Gunsmoke Justice (2 page)

“I’ll need my other beer, then,” Brad said, and moved into the saloon.

The big man was standing with his back to the bar, staring down a little stupidly at his own left hand. Blood ran from his fingertips to the floor, and a red stain was spreading across his dust-plastered shirt high on the shoulder.

He looked at Brad in wonderment. “Shot,” he said, and his voice was full of pained surprise.

H
IS NAME
, Brad discovered, was Olaf Hegstrom. The pain from the rifle bullet that had gone through his shoulder caused the sweat to pour down his face, but he made no sound at all.

With the girl’s help Brad made a crude bandage out of the available supplies at the Knothole Gap rest stop, and on her advice he decided to take to the hills, rather than follow the wagon road down into Sawhorse Valley.

At first he hadn’t believed her, but a short trip to a point of rock where he could look down on the road showed him that she was right. Newt had split his Double Q crew into two groups, and they had the road blocked just below the summit and out of sight in both directions. Brad returned tight-lipped to the building.

“I’m going in,” he told her.

She measured him with her cool gray eyes. “You’re the kind who would,” she said. “Even if you weren’t heading that way.”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“I don’t like brutality,” she replied.

“Sometimes there’s only one way to do things,” Brad said. His humor came, twisting his lips sardonically. “My way.” When she made no answer, he went on, “How about this Olaf Hegstrom, you said his name was?”

“Yes.” She looked toward where Olaf was seated, bandaged now, and staring down, still with the stunned look on his face. “No one knows much about him,” she said. “Except that he came nearly a month ago and disappeared into the north end of the valley. Someone said he was building a homestead shack up there. He was in town twice for supplies that I remember.

“Then today,” she continued, “I was coming up here and saw him riding ahead. We came up together and he told me he was on his way out to file a homestead. Before we got here I could see the Double Q riders behind us. They came in. And then you did.”

Brad rolled a cigarette thoughtfully and glanced at Olaf. “Where is the county seat from here?”

“Three days’ ride on a good horse.”

“Then,” Brad said, “I don’t think he’ll be filing very soon. I’ll take him back to his cabin so he can heal up.”

She looked at him strangely now. “You’d do that? They were trying to run him out of here. They’ve run others out. Now it will be you, too.”

Brad smiled at her. “I feel sorta responsible, ma’am. If I hadn’t busted in he might have got off with no more than a kick in his self-respect.”

“Do you think he’s that kind?” she demanded. “To dance for them?”

“No,” Brad admitted honestly. “I think he’d have fought and maybe got killed for his trouble. I feel responsible, anyway. Now if you’ll tell me how to get around the road, we’ll be going.”

She gave him brief, explicit directions. Thanking her, he went outside and took the horses to the rear of the building. With a nod to Tim Teehan for the free beer, he led Olaf out. The girl followed, studying Brad’s mount and the neat job on his pack horse.

“You’ve come a long way,” she said.

“Drifted,” he corrected.

“You’re just drifting into Sawhorse, then?”

Brad saw that Olaf was in the saddle, and then he swung up himself. He grinned down at her. “For a pretty girl, you’re an awful nosy one.”

Color flooded her face and she turned away sharply. He kept on grinning until she was inside the building, and then he pointed to the dim trail rising into the timber and started Olaf ahead.

It was not easy going. The trail was little more than a deer track and as they climbed firs came in to replace the high-branched pines. Some of the firs were spread-branched and these raked Olaf’s shoulder cruelly. But he rode without a murmur, seemingly content to trust the man behind him.

The girl had said to keep high and swing to the north near the first ridge. This he did, and when the sun was straight up they reached a shelf of rock that looked down on the valley. Brad pulled up and something inside him hurt a little as he looked on the expanse below.

It was the old feeling, only stronger than it had ever been. He had never seen such a fine layout for a spread. He sat with his hands resting loosely on the saddle horn, his eyes measuring and searching. Down there the Sawhorse Valley lay sprawled out for him to see. It was a long oval, blunted at the north and south ends. The hills on the south through which the gap ran and those on the west about halfway up the valley were mounds of rock and sage. But farther along the timbered slopes of the Sawhorse Range came in, circling the valley from halfway up the west side, around the north and down to the east.

Brad could see the fine silver lines of creeks coming out of the mountains and the gulched bed of the river as it twisted out of the north and flowed the length of the valley, cutting it into two unequal parts. What surprised him were the alternating patches of strong green contrasting sharply with the drab brown of drying bunch grass.

He turned to Olaf Hegstrom. “Looks like irrigated hay,” he said.

“Yah, hay,” Olaf answered. He lifted his good arm and pointed. “Alfalfa, they call it.”

Brad had seen some of it in the valleys of Wyoming. It was pretty much a new thing to him, but he had heard that in this country they winterfed all the stock, due to the heavy snowfalls, and this alfalfa was supposed to give a better yield than native grass.

“They irrigate it?” he asked Olaf.

Olaf moved his arm up and down. “With pump,” he said. His broad face creased into a frown. “There’s no water now.”

It took Brad a little time to get that. He studied the layouts below while Olaf explained. There were only five ranches on the west side, and the two nearest the north end of the valley had water enough to irrigate by horse-drawn pumps. The others were losing their hay. It was interesting, Brad thought as he listened, that the biggest spread, astride the northwest corner of the valley, was the Double Q outfit.

“I’ve seen that before, too,” he muttered, and started off again along the trail.

Olaf turned his horse carefully and then his voice came quietly, swinging Brad around. He spoke his
th
sounds more like a
d
but Brad had no trouble understanding. “They come,” Olaf said.

Down below, climbing up on a switchback trail toward them, rode five men. Even at that distance Brad recognized Newt and the lanky cowhand. Even while he watched, one man flung up a rifle and fired. The range was too great for accuracy, but close enough so that Brad heard lead singing through tree branches not ten feet away.

“Can you push that crowbait?” he demanded of Olaf. There was a nod, and he said, “Let’s ride, friend!”

The trail was plainer here on the ridge and for a while Brad felt they were gaining. It was a flat bench with a steep slope down and a line of rimrock breaking into the sharper edge of the high mountains above. There was no getting off of it here, and he pushed the horses to the limits he thought they could stand.

They were perhaps halfway along the valley when he glanced back and saw the first man outlined on a rise. He said, “They’re closing in.”

Olaf Hegstrom turned a pain-lined face toward Brad. “You go down,” he said and pointed toward the valley. Brad saw a narrow trail cutting its way steeply down the slope. It was something he could make. It was not a trail Olaf could handle, wounded as he was and riding a jaded pony.

“Keep going,” he said briefly. He looked back again and there were two riders in sight. Then the trees swallowed them momentarily. Brad leaned over and loosened his carbine in the saddle boot.

“Those jokers mean business,” he muttered, and wondered if their pride held so deeply that they would take this time to chase him and Olaf.

When two more bullets clipped branches not far above them he knew that whatever it was, they did mean business. He saw that Olaf was slowing, and now the trail rose again, ascending sharply and then flattening out on a ledge that gave no cover for a good half mile.

“Start climbing,” Brad ordered. “And stay low in the saddle.” He swung his rifle free.

Olaf looked at him and at the gun. “I stay,” he announced doggedly.

Brad gave him a grin of understanding that brought light through the dullness of pain in Olaf’s blue eyes. “You’re in the way here,” he said. “Take my pack horse. Ill catch up.”

Olaf was silent a moment as if weighing it. “Yah,” he said, finally. And when the pack horse was tied to his rig, he started up the precipitous slope.

Brad slid off his palomino and led it out of sight behind a screen of timber and buckbrush. Then he moved beside a thick-boled cedar where he could get a view of the trail. He held his fire though he saw a man appear some distance away. Turning once, he caught a glimpse of Olaf and the horses plodding along the open ledge now — fair game for anyone who got this close.

Brad lined his sights and waited. There were two trees not a hundred yards ahead forming a natural frame for anything that rode between them. The first man was the lanky cowboy, and he carried a rifle in shooting position. Brad shifted his own gun a fraction and fired.

The horse on the trail neighed shrilly and reared up. The rider’s howl was loud in the silence of the forest as the bullet caught his shoulder, driving him back and out of the saddle.

There was a boiling noise from behind and Newt came in sight, firing and riding low as he put his horse around the downed man. Brad levered and waited until Newt’s shot had clipped bark from above him. He shot, but Newt’s twisting run caused him to miss. Then another man appeared, and Brad sent a hurried shot that he knew was too low. The rider’s horse jerked as a foreleg shattered, and the man went crashing over its head and lay still.

Now there was only Newt. And he seemed crazed with the desire to get to Brad. A shot whined into his hat, jerking it from his head and he answered, still riding a twisted trail to make himself a poor target.

Then he was close enough and Brad dropped the rifle and palmed his  .44. He sent three quick shots, none of which made its mark, but the hail of lead slowed the man in front. Momentarily, he hesitated and then swung into the brush. Brad listened to the crashing until he decided it was receding, and then he waited a while longer.

At last two riders appeared, coming cautiously. One put a bullet through the head of the downed horse. The other captured the riderless one and they hoisted the lanky cowhand and the other aboard and led them off again.

“Through for now,” Brad said to himself, and holstered his gun.

Olaf was far ahead and, mounting, Brad put the rifle back in the boot and spurred up the trail after him. When he was on the flat, narrow trail of the ledge there were a few futile puffs from far below and sprays of rock blossomed behind and above him. But they were going, not coming, and the angle and distance were bad for good shooting. Brad rode on without concern.

He caught Olaf at the end of the ledge where the trail dipped into the timber, and they rode on more easily. It was nearing early dusk when the trail, having kinked northward, took a downward pitch.

While there was still enough light to see, they came to a crude log cabin, sod-roofed and set in a grove of firs. There were holes for two windows and a third hole for the door. But inside Brad found it clean with a packed earth floor and a bunk built into one corner. A sheet-iron stove sat under an open canopy chimney made of clay and wattles. There was practically no equipment except for a few pans and a coffeepot.

“This is it,” Brad said. He helped Olaf down and inside onto the bunk. It creaked under his massive weight as he lay back with a sigh of weariness.

“Barn,” he said and pointed.

“I’ll find it,” Brad told him.

He located the barn, a lean-to built on the rear of the small cabin. Inside there was a sack of grain, and near the door a small stream had been caught in a wooden V trough. Brad tied the horses inside, unsaddling them and taking the pack off the third. He carried it to the cabin and dropped it on the floor. Olaf Hegstrom — as if in Brad lay safety — had fallen asleep.

Brad worked while the light lasted. When the horses were cooled, he gave them water and a little grain and then staked them at the edge of a natural grassed bowl that sloped southward. He estimated it at close to forty acres, and wondered if Olaf had intended to farm this land.

The horses taken care of, he found an ax and cut a supply of poles and some fir boughs. It was dark inside the cabin now and he located a lantern and lighted it. Then he made a pole bunk in one corner as Olaf had done.

Olaf awakened as he was building a fire. He pushed himself to a sitting position. His shy smile reached out and touched Brad. “Thanks, friend.” There was a question in his voice.

“For now,” Brad said.

Olaf studied the answer carefully. “For now. For later,” he said. “You go. I go.”

Brad remembered the sight of the valley. “Maybe,” he said, “I won’t be going. Not if I find what I want here,” he added.

When he was ready for sleep he set his rifle handily beside him. This was the familiar pattern repeating itself; he knew it too well to lose caution. The Double Q riders weren’t through. Their vengeance might be temporary, but it was fire-hot right now and they wouldn’t rest until it was taken.

“A
QUEER ONE,”
Tim Teehan said, as Brad disappeared into the hills. He looked at the girl, who was preparing to leave. “The kind we need, you think, Faith?”

Faith McFee said doubtfully, “Wouldn’t it be replacing one kind of bully with another, Tim?”

“You think him a bully?” he asked. He wiped at his bar with a soggy cloth. “And he thinks me a coward.” His wizened Irish face wrinkled distastefully. “And maybe I am. But what can one man do against a hired crew?” He shook his head slowly. “I’m getting old, Faith, and like your uncle says, peace is worth a lot.”

There was no scorn in her for him. She understood both this man and her uncle. They had done their share of living and now they wanted to sit in the shade and rest. Not many years were left for either man. His wide mouth quirked in a gentle smile.

“You’re an odd one,” Tim Teehan went on in a slow voice. He drew himself a beer and sipped at it. “Angry at Dave Arden for holding off against Quarles’ Double Q, and angry at this man who dared to fight them.”

“Not angry,” she said. “Frightened maybe, Tim. There was something cruel in the way he went after Newt Craddon.”

“Ruthless, maybe, but not cruel,” Tim amended. “Newt is the kind you reason with by using a club. Hold your judgment,” he advised her.

“I always try to,” she answered, and started for the door. “Tell Molly I’ll be back. And I hope she’s better soon.”

“Molly has a strong heart,” Tim said. “And remember that. A man wants a woman with a strong heart in this country.”

“I’ll try,” she said again, and went out to her buckboard.

It was not a long trip to the town of Sawhorse Falls. The wagon road looped a short distance down the side of the gap and then followed a gentle grade to the floor of the valley. From there it was not a half hour with a good team to the edge of the town. Faith hurried “her team once it was safe to do so. The trouble at Tim’s had taken more time than she had planned to allow herself, and it would be almost time to open the restaurant for supper when she got back.

She drove automatically, the buckboard now empty of the presents she had taken up to Tim’s sick wife. Her mind was on the man she had met, and she frowned a little because he kept recurring to her. There had been something appealing about him and, at the same time, something frightening. Studying it, she decided that Tim’s word had been the right one. There was a quiet ruthlessness about the stranger. And yet she had felt his humor. Womanlike, she sought for a weakness in the man, and felt a vague desire to save him. From what, she was not quite sure. But in the man there was strength. And to see it misdirected in a brutal battle bothered her.

As she reached the valley floor, she forced her mind to the land around her and the problems of the people with whom she was most concerned. The ranches to the east were not yet bothered by the Double Q’s driving expansion, and so she gave them little thought. But those two places on the west slope, from this end of the valley as far up as Nick Biddle’s, were her friends. And It was about them she felt the most concern.

The southernmost ranch was Jim Parker’s “experiment” as men had first called it. They had laughed and gibed when he came packing a bag of books and sacks of seed. But when he showed them how to get hay without depending on the native grass for winterfeed, their laughter stopped and turned to interest.

And, from the time of Jim Parker’s coming, there had been trouble. Until then Nick Biddle and Ike Quarles had seemed satisfied to do as the rest, running what stock they could feed through the winter. But this business of irrigating hay gave Quarles, a shrewd man, the chance to grow big — and so he was taking it. The legality of his way was questionable, but what was legality where there was no law?

Once more Faith McFee thought of her uncle. He was the law in Sawhorse Falls but, for the same reason that Tim Teehan refused to fight, he refused to be the law beyond the town limits. Cowardice? She had never thought of Angus McFee as a coward. He had faced down more than one would-be gunman in his town and had won without needing to shoot. But how much of a true test had he ever taken?

She pushed the idea away. These were disturbing thoughts, ones she would rather not face. There was still the chore of daily living to do and it was this she had now to concern herself with. Someday, perhaps, the valley would have the peace it had once known. Until then what could she do, or Tim Teehan do, or any one man do?

Again she remembered the quick hardness of the stranger who had come in and challenged the Double Q crew. “One man,” she murmured aloud.

Perhaps, but one could stand against twenty for just so long.

• • •

Faith had the supper nearly prepared and was opening the door of her small restaurant when the noise of a group of riders boiled up from the street. She stepped to the board sidewalk and shielded her eyes against the slanting rays of the late westering sun. They were coming in from the north, and she recognized Newt Craddon in the lead.

She watched tensely as he went by, riding solid in the saddle, a deep scowl of anger on his bearded face. Behind him came the other men, with the last leading a horse on which two men rode. One, the lanky cowhand she knew as Clip, rocked with the pain of a bleeding shoulder.

Her uncle stepped from the door of the jailhouse next door, and now both watched until the riders reached the far end of the street and went around the side of the One-Shot Saloon.

“Going to Doc Stebbins,” Angus McFee said to Faith. He was a small man, weathered and sharp-faced with the air of a plucked bantam about him. “They didn’t stop to check their guns.”

“They hardly had time,” she pointed out, “with a wounded man to take care of.”

“No guns allowed in town,” he said sharply. “They know it.”

“There are times — ” Faith began.

“There ain’t no time,” he snapped at her. “If that law ain’t kept, there’d be fighting every time a Double Q man rode into town.” Pulling at his gun belt, he walked briskly down the street toward the One-Shot.

Faith sighed. He was right in his way, of course. By enforcing his ruling of making every man check his gun, the sheriff had kept the town peaceful. Because he had been here and had been the recognized law from the time Sawhorse Falls was little more than a single trading post, the law was old enough to be accepted without question. Men checked their guns automatically, picking them up when they left town. What fighting was done was without bullets until men stepped beyond the imaginary lines McFee had drawn around the town.

Faith waited until he was out of sight. Then the clerk from the general mercantile, a short way up the street, came in for his meal and she went back inside.

“Excitement,” he remarked. “Looked like a Double Q man got shot.” He sounded a little surprised, as if unable to think of anyone who would dare draw against a Double Q rider.

“Seems so,” she said, and brought his coffee.

He was about finished when the dealer from the Sawhorse Saloon directly across the dusty street came in for his supper. Shortly after, the blacksmith’s boy, Jube, put his head in the door. His freckled face shone with pleasure at so much going on.

“Double Q boxed some stranger on the high bench east,” he panted. He was the carrier of news, and he never failed to bring it first to Faith.

“Who says so?” the dealer wanted to know.

“One of Coe’s riders in town,” Jube explained importantly. “Him and Coe saw some of it. The stranger was holding Newt and his crew off, and that big Swede was riding the ledge trail going north. Then they saw the stranger going up. He had a big palomino. And Newt and his men coming back with Clip shot up and Baldy knocked cold!”

He pulled his head back abruptly and ran off to spread the story elsewhere. Faith, dishing a plate for the dealer, felt a muscle-shaking wave of relief. When Jube had first begun to talk she pictured the drifter and Olaf Hegstrom caught on the ledge by the Double Q crew. Such a trap would have been easy enough to fall into for a man inexperienced in the country.

But, after a moment, the relief went away and her mind formed another picture — a picture of the tall, lean man with eyes the same color as hers, standing off Newt, smiling as he shot Clip from the saddle, and she wondered what in a man’s past would give him pleasure in cruelty.

The restaurant started to fill, buzzing with the excitement of an accident to Double Q, and Faith was too busy to do more than work. Jube’s sister Colly came panting in, late as usual, and donned an apron to help. After that it was easier, but even so there was work enough to keep her mind from what had happened.

The last of the regular diners were gone when her uncle came in and sat down. She fixed a plate for him and one for herself, waiting for him to give her the news.

“I had a little trouble,” he said. “Newt was riled.” He sucked at his coffee and bobbed his head. “But I got their guns.”

“What about Clip?”

He looked up, taking a moment to remember Clip. “Shattered an arm. Reckon he’ll live.”

She felt an impatience at this concern for nothing but his own primary interest. She said, “Did they say what happened?”

“Didn’t ask,” Angus McFee answered.

No, she thought, he wouldn’t. The valley was no concern of his. She called, “Colly, will you bring more coffee?” and settled down to eating.

• • •

Newt Craddon sent Clip and Baldy home in a hired rig and walked by the alley behind the westside stores to the rear of the Sawhorse Saloon. Here, at the back, was a door opening to a flight of steps. At the top was a hall, and at the front end of it was a room he entered after knocking and being told to come in.

The owner of the Sawhorse Saloon, a tall man, thin to emaciation, was sitting behind a desk. He motioned Newt to a seat on the sofa.

“The boss come in?” Newt demanded.

“Too early,” the tall man said. “Biddle was here. He rode out before you came.”

Newt’s disregard for Biddle was contemptuous. “I’m going hunting, Keinlan. You tell Quarles some joker got the jump on us. He sided with the Swede.”

Keinlan nodded as if it was little concern of his. “I’ll tell him.”

Newt got up restlessly, the scowl deepening on his face. “The Swede headed for home, I figure.” At the door he turned. “And tell Quarles that Parker’s at the One-Shot in a poker game.”

Keinlan’s long face twisted. “I thought Quarles told Parker to stay out of Sawhorse.” The twitch came again; he was laughing. “Double Q’s having a little trouble making its orders stick.”

Newt swore at him and went out, slamming the door. Keinlan leaned back, rubbing his fingers thoughtfully over his lantern jaw. There was a good deal in this to interest him. When a man like Quarles was faced with trouble, it could be worthwhile to see how he fought it. He had been waiting for Quarles’ first weakness to show up. Carefully, he planned the way in which he would pass Newt’s information on to Quarles.