Howard Hopkins - The Lone Ranger - Vendetta

“I’m here now. Perhaps they’ll strike at me.” In truth, he was more worried they would strike at the man riding beside him. They were killing those from his past, men with only passing connections, old acquaintances. But this man beside him… he would die before he let them kill Tonto.

The Lone Ranger’s gaze lifted to the gnarled rocky walls of the canyon, swept along the ridge to either side in search of any signs of bushwhackers. Bright copper sunlight glared down, sparkled from mica embedded in the rock but not from rifle or gun barrels that might pinpoint lurking ambushers. Whoever was behind all this had not chosen today for a confrontation. Though the gang leader was by now expecting the Ranger to take notice and come, he had no way of knowing he and Tonto would be here, at Bryant’s Gap, to lay a trap.

I’m gonna be a Ranger someday, Dan — a Texas Ranger! You’ll see!

Another memory rose up, this one in warm shades of yesterday, and a thin smile drifted across his lips.

Two boys of ten and thirteen, himself and his brother. He’d whittled a gun and a crude wooden star out of a piece of cottonwood branch.

“Maybe I’ll be a Ranger, too,” Dan said, his brother’s young voice echoing from the past. They’d gone down to the riverbank after finishing chores on a bright Saturday morning. “You know you don’t do nuthin’ less I do it first!”

“That ain’t so!” his young self said.

“Is so!” Dan said.

“You be the outlaw!” he said. “And I’ll chase you down!”

“Why do I gotta be the outlaw?” Dan asked, scrunching up his freckled face.

‘“Cause I have the gun.” He held up the wooden toy, as if that emphatically ended the argument.

“Hell and tarnation,” Dan said. “That ain’t no reason!”

The younger boy gave his brother a look of reproach. “Pall switch your britches somethin’ awful if’n he hears you cussin’ like that.”

Dan laughed. “You won’t tell him.”

“Why not?”

‘“Cause I’ll switch yours if you do.”

“Say, that’s outlaw talk, hombre. You best be ready to git out of town ‘fore sundown if’n you know what’s goodferya.”

#

“Kemosabe?” Tonto’s voice penetrated the Lone Ranger’s thoughts and again the rock-strewn canyon floor lay before his vision.

“Just… recollecting, Tonto,” he said, melancholy lacing his tone and lingering in his soul. “Dan ended up becoming a Ranger before I did. I’d almost decided to start a cattle ranch. I’d grown out of my boyhood dreams, but Dan never forgot. I think he saw more in me than I saw in myself. I wonder, if I could go back, if I changed my decision to follow him… would he still be alive?”

“You cannot change what has been, Kemosabe. You can only shape what is to be. If it were not so the ghosts of my people would not ride the night skies.”

“I suppose you’re right.” The Lone Ranger sighed, heart heavy. “But I wish I could change that day. I never trusted that man, Collins. If I had done more…”

“What could you have done?”

The Lone Ranger shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

They rode onward another hundred yards, and the Lone Ranger’s unease increased the closer they came to the spot he and the other Rangers had met with doom. Tonto was right: he could not go back and change what had happened, and nothing he could have done that day would have prevented what occurred.

He reined up, Tonto following suit, and stared at the six graves ahead. Beside the graves, a boulder- and scrub brush-littered trail wound up to the left ridge, and again he surveyed both sides of the canyon top and the trail itself, spotting nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to indicate any sign of another ambush.

He dismounted, muscles stiff from tension. He laid a gloved hand on Silver's neck. "Stay, big fella," he whispered, then walked to the graves.

Tonto stepped from the saddle, followed him. When the Lone Ranger reached the graves, he knelt. Five of them had been recently filled in, but the sixth was still open. He scooped up a handful of earth and let it trickle through his gloved fingers.

"The graves were dug up," he said, swiveling his head and gazing up at Tonto. "Then these five were refilled." He stood, brushed dust off his glove.

"Cooper?" Tonto's dark eyes swept over the five mounds and one empty grave.

"I'm betting Cooper filled them in. He probably came out to visit his father's grave and found them open. He saw five bodies… Trace Cooper was always a smart hombre. He figured out the connection between me and the empty grave. That's why he sent the telegram."

"Someone else figured it out, too," Tonto said.

The Lone Ranger frowned, giving the Indian a slight nod. "I would have expected somebody like Cavendish to put it together. I think he half did before I showed him my face right before he died. That's why he asked me to take off the mask."

"But like you say, Butch Cavendish is dead. He took the knowledge of your identity to his grave."

“Yes… he did. But if he ever mentioned his suspicions to anyone...”

The Lone Ranger straightened, walked to the empty grave, peered down into it, as if he were gazing into a black screen of his past. In his mind he heard the gunfire and shouts of that day, heard the agonized sounds of the dying, and saw his brother perish before his eyes.

“Why?” he said over his shoulder to Tonto.

“Why?” the Indian said, face sympathetic but puzzled.

“That’s what the foreman, Brent, asked us before he killed himself. Why me, Tonto? Why did I live and these five other men die? What makes me any better than them? What gave me the right to survive?”

The Indian looked at the ground, silent for dragging moments. Then his gaze rose. “You were chosen, Kemosabe. By the Kichimanido or by the white man’s God or by pure Fate. You were chosen because of what your brother saw inside you that you did not see. You among men have the spirit to right the wrongs you see, the wrongs of other men. You were chosen to help those who would be prey to men such as Cavendish. You were chosen because your spirit refused to die and let others suffer. You were chosen because of those men that day, of all men, you alone would be able to accept and stand by the task to be put before you. You, Kemosabe… you Lone Ranger…”

The Lone Ranger’s head lifted and he suppressed the emotion choking his throat. The events of that day were like a puzzle and once the pieces were fitted together the picture was of a man driven to bring outlaws to justice, to protect the innocent and give his life for his duty to help others. His brother had seen it; Tonto had seen it. Indeed, after all these years, he saw it in himself.

“I want the leader of this gang, Tonto. There’s been enough death.”

“Do we fill in grave?” Tonto nudged his chin towards the open hole.

The Lone Ranger shook his head. “Not yet. Someone knows who I am. That someone, when I bring them in, won’t be inclined to keep it a secret any longer.”

“Perhaps…”

“No, Tonto. If we can take him alive, we will. Stopping a murderer is more important than my secret. If exposure’s the price I have to pay… then to hell with hiding…”

11

The present…

#

He was here. The Ranger. She knew it. She could feel it in her bones. The minutes were ticking away until her revenge. It wouldn’t be long before that masked man came in here looking for her, though she knew he rightly had no idea who she was or even that she was a woman.

He would go to the Cooper ranch first, having been summoned there, and find the bodies, determine that Cooper was missing. He would put it together that Cooper, alive and in the hands of the enemy, posed a risk to this Dan Reid the rancher had telegraphed. Perhaps that danger would make the Ranger act in haste, make a mistake. But she couldn’t count of that. He hadn’t survived this long by being stupid.