Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek (A Caleb York Western Book 6) - Mickey Spillane (classic novels .TXT) 📗

And the future of the Circle G depended on raiding below the border for fresh stock.

“You wear black well . . . Miz Hammond,” he said. His voice was slow, like melting butter. Yet there was always something at least a little salty in the way he spit his words out. Maybe that came from the cocky bastard knowing how handsome he was. Of course, she was well aware of her own beauty. With her money, that put her one up on him.

She gestured to the wicker table and he pulled a chair out for her and she sat, then he sat opposite.

“I don’t waste time in mourning,” she said. “I leave lamentation to my lessers.”

Showing her broken heart to anyone, she felt, was beneath her. If a woman wanted to be strong in the West—if she wanted to be strong anywhere—she could not so indulge herself.

“No, Miz, you go straight to revenge,” he said, and there was a wolfishness about the way half his upper lip curled as he spoke the words. “The way a man would.”

Her shrug was barely noticeable. “Revenge will come in time. William’s murder is not our major concern at the moment.”

“It’s not?”

She shook her head. “It was William’s own frailty that led to his ruin. I won’t pretend with you, Clay, that I’m not aware of that. Of my son putting himself in that position.” Her rage bubbled but she contained it. “The point is this—Caleb York disrespected me, disrespected all of us at the Circle G, by handling William’s bad judgment in so . . . final a way.”

Colman was outright sneering now, and lifting a vein-roped fist, shaking it. “That son of a bitch York.... Wearing a badge don’t make him any less a killer.”

She frowned in interest. “You have a history with our famous sheriff?”

Colman let the fist become fingers and pawed the air. “Not that he’d ever know. But he took the lives of more than one good man I rode with. Back when he was working for Wells Fargo.”

“Ah.”

The ramrod sat forward, knitting improbably dark eyebrows in the midst of all that blondness. “You know how it says on them posters, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’? I don’t know of him ever bringing a man back alive.” He grunted. “Dead was easier than watching a prisoner on the ride back and feedin’ him and sleepin’ round a campfire with some poor bastard angling to light out.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “York may not be the man he once was.”

Colman blinked. “How’s that, Miz Hammond?”

“I spoke to him today. Our famous sheriff came around with his tail tucked between his legs. Humble and sorry about what he had to do. Dripping with pity for the poor mother of his victim.”

Colman frowned as he shook his head. “Don’t sound like Caleb York. Don’t sound like him a’tall.”

“He’s older. He’s seen more. And this gives us . . .” By which she meant me. “. . . an unexpected advantage.”

“How so, Miz Hammond?”

She folded her arms, crossed her legs. “York will be more sympathetically inclined toward me and my thinking than he otherwise might have been.” She cocked her head. “Have you ever seen the Cullen girl?”

He nodded. “In town. Never spoke to her. No cause to. Pretty young thing, though. But hard to imagine she’s up to running a ranch—any ranch, let alone a spread the size of the Bar-O.”

Victoria’s eyes narrowed. “She grew up on that ranch. I have it on reliable authority that she has a good head on those slim shoulders of hers, supported by a spine inherited from her late father. And the late George Cullen is rather beloved in these parts.”

He snorted. “I heard he was just a blind old coot.”

“Cullen established Trinidad. Practically . . . invented it. He brought in shopkeepers and a banker and a doctor and more, just for the personal convenience of having a town nearby. When the way you buy supplies is to set somebody up in the supply business, well . . . you may have wound up a dead blind old coot, but you were a living, breathing man once. The kind of man who built this country.”

“Like your late husband.”

“Like my late husband,” she said, and she meant it, though she would gladly kill that monster again a hundred times over.

As for Claymore Colman, he was the third ramrod since the disgruntled ex-foreman who had, in bed, told her the truth about Andrew Hammond. She had a habit, or perhaps it was a policy, of getting close to her ramrods. Of having a man she could depend upon—not lean on—who could bring a strong hand to the cow herders, and give them someone to look up to and even fear . . . since some of them would never learn to respect a woman boss, even when she literally wore the pants.

“You play poker,” she said to him.

“I do.”

“Have you ever gone into a game that you knew would last a while? Where players with bankrolls had come from far and wide, and the intention was to play through the night? Perhaps even to play till one winner was left standing? Or perhaps I should say sitting.”

“I have.”

“So a game like that has to be played one round at a time, carefully, skillfully, strategically. You have to read the other players. You have to know how they think. You have to know their ‘tells.’ ”

He grinned. “Miz Hammond . . . you never played poker in your life.”

“Oh but I did. In my father’s saloon on the Barbary Coast. He taught me well. He would bring me into a game when I was, oh, thirteen, fourteen? And some of the men would howl with laughter, and others would just howl, but it was my father’s joint and if they wanted to play, it was house rules. You know about house rules, Clay?”

“I do.”

“So it was a novelty, having a child playing poker in a den of iniquity. Just a young