Montana Abbott 10: The Three McMahons (A Montana Abbott Western)

By Al Cody

It was a dreadful plan.
McMahon’s proposal, when first outlined, had shocked his men. There might be hitches in working so massive a scheme, but there was a reasonable chance it could be pulled off.
The results were foreseeable. Thousands of cattle, bunched and running blindly, rampaging through the streets could move as devastatingly as a prairie fire.
Rambo was slated to become, literally, a ghost town.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Jul 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005118129

Al Cody

Born in Great Falls, Montana, on July 25th 1899, “Al Cody” was a pseudonym of Archie Lynn Joscelyn. Joscelyn went on to become an enormously prolific and popular writer, especially in the western field, but also authoring a number of novels in the detective and romance genres along the way. In addition to the books he wrote under his own name and that of Cody, Archie Joscelyn also used the names A A Archer, Tex Holt, Evelyn McKenna and Lynn Westland.

Book preview

Chapter One

THE WORD WAS like fire in wood, smoldering, pervasive, its pent heat building to explosive proportions.

The word was McMahon.

Riding unhurriedly south, a big man on a big horse, Montana Abbott heard the name increasingly, a growl, a byword, a whisper muted by fear. While the white-crested hills to the west sprawled higher day by day, their easy knolls increasing to mountains, their massiveness crowding and encroaching upon the road, the word grew proportionately. Outlaw range. The country of the McMahons. Or, more accurately, of Mike McMahon.

Stablemen, merchants, cowboys, blacksmiths, druggists—almost everyone was eager to supply details, as men, shivering, would speak of the devil; not as an abstraction, but the incarnation of evil, real, unpleasantly close at hand.

Barney McMahon had been a wild Irishman, as fresh from the emerald green isle as the delays of transportation for life had permitted, escaping in turn the noose and a firing squad, evading the hardness of Tasmania, fighting his way to the western world, still west; marrying a dark-eyed beauty somewhere along the shores of the Rio Grande, a lady in whom the tumultuous blood of Spain rioted as hotly as did his own heritage from the land of shamrock and Shannon.

Small wonder that two sons and a daughter should breathe the wild air. No wonder at all that they became fighters, in a land where survival was not cheaply purchased. Aside from that heritage they were alike in only thing, a fierce family loyalty, for they were the Three McMahons.

Michael, as the elder, had been from the start the natural leader, and remained so. He it was who extended that leadership over other men, until he led an outlaw crew. The McMahon gang became a symbol for lawlessness, for ruthlessness tinged with savagery.

In a decade which to others seemed more like a century, he had established a fearful dominance, throwing back every challenge—until disaster had come with the first hot days of summer.

They were rustling a big herd, d’ye see, Abbott’s informant explained. A trail herd up from Texas. Only that time they rode into a trap. Seven were taken, including Mike McMahon himself. Now they’re standing trial, all together, in the court house at Rambo, Judge Digby Smith presiding. You’ll have heard of him, like enough. The Hanging Judge.

The trial had dragged, unexpectedly, though its conclusion was finally in sight, even as its outcome was certain. All the long range, east from the mountains, stretching like an empire north and south, the McMahon country, was in ferment. Threats were freely voiced to break them from the jail, to lynch the judge and the sheriff, to burn the town.

The stableman eyed the bigness of this rider from the north, the palm-polished butt of the holstered gun, his easy manner of moving or sitting the saddle. In his shrug was a hint of doubt.

Right now, with the hard core of the gang behind bars, the trail’s maybe not so risky as at other times—yet perhaps more so, for everything’s in ferment. Drifters, down from the north—like yourself. More trail herds on the move up from Texas. Friends of the law, and friends of the lawless. A devil’s brew, and with, so they say, the Witch to stir the cauldron.

The Witch? Abbott had been mildly intrigued.

Coleen McMahon. The sister. A creature, from all reports, half-angel, half-devil, but all woman. Possessed of a temper as wild as that of her brother Mike—or possessed by such temper. Defying him, a while back, which no man dared do, leaving to marry a man of her liking, a saddle tramp with never a cent to his purse. But returning now, or so the rumor runs, to help in this time of trouble, even as is the other brother.

He’s not been a member of the gang, then?

Pete! Laughter burst explosively, couched in derision, checked as suddenly. It’s not for want of trying. Pedro, he was, named by his Spanish mother, the poor devil a misfit from the first breath he drew. Born, maybe, to be a poet, but to his ill-fortune a McMahon. Worshipping his wild brother, seeking to ape him—a blundering mistake, to speak charitably. Penned these last years behind the walls of a penitentiary. But the whisper is about that somehow he’s broke from behind bars and, like his sister, is on the way to Rambo, hoping to free Mike and the doomed members who were taken with him.

Foredoomed, are you saying, before the trial is ended or a verdict handed down?

As sure to die as the vines of summer at the pinch of autumn frost. Their faces yellow like the leaves at the certainty of the noose, he added with ghoulish enjoyment. All the land is in ferment. But if you will ride, it’s your affair.

The afternoon sun was setting heat ripples above the browning grass. Sound shattered a brooding silence, an ugly cadence in angry warning as the horse emerged from a side-trail. Ageless menace and terror were compassed in a rising crescendo. Two roads came together, the one which Abbott had been following barely a wheel-trace, breaking out from fringing brush which in turn partly masked a line of evergreens. The crest of a long slope had hidden the linkage of roads.

A rattlesnake, of a thickness to match Abbott’s forearm, coiled in the middle of the road, flattened head and buzzing tail rearing in twin menace, the diamond markings making it a nightmarish creature of terrible beauty. But its challenge was not directed against Abbott or his horse. Another rider was ahead of him, who must have come along the wheel-trace and surmounted its crest only an instant before.

Normally such a reptile would slither away at the approach of any animal bigger than itself, bringing the chance of danger. But occasionally, startled as well as surprised or come upon suddenly when in a bad mood, a snake would hold its ground; and this one, venting chill warning, was terrifying to every sense—rank in odor, appalling in sight, deadly in sound. The sudden coming of the horse had taken it unaware, but the matching effect was worse. Confronted by timeless terror, the cayuse tried in a single frantic instant to halt, to turn short about and retreat. It reared, whinnying in fear, suddenly unmanageable, and Abbott saw that its rider was a woman.

Caught off-guard, she could do almost nothing to control the furious gyrations of the spooked animal. Ordinarily the pony would have completed its turn and plunged away, but as luck would have it, there was more than the diamondback in the road.

The hoof of a widely reaching leg came down slantingly on a loose and almost round stone, and the twisting effort of the horse completed the disaster. It neighed again in high terror and crashed in a wild sprawl. Its rider, unseated, was flung to earth almost at the spot where the horse had been some moments before, dangerously close to the cause of it all, the still coiled and defiant rattler.

Momentarily the confusion was compounded. Never possessed of good eyesight at any distance, probably more than half-blind as was seasonal with its kind, the diamondback was at a loss to understand this transposition of threats, certain only of what it took for menace. It continued to blast its rattle, head drawing back, on the verge of launching itself at the white, exposed throat of the girl.

She had fallen in a tumbled heap, starting instinctively to scramble back and away, checking with a manifest effort of will at the threat, with instinctive realization that any move on her part must be slow by comparison, apt to precipitate attack. A scream welled in her throat, choked to a moan by the realization of desperation.

It had all happened so swiftly that the senses could barely comprehend, with minds dangerously tardy to reflexes. Even with Abbott it was as much instinctive reaction as conscious thought. His hand went to the big forty-five, and it was not entirely luck that the gun was so well positioned that the holster rode easily, readily reached rather than encumbered, as could easily have been the case.

What had already transpired was no more sudden than the quickness of his draw and the blasting cough of the gun even as the barrel raised, seemingly before its muzzle had time to pick a target or center. But the next instant the coils of the diamondback were loosening in frantic convulsions, the flattened head flopping loosely, almost sheared away.

There was no need for a second shot, and in any case no target. The incipient scream, choked back half by terror and partly in realization, welled in a piteously desperate cry as the girl tried to scramble back, to regain her feet. She was still on hands and knees when Abbott reached her, hands reaching down and drawing her up. Then she was sobbing against his chest, and Abbott, his own horror of such a reptile giving him understanding, tightened his arms reassuringly and waited.

The chilling sound of the rattle had ended, though the tangled mass of coils continued to flop among the grass at the edge of the road. Abbott’s buckskin stood where he had left it, ground-hitched as the bridle reins had dropped, snorting its displeasure, eyes rolling. But it sensed that the danger was past, and it had not been too frightened.

The other horse had fared less well. The combination of events had sent it crashing down in a twisting tumble. Pain and ever-mounting terror had sent it scrambling up again, trying to plunge away at a wild gallop, only to check to a trembling, painful halt, one front foot dragging, scarcely touching the ground. If not broken, the leg was at least wrenched and twisted.

The far-off sound of a waterfall, invisible amid the green of mountain slopes, came back to ears shocked stridently by blasting harshness. Closer at hand, Abbott could hear the painful thudding of the girl’s heart, even as it strained against his own.

Chapter Two

TRAGEDY HAD BEEN averted by the narrowest of margins. Had the fangs of the diamondback gashed her throat, death for the girl must have followed swiftly, not alone from the point of the wound but the massive dose of venom. It was easily the biggest snake Abbott had ever seen, a creature more grown arrogant in its might.

Looking down and closer at hand, he took note of details more to his liking. The girl’s head was uncovered, crowned by hair so soft as to seem silken, of a rich and total blackness. Her face was still against his chest, but he guessed that she would be twenty-five or thereabouts,