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  One of the men said: “I’ll give you a chance to reach the trees.” George sweated. He knew he didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell. But he did clap spurs to his horse and jump it towards the trees. He heard the vicious whirr of the rope and ducked. It was too late. He was torn from the saddle. He fought the rope, but it did no good. He was being dragged. A man laughed - a high-pitched giggle. They were dragging him to death.

  A BREED OF MEN

  STORM FAMILY 7

  By Matt Chisholm

  First published in the U.K. in 1973 by Mayflower Books

  Copyright © 1973, 2014 by Matt Chisholm

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: July 2014

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Chapter One

  When Clay and Jody Storm crossed the valley from their place over by White Water and reported that they had lost calves on their part of the range and that they had found sign left by strange riders, pa took it all pretty calmly. Like he took most things. He sucked his pipe and stared off into the distance. This meant the pastel blue of the mountains, marching away into the west, range after range of them.

  This was a big country and it seemed to breed big men, but pa was the exception. He wasn’t exactly short, neither was he tall and there never seemed to be much of him. Yet he carried weight.

  He was thinking that life had been too quiet around here. They’d come through a quiet winter and the only excitement was that they’d heard a man had been hanged over by Denver for horse-stealing. But that had been in another country and it didn’t affect them. The Indians had been quiet and they had seen nothing of them except a family or two of Cheyenne who had come begging at the door. Will, as was his habit, had talked with them, fed them, saw they had some supplies to see them through and sent them on their way. He believed in staying friendly with Indians. Start trouble with them and you lost cows. Start too much trouble and you could lose men. They might look and act like beggars sometimes, but there were still fighting men in the tribes with some sand in them.

  It was a good time for stealing calves, just before the spring round-up and branding. Now before him was the task of finding the men who had cows with two or even three young ‘uns. That was the trouble. The country was starting to fill up. There were shirt-tail outfits all over. It would take time. Maybe this was an isolated incident, maybe it was the start of a rash of calf-stealing. They would be forced to start branding earlier than he had anticipated.

  He was about to say something to this effect, when he saw a rider approaching from the north. He could make out no details, but he could see the conformation of the horse. He knew every man’s horses. This was his brother, Mart. He was traveling hard and that wasn’t Mart’s habit unless there was call for it.

  Mart pulled his horse up in a lather and jumped down from the saddle. He was a big man without any tallow on him, as different as chalk from cheese to his brother. His touch of recklessness contrasted with his brother’s gentle mildness. Until a few years back he had carried around with him a reputation of being skilled with a gun and of using that skill more frequently than was necessary.

  We got thieves,” he said. “Found a mess of tracks over by Brack’s ridge.”

  Clay and Jody met their father’s eyes.

  Pa said: “Clay an’ Jody here just come in that we lost calves over by White Water.”

  “A hell of a note,” Mart said.

  They stood around, chewing it over in their minds.

  “You et?” pa asked. They shook their heads. “Come on in an’ eat.” They trooped into the house. Will’s wife Martha was at the stove. Will said: “Three more for breakfast, Martha.”

  She turned and smiled at them, welcoming her sons and her brother-in-law, a still handsome and slim-waisted woman in her early forties. She’d raised three sons and two daughters, gone from Texas to Kansas with the trail-herds, driven a wagon west into this country. She and her kind were the backbone of the West.

  When she brought them their breakfast, she said: Like old times.” They nodded and smiled. Jody lived with Clay and his wife, Sarah, over on White Water. Here they rode line for the Lazy S and Clay raised a few cows of his own.

  Martha Storm went to the door of the house and called: “Kate, Melissa.”

  Will said: “You heard any talk of thieves among the other cowmen?”

  They shook their heads.

  Mart said: “Only thing I can think of is some hard cases wintered in the hills to keep out of the way of the law. Maybe they’ve been livin’ off our beef all winter. It’s one move from stealing to eat to stealing to sell.”

  “What do we do?” Will said. He asked not because he wasn’t capable of coming up with a decision himself, but because he thought every man deserved a fair crack of the whip. His sons would never learn to make decisions if they didn’t have a chance to help make them now.

  They all expected Jody to speak first and he did.

  “Track ’em down,” he said. “An’ hang ’em.”

  Will sighed. Would the boy never learn?

  “Clay?”

  “Find out if any of the other folks have been robbed an’ get together.”

  “Mart?”

  “Do like Clay says, then ask Joe to track ’em. Might even have Joe hunt ’em down on his lonesome. He works best that way.”

  Will nodded. Would there ever come a time when they wouldn’t need the help of their father’s ex-slave, Joe Widbee? He was a perfect man of the wild places—mustanger, hunter, tracker. Men said he could follow a cougar over rock and home a hundred miles in the dark. They hadn’t seen Joe all winter. He had a cabin in a little rincon over west there in the hills. He hunted, caught a few wild horses when the fancy took him, came in to the valleys to work a while now and then at horse-breaking or branding. An independent man.

  The girls came in. Kate, twenty-one, unmarried and lovely. Ripe for plucking as men said when they were out of earshot of the family. A golden girl with a figure that drove the women-hungry men of the hills frantic, eyes that looked for something and never found it, a mouth with promise. Will turned and looked at her. The two hired men, Pete Hanno and Riley Brack, were crazy for her and fought over her intermittently. Pete and Riley were in the valley to the south of Three Creeks helping Prescott Harrison with his first roundup. Will’s middle son, George, was with them.

  Melissa, around fifteen, Will could never remember his children’s ages. Small, dark, full of fun, talkative like her brother Jody. Dark like him. The spoiled kitten of the family. She would never be a beauty like her sister, but she had that indefinable quality that attracted folk to her. Even at that young age, she seemed to burn with a fire that might one day consume her. Her intensity troubled Will.

  They clattered to the breakfast table. Martha put piled plates in front of them. They fell to with healthy hunger. Will gazed at them approvingly.

  Will said: “Mart, how about you ridin’ to Andy Grebb’s place at Spring Creek and listenin’ to the talk. See if there’s any stranger’s around. I don’t like to talk against a man, but I wouldn’t ezackly fall over in surprise if Grebb had a hand in this. It won’t be the first crooked work he’s been tied in with.”

 
“Sure,” Will said. “I’ll go now. But it could be Ed Brack up to his old tricks.”

  Will nodded. That was too true. Ed Brack had worked against the Storms ever since they had come into the country a few years before. He owned or claimed more range than he knew of. He ran cows in more states than he could count on the fingers of one hand. And he had wanted Three Creeks for winter graze. Only the Storms had stood stubbornly in his way. And he didn’t like anybody standing in his way. Two years running in the face of armed raids and hired killers, the Storms had stood their ground against him. Their final blow against him had been when his own son, Riley, had walked out on him in disgust at his bullying ways and signed on with the Storms as a hired man. Yes, it could be Brack.

  Mart downed his coffee and rose.

  “Fine breakfast, Martha,” he said. “See you, folks.”

  He walked out with that slow measured tread of his, a man sure of himself and his ability to look out for himself. A formidable fighting man, a man who made friends and enemies easily.

  “Jode,” Will said, “ride down to Harrison’s place and see if he lost any of his calf crop the way we done.”

  “Did,” corrected Martha.

  “Did,” Will repeated automatically. This had gone on since their courting days.

  “Sure,” Jody said. He was pleased. He hadn’t seen Prescott Harrison all winter and the man was a particular friend of his. The year before he and Harrison had a hand in some trouble with the Utes and the buying of breeding bulls from a powerful rancher up north, one Charles Rolf. Jody had nearly gotten away with Rolf’s daughter, while Harrison had ridden off with the man’s mistress—the lovely Manuela Salazar. That was a secret between Jody and Harrison. None of the family knew of it. Harrison was now married to Manuela and boasting that she would present him with five strong sons. Harrison never did anything by half.

  Jody rose and went out after telling his mother goodbye. He caught up his horse, Blue, and rode south.

  Will was about to tell Clay to ride into the hills and see if Joe Widbee was around when he thought of Clay’s young wife, Sara, over on White Water alone. If there were hard cases around …

  “Clay,” he said, “go on home. Stick around there and keep your eyes open till I send you word.”

  Clay knew what his father was thinking. Sarah had started their first child. The first grandchild in the family. Sarah was something special. He thought to protest, but held back the words. He thanked his mother for breakfast, had a joke with the girls and went out.

  “Martha,” Will said, “I’m goin’ to look for Joe. I could be gone a day or two.”

  “You’ll want supplies.”

  “Some. Don’t none of you go too far from the house.”

  “You think there’s danger?” She had heard the men’s talk, but she hadn’t taken part in it. That was her way.

  “Mebbe. Mebbe not. I can’t tell. So let’s be safe, huh?”

  “What happened?” Melissa demanded.

  “We been stole from,” Will told her. “We don’t know who an’ we aim to find out.”

  The girls plied him with questions. He said he didn’t know any more than he’d told them and walked out of the house. He roped a chunky zebra dun in the corral. It was a gelding and called Stripes. It would run all day on nothing but a bait of grass. Joe Widbee had gentled it for Will and there wasn’t anything it wouldn’t do at a soft word. It had a mouth of velvet and endless bottom. Will reckoned Joe had taught it everything but how to talk. Which just went to show.

  He saddled Stripes and Martha and the girls came out of the house. Martha carried his old Henry carbine, Kate his supplies and Melissa his ancient Colt. He felt like a knight of old being kitted out for battle. When he’d tied the wallet of supplies behind his saddle, booted the Henry and strapped on the Colt, he was ready to go. As it was only the girls there, he kissed Martha. Then he kissed the girls and told them to look out for themselves.

  “Any strangers come around here,” he told Martha, “drop the bar on the door and talk to them with a shotgun in your hands. No chances now.”

  “All right,” Martha said. “Anybody’d think me a city woman the way you talk.”

  Will grinned and stepped into the saddle. He lifted a hand and trotted Stripes down to the first creek. He crossed the shallow water of the ford, went on to the second creek and crossed that. Then he was climbing the first ridge. From the top of the ridge he turned in the saddle and waved to them. They were three small dots in the yard. His home looked good from up there. A feeling of enormous satisfaction came over him. Who would have thought that they’d have all this? A few years back, immediately after the War Between the States, there had been no hope. He was finished, cow-rich and money-poor. Then the cow-towns of Kansas had been opened to cattle for the shipping by railroad to the East and he’d been one of the first up the trail. They’d all gone with the cows, Martha, the two girls and even Mart on the run from Yankee law. And they’d made it. The profit from their first big sale had capitalized this place; they had sold the old place back in the brasada country of Texas and driven the remaining cows here to start a new herd. Last year Jody had brought in a prize breeding bull and Will had started to upgrade his cows. He was selling regularly to Denver and the mining camps. This year he was negotiating to send a herd up north to a man who wanted to fill virgin range. If they could keep their heads above water this year, the future looked hopeful. If they were thieved blind, they wouldn’t have a chance.

  He headed on west. He looked forward to seeing Joe again.

  Chapter Two

  George Storm, loaned to Prescott Harrison and his Box H brand, was working the range under the lea of the western hills when he came on the sign. He knew at once that it was sign that shouldn’t have been there. For one thing it had been made by four riders and their animals and a number of cows going in a westerly direction. Now the sign was fairly fresh, but not fresh enough to have been made by Harrison’s hands, for they had been working the southern part of the range for the past few days. The sign, therefore, had been made by strangers. Another thing, those four men had been driving cows in westerly direction and if they had been Harrison’s men they would have been driving them east.

  Had George been his normal self, he would have turned around, gotten some speed out of his horse and reported what he had found to Harrison. Ordinarily, George, the middle brother and sufferer of the emotional pressures said always to be on middle brothers, was a steady and sober young man. But a change had come over him during the long and hard Colorado winter. And the family had noticed it. The usually cheerful worker, the usually self-effacing, patient George who was inclined to ape his elder brother, Clay, but who occasionally broke out wild like his younger brother, Jody, suddenly became morose and dour, uncommunicative and at times quarrelsome.

  Jody, speaking of it to Clay, summed up with his usual confidence, with: “He jest wants a woman, is all. Why don’t he go along to Grebb’s an’ git it of’n his chest.”

  Clay then said something that puzzled his younger brother—

  “You don’t savvy George an’ you never will. He’s the deep one of the family, but nobody pays him any heed.”

  Jody looked at Clay in astonishment and dropped the subject.

  So George, for some reason possible unknown even to himself, trailed the cows and the four riders west. He didn’t doubt that the cows had been stolen and was surprised that thieves could be so brazen about the theft. They were either fools and amateurs or they just plain didn’t give a damn.

  He didn’t particularly know what he would do if he caught up with the men and somehow it didn’t really dawn on him that he would. He just saw the tracks and followed them. He certainly wasn’t afraid of the possible odds against him. He had been through the latter years of the War with a Texas infantry regiment and had seen some hard fighting. Burned powder and death were no strangers to him. Since coming into this country he had been in several hard running fights over range.

>   He was still following the tracks during the afternoon. He had some sandwiches with him made up by Harrison’s cuzie and there was water in the hills whenever he wanted it. He was vaguely surprised that the thieves had still made no attempt to hide their tracks.

  He was ruminating on this when he heard himself hailed.

  Stopping his horse, he looked around and saw a man above him among the rocks. The fellow had a rifle in the crook of his arm. It was a long shot even for a rifle.

  The fellow called: “Shuck your guns an’ git down.”

  Nobody liked the idea of shucking a gun. Particularly when the other man held one in his hands. George demurred. The man above lifted the carbine and fired a shot. The bullet kicked up the dust in front of George’s horse. The animal shied.

  George found that he was more mad than afraid. That had been good shooting at that distance. Just the same, his instinct was to shoot back at the man and, if possible, kill him. Where the sudden savagery came from in so mild a man as George there’s no knowing. Maybe it was an extension in the queer mood he’d been in lately.

  It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he jumped his horse to the right which took him nearer but made him less accessible to the man above. As he wrenched his rifle from the saddleboot and piled from the saddle, he found himself in the lea of some large boulders and completely out of sight of the man above. His horse skittered away back into the open again.

  George levered a round into the breech of his Spencer and crouched there. He hoped that the man did not have any friends around.

  Then came an incident which shook him to the core of his being and showed him something of what was to come.

  Another shot rang out. George heard a scream, turned his head and saw his horse sink to its knees. Another shot took the animal in the head and it fell over sideways.

  For a moment, George was rooted to the spot in disbelief and horror. That a man could kill a horse in cold blood was almost beyond his comprehension. Sure, it was no more than one of his string, just a working cow-pony and a not very good one at that. But it was a horse and horses meant something to the Storms.