Born Savage Read online

  “I understand.” Poor kid. You poor unhappy kid. By what destiny, by whose order, did it have to happen to you?

  She said: “I knowed you would. But if you kill Step, mean as he is, I’ll have to take my baby back home to Pa.”

  Ordway rejoined Koonce just outside the double-door entrance to the courthouse. The deputy didn’t look up. He stared across the street at the unsightly rear of the old buildings and the new porches nailed to most of them.

  Ordway said dryly, “Now that you’ve done your good deed, I’ve a couple of reasonably good questions to ask— if you don’t mind, deputy?”

  “I’ll answer one of them now. I’m still wearing this badge old Tobe pinned on me when I was seventeen because I figger I’m about as close to his killer as I can get”

  “Step?”

  “He’s been trying for weeks to get up nerve enough to fire me. What was that other question, Chann?” Some of the ice had gone out of him and from Ordway too, something of what had been flowing in. For almost a year the deputy had been blaming Ordway for Kathy Perry’s misfortune.

  “If I hadn’t got loose this morning Step would have finished me off. Didn’t you know that, amigo?”

  Koonce nodded, his eyes still straight ahead. “Enough that I followed along until you were in the clear. Couldn’t be seen riding back with you, Chann. Might have given Step the nerve to fire me.”

  “Then I’ll smooth my hackles down, too, Bob ” Shannon Ordway said. “Look—over the top of Hanse’s place. There they come.”

  The little cavalcade of about a dozen men had lipped up out of Squaw Valley, and for the two men who led it the ride had been anything but pleasant. There had been accusations over Waldo’s death, Ordway’s escape, and by the time they hove in sight of the old fort they were openly quarrelling.

  They pulled up in front of Hanse’s low, flat, log edifice grayed by thirty-odd winters.

  “Damn, but I need a drink,” Step growled to change the subject and because the thought was uppermost in his mind. “A real whackin’ thirst.”

  “Likely runs in the family,” Sonny sneered maliciously. “Probably caught it from your father-in-law.”

  Step made no reply. There was a sullen cast to his liquor-florid features as he stepped upon the awningless porch. Sonny had been that way at every opportunity all the way up the valley from Randolph’s ranch.

  One comer of the sheriff’s mouth held a small cut, still biting from Channon Ordway’s smashing blow. Lordy, what was Ethan going to say about this second blooper?

  Step almost shuddered as they grouped there on the porch. They were watching a familiar rig drawn by mare at a sizzling pace whip into view around a building’s ax-shaped comer.

  “It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Sonny remarked with a grin. “I’ve seen old Doc Cartwright make that comer a thousand times in a cloud of dust. Never hit it with a wheel hub yet, never missed it more than six inches.”

  “Wonder what it is this time?” somebody asked.

  They waited.

  Step nervously licked his dry lips. Maybe, just maybe, Ethan had wounded Chann. No, he decided. Ethan didn’t wound, he killed swiftly with a terrible black vengeance. Could be it was the other way around. Chann was too much like his father Tim.

  Henry Cartwright pulled the panting mare up close by the edge of Hansen’s porch and jumped down like a gray-goateed bantam rooster off its morning perch. He reached in by the seat, brought forth a kettle-shaped iron anchor with a rope already tied to the sorrel mare’s neck, and placed it on the ground as though the mare needed visual proof right under her nose not to stray.

  Big black bag in hand, he stepped upon the porch toward the assembled toughs of Sonny’s gang.

  “Get your damned thieves out of my way, Sonny,” he greeted another of the sons of old outlaw friends he’d delivered.

  Sonny spoke without rancor. “You seem to be in a mite of a hurry, Doc.”

  Cartwright ignored him until he reached the doors in the old log structure. “So were you the night I hauled you out of your mammy while your paw lay cut to pieces after a drunken knife fight,” he snapped.

  “Doc,” Step asked, licking at his dry lips, “who alls hurt in there?”

  “Ethan. But he’s probably got enough venom left so’s you won’t get off scot-free for letting a prisoner escape.”

  “Shooting?”

  “No, worse luck. Chann’s got too much of his mother and father in him. He just worked Ethan over with a gun barrel. Now stay the hell out of that back room while I’m working, understand?”

  “He sure means it too,” chuckled Sonny at the emptily swinging doors. “Even back in the old days, that scrappy little cuss never took no stink off any badman he ever had to work on.”

  They walked over to the west wall bar as Cartwright opened a rear room door and disappeared after closing it. At the bar Hansen, with no word of greeting except a hard scowl, began to set up bottles and glasses. He was hoping that Step wouldn’t treat and try to sign another chit.

  After today Step Eaton’s credit was a thing of the past in here. So was his presence.

  The sheriff poured a generous splash into a glass and downed it. He glanced at the closed door back there and wondered what was going on. Through a window he saw that a west wind had pursed its lips and blown puffballs into the distant sky. They hung up there around the crags below the snowy peaks like smoke rings.

  At this moment the sheriff of Tulac was afraid. More afraid than he’d ever been in his life. “Hanse, give me a pencil. How bad is Ethan hurt?”

  Hanse said with cold imperturbability: “No back-shooter signs a chit in this place or comes in anymore. Your bar bill is canceled. Now that Chann is back you ain’t goin’ to live long enough to pay me anyhow. Finish your drink and get out, Step.”

  “Well, now,” Sonny breathed the words softly at the giant. “What have we got in Tulac all of a sudden?”

  “I don’t owe you anything either,” Hanse rumbled ominously. ‘I paid it all the night we took your father out of the hands of some vigilantes up in Alder Gulch, Montana.”

  One monster hand lay under the bar and Sonny knew that it contained a .45, that the muzzle was pointed right at his belly, and that the tough old owl hooter would kill him with one shot if he made another wrong move.

  “All right, Hanse,” Sonny Shackleford replied meekly.

  It was a gift he’d acquired a long time ago, being meek at the right time. It had worked with Eric Randolph today, too.

  SEVEN

  Inside the back room, Doc Cartwright had placed the big bag on the green-topped table near where Ethan Ordway’s thick forearms were crossed. The shaggy black head rested face down between them. Below it was a fresh pool of blood.

  Now Ethan lifted his lion’s mane of hair and flung it back, and Cartwright saw that poetic justice had been done: one of Ethan’s eyes also was closed. Deliberately, the little man suspected.

  “Don’t talk,” he snapped. “I’ve got eyes!”

  He slid out of his coat and rolled up white shirt sleeves. After pouring alcohol on his hands to disinfect, he pushed Ethan’s head back and sat it at a proper angle on the neck, like a barber ready to apply comb and scissors. He parted the bruised lips and ran fingers inside.

  “One knocked out and two more broken off, Ethan,” he pronounced. “I can pry out the stumps, of course, but if you’ve got any sense you’ll start for Denver in a fast buggy with Sonny driving.”

  Ethan caught the import and made his answer. His decision to kill Chann Ordway had already been irrevocably posted. No side-track traveling!

  “Get them out and hurry,” he slobbered thickly. “I’ve got work to do, Henry.”

  “I know what it is!”

  “Then don’t try anything funny, such as drugging me. If you do I’ll kill you.”

  Cartwright fixed him with piercing, antagonistic eyes. “Don’t you ever, don’t you ever, threaten me like that again or I’ll shotgun you, E
than.”

  He brought out a bottle containing some pills, administered them to kill pain, and went to work. Fifteen minutes later the job was crudely but efficiently finished, the bleeding stopped. Ethan, his barrel-battered features salved but not bandaged, could talk with a thickened slur.

  Doc pulled off the last of three leeches beneath the eye and stepped back. “There,” he said with strange quietness, “now go start your blood bath, the rape and pillage of what has become a decent country. Forget everything decent you might have become and revert to what we all were thirty years ago. Then take your place in hell with Shackleford, your brother Tim, with old Koonce and Tobe Whitehouse and the others. Wait there a few years and we’ll all have a big reunion!”

  He rolled down his sleeves, buttoned them at the wrists, snapped the bag shut with a vicious metallic sound, and put on his coat.

  “Go tell Step to come in here,” Ethan commanded.

  Cartwright caught the tossed gold eagle and picked up his bag. “When a man chases the devil around the stump as long as you have, my friend, he finds out too late that he’s finally caught up with it.”

  He closed the door and walked toward the bar. Ignoring the questions in a dozen or more pairs of eyes, he placed the coin upon the bar and indicated the crowd.

  “Disinfect it, Hanse, before you serve the house. I don’t want it.” Doctor Henry Cartwright, M.D., Physician and Surgeon, turned and bent a baleful stare upon Step Eaton, Sheriff. He jerked his thumb in the direction from which he had just come.

  “Go on back there and pull down your drawers,” he sneered at the flush-faced lawman. “Teacher is waiting with a switch.”

  He spat disgustedly and left the low-ceilinged saloon to its own thoughtful silence. The symptoms showed an epidemic about to erupt in Tulac. Probable cure, and an old reliable one: gunfire.

  He replaced the kettle-shaped anchor, got into the buggy, pulled the mare around and sent her at a sizzling trot toward the ax-squared comer of an old log building. A hard jar, and Cartwright was almost flung out of the buggy as the left rear wheel bounced off the building’s comer.

  “Well, I’ll be bedoodled,” Cartwright muttered disgustedly as he looked back. “Henry, Mike Adkins was right. You are getting old!’”

  At the rear room door Step Eaton squared his shoulders in an effort to pump another inch of height and a pound or two of whiskey courage before facing Ethan. He would have felt less trepidation had he known the room contained a half-dozen rattlesnakes.

  Sonny, loaded with the kind of cash these days that Step formerly possessed, had jeeringly bought several rounds, jeered as Step drank them, knowing how much the sheriff needed false courage. Well, Step told himself, maybe cocky Sonny was wrong. Maybe the time was at hand to show a few people that Eaton had guts. Sure, right now! Step boldly decided.

  He’d face Ethan, listen to his roar, then go straight to the courthouse and fire that black browed deputy whose brooding eyes always seemed to be fixed at a point between the sheriff’s shoulder blades.

  Step could feel them each time he turned his back on old Tobe’s adopted son. Koonce was playing a waiting game, wearing him down a glance at a time, waiting for evidence of minder. Well, let ’em prove it first!

  That first time had been a tough one, putting two slugs into Chann Ordway’s back. But, once the ice was broken, the second time was much easier—and thorough too. Old Tobe never knew what hit him.

  “And there’ll be a third time too, by God, less’n somebody watches their step,” Eaton growled bravely and shoved open the door.

  Ethan sat with a huge hand wrapped around a tumbler of whiskey. Light from the window glistened upon his greasy face. “Close that door!”

  The courage drained out of Step. Just those three words and he was dog-whipped again, the way he had been with Ethan all his life, and he knew it “If you’ve got any lies ready, throw them out,” Ethan rumbled ominously. “I want the truth of what happened down there today.’’

  He listened in scathing silence until the sheriff finished talking. Nor did Step hold back anything. You didn’t hold out on a man like Ethan Ordway.

  He watched sardonically as Step picked up the bottle and poured himself a badly needed drink. “Now that you let him get away, just what do you aim to do about it?” he inquired.

  Step tossed off the slug. “Go after him,” he answered bravely.

  “Good. He’s right here in town. It ought to be easy.”

  “I ain’t got a chance against him with a short gun, and you know it, you black devil. Red Waldo’s gun was out and leveled when Chann shot him. I got to have time to do it in my own way.”

  Ethan rose to his feet. The room automatically became smaller, the ceiling lower. His bulk seemed to compress the air, the very breath in Step Eaton’s lungs.

  “Now you listen to me, you bottle-slobbering, wife beating excuse for a man!” Ethan Ordway snarled from back of a leveled finger long and black like a gun barrel, and ten times more dangerous. ‘Time has run out for you. It ran out when you let Chann get away from the Randolph spread. Thanks to your stupidity I’ve not only lost the best brand-blotter I ever saw work, but Sonny and his whole crew will now have to pull out of there.”

  “I think what you really want me to do is get killed so you can give Sonny this badge,” Step growled in a sudden burst of bravado.

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered that possibility since you began the battle of the bottle,” Ethan replied calmly. “I have.”

  “Well, what do you want me to do now?” Step growled sullenly, reaching for the bottle.

  “Get rid of Chann. And fast, before people wake up and give him a hand.” Ethan added mercilessly, “It’s your scalp or his, make your choice.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Step blustered, desperate, but still amazed at himself. “Now let me tell you something! A lot of old-timers thought it damn strange that the day three gunmen braced you in this place one of them was Jude Waldo. Then Tim came to your rescue and got killed. A lot of other old-timers thought it damn strange that while you killed two of them gunmen, Jude Waldo killed Tim Ordway and escaped to Cheyenne. You never went after him. You never even said nothing to Red about it—”

  Ethan’s right hand dropped the glass and flashed to the bottle. He slapped it from Eaton’s hand and sent it rolling into a comer, where it lay gurgling.

  “Get out of here, you ungrateful scum. Get out of here and keep your whiskey mouth shut and kill Chann Ordway before you die,” Ethan hissed, his face a hideous mask.

  Step slunk out the back way and onto the makeshift new porch, where the bottles and trash used to be. Ethan stepped to the door leading to the bar, and stuck his head through. “Sonny, come back here,” he ordered.

  Sonny came in as Ethan was picking up the bottle and setting it back on the blood-topped table. “He’s drinking far too much lately, Ethan,” the young tough said, reading the significance and having heard the sound.

  “It probably cost you a pardner today.”

  “I oughta killed him for it.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Thought maybe you might not like it. He shined your boots the first twelve years and licked them the next twelve.”

  Ethan changed the subject. “So Randolph chased you off the place after hearing a few things, huh?”

  Sonny nodded, then shook his head when the big man indicated the bottle and sat down again. He himself took a chair, removed his battered hat and pushed back his tawny hair.

  “He did, and I didn’t bat an eye either. Not with three rifles staring us in the face, Eric’s lined right at my mouth. If I had made one move, opened my big mouth, he’d have shot me dead.”

  “Them women, too?”

  “Hell,” Sonny said, not without admiration. “They’ve hunted animals all their lives, and to them two women that’s just what we was. Animals. We packed and got out.”

  “Maybe it’s better this way. We’ve got his herd rebranded, but one thing has kept me fr
om coming into the open until now. Ever kill a woman, Sonny?”

  “Coupla Ute squaws,” Sonny shrugged indifferently.

  “Supposin’ their skins are white?”

  “If it has to be done.”

  “First things first. Chann. He’s here in town. Get your men and get right on it, Sonny. I’ve figgered a way to get legal title to Squaw Valley.”

  Sonny rose to his feet and put on his hat. “What about Step?”

  The words came a little cautiously, warily.

  “If he gets lucky on a third try, fine. We’ll judge him later. If not—” Ethan shrugged.

  “Were rid of him and I get his badge,” Sonny Shackleford finished. “Fair enough, I reckon.”

  He happened to glance out the window and then turned. “I just wish to hell you’d get up and come over here and take a look,” he sneered disgustedly.

  The object of their conversation, full of both whiskey and new determination to start afresh with the whole world, had lurched off Hansen’s new and much cussed porch and out into the street. He’d forgotten his black racing mare, racked out front with a dead man’s reins— Waldo’s—on the bridle.

  Right now Step was obsessed with the determination to carry out his silent threats of several months: fire Bob Koonce and dare him to do something about it!

  Mike happened to come by from the bank, curious to see how Ethan looked and to keep abreast of developments. Thankful for any excuse to delay his journey on across the street, the sheriff swerved, lurched over and tried to block his path.

  “Where’n the hell do you think you’re goin’?” Eaton demanded truculently. He had spotted Kathy’s brown-dressed, thick-waisted figure crossing from the courthouse toward Ethan’s livery, probably to weep on the old drunk’s shoulder.

  Likely she’d heard the truth about the shooting in Mexico and gone running to her staunch, sympathetic friend, Koonce. Maybe she wanted the deputy to arrest him. Step’s alcoholic mind threshed about. So she wanted Chann back now, huh? Nice little frame-up. Her, Chann, and Koonce.

  This town needed a clean-up and now was the time to start ,