High Plains Justice



  High Plains Justice

  By Maryk Lewis

  First published by Robert Hale, London, 1992 as

  A Black Horse Western

  Published 2014 by Maryk Lewis at Splashwords

  Copyright Maryk Lewis 2014

  Hot lead flew, and blood flowed freely in 1859. The Cheyenne were raiding. When outlaws gunned down two sleepy cowpokes, and rode off with a thousand Texas longhorns, their main problem was what to do with the slow-moving cattle. Johnnie Bell’s problem lay in getting them back. The army couldn’t help — they had the marauding Indians to deal with. Texas Rangers had no jurisdiction once the cattle were over the border, and other settlers had their own homes and herds to guard. Luckily for Johnnie, he had two Comanche friends with points to prove, and along the way he met up with a feisty widow woman, who had lost both husband and herd to the self-same rustlers.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ePub format ISBN 978-0-473-31075-2

  Kindle/Mobi format ISBN 978-0-473-31076-9

  iBook format ISBN 978-0-473-31077-6

  By the same author

  By Fickle Winds Blown

  ONE

  The rustlers struck late in the day. Half-an-hour before sundown all was peaceful and quiet. Most of the stringy longhorn herd had mobbed up on the river flats along the true left bank, and the rest were drifting out of draws and arroyos to join them. Soon the older beasts would have begun settling down for the night, lulled and calmed by Eb de Lange’s dreamy singing, as he patrolled the up-river end of the bedding ground.

  Johnnie, the range boss, had gone back down river to the ranch, and would not be back until the morning. As he rode away the two cowpunchers he left with the herd grinned tolerantly at each other. They didn’t mind. Johnnie, the owner’s son, was young yet. Too easy-going, a bit green, and too darned good-looking for his own good; given time they would get him trained, the way all paid hands trained their employers. In the meantime he was a good man to work for, they liked him, and a bit of give and take would do no harm, or so they all thought at the time.

  Only Eb and his partner Rastus, then, were left to watch the herd. That was not expected to be a particularly demanding task, as most of the spring growth was in the bottomlands along the river, and the cattle were not likely to shift far away from it.

  Slow and gentle, the black cowpuncher’s mount, a hulking great half-draught horse, plodded across to the river. Then it turned, unbidden, back toward the left-hand terrace. Above the terrace the high plains of Texas rolled back mile upon barren mile to the sharp clear line of the horizon.

  Just as he turned, the first bullet lifted Eb from the saddle, and pitched him down on to the rocks by the river’s edge.

  His horse reared back, and lost its footing on the crumbling bank. Its shrill scream was cut short, when it landed back-first across a washed up log. The crack of its spine breaking sounded like a pistol shot.

  By then more and real shots were sounding from the mesas above both river terraces, and the panicking longhorns were surging, bawling, up the river, and away from the frightening noise of the guns.

  Startled, Eb’s partner, Rastus, came loping out of the cottonwood grove where their line camp was set up. He toted a Tennessee long rifle that had been all but worn out when his grandfather was a boy. That did not stop him from using it. He spilled black powder into the pan, tested the flint, and swung the long barrel up questing for a target.

  Far out across the sea of milling, rattling horns, and plunging brown backs, he spotted one of the raiders whooping in, intent on preventing any of the fear-maddened cattle from heading back down river. The rifle steadied. The blade of the foresight cut a line between the ears of the rustler’s horse. Rastus raised just a little. After all, the gun was old. The touch hole was bigger than the makers ever intended. When he squeezed the shot away, black powder, still burning, jetted up and sprayed his black forehead.

  Blue-black smoke blossomed from the muzzle.

  Rastus had to step to one side to see past the cloud. The rustler, hands to his face, was tumbling from his horse.

  Quickly, Rastus spat on his sponge, and probed his barrel for any lingering sparks. From his pouch he tipped in a quantity of powder, estimating the amount by eye. When it looked right, he pressed home a wad, and poked a lead bullet in after it. The ramrod he tucked in his belt.

  Another target?

  There were plenty offering. A dozen riders were driving up the flats on the near side of the river, and a couple of men were across on the other bank, turning back any cattle which tried to wade through. On the mesa, above and behind him, the whooping and hollering suggested at least as many more.

  Because he was on foot, a black man in dingy cast-off clothing, hidden in the evening shadows by the cottonwoods, Rastus had not yet been noticed. His powder smoke seemed just part of the gloom under the trees.

  He looked to choose another man to kill. He had the choice, and whichever one took his fancy would die. The fat one nearby? He would be an easy mark, and his death would be a kindness to his horse. The one in the bowler hat, with a white shining brow above his red bandana? That brow was tempting. Rastus had once had an owner with a brow like that. Still, he really ought to concentrate on one of those bellowing orders, say the tall man reined up by the river’s edge. The distance to him would help to disguise where Rastus’s fire was coming from.

  Again smoke bloomed from the rifle, its cough lost in the racket created by the rustlers trying to keep the cattle moving. When he could see again, Rastus found the tall man folded in the middle, clutching at his horse’s neck with failing fingers. The fellow lacked the strength to hold on. He slid away to the off-side, where his foot caught in the stirrup.

  His horse, already spooked, took fright even more, and turned to bolt, fishtailing, back down river. The unfamiliar weight dragging under its hind feet hindered it. It tried to kick its way clear, still fishtailing, which only dragged the tethered body further under its hind feet. Flesh and bones gave before the onslaught, but still the outlaw’s foot remained trapped in the iron, and he died, kicked and trampled, smashed again and again, by his own horse.

  Rastus was not watching. He had his third victim picked, a man with two guns. Two guns were worn by men who lived by their guns. That was a good enough reason for this one to die, and he did... taken clean through the temple at a good two hundred paces.

  Where next? Rastus prepared his rifle for the next shot without even looking down at his hands. In a moment the rustlers would all be out of range, and he wanted just one more to show the boss.

  Old Jamie Bell, ‘Ding Dong’, was a good boss. One who knew, too, that Rastus, for his part, was a good worker, but there was sure going to be some cussing and swearing at the loss of this herd, and Rastus wanted to be damned sure that the old man had ample proof of how well this cowboy had earned his pay.

  One left. A little weedy fellow had stayed back, over on the edge of the river bank. He had pulled a shotgun from his saddle scabbard, and he was kneeing his horse around to get a line on something out of sight below the bank.

  Eb had been over there some place. What else could the rustler be aiming at?

  That last shot from the old rifle took him high in the back of the neck before he could fire. Blood, teeth, and bone splinters spewed over the bank, and the rustler’s body followed right after. His horse promptly disappeared into the dust raised by the stampeding herd.

  A southern planter’s yell brought Rastus swing­ing about. He knew that sound. It featured in his nightmares, the hallooing of the young masters hunting slaves on the run. He had last heard it for real when
they came after him. After all this time one of them had found him... and his rifle was empty!

  Grey, both horse and rider, grey doom, plunging out of the draw at the end of the cottonwood grove, came thundering down on the trapped cow- puncher. He swung the rifle up to use the butt as a club, a desperate, useless gesture, but he had to try.

  The rider’s gun muzzle, the business end of a Colt revolver, opened enormous, round, hollow black in his face... and then came the shot, and that was it!

  For a while Rastus’s body twitched, and his heels drummed. The thudding of his killer’s horse faded up the river flats. Further away was the dimi­nishing rumble of the stolen herd, but in a short time that too was gone.

  There was a time then of peace and quiet again, but it didn’t last.

  Before it got fully dark the birds in the cottonwoods had begun chittering, shrill warnings of the vultures winging in to clumsy landings, and not long afterwards the coyotes arrived to scrap over the dead calves, which had been pulped under the pounding of all those fear-driven hooves.

  Other carcases were also there, but the calves tasted better. No peace was to be found in that place for the rest of that dreadful night.

  Come morning, and the sun was high, before young John Bell appeared far down the river, a dusty rider on a big black horse, with a smaller bay carrying a pack saddle behind him. Yellow hair, worn long and tied back with a bootlace, was covered by a broad-brimmed hat. The shaded features were long-jawed and sandy, clean-shaven the previous evening. The usual easy grin had been wiped away by a worry new found.

  He was coming fast, for his horses had scented blood on the breeze a couple of miles back, and their unease had caused him to push them into a smart trot. From a half mile down he knew there was trouble, and the last stretch was taken at a gallop.

  By the black cowpuncher’s body he drew rein. Breath caught shocked in his throat, even though he was by then expecting just what he found. Some had been chewed away from one arm, though otherwise Rastus was untouched... well, untouched that is, except for a bullet hole in his face, and there being no back to his head. The other bodies lying out on the bedding ground told part of the story, but it was left to the ravens squabbling down by the river to draw him to the rest.

  Guilt flooded through him. He should have been there. Dryfe Sands Johnnie they called him, the darling of the ladies in Baton Rouge. Dear God! The first real test he had ever faced, and he had failed his men by not being there.

  Eb de Lange was still breathing, unconscious, though certainly not dead. He was lying half under a driftwood log, and his horse, dead, was sprawled over the top. Also there, dead, with half his face missing, was the last rustler Rastus had killed.

  Johnnie, two yards of solid bone and muscle, swung down from the saddle, to ground-tie both his horses, before going to kneel by his wounded man. The bullet had taken the end off a floating rib, and torn out a whacking great hole almost under the solar plexus. A lot of blood had been lost. There was also bruising behind the left ear, where Eb had hit his head as he fell.

  That had to be the first job, of course, tending to Eb’s wound, and preparing him to be taken back to the ranch.

  He fetched the medical kit from the camp, and after pouring raw whiskey all over the open wounds, stitched the ragged edges together with horse hair, which had also been doused in whiskey. Any dirt in the wound should have washed out with all that bleeding. A pad made from a clean shirt, smeared with zinc ointment, went over the top, and was bound tightly in place with cotton bandages. Eb’s wife, Jasmine, had made them pack those bandages, old cotton sheeting torn into strips. It was as well they had listened to her.

  But then, it must be admitted, they usually did. Everybody did.

  With Eb tended to, the next job was a travois, a horse stretcher, two long cottonwood poles with cross pieces bound to take a canvas groundsheet. The front ends tied to the pack saddle, one each side of the horse, and the trailing ends did just that, trailed on the ground, sliding along, and being springy, taking the worst of the bumps out of what had to be a rough journey.

  Everything else from the camp was bundled up, and hung in the trees. Coyotes, bears, any other scavengers in the area would rip it to bits otherwise.

  Rastus? Johnnie would like to have taken Rastus’s body back to the ranch for burial. Trouble was, Rastus’s horse was gone, either stolen by the rustlers, or broken loose during the night. The torn end of the dangling halter could have meant either.

  Not so, the spare horses, which had been left in a fenced-off box canyon a short distance up river. They had been stolen. A section of the post and rail fence had been deliberately dropped, and the horses driven out, not only the cowpuncher’s spares, but twenty or more breeding mares that belonged to the ranch blacksmith.

  There was a shovel among the line camp equipment. Johnnie took it up to the mesa overlooking the bedding ground. If anything of Rastus was still around and watching, he would like that place. There was a view, far and near. The distant view suggested the freedom that Rastus had known only in the last part of his life. The near view was of the place where he had gone out in triumph.

  Deep the hole had to be. No wolverine or wild hog could be allowed to disturb Rastus’s rest. At least Johnnie could do that for him. Equally important, there had to be room for four. Rastus had made him a mattress of dead men to lie on, and his three victims had to be fitted into that hole first. Somewhere back in Rastus’s ancestry, there had been warriors. His last resting place would have met with their approval.

  Much of the day had gone before Johnnie was ready to set out for home. Eb was still breathing easily. The bullet had gone close, but didn’t seem to have punctured a lung. Johnnie wondered what else was in there that might have been damaged.