David Gates - The Cottonwoods

“All right. Maybe it was a couple of Farragut’s hands who got overly enthusiastic.”

“‘Who will rid me of this tempestuous priest?’“

Duquesne looked at Placido Geist blankly.

“Farragut Hagerty or his son is responsible for this. If a couple of their cowpokes took matters into their own hands, they have to answer for it. And so do the Hagertys.”

“I won’t go after father or son. I have to live here.”

“I don’t,” Placido Geist said. “I answer to my conscience, not to expediency.”

The sheriff took a long breath and let it out, keeping his temper. “I don’t much like being told I’m a coward,” he said.

“I don’t give a damn what you like,” Placido Geist said.

The cowboys came into town in a bunch and deployed in front of the hotel. It was eight o’clock in the morning. Most people on the street at that hour found cover, but some stuck around to see the show. They weren’t to be disappointed, as the drama was shaping up and a resolution imminent.

Placido Geist had been interrupted at his breakfast. He found this annoying. After achieving a certain age, there are men who choose not to suffer fools gladly. Besides, his eggs were turning gelid. He sent them back to the kitchen. He’d get fresh eggs, or be dead, in which case it made scant difference.

He stepped out onto the porch. He faced a dozen men.

“You’ve accused my brother of murder,” the tall man sitting on a roan horse said.

“You’d be the eldest Hagerty,” Placido Geist said.

“I’d be Peter,” the tall man admitted.

“And this would be your brother?” Placido Geist asked. He could see a strong family resemblance in the young man who edged his mount up next to Peter Hagerty’s.

“Everybody in town knows who we are.”

“They also know your brother to be chickenhearted and a bully, with no stomach for an honest fight, who hides behind his father’s hired pistoleros,” Placido Geist said.

The younger man jerked his handgun loose, as Placido Geist had expected, and the bounty hunter shot him out of the saddle with his Colt. The horses shied at the gunfire, and there was a moment of indecision. Derek Hagerty lay dead in the street.

Sheriff Duquesne stepped into the silence, a twelve-gauge shotgun held at port arms but both hammers cocked. “There’s no further argument here, Peter,” he said to Derek’s brother.

“This isn’t over,” Peter Hagerty said.

“Yes it is,” the sheriff said. “Your father has remedy in law, but he no longer makes his own.”

Hagerty looked at the bounty hunter. “We’ll seek you out,” he said.

“You’re welcome to,” Placido Geist told him.

“You should be indicted for manslaughter,” Duquesne said.

“I’ll surrender myself to the Texas Rangers, and them only. I mean you no offense.”

“Old man Hagerty will put a price on your head.”

“It won’t prove easy money.”

The sheriff gazed off into the middle distance. “Hagerty’s not a man to forgive,” he said.

“See to the whore, if you can,” Placido Geist said.

“I’d be hard pressed to see to my own benefit. You’ve made things more difficult than necessary, all around.”

“Every choice has consequences,” the bounty hunter said.

They tried for him some four miles out of town. Some deadfall had been dragged across the trail where it narrowed. There was higher ground on his right, with scrub for cover, and to his left a streambed, wooded on the far bank. The trail took a sharp dogleg, the streambed falling away, and a recent rockslide hid what was around the corner. Here was where the trail had been blocked. It wasn’t artful, but it would do. He didn’t hesitate to ride on into the trap. He figured two, three at the most. There’d be one across the stream, in the trees, and one in the scrub above. If there were a third man, he’d be lying in wait past the rockslide, to gun the bounty hunter if he got through the barricade. Placido Geist had his.45–70 Sharps in a saddle scabbard and the little Colt tucked at the small of his back, with a break-top Smith & Wesson.44 featuring a nine-inch barrel in a shoulder holster. Hanging from the saddle horn by a lanyard was a twelve-gauge Parker hammerless side-by-side, the barrels cut down to eighteen inches, the shotshells loaded with.25 caliber nickel-plated ball in a cluster of six, each of them double the weight of buckshot.

He knew they’d wait for him to pull up at the barricade, where he’d be sitting on the horse, a stationary target. The streambed might prove treacherous, water trickling over smooth stones, easily dislodged, footing slippery for the mare, and even money she’d break a leg. Which left the high ground to his right.

She was a quick horse, if sometimes stubborn. She’d never failed him in a fight. Fifteen feet from the barricade, he laid her head over and slapped the reins across her withers, urging her up the slope. From a standing start, he could feel her long muscles begin to pull, her lungs swelling.

There was a snap shot from the trees on the far side of the streambed that went wide.

Placido Geist pushed the mare upslope, letting her take her head as he unlimbered the shotgun from the saddle horn.

A man stood up twenty yards in front of him, a rifle in his hands. He was unprepared for this sudden rush.

Placido Geist swung the horse’s head aside and fired both barrels of the scattergun, taking the man off at the knees. He made a running dismount, pulling the heavy Sharps out from under the saddle skirt. He was above the rockslide now, looking down on a confused drygulcher on the other side. The man took the 400-grain bullet in his head, spraying bone fragments and brain.

Placido Geist levered out the spent round and thumbed a fresh cartridge into the gun, settling himself behind a crevice in the rocks. The mare had stopped, panting, her reins dangling along the ground.

“You the same three that hanged the kid?” he called out.

There was no answer from the trees along the streambed.

“You kill me, you don’t have to tell Farragut Hagerty the truth. You miss your chance, you’re dead either way. I were in your shoes, I’d hightail it for Oklahoma or Arkansas.”

The man stepped out of the trees. “You won’t shoot me?” he asked, arms akimbo.

Placido Geist had thought better of it. “You ride on,” he called down to the cowhand. “Whichever direction you go, you’ll be looking over your shoulder the rest of your life.”

They went their separate ways.

Placido Geist had separate thoughts, as well. We’re all guilty of something, he’d already decided. We simply pay for it in our own currency.

Copyright © 2006 David Edgerley Gates