Hart the Regulator 10

  Wes Hart - ex-soldier, ex-Texas Ranger, ex-rider with Billy the Kid. He’s tough, ruthless and slick with a .45. He’s for hire now and he isn’t cheap.

  Surprising the kind of money that can get left in a small farmer’s will. Old Jedediah Batt left a thousand bucks in gold to his brother Aram, who’s an old-time trapper up in the northern hills. Hart is hired to find him and tell him the news. But money can cause family upsets like crazy sons who get drunk and trigger happy just thinking about it. That might be enough for The Regulator to handle, if two hoodlums from California with a grudge apiece weren’t riding hard in his direction...

  THE SKINNING PLACE

  HART THE REGULATOR 10

  By John B. Harvey

  Copyright © 1982, 2016 by John B. Harvey

  First Smashwords Edition: February 2016

  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

  Cover image © 2015 by Edward Martin

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author’s Agent.

  For Alan and Nancy

  Chapter One

  There were three of them, two close by the river, the other eighty yards upstream. Blackfeet. The trapper watched them from the southerly bank, his eyes gray and curious. It had been a long time since they had invaded his trapping grounds, set out to steal his haul. The pair in the water were young, neither one of them long a warrior; they stepped with care, anxious lest they draw attention to their thieving. Most men - most whites -would not have got within reach of them without being heard. Likely seen. But Aram Batt was not like most men, not even most mountain men. He eyed the elk skin pouch that hung from the neck of one of the braves and admired the way the smooth fur tapered down to shiny black hooves, the intricate quill-work around the neck. The other brave was decorated with twin stripes of yellow paint across his forehead, one dark and the other light, the sun and the moon, especial gods of his tribe. A loose, flapping ornament hung down his back, attached by a narrow strip of hide to the thick, greased tail of his hair. It was fashioned from crimson and yellow beads surrounded by several inches of moose hair that curved widely away. Both men wore hide skirts with a roundel of beads and quills below the neck, a cross at the center. One wore elk skin leggings with white and blue thunderbirds along the inside; the lean, muscular legs of the other were bare.

  The water was cold for each of them.

  Aram sucked the last of his chewing tobacco from between his few back teeth and swallowed it silently.

  They had reached the first of his traps, set below the waterline and partly covered with weed and twigs. He had not checked them himself for five days and had good hopes of them being heavy with beaver. A lot of work, a deal of discomfort. He was not about to lose everything to a couple of thievin’ Blackfeet!

  As the brave in leggings bent towards the trap, Aram set his rifle along the branch of the tree to his left side and slipped his butchering knife from its sheath. Eight inches of steel blade worn into a curve at its center, razor sharp from the whetstone hanging in its buckskin case from the back of his belt.

  The brave finished clearing his cover from above the trap and spoke to his companion, pointing excitedly down.

  Aram ghosted between the alders, his moccasins softer than down.

  The first thing the Indian felt was an arm, thin and wiry, fast beneath his chin and bending his head sharply back, choking him. Next was the punch of the blade as it punctured the tautness of skin below the arch of his rib cage. His arms flailed in struggle and a gurgle escaped his mouth as Aram’s knife point sought his heart. He stumbled back against his attacker and already the air that hissed from his lungs was becoming pink with blood. Aram pulled on the haft of the knife but the brave fell away from him, juddering the bone handle from his grasp.

  The second brave had jumped back, startled, feeling for the weapon at his belt. He stepped into the thresh of water and lifted the blade clear as Aram closed on him fast. He saw the points of the white man’s eyes and his fingers faltered; he had seen his enemy’s weapon go down below the shifting surface of the water; he saw now the broad flash of a tomahawk blade as it rose from the white man’s side. His right arm struck out and missed the man’s arm by a finger’s length. He saw the upswing of the tomahawk and arched his head back, stepping awkwardly away.

  Something bit into his leg, hard and deep and his belly froze like the skin of a dead fish. For seconds he did not know what it was that had attacked him but Aram knew the brave had stepped onto one of his traps. For five days beavers had avoided it but not the Indian’s heel as it stamped upon the metal disc and sprung the steel jaws tight shut against the bone of his shin. Tight and holding fast.

  Aram saw rather than heard the brave scream.

  The tomahawk was too far into its swing for him to adjust. Instead of the head, it bit deep into the top of the shoulder, the force driving the blade edge inches into the bone.

  Aram heard the horse’s hoofs splashing hard along the bank of the river and turned away. Three paces took him to the alder, the long-barreled .60 caliber Hawken. He drew it clear and dropped on to one knee. The Blackfoot was galloping fast, his body low against his pony’s neck, cheek nuzzling the coarse hair of its mane. Aram shut his mind to the cries of the wounded brave and sighted along the barrel.

  Not until he was twenty-five yards off did the Indian thrust his body up in the saddle, his arm lifting a war club over his head.

  Aram felt the smoothness of the metal against his calloused finger and knew in his gut that the shot was good even as he made it. The pony went careening past and the dead rider struck the water with an almighty splash, a hole big enough to have stopped a buffalo above his breast bone.

  Aram slung the rifle over his left shoulder and waded back into the stream. He clamped his left hand down against the Blackfoot’s shoulder and wrenched the tomahawk blade free. For an instant the eyes of the adversaries met and held. Brown and gray. Pain faded from the brave’s mouth and everything was suddenly silent save for the splashing of the water and the noise of the pony disappearing up stream.

  Aram broke the silence with a blow that split open the front of the Indian’s head like kindling.

  Back on the bank, in the cover of the trees, he waited to see if there were more of his enemies to come. When he was certain there were not, he set foot once more in the freezing river, eddying red. Four of his six traps were heavy with beaver and he cleared them quickly, working with the precision of use. The traps would have to be reset upstream, baited with beaver scent and covered in green. He leaned for several minutes against the smooth trunk of a paper birch, the bronze of the young tree sappy against his fingers. He listened to the breathless song of a vireo somewhere to his right and waited until he caught a glimpse of its red eye bright against the white stripe beneath the blue-gray cap of its head.

  He would have wished things different, would have wished that the Blackfeet had not been there, intent upon pilfering what was his.

  He had lived long enough to understand that however far a man set himself from his fellow men, such wishes were little more than pipe dreams to be dragged away on the thrust of another’s ambition or greed. Even need.

  Aram fingered open the possibles sack t
hat hung from his neck and broke off a plug of chewing tobacco, working it between his teeth as he stepped clear of the thicket of trees and towards the clearing where his mules were tethered and chomping at the long-stemmed switch grass. Turning his head, he blinked into the early fall sun and saw for a moment the eyes of the Blackfoot as they had met his, the two yellows smeared across his forehead, sun and moon that had both gone out.

  Chapter Two

  Wes Hart had been in the saddle the best part of a week and it felt like the whole damned summer. He dropped to the ground and arched his back, pressing both hands into the spare flesh at the rear of his hips. The insides of his legs, where the leather patches covered the wool of his pants, were raw with sweat. Dust veiled his lean face, clogging his pores. He pulled the flat-crowned tan hat from his head and slapped it against his legs, shaking dirt down onto the straw-strewn floor. All the damn way from the coast through the Sierra to Virginia City! A handful of silver pieces in his saddle bags and one eye over his shoulder most of the journey. Him and Fowler, they’d left a couple of gunslingers on a spidery walkway out over the ocean at Monterey and they hadn’t left them for dead.

  It could have been, like Fowler had said between shots of bourbon, one hell of a mistake.

  Hart had nodded, felt the truth of what the detective had said in his bones, and still been glad he hadn’t turned his gun and pulled the trigger. It had been a missing kid job and though they’d found him in the end, they’d waded through a lot of blood to get there. Hart was sick with killing to the back of his craw. Which meant they were back there somewhere, the tall gunman with a Smith and Wesson .45 filed down to a hair trigger holstered at his left hip and a patch of dead skin over his left cheek and the slender Mexican with the bones of a girl and skin like burnished olive: Oklahoma and Angel Montero. They’d been hired by a gambler called Luis Aragon to kill a man who’d insulted his woman. It had got in the way of what Hart and Fowler had been doing and neither man felt like stepping aside. Not then; not after going through so much.

  So it was that Hart had sliced the middle finger of Montero’s gun hand down to the bone and Fowler had placed a couple of slugs in Oklahoma, one taking out his left knee cap and the other bursting through the top of his shoulder.

  Enough to stop the big man for a time, but not forever. Maybe it was enough to warn him off, keep the pair of them from any ideas of revenge. Maybe they’d be sensible and set it down to experience and start over. Maybe the sun would forget to rise up in the east at dawn.

  Hart and Fowler had split up short of the Sierras and if the gunmen were following, there was no telling which trail they’d take. Wes Hart had kept looking back, looking and seeing nothing that suggested he was more than alone.

  He shrugged: could be that was the end of it, after all.

  The livery owner came scuffing from the rear stalls and took the gray’s bridle, leading her away, sweat glistening on her coat. Hart gritted his teeth together and arched his body backwards a few more times before lifting his saddle bags and rifle from the floor and walking towards the arched doorway that led on to the street.

  Another hour and Hart was wearing a clean wool shirt -patched and deeply creased, but clean - leather vest and pants and boots that had been brushed at least. He’d soaked the worst of the trail dust and the worst of his trail aches away in one of the tall tubs at the Chinaman’s and scraped at his stubble in front of the cracked mirror in his room at the hotel. His Colt Peacemaker had been cleaned and oiled and was tied down to his right leg, the safety thong dipped over the curve of the hammer. The double-bladed Apache knife he always carried was in its sheath inside his right boot, the tip of the haft almost visible above the edge of leather.

  His hat was angled slightly over his right eye and his stride was long and purposeful as he crossed the street and paced seventy yards of boardwalk to the office of Herb Mosley, sheriff.

  ‘Jesus Almighty! Ain’t we seen the last of you yet?’

  It wasn’t the sheriff who spoke, but his deputy, leaning back against the wall close by the side window and scratching at the overhang of his belly as he did so.

  Hart stared at Rawlings and ignored what he had to say. Mosley swung his stiff leg off the edge of the desk and pushed himself to his feet. A couple of paces using his walnut stick and he was gripping Hart’s hand, something approaching a welcoming grin on his lined face.

  ‘Good to see you, Wes.’

  ‘You too, Herb.’

  ‘Shit!’ hissed Rawlings between his teeth and shrugged his way across the room.

  ‘Ain’t it time you checked up by the livery, Lefty?’ said the sheriff. ‘They’re still bitchin’ ’bout that grain loss from the other day.’

  Rawlings grabbed a double-barrel shotgun from a pair of pegs sunk into the wall, gave a glowering look at Hart, and slammed the door behind himself as he went out.

  ‘Still got a lot of charm, ain’t he?’

  Mosley laughed agreement and hobbled towards the stove at the back of the room, pouring coffee into a couple of tin mugs and handing one over to Hart without asking.

  ‘Like I said before, Lefty’ll do till I can find someone better.’

  ‘I guess you know your own business, Herb.’

  ‘Knew enough to offer the job to you, didn’t I?’

  Hart grinned. ‘An’ I knew enough to turn it down.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Mosley. ‘Thanks a whole lot!’

  He settled himself back in his chair, leg stretched out straight, not bothering to conceal the wince of pain that caught him as he sat down.

  ‘Still troublin’ you some, huh?’

  ‘Some! The bitchin’ thing like to eat through me if I’d give it half the chance.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Hart watched as the sheriff pulled open one of the drawers alongside his desk and took out a bottle of whisky, pouring a stiff shot into his coffee and swilling it round. He held out the bottle towards Hart, who shook his head, no, and the lawman stoppered the bottle and set it away.

  ‘Guess you rode back this way for your share of the reward,’ said Mosley after a while.

  ‘Could’ve had somethin’ to do with it.’

  Hart and Herb Mosley had ridden out after a bank robber called Henry George Barlow and finally persuaded him to come in quietly. Since Barlow was dead at the time he wasn’t in any position to argue – and you can’t come any quieter than that. There’d been a three hundred dollar reward for Barlow dead or alive, along with a tenth of any money that was recovered. Neither Hart nor the sheriff had found as much as a damned cent.

  ‘Got a hundred an’ fifty dollars waitin’ for you,’ said Mosley. ‘Put it in the safe at the bank.’

  ‘Let’s hope no one takes it into their heads to make a withdrawal before we do.’

  Mosley shook his head. ‘Not in this town they won’t. Not as long as I’m sheriff.’

  Hart nodded. ‘Long as they ain’t what’s known as famous last words.’

  Mosley swallowed down some more of the coffee. ‘Finish this an’ we can get right on over. First thing you can do with it is buy me a drink. They got some new whisky at the hotel, all the way from Scotland. Tastes like nothin’ I ever knowed.’

  Hart set his empty mug down alongside the stove. ‘You ain’t never heard nothin’ ’bout those others involved in that Ely robbery along of Barlow? What was their names? Thomas an’

  ‘High-Hat Thomas an’ Cherokee Dave Speedmore.’

  ‘That’s them.’

  ‘Caught a rumor ’bout Speedmore a couple of weeks back. Stage held up between here an’ Salt Wells, up by Fallon. Five or six men an’ the driver reckoned he heard one of em called Cherokee. Figured him for a breed sure enough, but whether it was Speedmore or not, ain’t no way of knowing.’

  ‘He got money on his head? If it was him.’

  Mosley nodded, pushing himself up from his chair. ‘Same as Barlow. Three hundred dollars. You get Thomas along with him, that’s a lot of loose change rollin’ r
ound your pockets.’

  Hart thought about it all the way to the bank and he was still thinking about it when he and the sheriff were leaning against the hotel bar savoring the taste of good Scotch whisky.

  ‘Why don’t you leave it be? Goin’ up against some gang for that kind of money, maybe it ain’t worth it.’

  Hart shrugged. ‘Six hundred dollars ain’t to be sniffed at, Herb.’

  ‘You ain’t wantin’.’

  ‘Not now maybe. That ain’t to say come six months I won’t be on the ass-end of winter without more’n the price of a beer between me an’ nothin.’

  Mosley tapped the end of his stick against the boards. ‘Man chooses to live his life the way you do, he has to take that kind of risk.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Now if you was to take Lefty’s badge you’d get paid regular—’

  ‘An’ end up as fat and foul-tempered as he is.’

  Mosley sighed and sank the last of his glass. ‘I guess you think that comes from workin’ for an old cripple like me?’

  Hart snorted: ‘One thing I can’t stand it’s some old man feelin’ sorry for hisself. Wallowin’ in self-pity like a hog in its own mire.’

  The sheriff looked at Hart carefully, judging the tone of his voice.

  ‘When we went up against Barlow,’ said Hart, ‘you didn’t handle yourself so bad.’

  ‘Bad enough it needed you to pull me out from under that bastard’s gun. Ride back in an’ finish things off on your own.’

  Hart shrugged. ‘No more’n the way things broke.’

  ‘Like hell! If ever I wanted proof as to how much older an’ slower I got, that day set it all out for me like a picture book.’

  ‘You’re okay. Now stop griping and get another drink down you before I get tired of spending this reward money.’

  Hart called over the bartender and had both glasses filled. He was thinking that Mosley was right; thinking also that a slug in the wrong place would slow him down to the point where a deputy’s badge would be the most he could hope for. Then he’d be tied down to one place and likely forced to stick it out until some bunch of businessmen decided he wasn’t worth his pay and tossed him out of office and on to the street. That was one of the penalties you paid for being a regular lawman and settling down, you let yourself be the tool of other folk. Them as paid for the food you ate and the bullets you slid into the chambers of your gun. Hell, there had been a time when he thought to settle down, make a place for himself and a family, kids … but that had been a long time back and likely he’d been a different man. Although she hadn’t thought so. She’d have recognized him all to easily now, standing in some bar with whiskey in his hand and a Colt strapped to his leg, fixing to ride out after some outlaw or other for bounty.