Black Hills (9781101559116) Read online

  Now the saddle was a horse of a different color. That was mighty tempting. He had wanted one for a long time, and wanted to make sure he got the right one, but he just couldn’t make up his mind. The brown leather of the saddles had a special glean to it sometimes and seemed to feel smoother, but black saddles had a charm of their own. He remembered seeing a Mexican saddle with special stitching in a small leather shop in Denver that was beautifully made, but had an oversize saddle horn. Just too many decisions to make right now, he thought. Better wait a bit until I’ve had a chance to look at a few more. He told them he would let them know later. Sven made arrangements to go by the next day for a saddle and was being escorted up the stairs of a side-street house by two lovely admiring ladies as Cormac rode out for home. Sven happened to look out at the street as he rode by and waved with a goofy smile on his face.

  There were a few more fights after that. Cowboys being what they are, some couldn’t resist a good challenge, and he was a challenge for them. But mostly, it was good clean fun until an oversize, drunken Mexican half-breed going by the name of Ghago, with the help of two cronies, decided they were going to take Cormac apart and see what made him tick. As Cormac walked through the swinging doors into the bar, Ghago hit him and knocked him backward into the street and the three of them charged after him.

  As he staggered and stumbled backward down the two steps to the dirt street, knowing he couldn’t regain his balance in time to meet the fast advancing threat, he let himself fall backward and rolled over to his feet in time to double over the closest attacker with a kick squarely between the legs. By their rules, fair play was out of the question.

  Expecting to find him down and helpless, the second attacker had done a running dive from the top step leading to the wooden boardwalk. Cormac grabbed his outstretched arms and, using the attacker’s own weight, swung him in a half circle, launching him into the horse trough just as Ghago slid to a stop in front of him. Cormac let loose his best punch, which staggered the Mexican backward against the side of the nearest horse at the tie-rail. Slender and wiry, Ghago was fast on his feet.

  When he bumped into the horse, his hand went up to the back of his neck, and as he caught his balance and stepped forward, a throwing knife appeared in his hand and flashed downward. Cormac was slowed by the thong still holding his gun from falling out of his holster, but his first shot was still fast enough to stop Ghago’s throw with a bullet in the middle of his chest.

  The second shot took the survivor of the kick, a hearty soul hunched over holding himself with one hand while gritting his teeth and coming up with a gun in the other. Cormac then turned toward the third gunman rising out of the horse trough with a gun in his hand, causing an instantaneous change of heart. The eyes of the would-be attacker opened wide in shock, and he threw his gun into the street. “No! Please!” he cried with both hands stretched out in front as if to stop the bullet he knew was coming.

  Cormac’s gun was already aimed at his chest with the hammer back and his thumb just beginning the slide off. All that would have been necessary was to let his thumb slide off the edge. He let it go, but stopped it. It was a temptation, but he remembered telling Lop Ear a long time ago that he couldn’t shoot everyone, and the man had dropped his gun. He hesitated. His life had come down to this. From a happy family pickin’ potatoes to this: Cormac Lynch, killer of men.

  Awe, Lainey, what happened? What did I do that was so terrible?

  “Oh, hell!” he said finally. Cormac adjusted his aim a bit and let the hammer fall, putting a hole in the shoulder of the gunmen’s gun arm. It spun him around, and he stood holding his wound, expecting another bullet.

  “While that’s healin’,” Cormac told him, “think about what happened here every time it hurts. The next time you’re inclined to pull that gun on somebody, remember how you felt looking down the bore of a forty-four when it was doing business.”

  A boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen was one of the onlookers who had quickly gathered when the fight began.

  “Are you Mack Lynch?” he called.

  Cormac allowed as how he was.

  “Thought so. I’ve heard about that draw. It’s even faster than they said.” His voice was loaded with admiration. His words called Cormac’s attention to the fact that the speaker was wearing two guns. He raised his eyes to look into the excited eyes of a kid. Cormac started to say something to him and then remembered that he himself had killed four men by that age. The thought was sobering; having a fun evening no longer interested him. Lop Ear and Horse had come up to sandwich him and share his sober reflections.

  “How ’bout we go home, guys.” It was an easy step into Lop Ear’s saddle, and as a threesome they plodded sadly out of town with him wondering if wherever his family was, were they still proud of the man he had become.

  CHAPTER 11

  Winters were cold and Cormac found a benefit to working in the mine deep beneath the earth; the temperature never varied more than a few degrees. After Christmas, he was sent out to the northern line shack with Wolfgang Hartzman, a stocky German ex-wrestler, another refugee from “the old country.”

  Mr. Haplander didn’t like fences, but a valley on the north side of the Flying H led to a deep arroyo over which he had lost many head of cattle when, drifting with the wind, they fell over the edge to their deaths in a blizzard. A fence had been put up across the three-mile wide valley entrance and it needed to be monitored and kept in good repair from cattle knocking it down by leaning against the posts to scratch their backs. Two or three broken posts could easily lay down a fifty-foot section of fence.

  Their job was to ride the gap and make repairs as often as necessary, blizzard or no. The amount of work didn’t call for two men, one was plenty but the danger of a man being injured with no help for miles was real, and the men complained of being alone for long periods of time with nothing to do. Cabin fever was also real. Loneliness and being cooped up could get to a man. As a way of passing time, Wolfgang taught Cormac some wrestling moves, and Cormac reciprocated by teaching Wolfgang how to accurately hit what he aimed at.

  Wanting to continue his mother’s teaching, Cormac always carried a book in his saddlebag for spare-time reading, oftentimes just a dictionary from which he had learned things like didactic being an instructional way of speaking like a teacher might use, and incommodious meant inconvenient, but this time he had forgotten to bring one, and that, he thought, was downright incommodious. And didactic. How on earth would somebody come up with a word like didactic? Was someone sitting around one day thinking, “We need a word for instructional speaking. I know. Let’s call it didactic and have faith that someone has a dictionary so they can find out what it means.”

  Also incommodious was climbing into a really cold bed at night that sat next to a really cold and thin cabin wall. “What you do,” Wolfgang told him, “is get into bed and roll up into as small of a ball as you can, then as you get warm, you straighten out by degrees.”

  “Sure,” Cormac answered. “But by the time you get straightened out all the way, I still got thirty degrees to go.”

  Cormac Lynch and Wolfgang Hartzman took turns starting the morning fire. A fire would be burning when they went to bed, which meant the next morning coldness would necessitate the sudden throwing-off of blankets, running to the potbellied stove, throwing in wood shavings pre-whittled for fire-starting, lighting a match to it, stacking increasingly larger wood pieces on the young flames, sitting the already prepared, and usually frozen, coffee pot on the flat stove top, and jumping back into bed until they could smell the coffee and hear it boiling and the cabin had warmed enough to get out of bed.

  Other than the catalog in the outhouse, the only thing in the cabin to read was a dime novel left on the table by some past cowboy, written by an author back East named Buntline with stories purportedly about the “Real Western Frontier.” Most western people thought it was mostly just real silly and figured Mr. Buntline had never been outside the city limits of his own
town, let alone “out West.”

  They were happy when finally their time was up and their relief showed up on the horizon. By the time the relief riders arrived, Wolfgang and Cormac were packed, mounted, and saying good-bye.

  Winter was replaced by a beautiful spring with wide Montana skies, so big and so very blue. Restlessness was settling in for Cormac. Working for twenty-five dollars a month for the rest of his life, half of it in a black hole in the ground, was becoming less and less appealing. He had been there nigh on a year, and for him it was work in the mine, work on the ranch, and go into town for drinks on Saturday night. He was getting fidgety, and the horizon was garnering his attention more and more as time went by more and more slowly. The novelty of a new job was wearing off and being replaced by boredom.

  Mr. Haplander seemed to be continually requesting him for painting buildings and repairs or driving Laurie into town with the buggy for supplies. Running Lop Ear and Horse across the prairie was the only exciting thing in his life. The three of them looked forward to their Sunday-morning rides exploring the Rockies or flying across the prairies and over the gently rolling hills of the Flying H. They made it a point of always stopping by the patch of sweet clover growing on the afternoon-shady side of a close-by hill. The horses loved it, and Cormac sometimes even nibbled a few bites just to be sharing something with them. It wasn’t bad. Over the years, he had eaten worse things. Lainey’s cooking, for example. No, that wasn’t true. It was just his old habit of teasing her that was kicking in.

  He and Laurie were becoming close, and she was exciting to be around. She sat close to him on the buggy seat while on the way to town, touched his arms or hands frequently while talking to him, always had a smile for him, and gave him an excited kiss on his birthday. She had finished filling out, making it necessary for her and her mother to make all of her dresses and blouses. Store-boughts just didn’t have enough room in certain places, and even then, some didn’t seem to have come out right. They fit her more than a little bit close, and the buttons on her blouse were frequently straining to do their job. But her blue jeans fit just fine.

  On one Sunday, Laurie was waiting for him at the corral with her Paint saddled and ready.

  “Good morning,” she said with a smile. “It’s a beautiful morning and an early ride sounded great. I thought I would tag along with you, if that’s alright.”

  “Sure. Let me throw a saddle on Horse, and we’ll get going.”

  As he was finishing the task, she called to him as he was stepping into the stirrup. “I’ll race you to the river.” Taking off before he was in the saddle, she went out of the corral at a gallop and turned east. The river was two miles from the ranch buildings and served as their eastern property line. Horse was on the move while Cormac was still mounting, and Lop Ear was right behind.

  Her Paint, Dandy, was fast. Cormac had seen her handily beat her brother’s horse the first day he had arrived, but he was sure the Paint was no match for his duo. His early Sunday morning running rides had gone unnoticed with the other hands usually sleeping off their Saturday night trip to town.

  Laurie was proud of her horse, and Cormac, not wanting to show her up and make her feel bad, held Horse back; besides, it was more fun to have her in front of him where he could watch her. Horse didn’t care for that even a little bit, and kept trying to grab the bit in her teeth. She wanted to show that black-and-white horse what running was all about. Every time Lop Ear started to get ahead, Cormac called him back. He wanted to keep the race close. Of course Laurie was the first to the river where she pulled up, laughing.

  “Those big ole fancy horses of yours aren’t so much. I knew Dandy could beat them.”

  “She is a good runner; I gotta give her that,” he told her. He wasn’t lying. She probably would outrun most other horses, just not his.

  Laurie stepped down and led Dandy along the river to cool her down. Cormac walked beside her, and Lop Ear and Horse followed along behind. Laurie kept looking back at them.

  “I’ve watched them follow you all over the ranch, and I can’t get over it. They’re like puppies. How do you get them to do that?”

  “I had nothing to do with it. It’s their own idea.”

  The river had narrowed with water rippling over the rocks near the shore, and the sun was shining warmly on the grass. The only sounds were from the chuckling water and a few birds singing in the branches of the Ponderosa Pines that were filling the air with the sweet pine scent of sap running in the warmth of the morning sun.

  “Let’s stop for a while to enjoy the sunshine,” Laurie suggested, while tying Dandy to a lower tree branch in such a way as to allow her to graze. Laurie walked down and stretched out on her back on the grass by the river with her hands behind her head. The blue jeans and long-sleeved blouses she normally wore fit her especially well, but Cormac couldn’t remember having previously seen the ones she was wearing today. They were tighter even than normal, her blouse only just managing to stay together.

  Cormac sat down beside her. “How long have you had Dandy?”

  She smiled up at him for a long moment, her eyes sparkling with excitement and her face flushed. The strength of the thread holding the buttons onto her blouse and the very fabric itself were being severely tested as her bosom swelled with every accelerated breath. She asked him softly, “Do you really want to talk about horses?”

  Cormac knew what she meant, and no, he really didn’t want to talk about horses. She had grown into an extremely attractive woman with an abundant body made to please any man; the thought of unbuttoning those buttons had been full on his mind for some time.

  He had frequently heard the hands discussing her looks and shape, and they all agreed that she and her parents had their caps set for Cormac. They figured her pa’s wedding present would be a section of the Flying H upon which they could build a ranch. Cormac was glad he had some money in the bank with which to do it.

  Cormac had always made little of their talk and laughed off the suggestion with a wave of his hand, but here it was. She was offering herself to him on a soft carpet of green grass under a clear blue Montana sky, with the soft lighting of the early-morning sun, a sweet pine fragrance in the air, and the music of the chuckling river nearby, almost as if the location had been carefully preselected. Her full lips looked mighty soft and inviting.

  From time to time, a hand or a cowboy in town had tried to capitalize on the freeness of her spirit, only to find her flirty ways a charade. She was merely having fun, and like learning the range of a new rifle, after being a slender flat-chested adolescent who had suddenly developed abundantly overnight, she was experimenting with the range, power, and effects of her recently acquired figure. She would, however, not be lain down until she found her life’s mate. Now she had made her choice and was going after him, all guns firing.

  Cormac had fantasized about such a moment. He wasn’t sure exactly how to do what was obviously expected of him, but he was certain he was going figure it out. Apparently it was something that comes natural. He had refused such offers before, but never from a woman such as Laurie Haplander. With Laurie, he realized, it was more than a physical attraction; he liked her a lot. They laughed a lot and enjoyed each other’s company. She was an exciting, vibrant, and desirable woman, yet he was hesitant.

  He recalled overhearing a conversation between his mother and Becky late one night when they had thought him to be asleep. His mother had revealed that she and their father had never gotten personal until they married. Cormac felt that to be a value worth honoring; it shouldn’t just be recreational, he thought, but between two people with special feelings for each other; he believed that. But he and Laurie did have special feelings toward each other. But even that wasn’t the main gist of it. So what was his problem? What was his hesitance? Why wasn’t he already claiming his moment instead of thinking it to death?

  Looking down at her smiling eager face surrounded by thick golden-blonde hair and wearing the look that had driven men
insanely out of their minds for centuries, he found himself wondering why not. Wondering what in the world was wrong with him. Wondering if somehow, something in his violent past had affected him in some strange way. Wondering how she would look with red hair, or maybe a handful of freckles sprinkled across her face? . . . or if she was taller and her smile was a little brighter white? Wondering if... Damn! . . . Damnit, damnit, damnit! . . . Lainey! . . . Lainey Damn Nayle! . . . Damn that woman! She didn’t want him anyway. Why couldn’t she just get out of his mind and leave him the hell alone?

  But, he had to stop this; he couldn’t let it go any further: it wasn’t fair to Laurie. She wasn’t just offering the obvious, she was offering a lifetime with a home and kids, and arguing and making-up, getting up before dawn, working until long after dark, taking care of him when he was sick, crying with him when he failed, and a white picket fence with flowers in the yard and a vegetable garden. She was planning forever. The other hands were right; her father would most probably give them land for a ranch as part of the package. By agreeing to what she was offering today, he would be agreeing to the rest. But, he wasn’t ready to do that, and he couldn’t not tell her. He turned away.

  “I’m sorry, Laurie,” he said simply. “Any man in his right mind would jump at what you are offering me, but it wouldn’t be fair to you. I like you a lot and think about you a lot, sometimes in the middle of the night in ways I can’t tell you about. And I’ve thought of this moment, but now that it’s here, I can’t do it.”

  “What?” Surprise registered across Laurie’s face. “What’s the matter, Mack? What’s wrong with me?”

  Cormac couldn’t look at her. “Absolutely nothing, Laurie,” he answered, shaking his head. “Not one single thing. In fact, I can tell you a great many things that are wonderful about you and not one single thing bad. But to go with you to where this is leading us, you deserve someone who loves you, and I was just this moment forced to realize that I am not that someone.”