A Century of Great Western Stories Read online

  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 count
ry 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 he
ad. 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.”