Trigger happy, p.1
Trigger Happy, page 1
LOOK FOR THESE EXCITING WESTERN SERIES
FROM BESTSELLING AUTHORS
WILLIAM W. JOHNSTONE AND J.A. JOHNSTONE
The Mountain Man
Luke Jensen: Bounty Hunter
Brannigan’s Land
The Jensen Brand
Smoke Jensen: The Early Years
Preacher and MacCallister
Fort Misery
The Fighting O’Neils
Perley Gates
MacCoole and Boone
Guns of the Vigilantes
Shotgun Johnny
The Chuckwagon Trail
The Jackals
The Slash and Pecos Westerns
The Texas Moonshiners
Stoneface Finnegan Westerns
Ben Savage: Saloon Ranger
The Buck Trammel Westerns
The Death and Texas Westerns
The Hunter Buchanon Westerns
Will Tanner: U.S. Deputy Marshal
Old Cowboys Never Die
Go West, Young Man
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Copyright © 2021 by J.A. Johnstone
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CONTENTS
Western Series from Bestselling Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Read More
About the Author
Chapter 1
Emerging from breakfast in the Fort Randall mess hall, Nathan Stark and his fellow scout Moses Red Buffalo paused to gaze off in the direction of a low hill about half a mile southwest of the fort’s wall.
They watched four buzzards circling in the sky above the crest of that hill, taking turns swooping down to a particular spot, landing for a minute or so, then rising again. Something up there—something dead—was providing the scavengers with their own breakfast.
“Noticed a couple of them up there yesterday,” said Red Buffalo. “Didn’t think too much of it. Figured they were probably picking clean the remains of a jackrabbit or maybe a coyote.” Red Buffalo frowned. “Now there’s four and they’re still mighty busy with it. Got to be some bigger critter, wouldn’t you say?”
“Reckon so,” Nathan allowed.
“Make you curious?”
“Curious enough to walk up there and take a look, you mean?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Nathan gave him a dubious look. “Ordinarily, I’d tell you to go ahead and have at it. My curiosity ain’t that strong and whatever it is those buzzards are picking at is long past any help. But, seeing how today is shaping up to be about as boring as yesterday and the day before that, the notion of a hike in the cool morning air to do some exploring, pitiful as that amounts to, is at least something to do. So yeah, let’s go have a look.”
The pair headed for the front gate, reporting tersely to the sentry on duty that they were going to check something out, and then angled in the direction of the distant hill and the circling buzzards. As civilian scouts under no current direct orders, they had far greater freedom to come and go than the uniformed soldiers of the garrison.
In his middle thirties, Nathan Stark was lean, though solidly muscled, with wolfish facial features and a mane of thick dark hair. He wore a flat-crowned Stetson, faded red bib-front shirt, buckskin trousers, well broken-in boots. A Colt Peacemaker rode in a holster on his right hip. On his left was sheathed a ten-inch bowie that he had pried from the dead fingers of his slaughtered father.
For his part, Moses Red Buffalo, a full-blooded Crow Indian, was of indeterminate age, somewhat stockier in build, perhaps an inch shorter. He wore his glossy black hair in two long braids trailing down from a brown slouch hat with an eagle feather stuck in its snakeskin band. A buckskin vest over a thin cotton shirt and fringed buckskin trousers tucked into high black leather boots completed his outfit. He, too, had a holstered Colt strapped around his middle and a bone-handled knife thrust in his belt. He also carried a Henry repeating rifle.
The pair gave off an unmistakable air of competence, alertness, and dangerous readiness as they glided lightly, silently, across the expanse of Dakota prairie grasses and began their ascent up the slope of the hill. The approach of the intruders caused the buzzards to squawk and flap their wings in protest.
Red Buffalo swung the muzzle of his Henry out ahead, slashing the air and snarling, “Scat, you ugly black varmints! Clear out before I blast you into more piles of putrid meat for other scavengers to feast on!”
“Here now. I thought Injuns, especially you bein’ a Christian one and all, walked in harmony with God’s creatures, great and small.”
Red Buffalo scowled. “Filthy birds! They are not God’s creatures. They are the spawn of the devil!”
Educated in his younger years at a Catholic mission school, Red Buffalo had become a devout Christian—one of many beliefs the two scouts did not share.
Nathan was considering some further remark to needle the Crow, but before he could decide what it should be, he was struck by a viciously foul odor that caused him to stop in his tracks and turn his face away.
“Egad!” he exclaimed. “Whatever’s giving off that terrible stench is something a hell of a lot bigger than the carcass of a jackrabbit or even a coyote.”
Red Buffalo faltered a bit from the same terrible stink but continued on a few more steps—close enough to come within sight of the bloated, shredded form at which the birds had been pecking. He halted, winced distastefully, and said, “You’re right, it is neither of those things. It is the body of a man!”
That was enough to bring Nathan the rest of the way forward. Gazing down, he grunted, “I’ll
“Whoever it is—or was—his clothing and boots mark him as a white man,” Red Buffalo stated.
“Yeah, you’re right. Say, wait a minute …” Then Nathan exclaimed once again, “Well, I will be damned! You’d never know it by the ruination that’s left inside them, but I recognize those duds. That shirt, the fancy leather belt … we’re looking at what’s left of none other than Dietrich Bucher.”
“Yes, I see it now, too,” agreed Red Buffalo.
“So the low-down, stinking snake didn’t get away after all!” declared Nathan.
A week earlier, Dietrich Bucher, a third scout assigned to Fort Randall, had come up missing in the wake of an attack on the fort by a war party of renegade Sioux under the leadership of a chief called Hanging Dog. Bucher had been part of a gunrunning scheme that could have resulted in a bloody massacre of the troops if not for Nathan’s efforts.
Bucher had been unaccounted for following the battle, neither among the surviving nor the dead, and most believed he had cut his losses and escaped.
Here was the proof that hadn’t happened.
As the two men continued to gaze down at the ravaged remains of the German, Red Buffalo said, “No, he didn’t get away. It’s kind of puzzling, though, that he ended up here.”
Nathan frowned. “What do you mean? The Indian attack backfired on him just like it did on his partners. What’s so puzzling about that? I say it’s well-deserved payback suffered by the whole lot of treacherous varmints.”
“I got no trouble with that part of it,” Red Buffalo said. “What I’m saying is I find it curious how Bucher came to fall in this particular spot.”
“You and your curiosity.”
“Don’t you see? How did he manage to get struck down clear up here? Could have been a wildly stray bullet, I suppose. But otherwise, the fighting was all down on the flat, closer around and in the fort. Look at the ground hereabouts”—Red Buffalo swept his free hand—“there’s no sign of Indian ponies or any other activity having taken place anywhere near here. And if a Sioux made a kill this far apart from the rest of the fighting, wouldn’t he have taken Bucher’s cartridge belt and boots? Not to mention his scalp.”
Nathan’s frown deepened. “No, he’s still got that. Leastways what the blasted birds didn’t tear away.”
“Don’t you see at all what I’m getting at?” Both Red Buffalo’s expression and his tone conveyed frustration. “Another thing. If this body has been up here a whole week, don’t it seem like—”
The rest of what he was going to say was cut short by a sudden wind-rip of sound—a peculiar thurrrp! of disturbed air that would have been indecipherable to most people but was all too familiar to the experienced ears of Nathan and Red Buffalo.
It was the sound of a bullet sizzling through the sixteen inches of space that separated them as they stood discussing their grisly discovery. And unless there was the slightest doubt, the confirming boom of the heavy rifle that had hurled the menacing slug reached them a ragged second later.
By then the two men were peeling away from each other and pitching themselves to the ground.
Chapter 2
Nathan hit the dirt and rolled to the side until he came to a halt in a slight depression filled with higher, thicker prairie grass. He sensed, without seeing, that Red Buffalo was executing a similar maneuver. The high grass wasn’t going to protect Nathan from another bullet, of course, but with luck it would make him a harder target for any further attempt by the bushwhacker.
But an anticipated second shot didn’t ring out.
Nathan bellied tight to the ground. He swept off his hat with his left hand and with his right drew his Colt. Then, edging forward a few inches, he cautiously parted the high grass and peered out.
“What the blazes was that?” Red Buffalo called from a few yards away.
“Somebody was trying to part the hair on one of our heads with a bullet,” Nathan answered.
Red Buffalo grunted. “A bullet makes an awful dull razor, though a right smart skull splitter. Who’s gotten proddy with you lately?”
“Ain’t got the time nor inclination to rattle off that whole list. You spot where the shot came from?”
“No, not yet.”
“There!” Nathan said abruptly. “That brushy ridge due north. See the powder-smoke haze in those bushes?”
“Got it,” Red Buffalo replied. A moment later his Henry roared once, then a second time as he sent some return fire back in the direction of whoever had opened up on them.
Extending his right arm, Nathan triggered the Colt in his fist three times, rapid-fire, and blistered the air with some lead of his own.
“You realize, don’t you,” said Red Buffalo, “that a handgun doesn’t have the range to make it as far as that ridge?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Nathan replied. “But the same ain’t true for that Henry of yours. Did you do any good?”
“No, not as far as I can tell,” Red Buffalo admitted grudgingly. “But I darn sure gave the bushwhacker something to think about.”
“Hell, I did that much,” Nathan scoffed. “Burned some powder, let off some steam. Made sure the dirty so-and-so knows he missed me and that I am annoyed by the attempt.”
“Annoyed enough to go after him?”
“You really have to ask?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Whoever it is don’t seem to be in a hurry to plunk away no more. Probably still best to wait a bit, though. Not be in too big a hurry to poke our heads up. In case he’s laying back waiting for another crack at what he missed the first time.”
“Uh-huh.”
As it turned out, neither Nathan nor Red Buffalo had to worry about being the ones to poke their heads up. The shooting had not gone unnoticed by men down in the fort. In a matter of minutes, four riders came boiling out the front gate and then made the sharp turn to proceed up the hill toward where the scouts were hunkered down.
Nathan recognized Corporal Cahill at the head of this detail. He had come to consider Cahill one of the more tolerable troopers at Fort Randall. He was young and inexperienced, but eager to listen and learn and work his way up through the ranks by effort, not favoritism.
When the riders were three quarters of the way up the slope, Nathan shoved himself up on one elbow and shouted, “Corporal! Dismount your men and walk them on the south side of their horses! There’s a bushwhacker up on that high ridge to the north and ain’t no telling when he might decide to open up again!”
Cahill promptly responded to the suggestion, ordering his men to quit their saddles and walk behind the chests and forefeet of their horses.
No more shots came from the ridge to the north.
When Cahill and his men reached the crest of the hill, Nathan and Red Buffalo pushed guardedly to their feet, all the while keeping a sharp eye on the distant ridge.
“Are you two all right?” Cahill asked. “We heard the shooting. You say you were fired upon from ambush?”
“One shot,” Nathan told him. “The rest of it was our return fire.”
“Do you think you scored a hit on the scoundrel? Is that why only the one shot?”
Nathan shook his head. “More likely we just drove him off. But keep your men spread out and a close watch, just in case he’s waiting for us to let our guard down and give him a bunched-together target.”
The men accompanying the corporal quickly fanned out, not waiting for an order.
“Any idea who it was? Or why he shot at you?”
“No, but we damn sure aim to find out,” Nathan assured the corporal.
Cahill snapped a nod. “We’ll report back to the fort and then form a more fully provisioned detail to ride in pursuit.”
Red Buffalo, who had remained keenly focused on the ridge, now turned his head, saying, “That would waste valuable time. If we’ve put that ambusher on the run, as it appears, he’ll be able to gain several miles on us before we set after him in the way you suggest.”
“Moses is right,” Nathan was quick to add. “If that varmint has lit a shuck, we need to start after him pronto!”
“But—”
“I’ll take full responsibility,” Nathan said, cutting off Cahill’s objection. “Let me and Moses take two of your horses and head out right away. You’ll have plenty to take care of here, mounting a burial detail.”
The young corporal looked bewildered. “Burial detail? I don’t understand.”
Nathan jabbed a finger in the direction of Bucher’s carcass. “Was up to me, I’d leave the scurvy snake to the buzzards and worms. But since he was attached in a scout capacity to Ledbetter’s command, I imagine there’s all sorts of proper protocol the good colonel will want followed.”
