Stand-Off At Blue Stack

  Stand-off at Blue Stack

  By the same author

  High Plains Showdown

  Stand-off at Blue Stack

  WILL KEEN

  ROBERT HALE

  © Will Keen 2000

  First published in Great Britain 2000

  ISBN 978-0-7198-2274-2

  The Crowood Press

  The Stable Block

  Crowood Lane

  Ramsbury

  Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.bhwesterns.com

  This e-book first published in 2017

  Robert Hale is an imprint of The Crowood Press

  The right of Will Keen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  CHAPTER ONE

  They came into Joel Cramer’s soddy out of a rain-swept Kansas night, walking into the single room with a rattle of the latch and a whisper of oiled hinges, dripping water onto the packed earth floor from shiny yellow slickers and bringing with them the smell of darkness and fear. Two of them, their stovepipe boots caked with mud, the lower halves of their faces masked by filthy bandannas knotted under ragged unwashed hair that poked from beneath rain-sodden felt hats whose brims sagged heavily over cruel, glittering eyes.

  The cold wet wind gusted in after them, bending the flames of the oil lamps so that their dim light cast giant, moving shadows that drew the small boy’s wide brown eyes.

  Then the one with the greasy blond hair and ice-blue eyes cocked his shotgun. He made a big show of it, easing the two hammers back with the heel of his thumb until they clicked; and he made sure that while he snapped those hammers back the twin blued muzzles never wavered, remaining always lined up on the woman’s faded shift dress and the clear restless outline of her firm breasts.

  The boy gurgled in delight, turning his tow-head to watch as the gun barrel flashed and among the shadows highlights danced.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Fran Cramer said softly, and in a swift movement she bent to gather him into her arms, lifting him from his tiny wooden chair set close to the comforting heat of the iron woodburner, her own eyes wide now, huge and luminous and fearful in her suddenly ashen face.

  ‘Weren’t you here a fortnight back with Manson,’ Joel Cramer said, ‘warning me off Jackson’s Creek? Ain’t he man enough to do his own dirty work?’ He came to his feet, knocking the edge of the heavy pine table with his thighs so that the supper dishes rattled.

  The questions went unanswered. The blue-eyed man with the shotgun spat wetly on the floor.

  ‘You,’ he rasped at the woman. ‘Hand over the boy.’

  ‘Wha. . . ?’ Her hands fluttered as she hugged the child. She turned her head jerkily in her panic, her eyes wild. ‘Joel, help me, I—’

  Boots scraped as the second man moved forward into the shifting circle of yellow light. A small circle on the dirty bandanna was moist, billowing in and out as he breathed through his mouth. Beneath tangled black eyebrows one milk-white eye was canted sideways in a knife-ruined socket. He fixed the other on Joel Cramer, said in his harsh, grating voice, ‘You want to help her, you tell her to do just what the man says.’

  ‘Hand over our son, Johnny, to a couple of Manson’s killers?’

  ‘To me. Pronto.’

  Without waiting he took a fast stride towards Fran Cramer and the slicker rustled and sprayed glittering droplets as his hands were thrust out and his thick fingers reached for the boy’s waist.

  ‘You leave him alone, you—!’

  The blast of the shotgun was a huge charge of dynamite in the enclosed room, the muzzle-flame like sheet lightning in its brilliance. Rank moist earth and twisted roots showered down from the roof. A spider scuttled into the shadows. The woman screamed. Shock drove her backwards against the wall where the old Henry repeater hung, the impact slackening her hold on the child. A framed tintype slid with a whisper of sound and the brittle crack of glass. In that instant the boy, now squealing with fright, was gone, torn from her slack grasp and borne swiftly towards the door.

  ‘Johnny!’

  Fran Cramer’s scream turned into a shriek that rose to the brink of hysteria and was instantly choked off. What emerged then was a muffled wail of anguish that brought Joel Cramer to the brink of tears as his wife pressed white knuckles to her teeth and bit down hard.

  Cramer came around the table in a rush, the shotgun’s blast ringing in his ears, the silent menace of the second charged barrel forgotten. A chair clattered over, was kicked away. His blazing eyes ignored the armed man with the smoking scattergun, instead peering anxiously towards the open door through which fine wind-driven rain drifted like a glistening mist.

  He was brought up short, stopping as if he had run into one of the soddy’s two-foot thick walls as the man with the ice-blue eyes pulled the second trigger.

  The thunderous blast brought Cramer swinging around so fast he overbalanced and fell hard against the table. His glance noted the angle of the shotgun. His head snapped round and he stared in horror at the front of his wife’s shift dress. It was torn to shreds by the charge of lead shot that had ripped into her soft body at close range, already soaked with slick red blood.

  The Henry she had dragged from its wall hooks fell from her hand to hit the floor with a clatter.

  Cramer said something, but the memory of the words – if words they were – was forever lost. An arm came up, not in fury but in a blind reaction, the simple unconscious act of pushing the killer out of the way so that he could get past to reach the woman he loved and hold her in his arms as she died.

  Then the empty shotgun came around in a vicious, back-handed swing. The twin barrels cracked against Joel Cramer’s forehead and suddenly he was wallowing in deep black water, floating forwards with hands outstretched as he blindly sought a cold river-bed that was out of sight and out of reach and eluded him until he knew no more. . . .

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fran’s dried blood covered most of the front of Joel Cramer’s shirt. A dark, ugly patch exposed by the cold light of a late spring dawn, it stiffened the cloth and scratched against his skin as the night’s dying wind flattened the garment against his chest and he moved in the saddle to the big horse’s regular gait.

  As he crossed the flat emptiness of the Kansas prairie on the ten mile ride to Jackson’s Bend, it had not yet occurred to Cramer that he would resolve to wear that shirt until he did the only thing he could for his wife now that she was gone: find her boy and bring him home.

  Nor had it occurred to him that he might find that task beyond his capabilities, and that mental lapse was something for which he could be thankful. With his mind still tortured by horrific images of cold-blooded murder and a screaming child being carried away into the dark night, thoughts of failure added to those of cowardice might easily have driven him over the edge.

  He knew that he had come close to snapping in those cold hours before dawn when the human soul is at its lowest ebb. Standing on the storm-swept ridge against which he had erected the soddy, with the fitful moonlight gleaming on the shifting grasslands and the dark wet earth of Fran’s grave, he had reached just about the lowest point in his whole life. It had taken a powerful effort of will to throw down the shovel, turn his back on the simple wooden cross and walk away; scarcely any effort at all to take the drum of coal oil and a flaming brand to their home of six short weeks and watch through his tears and the rolling black smoke as the contents of the soddy burned, for without her and the boy he was alone and would have been unable to bear its emptiness.

  What thinking he did allow himself on that ride into town was measured, and calculating. In the past weeks he had feared a visit from a renegade band of Qua
nah Parker’s Comanches, rumoured to have moved up from the Texas Panhandle, crossed Indian Territory into Kansas and established a camp somewhere on Jackson’s Creek. But in the dying seconds of Fran’s life, in that brief time that was measurable in missed heartbeats and opportunities and the shrill squeals of a frightened child, he had asked the blond killer if they were from Manson, and everything that had happened since had convinced him that he had guessed right.

  So now, sitting in front of the desk in the marshal’s office in the town of Jackson’s Bend, he said, ‘I want you to ride with me to Dyke Manson’s place.’

  The man behind the desk might have been hewn from the same crude stock as Jackson’s Bend, travelled down the same bleak road to arrive at the ruin and despair that was evident in the town and his cluttered office. He was fat and filthy, a dark-haired man with thick stubble covering the lower half of a greasy face. The ash from the mangled cheroot dangling from his wet lips dusted the front of his unwashed shirt and settled like white dust on the tarnished badge of office. His thick-fingered hands, the nails black and chipped, rested on the desk and toyed with a Stetson that was ragged and misshapen and encrusted with dried sweat.

  But the black eyes buried in the pouched flesh beneath his heavy brows were bright as buttons, and had been studying Cramer from the moment he walked in through the open door and dropped into the creaking wooden chair.

  ‘This got anything to do with that mess of blood soaking your shirt – or did that come about when you cut yourself shaving?’

  His fat belly wobbled against the desk as he chuckled deep in his throat at his own crude humour. Ash fell from the dead cheroot, and as the laugh turned into a choking cough he plucked it from of his mouth and mashed it into a brass ashtray.

  ‘Two of Manson’s hands used a shotgun to kill my wife,’ Cramer said, ‘then kidnapped my son. I want them arrested, then hanged.’

  ‘Any witnesses?’

  ‘Me. I’ll ride with you, identify them.’

  ‘Ain’t good enough. You sure you ain’t got confused between them and Comanche Injuns?’

  In the tense silence, the marshal’s breath rasped in his throat. He coughed, slid open a drawer, came up with a smeared whiskey bottle, half full. He pulled the cork with yellowed teeth, spat it across the room, swigged from the bottle. And all the time the black eyes stayed on Cramer’s face.

  ‘You’re the law,’ Joel Cramer said patiently as Jackson’s Bend’s marshal slammed the bottle down on the desk and belched. ‘It was one of Manson’s men damn near cut my wife in half with a scattergun. Wore a mask. Ice-blue eyes, hair like dirty straw. Had a partner been in a knife fight sometime, near lost an eye. Now, that’s before we get anywhere near Manson’s, Marshal. If there’s two men like that on his payroll, you figure that’s coincidence – or me tellin’ the truth?’

  ‘Where’d this happen?’

  ‘Ten miles out of town. West bank of Jackson’s Creek.’

  ‘Manson’s land – or a slice of Padraig Flynn’s Blue Stack spread if you dig deeper.’

  ‘What I heard, that’s all free range.’

  Cramer’s words were brushed aside as one of the thick hands moved across the desk, came to rest on a thick pile of dog-eared Wanted dodgers.

  ‘Homesteader.’ The fat lawman nodded, mouth twisted with contempt, eyes suddenly cruel. ‘One of them sodbusters. I heard Manson was having a spot of trouble. Nothing serious. Nothing he couldn’t handle. . . .’

  ‘I aimed to run cattle,’ Cramer said through his teeth. ‘I’d been there six weeks, it takes time.’

  ‘Maybe. But I ain’t prepared to go harassing a local cattleman on the say-so of a sodbuster name of . . . what was your name agin?’

  ‘Cramer. But that’s got—’

  ‘Yeah, Cramer.’ The shiny button eyes stayed fixed on Cramer’s face while the blackened fingernails deliberately riffled the papers. ‘What I figured when I saw that Colt six-gun with its shiny butt, worn low, tied down real neat. Though that don’t bring me any closer to understanding. Joel Cramer, gunslinger. Wanted down on the Rio Bravo for robbery and murder.’ His hand moved to the whiskey bottle, pushed it aside. ‘They call you Tucson, ain’t that right? You want me to sift through these dodgers, Cramer, find a particular one I know’s in there, invite you to step out back where we’ve got strap-steel cells stong enough to hold hard men like you till the circuit judge—’

  ‘That’s no way to find the killers,’ Cramer cut in, and now his voice was weary. ‘For some damn reason you’re holdin’ a pistol to my head. Maybe you and Manson are in cahoots. But what can either of you gain from murdering a woman, stealing a child?’

  ‘Dyke Manson’s a ’breed, moved down from the Nations, and that ain’t likely to make us close pards.’ The lawman leaned across the desk, jaw jutting as he glared at Cramer. ‘But as the elected law in this town I’m bound to protect his interests against your kind. All I’ve got is your word for what happened. And I still ain’t worked out what an Arizona gunslinger’s doin’ masqueradin’ as a sodbuster and hollerin’ murder. That alone’s justification for holdin’ you on suspicion.’

  ‘Suspicion of what?’

  ‘Give me a month with you settin’ in that cell, I’ll come up with something.’ The marshal laughed without mirth. ‘Unless, of course, you decide to leave town right now, get the hell out of Jackson’s Bend and out of my hair.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll do that.’

  ‘Only three choices, ain’t none of them pretty. Ride out, or I’ll slam you inside so’s you can stew waitin’ for the hangrope. If I can’t manage that without raisin’ a sweat, by God I’ll shoot you down like a dog, hitch what’s left to a hoss and drag your carcass through the dust to Boot Hill.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  The marshal’s words hung heavy in the silence. Cramer climbed to his feet, his chair scraping. He listened to the old swivel chair groan as the gross, unwashed marshal took his weight off the desk and leaned back, reaching for the bottle, then turned away in disgust and stepped out of the squalid office into the cool, clean air.

  He crossed the wide rutted street where the dust of his passing was quickly whirled away by the fickle breeze, knowing as soon as that sweet morning air began clearing his head that he was making a mistake searching for hidden depths in the man. The marshal wanted him out of town in a hurry because it was a damned sight easier than raising a reluctant posse to hunt down a couple of dangerous killers. His job was an easy ride on a lame horse called Jackson’s Bend. No doubt he ambled over to the saloon most nights of the week, puffed out his barrel chest with his back up against the bar, a jolt-glass in one hand and his other hooked in his gunbelt, played a few hands of poker with Manson and maybe took a small slice of the cattleman’s working profits on the condition that he earned his ordinary wages by doing nothing more energetic than sit in his shabby office drinking rotgut whiskey.

  Well, he’d said leave town, and that, Cramer thought wryly, was what he’d always intended. It just so happened that he’d do it in his own good time, and the direction he’d take was not one likely to ease the marshal’s troubled frame of mind.

  Cramer reached the far plankwalk, stepped up where the smell of frying beef drifted in a hot blue haze from the open door of the town’s only eating place – joe’s good luck restaurant – and took a moment to roll a cigarette and glance about him as the first light of the rising sun began to bathe the street and banish the chill.

  Jackson’s Bend was a settlement its forgotten founders had raised out of the Kansas prairie between the Smoky Hill and Pawnee rivers some forty miles north of Dodge City. Its one main street was flanked by twisted frame buildings constructed of warped planks held in place by rusting nails and hidden behind lofty false fronts that creaked and swayed in the wind. Of maybe a round dozen seedy commercial buildings, two were saloons serving up liquor that would fell a steer, another was Joe’s diner where steak and eggs were the staples. Like the saloonists, Joe was a rarity in a town that ha
d lost his way: they were successful businessmen, because everyone – resident or drifter – has to eat and drink. The other nine premises were not so lucky. They were left to attend to the less pressing needs of maybe a couple of hundred permanent inhabitants who were either too poor or bereft of hope to pack up and move to a better life.

  Cramer had ridden by at a distance on his way out to the prairie with Fran and the boy, picked up supplies from Jackson’s Bend’s general store once in the past six weeks and spent fifteen minutes washing off the smell of the town in Jackson’s Creek as soon as he got back home.

  But with his family torn apart and his home burned down to the ground out of which its sod walls had been hacked he was now left with no choice. His belly was rumbling, he was in urgent need of a hot bath and a shave and, with a final glance along to the tonsorial, he flicked away the half-smoked cigarette, stepped inside the empty café and placed his order.

  ‘Set a while,’ he said a couple of minutes later as the huge, aproned man placed a tin plate of beef and eggs and a steaming cup of coffee before him. He took out his tobacco sack, placed it on the table, and ate his breakfast in silence while the restaurant’s bearded owner grunted his thanks then sat across from him, sleeved the sweat from his face and fashioned a cigarette.

  ‘Couple of questions,’ Cramer said, his mouth full.

  ‘Fire away.’

  ‘If I wanted to talk to Dyke Manson, which way would I ride?’

  ‘North until you come across a sign nailed to a tree reads Pueblo. Another mile you’ll see the ruins of a big barn, a corral with most of its poles lyin’ in the dust and a house looks like its owner started buildin’ and ran out of cash and energy.’

  Cramer paused, frowning, his fork halfway to his mouth. ‘I was talking to the marshal. He said something about Manson bein’ a cattleman.’