King of the Range E-Book

Max Brand

• Herausgeber: Ktoczyta.pl
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Carrick Dunmore seemed to be nothing more than a happy-go-lucky cowboy whose main pastimes were drinking and sleeping. He wasn’t the kind of man who could challenge Jim Tankerton, the outlaw chief whose cruel violence terrorized the countryside. But Dunmore had a few tricks to outwit old Jim... One of many recommended westerns by this prolific author. Frederick Schiller Faust (May 29, 1892 – May 12, 1944) was an American author known primarily for his thoughtful and literary westerns under the pen name Max Brand. Highly recommended, especially for those who love the Old Western genre.

Leseprobe

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

CHAPTER XVIII

CHAPTER XIX

CHAPTER XX

CHAPTER XXI

CHAPTER XXII

CHAPTER XXIII

CHAPTER XXIV

CHAPTER XXV

CHAPTER XXVI

CHAPTER XXVII

CHAPTER XXVIII

CHAPTER XXIX

CHAPTER XXX

CHAPTER XXXI

CHAPTER XXXII

CHAPTER XXXIII

CHAPTER XXXIV

CHAPTER XXXV

CHAPTER XXXVI

CHAPTER XXXVII

CHAPTER XXXVIII

CHAPTER XXXIX

CHAPTER XL

CHAPTER XLI

CHAPTER XLII

CHAPTER XLIII

CHAPTER I

UNDOUBTEDLY Colonel Clisson was angry. All through the first day of the rodeo his anger grew, and on the second day it waxed mightily. He represented the whole of Texas and all of Texas ways, and it cut him to the very heart when he saw dally men from California and Nevada come into his territory and at his own pet rodeo, where he himself offered most of the prizes, carry away the glory and the hard cash.

The invaders had won at the shooting contest on the morning of the first day, distinguishing themselves with both rifle and revolver; on foot, kneeling, prone, or in the saddle on a moving horse, they had excelled the tie men in every respect.

Some said that this half dozen of center-fire riders were professionals, and not real cowpunchers at all. That is to say, they were a group who went from rodeo to rodeo throughout the country, splitting between them the prizes that they won. Such men, with none of the full and aimless hours on the range to burden them, were able to devote all their attention to the points that were most likely to count in a contest. They could bulldog, for instance, for a month at a time, and work up their skill close to perfection. Some of these men went into circuses, in the end, and traveled East and amazed the thousands.

But, professionals or not, Colonel Clisson was enraged by the successes of the invaders. After their victory in the shooting, they had been victorious in bulldogging, in riding wild steers, in roping, fancy and for time, in all the contests, and, when it came to the riding of the horses, which was the concluding portion of the entertainment, they stood well together at the top.

“They are professionals,” said the colonel’s foreman. “In that there grama country, they don’t learn to scratch their hosses none when they’re pitchin’ around. But look at that buckaroo now… look how tight he’s settin’ and swingin’ his spurs mighty fine. I wouldn’t hate to lay my bet that he ain’t drawed a paycheck off a ranch inside of five year. Look at the color of him. He’s as pale as a dude gambler.”

The colonel snorted. “There was a time,” he said, “when this country of mine was filled with ’punchers who would climb up the side of anything that called itself a hoss. But that time is gone, and I’m glad, sir, yes, I’m glad to see strangers come in and put our people in their place. Not one man, Pete, has dared to so much as ask to have a look at my mare, here.”

Pete Logan, the foreman, felt that there was a cut intended in this speech, and he scratched his chin for an instant and with thoughtful eyes watched the contest progressing between the center-fire buckaroo and the wrong-headed roan. It was a prize bucking horse, that roan. It fought like a pair of wildcats thrown over the shoulder of Old Nick. But, nevertheless, the stranger was flapping his hat and working his cruel, scraping spurs and taking the heart out of the roan rapidly and surely.

Pete turned his head and looked at the mare in the pen. The walls of that pen were nine feet high, because it was said that over a smaller barrier she would either leap or scramble, and up and down behind the bars she swung back and forth, like a panther walking at its cage screen. She was a fury, a thorough and educated bad one. When she felt the eye of the foreman resting upon her, she paused in her pacing to and fro and looked back at him, flattening her ears.

Pete Logan was upset and turned his head hastily away from her. He knew horses from beginning to end, but this was a very different matter. To enter a contest with her would be like entering the cage of a tiger. Even her beauty made her more terrible. For she was clad in chestnut silk, dappled over with leopard-like markings of shadow, and the gloss of her flank was as bright as burnished metal. She had had five years of glorious freedom on the range. Three times she had been stolen by roving horse thieves whose eyes were taken by her glory.

The first one had left a small scar on her back and a confirmed hatred of the human race in Excuse Me’s proud heart. The second had been pitched into a dreadful nest of Spanish bayonet, where even Excuse Me would not follow, and where he would have died like a tortured wildcat, with the mare prowling on guard about him, had not a range rider found him the next day and cut him free, and carried him off to the ranch house to wait for a doctor, and jail. The third would-be horse thief must have been a magnificent rider, for he had stuck to Excuse Me until his spurs had deeply scored her sides. But his fate had been the worst of all, for they had found him where he fell and where the demoniac mare had pounced on him. He was battered to a rag, literally beyond recognition.

When the colonel heard of that, he went out with a rifle to shoot her. But when he looked down the sights, and the round of them held the perfect beauty of her head, he relented. Instead, he ordered her to be caught up and gentled with the utmost care.

She was accordingly brought in. They said that she fought like a beast of prey, rather than a horse, rushing at the ’punchers instead of away from them, and biting at the ropes that restrained her. Then, for six months, the colonel himself supervised her training. There was nothing in the shape of a horse that could not be gentled and trained, he said, and he knew how to do it. But at the end of six months he was wearing a plaster on his right temple, and he walked with a limp. She was like fluid fire, said the colonel, and no precautions could make the handling of her safe. So he brought her to his rodeo to be given to the man who rode her.

That man never would come over the horizon, he was sure, but, nevertheless, it would be a beautiful and terrible thing to see Excuse Me perform.

However, he had brought her in vain. The ’punchers, when they asked for horses in the contest, paused only for one glance through the bars at lovely Excuse Me. Then they went hastily on, some with a visible shudder. For, in fact, as has been said, her beauty made her only grimmer to behold.

“Not even asked to try a saddle on her?” exclaimed the colonel with increasing savagery. “They ain’t a man of ’em that wouldn’t rather get on top of a tank of nitroglycerine.”

“Why, sir,” said Pete, with a rather lopsided grin, “I feel the same way about it.”

“You do? And ain’t you got no shame, Pete, to stand here, a strappin’ young feller like you, and confess that to my face?”

“The fact is,” said Pete, “that the nitroglycerine might not go off, but Excuse Me you damn’ well know would bust every time.”

The colonel snorted, which was his habit when he was cornered past the rescue of words. “Young man, young man,” he said, “I’ve seen the day that no hoss in this country would go unchallenged. I’ve seen men that have walked fifty mile’, for the sake of tryin’ their hands at a man-killin’ hoss. What you got that fool smile on your face for?”

“I was recollectin’ of the day,” said Pete Logan, “when we ties the sack of crushed barley onto the back of Excuse Me and turns her loose. Maybe you disremember that day, sir?”

“Bah!” said the colonel.

“I was smilin’,” said Pete Logan, “to think that she bucked so hard that she split open the side of that sack and sent the barley squirtin’ out like water.”

“I remember,” said the colonel dreamily, “that on that day she then spent a long time smashin’ that good barley into the mud of her corral.”

“Yeah,” drawled Pete, “she’s a lamb, I reckon.” He raised his hat. “How d’ye, Miss Furneaux?”

The colonel hastily followed the example of his foreman and removed his hat to a woman of middle age who now rode up to them. She had a handsome, sun-browned face, lean and clean-looking, and the most honest gray eyes in the world. She smiled at them both.

“Our boys are not having much luck,” she said.

“I would rather have us represented by the women, Elizabeth,” said the colonel. “I would rather have the girls of this country represent us than the spineless, weak-hearted, chicken-livered rascals who are out there now, lettin’ themselves be bucked off like so many sacks of wheat… half-filled sacks, at that.” He ended by pointing with a stiff arm. “Look!” he said.

At that moment, aptly to illustrate what the colonel had been saying, one of the Texas contenders was seen to leave the bowed back of his pony and fly upward without wings from his saddle, then drop like a plummet to the ground. The impact was audible.

“I hope he’s broken his neck,” said the colonel.

Miss Furneaux looked at Clisson without a smile, but also without malice, for she understood thoroughly the bigness of his heart.

“Why, that’s Archie Hunter,” she said.

“Archie Hunter?” repeated the colonel. “Why, then, I must say that he sticks in my mind, in some way connected with your name, Elizabeth. What is it?”

“He was the dearest friend of Rod,” she answered.

“Ah?” said the colonel. He began to add other words, but checked himself, seemed half choking, and turned a violent crimson.

Elizabeth Furneaux looked at him with the same faint smile of understanding. “You meant to ask me what the latest news is about Rod, I suppose?” she said.

“Why, Elizabeth, my dear child,” said the colonel, putting out a hand toward her, “I never want you to speak a word that will hurt you. I never want that.”

“I don’t mind telling you,” she said. “I had a letter from him not long ago, but, as usual, he says nothing about what he’s really doing. Except that he’s found a girl in the mountains. Something too exquisite to be human, I gather. Also… you probably know that they’ve attributed another shooting scrape to Rod?”

“The man near Denver, do you mean?”

“Yes. The man is dead. I’ve just heard. That’s all the recent news. Good-bye, Colonel. I’ll see you again before the rodeo breaks up.”

She rode off, and the colonel looked at his foreman with bared teeth, and Pete Logan looked back at him in the same fashion.

“I wish,” said the colonel, after a moment of sustaining this vicious grimace, “I wish that Rodman Furneaux were thrown in the pen with Excuse Me. Confound him, I wish no better than that.”

“They might get on fine,” said Pete Logan. “They’d be birds of a feather, after all.”

CHAPTER II

THE colonel said: “Everything lost… everything ruined… everything gone to a lot of single-cinch…”

The rest of his language defied reproduction.

“Here’s Sam Parker,” said Logan. “I been wonderin’ where Sam was. There’s a he-man when it comes to ridin’ a hoss.”

“Bah!” snorted the colonel. “That Parker is drunk. He can’t keep in the saddle hardly. You, Sam Parker, come here, sir.”

Sam Parker came. He was a brown-faced youth with not much forehead and a vast smile over a lantern jaw. He looked at the colonel with the indistinctness of crossed eyes and a clouded brain.

“Sam,” said the colonel, “are you gonna ride?”

“I reckon I am, sir.”

“Are you gonna stick on like a man?”

“I reckon I ain’t, sir.”

“Sam, you’re drunk.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sam. “I been collectin’ and collectin’ and collectin’ this here bun for three days, and now I guess I’m pretty well ripe. This here is about the best I ever been… I had an ol’ master to help to put on the finishin’ touches.”

“Some of those center-fire sneaks have got Sam drunk,” suggested the colonel. “Otherwise…”

“Who you been with?” asked Pete Logan.

“I jus’ lef’ ol’ Carrie Dunmore over to Chaffey’s crossroads place. We been lettin’ the red-eye percolate until it’s got into our bones and made ’em jus’ so sof’ that fallin’ off a hoss wouldn’t hurt.”

“Hold on!” exclaimed the colonel. “Did you say Carrie Dunmore? The Carrie Dunmore?”

“Yes, sir, ol’ single-shot Carrie. He’s over there. He’s jus’ warmin’ up strong.”

“Why didn’t the underbred coyote come on to the rodeo?” asked the colonel savagely.

“Because he said that the sun was shinin’ warmer and the sittin’ was softer and easier there in Chaffey’s place.”

“The lazy scoundrel!” cried the colonel.

“Yes, sir,” answered Sam with a vaster smile than ever. “I’ve heard of the gent that was so lazy he starved to death because he wouldn’t go to the smokehouse to get him a side of bacon. But I reckon that Carrie Dunmore is the most outlazyingest gent in the whole world.”

“That’s an honorable distinction,” said the colonel. “Is the fellow as drunk as you are, Sam?”

“Him, sir?” asked Sam Parker. “Is you referrin’ by any chance to my frien’ Carrie Dunmore? I gotta tell you, sir, that they ain’t enough liquor and time in the world to percolate into the insides of Carrie. He jus’ gets the outside a little pickled, but inside… he’s fine as could be.”

The colonel grew absent of eye and mind. Suddenly he said: “Pete, take Charlie and Joe. Take an extra set of hosses along, too. Ride like fury. It’s only two mile’ to Chaffey’s place, and, if you can’t get there in five minutes, you lose your jobs with me. Get that worthless, no-account, set-in-the-sun Carrie Dunmore, and bring him here.”

The foreman looked anxious. “That’s only three of us, sir,” he said.

“Suppose there are only three?” roared the colonel. “Is he a grizzly bear or a mountain lion? Besides, ain’t he drunk, by the report of that wo’thless Sam Parker? Go get that man. Rope him, tie him up, and bring him here. I’ll make him ride, confound him!”

Pete Logan departed at once. Along the fence, he picked up Charlie and Joe–seasoned cowhands–and told them what was wanted. They listened with long faces.

“Why don’t you ask me to go on an’ pull the teeth of a live buzz saw?” asked Charlie plaintively.

“It ain’t a question of wantin’ or askin’,” said the foreman. “It’s a question of gettin’ and doin’. The old man is nutty, he’s so mad. He wants Carrie Dunmore.”

“For a watch charm, maybe,” Joe said with delicate sarcasm.

But they rounded up an extra horse and started at once on a dead run. In the specified five minutes their puffing, dripping horses halted at the roadside place of Chaffey.

Sounds of mirth issued from within, and the foreman risked a spy glance through the window before entering. He returned, cursing: “There’s four of the best damn’ cowpunchers in Texas in there, and they’re all hangin’ around watchin’ Carrie juggle knives. It depends on how lubricated those gents are, what luck we have. Joe, you’re a neat hand with a rope. I’ll go in and get his attention… if I can. When I get in, you daub a rope onto him. Charlie, you stand by to help in any direction you might be needed.”

So, determined, grim-faced, they advanced through the door into the place, and there they found five cowboys stamping on the floor and singing a thundering herd song, while Chaffey himself, behind the bar, smote the varnished surface with the flat of his pudgy white hand in time with the music.

All this accompaniment was for the benefit of a large young man who was dancing a jig with uncertain and fumbling feet, laughing at his own clumsiness, but while he danced his hands were seriously occupied. On the bar were laid nine or ten knives–hunting knives and big Bowie knives. Of these he had taken three and was juggling them into the air as he danced. As the newcomers entered, he greeted them with an Indian yell and added a fourth knife to the three that were in the air. This complicated his performance. What with the stumbling feet and the flight of four knives, it seemed that at any moment he might blunder under the heavy, descending point of one of the weapons. Indeed, he seemed to be drawing his head from side to side to escape their fall.

“We’d better stop this,” said Charlie. “He’ll be carving with one of these Bowies, before long.”

“They’re gonna stop you, Carrie!” yelled one of the audience.

Carrie answered with wild laughter, and actually turned his handsome head for a fraction of an instant toward the trio. Yet he managed to keep the knives flowing upward without an interruption, yelling: “You there, Pete Logan… you line up ag’in’ the wall, ol’ hoss, line up there with your hands over your head, or I’ll split you right in two!”

Pete Logan hesitated, but he did not hesitate long. The wild light in the juggler’s eye convinced him that there was a real danger, and back he went to the wall and stretched his arms above his head, only growling as he did so: “I knew that we’d land in the mud, Joe.”

The chorus of five liquor-ridden cowpunchers grew louder, until it thundered, while Carrick Dunmore, still laughing, still reeling, flung a knife that stuck, humming, in the wood half an inch from Logan’s right ear.

“Hey!” yelled Logan. “Look out, you’ll murder me!”

“If you budge ag’in, old hoss, I will!” shouted Carrick Dunmore, and suddenly the knives flowed brightly from the flat of his hands–the four he had in the air and the others from the edge of the bar behind him. With them, he outlined the head of the foreman, who remained rigid with horror as, with shock after shock, the murderous steel flew home into the wall and hedged his head about in a close circle.

All the time the song of the cowpunchers thundered, and the knives flowed in beat with the song. When the last knife was thrown, however, enormous laughter swallowed all other sound.

Then: “Step out, Pete, and look at your picture drawed on the wall, there,” ordered Dunmore.

Pete stepped out and nodded to Charlie, and that worthy instantly had his rope over the shoulders of Carrick Dunmore. It happened with wonderful speed and unison of effort. While the five inebriated ’punchers were still helpless with excess of mirth, three pairs of hands were applied to the neck of the lariat, and Carrick Dunmore was yanked from his feet, dragged over the floor, and out the door, which was slammed and locked behind them.

“Hey!” shouted Dunmore. “You poor, pudding-headed…” Then laughter seized him again and shook him helpless.

Similar roars still bellowed from the saloon to tell of the hysterically weak men within. The trio, still grim enough and frightened enough, grappled Dunmore. His body was utterly relaxed, but it was not soft. It was loose, with the looseness of supple steel cables as they heaved him into a saddle, and then lashed his feet together beneath the belly of the horse.

Still he laughed as they started down the road. He reeled heavily from side to side. Only the lashings that gripped his feet seemed able to keep him in place, but still with inexhaustible laughter he roared and wept for joy at his own jest, as they thundered along, four men now, and three of them as proud of this exploit as though they had seized a robber chief from the midst of his band and carried him off to the power of the law.

So it was that they galloped onto the field of the rodeo, where the bucking contest still was in progress, although drawing toward a close, for the sun was sloping far to the west, and the dust that whirled up from the riding field floated, golden in the air. As they came, they could hear the bawling of an angry cow pony, and the whooping of an exultant and equally fierce rider.

“One of them center-fire Californians ag’in,” said the foreman, “but maybe we can do something ag’in’ ’em now. Where’s something to sober up this here Carrie Dunmore?”

They found a bucket of water and dashed it over him, and, as he emerged from it, spluttering, but still laughing with inextinguishable good nature, they led him to the judges and demanded his right to ride.

The judges regarded the unsteady newcomer with interest. “They’s only two horses left to ride,” they said. “One of them is for Tom Bizbee. The other is the colonel’s mare. Would you like to try her, Dunmore?”

“I al’ays loved the ladies,” said Carrick Dunmore. “Lemme see this pretty girl?”

They led him eagerly across the field to visit Excuse Me for the first time.