Black Hills (9781101559116) (25 page)

With his forearms and shoulders, Cormac managed to cover up, but Sven caught him with a couple of good ones that jumbled his thinking, but he staved off the onslaught long enough to get his wits back and launched a counter-attack. Though the Swede kept his face well protected, Cormac snuck one through from time to time and peppered him with body shots, all the while alternately taking and getting slammed by big Swedish fists coming from every direction. Both fighters sometimes got knocked on their nether ends, and both waited for the other to regain their feet.

It was a tit for tat slugfest for over an hour; Cormac's legs were getting wobbly, his arms were feeling like lead weights, and his breath was burning his lungs, but he could see Sven also weakening, and when Sven slipped and went to one knee, Cormac backed away and stood gasping for air, with his fists hanging at his sides, waiting for Sven to get up.

From those positions, they looked at each other, and without a word between them, agreed. It was all over but the shoutin'. The crowd had gathered larger than ever. Cowboys, miners, store owners, bartenders, sporting girls, men and women alike all watched in utter silence as Cormac walked unsteadily forward and Sven got to his feet. With their hands and faces a bloody mess, both fighters stood face-to-face with still not a word between them until Cormac asked raggedly with his Swedish impression, “Yoou redy for some beer?”

“Yah, shuure,” the big Swede answered.

“Yah, shuure,” Cormac answered.

And then came the shoutin' as the crowd came to life whoop-ing and hollering and yelling and hat throwing and even a few guns fired into the air. This fight would long be remembered and long be hashed and re-hashed. Some had heard of professional bare-knuckle fights lasting fifty or sixty rounds, but this had been a no-round fight: no chance for either participant to rest. It had been a slugfest, plain and simple. Holding each other up, but under their own power, they led the crowd into the saloon for the first of many drinks. First a double shot of whiskey from the special bottle like every bartender kept under every bar, washed down with a lot of beer.

In appreciation for attracting so much business, the saloons gave them free drinks and offered to pay them to make it a regular Saturday night attraction.

“Either yoouu got ta be nuts or yoouu tink I yam if yoouu tink I fight him again,” Sven told the group of owners that approached them.

“Even if you offered me a whole saloon,” Cormac agreed, “I wouldn't fight him again for it.”

Mooney's Café gave them free steak suppers; Scott's General Store offered them discounts on new saddles, and the red-light ladies offered them free samplings of their pleasures. Together they had the drinks and steaks, and Cormac said thank you very much, maybe later, to the other offers. He had heard of the health problems resulting from spending time with some of the sporting girls.

Now the saddle was a horse of a different color. That was mighty tempting. He had wanted one for a long time, and wanted to make sure he got the right one, but he just couldn't make up his mind. The brown leather of the saddles had a special glean to it sometimes and seemed to feel smoother, but black saddles had a charm of their own. He remembered seeing a Mexican saddle with special stitching in a small leather shop in Denver that was beautifully made, but had an oversize saddle horn.
Just too many decisions to make right now
, he thought.
Better wait a bit until I've had a chance to look at a few more.
He told them he would let them know later. Sven made arrangements to go by the next day for a saddle and was being escorted up the stairs of a side-street house by two lovely admiring ladies as Cormac rode out for home. Sven happened to look out at the street as he rode by and waved with a goofy smile on his face.

There were a few more fights after that. Cowboys being what they are, some couldn't resist a good challenge, and he was a challenge for them. But mostly, it was good clean fun until an oversize, drunken Mexican half-breed going by the name of Ghago, with the help of two cronies, decided they were going to take Cormac apart and see what made him tick. As Cormac walked through the swinging doors into the bar, Ghago hit him and knocked him backward into the street and the three of them charged after him.

As he staggered and stumbled backward down the two steps to the dirt street, knowing he couldn't regain his balance in time to meet the fast advancing threat, he let himself fall backward and rolled over to his feet in time to double over the closest attacker with a kick squarely between the legs. By their rules, fair play was out of the question.

Expecting to find him down and helpless, the second attacker had done a running dive from the top step leading to the wooden boardwalk. Cormac grabbed his outstretched arms and, using the attacker's own weight, swung him in a half circle, launching him into the horse trough just as Ghago slid to a stop in front of him. Cormac let loose his best punch, which staggered the Mexican backward against the side of the nearest horse at the tie-rail. Slender and wiry, Ghago was fast on his feet.

When he bumped into the horse, his hand went up to the back of his neck, and as he caught his balance and stepped forward, a throwing knife appeared in his hand and flashed downward. Cormac was slowed by the thong still holding his gun from falling out of his holster, but his first shot was still fast enough to stop Ghago's throw with a bullet in the middle of his chest.

The second shot took the survivor of the kick, a hearty soul hunched over holding himself with one hand while gritting his teeth and coming up with a gun in the other. Cormac then turned toward the third gunman rising out of the horse trough with a gun in his hand, causing an instantaneous change of heart. The eyes of the would-be attacker opened wide in shock, and he threw his gun into the street. “No! Please!” he cried with both hands stretched out in front as if to stop the bullet he knew was coming.

Cormac's gun was already aimed at his chest with the hammer back and his thumb just beginning the slide off. All that would have been necessary was to let his thumb slide off the edge. He let it go, but stopped it. It was a temptation, but he remembered telling Lop Ear a long time ago that he couldn't shoot everyone, and the man had dropped his gun. He hesitated. His life had come down to this. From a happy family pickin' potatoes to this: Cormac Lynch, killer of men.

“Oh, hell!” he said finally. Cormac adjusted his aim a bit and let the hammer fall, putting a hole in the shoulder of the gunmen's gun arm. It spun him around, and he stood holding his wound, expecting another bullet.

“While that's healin',” Cormac told him, “think about what happened here every time it hurts. The next time you're inclined to pull that gun on somebody, remember how you felt looking down the bore of a forty-four when it was doing business.”

A boy of maybe fourteen or fifteen was one of the onlookers who had quickly gathered when the fight began.

“Are you Mack Lynch?” he called.

Cormac allowed as how he was.

“Thought so. I've heard about that draw. It's even faster than they said.” His voice was loaded with admiration. His words called Cormac's attention to the fact that the speaker was wearing two guns. He raised his eyes to look into the excited eyes of a kid. Cormac started to say something to him and then remembered that he himself had killed four men by that age. The thought was sobering; having a fun evening no longer interested him. Lop Ear and Horse had come up to sandwich him and share his sober reflections.

“How 'bout we go home, guys.” It was an easy step into Lop Ear's saddle, and as a threesome they plodded sadly out of town with him wondering if wherever his family was, were they still proud of the man he had become.

W
inters were cold and Cormac found a benefit to working in the mine deep beneath the earth; the temperature never varied more than a few degrees. After Christmas, he was sent out to the northern line shack with Wolfgang Hartzman, a stocky German ex-wrestler, another refugee from “the old country.”

Mr. Haplander didn't like fences, but a valley on the north side of the Flying H led to a deep arroyo over which he had lost many head of cattle when, drifting with the wind, they fell over the edge to their deaths in a blizzard. A fence had been put up across the three-mile wide valley entrance and it needed to be monitored and kept in good repair from cattle knocking it down by leaning against the posts to scratch their backs. Two or three broken posts could easily lay down a fifty-foot section of fence.

Their job was to ride the gap and make repairs as often as necessary, blizzard or no. The amount of work didn't call for two men, one was plenty but the danger of a man being injured with no help for miles was real, and the men complained of being alone for long periods of time with nothing to do. Cabin fever was also real. Loneliness and being cooped up could get to a man. As a way of passing time, Wolfgang taught Cormac some wrestling moves, and Cormac reciprocated by teaching Wolfgang how to accurately hit what he aimed at.

Wanting to continue his mother's teaching, Cormac always carried a book in his saddlebag for spare-time reading, oftentimes just a dictionary from which he had learned things like
didactic
being an instructional way of speaking like a teacher might use, and
incommodious
meant inconvenient, but this time he had forgotten to bring one, and that, he thought, was downright incommodious. And didactic. How on earth would somebody come up with a word like didactic? Was someone sitting around one day thinking, “We need a word for instructional speaking. I know. Let's call it didactic and have faith that someone has a dictionary so they can find out what it means.”

Also incommodious was climbing into a really cold bed at night that sat next to a really cold and thin cabin wall. “What you do,” Wolfgang told him, “is get into bed and roll up into as small of a ball as you can, then as you get warm, you straighten out by degrees.”

“Sure,” Cormac answered. “But by the time you get straightened out all the way, I still got thirty degrees to go.”

Cormac Lynch and Wolfgang Hartzman took turns starting the morning fire. A fire would be burning when they went to bed, which meant the next morning coldness would necessitate the sudden throwing-off of blankets, running to the potbellied stove, throwing in wood shavings pre-whittled for fire-starting, lighting a match to it, stacking increasingly larger wood pieces on the young flames, sitting the already prepared, and usually frozen, coffee pot on the flat stove top, and jumping back into bed until they could smell the coffee and hear it boiling and the cabin had warmed enough to get out of bed.

Other than the catalog in the outhouse, the only thing in the cabin to read was a dime novel left on the table by some past cowboy, written by an author back East named Buntline with stories purportedly about the “Real Western Frontier.” Most western people thought it was mostly just real silly and figured Mr. Buntline had never been outside the city limits of his own town, let alone “out West.”

They were happy when finally their time was up and their relief showed up on the horizon. By the time the relief riders arrived, Wolfgang and Cormac were packed, mounted, and saying good-bye.

Winter was replaced by a beautiful spring with wide Montana skies, so big and so very blue. Restlessness was settling in for Cormac. Working for twenty-five dollars a month for the rest of his life, half of it in a black hole in the ground, was becoming less and less appealing. He had been there nigh on a year, and for him it was work in the mine, work on the ranch, and go into town for drinks on Saturday night. He was getting fidgety, and the horizon was garnering his attention more and more as time went by more and more slowly. The novelty of a new job was wearing off and being replaced by boredom.

Mr. Haplander seemed to be continually requesting him for painting buildings and repairs or driving Laurie into town with the buggy for supplies. Running Lop Ear and Horse across the prairie was the only exciting thing in his life. The three of them looked forward to their Sunday-morning rides exploring the Rockies or flying across the prairies and over the gently rolling hills of the Flying H. They made it a point of always stopping by the patch of sweet clover growing on the afternoon-shady side of a close-by hill. The horses loved it, and Cormac sometimes even nibbled a few bites just to be sharing something with them. It wasn't bad. Over the years, he had eaten worse things. Lainey's cooking, for example. No, that wasn't true. It was just his old habit of teasing her that was kicking in.

He and Laurie were becoming close, and she was exciting to be around. She sat close to him on the buggy seat while on the way to town, touched his arms or hands frequently while talking to him, always had a smile for him, and gave him an excited kiss on his birthday. She had finished filling out, making it necessary for her and her mother to make all of her dresses and blouses. Store-boughts just didn't have enough room in certain places, and even then, some didn't seem to have come out right. They fit her more than a little bit close, and the buttons on her blouse were frequently straining to do their job. But her blue jeans fit just fine.