GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK (Bear Haskell, U.S. Marshal Book 1)

  BEAR HASKELL, U.S. MARSHAL #1

  GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK

  by

  Peter Brandvold

  A MEAN PETE PRESS PUBLICATION

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Peter Brandvold

  Cover Design by Peter Brandvold

  Cover Photo Copyright www.dreamstime.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address peterbrandvold@gmail.com.

  Western novelist Peter Brandvold was born and raised in North Dakota. He has penned over 90 fast-action westerns under his own name and his penname, Frank Leslie. He is the author of the ever-popular .45-Caliber books featuring Cuno Massey as well as the Lou Prophet and Yakima Henry novels. The Ben Stillman books are a long-running series with previous volumes available as ebooks. Recently, Brandvold published two horror westerns—Canyon of a Thousand Eyes and Dust of the Damned. Head honcho at “Mean Pete Publishing,” publisher of lightning-fast western ebooks, he has lived all over the American west but currently lives in western Minnesota. Visit his website at www.peterbrandvold.com. Follow his blog at: www.peterbrandvold.blogspot.com.

  GUN TROUBLE AT DIAMONDBACK

  Chapter One

  Emma Kramer had to be one of the prettiest young ladies Deputy U.S. Marshal Bear Haskell had ever laid eyes on. And he’d laid his eyes—and more than just his eyes—on a few. But Emma seemed dead-set against advertising her beauty.

  In fact, she seemed determined to conceal it.

  The girl was dressed in a loose wool shirt with a grimy red neckerchief tied around her neck, and threadbare, wash-worn denim jeans with patched knees. Her old stockmen’s boots were as worn as ancient moccasins. Over the man’s wool shirt she wore a smelly buckskin vest probably twice as old as she was at twenty-one.

  The nasty, grease-spotted, weather-stained garment was several sizes too large for the girl, and Haskell thought he remembered that her deceased father had worn it around multiple smoky cook fires way back when he and Haskell were both hunting buffalo just after the time of the Little Misunderstanding Between the States.

  Not only wearing the ancient garment but wiping his greasy fingers on it while devouring buffalo hump or bits of a spitted sirloin.

  No, his lovely daughter didn’t advertise the fact that she was pretty. However, no amount of her old pa’s stinky attire could conceal the girl’s full, ripe figure, with its slender waist, rounded hips and long, well-turned legs. From a distance, you might not be able to tell she was about as pleasing to a man’s eye as any woman on God’s green wonder. But close up like Haskell was now, lying next to her on a sandy shelf in southern Colorado, his right hip almost touching her left one, it was hard to remain ignorant of the fact.

  How could this lovely creature beside him be the fruit of the loins of the likes of the two-timing, double-crossing, butt-ugly Coyote Kramer? The old joke amongst the hunters was that Coyote was so ugly that a horse doctor had helped his mother give birth in the back forty.

  Emma lay belly down beside him on the shelf, to his right. She was peering through Haskell’s field glasses toward an age-silvered log trapper’s cabin on the far side of a brush-sheathed dry wash. “Do you think it’s really those killers, Marshal Hask—?” She stopped abruptly. She’d caught him staring at her. Her perfectly sculpted, suntanned cheeks flushed. Color also rose into her ears behind which she’d tucked her long, wavy, tawny hair.

  “Marshal Haskell, what are you doing?” she asked, crisply indignant.

  Haskell blinked, turned away, turned back to her, his own ears burning. “Wha ... huh?”

  “You were staring at me. Lasciviously!”

  Haskell blinked again. “Absolutely not, Miss Kramer! And I will forgive your conceit!”

  “You were!”

  Haskell chuffed, haughtily indignant. “I was merely considering the situation. Pondering my next course of action.”

  “I don’t believe you.” Emma narrowed a pretty light-brown eye at him. “My father warned me about you.”

  “Your father warning anybody about anything is like a grizzly bear warning a goat about a mountain lion.” Haskell gave another outraged chuff then held out his hand. “Do you mind if I have my government-issue binoculars back?”

  “Here are your government-issue binoculars, Marshal Haskell.”

  “Thank you, Miss Kramer.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Haskell wagged his head in disgust then cast the girl a quick, furtive glance to see if she was buying his act. He couldn’t tell. She’d returned her attention to the shack across the wash. Since she was facing away, he couldn’t help taking one last quick peek at her wares, trying to blaze the image onto his brain for later recollection.

  As she began to turn her head toward him again, he quickly raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus. The old trapper’s cabin swam into view.

  It sat in thick brush about forty yards away from the wash, in a grove of cottonwood and box elders. A falling-down lean-to stable and corral flanked the place, as did another lean-to off to the left of the stable. Probably a woodshed. The place was quiet now in the mid-afternoon. Five or six horses stood in the corral, facing different directions, a couple switching their tails at flies.

  One man clad in only dull red long-handles and boots sat on a stump chair to the right of the cabin’s door. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and brought what must have been a quirley to his lips though Haskell couldn’t see it from this distance of three hundred or so yards.

  “What do you think, Marshal?” Emma asked. “Do you think it’s them? Like I said when I saw you in town, there were six of them. They crossed my land yesterday afternoon, heading this way. I had a feeling they were the men who robbed that stagecoach last week. They had a look about them, and one had a pair of gunnysacks—bulging gunnysacks—draped over the back of his horse. About the only folks who hole up in that cabin these days, since the half-breed trapper, Leonard Two Eagles died, are outlaws on the run.”

  Haskell lowered the field glasses. “You know what I think, Miss Kramer?”

  “What’s that, Marshal Haskell?”

  “I think you got a good eye.”

  She flushed a little with pride.

  “Well ... ”

  “And I think it’s a good thing we ran into each other in town, and that, having just finished up my last assignment, I was free to ride out here and check you out.”

  Emma narrowed that same pretty brown eye again. “Check what out?”

  Haskell ear tips warmed once more. The girl’s pretty tits had his brains scrambled. “Check out your situation out here, is what I meant to say. Pardon my tangled tongue. A man who spends as much time on his own as I do, campin’ out nights under the stars, trackin’ outlaws from sunup to sundown, from as far north as Billings, Montana to as far south as Corpus—”

  “I get your meaning, Marshal Haskell. Don’t you feel a sense of urgency here? If the men who held up that stage and then ran it off a cliff and killed all those people ... including a minister’s young daughter ... are in that cabin—”

  “If they’re in that cabin, I doubt they’ll be headin’ out anytime soon. Nah, they’ll sit tight for a while then pull out when they t
hink the posse from Socorro has played itself out and gone back home.” Haskell raked a thumbnail through the three-day beard stubble on his chiseled cheek. He didn’t normally shave when he was on the trail. Too many other things to think about—namely, staying alive. “Just to make a windy story only breezy, what I meant to say about what I said was I don’t talk near often enough to be much good at it. That was likely the cause of our misunderstanding.”

  He grinned, trying to disarm the girl.

  She was not having it, however. “Oh, I think you’re better at talking than you give yourself credit for, Marshal Haskell. That being as it may ... ”

  “Yes, that being as it may ... time for me to go to work.” Haskell gestured to her. They crabbed backward away from the lip of the wash. When Haskell thought they were out of sight from the cabin, he and the girl rose and walked, crouching, down to where their horses stood ground-reined in a rock-lined depression roughly thirty yards from the wash.

  Haskell dropped his field glasses into his saddlebags. He shucked the big Smith & Wesson New Model No. 3 Schofield revolver from the soft holster positioned for the cross-draw on his left hip.

  He broke open the top-break piece, which was nickel-finished and boasted a seven-inch barrel, and plucked a fresh cartridge from one of the two shell belts encircling his waist. (He’d hated it when, long ago pinned down against more owlhoots than he could count, he’d run out of cartridges, so he kept a good supply attached to his person.) He shoved the bullet into the chamber he normally kept empty beneath the hammer, so he didn’t accidentally shoot his pecker off, and closed the heavy gun, chambered in the .44 caliber like his rifle. He didn’t like to get complicated by toting around more than one caliber bullet.

  Bear Haskell was appropriately named. Bear was his given one. It had been the nickname of his great grandfather, Zekial Haskell, a heroic freedom fighter in the Revolutionary War. By all accounts, his grandson was his spitting image—a big, burly man, a striking one, an alluring one, by most women’s standards. Women were drawn to him irresistibly. There was a primitive pull.

  Most men found him intimidating though that was due mostly to his size, for Bear was good-natured but also quick to rile. He was tender without being timid, but when pushed he could tear a saloon apart and leave it little more than strewn matchsticks. If Haskell’s broad-shouldered, muscular, six-foot-six stature didn’t turn heads when he walked into a room, the dark, ruggedly chiseled face with warm, deep-set blue-gray eyes usually did.

  His thick, dark-brown hair curled down over his collar. A hide thong adorned with grizzly claws hung from his neck, down over his calico shirt—his one note of ostentation. (He’d killed the bear himself, before it could have killed him, and he saw the teeth as a totem of sorts but also as an emblem of kinship with his great-grandfather, who was said to have worn a bear claw necklace of his own.) This Bear wore a bullet-crowned black hat with a braided rawhide band, and dark-green canvas trousers, the cuffs of which he always wore stuffed down into the high, mule-eared tops of his cavalry style boots.

  Residing in a pocket sewn into the well of his right boot was a “Blue Jacket” .44-caliber pocket revolver manufactured by Hopkins & Allen—a beautiful piece with gutta-percha grips and a leaf motif scrolled into the nickel finish.

  Haskell slid his Schofield revolver into its holster and turned to Emma Kramer, who watched him closely, a concerned frown wrinkling the skin above the bridge of her resolute nose.

  “You stay here and stay down,” he told her.

  As he walked around to the right side of the horse he’d rented in Socorro, and shucked his rimfire Henry .44 from its saddle boot, Emma followed him, saying, “You’re not going to try to confront those men alone, are you? I counted six of them, Marshal Haskell. There might have been one or two more waiting for them in the cabin. That would make up to eight! I’d heard that the gang split up right after they’d robbed the coach and murdered all those poor, innocent souls!”

  “No doubt,” Haskell said, removing the loading tube from beneath his Henry’s barrel, making sure that the sixteen-shooter, too, was fully loaded and ready to dance. “But if I waited for help to make its way down from Denver, they’d likely be back on the trail before anyone got here. Besides, most of the lawman in Chief Marshal Dade’s stable are out on the trail, just like I’ve been for the past month and a half. As for local help ... ” Haskell shook his head. “Jack Todd might be a serviceable town marshal, but he tends to be drunk by noon, and, since”—he narrowed an eye at the sun—“it’s likely pushing on toward one-thirty, he’s likely pretty far down in his cups by now.”

  “Oh, my gosh, but, but ... what if something happens to you?”

  Haskell levered a live cartridge into the Henry’s chamber and gave the girl a confident wink. He cocked his hip and set the rifle on his right shoulder. He feigned more confidence than he actually felt, but there was still more than a bit of the schoolboy in the six-foot-six Bear Haskell, and he couldn’t help showing off for the uncommonly beautiful daughter of Coyote Kramer. “It won’t. You can bet the bank on that.”

  He gave her another wink then started to turn away. A second thought turned him back to face her. “But ... just in case it does, you’d best start back to your ranch. You stay there and when I’ve cut off the heads of those snakes, I’ll ride over for a cup of coffee and maybe a snort of thunder juice, if you have any on hand. If you’ll pardon me for bein’ so bold to invite myself, that is.”

  He smiled and tried like hell to keep his gaze from flicking down to her shirt, because he knew she was on the scout for such a peek. She must have seen the strain in his face, for she blushed again and said, “Of course.” She crossed her arms on her chest. “As long as coffee and whiskey is all you’ll be calling for, Marshal. Remember, my father warned me about you.”

  She tapped a boot in the dirt.

  “Oh, I remember.” Haskell gave a wry chuckle. “I’ll see you later, Miss Kramer.”

  Haskell moved down the hollow, away from the wash, intending to trace a wide course around the cabin and steal up behind it. When he’d walked only ten or so yards, Emma called behind him, “Marshal?”

  Haskell stopped, turned back to her, and arched a brow.

  She dropped her arms from her breasts and turned her mouth corners down with a vague chagrin. “Do be careful.”

  Haskell smiled, feasted his eyes once more, pinched his hat brim to her, and moved on down the slope.

  Chapter Two

  Haskell raised his Henry high across his chest as he moved through the brush, the rear of the cabin now appearing dead ahead of him. He was glad to see a small, plank door in the center of the back wall.

  He dropped to a knee in the knee-high grass and looked around.

  The stone-colored rear of the cabin was dappled with sunlight and shade. A cottonwood stood off both corners, fluttering their large, round leaves over the sod roof. Closer to Haskell was a leaning privy built of vertical split logs.

  To the left of the privy and nearly directly behind the shack was a lean-to attached to a corral of peeled cottonwood poles. Horses milled languidly inside the corral. The corral was left of the lean-to. Noises were coming from inside the lean-to.

  Haskell pricked his ears, listening. He picked up a man’s voice. Someone was out there. Haskell would have to take care of whoever was in the lean-to before he approached the cabin.

  He cursed silently. He’d hoped to have all of his quarry inside the cabin. But, then, he’d been hunting curly wolves for several years now and had come to know that things rarely went as planned.

  He looked at the cabin’s back door then rose from his knees and, holding the Henry straight up and down in front of him, moved quickly but as silently as an Apache through the high, wind-brushed grass. He’d learned to move lightly during his time in the war, in which he’d served on the side of the Union, for he’d spent a considerable time operating behind Confederate lines, blowing up ammunition dumps and supply trains.


  The hills in which he’d worked with a small team of guerilla fighters had been eerily silent on those warm, windless summer nights, and the least sound would have alerted enemy pickets and likely gotten him and his men killed or worse—captured and sent to one of the South’s infamously horrible prison camps.

  As Haskell approached the corral, he kept an eye on the horses. One had winded him. It had turned its head toward him, watching him incredulously, twitching its ears. The other six mounts were staring in other directions, one nosing a tin feed bucket along the ground with dull pings.

  Again, the man’s voice rose from the lean-to, louder this time.

  Haskell stopped and crouched behind an ancient tree stump.

  “How do you like that, you nasty bitch?” the man said, his voice pitched with anger. “How do you like it? Huh?”

  The man laughed.

  A young woman groaned, said, “Oh, you’re a savage. Stop! Please! You’re hurting me!”

  The man grunted, saying, “That’s the plan, bitch! I intend to hurt ya! I intend to hurt you real good!” He grunted especially loudly. It was almost a yell.

  The girl shrieked.

  Haskell remembered the preacher’s daughter who’d been on the stage. The gang must have taken her. He remembered hearing that it had been nearly impossible to identify the bodies after the gang had run the stage off a cliff, because they’d also doused it with coal oil and burned it.

  The outlaw laughed and grunted, and the girl sobbed.

  Haskell started to move toward the lean-to once more, when there was the wooden scrape of a door opening. He dodged back behind the stump, and dropped low. He doffed his hat and peered out around the side of the stump.

  A bearded man with thin, curly brown hair had come out the shack’s back door. He was clad in only a wash-worn balbriggan top, canvas pants, and suspenders, which dangled down his arms to his waist. He stood in the worn spot on the ground fronting the door, grinning as he listened to the commotion in the lean-to. Unbuttoning the fly of his pants, he flexed his knees and sent a yellow stream arcing out into the weeds before him.