Gunpoint

Book 3: Justa Williams Western

by Giles Tippette

Genres: Action & Adventure; Historical Fiction; Westerns

Synopsis

A legend in Western fiction, Giles Tippette brings the relentless, unforgiving West alive with bullet-driven tales of honor and survival . . . Justa Williams didn’t build up his sprawling Half-Moon ranch by sitting back on his spurs. More often than not he had to invest a bullet or two or three or more—as many as it takes—to keep the unwanted off his property. But when a scheming cattleman figures out a way to suck the ranch dry and kill off his prized possessions, it’s time for Justa to saddle up and hunt down the root of the problem. And when Justa gets there, there’s no telling how many bullets it’ll take to spell out R-E-V-E-N-G-E. Praise for Giles Tippette “Tippette can plot away with the best of them.”— Dallas Morning News “Like True Grit. . . a small masterpiece . . . brilliantly written.” — Newark News “Spine-jarring, bullet-biting intensity.”— Houston Post “Tough, gutsy, and fascinating.”— NY Newsday “Impressive authenticity.”— Booklist “His fiction is taught and gripping.”— Houston Spectator “Tippette can write rough and tumble action superbly.”— Chattanooga Times

Release date: February 14, 2017

Publisher: Lyrical Press

Print pages: 260

Sample

I was standing in front of my house, yawning, when the messenger from the telegraph office rode up. It was a fine, early summer day and I knew the boy, Joshua, from a thousand other telegrams he’d delivered from Blessing, the nearest town to our ranch some seven miles away.

Only this time he didn’t hand me a telegram but a handwritten note on cheap foolscap paper. I opened it. It said, in block letters:

Joshua was about to ride away on his mule. I stopped him. I said, “Who gave you this?” gesturing with the note.

He said, “Jus’ a white gennelman’s there in town. Give me a dollar to bring it out to you.”

“What did he look like?”

He kind of rolled his eyes. “I never taken no notice, Mistuh Justa. I jest done what the dollar tol’ me to do.”

“Was he old, was he young? Was he tall? Fat?”

“Suh, I never taken no notice. I’s down at the train depot an’ he come up an ast me could I git a message to you. I said, ’Shorely.’ An’ then he give me the dollar ’n I got on my mule an’ lit out. Did I do wrong?”

“No,” I said slowly. I gave his mule a slap on the rump. “You get on back to town and don’t say nothing about this. You understand? Not to anybody.”

“Yes, suh,” he said. And then he was gone, loping away on the good saddle mule he had.

I walked slowly back into my house, looking at the message and thinking. The house was empty. My bride, Nora, and our eight-month-old son had gone to Houston with the balance of her family for a reunion. I couldn’t go because I was the boss of the Half-Moon ranch, a spread of some thirty thousand deeded acres and some two hundred thousand other acres of government grazing land. I was going on for thirty years old and I’d been running the ranch since I was about eighteen when my father, Howard, had gone down through the death of my mother and a bullet through the lungs. I had two brothers, Ben, who was as wild as a March hare, and Norris, the middle brother, who’d read too many books.

For myself I was tired as hell and needed, badly, to get away from it all, even if it was just to go on a two-week drunk. We were a big organization. What with the ranch and other property and investments our outfit was worth something like two million dollars. And as near as I could figure, I’d been carrying all that load for all those years without much of a break of any kind except for a week’s honeymoon with Nora. In short I was tired and give out and wishing for a relief from all the damn responsibility. If it hadn’t been work, it had been a fight or trouble of some kind. Back East, in that year of 1895, the world was starting to get sort of civilized. But along the coastal bend of Texas, in Matagorda County, a man could still get messages from some nameless person threatening to kill him on sight.

I went on into the house and sat down. It was cool in there, a relief from the July heat. It was a long, low, Mexican ranch-style house with red tile on the roof, a fairly big house with thick walls that Nora had mostly designed. The house I’d grown up in, the big house, the house we called ranch headquarters, was about a half a mile away. Both of my brothers still lived there with our dad and a few cooks and maids of all work. But I was tired of work, tired of all of it, tired of listening to folks whining and complaining and expecting me to make it all right. Whatever it was.

And now this message had come. Well, it wasn’t any surprise. I’d been threatened before so they weren’t getting a man who’d come late in life to being a cherry. I was so damned tired that for a while I just sat there with the message in my hand without much curiosity as to who had sent it.

Lord, the place was quiet. Without Nora’s presence and that of my eight-month-old heir, who was generally screaming his head off, the place seemed like it had gone vacant.

For a long time I just sat there, staring at the brief message. I had enemies aplenty but, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of any who would send me such a note. Most of them would have come busting through the front door with a shotgun or a pair of revolvers. No, it had to be the work of a gun hired by someone who’d thought I’d done him dirt. And he had to be someone who figured to cause me a good deal of worry in addition to whatever else he had planned for me. It was noontime, but I didn’t feel much like eating even though Nora had left Juanita, our cook and maid and maybe the fattest cook and maid in the county, to look after me. She came in and asked me in Spanish what I wanted to eat. I told her nothing and, since she looked so disappointed, I told her she could peel me an apple and fetch it to me. Then I got up and went in my office, where my whiskey was, and poured myself out a good, stiff drink. Most folks would have said it was too hot for hard liquor, but I was not of that mind. Besides, I was mighty glum. Nora hadn’t been gone quite a week out of the month’s visit she had planned, and already I was mooning around the house and cussing myself for ever giving her permission to go in the first place. That week had given me some idea of how she’d felt when I’d been called away on ranch business of some kind or another and been gone for a considerable time. I’d always thought her complaints had just come from an overwrought female, but I reckoned it had even been lonelier for her. At least now I had my work and was out and about the ranch, while she’d mostly been stuck in the house without a female neighbor nearer than five miles to visit and gossip with.

Of course I could have gone and stayed in the big house, returned to my old ways just as if I were still single. But I was reluctant to do that. For one thing it would have meant eating Buttercup’s cooking, which was a chore any sane man would have avoided. But it was considerably more than that; I’d moved out and I had a home and I figured that was the place for me to be. Nora’s presence was still there; I could feel it. I could even imagine I could smell the last lingering wisps from her perfume.

Besides that, I figured one or both of my brothers would have some crack to make about not being able to stand my own company or was I homesick for Mommy to come back. We knew each other like we knew our own guns and nothing was off-limits as far as the joshing went.

But I did want to confer with them about the threatening note. That was family as well as ranch business. There was nobody, neither of my brothers, even with Dad’s advice, who was capable of running the ranch, which was the cornerstone of our business. If something were to happen to me we would be in a pretty pickle. Many years before I’d started an upgrading program in our cattle by bringing in Shorthorn cattle from the Midwest, Herefords, whiteface purebreds, to breed to our all-bone, horse-killing, half-crazy-half-wild herd of Longhorns. It had worked so successfully that we now had our own purebred herd of Herefords, some five hundred of them, as well as a herd of some five thousand crossbreds that could be handled and worked without wearing out three horses before the noon meal. Which had been the case when I’d inherited herds of pure Longhorns when my father Howard had turned the ranch over to me.

But there was an art in that crossbreeding and I was the only one who really understood it. You just didn’t throw a purebred Hereford bull in with a bunch of crossbred cows and let him do the deciding. No, you had to keep herd books and watch your bloodlines and breed for a certain conformation that would give you the most beef per pound of cow. As a result, our breeding program had produced cattle that we easily sold to the Northern markets for nearly twice what my stubborn neighbors were getting for their cattle.

For almost a year I’d been trying to introduce Ben into the cattle end of our business. For years he’d been in charge of the remuda, the horse herd, and even though he’d been around cattle all his life there was a great deal he didn’t know about running a ranch.

And he still had a good deal of settling down to do. Ben was four years younger than me and he was easily the best man I’d ever seen with a gun or with horseflesh. He just lacked judgment. He and I both took after our daddy with big shoulders and arms and hands. I was a touch over six foot tall and usually weighed around 190 pounds. Ben was nearly a copy of me except he was about a size smaller. We were both dark and both of us had green eyes and nearly black hair. Norris, my middle brother, didn’t look like he was out of the same breeding line. I reckoned that was because he took more after our mother. He was as big as I was, but he looked softer and he didn’t have the big hands or the muscled-up arms. He was more fair-complexioned than either Ben or me, a condition that Ben said was caused by his spending all his time indoors in an office.

Which he didn’t have much choice about since he ran the banking and investment side of our business. He’d been sent up to the University at Austin and he’d taken four years of that college book learning.

Only all that book learning wasn’t good enough for him. He wanted the books and he wanted to be a fighter. More than once I’d had to contrive a way to keep him out of the action when we’d had trouble of one kind or another. It wasn’t that he wasn’t a fair hand with a gun; he was. But that was just it, he was only fair. And faced with some of the gun hands we occasionally came up against, fair just wouldn’t do it. He resented my attitude and he resented what he considered a slur on his ability and manhood. I just always tried to explain it to him that we couldn’t afford to take a chance on losing him because he was too valuable and there was nobody could take his place. Sometimes that mollified him and sometimes it didn’t. Mostly he stayed mad at me.

I figured to go over to the big house and show the note to my brothers and Howard and see what they thought, but I didn’t figure to go until after supper. It had always been our custom, even after my marriage, for all of us to gather in the big room that was about half office and half sitting room and sit around discussing the day’s events and having a few after-supper drinks. It was also then when, if anybody had any proposals, they could present them to me for my approval. Norris ran the business end of our affairs, but he couldn’t make a deal over a thousand dollars without my say-so. Of course that was generally just a formality since his was the better judgment in such matters. But there had to be just one boss and that was me. As I say, a situation I was finding more and more wearisome.

I thought to go up to the house about seven of the evening. Juanita would have fixed my supper and they would have had theirs, and we’d all be relaxed and I could show them the note and get their opinion. Personally, I thought it was somebody’s idea of a prank. If you are going to kill a man it ain’t real good policy to warn him in advance.

I spent the balance of the afternoon looking over our herd of purebred Herefords and taking pride in what they’d done for the family fortune. My neighbors, Longhorn men to the core, had scoffed at my crossbreeding program, claiming it was too hot for these northern cattle along the Texas gulf coast and saying they wouldn’t last one summer. Well, these same doubting neighbors were now buying breeding stock out of my herd and scrambling to catch up to where we were in the beef market.

We were holding the herd down toward the coast, just short of the salt grass. They were allowed to eat a little of it since it was pretty well packed with minerals that were good for them, but we were careful they didn’t get too much of a good thing. Too much salt will bloat a cow, and a brute critter don’t have sense enough to leave off when they’ve had enough. They’ll just keep eating until they founder.

I visited a few minutes with the two-man crew that was hazing the Herefords along, and then rode the couple of miles down to the beach. An east wind was blowing and the whitecaps were just rolling in. On still nights Nora and I could lie in bed in our house and hear their long roar as they came rolling in.

I sat my horse and looked out over the gulf. Nora and I had had many a picnic on the little strip of sandy beach beneath my horse’s hooves. Off to my right was a little island of some five thousand acres. It lay about two miles off shore. When I’d started my breeding program we’d used that to mix our purebred cattle in with what Longhorns we’d selected, barging them out in a big old boxlike affair we’d built. After a few minutes I turned away. The island made me think of ranch business and the beach made me think of Nora. Right then I didn’t care to dwell on either.

After supper I had a couple or three drinks and took notice I was running low on whiskey. I made a mental note to myself to bring back a couple of bottles from the big house, where there was a good supply. We were all what I’d call hard drinkers, even Howard. At least he had been before he got shot and the doctor had cut him down to one watered whiskey a day, a blow that had nearly laid him out. But I knew he snuck a few on the side, and they weren’t watered either.

I did notice that I had been drinking more since Nora had been gone. But that was because there wasn’t much else to do, sitting around all evening in a lonesome house. But it didn’t amount to much. We all worked hard during the day, and what harm the whiskey might have done us got sweated out in the work. Of course Norris, who really didn’t drink that much, would preach to me and Ben on the subject whenever he went into one of his spells. But that was just Norris; he was generally preaching on one subject or another.

About seven I set out walking toward the big house. It was just coming dusk and there was a nice breeze blowing in from the gulf. I kept three saddle horses in the little corral behind my house, but I could walk the half mile in just about the same time as it would take me to get up a horse and get him saddled and bridled. Besides, the evening was pleasant and I felt the need to stretch my legs.

I let myself into the house through the back, passed the door to the dining room, and then turned left into the big office. Dad was sitting in his rocking chair near to the door of the little bedroom he occupied. Norris was working at some papers on his side of the big double desk we shared. Ben was in a straight-backed chair he had tilted back against the wall. The whiskey was on the table next to Ben. When I came in the room he said, “Well, well. If it ain’t the deserted bridegroom. Taken to loping your mule yet?”

I made a motion as if to kick the chair out from under him and said, “Shut up, Ben. You’d be the one to know about that.”

Howard said, “Any word from Nora yet, son?”

I shook my head. “Naw. I told her to go and enjoy herself and not worry about writing me.” I poured myself out a drink and then went and sat in a big easy chair that was against the back wall. Norris looked up from his work and said, “Justa, how much higher are you going to let this cattle market go before you sell off some beef?”

“About a week,” I said. “Maybe a little longer.”

“Isn’t that sort of taking a gamble? The bottom could fall out of this market any day.”

“Norris, didn’t anybody ever tell you that ranching was a gamble?”

“Yes,” he said, “I believe you’ve mentioned that three or four hundred times. But the point is I could use the cash right now. There’s a new issue of U.S. treasury bonds that are paying four percent. Those cattle we should be shipping right now are about to reach the point of diminishing returns.”

Ben said, “Whatever in the hell that means.”

I said, “I’ll think it over.” I ragged Norris a good deal and got him angry at every good opportunity, but I generally listened when he was talking about money.

After that Ben and I talked about getting some fresh blood in the horse herd. The hard work was done for the year but some of our mounts were getting on and we’d been crossbreeding within the herd too long. I told Ben I thought he ought to think about getting a few good Morgan studs and breeding them in with some of our younger quarter horse mares. For staying power there was nothing like a Morgan. And if you crossed that with the quick speed of a quarter horse you had something that would stay with you all day under just about any kind of conditions.

After that we talked about this and that, until I finally dragged the note out of my pocket. I said, not wanting to make it seem too important, “Got a little love letter this noon. Wondered what ya’ll thought about it.” I got out of my chair and walked over and handed it to Ben. He read it and then brought all four legs of his chair to the floor with a thump and read it again. He looked over at me. “What the hell! You figure this to be the genuine article?”

I shrugged and went back to my chair. “I don’t know,” I said. “I wanted to get ya’ll’s opinion.”

Ben got up and handed the note to Norris. He read it and then raised his eyebrows. “How’d you get this?”

“That messenger boy from the telegraph office, Joshua, brought it out to me. Said some man had given him a dollar to bring it out.”

“Did you ask him what the man looked like?”

I said drily, “Yes, Norris, I asked him what the man looked like but he said he didn’t know. Said all he saw was the dollar.”

Norris said, “Well, if it’s somebody’s idea of a joke it’s a damn poor one.” He reached back and handed the letter to Howard.

Dad was a little time in reading the note since Norris had to go and fetch his spectacles out of his bedroom. When he’d got them adjusted he read it over several times and then looked at me. “Son, I don’t believe this is something you can laugh off. You and this ranch have made considerable enemies through the years. The kind of enemies who don’t care if they were right or wrong and the kind of enemies who carry a grudge forever.”

“Then why warn me?”

Norris said, “To get more satisfaction out of it. To scare you.”

I looked at Dad. He shook his head. “If they know Justa well enough to want to kill him they’ll also know he don’t scare. No, there’s another reason. They must know Justa ain’t all that easy to kill. About like trying to corner a cat in a railroad roundhouse. But if you put a man on his guard and keep him on his guard, it’s got to eventually take off some of the edge. Wear him down to where he ain’t really himself. The same way you buck down a bronc. Let him do all the work against himself.”

I said, “So you take it serious, Howard?”

“Yes, sir,” he said. “I damn well do. This ain’t no prank.”

“What shall I do?”

Norris said, “Maybe we ought to run over in our minds the people you’ve had trouble with in the past who’ve lived to bear a grudge.”

I said, “That’s a lot of folks.”

Ben said, “Well, there was that little war we had with that Preston family over control of the island.”

Howard said, “Yes, but that was one ranch against another.”

Norris said, “Yes, but they well knew that Justa was running matters. As does everyone who knows this ranch. So any grudge directed at the ranch is going to be directed right at Justa.”

I said, with just a hint of bitterness, “Was that supposed to go with the job, Howard? You didn’t explain that part to me.”

Ben said, “What about the man in the buggy? He sounds like a likely suspect for such a turn.”

Norris said, “But he was crippled.”

Ben gave him a sour look. “He’s from the border, Norris. You reckon he couldn’t hire some gun help?”

Howard said, “Was that the hombre that tried to drive that herd of cattle with tick fever through our range? Those Mexican cattle that hadn’t been quarantined?”

Norris said, “Yes, Dad. And Justa made that little man, whatever his name was, drive up here and pay damages.”

Ben said, “And he swore right then and there that he’d make Justa pay damages.”

I said, “For my money it’s got something to do with that maniac up in Bandera County that kept me locked up in a root cellar for nearly a week and then tried to have me hung for a crime I didn’t even know about.”

“But you killed him. And damn near every gun hand he had.”

I said, “Yeah, but there’s always that daughter of his. And there was a son.”

Ben gave me a slight smile. He said, “I thought ya’ll was close. I mean real close. You and the daughter.”

I said, “What we done didn’t have anything to do with anything. And I think she was about as crazy as her father. And Ben, if you ever mention that woman around Nora, I’m liable to send you one of those notes.”

Norris said, “But that’s been almost three years ago.”

I shook my head. “Time ain’t nothing to a woman. They got the patience of an Indian. She’d wait this long just figuring it’d take that much time to forget her.”

Norris said skeptically, “That note doesn’t look made by a woman’s hand.”

I said, “It’s block lettering, Norris. That doesn’t tell you a damn thing. Besides, maybe she hired a gun hand who could write.”

Ben said, “I never heard of one.”

I looked over at him. “Ray Hays can write and he was a gun hand.”

Ben give me a look. “Aw, Ray was never no shooter. Hell, he was just an out-of-work cowhand that went to work for the wrong man. Besides, Ray can’t write all that well.”

Ray Hays was a sort of special case on the ranch. When I’d been nearly killed by this rich maniac up in Bandera, Ray had changed sides and more or less saved my life. Since that time he’d come to work on the Half-Moon ranch and helped Ben with the remuda. He was Ben’s best friend and thought he was one of the family. But when it came to any sort of trouble, outside of Ben and a man named Lew Vara, I’d as soon of had Ray Hays by my side as anybody.

I said to Ben. “Well, you’d think Hays was in the gun trade, judging from the amount of work he does around here.”

Ben flared up at that. “Hays works for me and as long as he suits me that’s all that counts. You keep your opinions off my hired hands.”

“Hays don’t know he’s a hired hand.”

Just as I said that Ray Hays himself came walking into the room.

“Speaking of the devil,” I said.

He give me one of them hurt looks of his that he ought to have taken out a patent on and said, “Aw, boss, you ought not to be calling me no devil. Ain’t Christian.”

“Aw, yeah,” I said. “I know they keep the church open just in case it might come over you to preach at some odd hour.”

I joshed Hays a pretty good amount but there wasn’t any sport in it. He was too easy. As often as I’d pulled his leg I was surprised one wasn’t longer than the other.

He stood there in the middle of the room eyeing the whiskey bottle. Finally Ben caught his drift, and took up a spare glass, poured him out a good measure, and handed it to him. Ray was about the same size as Ben except slimmer, and he had sandy hair and a light complexion. He took the whiskey, and found himself a chair by Howard, and sat down to make himself at home.

Howard said, waving the note, “Son, what are you going to do about this?”

I shrugged. “Well, Dad, I don’t see where there’s anything for me to do right now. I can’t shoot a message and until somebody either gets in front of me or behind me or somewheres, I don’t see what I can do except keep a sharp lookout.”

Howard said, “It’ll wear you down.”

“You want me to go around with my eyes closed?”

Ben said, “Look, big brother, ain’t much to be done with the remuda this time of year. Why don’t you let Ray hang about and watch your back?”

Hays looked up. “What?” he said.

I shook my head. “Right now I don’t know if this is a prank or not. I plan to treat it serious, but if somebody is a mind to kill me all the back-watching in the world won’t help. This message says on sight. I don’t know if that means facing me or picking me off at long distance with a rifle. If they plan to do that last I ain’t got a hell of a lot of choice or chance.”

Ben said, “Not much cover around here. Country is flat as hell.”

Which was true enough. There might be a little hump or a little wallow here and there but our rangeland, all up and down the coast, was nearly as flat as a desk top. Of course the grass was still plenty high and a man could lay up in that and be in concealment. But he might have to wait there a hell of a long time unless he knew where I’d be going.

Hays said, “Say, boss, what the hell is going on? Why should you need your back watched?”

I motioned and Howard passed the message across to Hays. I could see him moving his lips as he read. Like the others he read it twice. Then he looked up at me and said, “Wa’l, I’ll be dogs! Boss, I don’t like the looks of this.”

I said drily, “Funny thing, Hays, neither do I. Ain’t that strange?”

He said, “Awww.”

Howard said, “Son, why don’t you sleep up here of nights until this kind of blows over. Yes, and take your meals here.”

I shook my head. “I’ll be damned if I’ll be run out of my own house by a piece of paper. You talked about somebody wearing me down. Well, I start that sort of stuff and it would wear me down.”

I got up and poured myself out another drink and then went and sat back down.

Norris said, “Well, one thing you could do, you could put the bottle down while this is going on. That liquor don’t make you any more alert, you know.”

I stared at him in some amazement. “You going to sit there with a half a tumbler of whiskey in your hand and talk about me taking a drink?”

“Hasn’t anyone sent me a threatening message. Besides, I have noticed that you’ve been hitting it pretty hard since Nora has been gone.”

That got me more than just a little hot under the collar. “Why, you sonofabitch, don’t you come wading around here giving me advice. I’ll give you some right now for the rest of your life. Don’t ever give me no advice about my personal life. You understand?”

But Ben said, “Justa, bad as I hate to say it, Norris is right. You’ve been putting it away any time of day or night. And it don’t make you sharper.”

I said stiffly, “Well, you can go to hell also.” Then I looked over at Ray Hays. “You want to stick your oar in?”

He gave his head a quick shake. “Nooo, sir, boss. I ain’t got word one to say. No, sir!”

Howard said, “Now let’s just all calm down now. If there’s trouble on the outside we don’t need trouble on the inside. Norris, you and Ben have the good sense to keep your mouths out of Justa’s personal business. Justa knows how much he can and can’t drink. He’s been running this family for a good many years and he ain’t taken many wrong turns.”

I was grateful, but I didn’t say anything. I was just glad to see Howard having one of his better days. He was a white-haired, withered old man now with only one lung and a heart that could quit on him at any time, but he could still make his voice heard. Of course I still saw him in my mind’s eye as I had when I was a youngster, as big as I was now with a long stride and a big laugh and the vitality to work or fight or whatever was necessary until the job was done.

Norris said, “I apologize, Justa. I meant it for the best, but I see now I didn’t have any right.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I know you were just trying to help.” I drained my glass and got up and poured myself out another.

As I was heading back for my chair Ray said, “You ain’t worried, be you, boss?”

Ben said, “Oh, Ray, don’t always talk the fool. I swear, sometimes you beat anything I ever heard. What would you be if somebody sent you a message like that? Especially if you’d outdone as many folks as Justa has?”

Ray put his head down. “I reckon I’d be considerable disturbed.”

“Then why do you want to go to asking fool questions like that?”

. . .