He turned his pounding head and looked around him. A tall, lanky man with the face of a martyred saint was squatting over a small fire, a coffeepot smoking on the coals. Beside him lay a Henry rifle and farther away a big buckskin grazed near the stream, a few fallen leaves from the cottonwoods lying on his back.
Tyree struggled to rise, but could not muster the strength and sank back to the ground. He heard the rustle of a man’s feet through the grass, looked up and saw Owen Fowler towering over him.
“So you’re still with us,” Fowler said. “Couple of times during the night I sure thought you wasn’t going to make it.” The man shrugged. “Your breathing slowed and I felt your heart flutter, like it was giving out finally.”
Fowler kneeled beside Tyree. “You’re a tough one, all right, and mighty hard to kill. I did what I could for you, cleaned the bullet wounds in your side, then plugged them up with prickly pear pulp. The Indians use it to stop inflammation and infection and I guess they know what they’re doing.”
Tyree’s hand strayed to his neck and Fowler nodded. “Your skin is badly burned by the rope. Couldn’t do much for that except boil up some thistle blossom and bathe the burns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I guess we’ll find out.”
“What happened?” Tyree asked, the two words coming hard and painful from his torn-up throat.
A slight smile touched Fowler’s lips. “Well, near as I can tell, you were half-hung, then shot. I was riding west of here, getting reacquainted with the land on account of how I’ve been away for a fair spell, and I saw Clem Daley and Len Dawson leading a saddled dun across the flats. Daley was wearing a fancy buckskin coat, Apache maybe—”
“Kiowa. It was my coat.”
“Well, anyhoo, it seemed to me them two had been up to no good, so I came looking and that’s when I found you. And just in time, I reckon. Another couple of minutes and you’d have been dead as hell in a parson’s parlor.”
“I’m beholden to you,” Tyree said. “You saved my life.”
Fowler waved away his thanks. “Think nothing of it. Glad I was close by.”
“I’m betting it was Len Dawson who shot me,” Tyree managed, the words coming slow in a weak whisper. “I guess he wanted to put me out of my misery, but his hands were shaking so bad, he made a mess of it.”
“Oh, he didn’t mess up too badly,” Fowler said, his voice matter-of-fact. “His bullet hit just above your belt on the left side and exited out your back an inch higher. I don’t think any vital organs were hit, but I’m not a doctor so I can’t tell for sure.”
Fowler was silent for a few moments, then said, “Dawson has killed his share, but he’s not the worst of them. Daley now, he’s poison mean and good with a gun and his fists. The talk is that he’s killed seven men, and I believe it.”
Tyree tried to rise again, and Fowler helped him sit up, propping his back against a cottonwood trunk.
After he recovered from the pain caused by the shift of position, Tyree rasped, “Those two said they were acting on orders from a man named Quirt Laytham.”
The skin suddenly tightened around Fowler’s eyes. “Laytham is the man whose lying testimony got me sentenced to twenty-five years behind bars for murder. He swaggers a wide path around here, owns the biggest ranch for a hundred miles in all directions and is hungry for more, mine included. There are maybe two, three hundred cows on my grass right now, and all of them belong to Quirt Laytham.”
“Him and me have a score to settle,” Tyree said. He touched the rope burn on his neck. “For this. The two who hung me were acting on Laytham’s orders.”
“Best you rest your voice for a while,” Fowler said. “Keep talking and you may lose it altogether.”
Fowler rose and poured coffee into a tin cup. He kneeled behind Tyree and held the cup to his lips. “Careful,” he said. “It’s hot, but it will do you good.”
“I can manage,” Tyree said. He took the cup from Fowler and drank. The coffee was strong and bitter, the way he liked it, and it seemed to give him strength.
Fowler watched Tyree drink, then bit his lip as he thought for a few moments. Finally he said, “Mister, I don’t know who you are but—”
“Name’s Chance Tyree.”
Fowler nodded, his eyes suddenly guarded. “Heard of you, prison talk mostly.” He was silent for a while, then said, “You being a named Texas gunfighter won’t help you none in Crooked Creek. Go against Laytham and his riders and you’ll be bucking a stacked deck. Quirt is fast with a gun, but there are two working for him who are even faster. One is a breed, a natural born killer who calls himself the Arapaho Kid. And the other is Luther Darcy.”
If Fowler expected a reaction from Tyree he was disappointed. “There will be a reckoning between Laytham and me,” Chance croaked. “Depend on it.”
“The name Luther Darcy doesn’t mean anything to you?”
Tyree shook his head, a gesture that made pain flare in his throat. “No. Why should it?”
“Then you’d better learn up on him right quick,” Fowler said. “There are them who say Darcy is the fastest gun west of the Mississippi and there are others who claim he’s the fastest who ever lived, or will ever live, come to that. He killed a named man up in the Montana Territory a while back, then another in Crooked Creek just a few days ago.”
Tyree managed a weak smile. “I’ve come up against a few with that kind of reputation before and I’m still here.”
His eyes bleak in his long, melancholy face, Fowler said, “Maybe you’re still here on account of how you never come up against Luther Darcy.”
Chapter 3
The dawn brightened into morning and the cobalt blue sky was banded by streaks of red and jade. Tyree finished his coffee and built a smoke with unsteady hands. Beyond the hills, toward Crooked Creek, the last shadows had been washed from the brush flats and the wakening jays were already quarreling among the branches of the cottonwoods.
After a while Tyree tried to get to his feet, but the effort drained him and he slumped back to the ground, his head reeling.
Owen Fowler tightened the cinch on his buckskin then stepped beside the wounded man. “We have to ride,” he said. “I got the feeling Len Dawson and Clem Daley will come back to check on their handiwork. We don’t want them to find us here. Not if we want to keep on breathing, we don’t.”
A flicker of doubt crossed Fowler’s face. “Think you can stay on a horse?”
Tyree nodded. He knew he was very weak and the pain of the bullet wound in his side was a living thing that gnawed at him. His head pounded and his mouth was dry, his torn throat on fire.
“Which way are we headed?” he asked.
Fowler gestured vaguely to the northeast. “That way. Across the brush flats then into the canyonlands. My place, such as it is, is off Hatch Wash, and that’s a fair piece away.” The man hesitated, then added, “Had me a cabin once, but that’s gone. I’ve been sleeping under the stars since I got back.”
Something in Fowler’s face told Tyree this wasn’t going to be an easy trip. He had heard enough about the canyon country to know he was facing a harsh, unforgiving wilderness of rawboned rock ridges and high-walled mesas, the gorges so deep the rivers were lost below steep cliffs that hid the daylight. Even the Indians had steered clear of the place, visiting it only out of necessity, and seldom at that.
As though reading Tyree’s mind, Fowler kneeled beside him. “Where we’re headed the country is wild and mighty lonely. The land is broken and raw, all tumbled together, like God grew bored with it and left it unfinished.” He smiled. “It’s no bargain but considering the alternative, I’d say we’ve got little choice in the matter.”
“I’ll ride,” Tyree said. He struggled to his feet and the ground suddenly rocked so violently under him that Fowler had to quickly reach out and support him. Blood loss had left Tyree as helpless as a baby, and he cursed himself for his own weakness. He was a proud man who had never in his life asked help or a favor of anyone, and now he was totally dependent for his survival on a man he hardly knew.
“Can you make it?” Fowler asked, concern shading his dark brown eyes.
“I’ll make it,” Tyree answered. “Let’s hit the trail.” He looked at Fowler and saw the doubt in the man’s homely features. “I told you, I’ll make it,” he said, a sudden, stubborn anger in him.
Fowler nodded. “Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into.” A slight smile tugged at his lips. “Right now, Tyree, I’d say your chances of reaching my place are slim to none, and slim is already saddling up to leave town.”
Tyree disentangled from Fowler’s supporting arm. “Let’s ride,” he said, his face stiff. “Believe me, I can get there.”
Fowler swung into the saddle of the buckskin, then kicked the stirrup loose for Tyree. It took the wounded man several attempts before he summoned the strength to finally get up on the buckskin and settle himself behind the high cantle of Fowler’s saddle.
“Ready?” Fowler asked.
“As I’ll ever be,” Tyree answered.
“Then let’s get it done.”
When he thought about it later, Tyree could recall little of that ride.
The sun was already hot when they crossed the brush flats then entered the canyon country, but in the gorges between the cliffs and mesas the heat was almost unbearable.
Around them spread an immense, rough-hewn wilderness of sculptured rocks, needles, arches and narrow slot canyons that seemed to stretch away forever in all directions. Stunted spruce grew on the flat tops of immense mesas, desperately struggling for life in an uncaring environment, and the air smelled dry, like the dust of ancient Indian dead.
Only occasionally, mostly along the banks of the creeks, would there be islands of green with trees and grass where fat, white-faced cattle grazed.
“Quirt Laytham’s cows,” Fowler said, talking over his shoulder as they rode under spreading cottonwoods. “See his Rafter-L brand? Looks like he’s pushing his herds into the whole damn country.”
Tyree heard but did not answer. The pain in his side hammered at him and the skin of his face and neck felt thin and chafed. His hands were stiff and hard to close.
He knew he needed rest, lots of it, to regain his strength. His revenge on Laytham and the deputies who worked for him would have to wait. For the present, they could enjoy their victory. The reckoning would come later.
It was not in Tyree’s nature to back away from what he believed was right. He had been abused, victimized on the orders of a man who didn’t even know him, a man who made judgments only in the light of his own greed for wealth and power.
An enduring, sometimes stubborn man, there was in Chance Tyree a fierce determination to live, to fight back and win. He knew of no other way.
He and Fowler rode on. Despite its double load, the man’s rawboned buckskin made light of the trail. For miles they traveled in silence, the only sound the soft footfalls of the horse and the high lonesome creak of saddle leather.
The sun climbed in the sky and the day grew hotter. Riding among the canyons was like traveling through a gigantic brick oven. Above them, the sky had been scorched to a pale lemon and the dry dust kicked up by the horse rose around them in veils of swirling tan and yellow.
Tyree dozed, wakening only now and then when Fowler quickly reached back and stopped him from toppling off the horse.
As the daylight began to fall, the cry of a hunting peregrine falcon woke Tyree for the last time. “Hatch Wash just ahead,” Fowler said, feeling the younger man stir. “We’re almost home. And, as I said before, it sure ain’t much.”
Tyree blinked his eyes into focus and looked over Fowler’s shoulder. They were riding through a narrow gulch that gradually opened up ahead of them, revealing two narrow bands of green on either side of a shallow creek that wound between high canyon walls. Beyond the walls, towering cliffs, mesas, sandstone domes and spires of rock seemed to stretch away forever, here and there rincons, ancient streambeds, showing as yellow streaks high on their steep pink, yellow and red sides.
“The wash runs for twelve miles,” Fowler said. “Runs pretty much north and then west. But I guess you’ll be glad to hear we’re not going that far.”
The man kicked his buckskin into an easy lope, and Tyree found himself passing through thick stands of fragrant piñon and juniper. As the trail edged closer to the east bank of the wash, the trees changed to cottonwoods and willow, and cattle lifted their dripping muzzles from the water to watch them as they rode past.
“More of Laytham’s cows,” Fowler said, his face like stone.
Fowler swung his horse away from the creek, heading for what looked like a break in the canyon wall. The grass played out and the ground they crossed was sandier, covered in a profusion of desert shrubs, mostly sagebrush, greasewood and black-brush, with tall leaves of yucca spiking among them.
From the trail, the break had looked narrow, but as he got closer Tyree saw that it was maybe two hundred yards wide, carved out of the flat side of a mesa. Fowler entered the break, then rode up a gradual incline onto a flat, open bench. He crossed that bench, then another, the buckskin blowing a little, before riding into a wide, hanging valley shaped like a great, open amphitheater, the thousand-foot walls of the mesa hemming it in on three sides.
“We’re here,” Fowler said. “This is where I call home.” He glanced over his shoulder and grinned without humor. “At least I did, nine years ago.”
Tyree glanced around him. The valley was at least nine hundred acres in extent, and had probably been formed when the mesa split and part of it collapsed during some ancient earth shake.
The grass was green and rich, watered by a stream Tyree heard bubble near the far wall. Close to a hundred cows were in the valley, grazing or hunkered down under scattered spruce trees. All of them were sleek Herefords branded with Laytham’s Rafter-L.
Fowler kicked the buckskin toward the far parapet of the canyon and stopped at a wide rock overhang. The sheer wall behind the jutting slab of sandstone was covered in ancient paintings of tall, angular, human figures surrounded by zigzag patterns of red, yellow and blue.