Sidewinders

PINNACLE BOOKS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Scratch Morton reined his horse to a halt, drew in a deep breath, let it back out in a gusty sigh of contentment, and said, “Smell that, Bo. Ain't it good to be breathin' the fresh air of Texas again?”

“We've been back in Texas for several weeks,” Bo Creel pointed out dryly. “I've taken a few breaths in that time.”

“Yeah, but we're closer to home now,” Scratch countered. “As a matter of fact . . .” He rose in his stirrups so he could peer into the distance. “See that line of trees? If I ain't mistaken, that's where Bear Creek runs. Bear Creek!”

Bo smiled and told his friend, “I think you're right. It won't be long now.”

“As the saloon girl said to the travelin' preacher,” Scratch responded with a chuckle.

Scratch was right about one thing, Bo thought: it was good to get back to their old stomping grounds.

They had grown up not far from here, in the plains and rolling hills of south central Texas. This was one of the areas that had been settled first, way back when Texas wasn't the Lone Star State or even an independent republic, as it had been for nine years, but before that, when it was still a part of Mexico. The Creel and Morton clans had been some of the first American families to immigrate here.

They hadn't been acquainted with each other at the time. The families had met during the Runaway Scrape, that terrible exodus during the Texas Revolution when the rebellious American settlers had been forced to flee before the wrath of Santa Anna's army.

Bo and Scratch, little more than boys at the time, had become fast friends, and when the Texicans had finally turned and made their stand on the plains of San Jacinto, the two youngsters had been right there on the field of battle.

That had been their baptism of fire. They had saved each other's lives that day, the first of many times in the more than forty years since then.

The thing of it was, that battle easily could have turned out to be the end of their adventuring. Once Texas was free, Bo and Scratch had grown into young manhood, and Bo had already settled down, with a wife and young child, when tragedy struck and took his family away from him.

Unable to stay there and face constant reminders of what he had lost, Bo had gone on the drift . . . and naturally enough, Scratch, his best friend and always the more footloose of the pair, had gone along with him. Probably neither of them had thought at the time that their odyssey would last for decades . . . but that was what fate held in store for them.

They had been back to Texas on a number of occasions since then. It had been about ten years, though, since they had visited their boyhood homes. The Creels and the Mortons still lived in these parts, most of them on farms and ranches scattered along the banks of Bear Creek. The stream gave its name to one of the settlements in the area. About five miles downstream from the town of Bear Creek was a smaller settlement known as Cottonwood that wasn't much more than a couple of saloons and a trading post.

At least that was all there was to it the last time Bo and Scratch had been here. Bo was curious to see how much, if any, it and the town of Bear Creek had grown.

“I think we've sat here long enough,” Bo said. “Let's go see how the place has been getting along without us.”

A grin stretched across Scratch's leathery face.

“I'm right with you, pard,” he said.

The two Texans heeled their mounts into motion.

Despite the fact that the two men were edging past middle age, they both rode tall and straight in the saddle. Bo was dressed mostly in black, in a somber suit and hat that some said made him look like a preacher. He carried only one revolver, a Colt with well-worn walnut grips.

Scratch, on the other hand, was more of a dandy, sporting a cream-colored Stetson and a fancy fringed buckskin jacket. A pair of long-barreled, nickel-plated Remington revolvers with ivory grips rode at his hips in hand-tooled holsters. His hair had turned silver at a relatively early age, while Bo's dark brown hair was only touched here and there with gray.

They were both handsome men, and Scratch had romanced a number of widows from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border, sometimes having to leave town in a hurry when one of the “widows” turned out to have been lying about her marital status, resulting in an angry husband looking for Scratch.

Bo had a habit of being more discreet in his involvements with women, although there had been some along the way. He had no interest in getting married and settling down again, and at this late date, it wasn't likely Scratch would change his stripes and take that plunge, either.

Mostly they just drifted, taking work when they had to, usually as cowhands. But they had done other things, too, such as hiring on to help a federal marshal transport some prisoners from Arkansas to Texas.

That job had turned out to be pretty troublesome, but when it was over, Bo and Scratch found themselves at loose ends in their home state, so when the notion struck them to pay a visit to Bear Creek, it had been easy enough to amble in that direction.

Bo spotted something ahead of them in the trail, coming toward them and moving in and out of patches of shade cast by the trees on either side. After a moment he recognized it as a wagon being pulled by a team of mules.

Scratch had seen the wagon, too, and as he peered at the man on the driver's seat, he said, “Good Lord, is that old Avery Hollins?”

“Can't be,” Bo said. “He'd have to a hundred and fifty years old by now. He was ancient when we were still youngsters.”

“Well, he seemed ancient to us, anyway,” Scratch replied with a grin. “But that thing on his head sure looks like that old stovepipe hat he always wore.”

“It does,” Bo admitted. “I reckon we'll find out, because whoever it is, he's coming this direction.”

The two men kept riding, and within minutes the wagon rolled within hailing distance of them. Scratch raised a hand and called, “Hold on there, old-timer.”

The man on the wagon hauled back on the reins and brought the mules to a halt. His body was so bony under his clothes that he looked like he was made out of sticks and leather. He wore baggy wool trousers and a homespun shirt with a long, black leather vest over it. The stovepipe hat perched on his egg-shaped head had an eagle feather stuck in the band. His face was a mass of wrinkles. Bushy white eyebrows and tufts of white hair sticking out of his ears seemed to be the only hair on his head.

“As I live and breathe,” Scratch went on. “Avery Hollins. It
is
you.”

“Of course it's me,” the old-timer said in a high-pitched voice. “This is my wagon, ain't it? These is my mules. Who in blazes did you expect it to be?”

Scratch grinned.

“Well, to be honest,” he said, “if anybody had asked me, I likely would've said that you'd been dead twenty years or more.”

“Well, you'd have been wrong, wouldn't you?” Hollins demanded. His watery eyes squinted at them. “Do I know you? Who the hell are you boys?”

“You don't recognize us? I'm Scratch Morton, and this is Bo Creel. You knew us ages ago.”

Hollins's eyes widened in surprise.

“Bo Creel!” he exploded. He reached for the whip in the socket at the edge of the seat next to him. “You stay away from me! Get out of my way!”

The whip popped like a shot next to the ear of one of the leaders. The mule surged forward in its traces, and the others followed suit. Bo and Scratch had to yank their horses hurriedly to the side of the trail to get out of the way.

“What the hell's wrong with you?” Scratch yelled at Hollins as the old-timer sent the wagon bouncing and rattling past them. “You nearly ran us down!”

“Leave me be!” Hollins shouted back at him. He shook the whip at the two men on horseback. “Keep your distance or I'll whip the hides off both of you!”

Scratch's face twisted in anger. He reached for his right-hand Remington.

“Hold on,” Bo told him sharply, gesturing for Scratch to leave the revolver where it was. “You can't go threatening the old pelican with a gun.”

“I don't see why not,” Scratch said hotly. “He threatened to whip us.”

Hollins kept urging his team on, faster and faster. Dust boiled up from the wagon's wheels now. The old man twisted on the seat to throw a look of fear over his shoulder.

“Something's wrong,” Bo said. “He's really spooked.”

“Well, I'm really confused, and a little mad, to boot. What a welcome home that was.”

Bo frowned in thought as he stared after the wagon.

“He didn't really go
loco
until you mentioned my name,” he pointed out to Scratch. “It's like when he realized who I was, it terrified him.”

“I don't see why it would. You're pretty much harmless. We both are. Well, except to outlaws and rustlers and the like. We've tangled with a few of them.”

“A few,” Bo repeated, his voice dry with irony again.

In their wanderings, circumstances had forced him and Scratch to shoot it out with more lawbreakers than he could remember. Of course, the two of them had been accused of being outlaws more than once, he reminded himself.

“I guess we shouldn't let it bother us too much,” Scratch went on. “Avery Hollins always was as crazy as a hoot owl. I remember he used to say that an old Indian had taught him how to turn himself invisible. Claimed he caught himself a ghost horse once, too.”

“Those were just stories he made up to entertain the kids around here,” Bo said.

Scratch let out a snort.

“I don't care. When a fella spends all his time makin' up stories, sooner or later he winds up touched in the head.”

Bo couldn't argue with that.

The dust from the wagon had settled now. Bo lifted his reins, nodded toward the line of trees that marked the course of the creek, and said, “Let's ride on to town. Maybe when we get there somebody can tell us what put such a burr under old Avery's saddle.”