Hellrakers, p.1
Hellrakers, page 1
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The Hellrakers
Paul Lederer writing as Owen G. Irons
ONE
Van Connely liked the Gilded Cage Saloon. It was pleasant and warm and it was raining coldly outside. He had a tumbler half filled with whiskey beside him. There was a plumpish girl in a pink silk dress sitting nearby, flashing her knees and a pleasant, if false, smile. It made no difference which; it was a part of her trade. Connely now turned his attention to his own trade which involved pasteboard cards, piles of chips and cash money. He had always enjoyed playing cards, even before he discovered that it was his natural profession. He liked the snap and gliding of them as they were dealt around the table. He liked peering at their undiscovered faces, calculating the odds and reading the eyes of his opponents. He enjoyed moving a pile of stacked chips into the center of the green baize table, watching for a small flinch on the other players’ faces. Most of all he enjoyed raking in the wagered money and stacking it neatly at his elbow.
Of course, there were times that he lost, sometimes heavily, but this did not bother Van. The cards cannot always run right for you, and there would always be another day, a new deck dealt.
Just now as he sat watching the rain trickle down the windowpane beside him, watched as the yellow-haired saloon girl crossed her legs again, the Gilded Cage seemed one of the pleasantest places he had been in a long time. Shawnee Burns and Trapper McGee had come into Morrisburg with him, but these two were happily swilling whiskey and boasting or brawling at another night spot, the Dirty Shame, a rough-appearing establishment. Van Connely was in the mood for pleasant company and a little gambling.
The company wasn’t that pleasant, but it did not matter. He found out as the evening rolled on that his fellow players included a sallow, haunted-looking man with a hooked nose, Jesse Sparks, who was the owner of the Gilded Cage; and the mayor of Morrisburg, a well-upholstered, self-satisfied looking man named Wayne Sevier. Although other players sat in from time to time, these two stayed at the table all evening. So did a man named Court Riddick who played cards as if he didn’t understand the game. He had hairy hands and a single black eyebrow which sheltered his dark, brooding eyes like a caterpillar slithering across his frowning forehead.
The game now, with Jesse Sparks dealing, was five-card stud. Van Connely preferred playing draw poker where an individual player had the opportunity to discard when experience, the odds or simple intuition required it. With draw, especially five-card, you played the cards you were dealt. To Van it seemed to cut down on the skill of the game.
Just now, however, his hand was looking good. He had an ace up, one hidden, and a pair of fours showing. He glanced at the faces of the other players. It might have appeared to them that he had only the pair of fours, or they might have been guessing that he had another one face down. Mayor Sevier who had a pair of tens showing might have had another; he bet like he did, and Jesse Sparks who had the six and seven of hearts showing might have been grooming a heart flush. Riddick, whose beetle brow showed only consternation, had a seemingly good pair of jacks up, but when he glanced at his hole cards his face grew dark.
The man was not designed for playing poker.
‘Last card, boys – down and dirty,’ Jesse Sparks said easily. He proceeded to deal around the table. His face was expressionless; he sucked at a tooth and drank a little more whiskey. Something about him bothered Van, but he would wait and see how the cards played out, then drift over and see how Trapper and Shawnee were doing – or if the law had already picked them up.
Van’s last blue-backed card skated across the table, face-down, and he lifted a corner of the card to have a peek at it. A third ace, which left him holding a full house, aces over fours. Not bad at all. Across the table Sparks was smiling thinly. Van was not smiling at all. The last card that had been dealt to him was the ace of diamonds. The problem was, so was his hole card.
‘Bets? It’s your bet, Riddick – those jacks of yours are the best showing.’
Riddick with incredible slowness looked at his hole cards and almost timidly shoved a ten-dollar gold piece into the center of the table. Mayor Sevier followed and bumped him twenty dollars. Jesse Sparks raised them an additional twenty.
‘To you, Mister Connely,’ Sparks said. Van studied his cards once again – two aces of diamonds. How was he to explain that when it came time to show his cards? He stared at Jesse Sparks. Van hated a cheater. He especially hated a clumsy card sharp. Now if Van raised or even checked, his inexplicable ace would label him as a cheat himself, especially in Sparks’s own saloon. There was no point in throwing good money after bad. Van carefully stacked his cards and announced:
‘I’m out, boys. Thanks for the entertainment.’
Then, plugging on his hat which had rested on an empty chair beside him, leaving his earlier winnings on the table, Van went out into the cold of the rainy night, Jesse Sparks’s hawkish eyes following him.
It was still raining, but it seemed a little lighter now. By keeping to the plankwalks in front of the town’s buildings, all of which had awnings above them, he managed to stay mostly dry, except when he had to cross alleyways. Good thing – Van was wearing his freshly brushed and pressed pearl gray suit, his new boots and a yellow ascot. The boys had ribbed him before he left camp to come into Morrisburg, but Van had told them all that a man has to have his dignity, and outside of his honor, it was the most important thing he could possess.
Just now Van’s dignity was taking a little roughing up. By the time he reached the Dirty Shame Saloon, his new boots were caked with mud, his suit damper than was comfortable despite his best efforts. Not that it mattered in a dive like the Dirty Shame. Filled with scoundrels and rough range-hands, local foul-mouthed drunks, no one could have cared how he was dressed.
There was a brief, violent uproar in the corner of the smoky room and Van Connely looked that way as a table was pitched over. He knew even before he came upon the scene – and sure enough, when he got to where the trouble was, he found Shawnee Burns, pistol in his hand, staring across the overturned table and scattered cards at a tough-looking bald man with a bushy mustache. Trapper McGee was braced against the wall, his hand empty, but resting near his own holstered Colt. Van decide to take charge.
‘What’s this, men!’ he asked with a voice charged with false authority. ‘You know we can’t have any of this nonsense in here.’
The bald man and a couple of onlookers glanced at the man in the gray town suit, having no idea who he was, but believing he must be someone whose word counted for something around here. Not wanting to give the men time to question their first impression, Van continued:
‘You three – straighten that table up; sit down and relax. You,’ he said, leveling a finger at Shawnee Burns and at Trapper McGee, ‘I want you to walk out of here now. No more trouble, do you understand me?’
‘He called me a –’ Shawnee Burns objected reflexively. Van Connely cut him off.
‘I said now, gentlemen. This sort of activity can’t be tolerated here.’
Grumbling something indistinct, Shawnee shoved his pistol into its holster, glared at the bald man and started toward the saloon door, Trapper McGee following while Van, seeming to shepherd them from the confines of the saloon out onto the dark rainy street, came last.
‘Van!’ Shawnee was complaining, ‘I didn’t need you to stop it. Why, if you knew what happened, what he called me –’
‘Trapper?’ he asked the taller of the two men.
‘Ah, it was nothing, Van. Shawnee just decided he didn’t like the man. Which, it seems to me,’ he said to Shawnee, ‘seems to happen every time you get past your third whiskey.’
‘I notice you were ready to back him up,’ Van said.
‘I always will, but that doesn’t mean I like his games.’
‘All right. I understand that, but you two know how Captain Lynch frowns on these small incidents.’
‘I’ve seen the captain.…’
‘That doesn’t mean he would approve, does it? We’d better get our horses and travel back to the camp,’ Van said. They could not see his thin smile in the darkness. ‘After we take care of one little bit of business.’
Shawnee and Trapper followed Van silently to the stable where they had left their ponies. Van was not so concerned about the mud and the rain now, sloshing through it with a single purpose in mind. Retrieving their horses from the stableman, they saddled and mounted up. Van glanced at them – Shawnee still angry, but puzzled; Trapper McGee with his long hair falling to his shoulders. Trapper wore a hint of a beard, like someone had pressed an ink-stained thumb to his chin. Shawnee just wore his usual bristle of whiskers. It seemed that Shawnee never shaved but his beard never grew longer.
‘Where’s your rope, Trapper?’ Van asked.
‘Didn’t bring one. Didn’t see no need.’
‘There’s a need now – borrow that one,’ he said, nodding at a coil of new hemp rope hanging on a nail on the stable wall.
Then they walked their horses out into the cold and blustery night. Van led them toward the Gilded Cage, explaining exactly what he had in mind. It made no sense to Shawnee or to Trapper, but Van was ramrod of the outfit, and what he said went. Besides, they deserved to have a little fun.
The Gilded Cage was bright and glittery through the curtain of rain. A woman – the girl in pink? – laughed. The voices inside were only murmurs against the sounds of the storm. Van could make out barely a word spoken inside the saloon as he swung down from his horse, lasso in hand.
There were three porch supports in front of the Gilded Cage, and each man looped his lasso around one of them. In the saddle, they tied hasty knots around the pommels, and in unison backed their horses away into the muddy street.
When the ropes were taut, Van signaled with his hat and the horses backed again, with strength. The sound of cracking wood was loud even above the driving rain. The three supports broke almost in unison and the awning fell against the front of the building, shattering its windows, buckling a rafter. Inside voices cried out with urgency. People rushed toward the door, but there was no exit there with the fallen awning blocking the way. Van was carefully coiling his rope. He replaced it on its leather tie and nodded to his crew.
‘All right, boys – that’s all I had to say to them.’
The sky lightened as they rode the three miles toward the notch where the horses were kept, and by the time they had entered the narrow valley, the skies were clear enough to show clusters of silver stars between the parting clouds. It was cooler, but not uncomfortably so. They guided their horses toward the twin camp-fires burning low against the dark earth.
Van rode past a group of resting men seated around one of the low glowing fires and went directly to the chuck wagon. There he swung down. Before his boots had touched the ground, Captain Skyler Lynch had found him and he asked with some uneasiness:
‘Did you manage to keep the boys out of trouble tonight, Van?’
‘They were no problem, Captain.’
Skyler Lynch was not satisfied with the answer, but he saw no point in pursuing the matter further. Shawnee Burns had never been near a bottle of whiskey without something happening, and Trapper McGee was his best, perhaps only, friend and ally. However, Van had brought them back, intact and apparently sober. Lynch had other matters to worry about.…
Specifically forty-four horses. No, he thought, make that forty-two. Two of them had wandered off the day before or had been taken by the Indians.
They were already short on men to drive such a large herd, one reason Lynch had been reluctant to let Trapper and Shawnee Burns go into Morrisburg. But the men were due a little relaxation after the long trail from Wyoming; besides he had sent Van Connely along to watch out for them.
The horse herd was not huge, but Skyler had invested almost all he had in them. Driving them south to Arizona from Wyoming where he had purchased them was a huge risk, but he had no other options left. His own ranch was dying after three years of drought. Horses were going for a good price in the southern lands. He figured that if all went right he could make enough out of the drive to save his ranch, keep his head above water for at least another year when, hopefully, the weather would return to its normal pattern and rain would again fall on his depleted grassland.
All of this was constantly in Skyler Lynch’s mind as the herd made its way south. It was a gamble and he was undermanned. He had only seven riders, not counting himself – and that was the main reason he had been so reluctant to let any of them go into the nearby town for drinks and entertainment.
If Burns and Trapper McGee, for example, had been arrested on some charge and held in the Morrisburg jail to await trial, Lynch could not hold up the herd to wait for them. Tonight’s rain was only a sample of what was to come if they did not quickly move the horses south. It was the time of year for hard rains followed by heavy snowfall. If his crew could handle the horses if they encountered bad weather, he could not say – they were having enough of a tough time now, undermanned as they were.
Even now, the half-wild horses, their backs glistening in the starlight which shone through the broken clouds, looked restless, ready to run in all directions at the slightest provocation. They were much harder to handle on the trail than cattle, chiefly Skyler thought, because they were smarter – and swifter. Oh, horses were herd animals, too, but they were more likely to break from the group and take off on their own. True, a good cow pony could baffle a steer and pinch him back into the herd, but if one of these mustangs broke free, you had an out-and-out horse race on your hands.
Randy Staggs was approaching the tailgate of the wagon, leading his hammer-headed buckskin horse. Both looked miserable. It had been a long trail, and the rain had done nothing to improve anyone’s spirits.
‘Any coffee up, Captain?’ Staggs asked.
‘Over there,’ Skyler Lynch said, nodding toward a low-burning fire.
‘How are the boys doing?’ Lynch asked with a touch of weariness.
‘Not too bad,’ Staggs answered as he crouched beside the tiny fire to hook the blue enamel coffee pot out. ‘The box canyon is doing a good enough job of holding the horses although we’ve had a couple of ’em attempt to break out.’ He rose to his feet, cup in hand to study the long, mustached face of Skyler Lynch. There was a tiredness in his eyes deeper than that caused by riding the long trail. Staggs looked briefly toward the skies which were mostly clear; only a few ragged, wind-driven clouds sheltered the stars from view.
‘The boys could use some relief, Captain – they’ve been out there a long time now.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Lynch said heavily. ‘I’ll send Trapper, Shawnee, and Van Connely out after they’ve had a few minutes to rest.’
‘All right – are they in shape for it?’
‘Shawnee seems to have had a few too many drinks, but they should be all right.’
‘As you say, Captain,’ Randy Staggs replied doubtfully, touching two fingers to his hat brim.
Lynch nodded, watched as Staggs emptied his cup, tossed the dregs into the fire to hiss and strode away, leading his buckskin. All of the men had begun to call Lynch ‘Captain,’ although only Randy Staggs who had actually ridden with Lynch when he was a captain with the Texas Rangers had any reason to do so.
After his retirement Lynch had proved up on a hardscrabble parcel of eighty acres down in the Pocono country. He had left his daughter alone back there as a hostage to the elements and risked all he had on driving these horses through from Happy Forester’s Wyoming ranch. If he succeeded he and Kate would be set up comfortably for many years to come. If he failed it would mean the end of all of his ambitions, all of his dreams.
At eighteen, Kate was a bold, cheerful girl – people said she was certainly her father’s daughter – but she was unused to the deprivations of frontier life. At times Lynch regretted having brought her West, but she had insisted. After her mother’s passing she had nowhere else to go.
Men were grumbling at each other now across the campsite. No doubt Randy Staggs had told them that they had a shift to ride this night. Walking across the muddy earth, collar pulled up against the chill of the night, Skyler Lynch started that way.
He wished he had a steady, experienced crew, but there were few around willing to ride eight hundred miles with him. After trying all the neighboring ranches in the Pocono Valley he had given it up and virtually raked hell to find the men who rode with him now. Van Connely – who might have been on the run from the law and considered himself a gambler and not a ranch-hand; Shawnee Burns who was a drunkard on a downward spiral; and Trapper McGee who was overly fond of guns. These were the worst of them, and some of the others were not much better.
He was lucky to have run across Randy Staggs when he had – a trustworthy fighting man who had ridden many border trails with Lynch when they were both Rangers; the captain trusted and liked him.
There had been little trouble on the trail north. The weather held fair and the road was easily traveled. It was only when they started south again, pushing the herd of horses, that it seemed to dawn on the men that they were actually going to have to work for their pay.
‘Just give me a little while to get my head together,’ Lynch could now hear Shawnee Burns complaining. He saw Shawnee sitting up in his blankets, holding his head with both hands, Randy Staggs standing over him with no sympathy in his expression.
Lynch shook his head and started in that direction as the grumbling men were prodded to life. Was it going to be another five hundred miles of this? he wondered bitterly.
