Chapter 4

Sam was in a bit of a pickle because he knew his female boss-lady was expecting results from him and the only way he knew to fulfill her expectations meant that blood would be shed.

The thought of having to send some deserving characters to their maker with the simple pull of a trigger was not something that had ever bothered him before and in all honesty he would be the first one to admit that it was not a matter of concern in this situation also. He was a little worried about his brother Saul because he was a hot-blooded sort of cowboy better suited to getting into fist-fights and charming females into submission depravities than in the down and dirty finality of a face-to-face showdown with roughnecks that had no compunctions about making their point with the barrel of a pistol.

It was for that reason that he devised a mission for Saul that would require him to head up to the Santa Fe Courthouse and record the family deed on their original one hundred and sixty acres that was already homesteaded and being worked by their aunt and uncle and a pair of strapping cousins that had never strapped on a pistol belt their entire life. It just seemed that Saul would have a better chance of surviving his misspent youth back in Santa Fe than wandering around the Tucson Valley and finding trouble in every shadowy corner.

He was relieved to see Saul swing up on the Sorrel's back and light up a cheroot that had a pungent scent of wild cherry and bitter acrid smoke. The girls over at the house of pleasure were all lined up waving "goodbye" to the handsome young cowboy and Sam could see that Saul was embarrassed at the attention but the gleam in his eye showed he was eating it up like a bowl of peaches sitting in their own juice.

Sam felt like a weight had been lifted off his back when he saw Saul's horse disappear over the top of the rise on the way out of town. There was no doubt in his mind that all hell was going to break loose around here just as soon as the Texas Cattle Consortium started putting the screws to the sheepherders to drive them from the valley and the grazing land that was coveted by the recently widowed Belinda Roseberry for the fattening up of the steers being moved in from the Texas plains.

He rounded up Blackie Barstow and his group of gun-toting hard-cases to go with him to the bankrupt ranch of the former Cattlemen's Association and now the headquarters of the loosely knit sheepherder operations in the valley. They didn't expect to meet much opposition at the ranch house because most of the sheep-men were working the flocks to keep them away from the barbed wire and the nomadic local Indian tribes looking for meat to put on the table. They did rise a bit of dust moving down the long winding entrance to the sprawling ranch since there were eight of them in total but Sam was only planning to deliver the message of eviction to the sheep men and give them a time table to vacate the premises.

The dogs started barking when they were still a long way from the main house. Some of the hands were up and working on fences and building a sheep-dip needed to get the wool ready for harvesting. The shearing of the wool was an intensive affair that needed expert cutters from an agency that traveled from point to point to collect and ship the wool to the processing plant in another State. They were most Australian and European cutters and they didn't even carry weapons because they were far too busy to get involved in matters of conflict between competing interests in the frontier country.

In reality, it was the left-over remnants of the old Cattlemen's Association that caused the incident that became famous as the "Tucson Valley Massacre" and led to the eventual removal of all sheep industry interests from that part of Arizona. The soft-hearted flock owners had allowed the unemployed cowboys to bunk down and eat at the main house until they could move on to another area to find work. They didn't much take to the Texas way of doing things and hadn't sought employment with the Texas Cattle Consortium after they moved the vast herds into the valley. Besides, they came with all their own labor force of dark lean youngsters and the Mexican Vaqueros that handled a rope with the best of them.

The gaggle of half-dressed cowboys came out onto the long wide porch that sheltered the front of the ranch from the mid-day sun. Some of them were a little bleary-eyed from drinking the night before in the ranch-hand shack next to the covered feeding benches for the hired help before you got to the stables and the series of barns that housed supplies and feed for the stock.

Sam motioned to Blackie to get the men spread out because it was beginning to look like the bedraggled cowboys outnumbered them almost two to one. That was not counting the sheep men who seemed a little disinterested in the fast approaching confrontation. The man from Santa Fe had seen it all before and he knew without a doubt some half-drunk fool would pull his iron and start throwing lead in their direction just to underscore their general dissatisfaction with outsiders and Texans in particular.

The self-realizing prophecy came to pass even quicker than Sam had envisioned when a short gangly cowboy with bow legs and spectacles that made him seem like a school teacher or a preacher and not some unruly cowboy looking for trouble.

Same drew down on him with his repeating carbine and steadied his horse so his aim would not be thrown off by a sudden movement. The first shot went right through one of the glass circles of the troublemakers spectacles and he sat down on his haunches already dead before his ass hit the deck of the porch.