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    Ghost Ranch
    Ghost Ranch
    Ghost Ranch
    Ebook150 pages2 hours

    Ghost Ranch

    By Paul Lederer

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Caught in a land war, two gunmen are forced to shoot their way out

    A bloated dead cow bakes in the hot desert sun. This grisly omen is the first creature Trinity and Billy Raglan have seen since they stepped onto the deserted Bar-D Ranch, a desolate stretch of country that their boss has purchased for reasons known only to him. Sent to clear out the property after the former owner refuses to vacate, they detect no signs of life—until a sniper’s bullet breaks the silence. Trinity and Billy have walked into a shooting war.

    This is the opening engagement in a battle that could determine the fate of the territory. As Boss Clark fights three factions for control of the seemingly worthless land, Billy and Trinity find themselves caught in the crossfire. Their only routes of escape involve traversing an endless stretch of deadly desert . . . or shooting their way to freedom. 
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateApr 29, 2014
    ISBN9781480487338
    Ghost Ranch
    Author

    Paul Lederer

    Paul Lederer spent much of his childhood and young adult life in Texas. He worked for years in Asia and the Middle East for a military intelligence arm. Under his own name, he is best known for Tecumseh and the Indian Heritage Series, which focuses on American Indian life. He believes that the finest Westerns reflect ordinary people caught in unusual and dangerous circumstances, trying their best to act with honor.

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      Book preview

      Ghost Ranch - Paul Lederer

      ONE

      They spotted the first casualty lying in the dirt road leading the Bar-D Ranch which was still about ten miles distant across rugged, red country.

      ‘Who in hell do you s’pose would do that?’ Billy Raglan muttered, swinging down from his gray to take a closer look.

      ‘There aren’t many rules in war,’ Trinity answered. He sat his piebald horse, hands crossed on the pommel, while his older companion crouched over the victim of violence, his hat tilted back.

      ‘Damned shame, damned waste,’ Raglan muttered, looking up at his tall companion.

      ‘Most death is,’ Trinity said philosophically, popping out his canteen cork to take a drink of tepid water. The sun was riding high in the pale sky. ‘But there isn’t much we can do about it. Not when we’ve hired out to do what we’re doing.’

      Raglan was still concerned and confused. ‘They just cut her throat, Trinity! Left her lying in the sun. Hell, a Comanche wouldn’t do that.’

      ‘No.’ Trinity was tired of the conversation. The day was sweltering. Mirages danced before his eyes across the long flats all the way to the far-distant red hills that seemed to ripple in the heat haze.

      ‘Damn!’ Raglan said once again before he roughly kicked the bloated body of the white and red heifer that someone had left along their road.

      ‘Think she had calves?’ Raglan asked, swinging into the saddle, tugging down his hat to shield his eyes against the sun-glare.

      ‘Too young by the look of her,’ Trinity guessed, ‘Besides, we don’t have the time to search around for them if she did. Supposing we found calves? What would we do with them?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Raglan said, sniffing. ‘You’re right, I know. It’s just the waste.… Sometimes I hate our line of work, Trinity.’

      Which was that of hired guns, to put it as bluntly as possible.

      As Trinity sat his pony, watching the long land, the dry wind drifted over him and outside of the constant scent of sage and lightly drifting sand, there was no sound or smell across the prairie, no evidence of anything you’d expect to see and hear around a working ranch: cattle bawling, men shouting to one another, woodsmoke hanging in the air.

      ‘Kind of eerie, isn’t it?’ Billy Raglan commented.

      ‘What’s that?’ Trinity asked, as if he hadn’t noticed it himself.

      ‘Even out on the open range … all we seen so far is one dead cow. Who are we supposed to be fighting, anyway? And what does Boss Clark even want with this dead country? He’s already got about a million acres.’

      ‘Ten thousand,’ Trinity corrected. And even that was not considered a lot in west Texas where an acre of land could barely support two or three steers.

      ‘All right, ten thousand!’ Raglan said as they started their horses forward again. ‘This here spread,’ he commented, waving a dismissive hand, ‘won’t add much of use to his holdings.’

      ‘There’s water here,’ Trinity replied.

      ‘Yeah.’ Billy snorted dismissively. ‘I know – Shamishaw Creek. I’ve heard it described as the ‘Shamishaw Trickle’. Tell me, Trinity, do you see any green grass anywhere around us?’

      ‘I suppose it’s a seasonal creek,’ Trinity said as they crossed a dry arroyo, dotted with dry willow brush and stands of flat-paddled nopal cactus. ‘Besides,’ he continued as they achieved the flat once more, ‘It’s not our business to figure out why Jefferson Clark wanted the land. The fact is that he bought it and now these people won’t move off it.’

      Billy sniffed and wiped his cuff across his nose. ‘It sure looks to me like they moved.’

      ‘Taking the cattle and still owing Boss Clark the title for the land,’ Trinity reminded his saddle mate.

      ‘I can’t figure how a canny man like Boss Clark could have let that happen,’ Billy said. ‘I’d hate to deal with him myself – or play poker with him!’ Billy chuckled.

      ‘It was a woman who sold the property to him,’ Trinity said, as if that explained a lot.

      ‘Oh,’ Billy said, understanding. ‘They do have their ways.’

      In silence they rode across the land which was barren, dry, clumped here and there with greasewood and stands of mesquite, nopal and always sage. Once they passed a blackened cottonwood tree; it was the only sign of healthy vegetation they had seen, and now it stood barren and black as wrought iron against the pale sky.

      ‘Those hills,’ Billy said nodding toward the distant sawtooth range on the horizon ‘– that’s up in New Mexico, isn’t it?’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Trininty responded. ‘We’re near to the line. That’s for sure.’

      ‘I’d like to see that territory,’ Billy said with some wistfulness.

      ‘What for? The land’s not going to look any different from what it does on this side of the line.’

      ‘I don’t know,’ Billy Raglan answered. ‘Just to say I’ve been there, I guess.’

      Trinity reined in sharply. Billy looked a question at him. Then Trinity shook his head.

      ‘It’s nothing – I thought I heard some cattle lowing over to the west. I must be starting to imagine things.’

      ‘Well, keep on looking sharp,’ Billy advised. ‘If we run across anyone who knows who we are, they might just go to sniping at us.’ He fell silent as the horses plodded on toward where the Bar-D ranch house was supposed to be situated. ‘A woman foxed old Boss Clark, did she?’ Billy asked with a chuckle.

      ‘I wouldn’t know – that seems to be what the old man thinks.’

      ‘Well, a man can get silly around them, even the shrewdest of us.’

      Trinity smiled. ‘Is that what happened to you, back in Topeka? I know you were carrying a lot of gold when we rode in and didn’t have the money to pay for stabling your horse when we rode out again.’

      ‘Oh, that!’ Billy answered. ‘It wasn’t anything like this. You mean Gloria?’

      ‘I don’t think I ever knew her name – you two were always off alone somewhere.’

      ‘Well,’ Billy insisted, ‘she wasn’t one of those gold-diggers or cheats. We just didn’t get along.’

      ‘Why was that?’ Trinity asked, trying to keep the irony out of his tone.

      ‘My God, Trinity, didn’t you ever hear her talk! She had that squeaky mouse voice, like fingernails on a slateboard. Maybe it was a little amusing at first, but a weary man wants to hear a soothing voice to comfort him in the evening. When I was a schoolboy … did you ever go so school, Trinity?’

      ‘There was none where I grew up.’

      ‘Well,’ Billy said, ‘we had a little red schoolhouse. Dad made me go there when I was not needed at home. I guess I did not so much get any schooling, but used school as a place to act up, and learn about girls,’

      ‘What did you learn?’ Trinity asked.

      ‘I’ll tell you another time,’ Billy said with a flip of his hand. ‘Anyway, when I was in school there was a smug little girl with pigtails seated behind me named Marcia … Marcia something, and she dragged her fingernails across her slateboard. It put my teeth on edge, that sound, and I told her so. So she continued to do it forever after, every day. It about drove me crazy.

      ‘So you see, when I met Gloria back in Topeka, I thought I had struck gold. But she had this voice.…’ Billy made a fist and shook it, ‘I tell you, I couldn’t take it.’

      ‘So that was the reason you gave up on her?’

      ‘Sure – what were you guessing?’

      ‘I don’t try to guess about women,’ Trinity said. Then he dropped the subject as they crested a hillrise topped with golden-dry wild oats and came upon the Bar-D ranch house. ‘Check your loads, Billy,’ he advised. ‘We might be about to raise some hell.’

      They saw no one, heard no animals or voices as they trailed down the long dry-grass slope toward the log ranch house, but they rode cautiously, wary of a trap. Trinity described a circle in the air with his finger and motioned toward the rear of the house. Billy Raglan nodded and started that way, rifle across his saddlebow.

      The place was as silent as the fine blowing dust. By the time Trinity swung down at the hitch rail in front of the small ranch house and tied his piebald, Billy had finished circling the place.

      ‘There’s no one around,’ Billy said, tipping back his hat from his sweating brow, ‘And it makes no sense.’

      ‘No, it doesn’t.’ There were only two ways to look at it: either the former owners of the Bar-D had decided just to give it up and ride off, leaving the place to Boss Clark, or they were hiding out somewhere, determined to fight Clark off. Either way, they were going about this wrong. Boss Clark had paid good money for the Bar-D and the owner had failed to deliver the property deed to the county courthouse as agreed upon. It was starting to look as if the woman who owned the Bar-D had indeed bested Jefferson Clark – or was trying to. Trinity knew his employer well enough to know that he would not accept the slight. He would fight for what he believed to be his.

      Which was why Billy and Trinity were here on this hot, dry day. To do a little fact-finding and warn off anyone still occupying the land that they had no choice – they had to leave.

      ‘Who the hell pulls out and slaughters his own cattle along the way?’ Billy grumbled to the sky as he swung down from his horse. He was still thinking about the dead heifer they had come across.

      ‘Maybe they did get attacked by Indians,’ Trinity suggested. ‘That would explain why no one’s on the ranch.’

      ‘No it wouldn’t,’ Billy said with some heat. He was thirsty and trail-beat. ‘They’d stay right here behind these log walls and fight. Besides,’ he added, ‘why would an Indian kill a perfectly useable cow and leave it to bleach in the sun?’

      ‘A warning?’ Trinity suggested for the sake of conversation.

      ‘No, sir! Wasn’t no Comanches involved in this,’ Billy said positively. ‘Can we get out of this sun now, Trinity? I reached my limit about an hour back.’

      ‘All right,’ Trinity said, slicking his Colt revolver from his holster. ‘Do you want to go in first, or you want me to do it?’

      Billy Raglan seemed for the moment to have forgotten that they had no way of knowing if the house, abandoned as it appeared, was empty. ‘You go,’ he muttered, drawing his own pistol.

      Trinity approached the door, holding his revolver high. He looked at Billy, tapped three times on the door, then nudged it open with his boot toe. Finally he administered a healthy kick, entered, and crouched beside the open door. He and Billy fanned out through the musty-smelling house, searching for inhabitants. Trinity already knew there was no one there. An empty house always feels that way – empty. Absent is all warmth of human bodies, scents of cooking, echoes of long-ago laughter. You can tell when a house is empty even from the outside.

      Nevertheless, this was no time for taking chances.

      They met back at the living room with its low-beamed ceiling and open-mouthed native stone fireplace. Billy shook his head. ‘No one living or dead.’

      ‘I wonder what we’re supposed to do in a situation like this?’ Trinity said, seating himself on a broad chair covered with natural leather.

      ‘Do? We rest up and ride back and tell Boss

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