Riders From Long Pines Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART 2

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART 3

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Feeling Lucky?

  Stunned by the ranger’s pitching the gun at his feet, Quinn eyed the weapon lying in the dirt. He considered his odds while a drum pounded hard, sharp beats inside his forehead, inside his swollen chin. He looked up and caught the cold, killing look in the ranger’s eyes and heard Maria say quietly, “Sam, don’t do this. Don’t kill him.”

  “See what he’s doing?” Quinn said over his shoulder to the other two. “He wants me to make a move for my shooting iron. He wants me to grab it and come up fighting. But I see through his plan.” Staring at the ranger, he gave a tense, knowing grin. “He took all the bullets out of my gun. Didn’t you, Ranger? My gun’s not loaded, is it?”

  Sam stood staring calmly, at ease, yet with his gun hand poised at his side. “There’s only one way you’ll ever know for sure, Quinn.”

  SIGNET

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, May 2009

  Copyright © Ralph Cotton, 2009

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

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  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  eISBN : 978-1-101-03275-6

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  For Mary Lynn . . . of course

  PART 1

  Chapter 1

  Arizona Ranger Sam Burrack stood at the front corner of an adobe apothecary building, staring up the wide dirt street toward the Wycliffe Bank and Trust Company. A few minutes earlier he’d watched three of four men walk into the bank, each of them wearing riding dusters much like the one he himself wore. The fourth man had stooped down between two of the horses, the reins to all the animals in hand. He appeared to inspect one of the horse’s forelegs.

  Each of the three who’d walked inside carried saddlebags over their shoulders—empty of course, Sam noted. Each wore his hat pulled low on his forehead. As they had entered the bank, Sam had seen them pull their bandannas up to cover their faces. Any minute now they would come running out, guns blazing, as always, he told himself. He was ready.

  A block past the bank, he saw Maria standing at the corner of an alleyway, also wearing a riding duster, hers concealing the double-barrel she held against her thigh. Sam didn’t have to wonder if she was ready. Maria was always ready. He smiled slightly to himself, realizing that to anyone absently watching she would look like any other teamster or trail hand milling about on the boardwalk. He hoped so anyway.

  The four robbers were known as the Stockton Gang, gunmen out of New Mexico. They were bank robbers, killers and rogues to the man. There was once six members in the gang, but Sam had put two of them out of business. He had killed one, Ned Bramlet, four months earlier when he trapped Bramlet and “Curly” Lee Krebs in a brothel outside Templeton.

  Seeing his saddle pal Bramlet die with his chest blown open had taken an immediate toll on Curly Lee’s courage. He’d given up without a fight. Sam had watched him draw a ten-year sentence in Yuma Penitentiary only six weeks ago. It had been Curly Lee who had tipped him about the upcoming bank robbery in Wycliffe.

  How had Curly known?

  Not only had he known, Sam reminded himself, but he’d actually called this job right down to the day, almost to the hour. Interesting. Sam considered it, realizing that no robbers he’d ever come upon in his years as a lawman ever knew this far in advance where their next job would be. These kinds of men were never that well organized. The fact that Curly had called this job so closely meant only one thing. There was someone higher-up calling the shots. But who? He’d have to give the matter more thought when he had time.

  Up the street, out in front of the bank, Stanton “Buckshot” Parks stood up from the pretense of inspecting the horse’s foreleg. He looked back and forth, then across the street, where he caught a glimpse of a familiar face before its owner ducked out of sight behind a tall saguaro cactus. “Damn it to hell,” Parks growled under his breath. The face he’d seen had been that of Clayton Longworth, chief detective of the Midwest Detective Agency. Clayton Longworth never went anywhere alone, Parks thought.

  He looked all around again, then toward the door of the bank, then toward the corner of an alley running alongside the new stone and adobe bank building. Any minute now, Charley Stockton and the Dolan brothers, Cap and Erry, would come out, right into a trap, he told himself. His job was to keep watch and hold the horses. He’d done that well enough. But now that he saw what was awaiting them, he couldn’t think of any reason for him to stay there, other than loyalty.

  Well . . . loyalty had its place, he thought, but this wasn’t it. Crouching down, laying the reins to
all of the horses over the hitch rail, he slipped out from among the animals, around the edge of the boardwalk and into a dusty alleyway. As soon as he felt the shadow of the alley engulf him, he broke into a hard run and didn’t stop until he reached a corral full of horses behind the town livery barn.

  No sooner had Parks slipped away into the alley than the ranger had also caught sight of Detective Chief Longworth. As soon as he saw the detective, he shot a look toward Maria. Had she seen Longworth? He wasn’t sure, and he needed to know before the fight started and Maria stepped forward and Longworth mistook her for one of the Stockton Gang and—

  It was too late. The door of the bank burst open. The three robbers ran out, guns in the air, firing wildly, creating panic in order to make their getaway. But now Sam’s main concern was Maria. He watched her step forward from her position and swing the shotgun up from under her duster. He saw Longworth turn toward her; he saw the detective raise his Colt in her direction.

  Maria saw Longworth now, but she also saw the three robbers race across the boardwalk toward their spooked horses. They looked all around for Parks as the animals reared and nickered. “Damn Parks to hell!” Stockton shouted, seeing the unhitched horses turn and race away along the wide dirt street.

  Maria had no time to swing her shotgun toward Longworth, and the ranger was not going to stand by and let her get shot, accident or no accident. Facing Longworth while the robbers fired wildly and ran toward any horse in sight, Maria saw the detective fly forward and hit the dirt facedown as the ranger’s rifle shot nailed him from behind, high in the left shoulder.

  But she had no time to wonder about what she had just seen the ranger do. Cap Dolan, letting out a war whoop, came running toward her from across the street, firing two Colts at once. She braced herself against the waist-high shotgun and pulled the trigger. The impact picked Cap Dolan up and hurled him backward in a spray of blood.

  In the street, Erry Dolan saw his brother fall. He turned, standing in the seat of the topless buggy where he’d just jumped up into and thrown its driver to the ground. “Brother Cap!” he shouted, firing at Maria as he spun the buggy quickly and raced straight toward her.

  Sam’s second rifle shot hit the robber in his chest, picked him up and flung him backward over the rear of the buggy, leaving him facedown, moaning in the dirt. The buggy raced another twenty yards before slowing to a halt in the middle of the dirt street.

  Charley Stockton had managed to make it halfway down the boardwalk while the ranger had been busy shooting the detective and Erry Dolan. While he ran, Stockton had reloaded his Colt. Now, as the ranger turned the rifle toward him, Stockton fired repeatedly and shouted at the ranger as he ran, “You won’t take me alive, you dirty son of—”

  The ranger’s shot cut his threat short. The slug hit him in the rib cage just beneath his right arm and sent him crashing through a large glass window and pummeling into a display of sharp farm implements. Barely before the sound of glass breaking and metal implements clanking had settled, the ranger hurried up the street toward Maria. She had walked over to the detective who was lying on the ground and had stood over him.

  “Are you all right?” Sam asked her.

  “Sí, I am all right,” Maria assured him. She gestured toward Longworth, who lay clutching the front of his bleeding shoulder. “He is going to need a doctor.”

  “And here I am,” said the man who had been thrown from his buggy. Dusting himself off from his fall into the dirt, he walked toward the downed detective. “I take it this man is not one of the robbers?”

  “No,” Sam said, “He’s a detective with Midwest Detective Agency. His name is Clayton Longworth.”

  Longworth looked up at the ranger with a strange expression. “You—you shot me, Ranger? Didn’t you . . . recognize me?”

  “A lot was going on, Chief Longworth,” Sam said. “Be glad I didn’t hit you dead center.” He paused, avoiding Maria’s eyes, then asked the wounded detective, “What are you doing working alone anyway, with as many men as you’ve got?”

  “I wanted . . . the Stockton Gang myself,” Longworth said in a pained voice as the doctor attended to him. “The fact is . . . most of my detectives have gone over to the Pinkertons. It’s hard keeping good help . . . these days. Some of them have turned to outlawing, themselves.”

  Sam shook his head and looked at Maria, who stood staring at him. “You shot him knowing who he was,” she said quietly just between the two of them.

  Sam didn’t answer.

  “I would have taken care of it,” Maria said.

  “I know you would have,” he replied flatly.

  When she saw he would offer nothing more on the matter, she said in an even quieter voice, “I cannot have you shooting an innocent man to protect me.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Sam offered.

  “You could have,” she said.

  The ranger just looked at her.

  She eased up. “All right, you didn’t kill him. But I would have taken care of it.”

  “I know you would have,” he repeated in an unyielding tone.

  Before either of them could say any more on the matter, a townsman ran up and said to the doctor, “The one in the street is shot something awful, Doc Wilson! The one in the mercantile is cut to pieces and got a pitchfork through his belly!”

  “Tell them I’ll be along directly,” the doctor said calmly.

  “Directly . . . ? But they’ll be bled to death, Doc!” the man said excitedly.

  “That would certainly save us all some time and trouble, then, wouldn’t it, Willard?” he said over his shoulder.

  “What about Buckshot Parks?” Maria asked the ranger while the townsmen hurried back and forth, gawking at the aftermath of the bank robbery gone wrong.

  “He outran his shadow getting out of here,” said the ranger. ”We’ll stay on his trail, but I expect he’ll hole up for a while. When he sticks his head up, we’ll be on him. Parks is a natural-born thief. He won’t sit still for long.”

  At the Cleland Davis spread three cowhands milled about out in front of the bunkhouse, awaiting the return of their trail boss, Jet Mackenzie. When they spotted Mackenzie walking toward them from the big house with four riflemen flanking him, Jock Brewer, the most experienced of the three drovers, pulled his knife blade from a post he’d been throwing it into and said in speculation, “Boys, it looks like the news ain’t good.”

  The three gathered and stepped forward as Mackenzie and the riflemen stopped ten feet away. Mackenzie raised a hand toward the three and said, “Don’t none of you boys go flying off the handle when I tell you this.”

  “We ain’t getting paid,” Jock Brewer anticipated before Mackenzie could finish speaking.

  Chester Cannidy, the leader of the four riflemen, gestured toward Mackenzie and said to Brewer, “This man was your ramrod. Let him talk.”

  “I’ll handle this, Cannidy,” said Mackenzie, seeing Brewer eye the rifleman with a stare of hatred.

  “Then get to handling it,” said Cannidy with a no-nonsense look. “Mr. Grissin wants you out of here.”

  “Yeah, you make the yard smell like cattle dung,” said another rifleman, Elton Long.

  “That’s enough out of you, Elton,” Cannidy said to the grinning rifleman.

  The three young drovers had flared, but Mackenzie spoke up to keep things from getting out of hand. “All right, here’s the deal,” he said to the three drovers. “Long Pines is no longer Cleland Davis’ spread. Davin Grissin bought him out while we were on the drive. Grissin has his own men, so we’ve been let go.”

  “I told you something was up when they didn’t pay for the herd in cash at the railhead,” Brewer said to the other two. Then he said bluntly to Mackenzie, “What about our pay?”

  Mackenzie swallowed as if to push down a bad taste and replied, “According to Davin Grissin’s bookkeeper, we’ve got no money coming, leastwise not from Grissin. The bookkeeper says Cleland Davis owed us our wages, but he beat us out
of our money. He made no arrangements for us to get paid before he left for California.”

  “That’s bull,” Brewer cut in. “Clel never cheated a man in his life. Grissin’s bookkeeper is lying.”

  “Keep your mouth shut, Brewer,” Cannidy warned. “This ain’t the time to spin your opinion.”

  “I want to talk to Davin Grissin,” said Holly Thorpe, another of the three trail hands.

  “No, you don’t,” said Cannidy. “That wouldn’t be a smart thing to do, the mood you’re in.”

  “I can try to talk to the man without raising a ruckus,” Thorpe insisted.

  “You can catch a handful of your teeth too, if you keep on,” said Elton Long.

  “I said that’s enough, Elton,” said Cannidy. But then he turned back to Mackenzie. “Finish up and get moving,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to keep down any trouble here.”

  “Well, there it is,” Mackenzie said, also trying to avoid any trouble. “If we want our pay, we’ll have to go collect it in California. Clel is living there with his daughter, Ida.”

  “Dang it all!” said Jock Brewer. He yanked off his dusty Stetson and slapped it against his thigh. Dust bellowed.

  “You boys don’t feel no worse than I do,” said Mackenzie. “Being trail boss, I feel responsible for—”

  Thorpe cut him off, saying, “We don’t blame you for nothing, Mac.” He fidgeted with his wire-rimmed spectacles, adjusted them on the bridge of his nose and cut a dark glance toward Cannidy and the other three looming riflemen. “We all know who dealt us this dirty hand.”

  “Don’t talk about it here,” said Brewer, before Mackenzie could respond. He gave Cannidy and the riflemen a hard stare. “I say we go to town and pull some cork over this. These snakes are itching to show Grissin how tough they are.”