The Half Breed (15 page)

The Kid shoved Joe to one side but did not holster his gun. Jesse saw his brother released and relaxed his hold, the knife moved away from Betty’s neck. It was what she’d been waiting for. Back lashed her right foot, the Kelly spur driving into Jesse’s shin and bringing a wild yell of pain from him. His grip relaxed and Betty’s hands shot up to catch the arm which was round her shoulders. She gripped it and heaved Jesse felt his feet leave the floor, the room whirled around and he landed with a crash on the hard boards. His Colt had fallen from his holster and he grabbed for it. Something cold touched his cheek; he turned his head into the muzzle of a short barrelled Merwin & Hulbert revolver in Betty’s right hand.

‘I’ve had it all the time, Jesse,’ she said. ‘You’ve heard tell of a shoulder clip, I reckon. You would have if you’d tried to touch me.’

Joe clawed at his gun, then froze as he saw the Kid’s Dragoon lined on him. Feet thudded on the porch and two men came in. Joe’s grin died as he saw the men were strangers. He looked at the marshal’s badge on Chris Madsen’s vest, and the gun in Eph’s hand. They’d been two of the ‘drunks’ lying over Ben, Sam and Jube’s saddles; the third ‘man’ was on the rear horse, a roll of blankets with a hat fastened to it.

The Kid grinned at Betty. She’d sand to burn, that girl. Old Tommy Okasi’s wrestling throws served Betty as well as they did Dusty Fog, when needed. The Kid stepped forward to kick Jesse’s gun into the corner and saw Betty staring at Eph.

‘Heavens to Betsy!’ gasped Betty, recognition showing on her face. ‘It’s Sa—’

Quickly the Kid gave Betty an ungentlemanly nudge in the ribs which ended her words. ‘This here’s Eph Tenor, Betty gal,’ he said pointedly, then lowered his voice. ‘I know him, you know him, and Chris knows him. But Chris don’t want it known he’s been riding with Sam Bass for a day and never arrested him.’

Betty smiled; the sort of smile which would have melted a miser’s heart but did not fool the Ysabel Kid. Betty Hardin was getting set to charm her way. She felt sorry for the five young outlaws and knew that Chris Madsen took his prisoners for trial to Fort Smith, where the notorious Judge Parker, the Hanging Judge, presided. If Jesse and his gang came for trial before Parker, they would be lucky to get away with their lives and they did not deserve death, or a brutal sentence of imprisonment.

‘I suppose you’ll be taking them to Fort Smith, marshal,’ Betty said and the Kid watched her, a grin coming to his face.

‘Sure, Miss Hardin,’ agreed Madsen. ‘I doubt if they’ll bother you again.’

‘Couldn’t they be tried in the county where they did the holdup?’ she asked.

‘Could be. I suppose they could be put for trial locally but I’m supposed to take them to the Fort,’

Now Jesse was looking scared; realizing for the first time the consequences of being an outlaw. He and Joe looked so pathetic that Betty knew she must save them from Judge Parker.

Putting on a manner which would charm a bird out of a tree Betty smiled at Madsen. ‘You couldn’t do me a small favour?’

‘I don’t know as I could, ma’am. They need teaching a lesson and . . .’

The Ysabel Kid’s grin expanded. He knew how Betty Hardin operated, the trap was going to spring closed on Madsen.

‘I was just thinking,’ said Betty innocently, ‘how folks would laugh if they heard the United States Marshal, Chris Madsen, was riding for a full day with Sa—, Eph Tenor, and didn’t recognize him. Of course none of us would want it to get out, but I declare that at times I just talk and talk.’

‘All right,’ Madsen answered, giving up, as so many other men did when opposing Betty Hardin’s will. ‘I’ll hand them over to the local law and let them do the trying. Did they treat you all right?’

‘Like perfect gentlemen,’ replied Betty and Jesse looked relieved. The girl turned to the Ysabel Kid and went on. ‘Where’s Cousin Dusty and Mark?’

‘They stopped on in Mulrooney,’ said the Kid, trying to hold his face immobile but knowing she could read his thoughts.

‘Did they?’ asked Betty thoughtfully. ‘Come on, Loncey Dalton Ysabel, tell me all about it!’

The Kid tried to avoid telling Betty his guilty secret but half way back to the town, riding well behind the others so only Betty could hear, the story came out.

Up in Mulrooney a good friend’s wife produced her first son and Dusty Fog, Mark Counter and the Ysabel Kid found themselves roped in for the christening. Then came the trouble. The friend’s wife came from one of the more sober families of the town and cowhand clothes would definitely not be worn for such an important occasion. Dusty and Mark were used to wearing suits, town clothes, buttoned collars and ties. Mark, the Kid suspected, even liked wearing such clothes at times and Dusty accepted them. The breaking point came when the Kid found he was also expected to wear the rig. He spent a sleepless night trying to think of a way to avoid the indignity and decided on flight.

‘Any ways,’ he finished defiantly. ‘Happen I hadn’t done it there wouldn’t have been any of us at Bent’s Ford to come help you.’

* * *

It was the following morning. Outside the small town’s saloon Chris Madsen and the constable were preparing to escort the outlaws to the county seat for trial. Madsen turned to Betty Hardin, the Ysabel Kid and Eph Tenor standing on the porch, their horses ready to take them to Bent’s Ford.

‘Was I you, Eph,’ Madsen said, holding his hand out towards the Texan. ‘I’d forget about . . . horse-racing . . . in the Nations. It wouldn’t be safe at all. It’s not the hoss race season and we wouldn’t want to take folks away from their daily labours to start racing with you.’

‘You could be right at that,’ grinned Eph in reply. ‘I’ll maybe see you again some time, Chris.’

‘I hope not,’ replied Madsen, smiling back. ‘Not professionally, any ways.’

Betty watched the marshal’s party riding out of the town, then she turned to the man they’d been calling Eph Tenor.

‘Sam Bass,’ she said, ‘if you’re not the living end. Riding with a United States marshal and acting all friendly like. Wasn’t he fixing to arrest you?’

‘Why sure,’ agreed the Texas outlaw, grinning broader than ever. ‘I tell you, Miss Hardin, it’s fit to turn a Texas boy honest the way that man never forgets a face or a description. Sure, I allow he’d have arrested me, or tried.’

‘And you still stopped that
hombre
back-shooting Chris?’ remarked the Kid.

‘Surely so, Lon,’ replied Sam Bass. ‘You never know when we might want another tenor for a quartet.’

SOME KNOWLEDGE OF THE KNIFE

THE buzzards circled on wide-spread wings, swooping and whirling high in the sky. Twice they began a descent, only to rise again: unable to take the chance of landing by the still form which lay on the sand in the centre of the dried up stream.

Finally the black birds took the chance and started a circular glide towards the earth, then with frantically beating wings fought back into the air. They went higher and higher their powerful vision seeing the man who came riding along a trail through the woods, headed for the stream bed.

The Ysabel Kid rode easily in the double girthed saddle of his huge white stallion. He looked relaxed but was alert and watchful. It was a normal condition with the Kid, for he’d learned early a man must keep alert if he wanted to stay alive. His eyes picked up the circling buzzards but he thought little of the whirling birds. They were not unusual; the buzzard was part of the range country scavenger corps, picking the flesh from the bones of dead animals.

Only this time it was not an animal which lay dead.

The Kid brought his horse to a halt as he left the trees and saw the body lying on the sand. He reached down and drew the Winchester rifle from his saddle-boot before he dismounted. The man was dead but there was need for caution. The death was neither natural, nor suicide as the knife hilt sticking from the centre of the black broadcloth coat showed. It was murder and the murderer might still be lurking around, ready to take exception to anyone showing an interest in the body.

The woods around the Kid were still and only the faint noises of birds or small creatures came to his keen ears. He motioned to the big horse to stay where it was and advanced cautiously towards the body.

The woods widened out here to what must have been a river but was now dry, a gash of yellow sand running through the green of the wooded country. Here might once have been a ford almost a hundred yards across. The body lay half-way out, face down, stiff and still.

Just as he was about to step on the sand the Kid halted. His eyes went to the sign on the ground. The place was a regular crossing and well marked with a variety of tracks but the Kid saw immediately that there was only one recent set; they were old and blurred, except the prints of a big, well made horse. That was the horse the dead man must have rode. The Kid kept well clear of the sign, a purely natural instinct to avoid spoiling it!

When he reached the body the Kid was pleased he’d kept clear. He stopped and looked around him, trying to make out what had happened. By the side of the body were marks where the big horse had suddenly reared, the dead man falling from the saddle and rolling to lay as he now did. There were tracks where the horse had run on again, but nothing more. There was neither hoof nor foot prints to show how the knife came to be there. Just the bare sand, the one set of tracks and the old marks, nothing more.

The Ysabel Kid could read sign and there were few with his skill. This sign was all wrong; that, the Kid knew. He looked down at the body. In life he’d been big, well dressed, white haired man, a man the Kid could remember. He did not need to turn the body over to know that here lay the person Ole Devil Hardin had sent him to help! It looked like the help was a mite late in coming.

‘Sorry, Judge,’ he said gently. ‘I come as soon as we got word.’

Bending down the Kid examined the tracks of the dead man’s horse, paying careful attention to their depth. What he found out made him even more puzzled and he straightened up to look back towards his horse. It was all of fifty yards away. The Kid shook his head and turned to bend over the body, his eyes on the hilt of the knife. It was a style he’d never seen before and he knew quite a bit about knives and knife-fighters. The hilt was round, smooth and without any guard. What the blade was like the Kid could not tell for it was buried out of sight in the back of the coat.

The big white horse snorted, throwing back its head and moving restlessly. The Kid looked up, lifting his rifle slightly, ready to throw it to his shoulder as he saw three riders approaching from the open land on the other side of the sand. The Kid stood tense and watchful, looking more Indian than white as he prepared to hunt cover and fight for his life. Then he relaxed and rested the rifle barrel on his shoulder. He removed his low crowned, wide brimmed black Stetson and waved it to attract the attention of the men, then walked to the edge of the sand to meet them.

They were three Texas cowhands, two tall, one shorter. Tanned, efficient-looking men whose range clothes showed they were competent workers. They all wore a gunbelt, but none showed them as being real fast hands. The Kid knew their type. Loyal, hard-working, hard-playing men. Right now there was no levity in their expressions, only cold suspicion for they recognized their boss. The smaller man was looking hard at the Kid, his hand hanging by his side; the other two riders dropped their palms to the grips of their Colts.

‘You’d best hold the hosses here, gents,’ said the Kid, not moving his rifle from his shoulder. ‘No sense in spoiling the sign for when the sheriff comes.’

The three men looked down at the Indian dark young man and read the signs as well as the Kid. Here was a man, hard and tough, despite his innocent-looking, young face. That rifle was pointed harmlessly to the sky, but it could be brought into action easily enough, as could the old Dragoon Colt which was butt forward at his right side.

‘That’s Judge Hurley there,’ one of the taller men growled.

‘Sure,’ agreed the Kid.

‘He dead, Kid?’grunted the small man.

The Ysabel Kid felt relieved that Carney Lee recognized him. The small man was the Judge’s foreman; had been even in the days when the Kid’s father, Sam Ysabel, ran contraband on the Rio Grande and found the Judge a very good customer. That was several years back and the Kid wondered if he’d changed much. Lee could have replied to that question.

‘He’s dead,’ agreed the Kid. ‘Light down and take a look.’ The two cowhands glanced at their foreman. He knew this dangerous-looking young Texan but they were not entirely satisfied. Carney Lee swung from his horse and, as the other two dismounted, introduced them as Joe and Noisy. They walked across the sand and Carney Lee’s eyes flickered to the ground. Then his brow furrowed in a scowl and he looked even harder.

Halting by the body Joe, slightly the taller of the two cowhands, scratched his stubby jaw, spat and growled. ‘That greaser’s got him at last.’

‘How?’ asked the Kid mildly.

‘How?’ snorted Noisy, a gangling, bearded man who rarely said much at all. His eyes went to the sign, then bugged out as they read the message of the marks in the sand. ‘Hell yes! How?’

‘Throwed it in!’ suggested Joe, also reading the sign and drawing the too-obvious conclusion.

‘Throwed it in . . . all of fifty yards?’ said the Kid, indicating the sign. ‘That’d be some throw. I don’t reckon even ole Jim Bowie himself could have made it.’

‘You boys likely heard of the Ysabel Kid,’ Carney Lee remarked casually as Joe opened his mouth to growl some reply.

The change in the two men was instant. The suspicion left them and they both grinned amiably. The Kid was well known. He was regarded by them as a wild young heller who would not hesitate to bend the law if he thought there was need for such action. He was also known as a reader of sign who had few if any peers and as a man who could handle and throw his knife as well as the old Texas master, James Bowie.

‘Noisy,’ growled Carney Lee. ‘You head for Tasselton. Watch how you cross the ford here, don’t mess up the sign. And watch how you pass the Kid’s hoss, happen you don’t want a leg chewed off, Joe, you go back to the herd and bring young Jed Hurley back with you. I’ll stay on here with the Kid and wait for you to get back.’

The men obeyed without question. Noisy brought his horse across the sand, keeping clear of the sign and avoiding the Kid’s big white stallion which watched him with malevolent eyes. The other man went to his horse, mounted and headed back in the direction they’d come.

Returning to his horse, the Kid loosed the girths and removed the bridle. Carney Lee joined him after attending to his own, then rolled a smoke and offered one to the Kid.

‘Ole Devil sent you along?’

‘Soon as he heard from the Judge. Looks like I came too late. You’d best tell me what it’s all about. I reckon your hand meant Don Miguel when he said the greaser Him and the Judge still feuding?’

‘As ever they was. That’s not what the Judge wanted you along for, Mig wouldn’t steal nothing and the Judge knowed it,’ Lee replied. ‘Judge wanted you along to try and help us get whoever it is that’s rustling our stock and tried to kill him.’

‘That’s what the letter said,’ agreed the Kid. ‘How come you boys were out this way?’

‘We’re working a herd, branding and earmarking some of them for shipment. Saw the Judge’s horse coming and took to looking.’

That was to be expected. A man afoot on the range was in bad trouble and a riderless horse was always cause for concern. The hands would come out looking for him as soon as they saw their boss’s horse. The Kid found nothing unusual in Lee’s reply; it was as he’d expected. But there was a lot he wanted to know about the conditions prevailing on this stretch of range. All he knew at the moment was that he’d received an order from Ole Devil Hardin to come to Tasselton County and lend Judge Hurley a hand with some rustler trouble. Now it appeared there was more than just rustler trouble involved.

‘You’d best tell me about it, Carney,’ he suggested.

‘Ain’t much to tell,’ replied the other man. ‘It happened on us all of a sudden at the end of the spring round-up. We’d lost nearly three thousand head over the last year.’

The Kid gave a low whistle. That was rustling on a grand scale; three thousand head of cattle would take a fair amount of handling. To take so many in a bunch would need at least eighteen men. A full scale round-up would be necessary to gather them in. Even on the vast open ranges of Texas such a thing could not be done in secret.

‘Must have been a steady going on for some time,’ remarked the Kid. ‘How about your crew, they all saints?’

‘The regular boys are,’ Carney answered, a saint meant a cowhand who would not work in with the rustlers. ‘But you know how it is, a man can’t keep a full crew these days, has to use regulars in the trail drives and take on what he can. I’d trust Noisy, Joe and maybe three of the others and the rest never gave me no call not to trust them.’

‘Don Miguel been losing much?’

‘Not according to Alarez, I went over to hold a foreman’s jawing session with him a couple of days backs Alarez allows they turned up a couple of our steers which’d been hairbranded.’

‘Which same means that some of your round-up crew were working in with the rustlers,’ the Kid pointed out. ‘The branders’d have to be, and your tally man might have something to do with it.’

‘Brander might. I was using Noisy and a new man, real good man with an iron. Not the tally man. It was Judge Hurley’s nephew.’

‘I never knew he had one,’ the Kid remarked. He knew that it was possible for a man who was really skilled, to hair-brand a steer while the round-up was in progress. Burning the brand on the animal’s hair without touching the hide, so that when the hair grew out the brand would go with it. It would be no use doing so unless the tally man, recording the amount of cattle handled, worked with him.

‘How long’s this nephew been with the Judge?’

‘Come out just afore the round-up. You know the Judge war’n much of a hand at paper work. Had him that young dude, Jeff Dawson, to handle that sort of work for him most of the time. Then he heard from the nephew, a sister the Judge’d near on forgot about’s son. Was satisfied the boy really was kin and, having none of his own, sent for the boy to come,’ replied Lee, knowing the Kid needed to know the local set up. ‘Jeff didn’t cotton none to the idea, not when the Judge told him that young Hughie, him being the nephew, would be taking over the book wrangling. Judge was fair enough about it, told Jeff he could stay on as a hand at the same pay as he was pulling down as book-keeper.’

‘It’d have been this Dawson who’d be tally man, happen the Judge’s nephew hadn’t come out,’ remarked the Kid thoughtfully. ‘How about the Judge saying there was a try at killing him?’

‘Sure, was at that. Somebody took a shot at him as he was working in his office. Must have come through the window, the bullet. He was in the room on his own. Would have been killed but he dropped something and bent to pick it up just as the shot came. We made us a search all round, but couldn’t find nothing. I checked all the hands’ guns but warn’t none of them just been fired.’

‘The bullet come through the window? Bust it?’

‘Nope, you know how the Judge liked to have the windows open, allowed the scent of the mesquite helped him think.’

‘What was the Judge doing?’

‘Writing a letter to his nephew, telling him to come on out. When Hughie come he showed he was smart as a whip, for a dude. He’d been learning about book-keeping at this fancy Eastern college and took to tally-taking like the devil takes after a yearling. Only had Jeff help him out for half a day.’

‘There’s been any hard talk about Mig not losing stock?’ asked the Kid, his eyes going to the still form on the ground.

‘Some, you know what these hot-heads are.’

‘Where’d the Judge been; where was he coming back from?’

‘Tasselton. He went in last night, never said a word to any of us about what he was fixing to do.’

‘Strange looking knife that,’ the Kid drawled, stubbing his cigarette butt out. ‘I never saw one quite like it.’

With that he walked across the sand towards the body and Carney Lee followed him. They halted by the body and stood looking at it. The Kid’s attention was on the knife hilt. For the first time he noticed it was a dull black colour with the end charred as if it had been lying near a fire. Dropping his hand the Kid touched the hilt with his finger, and saw a small black smudge on the tip. Then he studied the angle at which the knife had entered the back, rose and stepped carefully astride the tracks of the Judge’s horse and looked back over his shoulder.