The Cimarron Kid (A Sam Spur Western Book 5) Read online

  The Cimarron Kid was a nasty little killer if ever there was one. He claimed to be nineteen years of age and to have killed a man for every year of his life. He was poison, and had been known to kill for the possession of a single horse. He’d also been a loner his whole life until he met Sam Spur and Cuzie Ben...

  Those two might well turn out to be the Kid’s salvation.

  THE CIMARRON KID

  SPUR 5

  By Cy James

  First published by Panther Books in 1970

  Copyright © 1970, 2015 by P. C. Watts

  First Smashwords Edition: September 2015

  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.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  Chapter One

  The world was young and they rode with light hearts, the slim fair-haired man and the Negro, letting their horses run. Sam Spur and Ben. Outlaws. Wanted dead or alive in Texas. Spur was twenty-six years old and he rode his famous bay mare, Jenny. On her he swore he could outrun any posse in the country. He had proved it on more than one occasion. At her heels ran Albert, the pack-mule, a large ugly animal, independent and cussed, the meanest mule outside or inside Kentucky from where he hailed. Ben rode a fine sorrel gelding. Ben knew horses if he knew nothing else. And he knew plenty. He reckoned he knew so much about horses that he could even think like one. Certainly, under his guidance, they had caught more than their fair share of the wild ones during the year. They had sold them for the most part to the army at Fort Bendink, the rest they had sold off to ranchers who needed well-broken cowponies. Money jingled in their pockets. They could now buy supplies to carry them through the winter in their mountain retreat.

  Fall was not far off, as they climbed into the hills, they could feel the nip in the air. Soon they would be wearing their coats.

  Suddenly Ben urged his horse forward till he was abreast of Spur.

  “Sam,” he said, “you hear that?”

  “What?”

  They halted their horses and they blew. The mule took a nip at the mare and Jenny tried to kick his head in.

  The two men listened. A faint popping came to their ears.

  “Gun-fight,” said Ben.

  Sam said: “Sounds more like a war.”

  They looked at each other. They were outside the law and it suited them to avoid other men. On the other hand … somebody could be in trouble.

  Spur said: “Let’s take a look.”

  They urged their horses forward, turning toward the high ridge beyond which the shots sounded. Their animals heaved up it and Spur, in the lead, held up his hand. They halted and stepped down from the saddle.

  Ground hitching their horses, they crept up the ridge.

  When they got to the top, they saw the drifting gunsmoke. At first, they couldn’t make out what was going on, then gradually the patter of the action showed itself. There was a tangle of rocks and brush to their right and in it there seemed to be a single gun being fired. Under cover and scattered around in a rough semi-circle were riflemen. And they were pouring shots at the defender. Now and then one of them would run forward to get closer to the quarry. They moved pretty smartly, for they were no sooner up and running than the rifle in the rocks started to cut down on them. One man sat behind a large boulder and bandaged a bloody leg. The besieged man had found a target at least once.

  Spur said: “I don’t know the facts, but I don’t like the odds.”

  “Nor me,” said Ben. “But it ain’t none of our business.”

  “It could be me down there,” Spur said, “or you.”

  “All right, all right, all right,” said Ben. “You aim to be a hero. Go ahead. Be a hero.”

  “You throwin’ in?”

  Ben grinned briefly.

  “Ain’t had no practice with my rifle in a long time. Lil shootin’ wouldn’t hurt none.”

  “Stay here, I’ll work my way round the other side of ’em.”

  “Yessir.”

  Spur heaved his Spencer carbine from the mare’s saddle boot and started to work his way around the ridge. It took him ten minutes to work his way around the dip in which the shooting was taking place. He got amongst rock and settled down, the carbine cradled against his cheek. He looked across at Ben and raised his hand. Ben replied in the same way.

  Spur got his eyes on a big bearded fellow who was creeping forward, rifle in hand.

  Wound him or scare the daylights out of him? Spur asked himself. He wasn’t the kind to cripple a man without good reason. As he said, he didn’t know the truth of the situation. Maybe the man defending himself in the rocks was getting what was due to him. So he aimed a few inches in front of the bearded man’s nose and let fly.

  The result was satisfactory.

  Startled, the man whirled, searching for the hidden marksman. At the same instant, Ben fired at him. The bullet must have gone close. The man yelled something in a suddenly hysterical voice and turned and ran. Spur started to lever and fire as fast as he could move, bouncing shots off rock so that the air down there must have been full of whining ricochets. Eight or nine men appeared from cover, running. There was alarm in every line of their body. Spur emptied his carbine and reloaded. They reached their horses to the right of Spur and hauled themselves with desperate haste into the saddle. He and Ben sent several shots after them to help them on their way.

  Then Spur stood up and started to walk down toward the defender. He could hear the dying sound of the pounding of hoofs. He couldn’t help laughing to himself.

  Ben came riding over the ridge, leading the mare and the mule.

  Spur expected the defender to appear now, but he didn’t do so.

  Spur called: “Where you at?”

  “Over here,” came a young voice.

  He threaded his way through the rocks.

  He found a young man lying with his back to a boulder. He looked pale and in the last stages of exhaustion. He was a good-looking fellow in a dark kind of a way and for a moment Spur wondered if he were a Mexican. He was dressed in a blue hickory shirt, leather vest and cord pants. His spurs were Mexican and silver. The hat that lay on the ground beside him was a Mexican sombrero. The conchos around the crown were silver. In his right hand he held a Remington revolver. It was cocked and it was pointed at Spur.

  “Drop the carbine,” said the young man.

  “Hey, now,” said Spur, “wait a minute.”

  “Drop it or I drill you where you stand.”

  There was iron in the young voice. Spur reckoned he couldn’t yet be twenty. He didn’t doubt the boy meant what he said.

  Ben came clattering through the rocks. He saw the gun and stopped.

  The boy said: “Shuck your guns, both of you.”

  Ben stared.

  “I ain’t the one to mention hit,” he said, “but we just saved your fool life, boy.”

  “Your guns, nigger,” said the boy.

  Spur watched Ben accept the insult.

  Ben said: “You pay for that, white boy.”

  Both knew what a gun was and what it could do. Ben laid his rifle on the ground and they both shucked their gunbelts
.

  “Now what?” said Spur. He became aware that the boy was wounded. The thigh of his pants was soaked with blood.

  “I want a horse. Go git me a horse, nigger. Make a wrong move and this feller gits it.”

  Ben sighed and went to get a horse.

  The boy said: “What do they call you, mister?”

  “Sam Spur.”

  The name meant something to the boy. It showed on his face. Then disbelief was there.

  “You funnin’ me?”

  “Ain’t no fun bein’ Sam Spur.”

  “You mean I got the drop on the great Sam Spur?”

  “Looks that way.”

  The boy started to laugh.

  Ben came back with the mare. Spur didn’t like that much.

  The boy said: “What does the nigger call himself?”

  That word again. Something winced inside Spur. It was like the word “bastard”—you could only use it with a smile to friends. The way the boy said it called for violence. Ben took it wooden-faced under the black eye of the pointing gun.

  Ben said: “The nigger call hisself Cuzie Ben.”

  The boy had the grace to blink. He looked from one to the other. He was in the presence of two badmen who were known the length and breadth of the frontier.

  Spur said: “And what do you call yourself, boy?”

  The boy said: “I don’t have to say. I’m holdin’ the gun. Remember?”

  “You won’t be holdin’ the gun much longer,” Spur said. “You’re bleedin’ to death.”

  The boy’s face was ashen; his eyes like great dark pools in his pinched face. He couldn’t last much longer. The gun wavered. The fright showed in the dark eyes; he could feel himself going.

  “I’ll be okay when I get on that horse,” he said. His voice was no more than a rustle of sound.

  “Sure,” said Spur.

  The boy hauled himself to his feet and stood there for a moment to gather himself, looking as though he would drop at any minute. Spur allowed himself a pang of pity for him. No more, because the wretched boy was going off on his pet mare. The boy tried putting the foot of the wounded leg to the ground and it gave under him. He nearly fell.

  “Bring that goddam horse nearer,” he snarled.

  Obediently, Ben brought the mare nearer. The boy told him to step back. Again Ben obeyed. The boy got a grip on the saddle horn with his left hand, put his left foot in the stirrup iron and heaved himself into the saddle. His face contorted with agony. But if Spur thought he could jump the boy then, he was mistaken. The gun didn’t stop pointing at him.

  The mare moved, the boy reined her in.

  “Don’t try followin’ me,” he said. “Or I’ll kill you.”

  “Sure,” Spur said.

  He dove forward suddenly. The boy snapped off a shot, but Spur was under the horse’s belly and coming up the far side, fast. Ben thought he had never seen a human being move so fast. In the next second, the boy was torn from the saddle and dumped on the ground. Ben sprang forward and kicked the gun from his hand. The boy flung himself after the gun, floundering on the ground like a landed fish. Ben stamped down on his gun-wrist. Spur caught him by the scruff of the neck and flung him backward. He lay panting, the wind almost knocked out of him. He looked as venomous as a snake.

  Spur and Ben picked up their gunbelts and strapped them on.

  Spur said: “Now that’s straightened out, we’ll fix that leg of yours.”

  The boy yelled: “Keep away from me.”

  “Hell,” said Ben. “It ain’t no skin off our noses, Sam. Leave him die if’n he wants.”

  “I’d like to believe you mean that,” Spur told him with a little smile.

  “Sure I mean hit,” Ben said.

  Spur approached the boy who kicked him in the crotch with his good leg. Ben leaned forward and started slapping the kid’s face, this way and that, batting it till it looked like it would come off his shoulders. Spur squirmed on the ground for a while, got up and walked awkwardly forward.

  “Maybe your idea was the best,” he told Ben. He rolled the boy on to his face and in a second had his hands lashed together behind his back. Then he turned him on his back, knelt down on the ankle of his good leg and ripped the pants away from the wound. It looked nasty and Spur clucked his tongue at the sight. He probed it with his fingers.

  “Lead’s still in there,” he said. “Let’s hope it hasn’t broken the bone. Ben, kneel on his shoulders—this is going to hurt like hell.”

  The boy watched him as baleful as a caught wolverine.

  Ben knelt on his shoulders. Spur fetched some whiskey from his saddle-pocket. Cleaned his knife with it, washed out the wound. The boy arched his back and drew in a great shuddering breath, but otherwise he didn’t make a sound. Spur knew guts when he saw it and acknowledged the fact. He took a drink himself and offered the bottle to Ben. When the Negro had drunk, Spur got to work. The lead was deep and it took him ten minutes of concentrated work and sweating before he held the piece of distorted lead in the palm of his hand.

  “Better out than in,” Ben commented.

  Spur found a clean shirt and tore off its tail, padded the wound and told Ben to hold the pad there. Then he made a tourniquet of a rawhide thong and twisted it tight above the wound. The boy fainted. Which was the best thing. Spur finished bandaging the wound and stood up.

  “Can’t do any more,” he said.

  “He’ll thank you with a bullet in the back,” Ben said. “He a goddam rattler.”

  “You could be right,” Spur said. “Scout around and see if you can find his horse.”

  Ben went to his own horse, mounted and rode off. He came back some fifteen minutes later leading a magnificent black gelding. The boy certainly knew horseflesh. Stole it, no doubt. He was conscious now, lying white-faced on the ground and watching them.

  “Can you ride?” Spur asked him.

  “Anythin’ on four legs.”

  They hoisted him into the saddle and he sat there, swaying. He looked like hell.

  Ben cast anxious glances around.

  “Let’s move,” he said. “Could be it ain’t too healthy around here.”

  Spur picked up the mule’s line and mounted the mare. They rode out northwest, heading for the hills and their home range. The boy clung to the saddle horn. They had covered a mile when he pitched out of the saddle. Spur and Ben sighed and halted.

  “Travois,” said Ben and they cut two poles. They hastily constructed a travois, using a rope and a tarp. They tied the travois to the boy’s own horse which didn’t seem to care for it much. The boy was in high fever now. They covered him with blankets and went on. After a while, Spur spoke.

  “I reckon we have the Cimarron Kid,” he said.

  Ben gave the unconscious boy a cold glance.

  “I said he was a rattler,” he reminded Spur.

  Spur smiled.

  “For once,” he said, “you was right.”

  Chapter Two

  Sheriff Carmody wasn’t a bad man, but he was ambitious. His early years had been wild ones and now he was trying to make up for them. He was in his middle thirties now and had made his reputation with the breaking up of the Mayflower Boys who for some time had spread terror among the stage drivers and miners of the Colorado gold fields. They were a loosely organized band of some dozen men, all dedicated to violence and the taking of other men’s possessions, preferably their gold. It had been a tough job to put pay to their activities and the whole nation had been grateful, as the press put it. It made Michael Carmody deservedly famous. He had showed guts and ingenuity.

  Now he trailed the Cimarron Kid and, doing so, he felt very much on the side of the angels. The Kid was a nasty little killer, if ever there was one. He claimed to be nineteen years of age and to have killed a man for every year of his life. That may have been an exaggeration, but it gave a man a good idea of the Kid’s character. He was poison and had been known to kill a man for the possession of a single horse. There was talk that he
had killed Mexicans and Indians without number, but he didn’t count those. Only white men were allowed in his scoring.

  Carmody had received news of the fight between the posse from Arkhold County and the Kid. They had had two men wounded, one of them seriously. The local sheriff claimed that he had wounded the Kid. They would have taken him if some dozen outlaws hadn’t jumped them and rescued the Kid. This was the first time Carmody had ever heard of the Kid working with anybody else. He had always been a loner.

  Carmody could understand that. He was a loner himself and had a dislike of posses. They were amateurs and they had no staying power. He regarded himself as a professional. He knew badmen. He had been one himself. He was an artist with a six-shooter, unequalled with a rifle. He had staying power and he had guts. On hearing of the battle with the Kid, he at once saddled his horse in Beddo City, his county seat, and rode for the battlefield. He reached it five days after the fight and found that the rain had wiped out all sign. This would have discouraged lesser men than Carmody. But the fact that he was within no more than a few days ride of the noted Cimarron Kid stiffened his determination to find him. When you didn’t know what to do, he told himself, you left it to luck. The Kid was wounded. He had been rescued by other men. A wounded man and a large bunch of riders couldn’t hide their trail forever. This country wasn’t exactly wide open, but there were cattlemen in the valleys, shepherds on the hills and miners in the gulches. The Kid must have been spotted.

  Mick Carmody tossed a coin and found that he was to head north. So he started out north. One thing he was betting himself. The Kid was now in the company of other men, but as soon as he was able, he would be on his lonesome again. For Carmody knew the Kid. He had ridden with him once. In the bad old days. The boy had been no more than seventeen at the time and he had been poison then. Hardened. Three weeks they had ridden together, hiding from the law. Then the New Mexican governor had pardoned Carmody, pardoned him and recruited him on the side of law. He had seen that it needed a thief to catch a thief. Under the governor’s auspices Carmody had broken the Mayflower gang. Then he had been offered the job in Arkhold City. He might not now be accepted in respectable society as he would have liked, but he was a force to be reckoned with. Who knew, one day he might stand for the state legislature. There was no place on earth like the West in which a man could rise quickly to the top. If he could catch the Kid, he would be well on the way to the top.