Part One



Coming home



Sometimes to complete a journey you have to return to the place you started from. At least that was the idea that brought Dee Bandy to the hills overlooking Clinton.

He had ridden through Bridger Pass four days before, wending his way slowly, not pushing the bay stallion but moving steadily southeast until he reached these low, forested, granite-rock-covered hills. Now he leaned forward on the bay, forearms resting on the broad pommel of his Mexican saddle, looking down at the distant, gray, weathered buildings of the town and considered what to do.

It was just going on toward dusk. Still early enough to ride down and get a room in the hotel. Get the bay a rubdown and a meal of corn for once. He could treat himself to a bath and have a good meal. Sleep in a real bed. The idea was appealing but there were still some things he had to work out in his mind.

He turned the bay and moved back into the forest of pine, oak and white ash to the face of a sheer, rocky bluff. There had been a slide there at some time years ago. Portions of the bluff eroded by rain had torn away and tumbled to the forest below, bowling over trees and creating a small open spot. Grass had grown in the clearing, enough for the bay to graze. Bandy hobbled the stallion and spread out his bedroll behind the largest of the rocks then gathered some dry branches and lit a fire. He was protected and far enough back in the trees so its glow wouldn't give him away. He brewed his coffee, heated the few beans he had left and ate.

Tomorrow he'd ride into Clinton. He'd been fifteen when he left seven years before, fed up with his hard-headed father, hating the drudgery of ranch work and longing to see more of the world than branding irons and digging strays out of tangles of shrub birch. Clive Bandy's spread, the Double B, was the biggest in the valley. There was ample water from both the Fox River and Diablo Creek. In spring and early summer there was lush grass for the stock and plenty for cutting to hay for later. The old man had carved it out of nothing, fighting for it, even killing a few who tried to take it away from him. Dee knew it would be his someday but he hadn't wanted it. Not then and maybe not now. He needed to think on it.

What he did want was to make peace with his old man, see his sister Caitlyn, his younger brother Ben and Feather, the half-Indian girl his father had taken in when Dee was a kid.

It had been a long seven years. He'd worked for a time for a stage company, first as a hostler, later as a guard on runs north to Montana and south to Oklahoma. From that he'd drifted south to Texas, rustled a few head of cattle across the border from Mexico. Half the men he met did the same thing or worse. Earning whiskey money, they called it. Or money to spend on the women who worked in the saloons and bordellos in the dusty towns dotting the border. More than once, he'd had to use the Russian .44 he'd taken with him when he left home. Men in that part of the country were hard, quick to anger and slow to back down. Sometimes there was no alternative but to settle arguments with bullets. He was no gunman but he'd learned if he wanted to live, it paid to be quick. He practiced until he was.

Tired of Texas, he'd ridden north on a cattle drive, ended up in a small Kansas town on the Sabine River west of Abilene and signed on as a town deputy. He might have stayed there but the sheriff, a man named Dwight Cobb, was an outlaw. It wasn't uncommon for western lawmen to have a history shaded toward lawlessness. They lived by the gun and often they died the same way. The cattle drives that came up along the Chisholm Trail from Texas to the railheads in Abilene were ripe pickings and Cobb organized a gang that preyed on the drives. Dee learned about it and fretted about it but in the end decided to look the other way. But holding up stage runs was another of Cobb's endeavors and on one of his hold-ups a guard was killed. Bandy called him on it and Cobb went for his gun. Much too slow. A locked drawer in Cobb's desk yielded a bit more than $4,600 and Dee took it. He guessed it was money gained by thievery and if he didn't take it someone else would.

Whether Cobb was a crook or not, it wasn't good policy to kill lawmen. Dee headed north.

It had grown dark. He put a few more branches on the fire, rolled himself in his blankets and drifted off.



Joseph



Sometime before dawn, Dee Bandy came awake knowing someone was watching him. He spun over, reaching for his Colt 1873, a reliable single-action model he'd traded the Russian for back in Kansas. He rolled back, drew aim and froze.

The figure sitting quietly on the other side of the glowing coals hadn't moved. It appeared to be wrapped in a blanket and to be chanting softly. Dee squinted into the darkness, then slowly rose to his feet.

"Joseph?" he said.

There was no response but he was sure the man was Joseph Broken Arm. But that was impossible. Joseph had been an old man twenty years before when he had stumbled into the Double B, carrying a small Indian girl. In halting English he had told of a Pawnee raid on an Arapaho camp that killed everyone except himself and the girl. She was half white, he said, the daughter of a white trapper and an Arapaho woman. Her name was Feather.

Clive Bandy had taken them both in and raised the girl as if she were his own. But that was so long ago. Joseph Broken Arm had to be dead.

Dee turned and thrust a short dry branch into the fire's dying embers. When it caught he turned back and held it up. The Indian was gone.

Dee built up his fire and brewed the last of his coffee, considering what he'd seen. Or what he thought he'd seen. He didn't believe in ghosts but a man would have to be a fool to ignore what his own mind told him. When he was a boy, Joseph Broken Arm had taught him to read weather signs, to track game as good as any Indian and to believe in things the mind taught you, things other men ignore that sometimes let you take a peek at the future. The lessons had saved his life more than once. Maybe that's what he'd seen, a sign sent to warn him about the days ahead.

As light began to filter through the surrounding forest, Dee saddled the big bay and retraced his steps of the previous day. Sun was just breaking over the Two Sisters, the twin buttes that held down the far eastern edge of the valley. Dawn crept across the rich grassland, painting the meadows a dusty gold. To his right, south of where he sat, the Fox River tumbled out of the mouth of Mustang Canyon and wound its way toward Clinton's north side. To the north, hidden in an outcropping of granite, Diablo Creek glittered like the links of a silver chain as it left the concave protection of Devil's Bowl.

Joseph had told him that ages ago the underground spring that fed the creek had gushed clean, sweet water. But one day an evil spirit entered the spring and it stopped flowing. Many of his people tried to trick the spirit into leaving but all failed. Warriors tried to kill it but the spirit could assume different shapes and was too quick to be hit with arrows or lances.

Finally, a famous medicine man came to the dry bowl where the evil spirit lay at the bottom in the form of a great lizard. The medicine man rode three times around the bowl, chanting words only he knew. As he completed the third turn, the lizard assumed the form of a white heron, flew to the rim of the depression and was changed into an immense white rock. Immediately the water returned to the spring and flowed off across the valley. True story or not, the white rock still stood at the edge of Devil's Bowl.

As a boy, Dee Bandy had believed all the stories the old man told. He knew now they were myths and superstitions. Even so, he couldn't help but wonder what Joseph Broken Arm was trying to tell him.



Danny Spiller



Dee Bandy left the bay at Bergman's Livery with instructions to rub him down good and give him a well-earned meal of corn.

"Corn's extry," Bergman's hand told him, eyeing the stranger's trail-worn clothes. He was about to say Dee looked like a drifter and, handsome Mexican saddle aside, which he could have stole anyway, how did he know Dee could pay for anything?

"Don't recall askin' what it cost, did I?" Dee said. There was something hard and dangerous in his eyes and the stableman decided to back off.

"Guess not," he said. "Corn it is."

There was a boy standing outside the stable as Dee Bandy stepped out carrying his hand-tooled Mexican saddlebags and his Winchester.

"Whatcher horse's name, mister?" the boy asked. He looked to be maybe about nine, with unruly brown hair. He was barefoot and wearing dirty corduroy trousers and a thin flannel shirt with a rip in one sleeve. Dee had seen a hundred like him—Mexican, half Indian or white—in towns from Lubbock to Abilene.

"What makes you think he's got a name?" he asked.

"Don't all horses?"

"Some don't," Dee said. "What would you call him?"

"Well," the kid pondered. "He's big and strong. I guess somethin' like Hero, maybe."

"That's a good name," Dee agreed. He started off toward the Clinton Hotel. The boy trailed along behind him.

"You here to kill someone?"

"Why would I do that?" Dee kept walking.

"Your gun's tied down," the boy said. "You a gunfighter?"

"Nope."

"Well, which one of 'em you gonna back?" the boy persisted.

Dee stopped. "You got more questions than a field full of grasshoppers, don't you? What do you mean, one of 'em?"

"Well, either the Double B or Lindsley's spread."

The name wasn't familiar. "Who's this Lindsley?"

The boy cocked his head and looked at Dee. "I guess you don't know, then. Lindsley come here 'bout two years ago and started building him a spread. Right off he had a run-in with old Bandy. They been fightin' ever since."

So that's what I've rode into, Dee thought. It's what Joseph was tryin' to tell me. A goddam range war. "What's your name, boy?" he asked.

"Spiller. Danny Spiller."

There was a Spiller used to ride for the Double B, Dee recalled. A big, hard-fisted man and a good worker whose wife had died giving birth to a baby boy two years before Dee had lit out. This could be the kid but Spiller wouldn't allow no kid of his to wander the streets of Clinton. "Any relation to Big Ed Spiller?" he asked.

"My pa," the boy answered. "They kilt him."

"Lindsley?"

Danny Spiller nodded. "Yessir. His hands did. Well nigh a year ago."

"Who's feeding you, Danny Spiller," Dee asked softly.

"Bergman sometimes," he said. "Sometimes I get something from the café. Stuff they throw out. If I go out to the Double B, they feed me good."

I suspect they do, Dee thought. And that's where the kid belonged. But with his pa dead, the boy preferred to stay in town for some reason. He dug in his pocket and came up with a ten dollar gold piece. "I thank you for your information, Danny Spiller," he said. "We'll talk again, like as not." He turned and walked off toward the hotel.

"Say, what's your name mister?" the boy called after him.

Dee Bandy didn't answer. The town would find out soon enough who he was. Then there'd be all hell to pay.



The Three Kings



It was his first bath in weeks and once rid of the sweat and trail dust, Dee felt about five pounds lighter. He put on a clean shirt and jeans and used the scissors he always packed in his gear to trim his rust-brown beard close to his jaw.

There was an old full-length mirror in his room, its silvered backing worn away in spots but still capable of giving him a clear enough image of himself. It was unlikely anyone would mistake the man who looked back at him for the raw, fifteen-year-old kid who'd left the valley seven years ago. He'd added a couple of inches and maybe thirty pounds since then, all of it hard muscle. Pale blue eyes looked out of a tough, weathered face not incapable of laughter. Other than a few small lines at the corners of his eyes, caused by squinting into southern distances parched by the sun and faint lines that marked the steely set of his mouth, his face was unmarked. More than a few women had told him he was handsome. He'd never thought so, but was glad to accept their opinions and the affection that went with them when offered. Man'd be a fool not to, he thought.

With trouble between his father and this Lindsley, it was clear what he needed to do. But not yet. He needed a day or two to figure out the lay of the land. If he could keep people from knowing who he was, he might be able to learn just what his family was up against.

But first he needed to eat. He strapped on his holster and tied it down tight to his leg then picked up his Stetson and regarded it ruefully. Once a fine gray, it was encrusted with dirt and stained beyond redemption with sweat and rain. He'd buy a new one later.

The town had changed. Maybe not as much as Dee himself, but there were differences: Clinton's side streets and alleys were still packed dirt but the main street had been caliched to make wagon passage easier. There were more stores selling clothing, leather goods and ranch supplies, two attorney's offices, a real doctor's office, a new bordello. The stockyards, now empty, south of town next to the Union Pacific station and the telegraph office, had been expanded, an indication ranching was prosperous. There were two more cafes and an honest-to-god tea room for ladies.

Dee picked one of the new cafes at random and tucked away a meal of inch-thick sirloin, four eggs, coffee and biscuits with pan gravy then walked over to Hoffman's Dry Goods. There were people on the street now and all of them regarded him warily, watching him out of the corners of their eyes or staring boldly. Two customers in Hoffman's, women pawing over bolts of cloth and sorting through boxes of buttons and ribbons, fell silent as he entered and moved as far away from him as they could. Hoffman himself, a gray-haired stooped, hollow-faced man wearing blue galluses over a wrinkled white shirt, waited on Dee courteously but nervously, obviously eager to avoid conversation or provocative questions.

It was clear Clinton was as edgy as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. They feared something was going to explode and the appearance of a gun-toting stranger did nothing to allay their fears.

It was not yet quite noon when Dee Bandy entered the Three Kings saloon. The place was empty aside from two old men playing cards, the piano player and Ivars Gudson, the town drunk. None of them bothered to look up when he pushed open the door,.

In Kansas when he was looking for information, Dee had found the easy way to loosen folks' tongues was to offer them a drink. He bought a bottle from McKendry, the pasty-faced mustachioed bartender, and took it to a table near the piano where the music man lounged dozing. He hung his new hat on the back of a chair, poured himself a shot of whiskey and put his boots up. He remembered the piano man from trips he'd made to town with his father to buy supplies for the ranch. He was a short corpulent man dressed in black trousers and a red shirt, over which he habitually wore a gold, brocade vest. He was practically hairless with an unusually wide, lipless mouth and slightly bulging eyes, features that led to his inevitable nickname.

Frog Addams was a silent harmless fellow who had wandered west some years before from Chicago for some unknown reason. He'd made it as far as Clinton where his urge to travel deserted him and he stuck like a cocklebur. He lived in a room over the saloon and spent his afternoons and evenings at the piano, sipping beer and thumping out old show tunes, perfectly content it seemed to do nothing more.

Dee's plan took a turn for the worse almost immediately. Shouts of men hurrahing it up outside were followed by the echoing clatter of shod hooves on the wood sidewalk in front of the Three Kings. There was another shout and two men burst through the door yelling for whiskey. The shorter of the two spotted Dee and grabbed the other's arm.

"Wall, looky there, Johnny," he said. "That jasper's got a damn-near full bottle."

The west was full of men like these. Rough ranch hands with the day off, looking for a good time, plumb full of themselves and reckless. Sometimes that recklessness took the form of foolhardy unreasonableness. The sheer difficulty of the west attracted such men; men who took without asking. Men who bullied lesser men into giving them what they wanted. You didn't back down from men of that sort. To do so was to be branded a coward, to wear a sign around your neck that said you didn't have the spine to stand up for what was yours.

Dee slowly lowered his legs and watched the pair approach, a stocky weak-chinned waddy with a sharp, beak-like nose and long, oily black hair and a big fat man well over six feet tall with a brutal unshaved face scarred by childhood acne. Not his choice of drinking companions.

"You boys care for a friendly drink?" he asked.

The rowdies exchanged quick glances and smirked. "Sure do," the fat man said. "But I reckon we'll just take the whole bottle."

He reached for it and Dee struck like a rattler, pinning the bully's left wrist to the table. The man jerked back, trying to pull away but the hand that held his wrist was like steel. Furious, he went for his gun but Dee already had his out and clubbed him to the floor with the Colt's butt. The other man had his gun half out of its holster when Dee leveled the .45 at him.

"Go for it," he said. "Hell ain't half full."

Beak nose let go of his gun and held his hands open at belt level. The fat man lay dazed beside the table and Dee put his boot on him to keep him pinned. He stooped, pulled the man's gun from its holster and tucked it in his gun belt.

"Now you," he told beak nose. "Take your gun out with your left hand. Do it real slow and put it on the table." The man glared at him but did as he was told. Dee tucked it in beside the other.

"I figure you're both stupid enough to want to come after me so I guess I got to fix it so you can't." Dee said. "I could kill you but it sure would spoil my day." He took his foot off the fat man's back and drove the heel of his boot down hard on the man's gun arm. He heard the bone crack as the man screamed and passed out. Beak nose was backing up hard, his hands held high and a look of sheer horror on his face. Without seeming to aim, Dee sent a bullet through the man's gun hand, the big .45 slug blowing away half his fingers.

He turned. Frog Addams and the old card players were staring at him open mouthed and McKendry had ducked down behind his counter. He picked up his bottle of whiskey and took a pull then poured the contents on the fat man's body.

"You wanted it," he said. "Enjoy it."



The Double B



After the dust-up at the Three Kings, Dee Bandy's options had dwindled to just one. He retrieved his gear from the hotel, saddled the big bay and headed for the Double B.

The ranch straddled the Fox River and he rode through lush meadow enriched by the spring rains and the frequent run-off from the western hills. Occasionally as he rode, he came upon bunches of grazing cows, many of them with unbranded calves. That was half the problem, he thought. Unlike the southwest where barbed wire staked out the boundaries of each man's herds, northern ranchers were stubbornly free-range. Any puncher with a rope and chaps could start his own little empire by culling a few of another man's calves or digging strays out of the brush. If a man had a big enough spread, he might tolerate a bit of larceny but too much of it could lead to bloodshed. Like as not, that was the root of the war between the Double B and this newcomer Lindsley.

The main buildings and corrals of the Double B lay on a rise just ahead, visible beyond the jagged, up-thrust rocks of Bear Tooth Ridge. Joseph had told him they were the teeth of the first bear, killed by Found-in-Grass, the Arapaho hero who grew from rags to become a great chief and who led the first buffalo hunt. Dee was about to spur the bay into a canter when a bullet pinged off a rock ten feet to his left and went singing off into the distance.

He pulled up and leaned on his pommel. ""If you were tryin' to hit me, you could sure as blazes use a few lessons," he called out.

He was answered with another shot that knocked his Stetson off into the grass. "Now, gol darn it," he yelled. "I just bought that hat."

"Come any closer and you won't ever have to buy another." The voice, a woman, came from Bear Tooth Ridge. Even after seven years, he knew who it was.

"Caitlyn?"

"How come you know my name, you ugly saddle tramp?"

"Ugly? Why, you used to think your big brother was right handsome."

There was a girlish squeal and a slender strawberry-blonde woman wearing a battered brown hat, jeans, a man's work shirt and carrying an old Spencer repeating rifle stepped out from behind the rocks, shading her eyes with her free hand.

"Dee? Is that you after all these years?"



Lord Lindsley



Any idea that Clive Bandy had mellowed over the years disappeared like chickens in an Oklahoma twister. His greeting, "'bout time you showed up," told Dee he was as bullheaded, intractable and incapable of showing emotion as he'd ever been. All that the passing of time had done was add a streak of gray to his thick brown hair, hang a few useless pounds around his already stocky frame and wind-and-sun-cure him until he was as unbendable as old leather.

Never a voluble man, his version of the current difficulties were brief and as unadorned as a shroud.

"This Lindsley fella showed up a few years back," he told Dee. "Right off he started pushin'. Lord Lindsley, he calls himself." In disgust, Clive spat into the dust of the corral where they talked as Dee unsaddled the bay. "Lord my left foot! God only knows where he got that from. Some book like as not. I had no crow to pick with the man but he come at me wantin' to buy some of the Double B's best river pasture. When I told him no, he set his punchers to stealin' my calves and strays. Big Bill Spiller caught 'em at it and got shot for it. I killed the man who did it 'n Lindsley's been fannin' the flames with his hat ever since."

"Where does Ben stand in this?" Dee asked.

It was a delicate question. His younger brother had never been a fighter. He was a handsome devil and bright as a new penny, slight of build with his father's thick brown hair and striking gray eyes. Ben was his father's favorite and as such, he'd been spared the rough toil Dee had endured as the daily price of his place at the table.

He was surprised when his father rounded on him like a bee-stung bear. "Don't be askin' about Ben," he growled. "You'll find out soon enough."

As they walked back to the ranch house, a striking young woman dressed in an emerald-green dress with white ribbons laced through the sleeves, stepped out on the broad porch and stood smiling shyly at Dee. Catching sight of her, Dee Brady was struck suddenly as dumb as if he'd been hit with a fence post. He had seen stunning women before—dark-eyed Mexican beauties, the lovely, pale, perfumed daughters of Kansas businessmen—but never a woman as heart-stopping beautiful as the one who stood watching him, a vision with long, shining obsidian hair, long-lashed, gray-green eyes and a trim figure.

It took a minute for him to find his voice, lost as it was somewhere down near his stumbling heart, but he finally managed to croak out her name. "Feather?"

"So you remember me, Dee Bandy," she teased.

"What I remember," he said, "is a dirty-faced little girl with skinned knees. Not some heavenly angel in a green dress."

Feather's face broke into a broad smile, "Well, Mr. Dee Bandy, you've certainly learned some fancy words since you've been gone." She turned and stepped back into the house leaving Dee as thunderstruck as a just-branded calf.

Throughout the midday meal that followed, even as Dee puzzled over the absence of his brother Ben and his father's angry reaction, he couldn't take his eyes off Feather, a fact she rewarded from time-to-time with shy smiles. It wasn't until he and Caitlyn were sitting together on the broad ranch-house porch after eating that Dee brought up the subject of Ben's absence. Caitlyn grew silent and sad for a moment before answering. "I'm afraid Ben is part of our problem."

"Ben? How could he be?" Dee rolled a smoke and lit it with a match struck on the rough leg of his jeans.

"Lindsley has three children," Caitlyn said. "Two daughters and a son. The son, Jacob, and one daughter, Ella, are cut from the same cloth as their father. Both of them are sneaky and as nasty as cornered bobcats. There's a Mrs. Lindsley, too. But back east. She came out, decided she hated cows and cowboys and took her fancy dresses back to Philadelphia."

There was movement behind and to one side and Dee realized Feather had joined them, sitting quietly in the swing hung from the porch roof.

"And the other sister?" he asked.

"Emma. She must have been switched at birth because she's a sweet girl without a mean bone in her body."

"Just a year younger than Ben," Feather added. "Pretty too, if you like 'em buxom."

Dee turned to look at her, a big grin on his face.

"Well, she is," Feather said, blushing a bit.

"Yes, she is pretty. All blonde and pink and Ben fell for her like a collapsing chimney," Caitlyn said. "I don't know how they did it but they managed to meet in Clinton and maybe out riding . . . anyway . . ."

"They ran off together," Feather finished.

"Where to?"

"Probably Laramie at first or maybe some place farther east. Three months ago Ben sent a wire from Cheyenne saying they were married. I guess they sent one to Lindsley too and he went up like a scalded moose. He swears he'll kill Ben on sight if he ever comes back."

Dee finished his smoke and flipped the butt end out into the yard where it was immediately attacked by one of the ranch hens. This was bad news and it explained his father's gruff reply. But maybe it wasn't as bad as it could be. "Well, if no one knows where they are," he said, "Ben's safe."

"Dee, that's just the problem," Feather said. "We got another wire from Ben just two days ago, saying Emma was with child. They're coming back. They're going to stay at the Clinton Hotel and try to make peace with Lindsley. They'll be here in five days and Lindsley knows it."

"Surely, Lindsley will change his mind about Ben knowing there's a child on the way, won't he?"

Caitlyn shook her head. "Any other man probably would. The news just made Lindsley madder than a wet hen."