Ralph Compton - Down on Gila River

Sam Sawyer was a cautious man, and he read the writing on the wall plain enough.

He stepped quickly to the door, but turned and said, “Sorry about the hoss an’ all. Just some bad luck.”

Another tirade of curses followed him outside.

* * *

“I’ve got two minutes to leave town,” Sam said.

“No luck with the forty dollars, huh, Pops?” Lorelei said.

“No,” Sam said. “The mayor wasn’t in the giving mood today.”

Lorelei handed Sam the reins of Dan Wells’s horse.

“I guess I’ll stay here for a spell,” she said. She looked around her. “It ain’t much of a burg, but maybe I can start my own house and liven things up a little.”

“Lorelei, you’re welcome to come live with me,” Hannah said.

The woman shook her head. “Thank you for asking, schoolteacher, but I’m a working gal and your kind of life ain’t mine.”

“Can you find room for me, Miss Lorelei?” the Kiowa said. “Me as a bartender, maybe, an’ my wife a cook?”

Lorelei said, “When I get my house, you and your wife have a job.”

Sam swung into the saddle. “We got to be going, Hannah,” he said. “I got Meriwether so mad he’s about to organize a hemp posse.”

He reached down and offered Lorelei his hand. “You take care, now, you hear?”

“You too, Pops, and be good to the schoolteacher and little Lori.”

“I’ll surely do that,” Sam said.

He shook hands with the Kiowa. “You’re a good one, James, no matter what folks think.”

“I’ll come by and see you and Miz Hannah,” the Indian said. “We’ll talk about old times on the war trail.”

Sam nodded. “You and the missus will always be welcome.”

* * *

Sam and Hannah, Lori up in front of her, rode toward the cabin near Haystack Mountain.

As they struck Mogollon Creek and followed it north, Sam turned in the saddle and said, “I’ve been studying on that love business, Hannah.”

“And what did you decide?”

“That I want to spend the rest of my life with you and Lori.”

For a few moments, Sam watched the fish jump in the creek. Then he said, “Is that love? I mean me wanting to do that?”

Hannah smiled, leaned from the saddle, and kissed Sam on the mouth.

“It’s close enough,” she said. “Close enough for me.”

If you enjoyed this Western adventure, don’t miss

Tucker’s Reckoning

A Ralph Compton novel by Matthew P. Mayo

Now available in a special hardcover edition!

Despite the creeping cold of the autumn afternoon in high country, and the feeling in his gut as if an irate lion cub were trying to claw its way out, Samuel Tucker reckoned that starving to death might not be an altogether unpleasant sensation. Of course, the warm, light-headedness he was feeling might also have something to do with the last of the rotgut gargle he’d been nursing since he woke up.

He regarded the nearly empty bottle in his hand and shrugged. “No matter. Finally get to see you again, Rita, and little Sammy. My sweet girls . . .”

Even the horse on which he rode, Gracie, no longer perked her ears when he spoke. At one time a fine mount, she was now more bone than horse. The sorrel mare plodded along the lush valley floor, headed northward along the east bank of a river that, if Tucker had cared any longer about such things, he would know as Oregon’s Rogue River. All he knew was that he’d wandered far north. And he didn’t care.

His clothes had all but fallen off him, his fawn-colored, tall-crowned hat, a fine gift from Rita, had disappeared one night in an alley beside a gambling parlor in New Mexico. The top half of his once-red long-handles, now pinked with age and begrimed with Lord knows what, and more hole than cloth, served as a shirt of sorts. Ragged rough-weave trousers bearing rents that far south had invited welcoming breezes now ushered in the frigid chill of a coming winter in high country. And on his feet, the split, puckered remnants of boots. These were the clothes Tucker had been wearing the day his Rita and little Samantha had . . .

At one time, though, Samuel Tucker had cut a fine figure around Tascosa, Texas. With his small but solid ranch, and with a wife and baby daughter, he’d been the envy of many. But that was in the past, before the sickness. . . . Mercy, thought Tucker, two years and I can’t think of it without my throat tightening.

“At least I don’t have to worry about being robbed,” he said aloud. His laugh came out as a forced, thin sound that shamed him for a flicker of a moment. Then once again he no longer cared.

The land arched up before him in a gentle rise away from the river. Here and there, trees close by the river for the past half mile had been logged off some years before, leaving a stump field along the banks. Ragged branches long since cleaved from the vanished timber bristled upward among still-green undergrowth seeming to creep toward him. He traveled along the river, and the gradually thickening forest soon gave way to an upsloping greensward just beginning to tinge brown at the tip.

He was about to pitch the now-empty bottle in the rushing brown flowage off to his left when the crack of a gunshot halted him. It came from somewhere ahead. Even Gracie looked up. Two more shots followed.

Curiosity overrode his drunken lethargy and the pair, man and horse, roused themselves out of their stupor and loped up the last of the rise. They found themselves fifty yards from an unexpected sight: two men circling one. The man in the center, a wide-shouldered brute wearing a sheepskin coat, sat tall astride a big buckskin. He held in one hand what looked to be a substantial gun, maybe a Colt Navy, but appeared to have trouble bringing it to bear on the two men who took care to keep their own horses dancing in a circle around the big man. He tried to do the same, tugging feebly at his reins.

What was wrong with the man? Tucker wondered. Was he drunk? He acted as much. And then Tucker got his answer. The man jigged his horse again, and the big horse tossed its head and stepped hard. Then Tucker saw the red pucker, blackened at the edges. The man had been shot in the back.

One of the other men shouted, then shot the big man’s hand. It convulsed and the pistol dropped. The shooter’s companion, thin and sporting a dragoon mustache and a flat-crowned black hat with what looked like silver conchos ringing the band, laughed, looking skyward. As he brought his head back down his laughter clipped short. He leveled his pistol on the big man in the sheepskin coat.

One shot to the gut and the victim hunched as if he were upheaving the last of a long night’s binge. He wavered in the saddle. The man looked so fragile to Tucker. It did not seem possible that this was happening right there before him.

The first shooter howled this time. Then he rode up close, reached out with his pistol barrel like a poking finger, and pushed the man’s shoulder. That was all it took. The big man dropped like a sack of stones to the grass. The buckskin bolted and the black-hatted man leveled his pistol at it, but the other shouted something, wagged his pistol in a calming motion, and they let the beast run. It thundered off, tail raised and galloping, toward where Tucker had intended to ride. How far was the man’s home place? Was he even from around here?

With a bloodied hand planted in the grass, the big man forced himself up on one knee. He gripped his gut, his sheepskin coat open, puckered about his gripping hand. From beneath the clawed fingers oozed thick blood that drizzled to the grass. Where did the man get his strength? Didn’t he know that he was as good as dead, but just didn’t yet realize it?

The man had lost his hat in his fall, and a breeze from the north tumbled it a few strides away. His head was topped with a thick thatch of white hair trimmed close on the sides, but the face beneath was a weathered mask, harder than leather, as if carved from wood. And it was the big man’s face that froze Tucker. The man had been back-shot, gut-shot, and more, but his expression bore unvarnished rage. Bloody spittle stringed from his bottom lip, his eyes squinted up at his attackers, both a-horseback a few feet away, staring down at him.