Do or Die

Chapter Four

Nebraska Panhandle

The rider was tall, and any woman who saw him would say he was uncommonly striking. He rode well, but not as one born to the saddle. From a distance he could easily be mistaken for a cowboy since he wore cowboy garb, from the Stetson atop his neatly combed black hair to the spurs attached to his boots. But up close, an observer would notice everything was new and showed none of the wear and tear of a true cowhand’s work clothes.

He had piercing green eyes, this rider, and he constantly scoured the countryside, searching. Several times that day he took a map from his saddlebags, spread it out across his saddle, and reassured himself he was where he wanted to be.

Confirmation came in the form of a well-worn trail that wound off across the prairie to the northeast. Churned by countless hooves, the ground had been worn bare. The rider followed it for over an hour, until he came on a crudely painted sign. Drawing rein, he read it twice, his eyes crinkling in amusement.

O. T. QUARREL RANCH

NO TRESPASSING. NO DRUMMERS. NO PREACHERS. NO INJUNS EXCEPT SIOUX. RUSTLERS WILL BE HUNG AT OUR CONVENIENCE. ALL OTHERS WELCOME.

“That’s comforting to know,” the rider said to the claybank, and gigged it on along the trail.

At any moment the rider expected to see the ranch house. But he had forgotten where he was. Distance meant little to men accustomed to vast open spaces. A Westerner thought nothing of traveling hundreds of miles to visit the nearest town. A rancher could ride for a week and still be on his own spread.

O. T. Quarrel had one of the largest spreads in Nebraska. His brand was famous from Montana to New Mexico for quality stock, whether cattle or horses. The men who rode for him were notoriously loyal to the brand, a fact the rider reminded himself not to forget once he arrived.

The sun was balanced on the western rim of the world when the rider finally spied the ranch house. It was modest but sturdily built and surrounded by a long bunkhouse, a stable, and sundry outbuildings. As the rider drew near, the clear peal of a triangle signaled the call to supper.

The rider slid his right hand under his slicker to a Smith and Wesson snug in its shoulder holster. He worked it up and down a few times. As he passed the stable, the corral caught his interest. All fifteen horses in it were pintos, or paints as they were known.

Next to the mess was a hitch rail. Beside it was a bench on which sat a battered washbasin, a used bar of lye soap, and a towel in dire need of a washing itself. Dismounting, the rider looped the reins around the rail, removed his hat, and dipped his comb in the brown water. He was running it through his hair when spurs jangled; someone was approaching from the ranch house.

“Howdy, stranger. Nice duds you’ve got there.”

The speaker looked as if he could tote an anvil under each arm and not feel the strain. His face was as rugged as the land and seamed by years of toil. Tufts of grey hair stuck from under his hat.

“I bought them in Cheyenne.”

“Do tell. Then I take it you’re not ridin’ the grub-line, not if you’ve got money to spare.” The ranch-man studied the rider. “We don’t get many visitors to these parts. Are you bound somewhere special?”

Replacing his Stetson, the rider turned. “I thought it’s against range etiquette to pry into another’s affairs.”

“I’m entitled. I own this spread. O. T. Quarrel is my handle, but most hereabouts call me Quarry.” Quarrel thrust out a callused hand with fingers like railroad spikes. “You could say I have a vested interest in pryin’ where others shouldn’t.”

“William Shores.” The rider shook. “You can call me Bill.”

Quarrel washed his hands in the dirty water and wiped them on the dirty towel. “Let’s go in. I don’t want to keep the boys waitin’ any longer than I have to.”

Seated at the long table were over twenty punchers ranging in age from barely old enough to shave to alkalied old-timers. They were waiting, some with forks and knives in hand, for the big augur to arrive. As soon as Quarrel stepped through the doorway, many cheerfully called out greetings.

Shores entered, and the good-natured yells died. He smiled, but no one repaid the courtesy.

“This way.” Quarrel moved to the head of the table. A puncher in the chair to the right got up and moved down to an empty one. Quarrel tapped the vacated chair. “Why don’t you have a seat, and we’ll get acquainted after we eat?”

The meal was typical ranch fare: fried steak and gravy, sourdough biscuits, beans, vinegar pie, and dried peaches. Shores followed the example of the punchers and heaped his plate high. A long day in the saddle had him famished, and he wolfed down his portions as hungrily as everyone else.

O. T. Quarrel had two helpings of everything. At length he pushed back his chair, lit an old corncob pipe, and squinted at Shores through the smoke. “Now then, suppose you tell me what brought you to my spread?”

Fishing in a pocket for his identification, Shores handed it over.

“William E. Shores,” Quarrel read loud enough for everyone at the table to hear. “United States Department of Justice.”

A gangly cowpuncher spooning sugar into a cup of coffee looked up. “What in tarnation is that, Quarry?”

Shores answered for himself. “The Justice Department was created about a year ago to help the attorney general enforce federal laws. The department also provides legal counsel in federal cases.”

The puncher’s grin was several teeth shy of a full set. “Just what we need. More government.”

His comment was greeted with general mirth and scorn. Shores let it subside before saying, “I’m a federal agent with authority to arrest anyone guilty of breaking federal law.”

Another puncher made a show of gazing around the room. “Anyone here see a federal law runnin’ loose? I wouldn’t want to step on it and break it.”

Shores failed to see the humor, but the cow crowd cackled.

Quarrel lowered his pipe and grinned. “Don’t take them serious, Mr. Shores. They’re good hands. They’d do to ride the river with, every last one. They’re just havin’ a little fun at your expense.”

“I’ve been around cowboys before.”

“You don’t say? I noticed you sit a horse right smart. So even though your clothes brand you a dude, I reckoned there was more to you than met the eye.”

“I was born in Texas,” Shores revealed. “Brazos, to be exact. Spent a lot of my childhood on horseback. But when I was eleven, my parents dragged me off to Chicago. I became a Pinkerton. Four months ago, I was contacted about becoming a federal agent.” Shores shrugged. “Here I am.”

“A Pinkertonian, huh? They’re not held in high regard in these parts. A pair showed up here a while back huntin’ a bank robber. They put on airs like you wouldn’t believe, but both combined weren’t worth their weight in spit.” Quarrel paused. “Who are you huntin’, Mr. Justice Department Agent?”

“I’m after the Hoodoos,” Shores announced.

Total silence ensued. No one looked at him except O. T. Quarrel. “What makes you reckon you’ll find them here?”

“I never said I would,” Shores responded, “but I hope to learn something equally as valuable. The information I need to track them to their hideout and put an end to their reign of bloodshed and terror.”

A puncher across the table snickered. “Hellfire, mister. You make them sound like they’re the worst hombres who ever rode the high lines.”

“Not all that long ago they murdered several troopers from the Second Cavalry. One of the troopers made the mistake of recognizing Kid Falon and decided to go for the marshal. Unfortunately, Curly Means overheard them and told the Kid.” Shores took a sheet of paper from a pocket and unfolded it.

“Three weeks prior to that, the Hoodoos murdered an old Shoshone by the name of Mat-ta-vish. Four months earlier, they shot two Arapahos who tried to stop them from stealing horses from an Arapaho village. Before that, it’s believed they stole a herd from the Pawnees. You name a tribe, odds are they’ve lost horses to the Hoodoos.”

“Any Sioux on that list?” Quarrel asked.

Shores ran a finger down the sheet. “No. Flatheads, Nez Perce, even the Blackfeet once.”

“Notice anything?” Quarrel asked. “Except for the troopers, who brought it on themselves, all those on your list are redskins.”

“What are you saying?”

“You won’t find any Injun lovers in this room, Mr. Shores. We’ve all had run-ins with hostiles at one time or another. We all know someone who has lost kin to a red arrow or tomahawk.” Quarrel blew a puff of smoke into the air. “Did you happen to notice my sign on your way in? I shoot any Injuns I find on my spread, except Sioux.”

“So you don’t care that the Hoodoos go around stealing and killing as they see fit?” Shores couldn’t hide his resentment.

“Not when they’re stealin’ from and killin’ Injuns, no.” Quarrel set his pipe down. “Brock Alvord is nobody’s fool. He’s been rustlin’ for years and never been caught because he steals from the red man and sells to the white. He knows that if he stole stock from me or any other rancher, we’d hunt him to the ends of the earth and treat him to a hemp social. But no one out here gives a damn what he does to redskins.”

“Indians should have the same rights whites do,” Shores declared.

The room rocked with hoots and jeers. “Pilgrim, you’re tryin’ to sell your tonic to the wrong crowd!” a cowboy hollered. “We’d all as soon every last Injun was pushin’ up tumbleweeds as breathin’.” He glanced at his employer. “Except the Sioux, of course.”

Folding the paper, Shores shoved it into his pocket. “I can see I won’t get anywhere by appealing to your sense of civic duty.”

“Our what?” The toothless puncher pulled his shirt out from his chest and peered down under it. “I’m not sure I have one of those.”

Laughter shook the rafters.

William Shores faced O. T. Quarrel. “Very well. Let’s get to it. In Cheyenne I ran into a cowhand who told me an interesting story. He claimed the Hoodoos paid you a visit a while back and sold you a fine herd of pintos for your remuda. Fifteen in all, rustled from Mat-ta-vish after they murdered him.” Shores nodded at a window. “The same fifteen pintos right out there in your corral.”

“That’s not true,” Quarrel said.

“You’re a liar.”

Chairs went flying as seven or eight cowhands leaped to their feet. But the cowboys froze when the federal agent’s Smith & Wesson blossomed in his hand, trained on the man they rode for.

Quarrel, as calm as could be, motioned at his would-be defenders. “Simmer down, boys. This gent doesn’t have enough sense to bell a cat, but he’s my guest, and we’ll treat him accordingly.” He smiled at Shores. “Put your nickel-plated hardware away, mister. All I’d have to do is snap my fingers, and you’d be perforated with more holes than a sieve.”

It was no idle threat. Shores replaced the Smith & Wesson but kept his hand inches from it on the table. “How can you sit there and tell me you didn’t accept stolen stock when I saw the pintos on my way in?”

“All I meant was that I didn’t buy them for my remuda. I bought them for the Sioux.”

Shores remembered the sign and the comments by Quarrel and the puncher. “You’ve lost me.”

Quarrel picked up his corncob pipe and puffed a few times. “I was one of the first, Mr. Shores. There was nothin’ here before me except prairie dogs. And the Oglala Sioux. This was their territory, and they drove off every white who tried to plant roots. But I wanted this land, wanted it from the moment I set eyes on it. So I hired an army scout to arrange a parley with the Oglala.”

“That took nerve,” Shores had to admit.

“When a man wants somethin’ bad enough, he’ll do anything to get it. I offered the Sioux their weight in trade blankets and trinkets. I offered them knives, rifles, ammunition. I offered all the money I had and more each year for the rest of my life. But they weren’t interested. All they wanted were horses.”

“Pintos?” Shores deduced.

“Injuns are mighty fond of bright colors. They love blue beads and red blankets and paint horses. So they agreed to let me stay for fifteen paint horses.” Quarrel chuckled at the recollection. “I don’t mind admittin’ I about pulled out my hair findin’ that many. I sent riders as far south as Texas, as far north as Canada. But I found the fifteen.”

“That was decades ago.”

The rancher nodded. “Fifteen paints that first year and fifteen more every five winters for as long as I live on their land. In another month, or moon as the Sioux call them, another fifteen are due.”

Shores digested this. “But you don’t need to give them the horses. The Oglalas drifted north years ago. They’re up on the reservation in the Black Hills. As far as the United States government is concerned, this land is yours, free and clear.”

“I gave my word, Mr. Shores. It doesn’t matter where the Oglalas are. I’m still here. I’m obligated to live up to my promise.”

Shores glanced out the window and did not say anything else for a while. “Why hire the Hoodoos? Why not send punchers out to find the paints you needed?”

The lines in Quarrel’s face deepened. “I never hired Alvord’s bunch. He’s been around awhile, Burt has. He knows how I got my start. He heard I’d need more paints soon. So he took it on himself to rustle some and showed up here to offer them to me for top dollar.”

“You knew they were stolen, yet you bought them anyway? By rights I could arrest you as an accessory.”

“You could try,” a puncher declared.

Shores ignored him. “All I’m interested in are the Hoodoos. Tell me where to find them, and I’ll forget the rest.”

Quarrel’s pipe was going out, and he tapped it a few times. “You give me too much credit, government man. I’ve known Brock since the early days, true, but we’ve never been friendly. He’s always been a hellion. Me, I like the straight and narrow. He’s not about to confide his secrets.”

“You can’t tell me where the Hoodoos lie low? Or whether any of them have a wife or a family stashed away somewhere?

“Sorry.”

Shores reached into his slicker and produced a different sheet of paper. “Do me a favor. Mat-ta-vish drew these in the dirt right before he died. His daughter thought they might be important, so she copied the drawings onto the back of an old buffalo hide.” He slid the paper across. “I sketched them as best I could.”

O. T. Quarrel gave them due consideration. “I’m not much on Injun symbols. If the Shoshones don’t know what they mean, it’s a cinch I wouldn’t.”

“Damn.” William Shores sat back, defeated. “I came all this way for nothing.”

Colorado-Nebraska border

Eli’s was part tavern, part general store, and all sod from roof to floor. The proprietor, Eli Brandenberg, had been on his way to the Rocky Mountains to prospect for gold when one of his mules came up lame. Insult was added to misfortune when the wagon train he was with had decided to go on without him. The wagon master had found tracks of unshod ponies and concluded a hostile war party was in the area. The rest of the emigrants took a vote and decided they were unwilling to slow their pace to a crawl and heighten the risk of losing their scalps for Eli’s sake.

After four days of being on his own, after being drenched by the most violent thunderstorm Eli had ever experienced and losing the canvas on his Conestoga to hail the size of walnuts, after running into a friendly band of Pawnees who offered to trade half an antelope for half a bottle of whiskey, and after a second mule broke a leg in a prairie dog hole, Eli decided enough was enough. He built his soddy, piled his belongings inside, and hung a sign over the door.

That had been a decade ago.

Eli prospered. He made annual treks to Denver for supplies, then charged five times what he paid when he resold the items to frontiersmen and Indians. He charged emigrants ten times as much.

Most days Eli had to himself. His old coon dog would doze by the counter while Eli indulged in his favorite hobby: picking lice off himself and crushing them between his fingertips. He loved how they squished.

This day, five riders arrived shortly after noon. Eli recognized them right away. They had visited him before and never caused trouble, so he had no qualms about serving them a couple of bottles of redeye along with their food. First, though, he took his coon dog and hid it in the storeroom behind the soddy.

Along about two in the afternoon, a couple of buffalo hunters rode up. There was no mistaking their profession. They wore buffalo coats and buffalo hats and had greased their hair with buffalo fat. Whenever Eli stood too close, he caught a whiff of an odor that reminded him of the south end of a northbound buffalo. They paid for a bottle and sat at the other table.

Eli didn’t pay much attention to which of the five long ropes asked the hunters if they wanted to sit in on a friendly game of cards. He thought maybe it was Curly Means, who was the friendliest cuss around when he was sober and there weren’t any dogs in the vicinity.

Engrossed in his lice-picking, Eli wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the gum-flapping. The buffalo hunters were on their way east after an extended stay at a boarding house in Denver where the ladies “were as plump as ripe plums and as sociable as schoolmarms,” as one boasted.

Only Brock Alvord, Kid Falon, and Curly Means joined in the game. Big Ben Brody leaned his chair against the wall and was soon snoring loud enough to be mistaken for an earthquake. John Noonan was sharpening a bone-handled knife he had acquired somewhere.

All seemed well until Eli heard Kid Falon say, “If you two stunk any worse, I’d swear I had my head up a buffalo’s ass.”

“This from a runt who took his last bath in horse piss,” a buffalo hunter rejoined, and both hunters laughed.

The Hoodoos weren’t nearly as amused. Particularly Kid Falon, who, as Eli recollected, prided himself on taking a bath once a month whether he needed it or not.

“I’d take that back, you bucket of fat, or learn to breathe dirt.”

The hunter so addressed pulled his heavy coat aside to display a Remington revolver. “I’d be a heap more polite, midget, when addressin’ your betters.”

Eli tried to head off trouble. He scurried around the counter and loudly exclaimed, “Gentlemen! Gentlemen! There’s no call for insults. We’re all here to have a good time, right?”

Kid Falon looked at him with eyes as cold as winter snow. “My notion of a good time is blowin’ out the lamps of jackasses who prod me. Are you volunteerin’?”

“No, never,” Eli hastily assured him.

“Then go on back to squishin’ your seam squirrels and leave us men to conduct our business.” Kid Falon pushed his chair back. “Now then, gents. What was that about you bein’ better than me?”

“Don’t push us, boy,” the second hunter warned. “We’re not greeners. We’ve tangled with Comanches and come out on top. We’ve outfought the Sioux and put the fear of dyin’ into a Blackfoot war party. And we’ve beat the tar out of more blowhards like you than there are blades of grass outside that door.”

“Is that a fact?”

Brock Alvord and Curly Means rose and stepped away from the table, Brock saying, “Don’t expect us to take the big jump over this, Kid. That leaky mouth of yours will earn you windows in your skull one day.”

The hunter with the Remington developed an interest in Falon. “Why did he call you ‘Kid’?”

“Most folks do.”

Curly Means was grinning from ear to ear. “His Christian name is Alphonse Rudolph Falon. Which shows that his ma and pa had a better sense of humor than most, or they were drunker than an Irishman on St. Patty’s day when they named him.”

The second buffalo hunter put two and two together. “You’re Kid Falon?” His complexion grew several shades lighter.

“I didn’t know who you were when I called you a runt,” said the first.

Never for a second taking his icy eyes off the hunters, the Kid slowly stood and pushed his chair back with the sole of his boot. “Whenever you’re ready to dance, start the fiddlin’.”

“Hold on!” The hunter with the Remington was ready to eat crow. “We’re not loco. We ain’t about to tangle with the likes of you. If it’s all the same, we’ll back on out and leave you be. What do you say? No hard feelin’s?”

“I hate cowards,” Kid Falon said.

“Please, Kid.”

“Those were your last words, bucket of fat.”

Eli was watching for it. Like everyone else, he had heard tales about the Kid’s speed. About how the Kid was chained lightning and then some. And here he was, about to witness it for himself. But just as the Kid’s hands moved, Eli blinked. The next he knew, his soddy thundered to two shots, and the buffalo hunters were flung to the dirt floor, chairs and all, bullet holes smack between their eyes.

Kid Falon never gave them another glance. He sat back down and began replacing the spent cartridges. “Drinks for everyone, Eli. The bucket of fat has a poke on him, so he’s buyin’.”

“Right away.” Eli scampered to obey, delighted at the thought of the story he could share with all those who stopped by his place from then on. His only regret was that the buffalo hunters hadn’t been emigrants.