Riders West Read online

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  Having quit Civil War devastated Texas, the Storm family – father, mother, three sons, two daughters – found their promised land in Colorado. But Colorado was then the American West’s furthest frontier, rich in fertile land but dangerously short on law and order. There were wild animals and Indians – but wildest of all were the desperadoes on the lookout for easy pickings …

  Colorado’s Three Creeks country was a hard land indeed, where the strong took whatever they wanted to satisfy their greed and the weak were gunned down if they got in the way. Ed Brack ruled supreme in this brutal territory, thinking he could scare the Storm family off. But the Storms didn’t scare easy. They stood their ground. So the cattle king burned their house… and took their women.

  Mild Will Storm, his brother Mart and black Joe Widbee saddled and rode against Brack, guns in their hands and a murderous hatred in their hearts …

  STORM 3: RIDERS WEST

  By Matt Chisholm

  First published by Mayflower Books in 1971

  Copyright © 1971 by P. C. Watts

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: July 2013

  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. If you’re reading the book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please.

  Cover image © 2013 by Westworld Designs

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Estate.

  Chapter One

  They came into the Three Creeks country in the fall of the year and that wasn’t a good time to arrive because there was bad weather right ahead of them.

  There were six of them - Will Storm and his wife, Martha, Will’s brother Mart. Will’s two daughters Kate and Melissa and the Negro rider, Joe Widbee. There were three females in the party and it was a man’s country. Some said it was too tough for most men. And they were most likely right.

  It was Will who found the Creek Country and he took one look at it and he knew that it was the place for him. There wasn’t a scrap of doubt in his mind. The grass was superb and there was plenty of water. The graze was sheltered from the hills and it looked like a real cattleman’s paradise.

  He didn’t doubt that the winters would be tough here, but he reckoned a man couldn’t have it all ways. Whatever way you looked at it, this place looked mighty green after the part of Texas he knew. It didn’t take him long, running his eye over the country from the back of his horse to decide right where he would build his house. He’d build him a place, he promised himself, that Martha could be proud of. He’d build it strong and he’d build it to stay. Nobody, he swore, was going to move him on from here.

  He turned his bay horse and rode back the way he had come, following the swathe he had made through the belly-high grass on the way in. He took it easy, gazing with immense pleasure at the heights around him, impressed by them beyond measure. This kind of country was new to him and he knew that it was something he had been looking for all his life. He knew too that this moment was a crucial one in his life. What he decided here and now would shape his own life and the lives of the people who depended on him. For the first time in his life he had the chance to start well.

  In the spring of the year, he and his family had driven three thousand head of Texas longhorns up the long trail to Abilene, Kansas. That maybe had been the real start. It had been tough going. Everything that could happen to them had happened.

  They had suffered stampede, terror by fire and the depredations and violence of outlaws. But they had got the cows to Kansas. Though they had lost a man on the way. The family had been through a baptism of fire together and it had drawn them closer. They had made it as one family, for Martha had insisted that she and the girls come along too. In the crew had ridden the three Storm boys: Clay, Jody and George. With the rest of the crew they were now down in the brasada country of Texas selling up the old place and hunting cows to bring up into this new country of Colorado. They would drive them here on the next spring grass. If they could get them through the Indians who might be on the trail, Will would have a herd on good grass to start a cow outfit that would amount to something.

  That was strong in Will’s mind at that time - to amount to something. A part of the great American dream. Until he had taken his family and cows north into Kansas he had been a man who drifted ahead of events, nothing more than a pawn in a gigantic game. From now on, he thought, he would make things happen. He had passed forty, he wasn’t getting any younger.

  He dreamed of the future, seeing his sons and daughters growing strong in a new land, saw them having their own children. He turned aside now a little from the trail he had taken into the valley and found himself on a narrower trail which his expert eyes saw had been recently used. He hadn’t covered a hundred yards of this, riding between high wild brush, when he came to an open space surrounded by high trees, boughs of which reached out over the pleasant glade. Their leaves were falling now and those that had rustled crisply under the hoofs of Will’s horse.

  Suddenly, the animal shied and in the same instant Will reined him in firmly, his eyes raised to the grisly sight that mocked the tranquility of the scene.

  From an over-reaching branch of a tree a man hung by his neck.

  Will gazed at him in horror, seeing the grotesque twisting of the neck, the head which had jarred to one side, the distorted face, hanging tongue and protruding eyes.

  A cattleman, Will knew. Scuffed boots, scarred chaps, empty gun-holster, faded blue shirt, torn red bandanna with white polka dots. The man’s hair was russet. He had been a fine enough looking fellow in life.

  Will reckoned that most likely he had been strung up there the day before. An obscenity in the beauty of the scene. A warning maybe. Will didn’t miss the point,

  He could see the scene relived - the men gathered around, the death-lust on their faces, the helpless man, hands bound behind his back, maybe trying not to show his fear. Then the sickening sound of the quirt striking the horse’s rump, the horse jumping forward and the man kicking, choking on the end of the rope.

  Sickened, Will rode forward. The corpse swung gently. Will’s horse acted up, hating the smell of death as much as the rider did. He rode him off to one side, dismounted and tied him firmly. Then drawing his knife, he found where the rope was dallied off and tied and cut it through. The sound of the corpse hitting the ground was unpleasant.

  Will then saw that he had been a fool. He had cut the dead man down and had no means of burying him. He cursed softly and went back to his horse, untied him and stepped into the saddle. He urged the animal forward, trotted along the narrow trail and then lifted it to a canter when he hit the more open country. Shortly after, he reached the saddle between the hills that was the way out of the valley and slowed his pace up the incline. When he reached the highest point of the saddle, he stopped and saw the wagon and riders straining up towards him. He stopped and watched them, wondering what he should tell them. The dead man could be looked upon as a bad omen. Like most men who had lived their lives on the edge of the wilds, he believed in luck and omens with the strength that other men believed in a religion.

  Omen or not, that dead man hanging by his neck surely carried his own message. But what did the message say? Had it been a warning to thieves or had it been a warning to anybody coming into the valley? Surely not the latter. Will had seen sign neither of
occupancy or cattle.

  But first things first. They had to camp and they had to bury the dead man.

  He rode on down towards the wagon. He would make his decision later. Mart and Joe would say their piece. They always did. His brother and the Negro rider had done so since they had all been boys together in the brush country.

  Mart rode out to meet him. He was a good many years younger than Will, he was the wilder of the two. He and Will had not seen each other since before the war until Mart turned up one jump ahead of the law and had joined the northing cattle drive. Will thought Mart was a pretty good man, even though he was his brother. A mite wild, there was no denying that, but he possessed all the frontier virtues. He stuck to his word, he didn’t welsh, and he could be relied on in trouble like no other man. Will didn’t doubt that the law wanted Mart for a killing, though he had never asked and Mart had never offered an explanation of why he was wanted. If Mart had killed a man, Will was willing to bet that he needed killing. In that day and age a killing wasn’t necessarily a murder. There were times when a man had to kill to stay alive.

  The man who rose towards Will now was tall and straight-backed. Since starting out from Kansas, he had grown a beard and it shone golden in the sun. There was a cast of feature about the two men and a way they moved that showed they were brothers, but in temperament they were quite different. Will was mild, hard to rouse; Mart was quick-tempered, though this was softened by abundant good nature. Will received humor with a smile, quietly; Mart had a laugh that was hearty and infectious. Will married Martha in his early twenties, stuck to her and she had given him three sons and two daughters. He was a family man. Mart was the perpetual bachelor, adored by women and kids, the man with a way with him, easy smiling, generous to a fault and, some said, fiddle-footed. He was in his middle thirties now and Will despaired of his ever settling down. Maybe in this new country ... There was a recklessness and a sharpness of mind about the man that often scared his brother. But the thing that made Will most nervous about him was his consummate skill with guns. He was one of those rare men who could fire a gun accurately without seeming to sight. His reactions were as fast as light itself. Will had seen Mart on occasion draw and fire a gun till empty quicker than he, Will, could clear his own weapon from leather.

  Handling a gun, Mart’s character underwent a startling change. All the heat seemed to go out of him. He was not one of those fancy gun-handlers who could remain cool when facing a target that could not shoot back at him. The deadlier his opponent, the calmer he appeared. Flesh and blood seemed to be transformed into a cold, fast-moving machine. The gun became an extension of himself. And strangely enough, he seemed never to practice. To see him reload his gun with a fresh loaded chamber from his pocket was to see artistry of movement and speed beyond belief. To hear him talk, though he seldom did so, was to listen to a master. Mart made Will sad sometimes. He could maintain complete mastery over guns, but, it seemed, he would never learn to master himself.

  There was a deep and abiding affection between the two men, enriched on Mart’s side by a respect for his elder brother which he had learned for the first time on the Kansas trail. Only then did he realize that latent ferocity that lay hidden in the depths of the elder man. Maybe there was nothing fancy about Will, but he was surely a man to reckon with.

  Mart was smiling as he rode up.

  ‘How much further?’ he demanded. ‘My ass is sore an’ keeps tellin’ me the miles. I’m sure desperate short on loafin’ time. An’ my constitution demands loafin’.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me,’ Will said. ‘Laziest sonovabitch I ever saw.’ They halted their horses. ‘Mart, there’s some of the prettiest country up ahead. Take the wagon on over the saddle. There’s a rough trail goin’ due west. It’ll take you down into good creek country. All the grass you could ever want. Pitch camp on a knoll to the right of the trail at the first creek you come to. Set an’ think about it.’

  ‘Sure will,’ said Mart. ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘Joe an’ me have a chore to do. With shovels.’ Mart raised his eyebrows. ‘Found a man hung. Don’t tell the women.’

  Will rode on. Mart stared after him. Will had shaken him a little. He was a little sensitive to the subject of hanging. He’d been closer than he liked to it several times himself.

  Will reached the wagon. Joe Widbee rode off to one side of it and Martha drove. The two girls were walking alongside the vehicle. Kate, aged eighteen, her hair bleached by the sun, her face tanned. She walked like a boy, long-legged, hating the skirts her father now made her wear. She had ridden wrangler up the trail from Texas with the herd, handling herself with the competence of a top-hand. Only on the trail had Will realized that she wasn’t a child any longer and that she was a woman. Hence, the skirts. Fourteen-year-old Melissa walked beside her, still showing her puppy fat, rosy-faced, eyes bright, dark hair curling. She was spoiled and Will knew it. Spoiled by him, by her brothers and by every man in the outfit.

  Martha was handling the team like a man, her face shining under the sunbonnet. Away from her, Will regretted ever bringing her into the wilderness, knowing this was no life for a woman. But with her, he was ever thankful that he hadn’t left her and the girls back at home till he had his affairs settled in the new country. The parting from her had been too long during the war and he didn’t ever want that again. He wanted to keep the whole family together until such time as they went voluntarily their separate ways.

  She smiled at him now and he saw again the young girl he had courted so long before.

  ‘Will,’ she said, ‘how much further? This country looks pretty good to me.’

  He reined around so he came alongside her.

  ‘Me too,’ he said. ‘You follow Mart down into the valley yonder. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Me and Joe’s goin’ to ride off a piece and take a look around.’

  Maybe she knew something was wrong, but she didn’t give a sign. She just nodded and kept the team moving up the gradient. Will dropped back until he was alongside Joe and said: ‘Break out a couple of shovels, Joe, without no fuss. You’n’me’ve got us some diggin’ to do.’

  Joe nodded without a word and turned for the rear of the wagon. As Will and Joe rode away a few moments later, little Melissa demanded in her shrill voice to know where they were going, but Will pretended not to hear. They rode up over the saddle, not a word spoken between them, seeing Mart ahead of them, looking over the valley. They rode down past him and then swung north until they hit the side trail. The horses acted up when they rode into the glade and Joe rolled his eyes. They tied their horses and Joe went forward on foot to look at the dead man. He sucked his teeth noisily and turned to Will. Their eyes met, showing each other what they felt.

  Joe wasn’t a talker, he knew what was wanted of him.

  He paced underneath the spread of the tree, concentrating. Will had never met a man for sign like Joe. He used to boast of the Negro that he could track a snake over a rock. That was maybe a slight exaggeration, but it gave some indication of Will’s opinion of the Negro.

  Theirs was a curious relationship and Will thought about it as Joe’s skilled eye spread the story of what had happened in that glade so short a time before. He and Joe were of much the same age. The Negro had been born a slave in the household of Will’s father who had freed him some ten years before the war. Joe had immediately taken to the brush and had disappeared from sight for several years. Many were the theories of what he had been up to during that time. Certainly Joe himself never let on.

  Martha always said that Joe made her nervous. Being with him wasn’t like being with a man, it was like being in the presence of an animal. It wasn’t the fact that he was black; Martha had known blacks since she first came into the world. It was the fact that he seemed to have developed all the instincts of a wild animal. Joe, for example, claimed, and Will never doubted him for one moment, that he could catch wild mustangs with his bare hands. The wild ones showed no fear of him. Towards them
he exhibited a kind of gentle firmness that gave them complete confidence in him. To Will he was always the supreme hombre del campo, man of the wild places. He could survive in the wilderness where other men would die. He knew the wilds as any expert Indian. He knew the ways of the beasts and birds, he could find life-giving berries to which other men were blind, he could run a horse down on foot, he knew instinctively where water could be found. On the long trail north, Will knew of no other man who he would rather have along than Joe. And Joe, who was no lover of white men, had only to be told that he was needed and he came along. There was a deep and unspoken understanding between the two men. Both were as certain as two men could ever be that the other would not fail him.

  When Joe had finished sniffing around the glade, he walked back to Will and said: ‘Poor bastard didn’t have no chance. The odds sure was agin him. Nine, maybe ten, done it. They wasn’t here long. Just rid in, strung him hup an’ headed out north. One man, he favored his right leg. One maybe an Indian, didn’t wear no boots.’

  That told Will a lot. He nodded and said: ‘Pity. I like it around here, Joe. Why was he killed?’

  The Negro shrugged.

  ‘Search me,’ he said.

  ‘Man gets himself killed like this for two reasons I can think of. He steals cows or he’s on land somebody doesn’t want him to be on.’

  ‘Could be either,’ Joe said. ‘Or maybe a hoss thief.’

  They fetched the shovels and dug the grave under the trees. They closed the grey eyes, then laid the man in the grave. It gave a man an unpleasant feeling to throw dirt even in a dead man’s face. Will was glad when they were through. When they had tamped down the dirt with their shovels and walked their horses back and forth a few times over the grave, then strewed leaves over it, they stood for a moment and Will said a few good words.

  ‘We didn’t know this man, Lord. Maybe he deserved to be hung. We wouldn’t know. Any road, look out for his soul, likely he needs it.’