, and folks back home would wonder about them for a while, and then time would make the memories become dimmer.

Like Galloway and me. We had no close kinfolk, nobody keeping account of us. If we were to get killed out here nobody would ask who, why, or whatever. It made a body feel kind of lonesome down inside, and it set me to wondering where I was headed for.

Once, far ahead of the herd, I heard a galloping behind me, and when I turned in the saddle I saw it was that Judith girl. She rode sidesaddle, of course, and looked mighty fetching as she came up to me.

"You'd be a sight better off with the rest," I said. "If we met up with Indians, you might get taken."

"I'm not afraid. Not with you to care for me."

Now, that there remark just about threw me. I suppose nobody had ever said such a thing to me before, and it runs in the blood of a man that he should care for womenfolk. It's a need in him, deep as motherhood to a woman, and it's a thing folks are likely to forget. A man with nobody to care for is as lonesome as a lost hound dog, and as useless. If he's to feel of any purpose to himself, he's got to feel he's needed, feel he stands between somebody and any trouble.

I'd had nobody. Galloway was fit to care for himself and an army of others. He was a man built for action, and tempered to violence. Gentle, he was most times, but fierce when aroused. You might as well try to take care of a grizzly bear as of him. So I'd had nobody, nor had he.

"I'd stand up for you," I said, "but it would be a worrisome thing to have to think of somebody else. I mean, whilst fighting, or whatever. Anyway, you'd take off after that Fetchen outfit if they showed up."

"I would not!"

She put her chin up at me, but stayed alongside, and said nothing more for a while.

"Mighty pretty country," I ventured after a bit.

"It is, isn't it? I just can't wait to see Pa's ranch." She sobered down then. "I hope he's all right"

"You worried about the Fetchens?"

"Yes, I am. You've no idea what they are like. I just never imagined men could be like that." She looked quickly at me. "Oh, they were all right to me. James saw to that. But I heard talk when they didn't think I was listening." She turned toward me again. "The happiest moment in my life was when you came from behind that tree trunk. And you might have been killed!"

"Yes, ma'am. That's a common might-have-been out here. There's few things a man can do that might not get him killed. It's a rough land, but a man is better off if he rides his trail knowing there may be trouble about. It simply won't do to get careless ... And you be careful, too."

A pretty little stream, not over eight or ten inches deep, but running at a lively pace, and kind of curving around a flat meadow with low hills offered shelter from the north, and a cluster of cottonwoods and willows where we could camp ... it was just what we needed.

"We'll just sort of camp here," I said. "I'll ride over and get a cooking fire started."

"Flagan!" Judith screamed, and I wheeled and saw three of them come up out of the grass near that stream where they'd been laying for me.

Three of them rising right up out of the ground, like, with their horses nowhere near them, and all three had their rifles on me.

Instinctively, I swung my horse. He was a good cutting horse who could turn on a dime and have six cents left, and he turned now. When he wheeled about I charged right at them. My six-shooter was in my hand, I don't know how come, and I chopped down with it, blasting a shot at the nearest one while keeping him between the others and me.

Swinging my horse again, I doubled right back on my heels in charging down on the others. I heard a bullet nip by me, felt a jolt somewhere, and then I was firing again and the last man was legging it for the cottonwoods. I taken in after him as he ran, and I came up alongside him and nudged him with the horse to knock him rolling.

I turned my horse again and came back on him as he was staggering to his feet. I let the horse come alongside him again, and this time I lifted a stirrup and caught him right in the middle with my heel. It knocked him all sprawled out.

One of the others was getting up and was halfway to his horse by the time I could get around to him, but I started after him too. He made it almost to the brush before I gave him my heel, knocking him face down into the broken branches of the willows.

Judith had now ridden up to me. "Are you hurt?" she asked.

"Not me. Those boys are some upset, I figure." I looked at her. "You warned me," I said. "You yelled just in time."

Three riders had come over the hill, riding hell bent for election. They were Galloway, Kyle Shore, and Hawkes himself, all of them with rifles ready for whatever trouble there was.

There was only blood on the grass where the first man had fallen. He had slipped off into the tall grass and brush, and had no doubt got to his horse and away. One of the others was also gone, but he was hurting - I'd lay a bit of money on that. The last man I'd kicked into the brush looked as if he'd been fighting a couple of porcupines. His face was a sight, scratched and bloody like nothing a body ever saw.

"You near broke my back!" he complained. "What sort of way is that to do a man up?"

"You'd rather get shot?"

He looked at me. "I reckon not," he said dryly, "if given the choice."

"You're a Burshill by the look of you," I said.

"I'm Trent Burshill, cousin to the Fetchens."

"You might be in better comp'ny. But I know your outfit. You folks have been making 'shine back in the hills since before Noah."

"Nigh to a hunert years," he said proudly. "No Burshill of my line never paid no tax on whiskey."

"You should have stayed back there. You aren't going to cut the mustard in these western lands. Now you've mixed up in rustling."

"You got it to prove."

Kyle Shore looked hard at him. "Friend, you'd best learn. Out here they hold court in the saddle and execute the sentence with a saddle rope."

"You fixin' to hang me?"

"Dunno," Shore said, straight-faced. "It depends on Mr. Hawkes. If he sees fit to hang you, that's what we'll do."

Trent Burshill looked pretty unhappy. "I never counted on that," he said. "Seemed like this was wide-open land where a man could do as he liked."

"As long as you don't interfere with no other man," Shore said. "Western folks look down on that. And they've got no time to be ridin' to court, maybe a hundred miles, just to hang a cow thief. A cottonwood limb works better."

Trent Burshill looked thoughtful. "Should be a way of settling this," he said. "Sure, I lined up with Black, him being my cousin an' all."

"Where's Black headed for?" I asked.

He glanced around at me. "You're one of them Tennessee Sacketts. I heard tell of you. Why, he's headed for the Greenhorns - some mountains westward. He's got him some idea about them."

Burshill looked at me straight. "He aims to do you in, Sackett. Was I you, I'd be travelin' east, not west."

The rest of the outfit were trailing into the bottom now with the herd. I spotted a thick limb overhead. "There's a proper branch," I said. "Maybe we ought to tie his hands, put the noose over his neck, and leave him in his saddle. Give him a chance to see how long his horse would stand without moving."