Ralph Compton Vengeance Rider Read online

  A LIVING LEGEND

  All eyes turned to the old man who was walking toward them, supporting himself on a silver-headed cane in his left hand. “I think I’ll deal myself a hand of this little fracas if y’all don’t mind.”

  “Step away, old-timer,” Fletcher said. “This isn’t your fight.”

  The old man smiled. “Damn it all, Buck. I’m but thirty-seven years old. Younger than you, a lot better looking, and I must say, when you get right down to it, a whole heap better mannered.”

  Jesse, his eyes ugly, snarled: “The man is right. This ain’t your fight, Doc.”

  Doc! Fletcher knew why the old man had seemed so familiar. The last time he’d seen Doc Holliday had been in Deadwood, ten years before. But the little gambler’s tuberculosis was now far gone and the disease had aged him terribly.

  Grief and fear spiked in Fletcher as he heard Doc say: “Jesse Taylor, Buck Fletcher is my friend. You know I can’t walk away from this.”

  “Then so be it, Doc,” Jesse said. His shotgun came up fast.

  Fletcher drew, but his gun still had to clear the leather when Doc fired, skinning his Colt from a shoulder holster with lightning speed.

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of New American Library.

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 2004

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  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18505-0

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Contents

  A LIVING LEGEND

  Title Page

  Copyright

  THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  Historical Note

  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 ravages 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, where 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

  One

  The horse was gone . . . and with its loss came the death of hope.

  Tiny McCue lay dead in a pool of his own blood, his small, thin body shot to doll rags, the tracks of the six riders who had murdered him pointing due south.

  Buck Fletcher took off his hat and wiped his sweaty brow with the back of his wrist, still desperately grappling to believe what he was seeing. His face bleak, he kneeled and looked more closely at Tiny’s body.

  Judging by the hole it had made, the little puncher had been shot in the back by a rifle at long range; then another six bullets had been pumped into his chest while he lay helpless on the ground.

  The thong was still over the hammer of Tiny’s Colt. The man never even had a chance to draw.

  Fletcher rose, a sigh escaping, unbidden, from his lips. Tiny had not returned to the ranch after he’d left to exercise the bay thoroughbred, a chore he performed regularly. That had been two days ago.

  At first Fletcher had not been too concerned, thinking that Tiny had stopped over at one of the surrounding ranches, something he did now and then to swap lies with other punchers.

  But when another day went by, he’d grown worried. The Black Hills country was beautiful, but hidden within its rugged splendor it harbored a hundred different ways to kill a man and sometimes all it took was a momentary lapse in concentration, a thoughtless choice or just some mighty bad luck.

  It looked like Tiny had run into all three.

  Fletcher had set out earlier that morning to search for the man, and after three hours of following tracks this is what he’d found.

  Around him the magnificent, uncaring land was bathed in morning sunlight, and the blue shadows were slowly washing from the arroyos and canyons of the surrounding hills. Jays quarreled noisily among the branches of the yellow aspen and higher up the slopes, green arrowheads of spruce stirred in a warm, southern breeze and, towering above the trees, rose soaring, fantastic spires of gray rock. The sky was a clear, brilliant blue, streaked here and there with hazy smears of white cloud, and the air smelled of pine and wildflowers.

  All this Buck Fletcher experienced without joy. A dull rage burned in him, changing the color of his eyes from the same blue as the sky to a hard, gunmetal gray, and his mouth under his sweeping dragoon mustache tightened into a thin line.

  Six men had come here, to his range on Two-Bit Creek in the Dakota Territory, and killed his hired hand. And they had taken the horse that meant the difference between life and death for Fletcher’s six-year-old daughter.

  Slowly, with deliberate motions, Fletcher rolled a smoke, a scalding anger building in him.

  He had not taken up his guns for almost ten years now, and had thought to never do so again.

  But he vowed to himself that he would take them up once again and exact a terrible vengeance.

  He had been wronged and he would bring about t
he reckoning.

  Fletcher lifted Tiny’s body onto the back of his horse. He was stepping into the stirrup, preparing to swing into the saddle, when the puncher’s hat fell to the ground. Fletcher picked up the hat and made to jam it back on the man’s head. But something caught his eye; the corner of a twenty-dollar bill sticking out of the band.

  There was a total of eighty dollars neatly folded into the hatband, and a picture of a buxom woman in corsets torn with loving care from a drummer’s catalog.

  Fletcher shook his head. It was little enough to show for fifteen years as a puncher and a dozen drives up the dusty, dangerous trails from Texas. Little enough to compensate a man for the rheumatisms that plagued him every winter and the pain from the Kiowa arrowhead of strap iron buried deep in his lower back, too dangerously close to the spine to be removed.

  Sometimes, especially when the red wheat whiskey was on him, Tiny was a talking man, and Fletcher recalled him once saying that he had an older sister back to Laredo, married to a man who traveled in hardware. He would get his wife to send the woman the eighty dollars, plus whatever Savannah considered a fair amount for the puncher’s guns, saddle and horse.

  It was not much of a legacy as legacies go, but it was all there was, that and the month’s wages still owing to him.

  After a careful study of the woman in the corsets, Fletcher folded up the scrap of paper and shoved it into Tiny’s shirt pocket. It might bring the little rider some comfort to be buried with it.

  Fletcher swung into the saddle and headed north toward his ranch on the Two-Bit. His buckskin gelding, made uneasy by the smell of blood and the nearness of death, tossed his head, jangling the bit, and once the horse shied as a jackrabbit burst from under his feet and zigzagged its way across the buffalo grass.

  Ahead of Fletcher rose the looming bulk of Dome Mountain, a great bulge in the earth’s crust cut through by deep gorges and ravines, and further east he could just make out the smoke-colored cottonwoods lining the banks of Lost Gulch.

  The sun had climbed higher in the sky and the morning was already hot, heralding another stifling day.

  Fletcher rode through a tree-lined valley between a pair of saddleback hills, where he briefly let the buckskin drink at a clear, shallow stream bubbling up from some tumbled granite rocks, then swung west, toward his ranch.

  As he left the hills and crossed the flat, he came across more and more of his own cows, young stuff mostly, Texas longhorns crossed with his Hereford bull, each bearing his FS Connected brand on the left shoulder.

  He’d sold twenty steers earlier in the spring, fresh beef for the miners in Deadwood, and the five hundred dollars the cattle had brought him now resided in a money belt at his cabin.

  This was seed money, and Fletcher had hoped he would soon see it grow to the ten thousand dollars he so desperately needed. But with the death of Tiny McCue and the theft of the fast, game Star Dancer, that hope seemed all but gone.

  Grimly, Fletcher set his jaw. No, it was not gone. He would take time to bury Tiny decent, then get the horse back—or die in the trying.

  His daughter Virginia, with her blond hair and her mother’s laughing green eyes, had no one to depend on but him. And if she asked it, Fletcher would move Dome Mountain itself for Ginny, even if he had to take the peak apart rock by rock with his bare hands and reassemble it somewhere else at a place of her choosing.

  In the past, during his wild, violent and ofttimes lawless years, Fletcher had never imagined that one day he would wrap his Colts in a blanket and settle down to the life of a rancher with a woman and child he adored. But now that it had happened, he could envision no other life. He would grow old with Savannah and see Ginny . . .

  But what of Ginny?

  That question hit Fletcher like a blow to the stomach. Yes, what of Ginny now that Star Dancer was gone?

  He had already made up his mind on that score. It was six against one, but he would bring back the horse. He had to.

  A thin column of smoke, straight as a string, rose from the chimney of the cabin as Fletcher rode up, and the smell of newly baked soda bread hung fragrant in the air. Savannah’s paint stomped at flies in the corral beyond the house and, nearby, the stream Fletcher’s father had diverted from the creek twenty years before tumbled over a bed of sand and mossy pebbles, chuckling in amusement with a humor all its own.

  But as Fletcher reined up outside the cabin he noted that the stream level was much lower, as was that of the creek. No rain had fallen since the end of March and out on the range the buffalo grass was already showing patches of brown, frizzled by the long winds blowing hot and dry from the south.

  Normally, for Fletcher, this would have been a worrisome thing, but right now he chose not to dwell on it. There were other, more pressing matters at hand.

  The cabin door swung open and Savannah stepped outside; the sight of her, as it always did, taking Fletcher’s breath away.

  His wife’s auburn hair was loosely pulled away from her face, tied with a pink ribbon at the back of her neck, and her emerald eyes were bright with welcome. Savannah’s teeth flashed white as she smiled, her mouth a little too wide for true beauty, tiny, arched lines showing at the corners of her lips. She wore a dress of pink gingham that matched the color of the bow in her hair and showed off the generous curves of her body. She was, Fletcher decided, not for the first or the last time, a right pretty woman, a woman a man would never tire of coming home to, a woman like no other he’d ever known.

  And he wondered, as he many times did, what she had ever seen in him.

  He knew himself to be a big, homely man who was not at all skilled in the social graces and whose pleasures were few and simple. He was now, at forty, showing traces of gray in the dark hair at his temples, and the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth were etched deep from exposure to all kinds of weather and from life and the living of it, a life recently good but before that almighty hard. What he did not know, and could not see, were the things Savannah admired in him. She loved his fumbling, always half-embarrassed kindness and the genuine good humor that crept into his eyes when she, sometimes thinking him a little too demanding, harkened back to his service in the War Between the States and addressed him as “Major Fletcher,” snapping to attention as she gave him the palm-forward salute of the Union horse artillery.

  But most of all, she admired Buck Fletcher’s genuine quality of empathy. He had the instinctive awareness and deep regard for another’s feelings that was, and remains, the mark of a true gentleman.

  Courage, determination, the will to endure, Savannah saw these and other attributes in her husband—most of which he could not guess at, and if she had ever uttered them aloud it would surely have embarrassed him horribly.

  Despite the morning heat, Savannah looked as cool as the sprig of mint in an iced julep glass, but now her cheeks drained of color as she saw the double burden Fletcher’s horse was carrying.

  “Tiny is dead,” Fletcher said, replying to his wife’s unspoken question. “They killed him and took Star Dancer.”

  Savannah’s face was stricken, understanding the consequences of the stolen horse as keenly as did her husband.

  Fletcher swung out of the saddle and, spurs chiming, stepped toward his wife. “I plan to bury Tiny decent and go after them.”

  “How many?” Savannah asked.

  “Six. Maybe more.”

  The woman nodded. “I’ll sack you up some supplies.”

  Fletcher had expected nothing less. He knew Savannah would not plead, would not beg him to let it go and have the law handle it. She accepted what had to be done. Like all frontier women, his wife knew that in this harsh, unforgiving land a man was expected to make his own way, right his own wrongs. With the spring roundup so close, there could be no asking the surrounding ranchers for help, nor, she understood well, would her husband ask for it.

  They needed the horse back and now Buck had it to do. That was the beginning and the end of the story. There would be no discussi
on. No argument.

  “How is Ginny?” Fletcher asked.

  Savannah’s face changed, lit up by a smile. “She was up today for a couple of hours. She even helped mix the bread dough.” The woman’s eyes sought those of her husband, seeking an answer to a question she’d not yet asked.

  Now she asked it. “Ginny’s getting stronger, Buck. Isn’t she getting stronger all the time?”

  Fletcher saw the pleading in his wife’s eyes, knowing the answer she wanted. Savannah had asked him the question but he chose to step carefully around it.

  “The doctors at the Swiss clinic . . .” he hesitated, trying to frame his words, “. . . they’ll make Ginny better.” He forced a smile. “You’ll see.”

  Savannah bit her lip. For a few moments she stood in silence, looking at her husband. She had hoped to hear comforting words that never came, hoped for a reassurance he could not bring himself to give. Fletcher realized she was disappointed, but he had never lied to her and now was not the time to start.

  Finally Savannah turned and glanced back toward the window of the cabin. “Buck, find Tiny a place further along the creek. I don’t want Ginny to know.”

  Tiny McCue, with the cowboy’s almost superstitious dread of tuberculosis, had seldom come near the cabin where Ginny lay. But the child had often watched him from the window as he worked, something of interest to see in a still, unchanging land.

  But Savannah was right. Better Ginny did not know. They would tell her Tiny had moved on, as several hands had done in the past.

  Fletcher had wanted to first go inside and see his daughter, but now he led his horse into the barn behind the cabin. He lit the fire in the forge and began to heat an iron rod, the rusty handle of an old branding iron. That done, he made a headboard of rough pine slats, and took the red-hot iron and wrote on the board. He had to reheat the iron several times before the marker was finished, precious time he knew he could ill afford.

  But Fletcher had seen too many dead men tumble into unmarked graves over the years, and he would not make Tiny another.