The Railroad War (3 page)

Jessie strained her eyes into the night's black gloom, which was lighted only by starshine. Beside the corral, the figure of a crouching man slowly took form. The darkness was too deep for her to distinguish anything except his figure, but she caught the glint of starshine reflected from the polished blue metal of the long-barreled gun in his hands.

“Be careful, Ki,” she breathed softly. “That might be a shotgun he's holding.”

“I can see it,” Ki replied. “It's a rifle. They're here on some kind of dirty business, all right, and they're not horse thieves, or they'd have the corral opened by now.”

“Do you see the other two?” Jessie asked.

“No, but—” Ki broke off as the man at the corner of the corral started moving toward the house.

“Where could they have gone?” Jessie frowned. “Unless the others are behind the house.”

“They probably are,” Ki replied. “Looking for a back door or an open window.”

Neither Ki nor Jessie thought of rousing the men sleeping in the bunkhouse. Both of them had reached the same conclusion at the same time as soon as they realized the intruders were making the house their target.

“We'd better—” Jessie began.

“Yes,” Ki broke in. Like Jessie, he kept his eyes on the moving man while he spoke. “I'll reduce the odds against us by keeping this one from joining his friends. But I don't want to make any noise, so I can't risk getting close enough to use my
bo
.”

Ki stepped off the veranda, taking a
shuriken
from his jacket pocket as he moved. In the black jacket and trousers he wore, he was an almost invisible shadow in the blackness, and his rope-soled slippers made only the faintest whisper of sound as he started toward the prowler.

Jessie followed Ki down the steps and stood watching. She released the safety of the Winchester she was holding ready. The well-oiled mechanism made a metallic click that would have been inaudible only a few paces away.

She watched as Ki angled in the direction of the corral to intercept the intruder, and saw the bright polished metal of the
shuriken
glinting in the starlight as it whirled silently and swiftly to its target. The prowler's breath rushed from his lungs in a strangled gasp when the razor-keen edges of the star-pointed throwing disc sliced into his throat. Then, as he involuntarily raised his hands to grasp the silent weapon that was draining away his life's blood, the man let his rifle fall.

A shout sounded from behind the ranch house when the gun hit the hard ground with a night-shattering clatter. Jessie started running along the front of the house, toward Ki. Boot soles gritted on the sunbaked soil, and almost instantly gunfire blasted away the night's silence as a dark figure rushed from behind the end of the veranda and let off a shot at Ki.

Ki had anticipated the counterattack. He hit the ground as soon as he heard the man begin moving, and was rolling toward Jessie, a dark streak against the light earth, when she brought up her rifle and returned the prowler's fire.

Jessie aim was better than the intruder's had been. The dark figure crumpled to the ground, a rifle falling from his lifeless hands and thudding to the earth as the gun and the man who'd fired it dropped at the same time.

A moment of silence passed, then the noise of more running footsteps from behind the house broke the already shattered stillness. Ki was on his feet by now, and Jessie's movement had brought her to within a yard of him.

“That's the third man!” Ki said. “Quick, Jessie! If we 14 can take him alive, maybe we can get some answers out of him!”

They rounded the edge of the veranda, straining their eyes to pierce the shrouding darkness. Jessie saw the running man first. He'd evidently started running when he saw the second of his two companions fall, and had taken a course that took him away from the house at an angle.

He had already covered enough distance to take him out of reach of Ki's
shuriken.
Jessie hesitated, holding her fire momentarily, waiting for Ki to launch one of his throwing blades. Ki made no move, and Jessie realized that the time for silence had ended with her first shot, but by then the fleeing intruder was a dim shadow in the distance. She brought up the Winchester and fired, but the thudding of the running man's footsteps did not falter. When she tried to get him in her sights again, he'd vanished in the en-shrouding night.

“I'm sorry, Ki,” she said. “I should have shot sooner.”

“No. I shouldn't have thought about trying to take him alive. What I said threw you off.”

To Jessie and Ki, the fracas with the prowlers had seemed to last a long time, but actually less than two minutes had passed since the first shot broke the night's quiet, and a light was just now showing through the bunkhouse windows. The door burst open a few moments after Jessie's last shot sounded, and the men of the Circle Star came roiling out.

Only one or two of the last to emerge had taken time to pull on boots or jeans; most of the men wore only their long underwear. Ed Wright and the others who came out first had not even stopped to jam their feet into their boots, Those who were bootless ran two or three steps, slowed down when the rough ground began to hurt their bare feet, and stopped when they recognized Jessie and Ki, and heard no more shooting.

Wright held a lantern in his left hand, but the Colt he gripped in his right hand had kept him from lighting it. The other cowhands also carried either revolvers or rifles. They stood in a ragged group at the edge of the area of yellow lamplight that seeped through the open door of the bunkhouse, peering into the darkness beyond Ki and Jessie, looking for a target.

“It's all over, Ed!” Jessie called. “Your boys won't need those guns.”

Wright answered with a question. “You and Ki are both all right, ain't you?” He handed the lantern to one of the men who had on both jeans and boots. “Here. Light it.”

“Neither of us got a scratch, Ed,” Ki replied.

“What in Sam Hill started the fracas?” Wright asked.

“Jessie was looking out the window and saw a man prowling around the corral,” Ki told the foreman. “She called to me and we came out to investigate. The rest of it just
happened
.”

By this time the hand with the lantern had struck a match and touched it to the wick. He held it up, and its wide circle of illumination showed the body of the intruder who'd fallen nearest the corral.

“There's one of ‘em, on the ground there!” the cowhand holding the lantern called out.

“There was three shots,” another of the men said. “Was this dead hombre the only one you-all seen?”

“No. There were two more,” Jessie replied. “One of them is lying just past the corner of the house. The third one got away.”

“You want us to saddle up and take after him, Miss Jessie?” Wright asked.

Jessie shook her head. “Trying to follow him in the dark would be time wasted, Ed. I'm sure he had a horse close by.”

“Horse thieves, you guess?” the foreman frowned.

Ki answered him. “They could've been, Ed. We didn't stop to ask them. We knew they weren't any of your boys, so we didn't hesitate to go after them.”

“Sure.” The foreman nodded. “They're bound to've been up to something crooked. Honest men would've knocked and said what their business was.”

“Your men can clean things up, Ed,” Jessie told Wright. “I'll leave that up to you.”

“No use putting if off,” Wright said. He looked around at the hands. “Big Bill, you take the boys who've got their boots on and move the bodies down behind the corral. We'll wait till it's daylight to do the burying.” He turned back to Jessie and went on, “If you don't mind, I'm going back and put on my boots and jeans. This rough ground sorta bites into a man's feet.”

“I'll go along with the men and take a look at the bodies,” Ki told Jessie. “Do you want to come along?”

She shook her head. “No. I'm sure we've never seen them before. I'll wait at the house.”

Led by the lantern-bearer, the three other men who wore boots started toward the nearest corpse. Ki joined them. He hunkered down beside the dead man and studied his face. As he'd expected, it was strange to him.

“Have any of you ever seen him before?” he asked.

One by one, the quartet of cowhands disclaimed any knowledge of the corpse's identity. Ki searched the dead man's pockets. In addition to a sack of Bull Durham, a packet of cigarette papers, and some matches, they held four gold eagles and some silver. Standing up, Ki led the men to the spot where the second body lay. None of the Circle Star hands could identify this corpse either. When Ki repeated his search, the results were much the same; the dead man's pockets yielded chewing tobacco instead of cigarette makings, but they also held four gold eagles and an almost identical amount in silver.

“Now that just ain't natural,” one of the cowhands said thoughtfully. “Everybody I know's got all kinds of truck stuck in his jeans pockets, like a knife and a spare bandanna and maybe a letter or two from home and some kind of personal stuff.”

“You're right about that, Bishop,” Ki agreed. “Someone told these men to be sure they didn't carry anything that would help identify them if they got caught.”

“Or killed,” one of the other hands put in.

“Or killed,” Ki echoed. He stood up. “You men know what to do. It's Ed's job from here on.”

Ki went to join Jessie. She'd opened the study door to let the light flood the living room, and was replacing her rifle on the rack by the door. Ki shook his head in reply to the unspoken question that was in her eyes when she turned to face him.

“Strangers,” he said. “Nothing in their pockets except some money. An almost identical amount of money, in fact. Four eagles and a few dollars in silver. Does that lead you to the same conclusion I reached?”

“I think I knew they were cartel killers from the beginning, Ki,” she answered in a quiet voice. “What you said about the money just confirms what I suspected when they didn't try to steal the horses. They were given fifty dollars each in advance, probably promised another fifty when they brought Bobby Tinker back, or reported they'd killed him.”

“Yes. That's my idea too.”

“Speaking of Bobby, I'd better look in on him.” Jessie started up the stairs, Ki following. She added, “The shooting may have roused him, and worry is the last thing he needs.”

“I suppose they trailed him from the railroad,” Ki said as they went up the stairs. “They'd have been given the layout of the ranch, of course, in case they didn't catch up with him before he got here.”

“I'm sure the cartel has a set of very detailed maps of the Circle Star,” Jessie said.

There was bitterness in her voice, for her words recalled all too vividly the black day when Alex Starbuck had died under a hail of bullets from the repeating guns of the cartel's hired assassins. Until that day, Alex had fought successfully all the efforts made by the corrupt European-based cabal to take over the industrial empire he'd built on the base of a small San Francisco store selling goods imported from the Orient.

At the time of his death, Alex's holdings had expanded to include either full control of or large investments in shipping, railroads, mining, foundries, banking, and other, smaller enterprises. It was this vast structure, as well as the Circle Star, that had been Jessie's inheritance from her father, just as had been his unflagging war with the cartel. Ki had served Alex, and had transferred his allegiance to Jessie after her father's murder.

“Speaking of details,” Ki said as they reached the door of Bobby Tinker's room, “did you find anything helpful in Alex's diaries?”

“Just one short mention of Captain Tinker and his ship, the
Sea Sprite.
But I still have several more to go through.”

Jessie opened the door of the room a crack. The soft glow of the lamp in the hall sent a shaft of light through the slit, and she saw Bobby sitting up in bed, the coverlet draped around his shoulders.

“Bobby!” she exclaimed, opening the door fully. “You shouldn't be sitting up yet!”

“I heard guns going off. I was scared. What happened?”

“There were some men prowling around,” Jessie said. “They may have been after our horses.”

“What horses?”

“Our ranch horses. Don't you remember, Bobby? I'm Jessie Starbuck, and you're at the Circle Star ranch.”

“I didn't remember right off, when the shooting woke me up,” the boy said. “But I do now.” He pointed to Ki. “Who's he?”

“This is Ki. He'll be your friend too, just like I will, if you'll let us.”

Bobby studied Ki's face for a moment, then nodded slowly. “I guess I will. But where's Mr. Alex Starbuck? He's the one I came to find. Grandpa needs help real bad.”

“We'll talk about that in a minute,” Jessie promised. “The first thing to do is to get you settled back in bed.” She spent a moment rearranging the covers after Bobby lay down, then said, “Now before we talk about helping your grandpa, wouldn't you like something to eat? You must be hungry.”

“I guess I am, some,” Bobby replied. “I feel sorta funny all over. Not as much as when I woke up. But when the guns stopped going off and I used the chamberpot, I felt better.”

“I'll see what I can find in the kitchen,” Ki volunteered.

When Ki had gone, Jessie sat down on the bed. “Bobby, Alex Starbuck was my father, and he's dead.”

Jessie watched the boy's face carefully. Bobby swallowed hard, but, as with any youth brought up on the frontier, death to him was a fact to be accepted stoically. His eyes widened and she saw his face beginning to pucker into a disappointed frown.