Joseph West - The Man From Nowhere - A Ralph Compton Novel

Dogfight

Oates kicked out at the female coyote and the hard sole of his right foot took her full on the snout. The canine yipped in pain and backed off, snarling. The dog coyote, hearing his mate’s cry of hurt, was startled and he too bounded back a few steps.

The first round to Oates. But, wiser now, the coyotes attacked again.

This time both of them jumped on Oates, and he collapsed under their weight. He smelled the feral stench of the animals and felt their fangs rip into his back and thighs.

Desperately, Oates tried to sit up, striking out with his right arm. He hit the dog a couple of times, but his punches were weak and ineffective. Blood sprayed around him and dripped like rubies from the muzzles of the coyotes.

Then the flat statement of a rifle shot racketed through the hollow quiet of the evening. The dog coyote shrieked and fell away, landing on its back, its legs twitching.

Another shot. The female dropped without a sound, her deadweight suddenly heavy on Oates.

He felt the coyote being lifted from him and a bearded face with good-humored hazel eyes swam into his view. “You all right, pardner?” a man’s voice asked. Oates tried to answer, but darkness took him and he knew no more.

THE IMMORTAL COWBOY

This is respectfully dedicated to the “American Cowboy.” His was the saga sparked by the turmoil that followed the Civil War, and the passing of more than a century has by no means diminished the flame.

True, the old days and the old ways are but treasured memories, and the old trails have grown dim with the ravages of time, but the spirit of the cowboy lives on.

In my travels—to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arizona—I always find something that reminds me of the Old West. While I am walking these plains and mountains for the first time, there is this feeling that a part of me is eternal, that I have known these old trails before. I believe it is the undying spirit of the frontier calling, allowing me, through the mind’s eye, to step back into time. What is the appeal of the Old West of the American frontier?

It has been epitomized by some as the dark and bloody period in American history. Its heroes—Crockett, Bowie, Hickok, Earp—have been reviled and criticized. Yet the Old West lives on, larger than life.

It has become a symbol of freedom, when there was always another mountain to climb and another river to cross; when a dispute between two men was settled not with expensive lawyers, but with fists, knives, or guns. Barbaric? Maybe. But some things never change. When the cowboy rode into the pages of American history, he left behind a legacy that lives within the hearts of us all.

—Ralph Compton

Chapter 1

At ten o’clock sharp on a fine spring evening, the Honorable Company of Concerned Citizens, City of Alma, New Mexico Territory, hanged the Hart brothers: Billy, Bobby and young Jimmy.

Next morning, at dawn, they came for Eddie Oates, the town drunk.

Let it be noted that at first the four Concerned Citizens present tried to wake the sleeping Oates almost gently. But when the little man continued to snore and slobber in his sleep, the boots went in.

Even after he woke, red-eyed and puking, kicks slammed into Oates’ ribs, none driven harder and by more rage than those of Cornelius Baxter, Alma’s only banker and richest citizen.

To even the most casual observer, the reason for Baxter ’s anger would not have been hard to find.

His expensive patent leather ankle boots, hand sewn by Rigby and Sons of New York, Boston and Denver, were splashed with the green bile that had erupted from Oates’ mouth.

God alone knows how it would have ended had not John L. Battles, proprietor of the Silver Nugget saloon, stuck out a pudgy hand and pushed Baxter away.

“Let it be,” he said. “We didn’t come here to kill the man.”

It took the banker a while.

The others present saw the boiling fury in Baxter bubble away gradually, then settle to a low simmer. He lifted pale blue eyes to Battles, for the saloon keeper was a tall man, and said, quiet and even, “John, don’t ever lay a hand on me again or I’ll kill you.”

After twenty years on the frontier, Battles was not a man to take a step back from anyone. He said, “Anytime you want to heel yourself, Baxter, we can have at it.”

Baxter’s face was crimson, the mouth under his mustache a thin, hard line, white and pinched at the corners.

Tall, stringy Jeddah Piper, the town undertaker, saw the danger and decided to act. “Here, this won’t do,” he said. “The Apaches have us under the gun and we’re all on edge. Gentlemen, let’s not start fighting among ourselves.”

The fourth citizen present, Clem Hamilton, who owned a dry goods store, tossed in his two cents’ worth. “Jed’s right,” he said. “Are we going to fight over a drunken nothing like Eddie Oates when we got Mescaleros all around us?”

Piper saw hesitation in the faces of Baxter and Battles and said quickly, “Get him to his feet. We’ll take him outside, where he can join the rest of them.”

“Wait,” Baxter said. He began to wipe his shoes on Oates’ shirt and pants. “The little son of a bitch can’t smell any worse.”

John L. Battles laughed, and with that, the bad blood that had lain between him and the banker was forgotten.

Chapter 2

Eddie Oates blinked like an owl against the morning light.

His sides hurt from the kicking he’d taken and there was the taste of blood in his mouth. He needed a drink but doubted there was one to be had.

When the Concerned Citizens had found him, he’d been asleep in the alley where he had fallen into unconsciousness shortly after the hanging of the Hart brothers. Now, suspended between Baxter and Battles like a crucifixion victim, his bare toes dragging behind him in the dirt, he was manhandled into the street and tossed in the zinc horse trough outside the Silver Nugget.

Oates sank, then rose, sputtering, gasping like a just-landed trout. Somebody rammed his head under the surface again. He was down there, swallowing water for what seemed a long time, then was suddenly released. He floundered, kicking, into a sitting position and heard laughter.

“First bath you’ve had in years, huh, Eddie boy?” a man yelled.

Other voices rose, harsh, amused and merciless.

“Why don’t we just drown the little shit?”

“Swim for it, Eddie!”

“Don’t piss in the trough, Eddie. My horse got to drink that stuff!”

More laughter followed; then came the voice of John L. Battles. “That’s enough, boys. Get him out of there and take him over to the gallows with the others.”

Rough hands dragged Oates from the trough. The cool water had not sobered him, or so he believed. For the past seventeen years, since he was twelve years old, he’d never been sober, so he had no clear remembrance of what it felt like.

Not being numb all the time, he recalled that. And the world he’d known as a boy didn’t spin around him so fast that he couldn’t catch up and find a place for himself. That too he remembered—or thought he did. Maybe he’d just dreamed that had been the way of it all those years ago.

Prodded by kicks to his butt, Oates was surrounded by a dozen grinning men and pushed, stumbling, toward the gallows.

The Hart brothers still hung there. Three long, lanky bodies swayed in the morning breeze, stinking of the vile stuff that had erupted from them and trickled down their legs as they kicked while being strangled in the rough embrace of the hemp.