Читать книгу Bullets for a Ranger: A Walt Slade Western - Bradford Scott - Страница 4

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A STORM WAS BLOWING in from Matagorda Bay, driving the gray waters of the Gulf before it in an endless procession of tossing, foam-capped waves. Overhead the cloud wrack writhed and tumbled. From time to time a wild white moon looked down through the rifts, glinted on the wave crests and touched the raving waters with silver fire. Birds scudded down the long slant of the sky like whirling leaves, seeking sanctuary. A great saddle-backed gull breasted the gale with steel-thewed pinions. A very master of the storm, he, harnessing the tempest to his own dark ends.

Twigs and leaves spun through the tortured air. Dead branches showered down from the chaparral. A tree fell with a crash. The wind howled in triumph and whooped across the sands of the beach, swirling the lighter particles in blinding clouds. It was a wild night already, in the last gasp of twilight, and held every promise of becoming even wilder as the hours passed.

Close to the water’s edge, where the arc of the bay swept around in a splendid curve, ran a trail. At the very apex of the curve stood a single dead tree, its naked branches swaying with a dry rattle. On one thick limb perched three dilapidated-looking crows sheltered from the blast of the wind by the ponderous trunk. With ruffled feathers, gleaming red eyes and drooping beaks, they appeared in a very bad temper indeed.

Riding north on the trail was a tall and broad-shouldered man on a correspondingly tall black horse. As they neared the dead tree, a terrific gust howled in from the bay. There was a crackling, splitting sound, a rending crash and a resounding thud as the tree gave up the battle of a century with the wind and fell across the trail. The crows, their shelter gone, went away from there with wrathful squawks. One hurtling black projectile, screeching curses, whizzed by so close that it fairly grazed the black horse’s nose.

The horse screamed angrily and snapped his milk-white teeth. Ranger Walt Slade, whom the Mexican peones of the Rio Grande river villages named El Halcón—The Hawk-rocked in the hull with laughter.

“Take it easy, Shadow,” he chided his mount. “That fellow wasn’t after you; he was just trying to get in the clear. Lucky for us though, we weren’t a few yards farther on. If one of those branches had larruped us, we would have felt it.”

The wrathful crow hurtled on, the wind buffeting him, his black feathers glinting in the moonlight that poured through a ragged rift in the cloud wrack. Straight for the shelter of a thicket some three hundred yards farther along the trail he scudded, his two companions screeching along behind him.

But when he reached the thicket, the crow’s reaction was peculiar. Suddenly he braked with his wings, rocking backward on the axis of the spread pinions. The wind caught him, and he turned a complete somersault in the air. By a seeming miracle of agility he caught his balance, veered and went streaking away at an angle from the thicket. An instant later he and his speeding companions vanished into a second thicket several hundred yards farther on.

Walt Slade stared after the vanished crows, his black brows drawing together.

“Now what do you suppose set those jiggers off that way?” he asked Shadow. “Looks like they ran smack into something they didn’t like the looks of. Must be something holed up in that brush. But what? Takes considerable to scare off crows, and on a night like this a bird will take most any kind of a chance to get under cover. Such a wind is liable to smash him all to pieces against a limb or a tree trunk. But those black galoots took right back against the wind.”

He glanced at the sky. “Going to cloud up that moon again in a few minutes,” he added. “Reckon we won’t take any chances; funny things been happening in this section of late, from all reports.”

While the moonlight still streamed down, he veered the horse carefully around the welter of smashed branches blocking the trail. Just before the cloud wrack thickened, he regained the track and rode unconcernedly along it.

But the instant the funnel of moonlight pouring through the rift snapped off like a searchlight beam, he swerved Shadow from the trail and rode due north across the sands to where a straggle of brush that encroached the beach began. The roar of the wind and the groaning of the trees effectually drowned the muffled beat of the horse’s irons on the sand.

Walt Slade was trailing ghosts—rather a unique pastime for a Texas Ranger. But that, in the opinion of many of the section, was what it amounted to. And it was to do just that that Captain Jim McNelty, the famous Commander of the Border Battalion, had sent him to the Matagorda Bay country.

“Men of steel!” snorted Captain Jim. “The old Spaniards in armor come back to life! Just a bunch of brush-poppin’ owlhoots, that’s what. Sheriff writes asking for a troop of Rangers to get things under control. A troop to chase ghosts! Yes, just a bunch of owlhoots playing on ignorance and superstition. Skalleyhoot down there, Walt, and run ’em into the bay. If you see a real ghost and get scared, send word back and I’ll come down myself. Get goin’!”

Slade chuckled at the thought of Captain Jim’s tirade, but he did not underestimate the seriousness of the situation. Ignorance and superstition are made to order for the unscrupulous and crafty who know how to make the most of those attributes. Ordinary wide-loopers in wet slickers and dripping “J.B.’s—” that was doubtless the answer. But sheep and cattle had been stolen and men murdered, which required a different “answer.”

For several hundred yards Slade rode north; then he veered to the east. Another hundred yards and he pulled Shadow to a halt in the shelter of a clump of chaparral and dismounted.

“You take it easy here for a spell,” he told the horse. “I figure that thicket can stand a mite of investigating, and from here on I’ll do better on foot. If there is somebody holed up there for some reason or other, doubtless an off-color one, they’d be sure to hear you clumping along. Stay put, and keep quiet.”

Confident that Shadow would do both, he stole forward to the edge of the thicket farthest from the trail, slowing to a crawl as he neared the first fringe of growth. It was a ticklish business, that slow stalk through the gloom, with always the threat of the moonlight pouring down again to reveal him to any chance watcher. He figured that anybody concealed in the growth would be keeping an eye on the trail, but of that he couldn’t be certain. With a sigh of relief he reached the bristle of chaparral and slid into it. Slowly, cautiously, he glided forward, testing the ground ahead at each step, noiselessly moving branches aside. Objects were eerie and unreal in the faint light that seeped through the cloud bank. As he penetrated deeper into the growth, the dark became absolute. Another score of yards, however, and the brush began to thin. Slade knew he must be close to where the tangle of branches edged the trail. He doubled his caution, straining his ears to catch any sound rising above the turmoil of the storm, peering with narrowed eyes to note the slightest movement amid the shadows. His instinct, developed over years of training, told him that no great distance away there was life, doubtlessly malevolent life. He halted, every sense at hair-trigger alert.

For some time he stood perfectly still, hearing nothing, seeing nothing. Finally he took another cautious step forward, planting his reaching foot on what appeared to be firm earth but was in reality the hard crusted rim of a badger hole. The rim crumbled under his weight and he lurched forward, completely off balance. Instinctively he clutched for support, gripped a welter of dry branches and saved himself from falling; but the branches broke in his grasp with a prodigious snapping and crackling. And at that moment the treacherous cloud wrack curled up like torn paper, letting through a flood of silvery moonlight. The whole scene became bright as day.

Walt Slade saw, facing him, the moonlight shining on the startled forms of two men apparently clad in medieval armor. The moonlight glinted on what looked like plates of steel protecting their chests. It shone on burnished round headpieces that also seemed to be of steel. But it also glinted on the barrels of anything but medieval forty-fives. The barrels jerked up as Slade went for his guns. The air rocked and quivered to the reports. Even in that hectic moment Slade was astounded by what sounded like a clang of metal striking metal.

Through the streams of orange fire and the fog of smoke gushing toward him, Slade saw one of the “men of steel” slew sideways and crash into a tangle of growth. He felt the wind of a passing bullet, heard the screech of another, which nicked his ear. Then two guns roared as one. Slade saw the dry-gulcher hurtle back, steady himself, fire again as the Ranger pulled trigger. A choking cry came from the dry-gulcher as he went down.

But Walt Slade neither saw the fall nor heard the death cry. For at that instant the world about him exploded in scorching flame and blazing light through which rushed a cloud of utter blackness to wrap him fold on clammy fold. Three motionless forms lay amid the brush as the clouds thickened and blotted out the scene of death.