Lassiter Tough (3 page)

Yes, he owed it to Vince Tevis, but also to the unknown young woman, fleeing wife or not, who quite possibly had been trying to escape a brutal husband, basing his evaluation on the two remaining Texans, the wounded one and Sam Lee. They were undoubtedly of the same stripe as the man he had killed; never had he seen a more arrogant and brutal face even in death.

In the passing days, Lassiter followed the trail until his luck ran out. A heavy rainstorm in this early spring obliterated the tracks he was following. And although he failed to pick them up again, he
pressed onward. For now he was in the Texas brasada, the thorny brush country that was hell on man and beast. It was from here that Vince Tevis had written him last, over a year ago, the letter finally catching up to him. Instinctively, he sensed that here in this brush country he would be settling the score for Tevis and the unknown girl. And here he would find Sam Lee.

And one day, as he rode deeper into the brush, the name of the outfit Tevis had worked for suddenly came to him. The Box C, owned by a man named Chandler.

Since the shooting back in New Mexico, the brand and owner's name had been blanked out of his mind. But it was as if thick storm clouds had rolled aside and there, in blinding sunlight, he saw it plainly in letters of fire.

He smiled grimly to himself.

He located Chandler, a lean, stooped man with a thick mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. A splinted-and-bandaged right leg rested on the seat of a straight-backed chair. He was sitting on the veranda of a rambling adobe ranch house.

When Lassiter introduced himself, Chandler looked at him more closely. “Be damned. Vince talked a lot about you.”

“Vince worked for you, didn't he?”

“Yeah. An' he run out on me right when I busted my leg. Never said a word. Only a note sayin' some-thin' come up an' he had to leave. Was figurin' on him for roundup, me bein' outta it on account of my leg. You know what happened to him?”

“He's dead.”

Chandler was silent for several moments while staring off across the brushy flats that seemed to stretch to infinity. “Dead. Well, I'll be damned.” He turned to stare at Lassiter, who leaned back against the porch rail. “Maybe it's the Lord slippin' Tevis a
bad hand from the deck for runnin' out on me. Where'd he get killed?”

“Over north and west.” Lassiter nodded in that direction. He wasn't inclined at this point to give details, not until he learned a few facts. “You know a man named Lee?”

“Lee what?” Chandler asked, looking up.

“It's his last name. First name's Sam.”

“Sam Lee?” Chandler mused. Then his face changed and he added carefully, “Don't reckon I do.”

Was there a sudden wariness in Chandler's light brown eyes? Lassiter wondered. Or was it his imagination? Some of Chandler's vaqueros were riding in, laughing among themselves. They dismounted down by the corral and started to unsaddle.

Chandler seemed deep in thought. Then he said, “Tevis said you was a good man, Lassiter. A good roper an' mighty handy with a gun. I could sure use you. Roundup starts in three days. . . .”

“I've got things to do before I can make up my mind about
anything,”
Lassiter put in quickly.

But Chandler seemed desperate to have Lassiter accept the job of bossing his roundup crew. He asked Lassiter to stay and they'd discuss it over whiskey, even told him where a bottle and glasses could be found in the parlor. It would save him limping into the house on the bad leg, Chandler explained. Chandler became almost tearful in his entreaties as Lassiter kept backing off. Chandler said he'd prayed to the good Lord to send him somebody and then out of nowhere Lassiter had appeared.

“Do it in memory of Vince Tevis,” Chandler urged, “if it ain't for the money. 'Cause I'll pay you damn good.”

“We'll see,” Lassiter said at last. The job Chandler outlined was tempting. He had nothing to tie him down at present. Once before, some years ago, he had worked a roundup in the Texas brush. It was an ultimate challenge for sure, because in all the West there was no more hazardous stretch of country than the brasada.

But first he had to hunt down the mysterious Sam Lee and make him pay up for complicity in the murder of Vince Tevis and the possible kidnapping of a girl.

He thought again about Chandler's reaction when he had mentioned Sam Lee. The rancher's eyes had lowered quickly. An involuntary show of surprise? It seemed so to Lassiter.

Somewhere he had lost the trail of the wounded man. But he had found the rancher who had hired Tevis as foreman. And it stood to reason that Sam Lee would be in the vicinity if Tevis had quit his job suddenly to run off with a girl. A girl that Sam Lee had trailed and finally captured.

Weary after the long ride from New Mexico, he needed a drink—alone—not with Chandler or anyone else. He needed time to start putting loose ends together.

So he rode a few miles to the town of Santos and entered O'Leary's Saloon. . . .

Doug Krinkle nodded at Lassiter riding fifty yards ahead on the brush-lined road. “There he is. Seems like we're s'posed to talk him outta workin' for Chandler,” Krinkle said with a laugh.

“Yeah,” Shorty Doane grunted. At six feet four and weighing two hundred and thirty-five pounds,
his nickname, applied in jest some years before, had stuck. “Let's go get him.”

Lassiter heard the two horses. He turned in the saddle and recognized the riders as having been in O'Leary's Saloon.

At first he thought they might be going to ride right on past him. But when they were abreast, they pulled up to match the stride of his horse. The slender, freckle-faced one was grinning on his right, the giant on the left.

Lassiter suddenly reined in his black horse. The pair, caught by surprise, rode on a few feet before halting. They looked back.

“If you hombres figure to keep me company,” Lassiter said coldly, “I don't want any. Move along.”

Shorty Doane laughed and rubbed the knuckles of a clenched right fist along the seam of his Levis. “Tough talk,” he said to his companion.

“Brad Sanlee don't want you takin' that job with Rep Chandler,” Krinkle said and lazily reached for his gun.

So that was it!

Hardly had the last word slipped through Krinkle's lips in his surprised face before Lassiter was ramming in the spurs. His black horse leaped before Krinkle finished speaking. It sideswiped Krinkle's dun with such force that the rider lost his seat. He went sailing off the horse, arms and legs beating the air.

So quickly had Lassiter moved that Shorty Doane wasted the time it took in forming a startled “O” with thick lips. Then he sent a hand streaking for his gun. But Lassiter had drawn his own weapon. He was turning the lunging black horse so as to enable
him to reach the left side of Shorty Doane's broad skull with the barrel of his .44. Doane went backwards off the rump of his horse. He lay flat on his back in the Texas mud, arms and legs wide from his oversized body, a startled look on his scarred face. A few feet away, Krinkle, in fetal position, was beginning to stir.

Lassiter disarmed both men before they could fully recover consciousness. Krinkle was staring up at him out of dazed eyes. Doane had an ugly gash on the left side of his skull. Blood trickled into his ear and to the muddy road, making a small puddle.

Angrily, Lassiter unloaded rifles and revolvers belonging to the pair. He hurled cartridges into the thick brush on one side of the road and the weapons, one by one, far out into the thorny Texas jungle.

“Tell Brad Sanlee,” he said to the dazed Krinkle, “that I'll be seeing him.”

It was the name the arrogant bastard in the saloon had uttered to impress him. Not Sam Lee. Vince Tevis, who had been in great pain at the time, had mumbled a name that Lassiter had simply misunderstood. Sanlee.

Just as Lassiter mounted up, something made him look over his shoulder. A beautiful blonde on a bay mare, unnoticed till now, was watching him forty feet or so down the road. She wore a green silk blouse that fit snugly across full breasts, and a leather-divided riding skirt. Her red lips were parted in surprise.

Lassiter tensed as she urged her bay forward a few feet. She sat in her saddle, looking down at Krinkle, who was sitting up, holding his head, and at Doane, now blinking his eyes.

“So Sanlee sent his skullbusters after you,” she
said in a deeply sensuous voice. Her eyes, a startling green, settled on his face. She wore a faint smile. “It seems they lost.”

Then she sank in the spurs and rode quickly in the direction of town. She was laughing so hard that tears came to her lovely eyes. . . .

At a bend in the road, the beautiful woman looked back and saw the dark stranger heading east. Why hadn't she at least asked his name? There had been something fascinating about him. The penetrating blue eyes when he stared at her had put a hollow feeling in her stomach. Who was he? She had never seen him before.

She continued on to Santos, aware that her heart was acting strangely. She was Isobel Hartney and owned the Hartney Store in Santos, which had been started by her grandfather. She had been East, attending an academy for young ladies, when news reached her that Jonas Hartney, her father, had died suddenly. It gave her an excuse to cut short her education and hurry back to Texas to run the store.

Witnessing the stranger manhandle Krinkle and Doane had been a delight. Maybe Brad wouldn't be quite so cocky as he'd become these last months since the passing of the autocratic Sanlee senior. Two weeks ago, or thereabouts, Brad Sanlee had
gone riding off without a word to her. He had taken Ad Deverax and Rupe Bolin along. It was rumored that Brad had been in a rage that no one at his Diamond Eight seemed willing to discuss. One morning he had simply gone pounding off to the north with his two hardcases. Only Brad had returned. No one seemed to know what had happened to Deverax and Bolin. . . .

In O'Leary's Saloon, the identity of the stranger had been no secret to Brad Sanlee. He had recognized him instantly, standing tall and brooding at the far end of the bar. It had brought back memories of an exciting afternoon in Tucson some three years before where he had been on business for his father. He had seen Lassiter stand up to Doc Kelmmer. Kelmmer, with eight notches in his gun, had intended to add Lassiter's before the day was out. But it hadn't worked out that way.

And today Lassiter, damn him, had turned down a decent proposition cold, which Sanlee couldn't understand. After witnessing Lassiter blow two holes in Kelmmer quicker than a man can blink, Sanlee had heard talk from excited onlookers afterward. They had said that Lassiter was a cold-hearted killer who'd spit in the devil's eye if somebody paid him. Tough enough to stare down a rattlesnake, others had said. Well, today he had refused a fine offer of four thousand dollars—a sum that Sanlee had figured to get back one way or another, once Lassiter was no longer of any use to him. The fact that Lassiter had flung the proposition in his face had been insulting.

Here he'd had all those frustrating days up north trying to pick up the trail of a wayward female, finally locating her and bringing her screeching and clawing all the way home. And then today having
had a brilliant idea, which would have made up for all the frustration, when he'd seen Lassiter in the saloon.

Lassiter didn't know it, but he was in for one hell of a big surprise down the east road. Sanlee grinned at the thought of Shorty using his fists. Lassiter would likely be in such bad shape he'd have to be carried out of Texas in a sack.

Sanlee gave a fierce grin to his three men who had remained in O'Leary's. “Drink up, you bastards. It's the last you'll git till roundup's over. Three weeks of pure hell in the Texas brush.”

After another drink, he mused aloud, “Kind of a shame in a way. Lassiter was a legend. An' after today, it'll be the end of it. . . .”

He broke off. Through the front windows of the saloon, he saw Krinkle and Doane come riding in. Doane was leaning far over, the saddle horn punching his big belly. He was bare-headed and the side of his face was streaked with dried blood.

Krinkle didn't appear to be in much better shape. When he dismounted at the hitching post, his movements seemed to give him pain. He tried to help Doane out of the saddle, but the big man's weight was too much. They both sprawled to the boardwalk. Men came at a run.

“Go out an' give 'em a hand,” Sanlee ordered his three riders. Then he poured himself another drink and stared moodily at his reflection in the mirror in back of the bar.

“Son of a bitch,” he said suddenly. “Damn, if Lassiter ain't livin' up to his rep.” Then he began to laugh, pounding the bar with his fist so that plump-and-balding Sid O'Leary looked around in surprise. “One way or another,” Sanlee was saying, still
howling with laughter, “I got to have that man in my hip pocket. He's one I can use, by God!”

A shame-faced and angry Krinkle finally related what had happened, with embellishments in their favor. Sanlee didn't believe him. Then Sanlee sent them down to Doc Clayburn's. Doane was still stretched out on the boardwalk and had to be helped.

An hour later, Lassiter was still angry at the attempt of the two Sanlee men to box him in. He thought about Sanlee. It was logical that the man Tevis had named with practically his last breath would come from the area where he had been working.

He could see the Chandler ranch house up ahead, the rain-washed, dun-colored walls shining in the sunlight. It was located on a large rise of ground for defensive purposes and commanded a view of the miles of brush on all sides. Brush had been hacked away near the house but it was a constant battle to keep it from overrunning everything.

Some of Chandler's vaqueros were by the bunk-house. When Lassiter rode up, they grew quiet. The segundo, Luis Herrera, regarded him gravely. He was chunky with a rope of mustache that looked as if it had been fashioned from black silk. He and his wife, Esperanza, lived in a small house in some cottonwoods. When Lassiter dismounted, the vaqueros drifted away.