Kiowa Trail (1964) (11 page)

Battery Mason was standing at the corner of the building. "Keep an eye out," I said. "I've a hunch."

Where the station stood, the ground was flat, but it swelled slowly up into low hills not over a quarter of a mile away. Such country is deceptive, and although it seemed open, and surprise an impossibility, one could take it too much for granted, and surprise was possible. I had seen it happen in just such terrain.

When I went back inside the saloon the bartender was setting them up. He grinned broadly at the sight of the book. "Well, now. There's a good piece of book for you. Thank you, mister. Thank you kindly."

He turned it admiringly in his hands, then hefted it. "Now, that there," he said speculatively, "why, that should keep a man in readin' for a year, or nigh to it."

"It's a fine book," I said.

He turned the pages. "Yep. Like I thought. Mighty full of big words, and some I never seen before! Now, I like that. I admire a writer who has words ... time I figure out what he means by them, a book will last me twice as long. Thank you again, sir!"

Battery Mason stepped to the door. "Conn," he said, "somebody's comin'"

It has been given me that I live in the moment, with an awareness heightened by every impression of the senses. No doubt a part of it was natural to me, but it was also conditioned in me by Jim Sotherton.

He lived in such a way, and he was forever commenting to me on how few people actually livednow. Most people, he said, exist in an emptiness between memory and anticipation, but never livein the moment.

Whatever natural tendency I may have had toward living in the moment was developed and increased by Sotherton's comments, and by his own awareness.

Now when I stepped from the door of the saloon into the bright sunlight, I stood for a moment to let my eyes become accustomed to the change of light. As I stood there on the weathered boardwalk, I looked down at the gray boards, at the cracks, the slivers, the places where some idle hand had whittled with a knife, and I was aware of the warm sun and the silence, of water dripping from the water tank used by the railroad into a trough used by passing riders. And then I looked up and walked to the end of the porch with Mason.

The air was startlingly clear. Far away in the sky was a puff of cloud against the blue. The smooth flow of the rolling hill was a soft green with the new grass growing, and I stood there, feeling the weight of the gun against my leg, the sun on my shoulders, squinting my eyes against the distance, watching the rider on the far-off hill.

He was one man alone, and he rode a mule. That was obvious from the gait of the animal. Sunlight gleamed on a rifle barrel.

Battery Mason swore suddenly, then he said, "Conn, you know more than one man who rides a mule?"

"Not in this country."

It was Hoback. He was coming on along the flank of the hill, taking his time.

A little chill went through me, the sort of chill you have when they say somebody has stepped on your grave.

The air was completely still, and I could smell the dust in the space - scarcely to be called a street - between the saloon and the station. Around the tight little knot of buildings all was bare, open to the sky and the wind. Only the distant rider moved.

Lowering my eyes for a moment, I saw an ant struggling with some tiny object, but an object larger than itself. Battery was leaning against the corner of the saloon, and I knew what was going through his mind. That was Bill Hoback, the Dutchman, out there.

We had not sent for him, and the chances were he was not riding in search of a job, so he must have been hired by McDonald or by Frank Shalett. McDonald was unlikely to have heard of the Dutchman, so it must have been Shalett's idea.

Shalett again. Now, who was Shalett?

Nobody needed to tell me, or Battery Mason, who the Dutchman was. He was a man-hunter. A man who stalked other men to kill - to kill for cash. He hunted men the way other men hunted buffalo, or deer. He stalked them, killed them, collected his price.

For a man riding a mule who was so well known by chuck-wagon yarns, the Dutchman managed to drop out of sight whenever he wanted. But he was known as a fast and deadly accurate shot with any kind of weapon. Handy with a pistol, though he relied more on a rifle or shotgun, both of which he habitually carried.

Nobody knew how many men he had killed, probably he didn't know himself. Does a butcher keep track of the beeves he slaughters?

By now he had seen us, of that I was sure; but he was coming on, riding right down to the station.

Suddenly, I felt a twinge of worry. Where was Rowdy? Where was Gallardo?

Battery was thinking the same thing. "Ain't heard a shot," he commented, "but those boys should ought to be back."

From where we stood we could hear the low murmur of voices from the station platform where Meharry stood with Flanagan. They had seen the rider, too, and were watching him, for in all that vast landscape he was the only moving thing.

"Makes a man think, seein' him around," Mason commented. "I'd sooner be in a dark room with a cougar."

"Do you know him?"

"Don't want to. But I was out in Colorado when he was around there."

Meharry stepped down off the platform at the station and walked slowly across the street. As he came up on the boardwalk he said, "You ever hear about his contracts?" he asked. "Anybody found dead with a bullet in them ... anybody of those he's supposed to get... and he gets paid."

My eyes returned to the rider. Never had I deliberately started out to kill a man who had done no harm to me or mine. I had killed two of the men who had murdered Sotherton, but that was my job, for he had been my friend and my employer, and in that country you fought for the brand you worked for.

This was different. This time I was going to have to order a man killed, or kill him myself, and of the two I preferred the latter.

This man must die, and he must die at once, for we might never see him again ... but he would be sure to see us. And one by one we would die. The man was more deadly than any Comanche.

Did he know we were here? I thought not. He had come unexpectedly into a trap.

He was close enough now for us to see him clearly, and he was older than I had thought. He might have been fifty, or perhaps older. He was a short man with a lean, sharp face and the coldest eyes I had ever seen.

He came riding up to the saloon and dismounted, tying his horse to the hitch rail. He merely glanced at us, then went inside.

Meharry moved over beside me. "Conn, I had a talk with Flanagan," he said. "He's going to talk over the wire with a despatcher back up the line. Maybe he can learn something."

When I went back inside, Hoback was standing at the bar, and he carried his shotgun slung from his shoulder, the butt up and about level with the top of the shoulder, the barrel dangling near his right hand. It was the first time I'd seen a gun carried that way.

He was half turned, so that his back was not to the door, and I went up to the bar and stood close to him, so close he could not get the shotgun into action if he wanted to.

There was no sense in beating around the bush with a man like this, and I had always believed in direct methods.

"You just rode in, Hoback," I said. "Did you see a man of mine out there in the hills?"

His eyes flickered the merest bit when I called him by name, but he said, "I saw nobody."

"I hope you didn't," I said.

He let that ride for a minute or two, but it worried him, and finally he said, "Why?"

"Because if you killed him I'm going to kill you." Fear rode before this man wherever he went, like a ghost horseman, and he was not accustomed to such direct talk. He started to speak, but I gave him no chance.

"I know who you are, Hoback, and why you are here. I also know how you get paid. Now listen to this. If one of my men, any one of them, is killed by any means whatever, I shall hunt you down and kill you like you've killed others."

Down the bar Battery Mason was holding his breath, and the bartender had moved as far away as he could get, but Bill Hoback had been taken off balance and was speechless. I did not give him a chance to reply or to get set. My left side was almost against him, and he had no chance to lift the shotgun, or even to lift his right hand without brushing me. His left hand rested on the bar.

"You get paid no matter who kills the man you're after, so we'll use the same rule you like. If any one of my men is killed, in any way whatsoever, we kill you."

He was sweating, but I'd never seen a man's eyes so mean, so bitter with a fury he could not let out.

"You're Conn Dury," he said.

"That's right, Dutchman. I'm Conn Dury; and if you'll recall, I spent part of my years living with the Apaches. I could follow your sign across a flat rock ... I could follow it by the smell."

He pulled back, trying for distance, but I moved right with him.

"You got no call to jump me," he protested. "I done nothing."

"And you aren't going to." As I spoke, a plan came to me suddenly. "In about half an hour there's an east-bound train due in here. We're putting you aboard."

"Like hell!" he said. I'll -"

My back hand took him across the mouth, and he staggered. His right hand dropped to his shotgun and it swept up, faster than a man could draw a gun, his right hand going back to the action, the left catching the barrel - a movement so incredibly swift that I'd never have believed it possible.

Yet I had followed him up, and as his gun came up I slapped the barrel aside. Had I been two feet further away, he would have blown me apart. As it was, the shotgun went off harmlessly with a thunderous roar in the close confines of the room, and then I hit him.

My right fist caught him on the jaw and knocked him sprawling. Leaping after him, I kicked the gun from his hands. He lay there, staring up at me, blood trickling from a split lip from my backhand blow.

A gun butt was visible in his waistband and his hand hovered close to it. I stood waiting, my own gun in its holster.

"Go ahead," I said. "Just go ahead and try it." He was no gunfighter in the sense that I was, that some of the others I had with me were. It might have been that he was faster and more accurate than any of us, but it simply was not his way of fighting. There was an instant when I thought his rage might bring him to draw, but the instant passed, and slowly his muscles relaxed. This man was not going to risk dying. He was a killer from ambush, a sure-thing killer.

"Meharry," I said, "tell Flanagan there will be a passenger on the next train - a passenger who will ride in a cattle car."

He lay there, resting on one elbow, hating me.

"Take his gun, Mason. Then go out and look over his outfit. We're going to pay him for it and let him ride out of here without it."

"He'll buy another."

"No," I said, "he's going out of here broke. We'll send the money, and whatever he has in his pockets, to the post office in Joplin. He can pick it up there." But when we stood on the platform watching the caboose of the train disappearing down the track toward the east, I had no idea that this was the end of the Dutchman. He would be back. I had only postponed the inevitable.

"You should have killed him," D'Artaguette commented thoughtfully. "You should have taken the slightest move he made as excuse and killed him, once you had him on the floor. Nobody would have blamed you."

"That's my trouble," I replied. "I've killed men, but I am not a killer."

We went back inside, and as the afternoon had waned into dusk, we ordered supper and sat down to wait for it. Several times one of us went outside, and at last I saw Rowdy Lynch and Gallardo coming down the slope together. I hadn't been that relieved in a long time.

The sky turned blood-red, and the red bathed the hills in soft crimson or pink; the night closed around us and gathered the hills into shadow, and the stars lit up their lamps.

"Conn," Rowdy said, "we're late because we found some tracks out there."

Gallardo had been the first to cut a trail, and it was the trail of a single rider - not the Dutchman - and Gallardo had followed it, for it led where he had been directed to ride.

Rowdy Lynch, coming up from around the station, riding south, but east of the town, had come on the trail of a large herd of cattle. Following that trail, he had come on Gallardo, working out the puzzle of the tracks.

The lone horseman had met the point of the herd. Ordinarily he would never have found those tracks, because the following herd would have wiped them out; but after the meeting, the herd had been stopped, and turned back again to the south.

"South?" I exclaimed.

"That was the way of it, Conn. And to me it spells trouble."

That lone rider might have been somebody from the herd itself, somebody who had gone ahead to look out for a good holding ground, and for water. I suggested as much.

"No, that rider was George Darrough, that buffalo-hunter friend of McDonald's. I'd know that horse of his anywhere. He rides an appaloosa he swapped from some Indian some time or other, and that horse has the smallest, prettiest feet I ever did see. I've seen those tracks before. That rider was George Darrough."