Guns of the Canyonlands (2 page)

Tyree had run into his kind before, a would-be hard case, probably with a local reputation as a fast gunman. Such men were not rare in the West. Boot Hills from Texas to Kansas and beyond were full of them.

Tyree, mindful of his decision to leave gun violence behind him, made up his mind right there and then to have no part of him.

“What will it be?” the bartender asked.

“Anything to eat around here?”

The bartender scratched under a thick sideburn, then nodded to a glass-covered dish at the end of the bar. “What you see is what I got. You like cheese? I got cheese and soda crackers.” He glanced behind him. “Maybe I got soda crackers.”

“It’ll do,” Tyree answered. “And a cold beer.”

“All I got is warm beer.”

“Just so long as it’s wet.”

The bartender found a plate, dusted it off on his apron and moved to the end of the bar. He fingered some chunks of yellow cheese onto the plate, added a handful of soda crackers, then set the plate in front of Tyree. From somewhere at his feet he came up with an amber bottle of beer, thumbed it open and laid it alongside the plate.

Tyree took a sip. It was warm and flat, but it cut the dust of the trail in his throat. The cheese smelled strong and the soda crackers were stale.

The man watched Tyree eat for a few moments, then asked, “Where you headed, Tex?”

Tyree shrugged as he picked a cracker crumb off his bottom lip. “No place in particular. Just passing through.”

“That’s a damn lie.”

The voice had come from behind him, that quick. That raw.

“What did you say, mister?” Tyree asked, his hazel eyes, more green than brown, moving to the towhead who was now standing square to him, straddle-legged, thumbs tucked into his gun belts.

“You heard me plain enough. I called you a damned liar.”

There was a vindictive challenge in the towhead’s words, the voice of one who had killed his man and was anxious to kill again.

A man can step away from a woman’s insult. He may feel that he’s all of a sudden shrunk to three feet tall, but he can swallow his pride and walk away from it. An insult from another male is a different matter entirely. There’s no walking away from that, not if a man wants to hold his head high and be judged and counted among other men.

This Chance Tyree knew, and he felt a familiar anger burn in his belly. The towhead was a reputation hunter acting out a timeworn ritual Tyree had seen before. This man would not be turned aside by talk, yet Tyree knew he had to make the attempt.

He popped a piece of cheese into his mouth and chewed, looking at the towheaded gunman reflectively, unhurried, seemingly lost in thought, like a man pondering the frailty of human nature. Finally he slowly shook his head, turned to the bartender and made a rubbing motion with his fingers. “Towel? Your cheese must have been feeling the heat because it was sure sweating considerable.”

The bartender laid both hands on the counter, his alarmed eyes slanting to the towhead. “Dave, I want no trouble in my place. You heard the stranger. If he says he’s passing through, then he’s passing through. Hell, he ain’t even carrying a gun.”

“I don’t believe that. He’s got one hid away fer sure.” The rat-eyed man at the table stood. He stepped beside the man called Dave. “We know why he’s here, don’t we, Dave? I say he’s tryin’ to fool us.”

“Sure we know why he’s here, Charlie,” Dave answered. “But he ain’t fooling nobody and that’s why he’s got two choices—ride on back the way he came or die right where he stands.”

Charlie smiled, showing prominent green teeth wet with saliva. “Better make your choice, stranger. This here is Dave Rinker. He’s killed more men than you got fingers. He’s fast on the draw, mighty fast.”

Tyree ignored both men and again turned to the bartender. “Where’s that towel?”

The man threw Tyree a scrap of dirty dishrag, then watched as the tall stranger wiped off his hands. He leaned across the bar, his mouth close to Tyree’s ear. “Now fork your bronc and ride on out of here, Tex, like the man says,” he whispered. “The food and the beer are on the house.”

“Much obliged,” Tyree said. He turned to face Dave Rinker, a slight smile tugging at his lips. “Now all Mr. Rinker has to do is apologize for that ill-considered remark about my honesty, and I’ll be on my way.”

To Rinker, this was the grossest kind of affront. He was a man used to bullying lesser men, who spoke and acted respectfully, wary of his low-slung Colts. Tyree’s quiet demand had thrown him. The big gunman’s jaw almost dropped to his chest and his pale blue eyes popped. “Me, apologize to you? Apologize to a two-bit hired bushwhacker? The hell I will.”

“Owen Fowler sent for you, didn’t he?” Charlie asked, a taunting note in his voice. “Admit it, Tex. Didn’t that no-good preacher killer send for you?”

The other man at the bar, the gray-haired oldster in puncher’s clothes, stepped away, opening space between him and Rinker. “I ain’t waiting for apologies or otherwise,” he said, his wary eyes lifting to Tyree standing cool and ready. “I’m ridin’.”

Rinker laughed. “You scared, Tom? Hell, I can shade this saddle tramp.”

“Maybe,” Tom said. “Maybe not. Either way I don’t plan on sticking around to find out.”

After the old puncher swung quickly out of the door, Tyree said, “Care to make that apology now, Rinker?”

A tense silence stretched between the two men, the saloon so still that the soft rustling of an exploring rat in the corner was unnaturally loud. Then the bartender spoke, his words dropping into the taut quiet like rocks into an iron bucket. “Maybe he’s telling the truth, Dave. Maybe Owen Fowler didn’t send for him. He could be just passing through like he says.”

“Zack, you shut your trap,” Rinker said. “I know why he’s here. He’s sold his gun to Fowler all right. You know I got no liking for Fowler, so now this is between Texas and me.”

“The worst and last mistake you’ll ever make in your life, Rinker,” Tyree said, his voice suddenly flat and hard as he moved his coat away from his gun, “is to keep pushing me. So go back to your drinking and just let it be.” He smiled, forcing himself to relax. He decided to make one final attempt to get this thing to go away. “But just to show there’s no hard feelings, I’ve decided to pass on the apology. I’m going to let bygones be bygones.” He nodded toward the door. “Now will you give me the road?”

“Sure,” the big gunman said, full lips stretched wide in a cruel grin under his sweeping yellow mustache, “you can go through that door—with four men carrying you by the handles.”

Rinker was ready, his hands close to his guns. There was a strange light in the man’s eyes, a glowing mix of sadistic joy and the urge to kill that Tyree recognized only too well from past experiences. He knew right then that this man would not let it go.

Then Dave Rinker went for his gun.

Tyree drew fast from the waistband, and his first bullet hit Rinker square in the chest. Another, a split second later, crashed into the man’s forehead, just under the rim of his hat.

The big towhead convulsively triggered a round that thudded into the sod roof. Then his Colt dropped from his hand as he slammed backward onto the table, sending Charlie’s bottle and glass flying. Rinker tumbled off the table and fell flat on his back, his stunned eyes wide, unable to believe the manner and the fact of his dying. The gunman tried to say something but the words wouldn’t come. He rattled deep in his throat and blood bubbled scarlet and sudden over his lips. His glazed stare fixed on the glow of the lamp above his head . . . but by then he was seeing only darkness.

Hammer back, Tyree’s gun swung on Charlie. But the little man threw up his hands and screamed, “No! Mother of God, no! Don’t shoot! I’m out of this!”

“Shuck that gun belt and step away from it, or I’ll drop you right where you stand,” Tyree said.

Charlie’s trembling fingers quickly unbuckled the gun belt like it had suddenly become red-hot and let it fall. He backed toward the door, looking down at Rinker, a tangle of shocked emotion in his eyes.

“But Dave was fast,” the man whispered, shaking his head in disbelief. “He was the fastest around.”

“Had he ever been to Texas?” Tyree asked.

“No . . . I mean, I don’t think so.”

Tyree nodded. “Figures.”

From force of long habit, he punched the empty shells out of his Colt, reloaded, then stuck the big revolver back in his waistband. He turned to the bartender.

“You saw what happened. I didn’t want this fight and Rinker was notified.”

The man opened his mouth to speak, but said nothing, his Adam’s apple bobbing like he was trying to swallow a dry chicken bone.

“What’s your name, bartender?” Tyree asked.

“Zachary,” the man answered finally, his stunned, haunted eyes a mirror image of Charlie’s. “They call me Zack Ryan, when they call me anything.”

Tyree motioned toward the dead man. “Well, Zack Ryan, will you take care of this?”

The bartender gulped, then nodded. “Sure, sure, Tex, sure. Anything you say.”

Tyree dug into the pocket of his pants and chimed three silver dollars onto the bar. “A man should be buried decent,” he said. “Lay him out fitting and proper in his best suit, and get a preacher to say the words.”

“I’ll do it,” Ryan said, nodding again, his face gray. “I’ll do right by him.”

Tyree lifted a hand. “Thanks for the beer and the food.”

He turned and stepped toward the door, his spurs ringing like silver bells in the sullen, smoke-streaked silence.

“Wait,” Ryan said, his curiosity overcoming his fear. “Did Owen Fowler really send for you?”

Tyree stopped in his tracks. “Who the hell,” he asked, a vague anger tugging at him, “is Owen Fowler?”

 

Chance Tyree ground out his cigarette butt on the heel of his boot, then swung his long leg back into the stirrup. “Well,” he said, to no one but himself, as is the habit of men who ride lonely trails, “maybe I’ll meet this Owen Fowler one day. Then him and me will have words.”

Tyree shook his head and kneed the dun forward in the direction of the flats.

He harbored no illusions about Crooked Creek.

The town would be the same as the last he’d visited, and the ones before that. The warm beer and raw whiskey would taste the same. The same choking yellow dust would cloud the street and the people would be as he’d found them in all the other towns he’d passed through, uncompromising men and women bred hard for a harsh land where nothing came easy.

Tyree was thirty years old that summer of 1883, and behind him lay a decade of gun violence, rake-hell years of blood, fury and sudden death. Many times he’d walked the line between what was lawful and what was not. In those days to be young and brave and full of fight were qualities other men admired, that fleeting moment of blazing, reckless youth when the old sat quietly in the shadows and watched and wondered and said nothing.

His ma had died giving birth to him. His pa had grieved for a while, then taken a new wife. Tyree had been raised hard and tough, knowing little of parental warmth or affection. His pa was too occupied with trying to wrest a living out of a two-by-twice ranch on a dusty creek south of the Balcones Escarpment.

When he was thirteen, his pa had given him a swaybacked grulla horse and four dollars and told him it was time for him to leave and seek his fortune. “Things are tough around here, Chance,” he’d said, “what with cattle prices the way they are an’ all. I got your new ma and the three younkers to care of an’ I just don’t have the money to feed you and put clothes on your back no more. So you see how things are with me here.”

Tyree turned his back on the ranch without regret and spent the next seven years drifting, working in the hard school of the cow camps and the long, dangerous drives up the trails to Kansas.

During those years he bought his first Colt revolver and learned how to use his fists. By the time he was eighteen he was counted a man and respected as a top hand.

He’d just turned twenty, still lacking a man’s meat to his wide shoulders, when he’d first sold his gun. Tyree had ridden with John Wesley Hardin, the Clements brothers and the rest of the wild DeWitt County crowd in the murderous Sutton-Taylor feud. He’d learned his trade well, patiently tutored by Hardin, a fast, deadly and pitiless gunfighter who had shown him the way of the Samuel Colt’s revolver and taught him much of the men who lived by it.

Since then Tyree had hired out his gun in five bitter range wars, worn a town-tamer’s tin star twice and for six months had ridden the box as a scattergun guard for the Lee-Reynolds Stage Company out of Dodge.

Tyree had been shot once, by a gunman named Cord Bodie, who did not live long enough to boast of it. Three years later he’d taken a strap-iron arrow in the thigh during a running fight with Comanche on the Staked Plains.

He stood three inches over six feet in his socks and weighed a lean two hundred pounds that year, all of it muscle crowded into his shoulders, chest and arms, the tallow long since burned out of him by sun, wind and a thousand trails through the wild country. When circumstances dictated, he’d suffered from the bitter cold of the high mountains like any other man, cursed the sweltering, gasping heat of the desert and gulped at the thick, fetid air of the Louisiana bayous and fervently wished himself somewhere else. But Tyree had the capacity to endure, to reach down deep and draw on a seemingly bottomless reserve of strength and will, and that was what set him apart from lesser men and made him what he was.

If asked, the only reason he would give for riding into the Utah canyonlands was that he wanted to see a place he’d never seen before, to stand and wonder at its beauty and lift his nose to the talking wind.

Like most of his restless breed, he knew that the iron road, the telegraph and the sodbuster’s plow were changing the vast Western landscape forever. Soon it would all be gone and there would never be its like again. Not in his lifetime, nor in any other.