the Mountain Valley War (1978) (3 page)

Trent nodded. "Looks like he plans to freeze us out or kill us off. What are you folks planning to do?"

Parson Hatfield shook his head. "Nothin' so far. We sort of figured we might get together with the rest of the nesters and work out some sort of a proposition. I'll send one of the boys down to round up Smithers, O'Hara, an' young Bartram. Whatever we do, we should ought to do it together."

He rubbed his grizzled jaw and a sly look came into his blue eyes. "Y' know, Trent, I always had me an idea you was some shakes of a fightin' man your own-self. I got an idea with some guns on you'd stack up right with some of those hard cases Hale has ridin' for him."

Tent smiled. "Parson, I'm a peace-lovin' man who come into the hills because they were restful. All I want is to be let alone."

"What if they don't let you alone?" Parson chewed his tobacco slowly, contemplatively.

"If they start bothering me and killing my friends, I might get upset. You folks want to farm and raise stock. I want to do that, too, but I also want to sit quiet sometimes and watch the smoke curl up from my chimney."

Hatfield shrugged a thin shoulder. "I got no worries about you, Trent. I haven't spent my life a-feudin' and a-fightin' without knowin' how a man shapes up.

"O'Hara will fight, and so will young Bartram. As to Smithers, he's a nervy enough man, but he's never had to use a gun. Hell stand pat, but whether he can make do when it comes to a downright shootin' fight, I ain't so sure.

"My young uns, they cut their teeth on a rifle stock, so I reckon when the fightin' starts, I'll be bloodin' the two young uns like I done the olders back in Kansas."

"What about the women?" Trent asked. "Maybe we should get them off to somewhere across the wild country before the shootin' starts. There aren't many of us, and Hale must have fifty riders, all told."

"He's got the riders," Parson Hatfield admitted grimly. "He surely has. But I'd rather tackle the whole fifty than Ma if I told her she'd have to git out until the fightin's past.

"You got no women of your own, Trent, so you don't know how impossible ornery one can be when you tell her she's got to leave, for whatever reason.

"Ma loaded rifles for me when we was feudin' back in Kaintuck, and she done the same in Kansas when we fit Injuns. She ain't no ways gun-shy, and when it comes to that, Ma has done a sight o' shootin' her ownself.

"Quince's wife feels the same, an' so does Jesse's. Those gals was brung up on the frontier, Trent, and they can stand with a man whether it be shootin', fightin', or workin'."

Trent shrugged. "You know them better than I do, Parson, but we've got an argument when the others get here. If each one of us tries to guard his own place, we'll be wiped out. It will be one man against a dozen or two dozen or whatever Hale makes up his mind to send. They've got to leave their places and come here, and together we can make a stiff fight of it. Scattered, they'll cut us down one by one."

He turned to his horse. "Parson, I'm going down to Cedar to have a talk with Leathers. We've got to know where he stands, and if he isn't going to sell to us, we have to find another way."

Parson's lean face was bleak. "Reckon they got us by the short hairs, Trent. If we can't get grub, we can't stay on, and whilst huntin' will do some of it, we'd have to have more than we could scratch up."

Trent lifted a hand and turned his horse into a trail. Not the usual trail, for that would be watched, but an old Indian trail known to few. He realized what a chance he was taking, for the killing had begun. Dick Moffit was dead, and he himself had been threatened. Hale riders would be carrying fire and death throughout the mountains now; yet, if he could see King Bill, there might be a chance to avert disaster. There was a chance that Hale himself did not even know of the killing; and if approached, he might stop it before it went further.

Parson Hatfield watched him ride away, then spat into the dust. "Quince, you an' Jesse catch up your bosses and ride along after him. He's surely goin' to git hisself into trouble."

A few minutes later the two tall mountain men had started down the trail on their flea-bitten mustangs. They were solemn, slow-talking young men who chewed tobacco and lived for their crops and their families.

"Quince? What's Pap sendin' us along for? You know that man ain' about to need no he'p."

"He's but one, an' they are many. Maybe Pappy figgers we'll learn somethin'. Anyway, when Trent comes out of Cedar, hell most likely come a-flyin'. Do no harm to have a couple of rifles to keep folks from crowdin' him too much."

"Well, I got me powder an' shot enough. I'd surely hate to run short when somebody was just a-sweatin' to get hisself shot."

It was going to be one of those white-moon nights when the trees stood black against the sky and there was darkness in the hollows of the hills.

A good night for coon hunting or feudin', and a good night to be hunting them Haleses.

Chapter
3

With no knowledge of those following, Trent rode rapidly. He knew what lay before him and did not, in all honesty, expect results. King Bill Hale was not likely to listen to a mere nester, to someone he considered far beneath him. If he thought of those people who lived in the high meadows at all, he thought of them with some distaste, as a minor annoyance to be brushed aside.

The Hatfields were simple, hard-working people unlikely to ever attain to wealth or more than a competent security. Simple folk they might be, but not to be taken lightly or ignored. They were God-fearing, stern, and fierce to resent any intrusion on their personal liberty. It was such men as these who had destroyed Major Patrick Ferguson and his command at Kong's Mountain. Not understanding what manner of men he dealt with, Ferguson had threatened them with fire and hanging, and they had responded by coming down from the mountains with their long Kentucky rifles.

These were the sort of men who had been the backbone of all the early American armies. They were fence-corner soldiers who knew nothing of parades but only that war was a matter of killing and keeping from being killed.

They were like Ethan Alien, Daniel Boone, the Green Mountain boys, Kit Carson, and Jim Bridger. They had learned their fighting by constant frontier warfare, and many of their type, the Hatfields included, carried some Indian blood in their veins and carried it proudly.

They knew nothing of Prussian methods of close-order drill, and did nothing by the numbers. Often they had flat feet, and few of them had all their teeth, but they fought from cover and made every shot count, so they lived, while many of the enemy died.

The Hale ranch was the greatest power in this part of the country, and its riders were hired as much for their ability with guns as for their skill with cattle. King Bill, shrewd as he was, had grown overconfident as he grew older. He had never known men of the Hatfield caliber. His life had been one of continual success, and he could not envision defeat by what he considered a bunch of poor white trash.

Trent considered the question as he rode. Hale might win, but not without a terrible price.

O'Hara? The big Irishman was affable and friendly, yet his easy manner masked a man who was blunt and hard. He wanted no trouble, but his past had been filled with it, from his first arrival from the old country to his years of laying track for the Union Pacific. He had won because he knew not the meaning of defeat. He won because he kept bulling on ahead, blind to the forces against him, blind to all those who opposed him.

As for himself, Trent had no illusions. A peace-loving man he was, yet there was something in him, too, of the old Viking berserk. His good sense told him there was no profit in fighting, but there was a savage something in him that gloried in battle. There was also a fierce resentment for those who abused their power, and a strong streak of rebellion ever ready to well up and express itself in battle.

He had never sought a battle, yet in all honesty he admitted he had never edged too far away from one, either. He now called himself Trent, but the man known as Kilkenny wore the same skin and walked in the same boots.

Had Hale been less blinded by his own success and his power, he would have seen what he was riding into, for Parson Hatfield was no Dick Moffit.

The trail skirted deep canyons, leading down from the high, cool meadows to the hotter flatlands below. At long last King Bill might have realized that when the low country was parched with summer heat the meadows in the mountains lay knee-deep with lush green grass and there were shaded pools and swift-running streams.

On the outskirts of town Trent drew rein to study the situation. Riding in was going to be much easier than getting out. None knew him here, to be awed by his reputation. Anyway, the old days were passing. One heard little of Ben Thompson or King Fisher. Billy the Kid had been killed by Pat Garrett, Virgil Earp had killed Billy Brooks. Names of men once mighty in the west were sliding into the grave or into oblivion.

As for himself, few men could describe him. He had come and gone like a shadow, and where he was now, no man could say, and only one woman.

King Bill Hale owned even the law in Cedar Bluff. He himself had called the election to choose the sheriff and the judge. In the broadest sense, there had been no unfairness in the election. The few nesters and the honest people of the town had too few votes to stand against his fifty riders; and of course, many of the townspeople admired and liked King Bill.

He was always ready to give money to any worthy cause, always superficially friendly. Greeted many people but rarely stopped to talk.

Trent himself had ridden into town to vote, and had voted for O'Hara. There had been no more than a dozen votes cast for the big Irishman. One vote for O'Hara had been that of the one person Trent studiously avoided, the half-Spanish, half-Irish girl Nita Riordan.

She was the only person, so far as he was aware, who knew that he was in fact Lance Kilkenny, the gun-fighter from the Texas border country.

Whenever Trent thought of the trouble to come in the Cedar Bluff country, he thought more of Cub Hale than of King Bill. The older man was huge, powerful physically, but not a killer, although he was responsible for the death of more than one person-men he had viewed as malefactors, enemies, trespassers upon land he claimed. But Cub Hale was a killer.

Two days after Trent had first come to Cedar Bluff, he had seen Cub Hale kill a man. He was a drunken miner, a burly, quarrelsome fellow who could have done with a pistol barrel alongside the head, needing nothing more. Cub Hale shot him down ruthlessly, needlessly.

There had been the case of Jack Lindsay, a known gunman, and Cub had killed him in a fair stand-up fight, with an even break all around. Lindsay's gun had scarcely cleared the holster when the three shots hit him. Trent had walked over to the man's body to see for himself, and you could have covered the three holes with a playing card. That was shooting.

There were other stories told of Cub's killings. Two rustlers caught in the act and both killed on the spot. He had killed a Mexican sheepherder in Magdalena for some imagined offense, killed a gunman in Fort Summer, and gut-shot another in the desert near Socorro, leaving him to die slowly.

Whether Cub was considered or not--and of course, he must be--there were still Dunn and Ravitz. Both had been involved in a minor way in the Lincoln County War, and both had been in Trail City. Later they left California just ahead of a posse. Theirs were familiar names among the dark brotherhood who lived by the gun, and they were known as strictly cash-and-carry warriors whose guns were for hire.

"Buck," Trent spoke aloud to his horse, "if war starts in this neck of the woods, there will be a lot of killing. I've got to see Hale and talk reason into him."

Cedar Bluff could have been any cowtown. There were three things that set it off: one was the stone stage station, which also housed the offices of the Hale ranch; the others were the two saloon/gambling-halls--the Mecca, owned by King Bill, and the Crystal Palace, owned by Nita Riordan.

It was a time when towns sprang into being overnight, bloomed and boomed briefly, then died. The mines played out or failed to prove themselves, and the prospectors, gamblers, and mining-camp women moved on, following the boom.

There were, as Trent knew from personal experience, several thousand people who followed the booms. Several hundred of them might be found in any new camp. Each dreaming of striking it rich or taking the money from somebody who had, or just following the booms because that was where the excitement was.

Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and dozens like them might be found in Dodge City, Tombstone, Silverton, or anywhere in between. Cedar was off the beaten track, but it was a one-man town, dependent for its existence on the Hale ranch and its hands. There was other trade, but not enough to keep a business open without them.

Trent loped the buckskin down the dusty street and pulled up in front of Leathers' store. He walked into the cool ulterior. The place smelled of leather and dry goods, and at the rear, where they dispensed foodstuffs and other supplies, he halted.

Bert Leathers looked up from his customer as Trent entered, and Trent saw his face change. Leathers wet his lips and kept his eyes from Trent. Hearing a slight movement, Trent looked around, to see a heavyset cowhand wearing chaps lounging against a rack of saddles. The cowhand took his cigarette from his mouth and looked at Trent with shrewd, careful eyes.