Born Savage Read online

  “Did you love him, Kathy?” Vernell felt herself compelled to ask.

  “I hated him,” Kathy said tonelessly. “He beat me when he was drunk and he killed my baby. He was just plain no good. But he was my lawful husband.”

  She covered the dead man’s face and tucked the blanket in under his shoulders. “I better go see if your pa might need somethin’.”

  There was a certain strength and dignity as she walked toward the porch where Mary Randolph also stood shading her eyes with a hand.

  FIFTEEN

  When the bearded, louse-ridden old buckskin men had first wintered in the lee of the promontory’s rim back in the 1830’s, it had been an ideal place to loaf in brush and skin shelters, swap lies and scratch, and watch for Utes in the valley and the basin below.

  When the tide of law began to push lawless men farther west, and the first hunted men showed up in the camp, the snarling old trappers moved on. The outlaws remained.

  Hansen had been one of the first to arrive. He had built his cabin for a big man and built it high enough so that a man six and one half feet wouldn’t bump his head when he straightened. He set up his plank bar between two tree stumps and told new arrivals such as Tobe Whitehouse and Shackleford and, later, Ethan and Tim Ordway that whiskey was cash; that he was tired of running; that come law-hell and high water and the Utes here he damn well stayed.

  They elected Tobe “sheriff” that winter, and within a year Hansen had a dozen wanted men busy cutting trees and building for the future. He had built his sprawling place, leaving a door to his cabin in the west wall near the end of the bar, and in the cabin Hanse had slept and ‘ batched and served his customers at any time of the day and night for more than thirty years, going on forty.

  This door was now locked from the inside—Ethan having found that out at once after Hanse’s six-shooter covered himself out of the place.

  Channon Ordway slipped in between two of the old buildings. He opened a door, still hung with rawhide hinges, and slipped inside Hanse’s sanctum where the weekly poker games were held.

  It was strange, but he had never been in this old cabin in his life. He nor any other kid in town. After the shack became a lean-to, it became a sanctum for a few men of the old days and no others. Ordway looked at the wall bunks, the stove and table, and two twelve-inch planks nailed between two pine stumps.

  He moved to the door, his spurless heels making no sound on the hard earth. He could hear muffled voices beyond the rawhide hinges. There was a heavy bar locked into cleats. With Koonce’s six-shooter in his belt, Ordway carefully lifted the hand hewed four-by-six. After forty years of nightly use it was as smooth as new paint.

  A rifle shot crashed out inside the building and then another. A muffled voice yelled gleefully: “I knocked out the rest of Mike’s fancy window. Next time he shows his head I’ve got him!”

  And that was why Ordway had to go out. There was a thing that had to be done and done quickly, a calculated risk of himself lest some more people outside die. And there was a compelling fire of hatred and vengeance to be wreaked upon a man without conscience, without soul.

  Channon Ordway, jerking savagely at the door, leaped into the room with a six-shooter in each hand. “Hold it! he called piercingly. “Don’t move!”

  They turned slowly, seven of Sonny Shackleford’s remaining range toughs and cow thieves and the man who now led them: Ethan Ordway. By a strange twist of fate Ordway’s eyes went to the spot where his father had died that day twenty years ago. It might have been imagination, but he thought he could see a faint stain still visible on the rough planking.

  ‘Well, well,” Ethan observed dryly. “This is much better than I had dared to hope.” He still was smiling as Ordway moved.

  Slowly Channon backed over until he came to the spot where Tim had died. He spoke to the outlaws. “There’s going to be a rush ‘on this place in about two minutes. You’ve got one of three choices. You can throw down your guns and hope that Hanse and Mike and Doc will let you ride out of the country. You can surrender your guns and chance a hangmans rope. Or you can shoot it out and die.”

  Ethan stood near the end of the bar, the same place where he had stood that day he was supposedly braced twenty years ago because he had taken a man’s wife by force and wanted her again as a widow.

  “That include me?” he grinned. His lips were healed but there was a dark discoloration still faintly visible from the gun blows at one eye.

  “No.” Ordway spoke softly. “Not you, Ethan.”

  His voice rose like the sudden lash of sleet against a window pane. “Take a look where I’m standing, Ethan! Don’t you think that Hanse and Doc and Pete didn’t know the truth all these years. Take a look, damn you, and throw your gun!”

  His own gun had been dropped back into its sheath. Koonce’s gun clattered to the floor. The other seven stood transfixed, afraid of Ethan, afraid of the terrible faced gunman as deadly as the older man.

  A faint sigh came out of Ethan, a final roll back of memories and the echoes of the wasted years. He drew like a jagged streak of lightning and the thunder of Colts erupted in the old room where Tim Ordway had died. Crash after crash, the foot-long streaks of orange fire, the convulsive thumbing of a single-action hammer.

  Ordway shot Ethan in the belly and felt fire through his left armpit. He forgot the men in the room, he forgot everything as he smashed a second shot and then a third into a man, backed against the end of the bar, who wouldn’t go down.

  From somewhere a shotgun thundered and then a rifle. Dimly he heard cries of men yelling don’t shoot, but through a haze of blood he saw only the giant, the evil of a monster who carried his own blood in his veins. A terrible black giant who though shot again and again, wouldn’t fall. Ordway fired the last shot in the .44 Colt and then went down as though sledge hammered. Weakly, he reached over and picked up Koonce’s pistol.

  He rested there on one elbow, his eyes on Ethan still standing at the bar. He lifted the gun weakly and heard Ethan’s voice. “No more, Chann. Please don’t shoot me anymore. I’m dead.”

  He stood there like a tall, smoke-blackened, abandoned chimney, with a charge of dynamite at its base. Ordway was only dimly aware that Koonce and Mike and the others were in the room, that four outlaws were dead and three stood with their hands in the air.

  Ethan looked at the man on the floor and a final gleam came into the dark, savage eyes. He smiled and a faint sardonic twist came to his lips. “You … should have done this … a long time ago … son, and blotted out the hell of my memories.”

  As a chimney with its base blown out falls, he crumpled at the knees, and then, halfway down, pitched over onto the floor. He lay there quivering, his great gaunt body rippling like water brushed by a gentle wind. He had been shot through the body five times.

  Ordway dropped the gun from his hand and his elbow collapsed. He looked up and saw a ring of anxious faces bent over him. “How many times?” Doc asked.

  “Twice,” Ordway said. “Both around the left armpit. I’ll never know whether he was aiming at my heart or whether maybe in the last few moments he didn’t care anymore.” ‘

  “Shut up and drink this,” Doc ordered, taking a glass of whiskey from Koonce, and Ordway knew then he wasn’t hurt too bad.

  There was a scuffing of boots and the flooring at Ordway’s feet vibrated as three men, their hands tied behind them, shuffled by, herded by the giant, Hanse. He walked flatfootedly, toes out, his huge stomach bobbing. His usual imperturbability had been replaced by a fierce scowl around the Prussian mustaches. Koonce snapped open the breech of his shotgun and inserted two shells.

  “I’ll take over, Hanse,” he told the old man. “You’re needed here.”

  “You won’t take over by a damn sight, and I’m needed someplace else right now. You just go round up some saddled horses. Six will be enough. And while you’re at it, bring three ropes.”

  Doc had already cut away Ordway’s jacket and shirt and was bandagi
ng swiftly. He finished, rose, and then bent over and grasped Ordway’s good hand. “On your feet, Chann. With the aid of Hanse and Mike I’ve got three more patients to look after down below the rim.”

  A twinkle came into his eyes above the goatee. “And do you know something, boy, I think I’m going to lose every one of them!”

  To his surprise Ordway found that he could walk. He went over to the bar and leaned against it, and suddenly he and Koonce were alone. All the others were gone, and nobody in town had dared come near in the aftermath of a Colt and Winchester showdown. Ordway looked through the old south doorway and saw three men of the old days leading three horses with bound figures in the saddles, jogging along the road that led down over the rim and into Randolph’s Squaw Valley. There was a motte of pine trees down there with high limbs that grew straight out “By golly, I just thought of something,” Koonce said dryly, a twinkle in his eyes below the black brows. “We were supposed to have an auction in town this morning.

  Tax sale by the sheriff. But since this town ain’t got no sheriff—you feel like walking?”

  “Sure. I’ve got to go set things right with a woman who thinks I’m still in love with Kathy.”

  Koonce said, “I don’t think you’ll have to go far. Here she is now.”

  Ordway caught sight of Kathy and Vernell as they ran past a window. Then they were inside and he saw her. She was coming straight to him, the strange dark eyes mystic and filled with a message that made his heart leap.

  “They told me that you had been shot,” she said in a very small voice. “And I think that something died inside me. Chann, oh, Channon Ordway, the agony you have caused in my heart.”

  He reached out for her and she came into the circle of his good arm. She lifted her face to be kissed and all pain fled as he bent to let his lips tell this woman how much he loved her.

  “Bob,” Kathy’s voice commanded. “I think you better come with me out there to the flagpole. Pa’s stumbling around out there tryin’ to help Miz Whitehouse and she’s cussing him something awful.”

  “You come here first, Kathy,” Ordway also commanded.

  She came with questioning eyes, the stem-like neck, and the thin, almost emaciated body, but with a strength and a dignity salvaged from the ashes of tragedy.

  He bent and placed a soft kiss on top of her fluffy hair. “You tell Lon,” he said gently, “that the livery is his. That bottle could have saved his life. Without it, he could have died and left his family in poverty. And no censure, Kathy. Wrong or right, it’s his life.”

  He walked with Vernell out of the saloon and onto the old porch where a hundred bronks with whooping riders in the saddle had been spurred across the thick boards. They stood there in the bright morning sun, the bloodstained man and the girl, watching a red tide of cattle pour over the east rim of Pronghorn like lava from a distant volcano..

  The girl beside him looked up and spoke softly. “My real father, Wentworth Randolph, once said that without death there can be no progress. Without fire no cleansing. The valley and the basin are cleansed now, my darling.”

  He walked with her toward Kathy’s house to tell Eric Randolph that it was all over, that two houses had died, that fire had cleansed valley and basin of bad memories. Near the ashes two new ranches would rise.

  Ordway glanced once at the road disappearing over the rim. But the riders were gone and so were so many other ugly things he wanted to forget He felt her fingers slip in and entwine with his as the two of them walked on toward where Mary Randolph stood on the front porch with a hand shading her eyes, then went inside to tell her husband that they were coming.