The Tall Men Read online

  The Tall Men

  Will Henry

  Brother vs. Brother

  Ben seized his brother, blocking his right arm with his hip, twisting him back against the wagon. “Where’d you git the whiskey!” he snarled. “Goddam you, Clint Allison, don’t put off on me!”

  Clint didn’t move. His dark face writhed, turned strangely pale. The hushed men scarcely heard his hard whisper. “Ben! Git your hands off’n me!”

  Ben knew he should not have touched him. Knew the Comanche craziness that got into him when he was drunk and anybody laid hands on him. But this. This miserable, basterdly luck. To have beaten the south plains rains, the Jayhawk blockade, the hell’s heat of the Platte Valley, the Sioux raid at Reno, Carrington, and his three-mile line—the whole lousy fifteen hundred miles of it—for what? This, for God’s sake? To end up with Clint drunk and Crazy Horse waiting over the next ridge? With three hundred miles and two thousand Sioux ahead of you, and your right-hand gun so slobbered he couldn’t stand up without a wagon behind him!

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1954 Henry Wilson Allen

  Copyright © renewed 1982 by Henry Wilson Allen.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477833308

  ISBN-10: 1477833307

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Brother vs. Brother

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  High Praise For Will Henry!

  This title was previously published by Dorchester Publishing; this version has been reproduced from the Dorchester book archive files.

  Chapter One

  They came from the south, riding ahead of the February twilight. Where the stage road crossed the last of the brooding hills they pulled their horses in. They sat them in silence, staring long into the valley below.

  Two miles down the gulch, beyond the main settlement, could be seen the lights of a second town. And beyond that, those of a third.

  The two riders shook their heads, moved uneasily in their saddles.

  They were lonely, wandering men, little taken with the ways of civilization and having, by hard reason of professional calling, ample cause for caution in regard to those ways. The year was 1866, the war nearly twelve months over. Lately they had been soldiers and before that, cowboys. But they had come home to find the herds scattered, the ranches deserted, the owners departed. Bread was no longer to be earned, nor board provided, by the practice of their sole art—the care and feeding of longhorn cattle on the open range.

  But the belly, in particular the ravenous, demanding belly of youth, had to be filled.

  In the following hunt to fill that belly it was inevitable that the old profession be replaced by the new. The war had taught them one proficiency. That of the gun. Within sixty days of Appomattox they were in business.

  It had proved a poor one.

  Along the Smokey Hill and Santa Fe stage roads which traversed their native Texas and Indian Territory heath, paying stage traffic was still but a trickle. And the hostile Kiowas and Cheyennes, grown overbold through the four-year absence of the Union troops, were shutting that trickle down to a starvation drip. Shortly it became impossible for an honest young road agent to earn a decent living.

  At this turn, hopeful word filtered down from the north. The gold strikes were still continuing in the country of Grasshopper Creek, Bannack and the Last Chance. It was information which caused the two youthful businessmen to look toward the land of the Sioux and the prospect of paying color at the grassroots with a cool and calculating eye.

  Where there was gold in the ground there would be men to dig it out. Those men would be wearing pants and those pants would have pockets. Before long that gold would wind up in those pockets. Men with gold in their pockets were apt to travel. Where they were, other men with no gold in their pockets were apt to gather.

  The two riders upon the hill had no gold in their pockets.

  “So thet’s her,” the first rider said at last. “Ben, she makes Fort Worth look like a cowtown.”

  “Fort Worth is a cowtown,” said the second rider.

  He made the statement simply and without apparent imagination, as a schoolboy would say Iowa is noted for her corn, or the Mississippi River begins in the north and ends in the south.

  He was a man who saw things that way.

  The sun rose in the east, sank in the west. Water flowed downhill, a tree bent to the wind, grass grew in the spring.

  It was what fooled you about Ben Allison. Men first meeting him looked at one another superiorly, shrugged, called him slow. It was an obvious judgment and one with which Ben seldom argued. But in the Southwest where he had come from men who had seen him move no longer called Ben Allison slow.

  “But this ain’t Fort Worth,” he continued now to his companion, breaking the long, thoughtful pause, “and it ain’t no cowtown.”

  “It sure ain’t!” agreed the other fervently. “Though I wish to Gawd it was. This here north wind has got my Dixie backside shakin’ like a hounddawg passin’ peach seeds. Let’s ride on down before we’re froze solid.”

  “All right, we’re gone. Mind you now, Clint, don’t be callin’ me Ben once we’re down yonder, you hear?” With the warning, he put his black gelding down the hillside, Clint following him.

  “Sure. What’ll it be this time?” Clint was cold and hungry and long without whiskey. And tired of changing names every time they rode over a new hill.

  “I think I’ll be ‘Sam’ this time,” grinned Ben good-naturedly. “Sam Allen. Say mebbe fer full, Sam Houston Allen.”

  “Ain’t thet a little fancy fer you?”

  “Could be I’m feelin’ a little fancy.”

  “Fair enough.” Clint returned the slow grin. “I’ll be Tom. Tom Pickett. Tom Jefferson Davis Pickett. Thet flossy enough fer you, sport?”

  Ben nodded soberly, accepting the other’s Mason and Dixon alias. “Yonder’s the town,” he gestured, reining his pony to a walk. “Now remember, bud, you see you don’t leave your liquor do your talkin’ fer you.” He paused, eying the younger man. “You hear me, Clint Allison?”

  “You handle your load, I’ll handle mine,” said his brother shortly.

  Again Ben nodded.

  “All right, Clint, you’re a man growed. You know why we’re here and what we come fer. It ain’t fer fun and it ain’t fer whiskey. Nor,” he added meaningfully, “fer women.”

  “Hard work,” announced Clint straightfaced. “Thet’s what makes the world go round. Lead on, good brother.”

  They turned the corner of Wallace and Van Bure
n Streets, squinting to the sudden blaze of the full city lights.

  The first things as always with such camps were the saloons. Slowing their horses they read them off: the Shades, the Big Horn, Barney Bailey’s, the Black Nuggett—as many as a dozen others. There seemed no end to them, nor to the brawling mill of loudvoiced, bearded miners crowding their entrances.

  “Good Gawd Amighty,” muttered Clint, “lookit all them cussed muckers and powder monkeys. I never see sech a herd of hardrock gophers in my life.”

  “What’d you expect?” asked Ben slowly. “Cowboys? This here is Montana, son. Gold is what they grow here, not beef.”

  “I reckon it is,” said Clint wonderingly. “But I cain’t gentle myse’f to it. Man, I allowed I’d seen some sizable diggin’s in my time, but this here—good Gawd Amighty!”

  “Diggin’s come and diggin’s go,” nodded Ben quietly. “But they don’t come no bigger nor go no richer than Virginia City—"

  They left their horses at Bailey’s corral. As they stepped into the outer glare of the street, they paused in the shadows of the stable alley only long enough to check their business assets. There was no conversation. They eased the long Colts from their halffrozen leathers, checked the capping of the nipples, eased the weapons back into the low holsters beneath the threadbare gray of the Confederate-issue cavalry overcoats.

  “Don’t fergit, Clint,” Ben grunted, “right off we do nothin’. Jest look and listen and size up our best bet.”

  “I want a circuit rider, I’ll send fer you,” growled Clint impatiently. “Right now my belly’s yellin’ fer sourmash, not sermons. Let’s drift.”

  “All right, watch yerse’f. Leave me do the talkin’.”

  “It’s a deal.” Clint stepped out of the alley. “I’ll do the drinkin’.”

  Ben watched him a minute, narrow-eyed, then hunched his shoulders and moved after him into the surge of the street crowd. Clint was a handful when the wind blew from where the women wore stockings and the city lights came served up with a bottle of forty rod. Sweet as a desert peach, sober, he was a pure crazy Comanche, drunk.

  Likely, Ben had always figured, it was their Indian grandmother showing up in him. For when you used that word Comanche on Clint, you weren’t more than three quarters fooling. The old lady had been a fullblood Kwanhadi. That red blood was strong, especially when mixed with the Virginia and Tennessee mountain strain which lay back of his and Clint’s dad.

  Nobody in God’s green world, excepting maybe Ben, could push Clint an inch once he’d got started on the Taos Lightning. He could hold more than a charred oak barrel and looked to see no higher reward in this life than setting out to prove it at the first pop of a quart stopper.

  Well, that had been fine for the old days when they were cowboys and had ridden into Lampasas or Paint Rock to tie one on. But the old days were long gone. The cow business as he and Clint had known it before the war would never come back. Nor would West Texas. The North Concho and San Saba country no longer had any more use for cowboys than it did for cows. And never would again. Meantime, in the tight game they were playing there was no room for whiskey. When you made your living with a gun you shot from taw, bare knuckles flat, and you didn’t play for chalkies. And when you checked your cylinders on the way to work, you never poured your powder from a bottle.

  Shouldering through the polygot human ore of Virginia City’s mainstreet vein, Ben caught up with the restless, long-striding Clint.

  “We’ll hit the Black Nugget, first.” He sidemouthed his orders. “She’s hooked onto the hotel and looks to be drawin’ the flashiest crowd.”

  “Lead on, brother!” Clint’s quicksilver character shifted to the spread of the big grin. “Our few bucks ain’t goin’ to last no longer in thet plush parlor than a Kansas darkie in a Kentucky crap game. But I’m your man, Sam. Jest show me the way!”

  “Clint,” said Ben slowly, “happen you don’t wash out on me, I’ll likely show you more than the way.” He paused, his eyes looking through and past his brother and far away, as they had a habit of doing to a man when that sober-dark mind of his was turning on a thought. “I got a hunch we’re goin’ to make the biggest strike since Comstock stumbled on his lode in Six-Mile Canyon.”

  In his quiet, slow way, unknown to himself or Clint or any man then living, Ben Allison spoke in words as tall as the shadow of history itself.

  Chapter Two

  There were upward of a hundred men packed into the forty-foot square of the Black Nugget’s main mudfloored saloon. From among their sardined ranks the practiced eye of the bartender picked the two newcomers the moment the street doors swung inward to admit them.

  His swift glance of discovery was followed by a second look, equally practiced, toward the bar’s undercounter and the rusted, ten-gauge shotgun which rested there. Satisfied, he returned his gaze to the approaching customers, nodding to himself as he did so. These were sure enough ten-gauge birds. And tough as buckshot.

  Some men have it in them to stand out in any crowd. Unquestionably, these were such men.

  The first one was very tall, blackhaired, noticeably slant of eye and easy of grin. Any boy long enough in a gold camp to know a jackhammer from a bullprod drill would know this one was no miner.

  The second man was taller still, six-four, if he was an inch, and all bone and sinew fattened by nothing but snake muscle. His face was different too, not so fresh nor so startlingly handsome, leaner and skullier than the first man’s, while his long hair was a pale, flax blond where it swept from beneath the flat-crowned black hat. But in the end it was the eyes which set the two apart for you.

  Where the first man’s were a deep, raw sky blue, those of the second were so light and springwater cold as to be almost colorless. And slitted as they were above the high cheekbones, watchful and wolf thoughtful, they trapped you and held you while those of his companion merely tapped you on the shoulder going by.

  “What do they drink in Montana, friend?”

  It was the second man asking it, the one with the eyes. His voice was pleasant and easy as March wind in a silver thaw. It fooled a man and made him uneasy.

  “Valley Tan. Four bits a shot, eight dollars a bottle,” grumbled the bartender, suddenly finding his bar top in need of a nervous polishing.

  “Make it a bottle and two glasses.”

  Clint scowled at Ben’s order. “What’s the idee? I had it in mind to belly-up to the bar.”

  “You had it in mind to get stunk-up as a skunk, too. But you ain’t. Yonder’s a corner table jest cleared. Grab the whiskey.”

  Clint speared the bottle out of the bartender’s hand, strode angrily off. Ben carefully counted the eight silver dollars onto the bar, frowned at what it left him and followed Clint. At the table he spun the last silver cartwheel toward his brother. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” he grunted.

  “Gawd Amighty,” grinned Clint, the prospect of the whiskey lifting his spirits, “you mean we’re thet close to the blanket?”

  “Thet’s all there is, there ain’t no more,” said Ben. “Drink up.”

  The younger Allison half filled his pint tumbler, slid the bottle and the other glass to Ben. His drink was down before Ben’s was poured. The subsequent stiffening of his scalp hair nearly lifted his hat off his head but he only gazed speculatively into the bottom of his empty glass and announced gently “Watch thet first mouthful, brother. It’s a seven-day son of a bitch.”

  Ben poured three fingers, put them down.

  “It ain’t been in the barrel long,” he agreed.

  “Thet stuff never saw no barrel,” said Clint. “They bottled it right out’n the buffler wallow, bull-water and all.”

  “Likely,” nodded Ben, looking around the room. “You see anything thet looks good to you?”

  “Thet strawberry blonde yonder at the bar. The one with the million dollar nuggets.”

  Ben glanced at the blonde, scowled at his brother. Clint got the point, settled down.

&nbs
p; “There’s plenty of money in sight,” he said, filling his glass again while making the observation.

  “Thet’s jest the trouble,” muttered Ben, letting his eyes run the smoky gamut of the nearby poker tables. “It’s in sight.”

  “Where’s your trouble in thet?” Clint pegged his third shot, the Valley Tan going down like water now that its first flame had cremated his throat beyond all feeling. His older brother eyed him narrowly, saying nothing. Clint shrugged, poured his fourth glass. Ben let him finish, pulled the bottle away from him and held it up to the light.

  “Thet’ll be your pint.”

  He said it in a passing way but it was a statement, not an opinion. “What we’re lookin’ fer,” he continued softly, “is a belt player. One with his poke in his pocket, not spilled out in front of him backin’ a busted flush.”

  Clint looked at him, broke his eyes away, grinned, jerked his head toward the street doors. “Them as asks, gits,” he drawled.

  Ben watched the big man come in through the doors, pause inside them to scan the room as though looking for someone—or anyone. He nodded, not answering Clint, his eyes busy with the newcomer.

  He was a blond man, one of the pinkskinned ones that never took a tan no matter they were in the sun and the wind their whole lives. And this one had been. You could tell that in a minute. He had a square of shoulders and trimming of hips for all his bulk, that told you right off he was a horseman. Not a cowboy nor yet a highline rider like him and Clint. But a man that knew horses and had sat to them one way or another, to ride or drive, for a long, tough spell.

  Probably a freighter, thought Ben. But not driving any more. No working skinner wore buckskins like that, all fringe and handmade, nor boots of that slim, thin cut either. Those were genuine Cordovans, mister, and a man didn’t come by a set of them for less than forty dollars, Yank. Clint had called this one’s tune pure and clear.

  He was their man.

  The thought no sooner formed than Ben felt the impact of the newcomer’s eyes. The big man’s glance had found him in the crowd and fastened on him with a jolt he felt clear across the room. Then, even as Ben was returning the compliment and while the big man was turning away from the exchange of hard looks, a hoarse-voiced miner at the table next to his and Clint’s was speaking disgustedly.