Slaughter's Way (A J.T. Edson Western) Page 2

  The Long Rail’s herd had been bedded down early, due to the return of Big Tag’s party from town. Leaving the cattle settled down to graze and rest on an open piece of ground well clear of any ravine or clump of trees that could harbor a bear or pack of wolves which might emerge in the darkness and spook the herd, the hands gathered in the camp. Their cook had chosen a pleasant spot, by a spring of clear water and on level ground at the foot of a gentle, bush dotted slope.

  After attending to the burial of Big Tag, the men gathered to settle around the fire and lounge at ease while discussing what action they ought to take against John Slaughter and the erring town of Blantyre to reassert the Long Rail’s hard-case reputation. Loyalty to their spread did not lead them to this line of thought. All knew the advantage their reputation gave them. Few people would go against Long Rail, and it was not advisable to let one town get far away with it lest others take heart.

  Only the cook and his louse appeared to be doing any work and neither of them gave any great energy to their duties. The louse shoved a couple of logs on to the fire and the cook gave the inevitable pot of stew a leisurely stir. All the other men lazed around and waited for their meal.

  Suddenly one of the hard-cases stirred, jerking his thumb up the slope and letting forth a string of low-spoken curses. His words and action brought the attention of every other man to the slope and they studied the rider who approached. Before he was half way down the slope, every man knew him to be the killer of Big Tag, and wondered why he chanced coming to their camp.

  “Hello the camp,” Slaughter called, halting his horse beyond the chuck wagon. “Can I come in?”

  Not until he received permission to enter did Slaughter swing from his saddle, leave the black stallion standing with trailing reins, and enter the camp area. A trail drive’s camp was its mobile home and received the same courtesy as did the spread’s main house. Ignoring the looks thrown at him by the sullen hard-cases, Slaughter walked by the chuck wagon and across the open space to where John Chisum, the Cattle King, sat enthroned on an old chuck box before the bed wagon.

  For all that he owned a great ranch and vast herds of cattle, Chisum wore clothes most of his men would have been ashamed to be seen in. A cheap Woolsey hat perched on his bald head and protected it from the elements. His sun-reddened face looked frank, open and jovial, the kind of face a man felt impelled to trust on sight—unless one happened to look at the eyes. They did not seem to hold the same warmth and twinkle of friendship as the rest of his face, but were cold, calculating and gave warning of the real man beneath the smiling exterior. Far too many people failed, until too late, to notice the eyes. For the rest, he wore a frayed bandana, cheap hickory shirt and old calfskin vest, patched levis and ready-to-wear boots, which no cowhand worth his salt would be seen dead wearing.

  The most noticeable thing about Chisum, it caught the eye in Texas even before one noticed the poverty of his dress, was that he did not wear a gun. The way Chisum saw it, any man who wore a gun and treated folks as Chisum did would most likely wind up one day having to use that gun to defend himself. So Chisum went unarmed and left any fighting—with its attendant risk of getting wounded or even killed—to his “warriors.”

  For that reason Chisum paid his men fighting wages, not that he was being in any way over-generous, for the men earned their pay. Besides, he always won back a good portion of their pay at poker or in other games of chance where, the way he played them, there was but little chance of his losing.

  It said much for Chisum’s ability to talk a bird down out of a tree that he managed to stay alive and without needing a gun in such company Yet, strange as it may seem, those hard-cases never gave a thought to the fact that Chisum invariably wound up as the ultimate winner in any game of chance they joined. Sure a man lost money in the games; but why worry? Uncle John Chisum would always see a man through until the next pay day, keep him in food and liquor, and always with a friendly smile and happy word. That was how all the men felt—and just how Chisum hoped they might continue to feel. He spent a considerable amount of time and thought on keeping his “warriors” happy and contented.

  “Howdy, Texas John,” Chisum greeted, rising and showing no signs of ill feeling as he held out his hand.

  “You got my word?” replied Slaughter, not taking the offered hand.

  “I got it,” Chisum agreed, his face losing the smile for an instant and showing the true man underneath, then going back to its habitual expression. “Set a spell and eat. Cookie’s just tossing up a beef stew. Hide of the steer he used’s right over there, got a Box O brand on it.”

  Slaughter turned his eyes to where a steer’s hide hung stretching on a rack by the chuck wagon. Its brand showed plainly, a square outline around a letter “O.” He knew the Box O to be a ranch some distance to the southwest of his place, a small spread as Texas cattle outfits went.

  “You own the Box O now, Mr. Chisum?” Slaughter asked.

  A slight frown creased Chisum’s brow and the smile wiped off his face again for a flickering instance. Chisum had been long enough in cattle country to have heard the old range saying, “If a Texan calls you ‘mister’ once, he’s curious; if he calls it you after he knows you name, he doesn’t like you.”

  The smile came back and Chisum reached behind the box he had been seated upon. He lifted up a foot-long piece of zinc stovepipe with a waterproof canvas cover at each end. Lifting one of the covers, he rummaged around inside the pipe and looked at Slaughter.

  “Got me a power-of-attorney note in here authorizing me to collect and drive to market any Box O cattle I see on the trail.”

  “Don’t bother looking,” Slaughter replied dryly, “I reckon it’ll be in there someplace.”

  Often during the past few years Slaughter had heard of the power-of-attorney notes Chisum kept in that piece of zinc pipe. They formed the source of the Cattle King’s wealth; and represented as neat a piece of legal skullduggery as had been pulled off since Peter Minuit bought Manhattan Island from the Indians for the equivalent of twenty-five dollars.

  When the meeting at the Appomattox Court House brought an end to the War Between the States, Texas men returned to their homes and found their herds of longhorn cattle scattered, either roaming wild over the range country, or stolen by Comanches or Mexicans. Around the same time Chisum, Charles Goodnight and other far-sighted men started the first trail drives, running cattle into New Mexico where the U.S. Army had large numbers of Apaches to feed. Other ranchers, who could not spare the time or lacked the knowledge to make such drives, asked Chisum to take their cattle along. Never one to do anything for nothing, Chisum’s first inclination had been to refuse. Then he had an inspiration. He agreed to drive the other men’s cattle to market for a share of the sale price, and their power-of-attorney to gather any of their stock he might find in his travels.

  With his friendly smile, Chisum charmed hardheaded businessmen into signing the notes. Mostly they failed to see anything wrong in the suggestion and went along with it as the only way they could sell off their cattle. What they forgot was the strayed and stolen cattle. Chisum had forgotten neither. He gathered the notes authorizing him to collect the branded stock of dozens of ranchers, keeping the papers in the length of zinc stovepipe. Once he had the notes, Chisum called his “warriors” together and they went out into the range country. Along with all the unbranded stuff he found, he collected every head of branded stock belonging to the ranchers wherever he found such animals.

  In such a manner Chisum built up his vast herds and founded his fortune. The unbranded animals were given the Long Rail brand, no matter what mark their mothers might have carried. At first the ranchers received—well—a portion of the money brought by Chisum’s sale of their stock; which they thought was better than nothing. It had been many years since last he paid out anything and the signers of the notes had for the most part written them off as a loss. Chisum did not part with the notes though, they still gave him a valuable source of income
.

  Usually the stovepipe was kept in the Salamander safe at his ranch, but when he was on the trail he carried it along in the bed wagon. He had only fetched it out ready to confront Slaughter with proof of his honesty, if the Texan asked questions about the animal which formed the trail crew’s evening meal.

  “Do you always feed your hands on other folks’ beef?” Slaughter asked.

  “The poor fool critter bust its leg, John,” Chisum answered, still holding the smile which did not reach his eyes. “Now we couldn’t let it lie and suffer for days, and it’d’ve been a mortal sin to leave all that there good meat to rot on the range, wouldn’t it?”

  “Likely,” Slaughter said. “Mind one thing, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Up north of here about twenty miles there’s a stream. Over the other side of it the slow elk and big antelope are plumb poisonous. Can ruin a man’s appetite permanently, happen he takes to eating them—it’s my range beyond that stream.”

  Again Chisum momentarily lost his smile. Slow elk and big antelope were the range names for cattle butchered for eating by folks who did not own them. There were many ranchers throughout the West, Chisum more than most, who boasted they did not know how their own beef tasted and that they would rather eat their own kin than stock which could be sold.

  Only it seemed that the ruling did not apply when crossing Texas John Slaughter’s land.

  With an effort Chisum fought the friendly smile back on to his face, but he sounded more than a mite sullen and angry as he replied, “I’ll mind it, John. There are some here as reckon you was a mite hard on Big Tag back in that town.”

  “I’m standing here afore them,” Slaughter answered, looking around him. “If anybody’s got anything to say, let him get up on his hind legs and say it.”

  Not one of Chisum’s hard-case crew offered to pick up Slaughter’s tossed-down gauntlet and accept his challenge. They noted the relaxed manner in which Slaughter stood, and how his gun hung so handily to his grip. Every man around the fire knew how fast Big Tag had been with a gun, and here stood the man who licked him. From the way they heard it, allowing for exaggerations to excuse why the other three failed to do anything more decisive than toting their pard’s body back to camp, Big Tag died of a sudden and fatal case of slow. That being so, none of the others aimed to try and take up where he unavoidably left off. At least not in a fair fight and standing face to face.

  “Shucks, John,” Chisum went on, after a disappointing pause while he waited for one of his “warriors” to get up and show his mettle. “Ain’t none of us wants fuss with you. There wasn’t no real harm in Big Tag, he was just a mite wild at times and maybe talked a piece too loud.”

  If Chisum expected his words would draw any comment from Slaughter, he was to be disappointed. For a few seconds he waited for the grim-faced Texan to speak, then gave it up in disgust and carried on:

  “All we want to do is cross your range and take a herd to market.”

  “Which same I’ve never stopped anybody from doing,” Slaughter replied. “As long as he minded my words.”

  Without another word Slaughter turned on his heel and started to walk back to his horse. He had faced the entire camp down, bearded the lion in his den, and knew that Chisum would think twice before breaking the J.S.’s rules of conduct.

  One of the trio who had accompanied Big Tag to and from town, and who still smarted under the stigma of failure, dropped his hand towards the butt of his Colt and studied Slaughter’s back. Chisum saw the start of the move and deliberately turned his back on the scene, placing the stovepipe deed container behind the chow box he used for a seat. None of the other men moved, either to assist their colleague or to warn Slaughter. The man’s gun came from leather and started to line

  The flat bark of a rifle sounded from among the bushes on the slope overlooking Chisum’s camp. A scream left the would-be killer’s lips as a bullet smashed his shoulder. Dropping his gun, the man spun around and went down.

  Almost before the echoes of the shot bounced back, Slaughter whirled to face the camp and demonstrated for everybody’s satisfaction how Big Tag came to die of the case of slow. The ivory handled Colt blurred from Slaughter’s holster, its hammer drawn back under a well-trained thumb and the index finger curled around its drawn-back trigger, while its muzzle lined with disconcerting accuracy on Chisum’s back.

  None of the Long Rail men moved, except for the wounded would-be killer who went down and rolled in agony on the ground.

  Slowly Chisum turned to face Slaughter. Give him his due, for all his many faults Chisum had sand to burn; or a considerable faith in the belief that Slaughter would not shoot down an unarmed man. Whichever reason, courage or belief, Chisum showed no fear as he looked at his wounded man and then to the bore of Slaughter’s Colt. The Colt aimed so it would plant a bullet in the vicinity of Chisum’s pet navel, and with its trigger depressed a simple lifting of the thumb was all that was needed to send a .45 bullet home.

  “Had my back turned to it the whole danged time, John,” Chisum said mildly, lifting his guileless face to the other man’s. “That boy and Big Tag was bunkies. But he ought to have known it’d be Slaughter’s way to leave a man up on the rim watching your back.”

  “Yeah,” Slaughter agreed, “he ought at that.”

  Holstering his Colt, Slaughter turned once more. This time nobody made a move, or even as much as batted an eyelid as he returned to his horse and swung into the saddle. Even the cook stood immobile, forgetting to stir and ignoring the stink of burning stew that rose to his nostrils.

  For five minutes after Slaughter mounted and rode out of sight over the rim, nobody made a move. Then Chisum gave an angry snort, turned to the cook and jerked his head in the direction of the moaning, wounded man.

  “Patch that damned fool up!” Chisum ordered. “Then get him to the hell out of my sight.”

  The Cattle King had no use for failures, and his man had failed. If the attempted murder had been realized, Chisum would quite happily have gone into a witness box and perjured himself blue in the face swearing that his man’s gun went off by accident as he took it out to clean it. However, the try failed and the wounded man’s usefulness to Long Rail ended from that moment.

  “How about that damned town, boss?” one of the men asked, although without the usual enthusiasm his kind showed when speaking of terrorizing a small town.

  “Herd looks a mite restless,” Chisum replied. “We’re likely to need all hands to watch it for a couple of days. Be too far by Blantyre to hand it its needings then. We’ll call in on the way down trail.”

  Strangely, though not surprisingly to Chisum’s way of thinking, his “warriors” did not raise objections. The excuse about the herd being restless made a good face-saver and they all knew that they would not return as a bunch but in dribbles as their pay ran out. So it appeared that the redemption of Blantyre could be forgotten and next year the Long Rail’s route would be such as to avoid passing the town and that proddy Texan’s land.

  Once over the rim and out of sight of the camp, Slaughter rode to where a roan and an Appaloosa horse stood tied to the breeze, their reins dangling before them and holding them as effectively as if they were staked down and hobbled. For a few minutes he chewed meditatively on his unlit cigar, then saw Washita Trace and Burt Alvord coming towards him, each with a Winchester rifle tucked under his arm.

  “Nary a move, John,” Trace remarked.

  “Didn’t reckon there would be, Wash,” Slaughter replied.

  It had never been Slaughter’s way to take foolish and unnecessary chances. A man would have been worse than foolish to ride into Chisum’s trail camp and deliver such a message without a couple of good rifles to cover his back. So, while Slaughter rode down the slope and held the attention of the Long Rail’s crew, Trace and Alvord moved in on foot, unseen by the trail hands, and took cover to watch for any treacherous moves.

  Knowing Burt Alvord, who had fired the shot
which saved his life, Slaughter felt surprised that the Long Rail man came off with no worse than a bullet-busted shoulder. Of course, the weak twenty-eight grain load charging the “old yellow boy’s” flat-nosed bullets tended to give poor accuracy at anything but short ranges, which could be the most likely reason that the man still lived.

  “Want me to trail ’em for a spell, boss?” Alvord asked.

  “Nope.”

  Slaughter might have gone on to explain that among the mail he collected in town had been a letter from the commanding officer at Fort McClellan, down on the New Mexico-Arizona line and close to the Mexican border. The letter confirmed an order for three thousand head of cattle to be delivered as feed for the reservation Apaches. While there were other ranches closer than Slaughter’s place, their owners preferred to chance the longer drive to Kansas where a much higher price might be obtained for their stock, rather than chance the difficult journey to the fort.

  The rancher did not trouble to explain, for one simple word satisfied Burt Alvord, in fact the simpler the words the better the Indian-dark young man liked them.

  For a time the three men rode in silence, then Washita Trace broke it with a chuckle.

  “Reckon Chisum might learn how his own beef tastes this trip, John,” the foreman remarked.

  “Not as long as there’s a head of any other spread’s among them,” Slaughter guessed. “Comes morning, Wash, I want every man out sweeping the southern end of the range.”

  “Got the order, huh?”

  “We got it.”

  “I’ll start the boys comes sun-up. Ain’t no point in leaving temptation in Chisum’s way when he comes through.”

  Chapter Three – The Missing Hundred Head

  The morning after his visit to Chisum’s camp, John Slaughter had breakfast with his blonde-haired, pretty and shapely little wife then went to the cook shack where Coonskin, his Negro cook, served breakfast to the hands. The fat, jovial ex-slave, wearing a coonskin cap instead of the traditional chef’s hat, offered his boss breakfast, for he could never reconcile himself to the thought of Slaughter living on a woman’s cooking.