Blood of Eagles Read online

  “If not the Barlows, then who?”

  “Have you ever heard of Falcon MacCallister?” a voice asked. The gray man from the wagon stood in the doorway.

  DeWitt turned and squinted at him. “Sypher,” he rumbled. “What are you doing here?”

  “You have trouble, Asa,” Sypher said. His shrewd eyes flicked from one to another of them, and back to DeWitt. “You and your men have been identified from that job in Colorado.”

  “That’s impossible,” DeWitt growled. “We left no witnesses.”

  Behind the desk, O’Brien edged away, trying to fade into the shadows. At a sharp glance from DeWitt he shook his head. “I’ve got no part of this,” he muttered. “I just sell—”

  “We’re all in it together,” DeWitt said. “Now shut up.” He turned back to Sypher. “They don’t know who took that money,” he insisted. “Nobody alive back there to say.”

  Sypher glared at him. “Do you think J. L. Horner is a fool? I told you to cover your tracks, Asa. The ‘Hiram Pasco’ thing was sloppy. You think they don’t keep track of their security? Horner’s people had you pegged within a day, and Kansas Pacific has issueda circular on you. I intercepted their message. They’ve called in a top gun to track you down. You and the five with you. Another thing, too. When I was at Dodge there was a wagon party taking on riders. Seems some of their men left for the Neutral Strip, looking for some outlaws that murdered a family over in Colorado. Said they raped the women, killed everybody and ran off with a prairie schooner.”He gestured with a thumb. “Like that one out there across the street. Looks like you and your boys are attracting quite a crowd, Asa.”

  “Stop calling me Asa!” DeWitt rumbled. “Around here I’m Colonel Amos DeWitt. Keep it that way! Did you bring the right-of-way papers?”

  “They’re in my valise,” Sypher said. “Noted and sealed. Says there’ll be a main line coming right through here. So let’s get to moving some acres.”

  “O’Brien will post the papers and mark the map.” DeWitt nodded. “This will bring the big money in.”

  “Then we better clean out those Barlows and all the other squatters,” Obermire pointed out. “Startin’ with that Barlow bunch. I’ll pick out the men, colonel. I’ve got some tough boys that’d just love to cut down the jaspers that took their saddle stock.”

  “We need to find out who killed Folly,” Casper reminded.

  Sypher glanced at each of them, his eyes hooded. “More problems, Asa?”

  “Nothing we can’t handle,” DeWitt spat. “You said the Kansas Pacific sent for a top gun. Who is it?”

  “They sent for Falcon MacCallister.”

  “Falcon MacCallister’s dead,” DeWitt said. “Billy Challis and Tuck Kelly ran across him outside Dodge. Billy killed him.”

  Sypher frowned. He knew about MacCallister. The man was a legend. The idea of Billy Challis putting him under ... well, it didn’t sit right. “Are you sure?”

  Out in the street the noise level increased as several battered wagons rolled past from the east, led by weather-hardened riders and followed by flocks of muddy children herding livestock.

  O’Brien peered out the dirty window. “Westers. They’ve come across the territories. They’ll be lookingto buy land.”

  Sypher stepped to the window, and sneered. “Them? They don’t look like they’ve got a nickel among them.”

  “These farmers’ll fool you sometimes.” O‘Brien shrugged. “I’ve seen ’em that wouldn’t spare six bits to put shoes on their young’uns, but they’ll come up with plenty of hard cash where land’s concerned. They’re all dirt crazy. Live in a pigsty and spend five, ten, thousand dollars on a barn. Never know what they got squirreled away in those wagons, either.”

  Casper Wilkerson glared at the salesman. “Oh, shut up, O‘Brien. You make me sick. We got squattersan’ bounty hunters to worry about, and all you think about, is fleecin’ farmers.”

  O‘Brien bristled, drawing himself up in a self-righteouspose. “You think town lots and planter plots sell themselves, Mr. Wilkerson? You think I don’t work damn hard for what we bring in around here? You just look at that map there! Those little tracts turn seven hundred to a thousand dollars apiece every time I hand over a deed. Why, I’ve got some parcels I can get fifteen hundred for, cash money. And twice that, if they get vacated so I can sell ’em again! Don’t you never look down your nose at me, Mr. Wilkerson! I’m the man that pays the bills around here!”

  DeWitt growled—a deep contemptuous rumble. He wondered if anybody besides himself and Sypher really saw what was at stake here. All of this, this finagling of lands and claims, was just a sham. O’Brien’s suckers were only the prime for the pump. As the claims were cleared, the town grew. And with the town came authentication of the fable that there would be a railroad.

  Hell, the rails might actually come this way if there was market enough to support them!

  The real money was out there, just watching and getting hungry—big money, maybe a million dollars or more, just waiting to be taken when eastern investorssaw an established town with patents on a railhead and no way to prove that the “railroad” plans were fake.

  But Wilkerson was right. There were some problemsthat had to be attended to before the real playersbegan to show up. He turned. “Kurt, send somebody out to the Spring place. Get Billy and Tuck back here. Billy’s had plenty of time to get well. They can help you clean out those nesters.”

  “I don’t need Billy Challis to clean out nesters,” Obermire asserted. “He’s loco as a jimsoned cow. You just keep him out of my way. I’ll clean out the Barlows.”

  DeWitt was fed up with the talk. “Then do it, Kurt! By the time Billy and Tuck get here, I want the squatters off that creek, and that mob of yours looking like an army.”

  Out on the street, a muddy old spring wagon with a bone-tired horse pulled up in front of the Emporiumand three people climbed down. The man was a shaggy weathered old graybeard with sagging galluses,a slouch hat, and run-down boots. The old woman was tired and feeble, and it took both the man and the younger woman—a sad-eyed slip of a girl no more than twenty—to help her down.

  They unstrapped a rocking chair from the shabby contents and set it on the Emporium porch, then helped the old woman into it. The old man fussed around his horse for a minute, then looked around bleakly, said something to the girl, and went inside.

  The commotion had attracted the attention of some of the men prowling the street, and a crowd of hecklers gathered, preening for the girl.

  “Will ye look at that, Moss?” a man said, grinning. “Grow ’em skinny where this lot’s from, don’t they?”

  “Skinny an’ dirty,” another said, laughing. “But you never can tell. With a old dress like that, a man just can’t see whether they’s anythin’ underneath worth lookin’ at. Tell ye what, though, I’d wager five dollars there’s some prime possum underneath there, if it was scrubbed a little.”

  On the porch, the girl glanced around, frightened.The other wagons, the ones they had been following, were gone now, out of sight down the bending street. The old woman seemed oblivious. As the laughing men edged closer, closing in on their prey, other people turned away, pretending not to notice. Moss and Newby and their crowd were rough men, and they wore the yellow flags of vigilantes.

  The girl looked this way and that, then glared at the nearest ones in defiance. “Y’all just let us alone!” she demanded. “We ain’t hurt nobody.”

  “My, my, Moss. You hear that? The little mudhen has a voice. Sounds like Tennessee hills, don’t she?”

  “Sounds just like music,” a vigilante said, grinning.“I’ll take the bet, though. I don’t think there’s nothin’ but skin an’ bones under them rags. Let’s us have a look.”

  Brett Archer had just stepped out of one of Paradise’stent-flap saloons. It took only a moment to see what was happening, and he started that way, his eyes glittering. But others were there ahead of him. As Moss reached for the girl, a hand closed on his a
rm and swung him around. He found himself staringup into the narrowed eyes of another vigilante—a quiet slope-shouldered outlaw named Cass Jolly.

  “That’s enough, Moss,” Cass growled. “You’ve had your fun. Now let her alone.”

  Moss blinked, and glanced around. His buddies were neatly flanked by several other night riders, all looking businesslike. Cutting his eyes back to Cass he said, “You bracin’ me, Cass Jolly? What the hell do you care?”

  “I was raised to mind my manners around women,” Cass said quietly, “and I expect other gents to do the same.”

  “Don’t put on airs with me!” Moss spat. “You’re no better than me. They got warrants on you in Missouri,just like me in Arkansas!”

  “I’ve had my bad turns,” Cass nodded. “Same as most of us around here. But bein’ outlawed don’t mean a man has to act like a waller hog!”

  Moss might have started the ball then, but a whang-tough drifter named Dawson crowded in, glaring at him. “I’m takin’ a hand in this,” the man said. “There’s things I won’t stand for.”

  The set-to lasted only a moment. Then Moss and his friends pulled loose and walked away, grumbling.

  Brett Archer waited a bit, then strolled along a muddy boardwalk and sidled up to a cluster of yellow-bandedhard cases. “What’s going on, Cass?” he asked. “Everybody seems almighty edgy.”

  The man only glanced at him. “Squatters an’ horse thieves,” he grumbled. “First they send Jacksonan’ some of the boys into a shootin’ gallery. Now the squatters are offerin’ to sell back the horses they lost.”

  “Enterprising bunch, seems to me.” Brett grinned.

  “You think it’s funny?” Cass hawked and spat. “Men get on edge, that’s when the skunks show their stripes. You saw that business with the squatter girl. Some jaspers don’t draw the line when they go bad. Me, I’ve had about all I can stand.”

  “But you hired on for the Vigilance Committee, didn’t you?”

  “Sure I did. Keep the peace and run off a few squatters. That was all. DeWitt may pay gun wages, but I don’t see him payin’ war wages.” He surveyed the street sardonically. “We got us some outlaws here, an’ then we got some plain rotten people. The milk’s separatin’, Archer. Them big shots better do somethin’ about this mess, or I’m fixin’ to move on. Lot of the boys are gettin’ fed up.”

  “Pretty well restricts a man when the law’s after him, doesn’t it?” Brett asked innocently.

  “My personal problems are none of your damn business!”

  “No, I guess not. But you know, if it was me I’d be thinking about settling down around here someplace.Law can’t bother a man where there isn’t any law ... or where he and his good neighbors can get together and make their own.”

  Some of the men around Cass were listening, now. “What do you mean by that?” Bob Hudgins demanded.

  Archer shrugged. “I mean, maybe some of you boys got dealt a bad hand. Happens sometimes, a man gets caught up in circumstance and next thing he knows the law is after him. And maybe being outside the law is the only choice he’s got, then. I know there are men around here who can’t go where they choose, even if they never started out to be outlaws. But it seems to me there isn’t any better place than right here to get a fresh start, if a man wants to.”

  “Here? You mean the Neutral Strip?”

  “Why not? This is No Man’s Land. No real law here, but there’s still right and wrong. Looks to me like a man could make whatever he wants out of it.”

  Aside, the drifter Dawson slitted his eyes. “Sounds like another feller I know,” he mused. “Like somethin’Falcon MacCallister might say.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Cassius Barlow hauled the old surrey to a stop on a ridge where scrub cedar clumps ended at a washoutcliff. Tying off his reins, he set the brake and stood, looking out across rough lands. “Fur piece f’m Rocky Top,” he muttered. “But I reckon it’ll do.”

  The arid breaks and scrub hills were truly a “fur piece” from the Cumberlands of Cassius’s youth and the brooding Tennessee slopes where he had set his stick so many years ago. Those hills were far away now, and in another life.

  Cassius had seen little but hard times in his sixty-oddyears on God’s Earth. Now he was a thousand miles from the old places he remembered, and still seeing hard times. He faced each day in the Neutral Strip just as he had faced every day of his life—with the stubborn fierce determination of a man who knows he can’t always win but has no mind to lose gracefully.

  Down the hill from where he had stopped, a man waited for him among the canvases and cookfires of a passel of Barlows and kin. Even from up where he stood, Cassius could see the stranger—a tall thick-shoulderedfigure standing at ease among men who would kill him as quick as lightning if he gave them cause. The man stood taller than most around him, and Cassius could almost feel the force of his eyes looking back at him from that far away.

  Even from there, the old man knew that this was a man to be reckoned with. The stranger stood tall, easy, and unconcerned, and something about him reminded Cassius of storm clouds just like those standing now above the westward hills.

  Cassius looked up at the darkening thunderheads, then back at the encampment. That man—that big moon-blond man waiting down there—he was like the clouds. He went where he would, casting a long shadow. And under the solemn presence of him, lightning lurked.

  Cassius was reminded of some of the old bunch back in the high-up hills. A breed apart, they were, and they strode the lands above Big Lick before the war came and thinned them out.

  Nothing had ever come easily along Big Lick. Two wives and five of Cassius’s children rested now in those hills back home, in the same soil that covered Cassius’s sister and two brothers and other kin. There were Barlows, Smiths, Landons, and Higginsesback there, and they were all cut from the same cloth, and all kin.

  That had been a hard life, like the one which shaped up to be out here in the west. Cassius knew no other kind, and only two kinds of people who mattered. There were kin, and there were others. Kin might bicker and brawl, but they hung together as clans do ... as the Barlows had, even through the war years and the worse times that followed.

  Kin followed kin. When Cassius decided, three years ago now, that it was time to pick up and move, the kin moved, too. The young ones led the way, spreading westward until Leotus sent word that there was land to be had past the territories. The word spread, and family by family they had filtered into this strip called No Man’s Land.

  It was Leotus, Cassius’s oldest still standing, who staked the first claim, and those who followed gatheredto his digs. It was the Lord’s work that Frank and Haden and their grown boys were there when the raiders came—the Lord’s work, and a word of warning from a stranger.

  Must have been some kind of a sight, Cassius mused, when those night riders came down on Leotus’s little place and met more than they’d bargained for. Two Barlows and a Higgins cousin were buried now on the rise above Leotus’s field, but they had good company. In the breaks below them, a full dozen vigilantes lay sod-planted and duly prayed over. Maybe two, three, more were put down in that squalid little town that they came from, too.

  And that man down there—that towheaded big man waiting for him—had a hand in how all that went. MacCallister, his name was. Falcon MacCallister.Leotus knew him to call by name, and Leotus said he was worth meeting with. They waited down there now, for council.

  When you’ve seen one Barlow, some said, you’ve seen them all. Forged in the unforgiving ranges of Appalachia, tempered by event and circumstance, they were people cut to a pattern, and that was the pattern of the hills.

  At the Rabbit Creek encampment, Falcon MacCallisterrested easy while he waited for the patriarch of the Barlow clan. All around him people came and went, and he observed them. There were Higginses and Taylors, Smiths and Landons, and some by other names, but they were all Barlows, and all carriedthe mark of the hills.

  They gave him coffee so
strong you could stand a spoon in it, and a bait of oats for Diablo, but few words were passed. He was a stranger, and these were not trusting people. They let him be, and he waited. The rolling hills darkened to the west, where thunderhead clouds climbed the sky. On a ridge out there, riders paused, crowding up in a wide ring around a lone figure in a surrey. Though Falcon had never met him, he knew who it was—the patriarchwas here. Falcon had asked for words with CassiusBarlow, and Cassius Barlow had come.

  Thunder rolled across the hills as the surrey rattledinto camp, followed by its dour escort, fifteen riders in all. It wasn’t until they were close that Falconnoticed three of them were women. They wore britches and rode like men, and the rifles they carriedwere as sure in their hands as any man’s.

  One of them rode directly to Falcon and looked down at him—her pretty face under a slouch hat. When she pushed the hat back to squint at him, he saw bright auburn hair. “I’m Becky Barlow,” she said. “Yonder’s Granddaddy Cassius. He’ll see you directly.”

  “Obliged,” Falcon said.

  “Knowed your daddy,” the old man said. “Only reason I come. So speak your piece.”

  Cassius Barlow sat on a cottonwood stump, flanked by sons and nephews, and Falcon gazed at him. Here was a man, he knew, who had met life head-on, every day of his life, and fought it to a draw. Here was one who had never asked quarter, and never surrendered.

  “I want you and yours to help,” Falcon said.

  “Help you? Why?”

  “Not me. I skin my own cougars. I want you to help yourself. You folks have come to settle here. If anybody can do it, you can. But there’s a rattlers’ nest that needs cleaning out, and that’s your problemmore than mine.”

  “You mean that bunch at Paradise.” Cassius spat. “They done made their run at us. We laid gospel on ’em.”

  “That was just a few.” Falcon shrugged. “When they come at you again, they’ll come in force. Those men are in a game with high stakes, with money on the table. They want the land, Barlow. They want all the land, and nobody but their own on it.”