The Tenderfoot Trail Read online

  Rising to his feet, Garrett crossed the cell, walking from gloom into light and back to gloom again. He reached up and tried the bars on the window. But they refused to budge, the iron set in cement by a man who knew his business.

  Discouraged, Garrett stepped back to the bunk and flopped down on his back. Carter had left him with his makings and he reached into his shirt pocket, found tobacco and papers and built a smoke. He thumbed one of his remaining matches into flame, lit the cigarette, and through a curling cloud of blue smoke stared moodily at the shadowed roof, trying to grapple with the reason why his life had changed so completely and rapidly—and for the worse.

  In less than twenty-four hours he’d gone from being a prosperous, good-looking young rancher with a herd to sell to a condemned criminal who’d soon be dancing at the end of a hemp rope.

  And now, as he studied hard on it, he remembered that the coffee thirst of an Arbuckle-drinking old man had been the start of it all. . . .

  Chapter 2

  In the early summer, when the corn lilies were in full bloom, Luke Garrett and his hired hand, bearded, sturdy old Zebulon Ready, moved the young rancher’s small herd off their pasture in the Judith Basin country and hazed them north toward Fort Benton, at the southern end of the Whoop-Up Trail.

  For six days Garrett and Ready drove the fifty shorthorn Durhams and small remuda of six ponies across good grass that in places grew belly-high to a steer. By the time they made camp a couple of miles outside of town, the cattle were fat and sleek, a fact that did not go unnoticed by Ready.

  “Luke, I’d say this herd is worth ten dollars a head in anybody’s money,” he said. “I reckon we can push those redcoat Mounties at Fort Whoop-Up to go fifteen, maybe more.”

  “Maybe so,” Garrett agreed. He reached for the coffeepot and filled his cup, his eyes restlessly scanning the darkness around him where the herd was bedded down. They were quiet right now, but anything could set them to running. Garrett saw lightning flash to the west and heard the distant grumble of thunder.

  “How little will Deke Waters take for the bull?” the old man asked. “Could be we’ll have enough money to buy the Angus and have enough left over to put in that artesian well you’re always talking about.”

  Garrett smiled. “Trouble is, there’s no little to it, Zeb. Deke wants five hundred and he won’t back off on the price a cent.”

  “Mean ol’ cuss, that Deke Waters,” Ready said, his bearded lips moving around the stem of his pipe.

  “He’s just a toothless old dog that chews real careful,” Garrett said.

  “Five hundred is a heap of money, Luke.”

  Garrett nodded. “I reckon it is, but then, that Red Angus of Deke’s is a heap of bull.”

  The bull was the reason Garrett had rounded up his herd early and pushed it north. He’d been told by a passing rancher down from Fort Benton that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta were right then paying ten dollars a head in silver for Indian agency beef.

  Prodding him too was the parting remark Deke Waters had made. “I’ll hold the Angus for you, Luke, but not for too long,” the old rancher had told him. “I’m short of ready cash my ownself and my old lady is agitating for a shade porch around the house. So you see how it is with me.”

  When a man calls your bluff, it’s time to look at your hole card again, and this Garrett knew. In his case, the card was his fifty young shorthorns and the five hundred dollars in Mountie silver they’d bring at Fort Whoop-Up.

  His mind made up, he and Ready had gathered the herd the next day.

  Ready, a long and lanky seventy-year-old with far-seeing blue eyes, stretched out a buckskinned arm and grabbed the coffeepot. He filled Garrett’s cup and said, “Drink up, Luke. After this, we have a handful of coffee for breakfast and then it’s all gone.”

  The young rancher set the cup between his legs and began to build a smoke. “I’ll ride into Benton tomorrow and buy some,” he said. “And we need salt pork and flour.”

  Ready nodded. “And a sack of sugar and maybe some raisins. And when it comes to the coffee, buy only Arbuckle, Luke. Accept no substitute.”

  Garrett smiled. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

  Ready was lean and long muscled, all the tallow burned out of him by a lifetime of hard trails. He’d been a Texas Ranger, Indian fighter and later, as a top hand, had helped Oliver Loving and Charlie Goodnight blaze their cattle trail from central Texas to Fort Sumner in the New Mexico Territory.

  That association had ended a few years later when Goodnight’s new foreman, a sour man called Wilson, told him, “Ready, I’m a man of few words. If I say come, you come.” Zeb nodded and answered, “Wilson, I’m a man of few words my ownself. If I shake my head, I ain’t comin’.”

  Ready figured it was high time to pull his freight and for a while he’d prospered in the restaurant business before giving it up to work for Garrett. It was a decision neither man had found cause to regret.

  Zeb was a talkative, friendly man and he had a relaxed, even-tempered way about him. In the past, a few hard cases, mistaking his casual manner for weakness, had thought him an easy mark. Five of them lay buried in Boot Hills from Texas to Montana, men who learned too late that Ready could also do a sight of talking with his gun.

  He was good with the Colt, better with the Henry, and there was no backup in him. As he’d told Garrett many times, “Luke, when your talking is all done, and you go to the gun, coolness and a steady nerve will always beat a fast draw. Take your time and you’ll only need to pull the trigger once.”

  Garrett had never been in a gunfight, but he’d listened and learned and stored away what Ready had told him. He didn’t know it then, but the old man’s advice would very soon save his life—and land him in more trouble than any young rancher could be reasonably expected to handle.

  Now Garrett looked across the fire at Ready as the man talked again. “Thunder to the west, Luke. I reckon I’ll saddle up and do some singing to the herd.”

  “I’ll do it,” the younger man answered. “You can spell me in a couple of hours.”

  As Garrett rose to his feet, Ready asked, “Luke, you heard anything about this here trail to Fort Whoop-Up?”

  Garrett shook his head. “Not much, except it’s two hundred miles of difficult country where everything that grows has spines and everything that walks has fangs. Add outlaws of every stamp, whiskey traders and downright hostile Crows, Blackfoot and Sioux, and the Whoop-Up Trail shapes up to be no place for a pilgrim.” The younger man smiled. “Or us either, come to that.”

  Ready stretched, his face untroubled. “That doesn’t do much to inspire confidence in a man. Outlaws don’t scare me none, but the Blackfoot are a handful. The Sioux will back off once in a while and go on their way, but the Blackfoot keep a-comin’ right at you.”

  “I reckon. Just sleep with your rifle close.”

  “Hell, I always do,” Ready said. “In Indian country a man can never tell which way the pickle will squirt, and that’s a natural fact.”

  Garrett left the fire and saddled a mouse-colored mustang from the remuda. The little bangtail barely went eight hundred pounds and had the disposition of a curly wolf, but it was good with cattle and sure-footed in the dark.

  Lightning glared in the distance, silver light flashing inside the building clouds, and thunder muttered threats as Garrett made a circuit of the herd. Most of the shorthorns were still bedded down, though a few were on their feet, grazing around the wild oaks that grew at the edge of the meadow.

  But there was a tension in the air the young man didn’t like. It crackled around him fragile as crystal, as though the slightest noise could shatter the night into a million pieces.

  And it seemed that the crowding darkness had eyes that watched . . . and ears that listened.

  “Damn it all, Luke,” Garrett whispered to himself, shaking his head. “You’re acting like an old maid, hearing footsteps behind you and a rustle in every bush.”

  Nevert
heless, he loosened the .44-.40 Winchester in the scabbard under his left knee and, in an effort to soothe his nerves and settle the cattle, began to sing in a low, tuneless baritone that more than once had made a cook stop the chuck wagon to look for a dry axle.

  Oh, slow up, doggies, quit roving around.

  You have wandered and trampled all over the ground.

  Oh, graze along, doggies, and feed kinda slow,

  And don’t always be on the go.

  Move slow, little doggies, move slow—

  A gunshot hammered apart the fragile fabric of the night.

  Immediately the cattle were up and running. Garrett swore, shucked his rifle and levered a round into the chamber. From somewhere behind the herd, he heard a man whoop, and another gun banged, a fleeting orange flare in the darkness.

  Lightning blazed among the clouds and in the sudden light Garrett caught a brief, flickering glimpse of a rider galloping hell-for-leather near the wild oaks.

  The thunder was now right overhead. Every few moments the sky flashed from horizon to horizon, constantly switching the surrounding country from darkness to a shimmering white glare where the trees, grass and stampeding cattle stood out in stark detail.

  Garrett angled toward the oaks, trying to cut off the running rustler.

  Ahead of him in the gloom he heard the pounding of hooves. As the lightning blazed again he and the rustler saw each other at the same instant. The brightness flickered into darkness just as the man’s gun flared in the night, then flared once more.

  Garrett reined up the mustang and waited, rifle to his shoulder. Thunder roared and rain spattered into his face. Then lightning burned across the sky and he saw the man who’d shot at him. He had slowed his horse to a walk and was riding under the branches of the oaks, his head turning.

  In that single, blinding instant, as the branded sky sizzled, Garrett fired. He heard a shriek and as the darkness again fell around him, he got off two more quick shots in the general direction of the now unseen rider.

  The raid on the cattle ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  The bellows of Garrett’s rifle bounded away, fading into the distance like the beats of a distant drum, and the hiss of falling rain now filled the echoing silence.

  Suddenly Zeb Ready was at Garrett’s side, his Henry slanted across his chest. The old man looked up at Garrett and said, “I was about to bed down when I heard the shots. What happened, Luke?”

  “Rustlers. I think I discouraged them, but they’ve scattered the herd to hell and gone.”

  “You get any of them?”

  Garrett glanced down at Ready, the man’s buckskin shirt already glistening black at the shoulders from the rain. “I took a shot at one of them over by the wild oaks. Don’t know if I hit him, but I sure thought I heard him holler.”

  Ready’s deeply lined face was grim. “Let’s go take a look.”

  With an effortless ease that belied his years, the old man vaulted onto the rump of the mustang and Garrett kicked the little horse into motion. After a few minutes of searching, they found a man’s body lying facedown in a clump of squawbush, the petals of its tiny yellow flowers scattered across his bloodstained shirt.

  Ready swung off the mustang and kneeled beside the downed rustler. He rolled the man onto his back, then looked up at Garrett. “You cut his suspenders, all right, Luke. This one’s about as dead as he’s ever gonna be.”

  Garrett stepped out of the saddle and looked down at the dead man. The rustler’s blue eyes were wide open, staring into nothingness, and his thin, hard mouth was stretched across his teeth in a final grimace of pain. He looked to be somewhere in his middle twenties and was dressed in the nondescript range clothes of a puncher.

  As though Ready had read his thoughts, the old man said, “Judging by his spurs and boots, I’d say he was out of Texas, maybe the Panhandle country. He’d been a bull nurse in his day, though he hadn’t punched cows in quite some time.”

  “How so, Zeb?” Garrett asked, his voice slightly unsteady. He’d never killed a man before, and there was a sickness in him—and an impossible yearning to go back in time and restore things to the way they were before he’d pulled the trigger.

  If Ready heard the tremor in the younger man’s voice, he didn’t let it show. “Luke, when you take the measure of a man, take the full measure. That engraved Colt on his hip isn’t a puncher’s twelve-dollar gun. And see here.” He grabbed the man’s right hand and showed it to Garrett, palm up. “He hasn’t done an honest day’s work with this mitt in quite a while. Fingernails are clean too.”

  “Outlaw?” Garrett asked.

  The old man nodded. “Could be. Or a hired gun of some kind.” He let the hand drop. “Now it don’t matter a hill of beans what he was. His day is done.”

  Ready rose to his feet, his knees snapping. “We’ll bury him come morning, then round up the herd.”

  Garrett shook his head. “No, I’ll take him into Fort Benton come first light. There were others with him tonight and maybe the law will know his name and who he was running with.”

  “Luke, the only law in Benton is vigilante law,” Ready protested. “Them boys could start into asking more questions than you got answers, especially if he was one of their own.”

  “He was a rustler, Zeb, and one of their own or no, vigilantes don’t take kindly to his type.” The young man smiled. “And besides, you need your coffee.”

  The night shaded into dawn under a watery gray sky, the dragon hiss of the teeming rain the only sound as Garrett saddled the mustang. Earlier, after they’d sat hunched and miserable around a smoking fire and drunk the last of their coffee, Ready had helped him drape the dead man facedown over his horse.

  Then the old man had left to round up what he could of the herd, telling Garrett he’d be back no later than sundown. “Don’t worry none, Luke,” he said. “I’ll find them critters. They won’t have run far.”

  Garrett was about to swing into the saddle when he saw six riders approaching his camp, led by a tall, thin man in a canvas slicker, a battered silk top hat on his bald head.

  Had the rustlers returned?

  Deciding to take no chances, Garrett slid his Winchester from the boot and waited, his wary eyes intently watching the riders as they drew closer.

  When the six men were still a ways off, Garrett saw a young towhead on a buckskin point to him and yell, “That’s him, Carter! That’s the dirty bush-whacker who killed Johnny Gibbs!”

  Garrett stepped away from the mustang, the Winchester ready in his hands, as the riders trotted to within ten yards of him, then stopped.

  “Put that rifle away, boy,” the man called Carter said. “You’re in enough trouble already.”

  The men with Carter seemed tough and capable, all of them bearded and armed to the teeth. A couple carried scatterguns across their saddle horns, a way of making sure they would get the last word should any gun argument arise.

  Carter jutted his chin toward the dead man and said, “Len, go see if that’s Gibbs.”

  The towhead threw Garrett a look of hatred and swung out of the saddle. He walked to the dead man, grabbed a handful of hair and jerked up the head, looking intently at the gray face. “That’s Johnny all right,” he said. “Like I didn’t know that already.” Len turned, looking up at Carter, who sat his horse, his face grim. “He’s been shot in the back.”

  “Could see that from here my ownself,” Carter said. His eyes slanted to Garrett. “Got some explaining to do, haven’t you, boy?”

  “The explaining is easy,” Garrett said. “This man tried to rustle my cattle last night and I shot him.”

  “In the back,” the towhead yelled, jabbing an accusing finger at the young rancher.

  “In the dark,” Garrett said. “I just aimed in his general direction.”

  “Carter, good ol’ Johnny never stole anything in his life,” the towhead said, his eyes on the tall man in the top hat. “He was true-blue and no rustler.”

  A slight
smile touched Garrett’s lips. “Seems to me outlaws and martyrs are greatly improved by death. Did you call him good ol’ true-blue Johnny when he was alive?”

  The towhead opened his mouth to speak, but Carter waved him into silence and nodded to Garrett. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Luke Garrett. I plan on driving my herd to Fort Whoop-Up. I hear tell the Mounties are buying Indian beef.”

  “Maybe you will at that,” Carter said. “But in the meantime we got a difficult situation here. Len says you bushwhacked him and Gibbs last night for no other reason than they were riding too close to your herd.”

  “Len said that?”

  Carter nodded.

  “Then he’s a damn liar.”

  The towhead’s face flushed and he swore as his hand dropped for his gun. But Garrett’s rifle swung on him and his cold voice cut across the quiet of the rain-slanted morning like a knife. “Shuck that black-eyed Susan and I’ll blow you right out of the saddle.”

  Len hesitated, seeing something in Garrett’s green eyes that he didn’t like.

  Carter stepped into the tense silence. “Do as he says, Len, or he’ll kill you for sure.” Then to Garrett: “You’re coming with us, boy. You can do your explaining to the Fort Benton vigilante committee.”

  Garrett waved the muzzle of the rifle toward the dead man. “I was bringing him in anyhow. Hardly the action of a guilty man, is it?”

  “You was getting rid of the body, is what you were doing,” the towhead said. “You take us all for fools?”

  Garrett shook his head. “Only you, Len. Only you.”

  “Johnny Gibbs rode shotgun for the Diamond R freight line, and they set store by him,” Simon Carter told Garrett as the two men sat drinking coffee in J. C. Hepburn’s Saloon and Pool Room, where the younger man’s trial was due to take place in less than an hour.

  The vigilante blew across his cup, scattering the rising steam. “Johnny was a big spender, so the saloon keepers liked him.” Carter shook his head slowly. “There are eight men on the committee who will hear your case. I’m one of them and four of the remaining seven own saloons, and two more work for the Diamond R.”