Ralph Compton Showdown At Two-Bit Creek Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  DANGER RANGE

  Fletcher rode under a vast sky, the clouds so close to the earth he felt he could reach up and grab a handful, then watch it vanish from his fist like smoke.

  As a boy he’d loved this land, thrived on its wonder, and now, gradually, that sense of awe, of belonging, was coming back to him.

  A ring-necked pheasant, startled, fluttered up between the front legs of Fletcher’s stud, and the big horse reared in surprise. An instant later, a gunshot boomed across the afternoon quiet, then another, racketing echoes slamming among the surrounding hills like the fall of shattered glass.

  Fletcher reined in his horse, looking around him.

  The shots could have been fired by a hunter out after meat to store against the coming of winter.

  Or they could mean big trouble.

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, June 2003

  10 9

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67377-1

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2003

  All rights reserved

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  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

  True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravage of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

  In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

  It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

  It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

  —Ralph Compton

  Historical Note

  By the time George Armstrong Custer and the 7th Cavalry surveyed the Black Hills in 1874, rumors of gold had been circulating for more than fifty years. At first the government tried to buy the Black Hills from the Sioux. But Paha Saha, as the Indians called their sacred Black Hills, was not for sale.

  What he could not get with money, the white man took by force. By 1876, the year in which this novel is set, there were thirty thousand miners swarming all over the hills.

  Deadwood, the epicenter of all this activity, was dubbed “the richest one hundred square miles on earth.”

  There is still gold in them thar hills. The Homestake Mining Company bought the area’s richest deposit in 1877, and it’s been producing gold ever since. Now more than a mile deep, it is the United States’ longest continually operating underground mine, though I heard recently that after one hundred thirty-six years, the gold is finally showing signs of exhaustion.

  Today the real mother lode can be found along Deadwood’s Main Street—the casinos where tourists from all over the world try their hand at gambling. But if you still have the gold fever and wish to forego the pleasures of the casino, try panning the tumbling streambeds of the Black Hills.

  Find a fast-moving stream and look for places where the current suddenly slows, allowing gold particles to settle out.

  In streams that flow over bedrock, the gold is often trapped in holes, pockets and other depressions in the bedrock. When the stream runs through boulders or layered rock, pan the sand and grit you’ll find in the crevices.

  A beginner can usually process a pan of placer gravel in about ten minutes. Be warned: it’s a long ten minutes standing in icy water up to your knees. In 1876, a day’s work for a seasoned miner was fifty pans a day, but not every batch of gravel panned out, and often he went to his blankets empty-handed.

  If you’re lucky and find some color, you can pan enough gold to pay for your grub and gas. If not ... Well, panning is a marvelous experience and a real, living link to the days of the Old West.

  Alan Pinkerton was an equal opportunity employer almost one hundred y
ears before the practice became widely accepted in the United States.

  He readily hired female agents and expected them to live by the same strict code of morals he placed on men: namely, to have no “addiction to drink, smoking, card playing, low dives and slang.”

  Pinkerton hired his first female in 1856, slender, brown-haired Kate Warme, who walked into his Chicago headquarters and asked for a job. She surprised Pinkerton when she said she didn’t want to work as a clerk but as an agent.

  Kate argued her point of view eloquently,” says the official Pinkerton history, “pointing out that women could be most useful in worming out secrets in many places which would be impossible for a male detective.”

  Kate became the first female detective in the United States. Pinkerton soon hired many other women at Kate’s urging, and he later appointed her Supervisor of Women Agents.

  By 1876, the female ranks had grown, Kate having shown Pinkerton the tremendous value of women to his organization.

  Pinkerton was a man way ahead of his time. Women were not allowed to join regular police departments until 1891 and did not become detectives until 1903. The term policewoman was not used until 1920.

  I don’t subscribe to the popular belief that Calamity Jane married Wild Bill Hickok in or around Abilene in 1870. Allegedly, the marriage vows were written in the flyleaf of a Bible, and the Reverends W. K. Sipes and W. F. Warren conducted the ceremony.

  It seems highly improbable to me that Hickok—a well-groomed dandy who, like his friend Colorado Charlie Utter, took a bath every day—would be attracted to, much less marry, the smelly, heavy-drinking, tobacco-chewing Calamity.

  It should be noted that Hickok’s notions of hygiene were so unusual in the malodorous and unwashed West that the famed pistoleer’s daily bath became one of the “sights” at the end of the trail.

  I am of the opinion that Ralph Compton believed the “flyleaf wedding” was concocted by Hickok as a practical joke, and that’s how I have interpreted his notes for that portion of Showdown At Two-Bit Creek.

  Chapter 1

  “Seems to me a man who has so much mought want to spare some for poor folks like us who have so little.”

  Buck Fletcher sighed, sensing the danger even as he recognized an old, familiar pattern that he’d experienced more times than he cared to remember in the clamorous saloons of dusty cow towns from El Paso to Dodge.

  He was being set up, backed against the wall, and only his death in a sudden, roaring blaze of gunfire would satisfy the two men facing him.

  The men stood tense and eager in a dugout that passed for a saloon in the Bald Mountain country of the Dakota Territory. They were rough, dirty and bearded, buffalo hunters by the look of them, and Fletcher recognized their stamp. These were men who would rather steal than work, and they would kill without hesitation or a single moment’s remorse.

  Both wore filthy sheepskin coats that were buttonless and tied around with string, moccasins to their knees and shapeless, battered hats that looked like they’d once belonged to other men. Fletcher figured these two shared maybe six rotten teeth between them, and even at a distance of eight feet he could smell their rank stench.

  The man who’d spoken was the younger of the two, a mean-eyed towhead with a Sharps .50 caliber cradled in the crook of his arm, his loose mouth grinning, confident of his gun skills.

  The two were on the prod, hungry to take what was Fletcher’s: his guns, horses and the three hundred dollars in hard gold coins he carried in his money belt.

  Fletcher was well aware that what he had was little enough. It wasn’t much for a man to show for four years of war, another four as a ranch hand, two as a cow town marshal and then five rakehell years as a hired gun.

  During those years, Fletcher had learned his profession well—the difficult way of the Colt’s revolver, the draw and fire that took so much time and patience to master. The years had honed him down to six feet of bone and hard muscle, and he was lean as a lobo wolf and dangerous beyond all measure.

  That Fletcher had now and then stepped lightly across the line that separates the lawful from the lawless goes without saying. It was the curious way of the gunfighter, a man who was part outlaw, part honest, upstanding citizen.

  He had little enough, to be sure. But still, too much to be so easily parted with. A man should be allowed to keep what is his and not be expected to give it up without a fight.

  Buck Fletcher had known men like these two before.

  Huge, uncurried and wild, they had the look of drygulchers and back-shooters. They were men completely without honor, living by no code except that of the wolf. They were bullies who would meet face to face only the old, the weak, the timid and afraid.

  The men didn’t know it then, though they should have as their lives ticked down to a few final moments, but Buck Fletcher was none of these things.

  But he was a man who had already seen more than his share of killing, and now he tried his best to walk away.

  “Boys,” he said, “I’ve been on the trail for a month, and all I want is a bottle to cut the dust in my throat and a quiet hour to drink it in. I’ve never seen you men before, and I mean you no harm.”

  He reached in his pocket and laid a gold double eagle on the rough plank that served as a bar. “That’s yours. Now, drink up and welcome.”

  The men grinned, and the younger man shook his head. “You don’t get our drift, rube, do you?” he asked. “Let me fill you in—we want it all. Every damn thing you got, including them boots an’ fancy jinglebob spurs of yourn.”

  “Now, there’s no need to rush your drink.” The older man smiled. “Take your time, feller. Me and my boy here, we’ll strip what we want from you after you’re dead.”

  Fletcher turned to the man behind the bar. He was as dirty and unkempt as the other two, his eyes sly and feral.

  “Can you do something?” Fletcher asked softly. “I mean, can you make it go away and let a man drink in peace?”

  The man shook his head, a gleeful, knowing glint in his eyes. “It ain’t my problem, feller,” he said. “It’s yours.”

  Fletcher nodded. “Figured you’d say something like that.”

  He’d been standing belly to the bar. Now he turned slowly and faced the two grinning men.. “You two have been pushing me mighty hard,” he said wearily. “I’m not a man who likes to be stampeded, not by trash like you. So let’s haul iron and get it over with.”

  Fletcher carried a seven-and-a-half-inch barreled Colt low on his right hip, its mahogany handle worn and polished from much use. Another revolver, its barrel cut back to four inches by an Austrian gunsmith in Dodge, hung in a crossdraw holster to the left of his gunbelt buckle.

  In that single sickening instant as Fletcher turned to face him, the older man knew he’d made a big mistake. He looked at Fletcher more closely and thought he saw something—something that ran an icy chill through his body and made him think he’d lost his reason. The tall, hard-eyed man wasn’t afraid like others he’d known. He stood calm and ready, as if repeating a ritual he’d gone through many times before.

  It came to the older man then that he should back off, call the whole thing an unfortunate misunderstanding and get drunk on the twenty dollars lying on the bar. Besides, there might be a better opportunity later, somewhere on the trail when they could use the Sharps big .50 and get a clean shot at this man’s back.

  That the young man facing him was a practiced gunfighter there was no doubt, and the realization chilled the older man even deeper, all the way to the bone. There was danger here. Cold death was hovering very close, and he knew as the moments ticked by that he was fast running out of room on the dance floor. Now was the time to walk away from this. Now, before it was too late.

  He opened his mouth to speak, planning to smooth things over, make what was happening stop before it went any further.

  He never got the chance.

  His son, meaner but less intelligent and not so perceptive, brought up the muzzl
e of his Sharps. He was lightning fast.

  Fletcher was faster.

  He drew his long-barreled Colt in a blur of motion that had long since become instinctive to him and slammed a shot into the younger man’s chest. The towhead screamed and staggered a couple of steps backward. His father roared, gripped by both fear and anger, and drew from the waistband. His gun never cleared the top of his pants. Fletcher fired, the bullet crashing into the bridge of the man’s nose. Blood splashed in a scarlet cloud around his head.

  The older man’s eyes curled back in his head, showing white, and he fell, shaking the foundations of the dugout.

  The towhead, badly hurt, screamed something unintelligible and tried desperately to bring the Sharps into play. Fletcher shot him again. The man’s face showed stunned surprise, an utter inability to comprehend that he’d caught a fighting scorpion by the tail and that he was the one doing the dying.

  He gasped. “I thought ... I thought ...” Then he was falling headlong into black nothingness, the rifle dropping from his lifeless fingers.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Fletcher saw the bartender come up with a double-barreled Greener. The man fired, but Fletcher was already diving for the dirt floor. Buckshot hissed like a striking snake past his head. He rolled, then came up on one knee and slammed two shots very fast into the man’s chest. The bartender crashed against the sod wall behind him, dislodging a shower of bottles from the shelf, then sank to the floor, the light already fading from his eyes.

  The air in the poorly ventilated dugout was thick with acrid, gray powder smoke, and the concussion of the firing guns had extinguished the oil lamp above the bar.

  In the gloom, Fletcher thumbed fresh shells into his Colt, then shoved it into the holster. He looked at the two men on the floor. They were both dead, the older man’s twisted face revealing the stark horror and disbelief of his last moments.

  The bartender was sprawled behind the bar ... if a rough plank laid across two barrels can be described as such. A framed motto had fallen off the sod wall of the dugout and lay across the dead man’s chest. It read: