Ransom Valley (Wind River Book 7) Read online

  "I'd say it's brisk and refreshing," he replied. "My name's Adam Maguire."

  She hadn't asked him to introduce himself, and she didn't really want to encourage him. There was quite a bit of difference in their stations in life, after all. But she found herself saying, "I'm Brenda Durand."

  "It's an honor and a pleasure to meet you, Miss Durand. It is Miss Durand, isn't it?"

  "That's right." Brenda was surprised that she would answer such a personal question from a perfect stranger, without even hesitating.

  "I was just passing through your town here, but I'm starting to think that might be a mistake. The more I look around, the more reasons I see to linger for a while."

  "How do you know it's my town?"

  "Ma'am?" Maguire said with a puzzled frown.

  Brenda waved that off. "Never mind." She started to step past him. "I hope you enjoy your stay, however long it is."

  He stopped her with a light touch on her arm.

  "I'd enjoy it more," he said, "if I could convince you to have supper with me. I was just on my way to the café . . ."

  Brenda was actually tempted to accept his invitation. He was good-looking, there was no denying that, and he had a compelling presence about him, but the richest woman in town could hardly share a meal with a man who was more than likely just a saddle tramp. No matter how handsome he was.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "My grandmother is waiting for me at the hotel. We always eat in the dining room there."

  Maguire shrugged. "Another time, then, maybe."

  Brenda didn't respond to that one way or the other. She just said, "Good evening, Mr. Maguire."

  He put on his hat and ticked a finger against the brim. "Miss Durand."

  As she moved off along the boardwalk, Brenda wanted to look back and see if Adam Maguire was watching her. She forced herself not to give in to that impulse. It seemed to her that the drifter already had a swelled head. She didn't want to give it any reason to get even bigger.

  Chapter 3

  Wind River's justice of the peace was a spare, balding man who wore pince-nez spectacles on his beak-like nose. His name was Edgar Toomey, and he had taken over the job a few months earlier after moving to the settlement from Rawlins to live with his daughter and son-in-law. He had practiced law for a number of years before retiring. Being the local magistrate allowed him to keep a connection with the legal system.

  "What's the prisoner's name?" Toomey asked when Cole brought the gunman before him the next morning. The man's face was haggard from a hangover, not to mention the clout on the head that Adam Maguire had given him.

  Cole prodded the prisoner's arm. "Speak up."

  The gunman winced and cleared his throat. A long, thin mustache hung down on both sides of his mouth. He said, "My name's Lije Beaumont, Your Honor."

  "You've been in trouble before, haven't you, Mr. Beaumont?" Toomey said.

  "Well . . . I reckon a few times. When I, uh, have too much to drink my head gets sort of muddled . . ."

  "Then you know what's going to happen next. I find you guilty of disturbing the peace and sentence you to pay a fine of ten dollars. If you don't have it, you can spend the next ten days in jail."

  "He's got it," Cole said. "Deputy Casebolt searched him before he was locked up, to make sure he didn't have a knife or a hide-out gun."

  "Yeah, I'll, uh, pay the fine, Your Honor," Beaumont said.

  "Very well. Give the money to Marshal Tyler, then you're free to go. And I'd suggest that unless you have a good reason to stay in Wind River, your best course of action would be to move on." Toomey rapped the gavel on the table in the town hall where he held court. "We're adjourned."

  Cole took Beaumont back to the marshal's office, where the man handed over a couple of five dollar gold pieces from his belongings. Cole gave him back his gunbelt and said, "That Colt's unloaded. Leave it that way until you get clear of Wind River."

  "You're runnin' me out of town?" Beaumont asked in a surly voice.

  "You heard what the judge said."

  "You got no call to run me out. I paid my fine."

  "You reckon you can stay sober and stay out of trouble?"

  Beaumont hesitated and shrugged. "Probably ain't likely."

  "Next time you might wind up dead instead of buffaloed."

  Still glaring, Beaumont said, "Yeah, well, you didn't have to hit me so hard. My skull feels like you damned near stove it in."

  Cole laughed. "I didn't hit you. Another fella in the saloon took care of that for me. If it had been up to me, there's a good chance I would have shot you."

  Beaumont's scowl turned even darker. "Who was it walloped me?"

  "That doesn't matter now. Get on out of here. And if you do stay in town, I'll be watching you."

  "No need to worry about that," Beaumont muttered. "Wind River ain't a very friendly place."

  He left the office. Cole followed and stood on the porch with a shoulder leaned against one of the posts holding up the awning. He watched as Beaumont went down the street to the livery stable. The man emerged a few minutes later mounted on a buckskin. He rode out of town, following the Union Pacific tracks west.

  Cole was glad to see him go.

  * * *

  Lije Beaumont rode alongside the railroad tracks until he was out of sight of Wind River. Then he turned his horse and headed northwest, toward a range of low, rocky hills dotted with scrubby pine trees.

  He urged his horse to a faster gait and seemed to know where he was going, even though there was no real trail through the desolate country in which he found himself. Some decent cattle range lay further north and west, in the grassy valleys between the foothills of the great snowcapped mountain ranges. That was the area where several big ranches were located. But this semi-arid, mostly barren stretch of country not far north of the railroad wasn't good for farming or ranching or much of anything.

  Except as a place where men could hide if they didn't want to be found.

  Beaumont followed a twisting path into the hills. Sheer rock walls closed in around him, leaving only a narrow passage. Beaumont had to weave around big slabs of rock that had broken off the heights in ages past and tumbled down into the cleft. Because of those obstacles and the looming walls, only two or three men at a time would be able to ride through here. That made the path easy to defend. A few men with rifles could hold off a small army if it tried to come through here.

  The trail ran for about half a mile, gradually angling up as Beaumont followed it. It finally ended in a gap that opened into a small valley. A creek flowed from a spring at the head of the valley, maybe a mile northwest of the spot where Beaumont entered it.

  The creek petered out before it reached the valley's far end, but along its course it provided enough water for grass and greasewood bushes and a few trees, mostly cottonwoods and aspen, to grow. The vegetation was responsible for a splash of green amidst the brown, tan, and gray landscape. At the moment the green was punctuated with patches of yellow and red as the leaves on the trees had begun to turn with the approach of winter.

  Beaumont had ridden only a few yards along the trail leading from the gap down into the valley when a voice hailed him and caused him to rein in. A grin appeared for a second on Beaumont's saturnine face when he saw a man step out from behind a boulder alongside the trail. The grin quickly became a scowl.

  "Damn it," Beaumont said, "did you have to hit me so hard? You just about busted my head open with that gun butt!"

  "I knew that skull of yours was thick enough to take it," Adam Maguire said as he leaned against the boulder with his thumbs hooked in his gunbelt. "Besides, when I saw how ready that marshal was to shoot you, I figured you'd rather have a sore head than a bullet hole in your brisket."

  "Yeah, there's that to consider, I reckon," Beaumont admitted grudgingly. "Anyway, now we know what sort of law they've got in Wind River."

  "That we do," Maguire agreed. "And when we make our move, they won't be able to stop us!"

&nb
sp; Chapt er 4

  The town council in Wind River met once a month, with the mayor, Dr. Judson Kent, presiding over the meetings in the town hall. The other four men on the council were Nathan Smollet, the manager of the bank; Harvey Raymond, who ran the general store; Duncan Blaisdell, who owned a saddle shop; and the proprietor of the livery stable, Patrick Milligan.

  All five men were in attendance at this morning's meeting, their businesses being looked after by others for the moment. Cole was there, too, as was Michael Hatfield, the sandy-haired young editor and publisher of the Wind River Sentinel. Michael attended all the council meetings so he could report on them for the newspaper. Cole was there because the council always wanted a report on whether or not there was any trouble brewing in the settlement.

  Cole didn't care for the meetings. They were boring, and he always felt like he could be accomplishing more by being somewhere else. He attended because he considered the councilmen to be his friends and they wanted him here. The fact that they paid his salary had never really entered into it; since he had spent most of his life as a drifter he had never considered himself tied down by the tyranny of wages. And since he'd inherited those holdings from Simone, he certainly didn't need the marshal's salary.

  Nathan Smollet was droning on about something. Cole wasn't sure exactly what it was; he had stopped paying attention soon after the bank manager started talking. But then he heard his name mentioned as Kent said, "And how about you, Cole? Do you have anything to report this week?"

  Cole looked up at the bearded physician who had come to America from England and wound up in this frontier settlement in Wyoming Territory.

  "It's been pretty peaceful," Cole said. "Had to break up a few ruckuses between punchers from the Diamond S and the Latch Hook, and one fella got drunk and tried to shoot up the Pronghorn the other day."

  "What happened to him?" Kent asked.

  "He spent the night in jail and paid a fine for disturbing the peace the next morning. Then he rode out of town and I haven't seen him since." Cole shrugged. "Good riddance as far as I'm concerned."

  "I'm sure we all agree," Kent said. "So, it sounds as if things have been rather tranquil – "

  "Which is just what I was talking about earlier," Duncan Blaisdell said as he leaned forward to look at the other men sitting behind the table. "Wind River is civilized now."

  "I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that – " Cole began.

  "Have you fired your gun since last week, Marshal?" Blaisdell asked. He was a beefy man with shaggy, graying blond hair and a soup-strainer mustache of the same shade.

  Since he was standing in front of the table where the council sat, Cole felt a little like a schoolboy who'd been hauled in front of the headmaster for some infraction of the rules. Blaisdell's sharply inquisitive tone reinforced that feeling, and Cole didn't like it.

  "As a matter of fact, I haven't," he admitted. "Other than a little target practice, I don't think I've had to fire my gun for a month or more."

  "Exactly my point," Blaisdell said to the others. "We're spending money we don't need to on law enforcement."

  "Wait just a minute," Cole said. "Are you talking about firing me?"

  Hurriedly, Kent said, "No, no, not at all. The town still needs a marshal."

  "It's the deputy I think we ought to get rid of," Blaisdell declared.

  That blunt statement took Cole by surprise. Judging by Blaisdell's earlier comments, the council had been talking about this before now, and Cole wished that Judson Kent had seen fit to give him a little warning. Maybe Kent had felt that he couldn't do that, ethically. He and Cole were friends, but Kent had a responsibility to the town as mayor, too.

  "Billy Casebolt's a good man," Cole said.

  "No one is claiming that he isn't," Kent said.

  "He's a good lawman, too," Cole went on. "Every time I've needed him, he's been right there to back whatever play I made."

  Blaisdell shook a finger and said, "The question is, do you really need him anymore? Based on what's happened in the past month or so, don't you think you could handle any problems that arise, Marshal?"

  "Well, that's just the thing of it," Cole said. "You don't ever know what trouble is going to come up. It's best to be prepared for it, whatever it is."

  "That's my thinking, too," Kent said. "Anyway, it's not as if we pay Deputy Casebolt a princely sum. His wages consist of little more than room, board, and ammunition."

  "I think we should vote on it anyway," Blaisdell said with a surly frown. "We could put that money to better use. Who'll second the motion?"

  None of the other council members said anything.

  After a moment, Kent said, "Well, I suppose we should move on to the next order of business. Thank you for your report, as always, Marshal."

  Cole nodded, glad for the chance to get out of there while he still had a deputy.

  Duncan Blaisdell was a pompous pain in the rear end, Cole mused as he walked back toward the marshal's office, but on the surface, anyway, he wasn't far wrong about Wind River getting civilized. In the early days of the settlement, not a week had gone by without several killings. There had been stampedes, the threat of an Indian war, conflict involving the Chinese members of the community, rogue mountain men, rustling, beatings, a church burned to the ground before it could even finish getting built . . . Back then, it had seemed like hell was breaking loose all the time, and lately, it hadn't been that way.

  What Blaisdell didn't understand was that you couldn't tell how long that stretch of peace was going to last. And when it came to its inevitable violent end, Wind River was liable to need both of its lawmen.

  * * *

  Fifteen men rode toward the settlement. Adam Maguire and Lije Beaumont were in the lead. Close behind them came a baker's dozen more, all dressed in rough range clothes except one huge, red-mustachioed man whose bulky muscles strained the fabric of the dusty black suit he wore. The hard-planed, cold-eyed faces of the men marked them as dangerous, as did the veritable armory of guns they carried.

  "Just two lawdogs, right?" Beaumont said to Maguire.

  "The marshal and his deputy, right," Maguire confirmed. "We've seen them both, and I asked around town enough to make sure there aren't any other deputies."

  "That old pelican won't be much to worry about. He likes to run his mouth, but that's about all."

  "Don't underestimate him," Maguire warned. "If any of you get a chance, kill him as soon as you can. I'll be looking for the marshal. I did some asking around about him, too. He was a scout and a wagon train guide before coming to Wind River. Rode with Jeb Stuart's cavalry during the war. He's a fighting man."

  "A couple of .44 slugs will knock all the fight out of him," Beaumont said.

  Maguire smiled and said, "That's true. That's why the first order of business is to put him out of the way. When the shooting starts, he'll come running to find out what's going on. I'll be waiting for him."

  When the gang was still a couple of miles from town, Maguire called a halt. "We've been over the plan several times," he said to the other outlaws. "Anybody have any questions?"

  A couple of the grim-faced men shook their heads. The others were silent.

  "All right. You know your jobs. We'll rendezvous back in the valley to split up the loot." Maguire lifted his reins. "Good luck. Let's go."

  The group split up. Four of the men stayed with Maguire as he rode toward the settlement. The others broke into groups of two men each and scattered so they could ride into Wind River at different times and from different directions. The presence of such a large bunch riding into town at the same time stood a good chance of alerting the marshal that something was about to happen. Surprise was an essential part of Maguire's plan.

  Along with acting fast and killing anybody who got in their way . . . especially Cole Tyler and Billy Casebolt.

  Chapter 5

  "Marshal, wait up!"

  Cole paused and looked over his shoulder to see who had called to him.
Michael Hatfield hurried along the boardwalk in his direction. The young editor was hatless, as usual, although he wore a suit and a string tie.

  "Council meeting over already?" Cole asked as Michael came up to him.

  "They didn't really have any other business to discuss once Mr. Blaisdell spoke his piece about Billy."

  "Did you know Blaisdell was going to bring that up about firing him?"

  Michael shook his head. "No, not really, but it doesn't surprise me. He's been talking about how he thinks the town should build an opera house, so they'll have to come up with the money for that somewhere."

  Cole stared at Michael for a couple of seconds before he repeated, "An opera house? What in the world for?"

  "Why, to have operas in, I guess," Michael said with a smile. "Mainly, though, Mr. Blaisdell thinks it would give the town some culture and help it grow. He says Wind River can become the biggest, most important town in the territory outside of Cheyenne."

  "Good Lord! If the place ever gets that big, the council won't have to fire me. I'll quit!"

  Shaking his head in amazement over what Michael had told him, Cole walked on toward the marshal's office. When he got there, he found Billy Casebolt pouring a cup of coffee from the battered old tin pot on the stove.

  "Anything important happen at the council meetin'?" Casebolt asked.

  Cole shook his head and said, "Just the usual hot air and foolishness." He didn't see any point in mentioning what Duncan Blaisdell had brought up and worrying Billy unnecessarily. Cole didn't intend to let anybody fire the deputy.

  Hell, he would pay Casebolt's wages himself if he had to, he thought. He could afford that now. The land development company brought in plenty of money.

  "When you finish that coffee," Cole went on, "why don't you take a turn around the town?"

  Casebolt frowned, clearly puzzled. "Why do you want me to do that, Cole? We don't normally make rounds this time of day. Besides, Wind River has gotten so plumb peaceful I ain't sure the place even needs a couple of star packers no more!"