Guns of the Canyonlands

Chapter 14

The day was shading into evening when Tyree rode up to Boyd’s cabin. The old rancher immediately burst through the door and seemed genuinely pleased to see him. He looked at Sally, taking in her shabby clothes and the rifle under her knee. “And who might this young lady be?”

Tyree smiled. “Just a maverick passing through. Her name’s Sally Brennan. She’s flat broke and needs a place to stay and I thought about you.”

“Of course she can stay!”

Lorena stepped out of the cabin and gave the girl a dazzling smile. “You can stay here as long as you like, Sally. It’s been ages since I had another woman to talk to.”

Sally smiled in return and swung out of the saddle. “Thank you. I could sure use a bath and somewhere soft to sleep. I’ve been lying on rocks or straw for months.”

For a brief moment Lorena’s eyes caught and held Tyree’s, both of them aware of the uneasy truce that lay between them. She had not asked him how he’d met the girl, but he knew that would come later.

Lorena fussed over Sally and led her into the cabin. When they were gone, a grinning Boyd studied Tyree, his left eyebrow rising in a question.

“It’s not what you think, Luke. Like I said, she’s passing through and needed help.”

Boyd nodded, but seemed unconvinced. “Whatever you say, Chance.” The grin died on his lips and his face became somber. “You catch up with the Arapaho Kid?”

“Yes, I did.”

Tyree swung off the steeldust and Boyd said, “Well?”

A few moments passed before Tyree answered, the old rancher’s question dangling in the air. Finally he said, “The Kid won’t be murdering anyone else.”

Boyd grinned. “You kill him?”

“No,” Tyree answered. “I smashed up his hands. As long as he lives he’ll never be able to shuck a gun again.”

“You . . . you broke his hands?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I did. Killing him would have been too easy. I wanted him to pay for what he did to Owen—pay for it every single day of his life.”

Tyree saw Boyd struggling to come to terms with what had he’d told him. Killing a man he understood, but maiming him and then letting him go was beyond his comprehension.

“Luke, I made the punishment to fit the crime,” Tyree said. “It was a reckoning. And in the end, the Kid knew it and the memory of what happened will stay with him.”

Boyd opened his mouth to speak again, but Tyree turned, gathering up the reins of his horse and doing the same to Sally’s pony. He was about to walk the animals to the barn, when a man’s voice called out from across the creek. “Hello the cabin!”

Boyd’s eyes screwed up against the falling darkness as he scanned the far bank. “Hell, that’s Steve Lassiter. He’s got a spread north of here. Now, what does he want?” Boyd cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Come on in, Steve.”

Steve Lassiter was a solemn, long-faced man with the eyes of a bereaved bloodhound. He sat round-shouldered and ungainly in the saddle of his bay mustang.

“Light and set a while, Steve,” Boyd said. “Take a load off yourself.”

The rancher shook his head. “I’m obliged, but I can’t stay, Luke. Jean will have supper on the table and she gets a mite testy if’n I’m late for meals.” Lassiter groaned softly and eased his position in the saddle. “Got news, Luke. Big news.”

“Well, let’s hear it.”

“I was in Crooked Creek buying pipe tobacco and some pins for Jean at the general store.” Lassiter shrugged his skinny shoulders. “I’m forever running out of tobacco. Then I heard shots being fired and all kinds of commotion going on in the street outside.”

Lassiter, a dour, taciturn man by nature, nodded. “Yup, that’s what I heard all right. Darnedest thing.”

“And?” Boyd prompted, a hint of irritation in his eyes.

“Well, it seems that rustler you caught . . . what’s his name—”

“Roy Will.”

“Yeah, him. Well, anyhoo, he escaped. Got himself a gun and a good pony from somewheres and skedaddled.”

“Tobin, that fat useless . . .” Boyd began angrily.

“The sheriff took a few shots at him,” Lassiter interrupted, “but there are them who say he was holding his gun mighty high, like he was shooting at the moon.”

Lassiter sat in silence for a few moments, then said, “Just thought you’d like to know, Luke. Best you keep that prize bull of your’n right close until Will is caught again or kilt.”

The rancher’s hound dog eyes slid to Tyree, widening in surprise. “By them that described you in town, I’d say you must be Chance Tyree. Heard about you this morning, you and the Arapaho Kid.” Lassiter shrugged. “Can’t say as I approve of what you done. Best just to kill a man like that and be finished with it. Don’t see much point in taking a man’s soul besides.” He touched his hat to Boyd. “Well, I’ll be on my way now, Luke. We’re having fried chicken for supper.”

After Lassiter had gone, Tyree tended to the horses, then rejoined Boyd who was sitting on the cabin stoop, thoughtfully smoking his pipe.

“Come first light tomorrow, I’ll go haze the bull back toward the cabin,” Tyree said. “Just in case.”

“You think Will plans on coming after you, Chance?”

“Certain of it. I believe that’s why Tobin let him escape. He figures Will can do Laytham’s dirty work for him.”

“You sure Laytham is behind it?”

“If I was a gambling man, I’d bet the farm on it.”

“Why does Laytham want you out of the way so bad?”

“Because I’m a thorn in his side. He knows Clem Daley and Len Dawson told me they were acting on his orders when they hung me. And he’s learned by this time that I found out about the Arapaho Kid getting paid a hundred dollar bonus for killing Owen.” Tyree shrugged. “Add to that the fact that I warned him through Tobin to leave the territory, taking only what he can carry on a horse, and he’s got reason enough to want me dead. Plenty of men have been killed for a lot less.”

Boyd smiled. “Leave the territory. Hell, I doubt ol’ Quirt will do that.”

“He has a couple more days. And if he doesn’t leave, I’ll go after him.”

The old rancher shook his head. “You’re not a forgiving man, are you, Chance?”

Tyree turned and looked into Boyd’s eyes. “Owen Fowler was a forgiving man, but it didn’t do him much good. He was still shot down in the street like a dog. I won’t repeat that same mistake.”

Boyd sat in silence for a while, then said, “Tomorrow, you be careful. Don’t make yourself a target for Roy Will. He’s a bad one.”

Tyree grinned. “Luke, I reckon I’m already a target for Roy Will.”

As the two men sat and smoked, the darkness gathered around them and the night sky became bright with stars. A cooling breeze had picked up from the north, rippling the surface of the creek, stirring the branches of the cottonwoods to a restless rustling.

Good smells wafted from the cabin—the tantalizing odors of frying beef and coffee—and Tyree felt his stomach rumble.

“Come and get it, you two,” Lorena said, her head popping out of the open doorway.

Tyree and Boyd stepped inside and Lorena bade them sit at the table. “Now,” she said, “I want both of you to close your eyes. Don’t peek.”

Boyd turned to Tyree, a long-suffering look on his face. “Best do as she says, Chance, or we’ll never get to eat.”

Tyree closed his eyes. Then, after a few moments, Lorena called out, “Ta-da!”

When Tyree opened his eyes again, Sally stood at the end of the table in a blue gingham dress with a lacy white front. She had washed her hair and it cascaded over her shoulders in loose, shining curls.

“Lorena gave me this,” she said. “I’ve never had a dress this pretty before in my whole life.” She smiled at Tyree. “It’s good to feel like a girl again.”

Sally had none of Lorena’s classic beauty, but to Tyree she looked fresh and lovely with a childlike innocence. It was hard to believe this was the same girl, smelling of horses and cheap whiskey, he’d met in the barn at Crooked Creek.

It was even harder to believe that she’d tracked a man all the way from Wyoming for the sole purpose of watching him die.

Tyree rose and gallantly pulled out Sally’s chair for her, while Boyd did the same for Lorena. “Why, thank you, Mr. Tyree,” the girl said as she sat.

“You are quite welcome, Miss Brennan,” Tyree said.

And they laughed, all four of them.

Tyree left the Boyd place before the sun was up, while the sleepless coyotes were still talking. He rode east along the creek, casually eyeing the darkened canyons as he passed. He saw no sign of Boyd’s elusive bull, but that didn’t really matter because it was not the reason he was here.

He knew Roy Will would come back to try and make good on his vow to kill him, and Tyree wanted the man well away from the cabin, where there was no chance a stray bullet might hit Lorena or Sally.

Just as the darkness was giving way to the dawn, Tyree stopped in a wide dry wash beside the creek and lit a fire. He built the fire big, with plenty of smoke, a beacon that would attract Will to this place.

Tyree filled his coffeepot at the creek, threw in a handful of Arbuckle’s Best and placed the pot on the coals to boil. Like smoke, coffee could be smelled for a long distance and would be further bait for the rustler.

When the coffee boiled, Tyree poured himself a cup, then rolled a cigarette. Around him the new day was brightening into morning. The light was chasing the shadows from the canyons, adding color to the surrounding mesas and rocky crags, painting them in muted hues of pink, tan and dusty yellow. Green splashes of spruce and juniper were becoming visible and along the creek trout jumped at the first flies.

Tyree hitched up his gun belt, slipped the thong off the hammer of his Colt and waited, every sense alert, knowing what must inevitably come—the gun violence that was probably even now headed his way.

There seemed to be no end to his years of living by the Colt, years of watchfulness, the constant keen awareness of everything and everyone around him. He had spent most of his life looking into the eyes of other men, measuring them, wondering if this was a man he’d have to kill—or would this be the one, faster, surer, that killed him.

For a while now, he’d been thinking of finding a place right here among the canyons, where the name Chance Tyree and what it stood for might be forgotten. He had thought to hang his gun from a nail on the wall and live without trouble.

But that dream seemed more remote than ever.

If he survived his encounter with Roy Will, there would still be Quirt Laytham—and Tyree’s desire for revenge on Laytham was a living thing that ate at him and gave him no peace. It was an open wound that his hate kept festering, a wound that otherwise would have healed and done well.

But that was the hard way of the gunfighter, the only way Chance Tyree knew, and perhaps he had no chance of ever stepping back from it.

It was a gloomy thought, not one to bring much comfort to a man.

The morning wore on, and by the time Tyree had drained the coffeepot to the grounds, the sun had climbed high into the sky above the canyons, scorching the hot, dusty land into drowsy silence.

Tyree threw another branch on the fire and watched a foot-long leopard lizard panting on a rock close to him. From nearby he heard the stealthy slither of a snake through the long grass. He rose, stretched, then froze into immobility as a pair of startled ravens burst from the branches of a juniper growing close to the sandy base of a mesa opposite him, near the dark entrance to a canyon.

An animal instinct taking over, he immediately hurled himself to the ground, drawing his gun as he hit flat on his belly behind a low hummock of sand and sagebrush. The flat statement of a rifle shot echoed through the canyons and a bullet spaaanged! viciously off the rock where the lizard had been basking. A second kicked up a startled exclamation point of dirt close to Tyree’s head.

A drift of smoke rose from a jumble of talus rock to the right of the juniper, and Tyree thumbed off a couple of fast shots in that direction. He had seen no target, but he hoped to keep the hidden rifleman’s head down.

Tyree turned onto his back, punched out the empty shells from his Colt, then, thumbing cartridges from his belt, filled all six chambers. He rolled on his belly again and lifted his head, trying to see better. Immediately a bullet kicked a stinging spurt of sand into his face.

He was pinned down where he was and it was only a matter of time before the rifleman found the range and nailed him. Somehow or other he had to outflank the man and get a clear shot at him.

Tyree hammered a fast, offhand shot at the rifleman and heard his bullet clip a rock, whining wickedly. A couple of rifle shots probed for him, one thudding into the roots of the bunchgrass an inch from his head.

He couldn’t stay where he was.

Slowly Tyree inched his way back from the hummock and regained the comparative shelter of the dry wash. Crouching low, he followed the wash to the creek and dived into the shelter of thick brush growing around the roots of a stand of cottonwoods. A bullet rattled through the branches above him, then another.

Tyree worked his way to the creek and rolled off the bank into the water, a drop of several feet. Here he was shielded from the rifleman by a high dirt embankment crowned with tall grass and scattered white and pink wildflowers. His boots slipping and sliding on the rocky bottom, he followed the creek east for twenty yards, the embankment slowly diminishing in height until he had to bend over to stay hidden.

Now and then a bullet split the air near him, but mostly the rifleman’s probing shots went well wide, behind and in front of him.

Ahead of Tyree the creek took a sharp bend to the left, around a high, jutting sandbank crested by coarse bunchgrass and a stunted willow that trailed drooping branches into the water. Between Tyree and the tree lay thirty yards of open ground where the creekbank was broken down and trampled flat by the hooves of cattle. Before he reached the cover of the willow, he’d be exposed to the rifleman’s fire for four or five seconds. The risk was great, but it was a chance he’d have to take. He couldn’t stay where he was. To go back would mean taking up a position behind the high embankment. He’d be out of danger but would have no hope of getting a clear shot at his bushwhacker. If the man left his position and came at him he wouldn’t see him until the last moment and by then it could be too late.

Tyree made up his mind.

He straightened, then made a dash for the willow. Immediately he heard the crash of the rifle and felt a bullet tug at the back of his shirt. He ran on . . . twenty yards to go. Running flat out, awkward in spurs and high-heeled boots, he covered another few yards, then his foot rolled on a loose rock and he stumbled and fell flat on his face in the water. A bullet spurted a small fountain near his head, then a second burned across the back of his right thigh. Tyree got to his feet and ran, thumbing off wild shots toward the rocks where the rifleman was hidden.

The sandbank was very close now and he dived for its shelter as bullets whapped into the water or creased the air around him. Tyree splashed into the creek, throwing up a cascade of water, rolled, and came up against the bank, a four foot high ledge of soft yellow sand tangled with willow roots.

For a few moments, he leaned against the bank, breathing hard, his chest heaving. Then he took off his hat, filled it with creek water and poured the water over his head, enjoying its welcome coolness.

It was time to move again.

After several attempts, his boots slipping on the loose sand, Tyree managed to get a toehold on a thick root and clambered up the bank. Heavy clumps of Indian grass grew around the base of the willow, and he worked his way through those until he had a clear view of the rocks where the rifleman was hidden.

There had been no time to grab his own rifle, and Tyree was keenly aware of the uncertainty of his Colt at this distance. Between him and the bushwhacker lay fifty yards of open ground, too far for accurate revolver work.

But he couldn’t get any closer without exposing himself to the hidden marksman’s rifle, so for better or worse, here he had to stay.

There was no movement among the rocks, and Tyree took the time to reload his gun. The day’s heat was building and the sun was hot on his damp back, steaming off the creek water.

He waited, scanning the rocks with eyes that missed nothing.

There it was, a movement, just a flash of blue cloth against the drab dun of the rocks!

Tyree pushed the Colt straight out in front of him, holding the handle of the gun with both hands. He thumbed back the hammer, the metallic triple click loud in the quiet, and sighted on the rocks.

A few slow minutes inched by as beads of sweat gathered on Tyree’s forehead and his mouth ran dry. Around him the rugged land lay still, silent and unchanging, except in the far distance where the buttes, crags and mesas were already shimmering, shifting shape in the growing heat.

Another fleeting glimpse of blue. And another. More of it that time.

Slowly, looking around him like a wild thing, a man emerged from the rocks, a rifle slanted across his chest. Tyree recognized the yellow hair under the man’s hat and the bloodstained bandage on his shoulder. It was Roy Will. As he’d expected, the outlaw had wasted no time on making good his promise to avenge his brother’s death.

Will took a few steps toward the creek, then stopped, his head turning, checking the land around him. Warily, he angled toward the spot where Tyree was hidden, advanced three or four yards, then stopped again, his eyes speculatively scanning the willow.

Tyree laid the front sight of his Colt on Will’s chest and his forefinger took up the sixteenth of an inch of slack on the trigger. He held his breath, gripped the gun rock steady—and fired.

Will jerked as the bullet burned across his left arm. He threw the rifle to his damaged shoulder and hammered off three fast shots in Tyree’s direction, all of them crashing into the branches of the willow well above his head.

The man was close enough that Tyree saw him wince as the recoiling rifle pounded against his broken shoulder.

Tyree fired again. A clean miss. But it was enough. It seemed Will was an outlaw who clearly understood his limitations and he had decided this was not his day. The man ran back to the shelter of the rocks and a few moments later Tyree heard the echoing clatter of a horse’s hooves in the canyon.

Quickly Tyree sprang to his feet and ran to the dry wash where the steeldust was grazing. He caught up the reins and swung into the saddle, then galloped toward the canyon mouth.

He had no intention of letting Will escape to bush-whack him another day when his shooting shoulder was better healed and his aim surer.

Ahead of Tyree the canyon entrance yawned open, a clean-cut cleft in the rock not a whole lot wider than a slot, its sheer sides climbing six or seven hundred feet to the flat top of the mesa. Will was obviously gambling that the canyon had an outlet on the other side of the mesa, an uncertain thing since so many of them were boxes, ending in an impassible barrier of rock.

Tyree reined in the steeldust and entered the canyon at a walk, his Winchester ready to hand across the saddle horn. There was a thin trickle of water along the canyon bottom and a few deer and cattle tracks. The light was thin, picking up an amber tint from the walls, and the sandy bottom was broken in places by clumps of prickly pear and ocotillo. The canyon smelled of cows and the dust kicked up by Will’s horse.

Down here it was very quiet, the only sound the creak of Tyree’s saddle leather and the soft thud of the steeldust’s hooves on the sand. His stirrups scraping against the walls, Tyree rode around a tight bend and then entered a rock passageway about fifty yards wide with smooth, curved walls. Here the water had pooled in a long, shallow tank but was only a couple of inches deep.

Ahead of him, its top hidden from sight by an outcropping of rock, a shallow trough rose from the canyon floor and slanted upward, following an unexpected, gradual slope in the wall. The basin had been gouged out in ancient times by the fall of heavy boulders, and later by rain erosion. Tyree guessed it went clear to the top of the mesa.

He rode around the outcropping and immediately reined in the steeldust. Roy Will, probably fearful that he’d ridden into a box, was urging his horse up the trough. The rustler rode to his left, then turned right again, creating his own switchback trail up the slope. He was attempting to reach the summit of the mesa, trusting to luck that he’d find a way back onto the flat.

But Will wasn’t going to make it.

The rustler fought his horse as it faltered, its hooves skidding on loose sand and talus, frightened arcs of white showing in its eyes.

“Will!” Tyree yelled. “Throw down your gun and get down from there.”

“Damn you, Tyree!” the man cried, surprised, his face twisted in fury. “I’ll see you in hell first!”

Will savagely swung his struggling horse around and headed down the slope, his mount sliding most of the way on its haunches. The rustler had booted his rifle, but the Colt in his hand barked. The bullet missed Tyree’s head by inches, caromed off the canyon wall then ricocheted wildly, the whining lead bouncing back and forth from rock to rock, dangerous and lethal.

Will had almost reached the bottom of the canyon and was firing as he came. His plunging horse was an unstable platform for accurate shooting, but his bullets rebounded from the rock walls and Tyree was aware of the peril of all that wildly flying lead.

Tyree fired his Winchester from the hip, working the lever fast, hammering bullets into Will. Sudden red roses bloomed on the rustler’s blue shirt and the man screamed, threw up his arms and fell backward out of the saddle, hitting the sandy floor with a thud.

The hollow echoes of his gunshots were still reverberating through the smoke-streaked canyon as Tyree swung out of the saddle and stepped to the fallen rustler.

Will’s eyes were wide open, but he was seeing nothing. The man had been already dead when he hit the ground.

The rustler’s horse was also down, its right leg shattered by a ricocheting bullet. Tyree put the animal out of its misery with one well-aimed shot, then holstered his gun.

Suddenly he was tired, tired beyond belief, the wound in his side a dull, relentless ache that pounded at him. He stepped into the saddle once more and turned his horse toward the mouth of the canyon.

For some reason he could scarcely fathom, he badly wanted to see Sally again.