Talon & Chantry 07 - North To The Rails (v5.0) (7 page)

“You’re carryin’ some bruises. Did you get throwed?”

“No. Because I wasn’t anxious to shoot, a man named Koch questioned my courage. We had a bit of a go-around. I whipped him.”

He drank his beer. The conversation along the bar began again, and Chantry asked McCarthy, “Did you ever run across a Pawnee named Sun Chief?”

“Uh-huh. Good man. He was one of Major North’s Pawnee scouts. Got wounded and had to drop out. Heard he was up and around again.”

“I hired him to scout the trail for me, the trail to the railhead.”

“You takin’ on anybody else? I’m rustlin’ work.”

Tom Chantry drained his glass. “McCarthy, you heard my story. I’m not a man who believes in guns, and there are some who think I’m yellow. You still want to join me?”

McCarthy shrugged. “Every man’s entitled to think the way he chooses, the way I see it. I think you’re wrong, and I think the time’ll come when you’ll pay for it. What you’re sayin’ is that I got to take my own chances that you’d back me up in a tight spot, ain’t that it?”

Chantry felt anger stir within him, and with it a feeling of resentment. Why could things never be simple? Yet, what would he do if it came to that? Supposing he was caught in a situation where he must fight or die? Or worse still, where he must fight or one of his men would die?

“You’d have to gamble on it, McCarthy,” he said. “I believe a lot more can be done by reason than by guns.”

“All right. You trust to reason,” McCarthy said, “but you won’t mind if I wear my guns, will you?”

“As you like. I’m not a reformer.”

McCarthy lifted his beer. “Luck,” he said. “You’re sure a-goin’ to need it.”

He ordered another beer. “This’ll have to be the last,” he said. “I ain’t carryin’ any more money.” When the beer arrived he said, “Now that I’m workin’ for you, what do I do?”

“Bring your beer along,” Chantry suggested, “and we’ll sit over there at the table. I’m going to order us a couple of dinners and you’re going to tell me every way you can think of that Williams might use to drive me off the herd.”

For an hour they talked. Bone McCarthy was a cool, knowledgeable man with much experience on cattle drives and roundups. He ran through the possible ruses, one by one. Bad horses, Indian scares, maybe a rattlesnake in the bed. “He may even have put Koch up to jumpin’ you. It’s the sort of thing he might do.”

After a while McCarthy was silent, but he seemed to have something on his mind that he hesitated to say.

“What is it?” Chantry asked.

Bone looked up at him, then filled both their coffee cups. “You know damn well what he’ll do, Chantry. He’ll have somebody brace you with a gun. He’ll catch you when you’re armed, and you’ll have no excuse.”

“I simply won’t shoot.”

Bone stared at him. “You don’t seem to read the sign,” he said. “If you don’t shoot, he’ll kill you…whoever French Williams gets to bully you into a fight. It won’t matter one damn what you do, whether you drop your gun or whatever, he’ll shoot, and shoot to kill.”

“He’d kill me for that herd?”

“You must be dreamin’, man. Of course he will. He’d kill his whole outfit for that herd. Right now I’d say the odds are a hundred to one against you makin’ the next fifty miles.”

They stopped talking then, but Tom Chantry considered the matter. French Williams was a known thief. He had killed men. He might offer an appearance of fair play for the look of the thing, but Bone was sure to be right. Somebody who rode with them would challenge him, and at his first move, would shoot and shoot to kill…any move Chantry made would be construed as a move for a gun—a move to shoot.

The only thing he could do was avoid carrying any weapon at all. He said as much.

McCarthy shrugged. “Worse comes to worst, they’ll get you out on the grass somewheres, shoot you, and plant a gun on you. It’s been done.”

He looked hard at Chantry. “Can you shoot? I mean, did you ever use a gun?”

“I can shoot. I’ve hunted a lot.”

“How about with a hand gun?”

“Yes. I’ve used one.”

“Can you draw? I mean, can you get a gun out of your holster without dropping it?”

“Yes. My father showed me when I was a youngster. He had me practice. But I never liked it.”

“Just get it out, and no matter what he does, even if you get hit, you level that gun and shoot. Take your time, but make that first shot count. You may never get another one.”

“There’s no use to talk of it. I won’t be carrying a gun.”

“Well, in case you change your mind, you make that first one do the job. I’ve seen many a fast-draw artist who got his gun out quicker’n scat, an’ then put his first bullet right out in the dust betwixt ’em, an’ never got another shot.”

Chantry pushed back from the table. “Here’s what I want you to do.” He put a twenty-dollar gold piece on the table. “Get yourself some grub, and then you keep an eye on the herd. You see whatever goes on, but you keep out of sight. If anything happens that you think I ought to know, you get in touch with me. I’ll be riding out from the herd every day.”

“All right.” Bone McCarthy stood up.

“You watch yourself, do you hear?”

T
HE TAWNY PLAINS swept away in all directions, a gently rolling stretch of grama and buffalo grass with patches of greasewood; over some of the higher levels the plain was dotted with Spanish bayonet, or yucca. Far off, the moving black mass of a small herd of buffalo showed against a brown slope, and in a gully the stark white of scattered bones.

The herd was behind him again and he rode warily, without his rifle, carrying only the bowie knife he carried for work around the camp, or casual use. His eyes swept the horizon, hesitating here and there…but nothing moved.

The dust held no tracks, and when he came up to the river bed he saw that it was dry and cracked into plate-sized slabs of gray mud, baked and crisp.

No water.

Chantry mopped the sweat from his face and squinted his eyes against the sun. It was mid-afternoon, and the herd had been without water since daybreak…there had been an expectation of water at this place.

French Williams had mentioned casually, in an offhand manner that they would water here. Had he known the creek was dry? Chantry suspected it, but had no way of knowing.

It was twenty miles to the next water, which meant a dry camp tonight, with a parched and restless herd, hard to hold. He glanced at the sun. Had they swung farther west? Williams was pointing the herd now. This morning it had been Koch.

Williams knew far more about the ways of cattle on a drive than Chantry would ever know, and he had driven over this country before…whether by this route or not, Chantry did not know. Undoubtedly the man had a plan of operation, and was not proceeding in a haphazard manner. He was a cool head, seemingly reckless and careless, but Chantry had quickly divined that the gunman was basically cautious.

He scanned the horizon again. Here at the river bank there was a little brush, and further away there were trees. Turning his horse down the dry watercourse, he walked it slowly toward the trees. There might be water down there, some isolated pool where he could at least water his horse.

Even while his senses were alert to the surroundings, he was considering his problem. He now had two assets in Sun Chief and Bone McCarthy, neither of them known to French Williams. But his greatest asset was the fact that French Williams underrated him, considered him a tenderfoot. He on his part was aware that Williams was a dangerous and treacherous adversary. That is, he knew from his own guesses and from what McCarthy had said, and it was enough to make him cautious.

Tall cottonwoods suddenly loomed ahead and the watercourse was so narrow that he could no longer proceed. Ahead of him it narrowed into a rocky channel, impassable for a horse, and fell off sharply into a canyon.

He rode up the bank and into the trees. There, in their dappling shade, he paused to listen.

The cottonwoods rustled, somewhere a crow cawed into the hot afternoon, and then he heard a low murmur, followed by a faint clink, as of metal on metal.

Dismounting, he tied his horse with a slipknot, and walked cautiously forward, moving from tree to tree. Back in the East he had often stalked game in the woods, and he knew how to move quietly.

Suddenly the ground dropped away before him and he was looking into a small, grassy park scattered with cottonwoods, with willows growing along the stream-bed. Near the edge of the willows two men sprawled lazily near a dying fire. They were too far off to identify them, but he had no need, for their horses were grazing nearby, and one of them was the horse he had ridden out of Las Vegas.

The Talrim boys! Hank and Bud Talrim, who had taken his horse at gun point.

He drew back, and carefully made his way to his horse. Mounting, he rode back the way he had come.

What were the Talrim boys doing
here?

Of course, they might have gone anywhere. But they were escaping from the law, and one would imagine they would keep on running. Instead, they had for some reason circled back and were now here, close by his herd.

Curious, he rode back to the herd, switched his saddle to his other horse, and rode out again. Glancing back, he saw Williams staring after him, but he rode ahead directly east from the herd, cutting for sign. He had gone only three miles when he found it—the tracks of two riders, tracks not many hours old, and one set was the tracks of his own horse.

All right. So they had come up from the south, but that was necessary, for when he had met them they were heading south. He back-tracked them for several miles on a route parallel to the herd. On at least one occasion they had ridden high enough on a low hill to look over and watch the herd.

In itself, that meant nothing. They could have heard the lowing of the cattle and simply come to take a look. On the other hand, it was worth thinking about. Was it simply coincidence?

He had to remember that French Williams had gone to the trouble of locating and hiring Dutch Akin. Had he somehow gotten in touch with the Talrim boys? Were they to be his ace in the hole?

They were known murderers…wanted men. Would they kill for hire? They would. They would even kill simply to kill.

He swung his horse from their trail and started back to the drive.

For the first time he found himself wanting a gun. He was a fool, he told himself. With such men as the Talrims one did not reason. One did not sit down and discuss their mutual problems, because there were none. These men were killers.

This was a different land from the East, ruled by a different set of principles. The circumstances and conditions were different; it was a land to which law had not yet come, nor the restraints that society can exercise upon its members.

Heretofore he had been protected, one man of many who were protected by law, by the pressures of society, by fear of retribution. He had not had to fear, for other men stood between him and danger, but here there were no such men. A man was expected to stand on his own feet, to protect himself.

He was realizing how cheap are the principles for which we do not have to fight, how easy it is to establish codes when all the while our freedom to talk had been fought for and bled for by others.

Tom Chantry was no fool. He had won his battle with Dutch Akin by restraint and reason, but he was wise enough to know that neither of these would prevail against such men as the Talrim boys. Reason or restraint would seem weakness to them, and they were the kind to strike quickly when they discovered weakness. They had been quick to take his horse when they discovered he did not carry a gun, and they had shot at him, almost casually, as an afterthought, not caring greatly whether they killed or not.

He looked off in the direction in which his cattle had gone, then touched his spur lightly to his horse’s ribs. He would go back. It was time. There were decisions to be made.

Chapter 8

T
HE CATTLE MOVED north with the rising of the sun, stirring the dust across the short-grass prairies, blue grama with occasional patches of little bluestem and curly-leaved sedge, and on some slopes a scattering of prickly pear. The cattle moved slowly, grazing as they walked, and Tom Chantry rode the drag, considering his problem.

Dutch Akin switched horses and rode back to join him, lifting a hand as he passed, hitching his bandana over his nose to keep out the dust.

It was very hot. McKay went by, circling to bring a bunch-quitter back to the drive. When he had driven the steer where he belonged he dropped back, riding beside Chantry.

They had fallen back to be clear of some of the dust and to keep an eye on any laggards that might cut out for the flanks.

“Quite a whippin’ you gave Koch,” McKay commented, “an’ he had it comin’.”

“There’s a difference,” Chantry said, “between a man who doesn’t want to kill anybody and a man who’s afraid. He just wasn’t reading the sign right.”

“You be careful,” McKay said. “He’s been talkin’ that it ain’t over.”

At the nooning Chantry rode in to switch horses, and got his saddle on the little buckskin that was one of the horses allotted for him to ride. He planned to scout wide of the herd that day, as he went to the wagon for his rifle.

As he stepped up to the wagon he heard Koch grumbling about something nearby, then heard his voice suddenly grow quiet. He read nothing into it, but had just drawn his rifle clear of the wagon when Koch said, “All right, you blasted tenderfoot! Now you got a gun, turn an’ start shootin’.”

The rifle barrel was in Tom’s left hand, which gripped it close to the fore-sight. Koch was not more than a dozen feet from him, and Tom wheeled sharply, swinging the rifle. As he came around he let it go, sending it flying toward the big man’s face.

Koch ducked and Tom Chantry lunged at him. The big man staggered, caught his balance and swung the gun around, but it went off of itself before he brought it into line. With the smashing report the cattle suddenly lunged and were running.

Chantry hit Koch with his shoulder, knocked him sprawling, then fell on him, knees in the big man’s belly. Without moving a knee, Chantry swung two hard punches at his face. Then he leaped back and, as Koch started to rise, smashed him in the face with his knee.