Fourteen
Cord heard the riders coming long before he or any of his men could spot them. It was a distant thunder growing louder with each heartbeat.
“Load up the guns, Mother,” he told his wife. “I believe it’s time.” He walked to the dinner bell on the porch and rang it loudly, over and over. Del and four hands came on the run, carrying rifles, pistols belted around them.
“Stand with me on the porch, boys. Mother, get your shotgun and take the upstairs.”
“I’m up here with a rifle, Daddy!” Sandi called.
“Good girl.”
Rifles were loaded to capacity. Pistols checked. A couple of shotguns were loaded up and placed against the porch railing.
Thirty riders came hammering past the gate and up to the picket fence around the ranch house, Hanks in the lead.
“I don’t appreciate this, Dooley,” Cord raised his voice. “You got no call to come highballin’ up to my place.”
“I got plenty of call, Cord. Where’s my daughter?”
Cord blinked. “How the hell do I know? I haven’t seen her in days.”
“You a damn liar, McCorkle!”
Cord unbuckled his gun belt and handed it to Dell. He swung his eyes back to Hanks. “You’ll not come on my property and call me names, Dooley. Git out of that saddle and let’s settle this feud man to man.”
“Goddamn you! I want my daughter!”
“I ain’t got your daughter! But what I will have is your apology for callin’ me a liar.”
“When hell freezes over, McCorkle!”
Two upstairs windows were opened. A shotgun and a rifle poked out. Sandi’s voice said, “The first man to reach for a gun, I kill Lanny Ball.” The sound of a hammer being eared back was very plain.
The sounds of twin hammers on a double-barreled shotgun was just as plain. “And I blow the two Mexicans out of the saddle,” Alice spoke.
Diego and Pablo froze in their saddles.
“Dooley,” Cord’s voice was calm. “Would you like to step down and have some coffee with me? You can inspect the house and the barn and the bunkhouse ... after you tell me your anger overrode your good sense when callin’ me a liar.”
Hanks’s eyes cleared for a moment. Then he looked confused. “I know you ain’t no liar, Cord. But where’d she go?” There was a pleading note in the man’s voice.
“I don’t know, Dooley. I didn’t even know she was gone.”
But the moment was gone, and Jason Bright and Lanny Ball and most of the others knew it. There would be no gunfire this day.
“The Box T,” Dooley said. “Liz wasn’t lyin’.”
“Dooley,” Cord said, “You go over there a-smokin‘, and if she is there, she’s liable to catch a bullet. ’Cause Smoke Jensen and them others are gonna start throwin’ lead just as soon you come into range.”
“She’s my daughter, dammit, Cord!” Some of the madness reappeared.
“She’s also a grown woman,” Alice called from the second floor.
Hanks slumped in his saddle. The fire had left him ... for the moment. “She don’t want my hearth and home, she can stay gone. I don’t have no daughter no more.” He looked at Cord. “It ain’t over, Cord. Not between us. The time just ain’t right. There’ll be another day.”
“Why, Dooley? Tell me that. Your spread is just as big as mine. I made peace with Fae Jensen. She ain’t botherin’ nobody. Let’s us bury the hatchet and be friends. Then you can fire these gunslicks and we can get on with livin’.”
Dooley shook his head. “Too late, Cord. It’s just too late.” He wheeled his horse and rode off, the gunnies following.
“Did you see his eyes, Boss?” Willie asked. “The man is plumb loco.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, Willie. Question is, when will it take control of him ... or rather, when will he lose control?”
“One thing for certain, Boss,” Del said. “When he does go total nuts, we’re all going to be right smack dab in the big fat middle of it.”
“Something is rotten,” Cord spoke softly. “Something is wrong with this whole setup.”
“Riders coming, Boss,” Fitz said.
As the dot on the landscape grew larger, Del squinted his eyes. “Smoke Jensen and the Moab Kid.”
Sandi smiled and Alice said, “I’ll make fresh coffee.”
Beans sniffed the air. “Lots of dust in the air.”
“I think Cord’s had some visitors,” Smoke replied. “Look at the hands gathered around the house.”
The men swung down and looped the reins around the hitchrail. Cord shook hands with them both and introduced Smoke to those punchers he had not met.
“Fancy seeing you, Beans,” Cord said, a twinkle in his eyes. “It’s been so long since you’ve come callin’. Hours, at least.”
Beans just grinned.
“Gather your men, Cord,” Smoke told the man. “This is something that everybody should hear.”
Cord’s three sons had just ridden in. His other four punchers were out on the range. Everybody gathered around on the porch and listened as Smoke related what Rita had told him.
“Damn!” Max summed it up, then glanced at his mother, who was giving him a warning look for the use of profanity.
“Let’s kick it around,” Smoke said. “Anybody got any suggestions?”
“Take it to them ’fore they do it to us,” Corgill said.
“No proof,” Cord said. “Only the word of Rita and she didn’t even see the men; just heard them talkin’.”
“If we don’t do something,” Cal said, “we’re just gonna be open targets, and they’ll pick us off one at a time.”
Cord shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. I think they got to do everything all at once. At night. If what Rita says is true—and I ain’t got no reason to doubt it—they’ll split their people and hit us at the same time. And they can’t leave any survivors.”
“I’ve got people bunching the cattle and moving them to high graze,” Smoke said. “They’ll scatter some, but they can be rounded up. From now on, we stay close to the ranch house.”
Cord nodded his head and looked at Willie. “Ride on out, Willie. Tell the boys to start moving them up toward summer graze. Get as much as you can done, and then you boys get on back here. We’re gonna lose some to rustlers, for a fact. But it’s either that or we all die spread out.” He glanced at Smoke. “When do you think they’ll hit us?”
Smoke shook his head. “Tonight. Next week. Next month. No way of knowing.”
Cord did some fancy cussing, while his wife listened and looked on with a disapproving frown on her face. “We may end up taking to the hills and fighting defensively.”
“I’m thinking that we will,” Smoke agreed.
“You mean leave the house?” Sandi protested. “But they’ll just move in!”
“Can’t be helped, girl,” her father told her. “We can always clean up and rebuild.”
“Or just go on over and kill Dooley Hanks,” Rock McCorkle said grimly.
“Rock!” his mother admonished.
Cord put a big hand on her shoulder. “It may come to that, Alice. God help me, I don’t want it, but we may have no choice in the matter.”
“Here comes Jake,” Del said. “And he’s a-foggin’ it.”
The puncher slowed up as he approached the house, to keep the dust down, and walked his horse up to the main house, dismounting.
“What’s up, Jake?” the foreman asked.
“I just watched about fifteen guys cut across our range, comin’ from the northeast. Hardcases, ever’ one of them. They was headin’ toward Gibson.”
Alice handed the puncher a cup of coffee and a biscuit, then looked at her husband. He wore an increasingly grim expression.
‘The damn easterners talk about law and order,” Cord said. ”Well, where is it when it comes down to the nut-cuttin’?”
Smoke pulled out his right hand Colt and held it up for all to see. “Right here, Cord. Right here.”
“The Cat Jennings gang,” Charlie said. He had been to town and back while Smoke was talking with the men and women of the Double Circle C. “He’s been up in Canada raisin’ Cain for the past few years.”