Chapter 6

Look in my blog for a glossary if you have trouble with understanding some words in the dialog done in dialect.

The train rumbled away from the water stop, leaving four bandits standing beside the track looking pretty foolish. Jed commented, "The door to the Express car is open, so there has to be one or more bandits still inside. If they had gotten the money from the safe, they would have left by now."

Al replied, "Yeah, ya gotta be right. How're we gonna take them?"

"Let's be sure we are out of range of the bandits we left standing beside the track and then have the engineer stop the train. We can take care of the rest of them then."

The train chuffed along for about two miles before Jed had the engineer bring them to a stop. No train comes to a smooth stop when the engineer is nervous and twitchy, so it was a bouncy and awkward cessation of motion. The train crew was used to compensating for this sort of bouncing around, but not the passengers. Jed and Al were shaken, and they were expecting the stop, but the two bandits still in the Express car were both jostled to the floor. The express messenger quickly grabbed their guns before they could untangle themselves and return to their feet. In a fit of stupidity, one of the bandits tried to charge the express messenger and was fatally shot for his trouble. The other bandit was still groggy from banging his head when he fell, so he just sat on the floor and groaned.

Al and Jed showed up and were almost shot by the nervous messenger, but were able to make it known that they were Rangers before any more shots were fired. The messenger stripped the dead bandit of valuables and tossed him out of the car. Al and Jed took the remaining bandit into custody and marched him back toward the rest of the train, looking for the conductor. When they found the conductor, they chained the bandit in the baggage car and returned to their seats in the passenger car to resume their trip to Laredo.

When they got there, there was more of that damned paperwork to fill out!

There was a rash of cattle rustling up near Lazy Butte (locally known as Lazy Butt) and Jed and Al were sent to put a stop to it. Nobody had much information on who might be doing the rustling, but the problem was big enough that three different sheriffs asked the Rangers for help. There were no clues at to what had happened: the cattle simply disappeared! The town of Lazy Butte seemed to be stuck in the middle of all of the activity, so that was where Jed and Al headed.

Lazy Butte hardly qualified as a butte, but the locals got such a kick out of the name, that anybody who tried to change it was shouted down in a clamor of protest. Lazy Butte was nearly 20 miles long and rose from the surrounding land in a long, slow climb to 112 feet tall before abruptly dropping in a near shear face to the plain below. The "Lazy" appellation came from the way it rose so slowly and took so long to become very tall; its top was practically flat, though not completely horizontal, so maybe it was truly a butte. Nobody really cared, but almost everybody loved the name.

The butte with the name of Lazy Butte was only about two to three miles wide, so it didn't really offer much to attract people to it, though there was some grazing done on the lower section. The only known water on the butte was what was caught in small pits or "tanks" whenever it rained, so it wasn't practical to try to run a ranch on the butte; in the dry season the cattle would have to be moved down so that they could find something to drink.

Most people avoided the hill for a variety of reasons, one of which was the rumor of ghosts up there, especially at the high end. This rumor was especially rampant right now, because several bums who had styled themselves cowboys had ridden up the length of the butte to try to establish a hardscrabble ranch and had simply disappeared. There was no sign of them, their horses, or the few motley cattle they had driven up the butte. Further credence was added to the legend of ghosts by the unearthly glow sometimes seen to emanate from low clouds that occasionally hung over the high end of the butte.

Al and Jed arrived in the town of Lazy Butte late in the afternoon. It was too late to do much formal investigative work, so they took a room at the hotel and headed for the saloons to pick up what they could in the way of local gossip. They had taken off their Ranger badges and put them in their pockets, since both men knew that people were more likely to talk freely if they did not know that a representative of the law was present.

The first saloon they visited was the one associated with the hotel. It was a raucous place, exactly the kind of setting likely to produce useful information. Jed talked to the bartender for a while, and Al circulated among the customers randomly scattered around the barroom. He was carrying a beer mug, and made an effort to talk to everyone whom he could induce to talk to him.

A piano player was banging away at some semblance of a tune coming from a badly out of tune upright piano. A few prostitutes circulated about, trying to stir up business and occasionally picking up a horny cowboy for a few minutes of "rolling in the hay." Al was approached several times by various of the ladies, but he was put off by the smell coming from most of them. He might have been tempted if one of them had bathed more than once a month.

Al had made the rounds of the saloon floor, and Jed had finished talking to the bartender, so they met to take a seat in chairs along one wall of the saloon. Jed commented, "Well, unless you have learned something useful from your conversation with the customers, we might as well move on to the next place."

"Yeah, they wuz full of gossip, but there weren't anythin' useful they had ta say. Let's move on."

The second saloon they visited was no more productive than the first, but the third saloon produced some interesting information. It was Jed's turn to talk to the bartender while Al circulated among the other patrons. Al was talking to a local cowboy, and the man said, "My buddy, Jess Lawson, wuz one of them yahoos what went up on Lazy Butte to start a ranch. That bunch what he wuz with weren't no galoots what didn't have no sense. Jess told me that he had found a spring up on the butte an' he wuz shore there was enough water fer a big cattle herd. They didn't have many cows, but they wuz all prime stock. I shore wish I could find somebody ta go up the butte with me ta hunt fer my friend. I don't believe in ghosts, but I ain't fool enough ta go up there by myself."

Al said, "Would ya go up there ifen me an' my pardner went with ya?"

"Yeah, I guess so, but why would y'all want ta go up there with me?"

"Cuz we're both Rangers, an' we're paid ta look inta things like this."

"Hell, in that case, I'd love ta have y'all go with me. When kin we leave?"

"How does tomorrow sound?" At an affirmative nod, Al said, "OK, ya wait here an' I'll git my pardner. I'll be right back." Al collected Jed at the bar and brought him back to meet the cowboy. "Jed Snodgrass, this here is Tom Adlac. He's the one what kin maybe lead us ta the people we're huntin'."

"I'm glad to meet you, Tom. Al says that you can meet us tomorrow morning. Where and when are good for you."

"Jed, no offense, but ya shore got a funny way a talkin'. I ain't sure I kin always understand ya. 'Spose we meet at Hanson's Livery Stable at 7:00 o'clock?"

Jed chuckled and said, "If you don't understand me, Al can translate for you. I'll explain why I talk this way when we have more time, tomorrow. Our horses are at Hanson's, so that is a good place for us. We'll see you then. Good night, I need to go to bed. I'm beat."

The next morning, Tom was waiting at Hanson's Livery Stable when Jed and Al showed up after eating breakfast. They rented a pack mule and stopped by a general store to pick up provisions. Jed explained to Tom that they were on a case and did not want a lot of people to know who they were.