Ralph Compton - Doomsday Rider

Even now the bushwhacker could be coming this way, and Fletcher knew his time was running out fast.

Gritting his teeth against the hammering pain in his side, he climbed higher, slipping, sliding, the bloodstain on his shirt spreading wider. Finally the top of the rock ledge came into view. But he’d been wrong. The top was not flat, but dome-shaped, and it was mostly open, just a few sparse shrubs growing along its weathered edges, providing no cover.

Better to climb farther, then come at the rifleman from higher up the slope. Could he make it that far? He was dizzy, gasping for breath in the thin, cold air, and the pain in his side was a living thing, devouring him.

Fletcher climbed higher, beyond the overhang, and reached a band of aspen, their slender trunks crowded close together. He sat with his back against a tree, breathing hard, and after a few minutes was wishful for a smoke. But if the rifleman was alert—and why shouldn’t he be?—the smell of tobacco would give his position away.

A few flakes of snow drifted lazily through the branches of the aspen, and from somewhere close by Fletcher heard the faint murmur of running water.

He rose slowly to his feet and followed the sound. After a few yards he found a small mountain stream, no more than a foot across and a few inches deep, tumbling over some rocks. Fletcher knelt and dipped a cupped hand into the stream and drank. The water was clear and ice cold and it refreshed him. He opened his mackinaw and pulled up his shirt, examining his wound. The flesh around the bullet hole was angry and inflamed, but the bleeding appeared to have stopped for now. He could not see the exit wound on his back, but he guessed it looked even worse than this one.

Fletcher dipped into the stream again and poured water into the wound. He didn’t know if it was doing any good, but the icy coldness helped numb the pain a little, and perhaps the water would help keep it clean.

He looked at his shirt with unhappy eyes. “Ruined,” he whispered. He didn’t have another.

Painfully, Fletcher rose to his feet and made his way through the trees. There was no sign of the bushwhacker, and around him stretched only the gathering gloom of the gray day and silence.

It took him ten minutes to reach the spot on the slope he calculated was above the rock where the bushwhacker had lain in wait for him. Drawing his guns, he made his way down the steep incline.

Fletcher cleared the tree line and stepped warily. Ahead of him lay thirty yards of slanting, open ground, covered in snow, and beyond that the bushwhacker’s outcropping of rock. But of the rifleman there was no sign.

Fighting back a wave of weakness, Fletcher made his way down the slope. All his senses were clamoring, his skin crawling as, moment by moment, he expected to feel the sledgehammer blow of a bullet.

But he reached the outcropping without incident and, tense and wary, made his way among the scattered boulders along its northern edge.

At the base of the outcrop was a stretch of level ground where a saddled buckskin stood, its reins looped around a patch of brush. The animal lifted its head as Fletcher stepped toward it, ears pricked, then relaxed as it recognized a human and not a predator.

Fletcher looked around him but saw nothing but mountains and trees, the creek almost hidden in the distance by the falling snow.

He saw tracks where the bushwhacker had left his horse then climbed onto the rock. Stepping carefully, Fletcher walked to the other edge of the outcropping and came upon another set of tracks. The snow had not yet blanketed them, and they led off in the direction of the rock shelf where he’d first thought to seek cover.

Fletcher walked back to the buckskin and for the first time noticed two ornate silver letters on the skirt of the saddle— H.C.

Hank Crane!

Like a relentless bloodhound, the bounty hunter had tracked him here, all the way from Hays.

Fletcher shook his head, stunned. No wonder they said the man was good, maybe the best there ever was. Somehow Crane had looped around and gotten ahead of him. From there he’d watched and waited for his chance, and when Fletcher had decided to ride higher up the slope, away from the creek, Crane had taken up a position here.

Knowing his strength was giving out fast, Fletcher thought his situation through, then decided on a desperate, dangerous plan. It had to be now. If he waited any longer he’d be too weak to do what had to be done.

He stepped to the buckskin and swung into the saddle, gasping against the sudden, agonizing pain in his side.

Fletcher let the reins drop and kneed the horse around the rock, both his guns drawn. He rode around the base of the outcropping and followed Hank Crane’s tracks.

When the rock shelf came in view through the tumbling snow, he reined up, squinting his eyes as he scanned the land around him for the bounty hunter.

At first he saw nothing; then he caught a quick gleam of metal on top of the shelf. Fletcher rode closer. He was still about fifty yards from the shelf when he made out Hank Crane, rifle in hand, looking up at the slope above him.

The time had come and it was now or never.

Fletcher let out with a wild rebel yell and raked the buckskin with his spurs. The big horse sprang forward as Crane turned, his rifle coming up fast. The man fired. Too fast. The bullet clipped the brim of Fletcher’s hat.

Closer now. The buckskin was floundering, its head pecking into the snow, but the horse was game and fountains of white scattered up from its flying hooves.

Crane stepped to the edge of the rock shelf, sighting carefully. Fletcher fired with both guns, again and again, a hammering drumroll of sound echoing among the surrounding ravines and canyons.

Fletcher was aware that the concussion of his guns had collapsed the high snowdrift and a massive wall of white was tumbling down the slope behind him.

But right now all his attention was on Hank Crane.

The bounty hunter had been hit, and his left arm hung useless at his side. He threw down his rifle and grabbed for his holstered Colt.

Fletcher was much closer now. He fired at Crane, fired again, and the man rose on his toes and fell from the shelf, thudding onto the hard ground below.

Crane was lying on his back, looking up at him as Fletcher rode up and swung out of the saddle.

The bounty hunter’s face was gray as life slowly ebbed out of him.

“Well, if this don’t beat all, Buck,” Crane said. “I thought I’d done for you fer sure.”

Fletcher swayed on his feet, teetering on the edge of exhaustion. “You came close,” he said.

Crane nodded. “You’re good, Buck. Real good.”

“Damn right.”

“I trailed you all the way from Hays. But this was the first time I got a shot.”

Blood stained Crane’s mouth and the bottom of his mustache and his gray eyes were fading fast. “I wanted the thousand in gold. A man will ride a long way for that kind of money.”

Fletcher wanted to tell Crane that the reward was probably no longer in effect and that he was dying for nothing. But he didn’t. Instead he softened his voice as much as he was able and said, “You lie quiet now, Hank, and make your peace with your maker. Your time is short.”

But Hank Crane didn’t hear. He was dead.

Later Buck Fletcher walked back down the slope and found his horse.

The wound on his side had opened up again and he was bleeding heavily, the pain now a dull, all-consuming ache.

He looked around him. At the trees, the mountains, and the vast arch of the broken sky, the smell of pine and falling snow in the air.

He had thought to go to Denver, but now he would not.

Fletcher swung his horse to the west.

He would go into the mountains and there he would heal his body.