Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

Fletcher rode down the rise and reached the valley floor. He swung out of the saddle and cast around looking for tracks. After a few minutes he found them, angling across the valley toward a long line of spruce and cedar.

Was that a lantern bobbing among the trees?

Fletcher wiped the back of his hand across tired eyes and looked again. What he saw was just a pinpoint of light against the surrounding darkness, a light that flickered among the pines.

It was a campfire!

Fletcher shook his head. It couldn’t be Wilson. The man didn’t shape up to be that stupid . . . or confident.

Or did he?

Fletcher recalled Wilson’s arrogance when he first arrived at the pueblo. Did he think that no one would dare follow him into this wilderness?

It was possible, Fletcher decided. Unlikely, perhaps, but possible.

There was also the chance that he was seeing an Apache fire, and if that was the case, he’d be in a world of trouble if he rode closer.

Fletcher sat his horse, turning the probabilities over in his mind, then came to a decision.

Maybe it was Wilson and maybe it was not. He had to find out for sure.

Fletcher urged his horse forward, trusting to the dark to keep him hidden, angling across the valley to a point among the trees just to the north of the fire. When he reached the pines he swung out of the saddle and led the horse among the close-growing trunks. Thick brush lay underfoot, some of it covered by areas of snow, and here and there tufts of coarse, yellowish grass stubbornly shoved up from the ground.

Fletcher left the mustang—far from a picky eater—near a patch of this grass and slid his rifle out of the boot. He unbuckled his spurs and hung them on the saddle horn and on silent feet made his way through the trees toward the fire. It was rough going in the darkness, and thorns and brush tugged at him, slowing him down.

He crept closer to the campfire, now dying to an orange glow in the darkness.

Closer still.

Wilson sat with his back against a tree in a small clearing among the trees and he did not look up when Fletcher stepped into the circle of the firelight, his rifle pointing at the man’s chest.

“Get on your feet, Wilson,” he said, his anger flaring. “I intend to beat you to within an inch of your life, then turn you over to the army. That is, if you’re lucky.”

The man didn’t answer, but kept his stony gaze on the guttering fire.

Fletcher stepped closer and kicked the man’s feet and Wilson slid to his left, his head hitting the ground with a thud. Something small and white slid off his chest and landed beside him.

Wilson’s eyes were wide open, shocked and unbelieving, and he was dead.

The handle of a bowie knife stuck out from his back, its eight-inch blade buried deep between his shoulder blades.

Fletcher bent and picked up the white object that had fallen from Wilson’s chest. It was a sack of Bull Durham tobacco rolled up in a piece of paper, and on the paper Fletcher read the hastily scrawled, penciled words: I knowed you was out of tabbaka.

Fletcher looked around at the surrounding trees, his knuckles whitening on his Winchester. But there was only silence and the mocking rustle of the wind among the pine branches.

Someone had beaten him to Wilson. But how?

Then he recalled the box canyon that had cost him an hour. Whoever had killed Wilson had taken advantage of that lost time to get to the man first.

The other question running through Fletcher’s mind was, Who?

Old Charlie had told him maybe he had a guardian angel, but angels didn’t go around sticking bowie knives into people’s backs, even into the back of a lowlife like Andy Wilson.

Fletcher felt his skin crawl. This was not the work of an angel. Wilson had been murdered quietly and efficiently by someone who knew his business.

This was more the work of a devil, and Fletcher had a feeling that down the line the man would exact his price—and then there would be hell to pay.

Fletcher was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, especially when it came to tobacco. He rolled a smoke, then lit his cigarette with a brand from the fire.

Wilson’s battered coffeepot had been neatly pushed to the side of the flames, where it would stay warm without boiling further, and the same thing had been done with several strips of thick bacon, each cooked and skewered on its own stick.

After he’d finished his cigarette, Fletcher poured coffee into a cup that was lying nearby and ate the bacon.

After he finished eating he looked around Wilson’s camp. The money sacks were gone but Fletcher’s stud was tethered back in the trees and seemed to be in good shape for the trail.

There were tracks in the patches of snow surrounding the camp, mostly of Wilson’s cavalry boots, but here and there were the smaller, neater footprints of a man wearing high-heeled boots, the heel underslung and the toe squared off in the current Texas fashion.

Fletcher poured himself another cup of coffee, smoked a cigarette, then, after a last, cold look at Wilson’s body, led his stud out of the trees, swung into the saddle, and rode back for the mustang.

He had to get back to the pueblo.

There was a burying to do.

* * *

As the night brightened into morning and even before the pueblo came in sight, Fletcher knew something was wrong.

Like a man can tell by a sudden shift in the atmosphere that a thunderstorm is due, he sensed the taut, strung-out tension in the air.

Fletcher spurred his stud, trailing Charlie’s mustang after him, and worked his way around the southern rim of the hill and rode out into the flat in front of the cliff.

He swung the stud toward the pueblo just as several people left the building and came toward him.

As he reined up the woman who wore her hair in a long braid stepped close to him, a fluttering piece of paper in her hand.

“Estelle is gone,” the woman said. “Two men came here just before sunup and took her. One of them left you this.”

She handed the paper to Fletcher. It was written in the same hand as the one left on Wilson’s body, and the spelling was just as bad.

Fletcher—We have the girl.

Kum and get hur

If you want hur

Fletcher read the note, then looked down at the woman. “What did these men look like?”

The woman shrugged. “What does any man look like? One was big and bearded, the other smaller and meaner and he did all the talking. They both wore big Texas sombreros like yours . . . and had guns like yours.” The woman hesitated, then said, “The men said you should head northwest toward Mazatzal Peak.”

Fletcher sat his saddle and thought this through.

The men who had taken Estelle badly wanted him to go after her. The question was why?

There was only one possible answer: Falcon Stark had sent these men to the basin to kill his daughter, and they wanted to draw Fletcher to them when the deed was done.

A quick bullet in the back; then they could tell General Crook that Buck Fletcher had murdered Estelle, that they’d caught him in the act and killed him after a desperate gun battle.

It was neat, efficient, and well planned. And it was typical of Senator Falcon Stark’s warped thinking.

Any man who would sacrifice his own daughter to preserve his reputation and keep alive his hopes for the presidency had to be insane.

It wasn’t power that had corrupted Stark—it was the wielding of that power, and with it the knowledge that he could crush anyone who stood in his way and if necessary move mountains to achieve his aims.

He had patiently set up Fletcher for the murder of a sheriff, worked behind the scenes to make sure he was convicted and sent to prison, then had him quickly released so Estelle’s murder could be blamed on a notorious gunfighter out for revenge.