Predators and Prey Page 2

  “That big oak tree on the edge of the bluff has a good limb for hanging him,” Kunzel said, pointing.

  “Take him over there while I tie a hangman’s knot,” Santell said. He took his lariat from his saddle and followed along behind Jason and the two men holding him on the horse. Expertly he made a loop and tied the slipknot. When the men stopped beneath the limb of the oak, Santell walked close to Jason and dropped the noose over his head.

  Jason looked at the outlaw leader with wide eyes. “Please don’t hurt me anymore.”

  Santell laughed. “We’re only going to hang you.” Cotter was right, Tolliver appeared very strong. Why hadn’t the fellow fought? Damn odd.

  Santell tossed the loose end of the lariat over the limb of the tree. “Cotter, draw that tight and make it fast to the oak.”

  Cotter grinned in anticipation of the hanging. He jerked the lariat taut with a sharp pull.

  Jason cried out at the painful tightening of the noose around his neck. His hands began to wrench and tear at the ties that bound him. “Let me go!” he pleaded. Tears started to flow down his cheeks.

  “He’s ready for hanging,” Cotter said. “So let’s hang the crybaby.”

  Santell looked at Jason. “Tolliver, do you have any last words to say before we let you walk on air?”

  Jason tried to speak but could not. He sat taller in the saddle to loosen the choking rope. That did not give enough slack. He stood up in the stirrups of the saddle.

  Jason swallowed. He spoke in a small, frightened child’s voice. “Nathan won’t like you for hurting me.”

  Santell threw back his head and laughed uproariously. Cotter and Kunzel joined in, slapping their thighs and glancing at each other in great mirth. Their loud laughter swept out across the bluff above the river. An evil, contorted echo bounced back from the vertical stone walls of the house.

  “I don’t give a damn what Nathan likes,” Santell said. “He’ll soon be joining you in hell.”

  Santell grabbed the bridle of the horse and led the animal from under Jason.

  ***

  Nathan dismounted from his horse and squatted in the meadow near the edge of the woods. Clouds were scudding down fast from the north. Blustery winds rushed out ahead of the approaching storm front and whipped the dry reeds of the previous year’s dead wild grass. He reached out to part the grass and hold it still so that he could study the tracks of the three shod horses in the dirt.

  Several times during the last two days he had found the same sets of hoof prints. At first he thought they had been made by a group of horsemen merely passing through. Now he sensed danger from the riders.

  He swung back astride and followed the trail at a trot. It was time to run the men down and discover their purpose for being here on his land.

  The hoof prints led around the border of a large meadow, then swerved to pass near a cattle loafing area among a clump of large trees. The sign continued on up and across a string of hills to a spring. There the men had sat their horses for a time.

  Nathan nodded to himself. The strange riders were counting cows. His cows.

  A mile farther on, the horsemen had left the meadow and entered the woods. In a low swale full of a dense stand of trees they had made a hidden camp. The fire had been small, leaving few ashes.

  Nathan felt a chill, as if a feather had been drawn along his spine. He twisted in the saddle to look in the direction of his home on the bank of the Salt Fork of the Red River. A sudden premonition surged over him that. Jason needed his help.

  He pivoted the horse and spoke sharply to it. The mount sprang away in a gallop, darting through the woods and dodging the trees like a big cat.

  The horse broke free of the woods and struck a large meadow. Nathan leaned over the neck of the beast and slapped the outstretched neck a stinging blow with his hand.

  “Go!” he shouted into the animal’s pointed ears. The horse took the command, its legs stretched, and the iron-shod hooves beat a rapid druming tattoo on the ground.

  At a dead run the horse carried Nathan over the meadow, then through a finger of trees and into a long grass-covered area studded with boulders lying between wooded hills. Half a mile farther along a rimrock blocked Nathan’s course. He reined the mustang in a series of left and right switchback jumps down a broken, rock-filled gully through the massive rock outcrop.

  Horse and rider broke free of the rocks and raced out into a wide, flat section of land sloping down toward the Red River. Nathan spurred. Two miles and he would be home.

  They left the meadow and plunged into thick woods. Nathan pulled the mustang down to a walk and went on quietly toward the clearing where the ranch house sat.

  He halted in the fringe of the trees and stared ahead, searching. The corral was nearest to him. The six head of horses were still there. Beyond was the house. No one stirred in the yard, and no smoke came from the chimney.

  Nathan’s view jumped past the house to the big oak tree on the edge of the bluff. Something hung to its thick lower limb.

  Oh God! Jason.

  Nathan screamed a wild cry full of pain and terror. He raked the sharp rowels of his spurs brutally across the ribs of the mustang. The animal burst into the clearing.

  2

  “Here he comes,” Kunzel said in a gleeful voice as he watched Nathan race the horse across the clearing toward Jason. “Just as you said, Santell. Tell me when you want me to shoot.”

  “Don’t be in a hurry,” replied the outlaw leader. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “Let’s see the show for a while,” Cotter said. “Damn. This should be a good one.”

  The rider reined his horse to a sliding stop beside the body swaying in the wind. Swiftly he clasped the figure to him. He snatched a knife from a sheath on his belt and slashed the rope.

  ***

  Clutching Jason tightly in his arms, Nathan threw his leg over the saddle horn and slid from the horse’s back to the ground. He dropped to his knees and laid Jason on his back. He yanked the choking noose loose from his brother’s neck and flung it aside. The shirt was ripped open with a popping of buttons.

  Nathan pressed his ear to the still chest. With every particle of his being, he willed that there should be a heartbeat. His brother must not be dead. He strained to hear.

  Not one sound, not one flutter of a heart struggling to live came from within the quiet body. Nathan raised his fist and struck the center of the broad chest. And hammered down again, and again. The heart must start. He dropped his ear against the pale chest. There was not one whisper of life.

  Nathan examined Jason more closely and saw that the blood on his face was congealed, almost dry. The body held little warmth. He was an hour too late to save his brother.

  He remained kneeling and closed Jason’s shirt. He untied the bound hands and folded them across the chest. The long legs were straightened.

  The blue eyes were open and staring out from the face, burned brown by sun and wind. Never had the eyes seemed more innocent. Why had harm come to somebody so free of violence himself? With a thumb and forefinger Nathan closed the cold lids, holding them shut for a moment before removing his hand.

  Jason’s neck was unnaturally bent to the side and ringed with a red wound, caused by the noose that had choked away his life. A raw rope burn was on his jaw and the side of his face, made by the dying man’s struggles against the hanging rope. Tears pooled in Nathan’s eyes at the cruelty and pain that had been inflicted upon his brother.

  His teeth clenched and he climbed to his feet. God damn the murderous bastards who had slain Jason! He would find them and send them all to the blackness of everlasting death.

  A blast of wind buffeted Nathan and he looked up to survey the sky. Dense black storm clouds were speeding close upon the valley of the Red River. The wind was growing stronger, and it had cold teeth that nipped at him. A norther was hurrying straight from the birthplace of blizzards. Jason had to be properly buried before the storm struck. Nathan strode off h
astily along the bench and entered the stone walls of the house.

  He tossed aside the buffalo sleeping robe from Jason’s bed and stripped away the blue Indian blanket beneath. Taking the blanket and a length of cord, he returned to Jason’s still body. Here on the bluff where a man could see for many miles along the beautiful valley of the Red River, he would bury his brother. Nathan began to dig a grave.

  As he labored, the temperature fell steadily. The wind increased in strength, howling a dismal dirge through the brush and rocks on the face of the bluff. The sun dimmed, then vanished, as the leaden clouds drove in beneath it to hide all of the sky.

  Nathan held tight rein on his bitter sorrow. He concentrated his thoughts on the short-handled shovel, the iron blade ringing harshly with each blow upon the hard, stony earth. He would mourn his brother later.

  When the excavation was chest deep, he encountered a hard layer of sandstone. He could dig no deeper. Jason, your grave is ready.

  Tenderly Nathan wrapped the body in the Indian blanket and tied it in place with the twine. He climbed into the grave and, drawing the body into his arms, lowered it to the bottom at his feet. He positioned the blanket-shrouded form and straightened.

  He started to hoist himself out of the grave, then halted. He untied one strand of the twine and reopened the blanket at Jason’s head. And as he had done a thousand times before to quiet his brother and drive away his nightmares so he could sleep, Nathan ran his hand twice through the thick mop of reddish hair and then over the brow.

  His brother’s brow was cold. Smooth and cold, like a river rock.

  “Be at peace in your long sleep,” Nathan whispered.

  Nathan felt the full impact of the loss of his brother. Only Nathan, of his lineage of Tollivers, now remained alive in all the world. Never again would he enjoy the presence of Jason, gentle Jason who played at work and asked childish questions and who had the most pleasant and joyous laugh ever uttered by man.

  Nathan felt the gathering in of his memories, time falling away, going back to his deepest recollection. He journeyed again through the few short childhood years with his mother and father, far away to the east in the mountains of Virginia. Then suddenly both of those loving people were gone, swept away by the deadly disease—cholera.

  Cut loose from family, the gangly twelve-year-old twin brothers drifted off along the mud roads through the never-ending forest of giant oak, beech, maple, and chestnut trees. It was only natural to travel in the same direction that the tide of immigrating people moved with their animals and wagons—to the west.

  The raggedy boys worked for handouts of food and permission to come out of the rain and sleep in barns. Dry hay for bedding was a Luxury.

  Nathan often fought in those early days with the bully boys of the towns Jason and he passed through. The loudmouths poked fun at Jason, calling him feebleminded and a half-wit. A terrible fever had struck Jason at the age of seven, holding him in a wild delirium for three days. Thereafter his body grew to be that of a man, but his mind did not develop. Jason had been doomed to live forever in the simple world of a child.

  When Jason cried at the cruel, taunting words of the bully boys, Nathan charged them with swinging fists. He lost many of those first battles with the larger boys. However, he grew tougher with each fight and lost fewer and fewer.

  The two brothers would halt their wandering and work for a week, or a month, then Nathan would grow restless and would gather their scant possessions and, with Jason in tow, strike out again along the frontier byways.

  The cold winters and hot summers passed as Nathan and Jason drifted. When they were fifteen, their travels brought them across Tennessee to the banks of the Mississippi River. Nathan worked for a year there, chopping wood by the scores of cords for the boilers of the steamboats that plied the river from New Orleans, north to Cincinnati and a hundred other cities. That year, swinging the iron-headed ax, Nathan grew to the full size of a man.

  Using the hard-earned chopping money, Nathan bought sturdy buckskin clothing and horses for the two of them, and firearms for himself, a Navy Colt revolver .36-caliber and a Sharps carbine .52-caliber. Jason and he crossed the Mississippi into Arkansas and, riding onward for days, passed into Texas.

  During the year Jason turned eighteen, he rode guard on the stage line between Houston and the rapidly growing capital city of Austin. That year fell during a turbulent period in Texas. Highwaymen struck at the stage many times. During those attempted robberies Nathan killed some of the bandits. The stage was successfully taken only one time, and that while Nathan lay wounded and unconscious in the dirt of the road. The following year found him working on the Satterlee Ranch, a large land holding located astride the headwaters of the Tongue and Pease Rivers in northwest Texas.

  While on a buffalo hunt north of the Salt Fork of the Red, Nathan discovered a band of wild cows, thirty or so and their calves. He told Billy Valentine, with whom he rode while doing ranch tasks, of his find.

  The old rustler, now turned honest cowboy in his last years, had slapped his leg and laughed. “Boy,” he said, “you’ve got a God-sent chance to become a rancher in your own right and not have to work and take orders from any other man.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Nathan.

  “Do you know how most men start becoming ranchers on the frontier?”

  “Tell me.” Nathan sensed a tale about to be told.

  “Well, he buys a few cows and drives them out past the farthest white settlement and into Indian country. Then, over the next few years, he occasionally sneaks back and picks up unbranded calves from the more established ranchers, those with the biggest herds, and drives them off. He puts his own brand on them. So in a very short time he has a three-or four-hundred-head outfit. Then he stops his stealing and lets his herd just grow naturally.

  “Of course, the ranchers that lose the calves call that rustling. They hire tough riders, like Satterlee did with those three hombres that live in a wing of the big house. They’re good with guns and would hang a man quick if they caught him with a stolen calf.”

  “Satterlee’s spread is damn big,” Nathan said. “Is that how he first got his start?”

  “He got started while I was still up in the Oklahoma Territory. But I’ve heard that for the first few years after he came to the Pease River country, his herd sometimes grew by two hundred percent in a year, and he never bought one of the animals.”

  Valentine studied Nathan. “You’re strong and a hard worker. You know cattle. Out there, away from other men, Jason wouldn’t be bothered by all the mean talk said to him.”

  The old rustler swung his arm to the north. “The land is free for the taking beyond the Red River. But the Comanche are there and they’ll kill some of your cows, and maybe you too. So if you go, be careful. And be damn certain you don’t get caught stealing calves. Take only a few from each rancher so he’ll not know that his losses ain’t from wolves and lions.

  Within the week Nathan had quit his job on the Satterlee Ranch. Jason and he loaded their possessions on two packhorses. Tucked away among the items was a branding iron Nathan had made at the ranch forge. Half a day’s ride brought them to the North Fork of the Pease River. They made camp in the edge of the night and slept to the sound of the river’s song.

  Morning sun found them pushing northwest. In the late afternoon they forded the North Fork of the Red River and passed into the wild land claimed by the fierce Comanche.

  Nathan and Jason explored the broad valley of the Red River with its braided stream channel and many marshes. Giant cottonwoods and thickets of willow, and tall water-loving grasses grew in dense abundance on the rich bottomland. On the rolling hills above the river, broad grassy meadows, interspersed with stretches of brush and trees, extended for miles.

  Finally Nathan selected the land he wanted. He built tall stone cairns to mark the boundaries of his new ranch. The area was fifteen miles on a side, the Red River being the south limit. On the top stone of each cairn he
chiseled his brand, TT, for two Tollivers. He roped and branded the wild cows and their calves that he had seen in the days before. The orphan brothers were now men of property.

  Nathan labored from daylight to dark. Even Jason seemed to sense that something new and good, and perhaps permanent, had come into their lives. He worked doggedly beside Nathan. A generous-sized ranch house began to rise on a tall bluff above the Red River.

  All the exterior walls were constructed of stone with mud mortar, and had been completed by the end of the second autumn. The construction of a round stone corral followed. All this last winter the brothers had lived snuggly sitting in the snowy evenings before a fire in the huge fireplace.

  At times, as the months passed, Nathan would cease his labor on the house and ride away, leading five horses with special packsaddles he had built. He had taken Jason with him at first, afraid his brother would wander off or that the Comanche would come and harm him. However, Jason did not like the hard riding, and after a few trips Nathan allowed him to remain behind.

  Nathan traveled swiftly far beyond the ranch, a hundred miles, sometimes a hundred and fifty miles. There in the woods and brush thickets that abound, he would rope the half-wild calves and tie them upon the backs of the packhorses. Journeying at night and covering forty to fifty miles in the darkness, he returned stealthily home. The Double T brand was burned onto the flanks of the calves and the animals turned loose. Never once did Nathan take a Satterlee calf.

  Nathan shook himself and roughly dashed away his tears. Why had the bandits killed gentle Jason? He was no threat to them, regardless of what they did. Why hadn’t they simply taken the cattle or whatever they wanted and left?

  He again shrouded Jason’s face with the Indian blanket. Rest easy, my brother, for soon I’ll send your murderers to their graves. He grabbed the top of the excavation and jumped out.

  3

  “What’s he doing there so still?” Kunzel asked, staring across the meadow at Tolliver, standing in the grave with only the top part of his body showing.