Ralph Compton Showdown At Two-Bit Creek Read online

“Jeb,” Buck said, “who did this to you?”

  “Higgy Conroy. Him and his gunmen caught me out in the open playing with the pup, and he shot me. He didn’t even say ‘Hi’ or nothing, just grinned, then drawed his gun and shot me.” The old man grasped the sleeve of Fletcher’s mackinaw. “But I fooled him, Buck. I ran into the cabin an’ got me my Henry, then I hightailed it out the back door an’ into the trees.

  “When they came at me all in a rush, I killed one of them an’ winged another. Then I heard Higgy say to leave me alone ’cause he’d gut shot me real good and that I’d die soon anyway.”

  Jeb cackled, his lips flecking with blood. “Fooled ’em again. I stayed alive, knowing you’d eventually come back.”

  The old miner tried to sit up, and Fletcher cradled his shoulders in his arms.

  “Buck,” he said, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe what he was about to say, “Hig shot the pup. The pup knowed something was going on when I got shot an’ ran for the trees. I saw Hig get off his hoss. Then the pup ran over and started into barking at him and biting at his boots.

  “Hig, he didn’t even look. He just lowered his gun and shot the pup, and he laughed while he was a-doing it. The pup, he just crawled away whimpering, an’ I guess he’s dead by this time.”

  Jeb’s eyes were bleak. “Buck, why would a man do a thing like that? Why did Hig kill the pup? I mean, he was no bigger’n a nubbin, and them little teeth of his couldn’t do Hig no harm. An’ why did he kill me? I didn’t mean him no harm either. I just wanted a warm place to hole up for the winter on account of my rheumatisms. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, is there?”

  The old man searched Fletcher’s face as though trying to find the answer to his questions in the big man’s battered features. “Can you tell me, Buck?” he asked. “It’s something I want to know.”

  Miserably, Fletcher shook his head. “Jeb, I don’t know the answer. It’s hard to figure what drives a man like Higgy Conroy. Some men are just evil, Jeb. They have a black heart, and the blood it pumps around their body is bad blood. All you can do with a vile thing like that is kill it and rid the earth of its shadow.”

  Jeb grimaced as a wave of pain hit him, and Fletcher said, “Old timer, I’ve got to get you into bed.”

  But the old man held up a weak hand. “No, let me die out here, Buck. I want to see the sky. I never was much of a one for a-lyin’ in bed when I had me a misery.”

  Jeb looked up at the bright blue sky, where the sun had already climbed to its noon position. “Dang me if’n it ain’t getting dark already, an’ the shadows are deepening. Hell, Buck, I shouldn’t be lying here. I should be busy getting your supper ready. You must be mighty hungry.”

  “You lay still, old timer,” Fletcher said softly. “Supper can wait.”

  Baker stepped up beside Jeb, an odd expression on his face. “Jeb,” he asked, “have you seen Savannah?”

  Jeb looked at Fletcher. “Friend of yours, Buck?”

  The big man nodded. “We’re on the same side.”

  “No, mister, I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her,” Jeb said. “She hasn’t come near the cabin, or I’d a seen her fer sure.”

  Fletcher noted a look of satisfaction on Baker’s face that came and went quickly, and he wondered at it.

  Did Matt Baker know Savannah?

  Could he be the one who was hunting her?

  Fletcher couldn’t quite bring himself to believe the latter. But it was a possibility to consider, and it was a worrisome thing.

  “Buck,” Jeb said urgently, “I got something to tell you.” The old man was going fast, and his eyes were clouded. “My poke... it’s yours. Look... look behind the stove. I put it there, for safety’s sake.”

  He pulled on Fletcher’s sleeve. “I got nobody, so I want you to use it. Build yourself a life with it, boy. An’ listen, don’t let them Deadwood banks tell you there’s sand or rotten quartz in there with the gold. It’s all dust and nuggets, every last ounce of it.”

  The old miner smiled. “I got something else to say, Buck.”

  Fletcher nodded. “What’s that, Jeb?”

  “Just this. What you’ve been hunting for all these years was right here at Two-Bit Creek all the time. You just didn’t know it.”

  “What was that, Jeb? What was I hunting?”

  “A home, boy. This was the only home you ever knowed, an’ it still is. You just wandered afar from it, but now you’re back.”

  Jeb struggled to sit up, but couldn’t manage it and fell back into Fletcher’s arms. “Look around you, boy.” He smiled, uttering the last few words of his long life. “This... is ... home.”

  Then Jeb Coons was gone, his head suddenly heavy on Fletcher’s shoulder.

  Fletcher laid Jeb on the ground and with gentle fingers closed his eyes.

  “He died well,” Baker said quietly. “In the end, that’s the true measure of a man.”

  Fletcher opened his mouth to speak, couldn’t find the right words, and said only, “I’ve got a burying to do.”

  Buck Fletcher knew nothing of love, how it felt to a man, but he knew well of hate. And now hate curled inside him, a venomous, deadly rattlesnake ready to strike.

  And it would strike first at Higgy Conroy.

  Chapter 10

  Fletcher and Matt Baker buried Jeb among the aspens.

  Baker, who knew the words, said the Lord’s Prayer over the grave, but even that wasn’t much to close a man’s life and say farewell. But Fletcher consoled himself with the thought that Jeb lay close to his mother and father, and maybe that was as it should be.

  As the two men walked back to the cabin, Baker suddenly stopped and nodded toward a tall pine. “I think I see your dog,” he said.

  Fletcher looked and saw a small, still bundle at the base of the tree where the pup had often sat and pretended an interest in Voltaire, if only for a few minutes before he got bored and went off sniffing and exploring.

  “Yeah,” Fletcher said bleakly. “It’s the pup, all right.”

  “I’ll do this,” Baker said. “I mean, the burying.”

  Fletcher shook his head. He had been given a bitter cup to drink this day, and now he would drain it to the dregs.

  “He’s my dog,” he said quietly. “I’ll bury him.”

  The men walked over to the tree. The pup was stretched out, blood on his chest and hindquarters, and the snow around him was stained red.

  Baker kneeled beside the little animal and put a hand on his side. “Hell, Buck,” he said. “He’s still alive.”

  Quickly Fletcher kneeled and ran a hand over the pup’s body. The little dog was warm but unconscious. As far as he could see, the bullet had entered the pup’s chest and exited near his rear left leg. Both wounds were crawling with maggots, but that was a good thing. The maggots had kept the wounds clean and stopped an infection from getting started.

  The pup’s breathing was very shallow, and his pink tongue lolled out of his mouth. His eyes were shut. When Fletcher put a hand on his chest, he felt the animal’s heart fluttering weakly.

  Gently, Fletcher picked up the little dog in his strong hands. The pup whimpered softly and opened his eyes.

  “I know, I know, boy; it hurts,” Fletcher whispered. “But we’re going to fix you up, and it won’t hurt anymore, don’t worry.”

  Reassured by the man’s voice and the gentle cradle of his strong hands, the pup turned his head and licked Fletcher’s fingers.

  Fletcher carried the little animal into the cabin. He laid him on a blanket on the floor and made up the fire. The maggots had done their job, and now Fletcher carefully cleaned them from the pup’s wounds and laid him closer to the stove.

  “Just let him lie there quiet for a while, Matt,” he said. “I’m going outside to gather up a few things to help him.”

  Baker nodded and kneeled beside the pup, stroking his head. “He’s a tough little cuss, Buck,” he said. “A .45 makes a big hole in a dog this small.”

  Fletcher no
dded. “He’s a survivor, Matt. Like the rest of us, I guess.”

  “Think you can save him?”

  “I’m going to do my best.”

  Fletcher walked around outside, gathering the plants and other things he needed. Even this late in the year, purple coneflowers were still blooming, and these would prevent infection. He gathered juniper bark for pain relief and stripped off some pine bark. The barks he would soften in boiling water and use as a poultice to speed healing.

  The Indians had used all these natural medicines to heal wounded warriors, and Fletcher reasoned that if it worked on people, it would work on dogs.

  His hands full, he returned to the cabin. While he was gone, Baker had made a broth of beef and onions, then strained it through a cloth. As Fletcher watched, Baker spooned up a little broth and blew on it to cool it down. He then let the pup lick it from the spoon.

  Weak as he was, the little dog was starving and eagerly lapped up the broth. Baker’s face lit up with a joyous, boyish smile. “Hey, at least he still has an appetite.”

  Fletcher felt a sharp pang of guilt. He’d entertained the possibility that Matt Baker was the rifleman who’d tried to murder Savannah. But judging by the tender way he cared for the pup, it hardly seemed possible that he was a cold-blooded killer. But if he wasn’t the mysterious assassin, then who was he? And why had he showed up here just as a range war was brewing?

  Fletcher shook his head. Baker would tip his hand eventually, and then he’d know where he stood. He could wait.

  The gunfighter boiled water and made a tea of coneflowers and juniper bark. He then boiled up some of the pine bark and, when it was good and soft, squeezed out the excess water.

  He managed to get some of the tea down the pup’s throat, though the little animal protested weakly against the taste. Fletcher spread the soft pine bark on some pieces of cloth torn from his second-best shirt and bound up the pup’s wounds.

  “The coneflower tea will knock him out,” Fletcher told Baker, “and that’s good. What he needs right now more than anything else is warmth and plenty of sleep.”

  “You know,” said Baker, “I think he’s going to make it. He’s breathing easier.”

  “I sure hope so.” Fletcher smiled. “I feel responsible for the little feller.”

  Baker nodded. “He’s just a helpless, hurt little thing, Buck. Right now all he has to depend on is you.”

  “I know. And do you know something else? I kinda like it.”

  Later Fletcher looked behind the stove. Jeb’s gold was where he said it would be, hidden in a recess in the cabin wall.

  Baker hefted the leather bag in his hand and whistled. “This is heavy. There must be twenty pounds of gold in here if there’s an ounce. How much do you figure this is worth?”

  Fletcher shrugged. “Last I heard, gold was selling for about twenty dollars an ounce in Deadwood.”

  Baker whistled again. “Hell, then this poke must be worth at least seven thousand dollars.” He looked carefully at Fletcher. “What you going to do with all that money?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Jeb said it was to build yourself a life. What did he mean?”

  “I don’t know that either. Jeb was dying. Sometimes dying men say strange things.”

  “Or true things,” Baker said.

  Fletcher looked into the young man’s eyes, but he could read nothing there.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But right now I don’t want to think on it.”

  Over the next few days, Fletcher and Baker scoured the surrounding hills looking for Savannah, returning at regular intervals to the cabin to feed the pup and change the dressing on his wounds.

  On the night of the third day, clouds drifted in from the north, and it snowed again. Only a few inches lay on the ground, but day by day it was getting colder, and the promise of a hard winter was in the air.

  The pup’s wounds were healing, and he was getting stronger. The soft bones of his rear leg had been shattered by Higgy Conroy’s bullet, and it was obvious to Fletcher and Baker that the leg was healing crooked.

  “He isn’t going to chase too many jackrabbits when he grows up, that’s for sure,” Baker said one night as he held the pup in his lap and fed him scraps of meat.

  “He’s smart though.” Fletcher smiled. “He’ll bush-whack ’em.”

  Fletcher and Baker covered the area from Boulder Pass in the north to Elk Creek in the south, but of Savannah there was no sign. It seemed that she’d dropped off the face of the earth.

  Matt Baker did not seem overly concerned about Savannah’s disappearance, and Fletcher had the idea that he was helping in the search only out of some sense of duty.

  Maybe he felt he owed her that much.

  Or—a thought that disturbed the gunfighter greatly—maybe he already knew Savannah was dead.

  Matt Baker had no past that he cared to reveal, and Fletcher could not get a read on where he stood. The man was as mysterious as his past, and that made him even more of a puzzle.

  Once they met some Lazy R hands camped on the south bank of Lost Gulch. The cowboys were hazing a small herd toward winter grazing closer to the ranch, and they said they’d seen no one on the range for days.

  The top hand, a tall, quiet-faced man named Garnett, invited Fletcher and Baker to coffee, and, since he seemed eager to talk, they filled their cups and listened.

  “Been no trouble around here since Pike Prescott was killed,” Garnett said. “Seems his daughter doesn’t share his ambitions, and that’s a good thing for all of us, especially Miz Tyrone.”

  “Have you seen any PP Connected cows on Lazy R range?” Baker asked.

  Garnett shook his head. “Nary a one. It looks like Prescott’s daughter pulled them all back.”

  “Seems to me, Mrs. Tyrone and Prescott’s daughter could become friends,” Fletcher said. “I mean, they’re women running ranches, and when you get right down to it, there’s enough grass for both of them.”

  Garnett’s lips twisted into a smile under his drooping mustache. “Say, wouldn’t that be something? I mean, after all this war talk, Amy Prescott and Miz Tyrone becoming as close as sisters.”

  Another hand, a young towhead in a sheepskin coat, said, “If Amy Prescott pays off her father’s gun hands and gets rid of that snake Higgy Conroy, then things really might settle down around here and become downright peaceful.”

  Fletcher smiled, but when he looked at Matt Baker, the man’s eyes were guarded, and his face was set and grim.

  “You boys stay on guard and sleep close to your rifles,” Baker said. “I got a feeling there are other forces at work here, and I don’t think this range war is ending. I got the feeling it’s only beginning.”

  Again, Fletcher studied the man named Baker. And wondered.

  After a week of useless searching for Savannah, Fletcher gave it up. He and Baker rode back to the cabin. After supper that night, Fletcher rolled a smoke and said, “Matt, we’ve been all over this range and haven’t found Savannah.” He lit his cigarette, then added, “I reckon there’s only one place we haven’t looked.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Deadwood.” Fletcher tapped ash off the end of his smoke and said, “I plan to ride over there tomorrow and see if I can find her.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No, Matt, I need you at the cabin. Savannah might return here. Besides, somebody has to stay and look after the pup.”

  Baker thought for a few moments and obviously saw the logic in what Fletcher was saying. “You’re right,” he said. “Somebody has to stay. It might as well be me.”

  Fletcher saddled up at first light and headed northwest for Deadwood. Jeb’s gold was in his saddlebags, and he rode alert and ready, prepared for trouble.

  His big sorrel was eager for the trail and stepped out smartly as he rounded the peak of Lexington Hill, riding along a line of quaking aspen. With the coming of fall, their leaves had turned to bright yellow, splashed here and there wit
h crimson, and among them grew tall green arrowheads of spruce and pine.

  Fletcher rode past the hard-rock Chance Preston Mine, with its one-thousand-foot shafts tunneled deep into the bowels of the earth. Dozens of Chinese laborers in cone-shaped straw hats, speaking a language no one but they could understand, loaded quartz-lined ore into wagons under the watchful and intolerant eyes of bearded, cursing bullwhackers.

  In the hierarchy of the West, the red-shirted, profane bullwhackers occupied society’s lowest rung, lower by a notch or two than even the despised buffalo skinners. They toiled for twenty-five dollars a month, ten dollars a month less than the more respected mule skinners, yet it was their teams of eight oxen that made the Black Hills gold rush possible.

  The big, ox-drawn freight wagons could cover ten miles a day, hauling essential supplies into Deadwood: everything from heavy drilling equipment and support timbers to calico, canned peaches and pins.

  The bullwhacker’s badge of office was his whip, a three-foot-long hickory stock attached to twenty feet of braided rawhide, a “popper” of buckskin at the end to make it crack. The lash weighed almost six pounds, was always wielded with two hands, and an experienced teamster could pick off a fly on the lead ox’s ear without touching the skin.

  Armed with his whip, a revolver buckled around his waist and a Bowie knife handy in his belt, the bullwhacker was feared by many on the plains even more than hostile Indians.

  Just before noon, Fletcher crossed Spruce Gulch and rode into Deadwood. The town was roaring, bursting at the seams with thirty thousand miners and those who preyed on them: soft-handed gamblers, whores with bold, knowing eyes, and goldbrick artists of every stripe. Everywhere were hard-bitten horsemen in from the Plains: cowboys, drifting gunmen and soldiers, men who rode with the long winds in lonely places under a vast sky and had fought the Sioux and Cheyenne and sometimes each other.

  In the months of June and July alone, a million dollars’ worth of gold had been ripped out of the Black Hills, and Deadwood was booming.

  The original tents and shanties had been replaced by more than two hundred buildings—houses, saw mills, saloons, brothels, hotels and restaurants, all climbing the steep walls of the gulch—and there was even talk of getting one of those newfangled telephone exchanges.