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

journey a weaving one, but he felt a calm settle over him, after living so long in the midst of so much desert; it was soothing somehow to have his boots cracking dry brown needles and crunching fallen leaves, though the occasional outgrown root made the going bumpy.

Swords of sunlight cut through cool blue shadows, while birds called and pecked as smaller animals scurried and stopped and scurried some more. With the ground still damp from the winter, he could smell pine resin and leaves and loam and minty grass, as the rush of the stream up ahead made itself known and then became more and more dominant.

Then came the sound of men, and ruined it.

He paused where the pines gave way to a steeper grassy incline that fell a few feet to more green before the dramatic white of the sandy bank of Sugar Creek. Along the tree line, horses were tied up, their whinnies and neighing punctuating the flow of water. That bleached beach of perhaps five feet of width was despoiled by half a dozen cowboys milling, smoking, many with the heel of their hands on the butts of low-slung guns.

Closer to York, on the grass, were two campsites, separated by perhaps twelve feet, where wood was piled, awaiting a nighttime fire, not needed for many hours yet, the sun high and glinting off the nearby sand and shimmering on the gently rolling stream. Across the water was nothing but another ribbon of white with a rocky rise to scrubby trees. No one was over there, at the moment, not that could be seen anyway.

On this side, at least a dozen men were either sitting around the pair of cold campfires or just on their haunches on the grassy slope to the left and right of where York emerged. He’d seen plenty of them before, knew many by name. The Circle G, ever since the days when it was in the late Sheriff Harry Gauge’s hands, had been home to a rough damn bunch of cowhands—rabble and rustlers to a man.

Added in were the Arizona Cowboys who had been lately hired on—“cowboys” with a capital C, which might also have stood for Clanton. These survivors of the Tombstone ruckus had rustled and robbed and even now wore their trademark rattlesnake hatband—either a silver version some jeweler pounded out or an actual rattlesnake skin.

This bunch of dead-eyed, sneering back-shooters, added to the Gauge residue, constituted about the scruffiest collection of supposed ranch hands York had ever seen.

But then that was the West, wasn’t it? The Earps had been gamblers as well as guardians of the law, pimps and protectors of civilization, horse thieves and posse men after stagecoach robbers. Many considered Caleb York a killer as bad as any of the human flotsam and jetsam scattered about this white beach like the aftermath of a drunken bacchanal.

No, worse—York had killed more men in his time than any three of these lowlifes combined. Any four.

So who am I to talk? he thought.

With his Winchester gripped in his left hand, York stepped out from the trees and eased down the grassy slope, a couple dozen or so eyes fixing on him with the usual love bad men reserved for men wearing badges.

He nodded to a few, and they would pause but nod back, eyes narrow with suspicion, contempt, or both. A figure approached York, someone he did not recognize at first; then it came to him—Clay Colman, who’d been suspected in a robbery that York investigated for Wells Fargo.

York had never quite got the goods on Colman, but had gunned down the other two suspects—a close shave, as they’d both pulled on him at the same time.

Colman was a good-looking, strapping son of a bitch, blond, blue-eyed, with sharp features and a black hat sporting, yes, a rattlesnake hatband. Genuine rattlesnake, at that.

“Mr. Colman,” York said. With a nod and a tight smile.

“Sheriff,” Colman said. With a nod and a tight smile.

Neither man even thought about shaking hands.

“I understand,” York said, “you’re the Circle G ramrod now.”

His smile was barely there. “I am. Miz Hammond is a hell of a boss, for a woman.”

York gave him a similar smile back. “From what I see, she’d make a hell of a boss for a man . . . though I don’t imagine anybody’d mistake her for one.”

“No. No indeed.” Colman pushed his hat back on his head, his hands going to his hips. “How can I help you, Sheriff?”

“Well, I see a few familiar faces among your crew. Some Arizona boys, from back in those days.”

“True enough.”

“And a couple that don’t strike me as your average cowpoke. Isn’t that Billy Bassett over there?”

York pointed off to the left to a skinny mustached character, a Remington revolver low on his hip.

“Yep,” Colman said.

Then the sheriff pointed off to the right, indicating a guy of medium height in a dark suit, training his close-set eyes across the glimmering stream. “That’s Dave Carson, right? He’s worked both sides of the law. But then many have.”

“Yep,” Colman said.

“And up ahead of us, that one’s pretty unmistakable—the Chiricahua Kid himself.” York nodded toward the muscular Indian in the army jacket and black sombrero, who—like the other two he’d pointed out—was staring across the strip of water like a hawk. A hungry one.

“Yep,” Colman said. “We don’t hold no grudge against the red man.”

“That particular one didn’t leave many alive to hold a grudge.”

Colman nodded. “Probably not any, y’get down to it.”

“Those three gents stand out, and not just ’cause you have ’em positioned all along this stretch of sand.”

“Stand out how, Sheriff?”

“They kill for money.”

“Like soldiers.”

York nodded a few times. “You could say that. But I’m here in hopes of keepin’ a war from breakin’ out. What’s your intention, should the Bar-O boys herd their stock to this stream?”

Colman flipped a hand toward Sugar Creek. “My notion, since you ask, is to start shootin’ into the air. That’ll rile the beeves, and they’ll start stampedin’. Who