Clay Nash 14

  The Home of Great Western Fiction!

  Three of Wells Fargo’s top investigators died on the same day. It could have just been coincidence, of course, but Clay Nash didn’t think so. Not only were they colleagues of his, they were also friends, so when Jim Hume gave him the job of finding out the truth behind their murders, it was just about as personal as it could get.

  But the trail ahead was fraught with death and danger. And when Clay finally overstepped the mark and had to quit Wells Fargo before Jim Hume could fire him, he suddenly found himself vulnerable to all the enemies he’d made during his long career as a troubleshooter.

  No longer protected by Wells Fargo, a whole bunch of outlaws with a score to settle tried to ambush him, blow him up and generally hound him to hell. Before the truth of the case was revealed, he came frighteningly close to a slow, agonizing death behind bars … but when all the chips were down, he came back with all guns blazing!

  CLAY NASH 14: COMPADRE

  By Brett Waring

  First Published by The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd

  Copyright © Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  First Smashwords Edition: February 2019

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd.

  Chapter One – Three Good Men

  Chuck Claybourne had no inkling that he was going to die. As far as he was concerned it was just the normal stage run from the Wells Fargo depot at Sundance, down-trail to the way station at Swing Creek and on to Muldoon’s Folly, Carnage Point, Frenchman’s Peak, Brigham, touching Salt Lake City and

  then the long, lonely run back to Sundance.

  Wells Fargo were just opening up the wilds of Utah after the Mormons had cut their own trail through dust and rain and locusts, and marauders who figured a man with more than one wife should be on the wrong end of a bullet. Through long and discreet negotiations, the company had at last gained the Utah Concession and the Wells Fargo leather-suspended Concord coaches were proving mighty popular to the Mormons wanting to make the pilgrimage down to the new Tabernacle—Brigham Young’s memorial—being built in Salt Lake City.

  They often carried their wealth with them: jewels, hard cash, household silver. No matter what Joseph Smith claimed the Good Book said about ‘doing unto others’ or ‘thou shalt not steal’, the settlers had learned by hard experience that not everyone lived by these doctrines.

  Some of the outlaws that roamed the wild trails of Utah in a land so far above the law, were finding that stagecoaches they stopped just for the hell of rousting some of the Believers, were loaded to the brim with loot.

  So Wells Fargo provided some of its best shotgun guards to ride along and protect both passengers and their possessions.

  Chuck Claybourne was one of the best of the company guards and he looked forward to the run with confidence. So far he had made four routine round-trips without incident except the occasion when two drunken rowdies braced him outside the depot when he first arrived, insulting him for having anything to do with the Mormon Run.

  One cracked head and one dead man later, they left him well alone. And that suited Claybourne, for he was a loner. He didn’t make friends easily and he preferred his own company to that of other Wells Fargo employees, or men outside the company for that matter. The closest he had ever come to making a real amigo within Wells Fargo had been when he and Clay Nash, Jim Hume’s top investigator for the company, teamed up for a spell and tracked down a gang who had been having much success holding up gold coaches in the Montana Hills.

  Claybourne liked Nash. He was a lot like himself: taciturn, a man who didn’t waste words on unnecessary pleasantries, or state the obvious just to hear his own voice. When Nash spoke you listened because the man had something to say. He was also deadly with guns and fists and no slouch with a knife, either. Claybourne had seen him in action and he aimed to put in for a transfer to the Detective Section after this final round-trip run. He figured his own talents of scouting, speed and accuracy with firearms, and natural secretiveness, would be attributes that Jim Hume could not afford to ignore. Without boasting, Chuck Claybourne knew he was mighty good at his job and he had ambition and figured he deserved to improve his position.

  Clay Nash had offered to help him get the transfer.

  But that would be after the ten-day round-trip was over.

  Now, Claybourne bustled the chattering passengers on board, walking round the coach, checking the door locks and the lashings on the luggage bay, even though, strictly speaking, this was the driver’s chore and likely had been done anyway. Satisfied, he grabbed his double-barreled Ithaca shotgun from the depot clerk and swung up onto the high seat beside the gnarled driver, settling himself into his usual position, with his left boot braced against the footboard, right leg pulled back beneath the seat so that the heel rested on the iron-bound express box there, and cradled the heavy shotgun in his arms. He tilted his hat to just the right angle so that the brim kept the full glare of the rising sun out of his eyes and then nodded solemnly to the driver.

  “Let ’er rip, Pete. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be.”

  The driver pouched his chaw of tobacco in his left cheek, spat a glistening brown stream over his right shoulder and let out an ear-splitting yell as he cracked his long whip over the backs of the patient team. They slammed forward against the harness leather and the Concord lurched, jostling the passengers, bringing a few good-natured cries from the ladies and muttered imprecations from the men, and then the stage rolled out of Sundance on the beginning of its long run.

  Halfway to the first way station at Swing Creek was as far as Chuck Claybourne got ...

  There was a massive pile of jumbled boulders, some as large as several houses stacked together, just to one side of the trail out of Sundance. Locally, the rocks were known as Joshua’s Seat and, as there was permanent water there in the form of springs that spewed water down lacy falls, they were a popular picnic spot used by the folk from Sundance.

  But this day, the rocks were about to be used for something much more sinister.

  There was a man perched between two egg-shaped boulders up near the top. He had field glasses to his eyes, the lenses trained on the curve of the trail where the stage would have to appear as it rounded the clump of aspen and cottonwoods. Already he could see the thin amber haze rising above the trees and he figured it had to be the stage but he was a cautious man and he waited until the vehicle swam through the heat haze and into the field of view of his lenses before nodding slowly in silent satisfaction.

  He had plenty of time to get ready and he wrapped the neck-thong around the glasses and put them away in a leather cavalry case, buttoning its flap, before starting his climb down out of the rocks. He was tall and wide-shouldered, with thick black hair showing beneath a Stetson that was old and creased and had an upswept brim. He wore only a single six-gun and this was tied down to his thigh in a low position.

  But the man didn’t bother with his six-gun now, or even with the Winchester that rode in a fringed saddle scabbard on the dappled gray horse that was tied down in a circle of boulders near the foot of a low waterfall. The spray filled the area with
a fine, cool mist and the horse cropped at clumps of sweet green grass growing between the smaller rocks.

  It lifted its head as the man walked into the circle of rocks and placed the leather-cased field glasses in one of the saddlebags. He patted the animal affectionately, briefly, on the neck, and then untied a long slicker-wrapped bundle from behind the cantle. He unwrapped the item and a massive, oil-gleaming rifle came to light. He dropped the slicker and stood the iron-clad butt on this, taking the oily rag jammed in the trigger guard and lightly wiping it over the lines of the huge weapon.

  It was a Sharps buffalo rifle, but more than that, it had been specially made and tuned and came under the category of ‘Creedmoor’, which made it one of the most accurate weapons ever produced. It could drop a buffalo with a 566-grain bullet through the lungs out to a distance of 2,300 yards and the man now holding the gun had done exactly that, time and time again up on the Red River in the heyday of buffalo hunting. This was an 1877 model Sharps with the famous drop-block action in forty-five caliber, taking a massive charge of powder in a chunky brass cartridge case. When fired, the heavy-grained projectile was slammed down the special rifling in the octagonal barrel with tremendous power and speed.

  There was a folding tang aperture sight fixed above the double-set triggers, but this was folded down now. Over the barrel, running the full length from breech to muzzle, was a long, thin blued-metal tube with a bell-shape at the breech end. There were no lenses, just the tube.

  It was a German-built Sighting Tube and though telescopic sights, containing distorting lenses, were in use in the West at this time, this particular Werner-Schultz-Larssen model was without glass. It was simply as the name implied a ‘sighting’ tube. Looking through it at the target, all other distracting detail was obliterated and the target, whatever it was, seemed to hang just at the end of the long steel tube. Visible in the very bottom, just as a slight bump in the outlined circle of the tube’s end, was the tip of the Sharps’ foresight. It was not used for sighting as such, but more as an indication that the tube was fixed dead-in-line with the axis of the rifled bore.

  The man in the rocks carefully stowed the oily rag under his bullet belt and then flipped open the worn steel cover in the rear of the thick butt. The rectangular ‘door’ revealed that holes had been drilled into the butt timber and four long, gleaming brass cartridges had been lovingly rounded and smoothed so that all visible imperfections were removed. These bullets would speed as true as any ever made.

  The oiled breech made hardly any noise as the man flipped open the trigger-guard lever and thumbed back the huge, curving external hammer. He slid the cartridge into the exposed breech and it fitted so snugly that he had to press mighty hard with his thumb to push it right home. Normally, hunting cartridges would not fit this snugly for it would need very few shots to expand the breech and have the empties jam up.

  But this cartridge was not for killing a string of buffalo, only one man.

  The lever clicked back into the locking-up position and he lowered the hammer gently, trigger depressed. Then he took a smooth, forked stick from inside his bedroll, climbed up the rocks beside the waterfall and lay down on a flat area of rock that overlooked the trail below. The stage rocked and swayed along the trail, ahead of a funnel of dust.

  The man in the rocks jammed the forked stick in a crevice in the rocks that he had found earlier and he laid the heavy fore-end of the rifle in this, settling himself comfortably on the flat, working the iron butt plate into his shoulder, feeling the smooth oiled wood of the stock pressing against his right cheek.

  He looked through the sighting tube, worked around until it showed the coach team, lifted it slightly and circled Chuck Claybourne, moving the rifle slowly to follow him, at the same time notching back the big hammer. The big guard was alert as usual; it wouldn’t matter if the stage was three miles or three hundred out of Sundance, Claybourne would be just as alert. He was a man who took his job seriously, as in fact, anything he did.

  Which was exactly why his doom was now sealed.

  The finger curled around the first trigger increased its pressure and took up the slack. The trigger slipped its setting and his finger continued on past the metal tongue to the second trigger and barely caressed it; this was the one that would trip the mechanism and allow the hammer to slam home on the firing pin.

  Claybourne’s image still filled the circle at the end of the sighting tube as the heavy Sharps’ barrel followed the unsteady movement of the stage as it rolled by on the trail below.

  The scar-faced man drew in a steady breath to the limit of his lungs, slowly released about half of it and held the rest. The rifle was as steady as a rock and the tube was lined-up squarely in the middle of the unsuspecting Claybourne’s chest. The killer’s finger increased its pressure lightly and the trigger let off crisply. The hammer fell smoothly. The firing pin was driven home onto the Berdan percussion cap in the end of the massive cartridge.

  The explosion of the Sharps sounded like a cannon-shot smashing down out of the rock pile known as Joshua’s Seat. Claybourne had no chance and certainly didn’t know what hit him. One second he was sitting there, shotgun cradled at the ready, eyes and ears alert. Next, the guard almost jumped out of his seat as Chuck Claybourne’s body was flung back onto the top of the stage and something wet and bloody splashed the driver in the face and on the back of his hands.

  Even as he stared down at the gore, he instinctively whipped up the team and the sudden lurch rolled Claybourne’s body over the side of the coach. It thudded to the trail and by now there was pandemonium among the passengers. The driver didn’t care. He was gray-faced, standing up, screaming and whipping up the team, urging them to get the hell out of there.

  He needn’t have worried. There were no more shots. The killer did not ride out of his cover nor make any attempt to stop the stage. In fact, the scar-faced man automatically extracted the smoking cartridge case, deftly catching it as the ejector sent it arcing through the air. He replaced it in the socket under the Sharp’s butt plate and lay there, still prone, smiling crookedly as he saw the panicky escape of the stage.

  But he was more interested in the bloody bundle of rags lying beside the trail. He stood up, wrapping the Sharps in its slicker after wiping it down again with the oily rag and then jamming this last into the trigger-guard. He strapped it back behind the cantle, took his forked stick and stowed it and then mounted his horse and rode down to where Claybourne’s body lay beside the trail. The stage was out of sight now, down in a dip in the trail, flying for the way station, driver and passengers with quaking bowels.

  The man dismounted and used a boot toe to heave Chuck Claybourne onto his back. He nodded in satisfaction as he saw that the man’s chest had been completely smashed in. Claybourne must have been dead before his body was lifted out of the seat by the strike of the bullet.

  Yet the scar-faced man drew his six-gun, took careful aim, and drove a bullet through the guard’s head.

  Then he mounted again and rode back towards Joshua’s Seat.

  Fort Bridger had grown considerably since it had been the rendezvous camp of the mountain men of thirty, forty years ago. Named after the most famous mountain man of all, Jim Bridger, who was reportedly half-grizzly himself, the camp had become an army encampment and base for punitive patrols after ‘the Injun’ had reacted violently when the white man had moved in on his hunting grounds and he had had to compete with firearms as he watched his food supply shot down in dozens, hundreds, for pelts and hides, the carcasses of meat left to rot.

  Now there was a real fort built of logs in a high stockade that housed the army troop permanently stationed at Fort Bridger and, outside the fort area, the town itself. It was a typical high-country town with the buildings of heavy logs, the shingled roofs covered with layers of earth and grass as defense against the cold of the biting winters, large stone fireplaces in even the smallest of dwellings. There were stores and places of business, a high-steepled church and a
Community Hall.

  In that year, Wells Fargo had hired the rear half of the hall to use as temporary offices for their stage service which was just getting itself established in the area. They were building offices up on Main, between the largest general store and the livery stables so Fort Bridger folk figured the town’s future was assured if a company like Wells Fargo aimed to establish permanent offices there.

  A stage had just come in from Denver and there was the usual chaos of unloading and voluble complaints by a couple of passengers over the length and discomfort of the ride. The depot manager, Randy Shaw, newly-appointed and wanting things to run smoothly, tried to calm down the complaining passengers, ushering them out of the temporary offices onto the rear loading platform, which happened to be vacant at the moment.

  The passengers were man and wife, in their thirties, or, being a little kinder, maybe the woman was in her late twenties; the ravages of pioneer life often made it difficult to tell a woman’s age accurately. Their name was Cameron and they were en route to Green River Station but now wanted to claim the rest of their fare back.

  “My wife is with child, sir,” said the red-faced Lafe Cameron, “and she has been buffeted and jostled continuously all the way from Denver! I was led to believe by your advertising that these are the most comfortable coaches this side of the Mississippi and, I would venture to say, sir, that that is downright misleading, in fact, an outright lie!”

  Shaw colored at this slur on the company but figured to try to placate Cameron and so controlled himself with difficulty, forcing a smile.

  “I’m very sorry you feel that way, Mr. Cameron, and I apologize on behalf of the company, ma’am, for any discomfort you have undergone. I understand that a lady in your delicate condition should not be subjected to roughness and I’ll take the driver to task. I assure you our coaches are sprung on top-grade leather and in the latest manner. You wouldn’t get a more comfortable vehicle anywhere in the U.S.”