Cowpoke Justice

By William Hopson

Cowpoke Justice, first published in 1941, is a fast-paced western set in 19th century Montana. William Hopson authored a number of popular cowboy and western-themed novels in the 1930s-40s. From the dust-jacket: Dud Hardin was coming home to the Montana range country with thirty thousand dollars and a thousand head of cattle acquired along the Rio Grande. And the bitterness of fifteen years rolled away from the salty rannihan as he thought of seeing his father once more ... But his grimness returned threefold when he discovered that both his father and his father's partner had been murdered, and that the human vultures who had done it were preparing to take over his ranch. Moreover, an outlaw had been hired to impersonate the long-lost Dud, and accused the real son of dry-gulching his own father.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phocion Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781839740220

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COWPOKE JUSTICE

By

WILLIAM L. HOPSON

Dud Hardin was coming home to the Montana range country with thirty thousand dollars and a thousand head of cattle acquired along the Rio Grande. And the bitterness of fifteen years rolled away from the salty rannihan as he thought of seeing his father once more.

But his grimness returned threefold when he discovered that both his father and his father’s partner had been murdered, and that the human vultures who had done it were preparing to take over his ranch. Moreover, an outlaw had been hired to impersonate the long-lost Dud, and accused the real son of dry-gulching his own father.

• • •

Cowpoke Justice was originally published in 1941 by Phoenix Press, New York.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

CHAPTER I 7

CHAPTER II 11

CHAPTER III 17

CHAPTER IV 20

CHAPTER V 24

CHAPTER VI 27

CHAPTER VII 33

CHAPTER VIII 36

CHAPTER IX 42

CHAPTER X 47

CHAPTER XI 51

CHAPTER XII 57

CHAPTER XIII 61

CHAPTER XIV 66

CHAPTER XV 72

CHAPTER XVI 76

CHAPTER XVII 81

CHAPTER XVIII 86

CHAPTER XIX 90

CHAPTER XX 94

CHAPTER XXI 99

CHAPTER XXII 103

CHAPTER XXIII 107

CHAPTER XXIV 112

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 120

DEDICATION

• • •

To

Mrs. E. W. Albert at Oro Grande, this

book is dedicated with affection, in

fulfillment of a promise made

nine years ago.

—W. L. H.

CHAPTER I

A MID-DAY Montana sun beat down upon the bobbing, swaying backs of some two thousand half-wild, part Mexican steers winding in a long sinuous line up the middle of the grassy, mile wide swale. Dust rose in sluggish brown clouds beneath the tramping of more than eight thousand plodding hoofs and hung motionless in the still air, as though in angry frustration at the herd’s passing; and to the ears of the sullen masculine population rostering the tiny hamlet called Trail City there floated a rumbling lowing.

Eight months had passed since the herd had left the Texas country, winding its way northward across state after state, fighting wind and storm and drought, while its trail-hardened crew fought them across mountain and plain and stream. Eight months of chuckwagon food and a bed under the stars. Eight months during which the stony-faced man riding at point always kept his eyes northward toward the distant home that he had run away from thirteen years before.

Now, as Trail City’s sprawling shacks came closer into view down across the flats a half mile to the east, Dudley Hardin turned in the saddle and looked back. And for just a moment the stony cast of his lean, sun-bronzed face broke into a half mocking smile as he viewed the herd. He was thinking of the night thirteen years before, when his father, harsh, iron-willed Buck Hardin, had slashed his back to ribbons with a quirt for roping a yearling and breaking its foreleg; Buck Hardin, the father he had told himself for thirteen years that he hated.

Dud turned in the saddle again, the brief, sardonical flicker in his bleak gray eyes sinking from sight almost as quickly as it had come to the surface. His was not a handsome face. The cleft chin jutted out just a trifle too far, the nose a little too hawk-like. And there was something about the lines of his mouth that gave the impression that he was sardonical and hard-bitten toward all the world and at himself too, as indeed he was.

A dusty red bandana sagged at the muscular column of his throat above a faded flannel shirt that fitted snugly at the wrists as though the wearer had been most careful about such little things in selecting it from the counter. The vest covering his wiry shoulders and from which the tagged string of his tobacco sack dangled had seen much wear. Instead of the usual brown leather chaps, he wore bat-wings of leather that was solid black, though scarred and scuffed from much contact with mesquite, cactus and chaparral. His boots, too, weighted by thick shanked spurs with big dull rowels that made little tracks in the dust when he walked, showed much evidence of hard wear. Two lead-studded cartridge belts encircled his lean waist, suspending a pair of open-topped gun sheaths which were tied down with rawhide thongs to slits in the chaps.

And with every movement of his hardened body, one of his ungloved hands always seemed to have a way of falling close to the butt of one of the heavy guns.

Dud pushed back the red Mexican sombrero and wiped at his strangely white forehead, turning again as Miguel Gonzales, his majordomo, loped up and chopped his horse over beside that of his boss.

She’s a pretty sight, eh, Dud? grinned the Mexican.

Dud nodded, letting his gray eyes flick over the handsome face of one of the most unusual men he had ever met. Son of an Irish mother and a Castilian father, Miguel was twenty-four years old. He wore a blue, high-crowned sombrero with gold lace on the roll brim, a short Spanish jacket with more gold lace, short chaparajas of the kind worn in Mexico, and spurs with the biggest rowels Dud had ever seen. There was an ivory-butted .45 that gleamed like a wolf fang at his right hip, and nestling in flat scabbards between his shoulder blades were two wicked throwing knives. Miguel had once mentioned, with a shrug of his slim shoulders, that he had killed a man with a knife thrown across the dusty street of a Sonora town.

Just what had brought him north, along with Spotted Tail, the Apache Indian night wrangler who had been with him when he joined the outfit, Dud did not know. Nor had he ever intruded enough to ask the man who in eight months had become his majordomo and his friend. But in the jaunty son of a Don from Mexico he had found a man who worked like a Trojan, who could laugh in the face of danger, who continually preened his tiny black mustache from a metal mirror in his shirt pocket.

All Dud knew was that something besides the job had brought Miguel north accompanied by the Apache trailer.

Otherwise, Miguel spoke three languages besides Spanish and played the guitar like a maestro. His one open boast was that he had been ousted from an exclusive institution of higher learning in Mexico City because he knew more Latin verbs than his teacher—and had proved it by trouncing the schoolmaster in a fistic encounter.

Nearly twenty-one hundred head, Mig, Hardin said to Gonzales, shoving his sombrero back into place. "That’s only a loss of about sixty through stampedes and such in eight months. Sixty steers and four men," he added grimly.

Miguel understood. Somewhere back along the line in the last two hundred miles had been a Winchester wizard who shot like the very devil from hell. He struck during storms and at night. He struck from long range and at isolated men. And the last man had dropped less than twenty-four hours before while working a couple of strays back toward the drag.

How much farther we got before we hit the home range? queried Miguel, reaching for his tobacco sack. They were plodding along at a walk at point now, the lead steers bobbing along less than sixty feet behind. Strung Out in their positions along the flank, came a dozen or so riders so tanned they looked swarthy, all wearing sombreros and cartridge belts over their shoulders bandolier fashion. Off to one side rode Cinco Centavos—Five Cents—the wandering Mexican boy wrangler they had picked up on the way through the Panhandle country in Texas, keeping his remuda bunched. Big Nigger Tom, the giant ebony cook, worked his four-horse wagon along not far from where Cinco lolled in the saddle and dreamed youthful dreams of dark-eyed Senoritas.

About one hundred and fifty miles, I reckon, Dud said. Y’know, Mig, I reckon it’s sorta funny—my father and me. He was a pretty tough customer in his day, from what little I could learn, and mebbe I inherited too much of the bad Hardin blood. It’s what caused me to think I hated the old gent all these years. Yet, sometimes I think I’ve been purty much of a plain damned fool.

Miguel chuckled, his black eyes snapping. Dud, you never for one minute fool me. All the time as we get nearer to Montana and the home you leave so many years ago, I see something in your face that you never suspect was there. I see a man who’s hard and bitter, yet a man who’s just a little homesick. They say that w’at a little boy once learn he never forget. I think you’re just homesick for Montana.

It was a long speech for both of them. It was one of those times and places where such a thing came out unconsciously, as though both had wanted to say it all along but had never broached the subject. And now Miguel said:

Life she’s fonny sometimes. You’ve been away for thirteen years, and w’en you get home your job is complete. W’en I leave you with the herd, my job she’s just begin. For somewhere up here in this country, Dud, is a man—

He shrugged his slim shoulders and let it go at that, and Dudley Hardin understood.

From the fringe of timber some half a mile or less to the west of them, a rider suddenly broke into view and came loping down toward them. Dud and Miguel watched lazily, and then Spotted Tail, the Apache night wrangler, loped up and came to a halt beside them. He wore boots and chaps and jumper, but no hat. His black, coarse hair was braided down his back in two thick braids whose ends were tied with rawhide strings.

He spoke in a mixture of broken English and broken Spanish, giving a wave of the arm back into the distance. Find trail again. Same as before. Lose it again. Find this.

He took from his jumper pocket a shiny cartridge case and handed it to Dud. Hardin took it and turned it over in his fingers, not needing to look at the 40-82 stamped on the rim to recognize it. Only his lips thinned a bit. Jimmy Hays had been but a boy of eighteen and the trip had been his first trail drive. Dud and some of the others had buried him at dusk the evening before.

That makes four, Dudley Hardin said significantly, and dropped the shell into his shirt pocket.

The big four-horse wagon manned by Big Nigger Tom in his floppy old hat and run-down boots, suddenly broke into view from down below the remuda and headed off across the grassy swale in what was to all appearance a runaway. With canvas flapping out behind and round staves bobbing back of him, the ebony giant see-sawed his half-broke broncs toward the few motley, weather-beaten shacks comprising the combined business and residential section of Trail City, whose population was solely masculine.

There goes Tom after the chuck, Dud said to his majordomo, feeling for the thick wallet in his pocket. Come on, Mig, let’s go down while he stocks up again.

He threw up his hand in signal, and fat Pete Chavers, the middle-aged segundo or second under Miguel, came galloping up from his position further back. Pete was about forty, sported a red walrus mustache, sat in his horse like a huge cockleburr, and had no equal in the world when it came to handling wild cattle.

Keep ‘em headed right on up the swale past town, Pete, Dud called over. Mig and I are going in after Tom.

Right, nodded Pete briefly, and went back to daydreaming of his wife and three kids in far away Texas.

CHAPTER II

DUD wheeled away and, followed by Miguel, loped off down across the flat after the wildly rolling chuckwagon. The vehicle plunged toward the shacks, careened around the corner of a deserted saloon, and sent a startled mongrel yelping away in fright. Tom hauled back on the lines and drew up in front of Trail City’s single, dingy mercantile store in a cloud of dust. A half dozen or more horses dozing at the hitching rail pulled back and shied.

That cook’s going to hit a rock some day and blow him and that wagon all to hell, chuckled Miguel Gonzales as the giant jumped down from a high wheel and wrapped the lines around the hub. Never have I seen such a hombre. If you gave him a chance, he’d probably try to punch cows with it.

They rode on and presently swung down back of the wagon, leaving their sweaty mounts with reins trailing. As Miguel started to duck under the hitchrail, Dudley Hardin said in a low voice:

Just a minute, Mig!

The Mexican turned inquiringly. Dud was looking at the shiny wooden stock of a repeater protruding from the boot slung by rawhide thongs under the left saddle skirt by which he stood. He pulled the weapon out, looking for the caliber number stamped on the barrel.

Every town we hit since that dry-gulcher first struck, you keep on hunting for a gun to match those shells, said the Mexican. Why you bother? Someday he’ll leave a trail not blotted out by rain, and w’en he does, that Apache will never be shaken off. That copper-skinned devil worked on my father’s hacienda in Mexico w’en I was just a boy. You don’t know Spot. He’ll get him yet.

Not if I meet him first, grunted Hardin grimly, and tapped his left shirt pocket.

While the slender Mexican kept watch in apparent idleness, Dud slipped in among the other horses and pulled more Winchesters from their long boots, shoving each one back again. Most of them were 30-30’s or the more commonly used 44-40. There was one 38-40 and a heavy 45-90.

But no 40-82.

At the last horse in line there was a boot but no weapon. Dud started to turn away. Then he bent swiftly as the marks on the dry, dusty ground by the animal’s left hoof caught his eye.

Mig, come here! he ordered sharply.

The Mexican jangled over and bent for a look at the imprint.

Take a look at that left hoof mark where this cayuse has been stomping around, grunted Dud in a low voice. Notice that crack. Remember what Spotted Tail found when he picked up one of these four empty shells—the imprint of a crack in the left front hoof and a chip off the outer edge? Mig, that hoofs a dead ringer for the diagram the Apache drew. Soon as we get back to the wagon I reckon I’ll bring him in here for another look.

He’ll know pronto when he sees it, said the Mexican. That war whoop is a wizard w’en it comes to trailing anything.

Dud bent for another look at the mark, then grasped the animal’s leg by the fetlock. He lifted the hoof and turned it back, studying it intently. Then he straightened, letting it drop, as a biting voice came from the doorway of Beaseley’s General Store.