Ralph Compton Showdown At Two-Bit Creek Page 4

  “Coons.” The oldster grinned, without a moment’s hesitation, revealing only pink gums. “Jeb Coons. Coons by name, Coons by nature, I always tell folks.”

  “Well, Jeb Coons, see to that water,” Fletcher said.

  He had not offered his own name, and he knew that Coons, as was the way of Western men, would not press the matter.

  For just a moment, Fletcher stood silent and looked around the cabin. He’d expected memories to come flooding back, but there were none. He recalled the sound of his father’s laugh, his mother’s voice, sweet and high, singing “Brennan on the Moor” as she sat with her sewing basket in the short winter twilight. But their faces were no longer clear to him. They had been dimmed like fading tintypes by the passing of the long years, never to return.

  A sudden lump rising unbidden to his throat, Fletcher quickly stepped outside, caught up the horses and led them behind the back of the cabin. The barn, being sod with timber roof, had not fared as well as the cabin. The rear portion of the roof had caved in, but there was still plenty of room in front for Fletcher’s horses alongside Coon’s buckskin. There was roof enough left to shelter the horses from the worst of the falling snow, and the sod walls were still sturdy and would keep out most of the wind.

  Fletcher rubbed down his horses with a piece of sacking, forked some hay into their stalls and fed them each a few handfuls of oats.

  When he returned to the cabin, Coons had water warming, and Fletcher used this and a fairly clean towel to bathe the woman’s head. The bullet had just grazed her, but it had left a nasty cut that had bled considerably.

  “Ain’t you gonna take her clothes off?” Coons asked, bending over Fletcher’s shoulder. “You ought to take her clothes off, you know.”

  The gunfighter turned and glanced into the old-timer’s eyes, looking for heat there. But he saw none, just genuine concern.

  “Why would I take off her clothes?” Fletcher asked. “It’s her head that’s hurt.”

  Coons shrugged. “I figured that’s what you do with folks that are feelin’ right poorly with a misery.”

  “Well, I don’t know anything about taking off women’s fixings,” Fletcher said. “Anyway, dressed or undressed, she’ll be all right. I got most of the blood off; now we’ll just let her sleep. I recollect a doctor telling me one time that sleep is nature’s medicine.”

  “Know her?” Coons asked.

  It was Fletcher’s turn to shrug. “Never saw her before in my life.”

  “Me neither,” Coons said, “but there’s a lot of strangers moving into the country around here. Gun-handlers mostly.” A sly look crept across his face. “Like you, Buck.”

  Fletcher was startled, and it showed. “You know me?”

  “Figgered it right off as soon as you walked through the door and into the light. Seen you in Dodge the time you kilt them gunfightin’ cousins, Austin Bowen an’ Jem Lassiter. Mister, you was hell on wheels that day. Me, I took to studying on things when you was to the barn, and I figger you’re here for the war.”

  “What war?”

  “You mean you don’t know?” The words came slowly.

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking.”

  “Why, the war between the PP Connected an’ the Lazy R, of course. Deke Tyrone, the owner of the Lazy R, was shot off his hoss, dead when he hit the ground, by person or persons unknown. An’ since then, hands have been killed on both sides, herds rustled and sich, and I reckon this is just the beginning. The way this war is stacking up, I’d say the worst is yet to come.”

  Coons ladled stew into a bowl for Fletcher and poured him a cup of coffee. He watched the big man eat for a few moments, then said, “Got me a poke from my diggins in Deadwood. It ain’t much, but I figgered it was enough to let me winter here in this cabin. I found it abandoned an’ all, and pegged it as a right snug place to nurse my rheumatisms until spring.

  “But then Pike Prescott came up here with some of his boys day afore yesstidy an’ told me to get out. That’s why, when you rode up to the cabin, I figgered you was here to run me off.”

  Fletcher scraped his bowl clean, and Coons refilled it. “For what it’s worth, Jeb,” the big man said, taking up his spoon again, “I was raised in this cabin. My ma and pa are buried out back, among the aspen. I guess that gives me some kind of claim to the place. So after I ride on out of here, you can stay as long as you like.”

  “That’s mighty civil of you,” Coons said, “but I reckon Mr. Prescott will have something to say about that.”

  Fletcher finished his stew and held up a hand, patting his stomach with the other, when Coons offered more. He fished in his shirt pocket for the makings of a cigarette, and as he rolled it asked, “Who is this Prescott, and why does he cut such a wide path around here?”

  “Prescott owns the PP Connected,” Coons said. “He’s the biggest rancher in these parts, and he wants to be bigger still. He offered to buy out Deke Tyrone, but Tyrone, he ran Pike off his place an’ told him he’d see him in hell first.

  “Three weeks later, Tyrone was murdered, bushwhacked by someone using a high-powered rifle. An’ when I say high-powered, I mean a mighty big gun that clean blowed his head off.

  “Now, the war that’s about to bust this country wide open will be between ol’ Pike and Deke’s widow, Judith Tyrone. She’s a pretty young filly. She owns the Lazy R now, and folks say Prescott is pushing her hard. There’s a lot of money to be made selling beef to the Deadwood miners, an’ it seems Prescott wants it all for his ownself.

  “I hear tell he plans to run his cows all the way from the Platte north to False Bottom Creek an’ as far east as Deadman Gulch an’ maybe beyond. ”When he does that, he’ll have the Lazy R boxed in tight as Dick’s hatband. Prescott’s claiming some of the best winter range in the Territory, an’ Judith Tyrone will have nowhere to go with her herd. She can’t move ’em west without bumping into some of the big Montana outfits, and Prescott’s claiming all the grass to the east.”

  Coons shrugged. “Like Deke, she’s refusing to sell out. Put it all together, and you got—”

  “A casus belli,” Fletcher said, finishing it for him.

  “A what?”

  “It’s Latin,” Fletcher said, smiling slightly. “It means a cause for war.”

  The old man nodded. “Yup, that’s what it is all right—a real cat’s belly.” Coons’ face wrinkled into a puzzled grin. “Buck, you real sure you ain’t here to sell your gun, times being as they are? Ain’t like you to sit idly by an’ watch it all happen.”

  Fletcher shook his head at the old man. “I’m headed for Deadwood, maybe as early as first light tomorrow. There’s nothing here for me, and now I get to it, I don’t recall there ever was.”

  The woman stirred on the bunk and moaned softly. Fletcher stepped to her side and took her hand. “Can you hear me?” he asked.

  Slowly the woman opened her eyes, and Fletcher felt his breath catch in his chest when he saw how green and beautiful they were.

  “My ... my name is Savannah,” she whispered.

  Fletcher introduced himself and Coons, then asked gently, “Who shot you?”

  The girl looked surprised. “Somebody ... somebody shot me?”

  “I’d say somebody was doing his level best to kill you.”

  Savannah looked at the big, hard-faced man with the clear blue eyes by her side, then at old Coons, who was giving her an embarrassed, toothless grin.

  “Where am I?” she asked.

  “At a cabin on Two-Bit Creek,” Fletcher said. “I found you lying in the snow up near Whitewood Peak. Somebody killed your horse and tried real hard to kill you. Me and him, whoever he was, exchanged shots, but I lost him in the snow.”

  Savannah’s fingers strayed to her head. She winced.

  Fletcher nodded. “You were wounded. Whoever the would-be killer was, he came real close.”

  “What was I doing out there?” the girl asked.

  “Ain’t no place for a lady like you, an’
that’s for sure,” Coons offered. “Nothing out there but grass an’ trees an’ maybe the odd wolf or coyote.”

  “I can’t remember a thing,” Savannah said, panic rising in her voice. “I remember my name, but the rest is a blank. It’s like my memory has been wiped clean.”

  The girl’s purse, a small leather affair closed with a drawstring, had been lying forgotten on the floor. Fletcher picked it up and handed it to her.

  “Maybe there’s something in there that will jog your memory,” he suggested.

  “Please go ahead and open it,” Savannah said. “I might have identification in there.”

  Fletcher opened the purse and turned the contents out on the bunk. Apart from a few women’s fixings, the small pile on the blanket consisted of five newly minted gold double eagles, some loose change and an elaborately engraved .41 caliber Remington derringer.

  Shaking his head in puzzlement, Fletcher picked up the gun. “Odd thing for an obviously well-bred young lady to be carrying,” he said. “Why did you feel the need for a belly gun?”

  Savannah shook her head.

  “Mr. Fletcher,” she said, “I only wish I knew.”

  Chapter 4

  The snow ended during the night, leaving a six-inch covering outside the cabin and on the flat grassland. The branches of the surrounding pines were bowed under a frosting of white, and the sun rose bright and cool, touching the snow with a pale golden light.

  Fletcher, who had spread his blankets on the floor of the cabin, rose early, fed the fire in the stove and put coffee on to boil.

  He checked on Savannah, who was sleeping peacefully, then shrugged into his mackinaw and stepped outside, taking his rifle.

  The country lay quiet around him, beautiful in a mantle of white, and Fletcher felt an odd elation, a sense of belonging, of discovering the place where he truly belonged.

  He shook his head in sudden irritation.

  No, he didn’t belong here. A man makes a path, sets a course, and the future course of Fletcher’s life lay in the brawling, noisy and violent towns where ambitious men paid highly for gun skills in round, hard coins of silver and gold.

  He was no farmer to bend his back to a plow, nor was he a cattleman. Fletcher was what he was, what he’d always been, a man who made a living from a gun, on either side of the law, and to that life he must return. It was the only life he knew, and destiny had ordained that it was the only life he would ever know.

  The bright flames of elation he’d felt when he first stepped outside the cabin and gasped at the magnificence arid beauty of the land had burned out as quickly as they had come. Now, in their place, were left only the cold ashes of defeat and hopelessness.

  Buck Fletcher knew he was shackled to his gun as firmly as a prisoner to a ball and chain—and that realization tasted like bitter gall in his mouth.

  His face stiff and bleak, Fletcher made his way behind the cabin and climbed the rise until he reached the aspen. He stood among the trees and glanced around, frowning, trying to remember. It had been a long time ago. So long, it sometimes felt like a hundred years and made a man think that maybe it had all happened in a different lifetime.

  He’d dug the graves for his parents among the aspen directly behind the cabin and had made two crosses of tree branches. Of those, after the passage of fifteen years, there was no sign. Nor was there any sign of the graves.

  The ground under the aspen looked undisturbed, the mounds smoothed out by rain and wind and snow and the turning of time. Ma and Pa were here somewhere, but in a place now known only to God.

  Fletcher took off his hat and bowed his head.

  This morning he had no prayers. Those, like the graves, were long since forgotten.

  “Just so you know I’m here,” he whispered. “I came back to see you.”

  He stood there for a few long minutes, trying to remember how it had been when he was a boy. It was all gone. Too much hard and dangerous living in the intervening years had made every detail recede into forgetfulness. In trying to remember, he was clutching at a mist always drifting just out of reach of his outstretched hands.

  An errant wind stirred the branches above Fletcher’s head, and a few flakes of snow fell on his shoulders. He nodded as though it was a signal. “Just so you know I was here,” he whispered.

  He turned on his heel and walked back down the slope to the cabin. He didn’t look back.

  He had thought to ride to Deadwood that morning. But he delayed, making the excuse to himself that he could not leave Savannah here alone with just an old man for protection.

  Her killer might come searching for her, and even though Jeb was no pilgrim, he was stiff and creaking with the rheumatisms and might be no match for a skilled gunman, especially one that shot from ambush.

  This is what Fletcher told himself, but even as he did he knew it was a lie. He did not want to leave. Something was holding him here. But what it was, and the reason for his remaining, he could not even begin to comprehend.

  That day and the next he spent with his books, reading outside in the bright sunlight, his back to a tall pine tree.

  The speckled pup took his accustomed place at Fletcher’s side, snuggling close, his eyes adoring. But when the big man read Voltaire aloud to him, the little pup usually decided adoration had its limits and would run off to chase his tail in the snow or wander into the brush on some doggy exploration.

  Slowly, Fletcher felt the tension leave his neck and shoulders. At night, as he and Savannah and Jeb talked in the cozy cabin by the firelight, he even managed to laugh a time or two.

  Jeb Coons had a fund of stories about gold mining and had even prospected with a burro in the Arizona Territory. He regaled Fletcher and Savannah with tales of bloodthirsty Apaches and desperate gun battles among craggy, sun-blasted rocks and giant Saguaro cacti, making much of his own bravery and derring-do.

  Fletcher doubted that half the stories the old man told were true, but that didn’t matter. For someone like himself who rode long and lonely trails, it was the companionship that mattered. The closeness of other human beings.

  For her part, Savannah’s memory had not returned, and what had been her past remained hidden behind a thick fog of forgetfulness.

  She had a fine singing voice and was somehow able to recall the old songs of the Irish and the Welsh and the folk of the Tennessee hills. As he watched her sing in the firelight of that second evening, her face flushed from the fire, eyes shining, Fletcher felt an odd stirring inside him. Could this woman, young, lovely and poised, ever become a wife to a man like him?

  As soon as the thought came to him, he shook his head, dismissing it. No, it would never happen. What had he to offer a woman like Savannah?

  The answer was nothing—except maybe a life of restless, incessant wandering, gun violence and, at the end of it all, young widowhood.

  Savannah was a wife for another man, maybe a man she was yet to meet. But that man would not and could not be Buck Fletcher.

  And what of love? He had no idea what love was, what it felt like. When a man visited the girls on the line, was that love? Was it as simple as that? Just a straightforward contract between two people to stay together for an hour or a lifetime?

  Fletcher had no answer to these questions. Nor, he decided, would he seek them. Why trouble himself with matters that would never concern him?

  Next morning, Coons and Savannah busied themselves preparing breakfast while Fletcher, deciding three was a crowd and being of suspect cooking skills, took his book and found his accustomed place with the pup under the pine. He sat reading, enjoying the good smells of coffee boiling and bacon frying.

  Today he had left his Winchester inside, but he was wearing his gunbelts. The fact that Savannah’s mysterious enemy was still out there somewhere continued to trouble him.

  Fletcher heard the sound of cantering horses, and he lifted his head from Voltaire in time to see a party of a dozen horsemen heading toward the cabin. He closed the book and laid it down
carefully, then stood, a lone but defiant figure, ready to face whatever it was these horsemen represented. If they professed to be friends, he would greet them as such. If enemies ... Well, he could accommodate them too.

  In the past, men had come at Fletcher in many guises, some hiding their true faces behind a smile or a scowl, but the big man who now reined up, a flurry of snow fanning into the air from his horse’s hooves, presented no such facade. He was what he was, and he didn’t mind showing it to the world. His face was handsome, arrogant, brutal—the face of a man well used to power and the ruthless, uncaring wielding of it.

  The men who were with him seemed tough and capable, but they looked to be ordinary punchers—all of them, that is, but one. That exception was young and blond, with the merciless yellow eyes of a snake. He wore two guns, silver-engraved and ivory-handled, each worth more than a cowhand could make in six months.

  But this was no cowhand. Fletcher recognized him for what he was and knew he’d be pure poison with a gun.

  “You there, fellow!” the big man yelled. “Who are you?”

  “Who are you?” Fletcher shot back, suddenly irritated by this man’s brusqueness and high-handed manner.

  “My name is Pike Prescott, and this is my land. You’re trespassing, and I want you off it now.”

  Prescott was four inches taller than Fletcher’s even six feet and at least fifty pounds heavier than his lean one hundred and eighty. His eyes were as hard and devoid of feeling as blue pebbles at the bottom of a creek, and his mouth was a thin white slash of anger.

  “If I find you here tomorrow morning,” Prescott continued, flat and slow, “I’ll hang you alongside the other squatter who lives here.”

  Fletcher smiled without warmth, a tall, significant exclamation point of danger against the white of the snow.

  “This isn’t your land, Prescott,” he said. He’d purposely left off the “Mister” this man was no doubt accustomed to hearing from lesser mortals, and he saw that he’d stung him. “My father and mother owned this place and the hundred and sixty acres surrounding. They’re buried back of the cabin. I was raised here, and I think maybe I’ll stay.”