Hired Guns Read online

  Behind his desk, Roland regarded his mining foreman with a flat, tolerant gaze. When he’d sent for the man first thing this morning he had fully expected this kind of reaction and part of him even felt a touch of empathy. But he couldn’t help it, he had to do what he felt rated the highest priority.

  “I guess I need to remind you, Mace,” he said calmly, “that your main purpose here—like everyone else present, including me—is as an employee of Dixon Enterprises. Yes, your primary duty has been overseeing the mining operation of the Gold Button and you’ve done a commendable job, even under the pressure of maintaining a decent yield out of a strike that hasn’t proven as rich as originally hoped for.”

  “I know my job, sir,” Vernon said stiffly. “And I’ve never complained about the pressure of keeping up an acceptable yield, even under tough circumstances. But because I know my job is why I’m protesting that yanking a half dozen men off my crew is gonna make it nearly impossible to keep up quota. I’m already working most of ’em twelve, sometimes fourteen hours a day. I don’t see how I can make up the difference for the loss of even a couple, let alone six.”

  “Whip some of those lazy Chinee a little harder, that’s all you gotta do,” spoke up Hack Ferris from where he sat slouched in a chair over against the wall.

  Vernon shot him a scathing look. “I don’t need no lip out of you, telling me how to run my crew. You want to worry about something, worry about that pack of so-called hardcases you’re supposed to be in charge of. Seems to me if they spent less time in the whore cribs and practiced with their six-shooters as hard as they do tipping up liquor bottles, maybe they could do a better job of hitting what they aim at and not get shot up so bad themselves!”

  Ferris started to shove up out of his chair and Vernon turned quickly, bracing to meet him.

  “Stop it!” Roland shouted, freezing both men. He stood up behind his desk, hands balled into fists that he slammed down hard on the polished surface. “Don’t I have enough aggravation without my two top men butting heads with each other? Don’t we all have too much invested in this valley?” Roland paused, but his expression stayed dark. “It was my father’s idea to bring in this Jensen character. Send him here and then have him apprehended, but make sure he was kept alive—those were his instructions. The same ones I passed on to Hack.”

  Roland looked at Vernon and went on, “I didn’t bother to tell you about any of that. There was no need for you to know or concern yourself. You still had your hands full with your mining responsibilities and there was every reason to expect that the apprehension of one lone stranger wouldn’t pose much of a problem.”

  Vernon frowned. “You say your father sent Jensen here—and then gave orders to capture him as soon as he showed up?”

  “Don’t try to make sense of it,” Roland said peevishly. “Some kind of ancient score the old man is looking to settle in some overly elaborate way. I’m not privy to all the details myself. I wish I didn’t know any of it, that none of us here had been brought into it at all. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.”

  “So what happened?” Vernon asked. “What went wrong?”

  “The stranger was a gun-twirlin’ bearcat we had no warnin’ to expect, that’s what happened,” Ferris said bitterly. “Add to that our orders to take him alive—havin’ to pull our punches, in other words, when it came to shootin’ back—and the slippery varmint got away from us. But before he did, he put the hurt on five of my men, two of ’em permanent-like.” The gun boss jabbed a thumb toward the lumpy bandage covering the back of his head, adding, “And he nearly cooked my goose, too.”

  Vernon’s mouth pulled into a tight line. He hesitated a moment, then said, “You got my regrets on the injuries and for losing some of your men. What I said before . . .”

  “That’s better,” Roland was quick to interject. “You two don’t have to like each other, but I need you to get along or at least not fight against one another. You understand? If we make it through this current rough patch, we have every right to find ourselves on the brink of a very sweet opportunity. Once all the modern equipment starts rolling in and those new shafts hit that sweet mother lode we’re assured is there waiting, then everything in this formerly remote corner of nowhere is going to change and change big. If my father’s plan for making over the valley and the town the way he envisions it starts to pan out—and I wouldn’t bet against the old pirate—we’ll be right there on the ground floor of it all. Shoot, I’m counting on being mayor of the new town. I’ll put you two fellas on my city council and set you up in prime businesses, whatever line you want.”

  Ferris’s eyebrows lifted. “I want a saloon! With dancin’ girls . . . Man, wouldn’t that be the life?”

  Vernon remained silent, not being so quick to get caught up in the fantasies Roland was painting.

  Returning to the realities of the present, a somber-faced Roland said, “But first we’ve got to finish clearing away these problems standing in our way. That annoying flea Tom Eagle still has to be swatted, but first and foremost is catching that Jensen scoundrel before he causes more trouble. In order to do that as quickly as possible, we need to throw a wide enough net. That’s why we need more men. Some of your miners, Vernon.”

  Showing signs of relenting somewhat, Vernon nevertheless saw fit to remind everybody, “That’s the thing, though. My men are miners, not hard-riding manhunters.”

  “You’ve got plenty of hombres on your crew who know how to ride,” Ferris said. “What’s more, I’m willin’ to bet some of ’em have wrapped their mitts around a six-gun somewhere along the way before they ever took up a pick handle.”

  “Surely you can select some adequate men,” Roland appealed to Vernon. “It’s only for a limited time. Hopefully just a day or so. Maybe it can be wrapped up as quickly as today. Our best chance for that is to act fast and make a wide sweep.”

  “We figure Jensen was kept holed up somewhere last night by the rain,” Ferris explained. “Since he don’t know the area and has no reason to stick around after the way we slammed the door on him, we’re guessin’ he’ll head back for Helena the same way he came in. That means goin’ through Balfour Gap off to the south. At first light, I sent most of my boys to ride out hard, aimin’ to get ahead of him and be ready to cut him off if he makes it that far. As soon as you can supply me some more men, I mean for them to join me and Dog DeMarist, my tracker. We’ll get on Jensen’s trail and either run him down or run him up against those boys I got waitin’ for him. Either way, we’ll clamp down on him and I don’t intend for him to squirt away from me again!”

  Vernon’s hands quit twisting his cap and he heaved a ragged sigh. “All right, I guess that’s how it has to be,” he said without enthusiasm. “Give me a few minutes to go round up some men.”

  “Just don’t send me none of them lazy Chinee,” Ferris told him.

  Vernon shot him another menacing look and Roland was quick to say, “You can trust Mace to pick men best suited for the job.”

  Vernon continued to glare at Ferris for a long count. Before going out the door, he said, “You see to it the men I give you come back in one piece. They don’t, I’m holding you personally responsible.”

  Chapter 20

  “That ungrateful pup! I never figured he had enough sand to pull a stunt like this.” As he made this declaration, Ben Pettigrew raked his eyes over all those gathered about him, almost like he was challenging anyone to take issue with his words.

  When a response came, it was from his wife Lucille, standing right beside him. The two made quite a visual contrast, him so broad and hulking, even balanced on the crutch that helped support him, her just a tiny slip of a woman but with a spark in her eye and a boldness to her posture and a lift in her chin when she spoke.

  “What did you expect?” she demanded of her husband in a biting tone. “Maybe if you hadn’t treated Heath so harshly and told him practically every day that he didn’t measure up to your idea of having enough sand, you wouldn’t
have driven him away.”

  Pettigrew’s mouth dropped. “You’re blaming this on me?”

  “I’m blaming it on all of us. All of us,” Lucille said, cutting her gaze to Tom and Jane Eagle, “who played a part in treating Heath and Belinda like children and not even showing them enough respect to hear them out and allow them to make their case for wanting to be together.”

  “We understood well enough their feelings for one another, Lucille,” Jane Eagle replied earnestly. “My goodness, none of us are so cold or ancient we don’t remember feeling that way ourselves.”

  “Why then? Why were we so determined to discourage them, to keep them apart?” Lucille wanted to know.

  Jane said, “I don’t agree that we brushed them off like children. But the fact is, my Belinda, even now, is only sixteen.”

  “And how old were you, Jane, when you and Tom married?”

  Jane faltered at giving a reply.

  “I already know the answer. Seventeen. Same as me. And I’ll bet most of the other married or formerly married women here weren’t a whole lot older.” Lucille looked around. “Am I wrong?”

  The encampment had woken that morning to the realization that two of its members—Heath Pettigrew and Belinda Eagle—had run off together during the night. Heath had left nothing in the way of an explanation.

  Belinda, on the other hand, had left a rather lengthy note pinned to her pillow and addressed to her mother. The crumpled slip of paper was even now clutched in Jane’s hand.

  Dearest Mother—Please do not worry or be vexed with me. Heath and I have gone off to be together. He will take good care of me. We are deeply in love and have reached the conclusion that this is the only way for us to have a life with each other. In town, before the trouble, it was bad enough but there still seemed hope. The way things are now, there may be none. This is not our fight and getting caught in it may ruin any chance for us if we don’t take this action. Please try to understand.

  All my love to Father, Davy, and you

  —Belinda

  It hadn’t taken long for the news of this surprising development to spread, and as each member of the refugee party heard, they came to the main canopy, gathering to discuss and offer whatever they could in the way of help. Not everyone present had been aware of the burgeoning romance between the two young people back in Hard Rock—“before the trouble,” as Belinda put it in her note—nor the way their parents had quashed it (or believed they had) back then. That bit of history was being revealed to all, along with the rest of what had now transpired.

  A grim-faced, obviously shaken Tom Eagle joined in the exchange between his wife and Lucille Pettigrew. This meant, out of necessity though he would have preferred to have kept it more private, also addressing everyone else who was gathered around.

  “Sometimes age—or maturity might be a better word—ain’t measured in just years. The fact of the matter is that Belinda, now at sixteen or even in another year or two at seventeen or eighteen, may still not be as mature as Jane was at that age. Probably the same for you, too, Lucille. I guess you could say we maybe sheltered her too much. Whatever the reason, that’s the way we saw it, her mother and me, when this whole thing started between her and Heath and why we discouraged it. It was never anything against your boy Heath. You and Ben had your own reasons for holdin’ him back.”

  “He wasn’t ready, neither,” Pettigrew stated. “If he’d have come to me like a man, face to face, and told me he wanted to strike out on his own, I would have had a chance to work with him a little bit, try to prepare him. But he never gave me a clue. The first I knew he had any notions along those lines—before this latest shenanigan—he was already wanting to haul off and get hitched. He was no more ready for that than I was for . . . for . . .”

  Eagle’s eyes narrowed. “For what, Ben? What weren’t you ready for?”

  Pettigrew stammered some more before finally managing a response. “For seeing my son make a fool of himself. For seeing him break his ma’s heart and . . . and everything else that a foolhardy thing like this could lead to.”

  “Like you someday havin’ grandchildren with Indian blood in ’em? Tell the truth. Ain’t that been your biggest objection to Heath and Belinda all along?” Eagle demanded.

  “You got no call to say that, Tom,” Pettigrew protested. “I was always square with you, always showed you the respect you earned and deserved as sheriff.”

  “Yeah, you put on a real good act whenever I was around,” Eagle said. “But what about some of the things you said behind my back about me and Indians in general? I didn’t even have to hear about ’em to know. I’ve been around people like you all my life and I already knew. I could smell it on you right from the first, the way you really felt about me bein’ a half-breed. You think you were the only one who thought about potential grandkids? You think I wanted any grandchild of mine growin’ up around your kind of hate?”

  “Stop it, the both of you!” Lucille said sharply. “This isn’t the time to let yourselves be distracted by that kind of bitterness.”

  “Lucille’s right,” Jane was quick to add. “If you two had all that resentment bottled up in you, you should have found a way to work it out long before this. Now is not the time.”

  Luke chose that moment to speak up from where he’d been standing quietly on the periphery of the gathering. “I know I’m a newcomer to all this, an outsider,” he said in a level tone as he stepped forward. “And I don’t know anything about the history between the two youngsters or the hard feelings that obviously have been brewing between their fathers. But what the mothers are saying is exactly right—none of that matters right now. The thing that does is the fact that Heath and Belinda may have placed themselves in danger and we should be concentrating on what to do about it.”

  The faces of Jane and Lucille immediately pinched with anxiety.

  “Now wait a minute, Jensen,” said Whit Barlow. “I know they’re not my kids so it’s easier for me to be a little calmer. But aren’t you laying it on a little strong with this danger talk? The parents are upset enough, no need to make it worse. What’s the big danger? It’s summer, the weather is agreeable, they took a decent amount of provisions with ’em. And they are nearly full grown. I suggest the best thing is to let ’em get this running-off notion out of their heads and they’ll come to their senses quick enough. The rest of today, probably tonight, maybe a stretch of the next day . . . by tomorrow evening I’m betting they’ll be showing up right back here on their own.”

  Before anyone else could say anything, it was Barlow’s tomboyish daughter Betty who responded, saying in a strong, clear voice, “You’re wrong, Pa.”

  Chapter 21

  Having caused all eyes to swing in her direction, Betty Barlow stood her ground and spoke the rest of what she had to say, directing her own gaze to the two sets of affected parents.

  “And so are the rest of you—wrong in the way you’re thinking. You’re still seeing Belinda and Heath as just a couple of kids. Children caught up in a romantic fantasy. You haven’t learned anything because you haven’t taken time to really listen to them, to what they want, to believe how truly in love they are. Belinda kept telling me how trapped they felt, how they didn’t see any—”

  Jane interrupted the girl. “Belinda talked to you about this? She told you they were going to run away together?”

  “She told me they were thinking about it, how they didn’t see no other way. But I never had no idea they’d made up their minds for sure, or that it was going to be last night.”

  “Did she say where they planned to go?”

  Betty shook her head. “No. She never talked about that.”

  Tom Eagle turned to his son. “How about you, Davy? Did your sister say anything to you about any of this?”

  The boy shook his head earnestly. “Uh-uh. I knew she was still moonin’ over Heath, but that’s all. I never had no idea they were planning to run off. Honest, Pa.”

  Lucille Pettigrew
stepped closer to Luke and gazed up at him with a deeply concerned expression. “What did you mean before when you said we should worry about them being in danger?”

  Luke looked down at her for a second before lifting his eyes and once more sweeping his gaze across the others. “I’d think it should be obvious to all of you. Who’s prowling that whole valley out there and doing so now with an extra dose of anger because of the toll I took on them yesterday?”

  “Hack Ferris and his boys—Dixon’s thugs,” Eagle said.

  Luke nodded. “They’ll be mainly on the lookout for me, but that certainly won’t stop them from pouncing if they should happen to catch sight of those youngsters. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Eagle grimaced. “Yeah. They’d pounce for sure.”

  Several of the women onlookers gave sharp intakes of breaths.

  “You must go after our children then, immediately,” implored Jane. “We can’t risk Heath and our daughter falling into the hands of those devils!”

  “I spoke wrong before. What you’re saying is on the mark, Jensen, and I’m a fool for not thinking of it sooner,” declared a scowling Whit Barlow. Turning to Eagle, he added, “I’d be proud to ride with you, Tom. Say the word and I can be saddled up in two shakes.”

  “Same for me,” said Howard MacGregor, the stocky, dour-faced farmer who’d had his crops burned and was run off his land. “I’ll have to borrow a horse but I’d sure welcome the chance to ride out against those burnin’, thievin’ scoundrels!”

  Suddenly, everybody seemed to be yammering excitedly all at once. Urging, offering advice, volunteering, asking questions . . . until Tom Eagle was forced to raise his arms and issue a shrill whistle to quiet things down.

  “Everybody take it easy! Give me a chance to think. I know you all mean well and you all want to help in your own way. But we need to calm down and take a minute to put together some kind of plan before we go chargin’ out like nothing more than an unruly mob!”