The Black Hills Read online

  “I’m done!” Stanley yelled at the sheriff. He glanced at Shep and Tye and then shifted his fear-bright gaze to Angus and yelled, “You Buchanons are pure mountain crazy!”

  He ran over to where a mouse-brown dun stood tied to a hitchrail. He ripped the reins from the rail, clambered into the saddle, reined the horse into the street, turned it north, and put the steel to it. The horse whinnied shrilly and lunged off its rear hooves.

  A gun roared behind Hunter. He whipped his head around to see Stillwell standing atop the porch of his office, extending his Colt straight out toward the fleeing deputy. The Colt bucked and roared three more times. The fleeing deputy screamed as he flew forward over his horse’s pole.

  The horse buck-kicked fearfully. The deputy rolled down over the mount’s right withers, hit the street, and rolled in a billowing dust cloud.

  One of the dun’s rear hooves clipped the man’s head with a dull thud, and the horse continued galloping north, screaming. The deputy lay in a twisted, bloody pile in the sifting dust.

  “Hold it, Stillwell!” Shep warned from the mercantile roof, aiming down his Henry’s barrel at the sheriff.

  He must have thought that Hunter would be Stillwell’s next target, since Hunter was the nearest Buchanon. He’d been wrong. Stillwell glanced from Shep to Hunter. He stood glaring for a moment, mute with rage, then swung around, holstered his pistol, crossed the stoop, and disappeared inside his office, slamming the door behind him.

  “Hunter!” Angus yelled as he rose from behind the rain barrel. “You all right, son?”

  Hunter only vaguely heard him. He was looking around at the dead men lying in growing blood pools. The only deputy alive was Buck Fowler, who remained in the fetal position, writhing miserably, pressing his hands to his crotch and cursing under his breath. Hunter could smell the blood and the viscera of the dead men around him, the rotten-egg odor of cordite. He’d never wanted to smell that stench again.

  Flames of rage began igniting again, rising up from the small of his back, as he turned toward the sheriff’s office.

  “Coward,” he snarled through gritted teeth. “You coward, Stillwell!” he shouted. “This was your fight, Stillwell! You started it! Get out here an’ finish it!”

  He looked around. A Schofield revolver lay in the street beside one of the dead deputies. Hunter picked it up, wiped the blood, dust, and horse manure from its barrel, and opened the loading gate. Four pills remained in the wheel. That was enough.

  “Hunter!” Angus bellowed behind him.

  Ignoring the old man, Hunter strode with grim purpose toward Stillwell’s office. He was halfway there when young Tye walked out from behind the harness shop.

  “Hunter, what . . . where you . . . ?” He stopped and frowned curiously as Hunter mounted the steps of the sheriff’s porch.

  Hunter crossed the porch, tried the door.

  Locked.

  Hunter stepped back and rammed his heavy left shoulder against the cottonwood door. It cracked down the middle but didn’t open. Hunter stepped back again, and again he heaved his shoulder against the door. This time the door burst open in two halves, wood slivers flying from the frame, the locking bolt clattering onto the office’s wooden floor.

  Hunter stopped when he saw Stillwell standing in an open doorway before him—the doorway to the cellblock. The sheriff aimed his Colt straight out from his shoulder, bunching his lips in fury.

  Hunter lurched back behind the building’s front wall just as Stillwell’s revolver roared once, twice, three times, the bullets hammering the inside wall opposite of where Hunter crouched, one slug screeching past him through the door to plunk into the street.

  Hunter jammed the Schofield around the doorframe and fired into the office. His bullet flew wide as Stillwell gave a startled cry and ran from Hunter’s right to his left, angling toward a glass window at the back of the room.

  Hunter fired two more rounds, and then Stillwell dove through the window in a shower of screeching glass. Hunter bounded across the room. Through the broken glass, he saw Stillwell gain his feet and run straight out away from the office.

  The cellblock was on the L-wing, to his right. Several prisoners, including a couple of females, laughed and jeered through their barred, glassless windows, one man shouting, “Stillwell, you yaller dog—I never knew you could run so fast!”

  “Hey, Stillwell—where’s the fire?” bellowed one of the females.

  “It’s in his drawers!” yelled another.

  Another man said, “Look at Stillwell imitatin’ a jackrabbit!”

  Hunter poked the Schofield through the broken shards jutting around the window frame. He purposefully pulled his shot wide, not wanting to shoot even Stillwell in the back. He was just venting his spleen. His bullet plumed dirt just inches off Stillwell’s hammering boots.

  The sheriff bulled through some brush, leaped into a wash, and disappeared.

  Behind him, the prisoners yelled and whistled, laughing raucously.

  “Hey, Buchanon—that you?” one of them called.

  Hunter slid his gaze to the third barred window from the cellblock’s far end. “That you, Clancy?”

  “Sure enough. Bring the key, will you?”

  Hunter thought about it. Clancy was a good ole boy from the ’Bama hills, probably locked up for drunk and disorderly and ordered to pay a hefty fine merely because he was born in Dixie. Since there was no one to tend the jail, with the bulk of Stillwell’s deputies lying dead in the street and the other, Fowler, in no condition for anything but a long convalescence, it would have been a crime to keep prisoners locked in the cellblock.

  Who knew where Stillwell had gone or whether he’d return? The man’s pride had likely taken quite a hit.

  Hunter took a key ring hanging from a ceiling support post and strode down the cellblock corridor. Prisoners to either side erupted in cheers, thrusting open hands through the bars. Hunter chose one large, scarred hand at random to offer the key to.

  “Thanks, Buchanon!” said the man to whom the hand belonged—Rascal Willis, a burly ore driver who worked for Ludlow and Chaney at the King Solomon. “I owe ya a beer!” He looked badly hungover—his hair was matted and tangled, and both eyes were black and swollen from a recent brawl.

  “Turn ’em all loose—will ya, Rascal?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure—hey, what happened out there in the street? We heard the shootin’!”

  Hunter had already left the cellblock and was heading for the door hanging in pieces from its frame. He paused to lean down and rip up the Confederate flag that Stillwell had been using as a mud mat. He balled it up and shoved it into Stillwell’s potbelly stove, giving the old guidon the proper disposal it deserved.

  As he stepped out through the broken door, he heard one of the prisoners yell in the cellblock behind him, “I don’t know for sure, boys, but I got me a feelin’ ole Stillwell got a goodly dose of the Buchanon boys!”

  The prisoners laughed and gave a raucous Rebel yell.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hunter dropped down the steps of the porch fronting Stillwell’s office. His father, old Angus, and brother Shep waited in the street near the bottom of the steps.

  Sixty-three years old, Angus was a leathery, sinewy old-timer with a full head of thick, coarse gray hair and a long bushy beard one or two shades darker than the hair hanging down from beneath his old Confederate campaign hat.

  His eyes, set deep in sun-seared sockets, were the same frosty blue as Hunter’s. He wore a buckskin shirt and canvas breeches held up with snakeskin galluses. A potbelly swelled the front of his shirt, and his shoulders owned a definite slouch.

  Still, there was a rough-hewn ruggedness about the elder Buchanon, whose friends back home had called Reb. His left sleeve was rolled and pinned up close to the stump. A corncob pipe and canvas makings sack jutted from a breast pocket.

  “Did you fix that badge-totin’, green-horned devil?” he asked his middle son.

  “No,” Hunter said, step
ping into the street before the two men facing him.

  “You all right, Hunt?” Shep asked.

  Two years Hunter’s elder, at six-feet-three he was equal in height but with a goodly portion of excess tallow. Hunter was all muscle. Shep excelled at blacksmithing and gunsmithing, and had the roast-size hands and thick neck to show for it. He held his Henry repeater on his shoulders, and his left gloved hand was closed over the stag-butted grips of his Remington.

  Shep moved up close to scrutinize Hunter’s face. “They gave you a good working over, they did.” He grinned suddenly, which was Shep’s way, his brown eyes flashing a boyish glee. “They ain’t in any condition to do it again.”

  Hunter didn’t share in his older brother’s easy nature. Especially when it came to killing. Hunter didn’t hold it against him. Shep had missed out on the killing fields of the war, but he hadn’t had it easy at home, tending the farm as well as seeing to young Tye and their ailing, bedridden mother, who’d died from consumption the year before Hunter and Angus had returned—a fact that still caused Angus to sob himself to sleep at night.

  “Anna sent for you, I’d fathom,” Hunter said.

  “That girl’s smarter’n a half dozen of you,” Angus said, narrowing his eyes in reproof at his middle boy. “You don’t deserve her, an’ I never thought I’d say that about a Yankee girl.”

  “I’m sorry you had to come.”

  “Well, the point is we had to, little brother,” Shep said, though there was nothing “little” about Hunter Buchanon. “If we hadn’t, it’d be you lying out there instead of Stillwell’s deputies.”

  “I know,” Hunter said grudgingly, glancing at the dead men once more. Turning back to his father and Shep, he said, “This is only the start of trouble—I hope you both realize that.”

  “Trouble from where?” Angus said. “Hell, Stillwell’s cut ’n’ run, and his deputies are saddling golden clouds and sailin’ off to the great beyond. All except Fowler, that is, an’ he’s a damn fool.”

  “Yeah, well, Stillwell’s not dead, and there’s more men from where these men came from.” He glanced at the dead deputies. “Besides, Stillwell’s got friends in high places.”

  He turned to look toward the King Solomon Mine office and diggings to the east. Graham Ludlow and Max Chaney had brought in Stillwell, who’d done a good job protecting their interests. They weren’t likely going to take it sitting down that their Yankee sheriff had gotten his hat handed to him by four ex-Confederate misfits from the western Hills.

  Especially when one of those misfits was courting Ludlow’s daughter against the elder Ludlow’s wishes.

  “Pshaw—it’ll all blow over in no time,” Angus said with hollow optimism.

  Hunter wasn’t so sure about that.

  Again, he looked at the dead men. The town sawbones, Dr. Norton Dahl, had come into the street with his black medical kit, probably having heard the crackle of gunfire from his office on the other side of town.

  The thirtyish, somewhat bedraggled, bespectacled medico was now tending the cursing and grunting Buck Fowler, who was casting dark, threatening glances toward the three Buchanons standing out front of the sheriff’s office. Meanwhile, the prisoners emerged from the cellblock, blinking against the sun and slapping Hunter on the back as they headed into the street to inspect the dead deputies before heading off for drinks in the Tigerville saloons.

  Hunter saw that Luke Chaney now lay in the street with the rest of Stillwell’s men. After dumping Chaney unceremoniously into the dirt, Young Tye had taken the wagon over to one of the saloons that had ordered ale from Angus, and was offloading a couple of beer kegs. That’s where the youngest Buchanon brother was now, accepting cash payment from the apron-clad Silver Dollar proprietor, Ralph Richmond.

  “You shouldn’t be goin’ around unarmed, boy,” Angus told Hunter now, gently but gravely, knowing they’d been over this ground before but hoping that after today his stubborn middle boy would listen to reason.

  “It wouldn’t have done me any good here, Pa.”

  “It would have given you a fighting chance!” Angus said, losing his temper. “You’re as muleheaded as your mother was, and that’s sayin’ somethin’!”

  “I know it is.” Hunter walked over to the old man, several inches shorter than he, and planted a kiss on Angus’s craggy, bearded cheek. “Thanks for saving my hide, though I know I don’t deserve it.”

  Angus flushed and turned away, customarily embarrassed by any show of affection while also basking in it.

  Hunter turned to Shep and repeated himself. “Thanks, brother.”

  “We didn’t do it for you,” Shep said, his eyes sparkling again with amusement. “We were worried what your girl would do to us if we . . .”

  He let his voice trail off as the thudding hooves of a galloping horse sounded.

  “Speak of the devil,” Angus said as he turned to see Annabelle Ludlow galloping hell for leather down the middle of the main street, from the south.

  She was approaching at a fast clip atop her buckskin, Ivanhoe, her dark red hair bouncing on her shoulders, eyes wide and fearful. When she got close to the dead men lying sprawled in the street fronting the jailhouse, she drew the buckskin to a skidding halt and looked around, surveying the scene of battle, likely wondering if Hunter himself lay among the dead.

  When she swung her head toward the jailhouse, her green eyes showed instant relief. Hunter stepped around his father and Shep, and walked over to where Anna sat astride the sweaty, dusty Ivan.

  “Oh, Hunter,” she said softly. Her expression changed to one of guilt, and she winced a little, turning her mouth corners down. “Are you . . . angry?”

  “At you?” he said. “How could that be? You saved my ornery hide.”

  She looked at the dead men again and gave a shudder of revulsion. “This is my fault.”

  “Hell, no, it ain’t,” Hunter said. “It’s Chaney’s fault. And Stillwell’s. None of these men needed to die here today. Stillwell’s a damn fool, and he should be among them.”

  Annabelle swung down from her saddle. She winced again as she walked up close to Hunter, who towered over her, and stared up into his face.

  Gently, she touched fingers to his battered cheeks. “They gave you a good working over, didn’t they?”

  “Looks worse than it is.”

  “You need some raw meat for that eye, salve for your lips.”

  “Later.”

  Hunter walked over to where his father’s and brothers’ horses were tied to a hitchrail in a break between the mercantile store and a ladies’ dress shop. He snagged the reins of Tyrell’s Appaloosa from the rack and swung up into the saddle.

  “Pa, have Tye drive the wagon home, will ya?” he said as he galloped past his father and brother, heading back toward Annabelle. “I’m gonna borrow his hoss!”

  “All right,” Angus said, staring after him speculatively. “You don’t be late for supper now, son,” he called with irony. “Be dark soon!”

  “Come on,” Hunter said to Annabelle, who scowled up at him curiously.

  “Where we going?” she asked.

  “I got somethin’ to show you.”

  “I’ve already seen it,” Annabelle said as she swung up onto the buckskin’s back, her eyes flashing coquettishly. “And I was right impressed.”

  Hunter grinned and snorted. He turned the Appy south.

  Annabelle followed him at a wild gallop out of Tigerville and into the countryside beyond. Bobby Lee loped out from the break between buildings he’d been soothing his nerves in, and followed them, a gray-brown ghost crackling through the brush along the trail.

  * * *

  A half hour later, after by turns walking and trotting their horses as the afternoon sunlight waned, casting long shadows out from the pine-stippled hogbacks rising around them, Hunter and Annabelle reined their horses to a halt on the third of three consecutively higher benches rising just north of the main trail.

  Hunter stared up pas
t yet a higher fourth bench toward a small, weathered log prospector’s cabin hunkered at the base of a limestone ridge that resembled a giant pileup of large boulders fused together by ancient lava. Brush and a few hardy trees grew out of the clefts and furrows between the rocks that jutted two hundred feet toward the gradually darkening sky.

  The cabin was on open government range; Hunter had stumbled upon it unexpectedly several years ago while out hunting. The cabin had probably been built by one of the first white prospectors to illegally hunt for gold in the Black Hills.

  Though old, it was still relatively weathertight and supplied with a working sheet-iron stone, a table and a few chairs, shelves for food, and a comfortable cot. Hunter figured the prospector who’d built the structure had abandoned it when he’d either been chased out of the Hills by the Sioux or he’d mined all the gold out of the mountain behind it.

  Hunter and Annabelle had put the cabin to good use after they’d met not far from here, when they’d both been out riding in the Hills, looking for game, and their love had blossomed. They often met here secretly, away from the prying eyes of Annabelle’s father and her foppish brother, Cass, to spend a long afternoon now and then in the best way known to both man and beast—making love.

  The cabin was their trysting place, known only to them, and their love play was what Annabelle was obviously thinking about now as she turned a devilish, glittery-eyed grin to Hunter and said, “Well, I guess I know what you have on your mind, Hunter Buchanon!”

  “I’ll do you one better than that!” Hunter batted heels against the Appy’s ribs and galloped on up the incline through pines and firs and a few scattered aspens.

  “What could be better than that?” Anna called behind him, laughing.

  Hunter galloped around behind the cabin and over to the base of the rocky ridge flanking it and which now threw thick, purple shade over the cabin and the forested bench around it. In the valley below the cabin and through which the trail from Tigerville snaked, appearing like a thin cream ribbon from this vantage, sunlight lay like molten copper in a long, deep mold.

  As Anna galloped up behind him, Hunter swung down from the saddle and dropped the Appy’s reins.