Hart the Regulator 5: Blood on the Border

By John B. Harvey

The Regulator is Wes Hart — ex-soldier, ex-Texas Ranger, ex-rider with Billy the Kid. He’s tough, ruthless, and slick with a .45. He’s for hire now and he isn’t cheap...
The good citizens of Caldwell had raised a fistful of dollars to pay for the railroad that would bring the Santa Fe thundering to their town. It was not a popular idea with Clancy Shire, the local cattle baron. Then the money went like a dollar bill loose in a dust-storm. Carried off by three of the nastiest desperadoes even the border country had seen.
Which explains how the folk of Caldwell are paying out to the Regulator. They need his kind of muscle for protection. For Hart it’s another job, but not every job has a pretty widow woman as well as a payday.
Could make a man sentimental...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: May 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311658289

John B. Harvey

Initially a teacher of English and Drama, the novelist John Harvey began writing in 1975, and now has over 100 published books to his credit, most recently a collection of short stories, A Darker Shade of Blue, and a novel, Good Bait. The first of his celebrated Charlie Resnick novels, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times as one of the 100 most notable crime novels of the last century. Flesh and Blood, the first of three Frank Elder novels, was awarded both the British Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger and the US Barry Award in 2004. In 2007 he received the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing, and in 2009 he was made an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Nottingham. A published poet, John ran Slow Dancer Press for nearly twenty years; in addition, he has written many scripts for television and radio, including dramatisations of novels by Graham Greene and A.S. Byatt and (with Shelley Silas) Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. John was one of the original 'Piccadilly Cowboys' and Piccadilly Publishing is proud to reissue his Herne the Hunter series, which was co-written with Laurence James under the name 'John J. McLaglen'.

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Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

The Regulator is Wes Hart — ex-soldier, ex-Texas Ranger, ex-rider with Billy the Kid. He’s tough, ruthless, and slick with a .45. He’s for hire now and he isn’t cheap...

The good citizens of Caldwell had raised a fistful of dollars to pay for the railroad that would bring the Santa Fe thundering

to their town. It was not a popular idea with Clancy Shire, the local cattle baron. Then the money went like a dollar bill loose in a dust-storm. Carried off by three of the nastiest desperadoes even the border country had seen.

Which explains how the folk of Caldwell are paying out to the Regulator. They need his kind of muscle for protection. For Hart it’s another job, but not every job has a pretty widow woman as well as a payday.

Could make a man sentimental...

BLOOD ON THE BORDER

HART THE REGULATOR 5

By John B. Harvey

First published by Pan Books in 1981

Copyright © 1981, 2014 by John B. Harvey

Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: June 2014

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.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

Cover image © 2014 by Edward Martin

edwrd984.deviantart.com

Series Editor: Mike Stotter

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Published by Arrangement with the Author.

For Caroline Upcher – who, when she isn’t reading books, likes movies, too

Chapter One

They weren’t taking short cuts and they weren’t taking chances. A two-horse rig with a couple of front riders and another one minding the tail moved north-east at no fast pace, following the main trail from Caldwell towards Wichita. The high wheels of the carriage spun the dust out behind like grey silk thread. Andrew Fairburn sat in the passenger seat, a silk kerchief knotted across the lower half of his face; even so the dust somehow infiltrated his protection, irritating his nostrils and the back of his throat. His brown hat was pulled down over his forehead and grey eyes squinted out from underneath it, their pupils at one with the dust.

Fairburn wished for the journey to be over and not solely on account of the discomfort. He sat with his legs hard against a black leather attaché case, one of his hands from time to time reaching down to touch the metal clasp as if ensuring that it were still locked. This gesture was rendered unnecessary by another, in which he patted the side pocket of his coat, feeling the small, single key on its ring.

Fairburn licked his lips beneath the kerchief and tasted a thin rime of dust: two thousand US dollars.

He coughed nervously and glanced round. Alongside him, Barcroft, who ran the largest of Caldwell’s three livery stables, grunted and flicked out with his whip. The horses broke into a trot which lasted for little more than a quarter of a mile before they resumed their walk.

‘Be at the river in ten minutes,’ growled Barcroft. ‘More or less.’

‘Hmm.’ Fairburn didn’t sound too convinced. ‘Do we have to travel at this snail’s pace? If we carry on like this we won’t reach even Wellington by nightfall.’

‘Long journey ahead,’ said Barcroft, not caring overmuch for the man’s tone, ‘don’t do to take it out of the horses too early. Better to get there later than not at all. Least …’ The driver turned his head at the last moment and spat tobacco juice into the air. ‘…that’s the way I see it.’

‘Mmm.’ Fairburn knew men like Barcroft well enough to realize it was a waste of time arguing with them or trying to get them to change their ways. He tapped the key through the material of his black coat. That was the trouble with so much of the territory – too many folk without the ability to see anything more than what was directly in front of their faces. No foresight. No vision. He grudgingly allowed himself the beginnings of a smile. At least some people in Caldwell had begun to see sense, the farmers in the area as well. Sense enough to provide a healthy subsidy to the railroad so that it would build an extension of the line down to Caldwell. That way the cattlemen who’d been driving their herds further north in Kansas - to Abilene and Dodge, to Ellsworth and Wichita - would stop at Caldwell, north of the state line. Then see the town boom!

Fairburn had been one of the first men to see the potential of the settlement. Yes, one of the first. Not the first, as he would willingly confess to anyone who cared to listen in the saloon of the Caldwell State Hotel, that honor went to Charles H. Stone and James H. Dagner, who surveyed and bought the land back in seventy-one. Bought and sold it at a good profit, too. No, he hadn’t been there that early, but nevertheless he was proud to think of himself as one of the founder-fathers of the town. Those had been Fairburn’s exact words at the dinner to celebrate his ninth term as president of the local Cattle Growers’ Association: one of the founder-fathers of the town.

Fairburn considered loosening his kerchief and lighting one of the small cigars he had sent regularly from Kansas City, but decided against it. He would wait until they made a stop, probably once they’d crossed the Chikaskia. Then he could stretch his legs and enjoy a smoke.

Seventy yards ahead of the carriage, Jay Cambridge was just finishing rolling a cigarette. He did this with his left hand, keeping the reins of his horse tight in the right. He set the paper against his thin lips and licked the edge down, setting one end in his mouth as he fingered a match from his waistcoat pocket and struck it against the metal of his pistol butt.

‘One day,’ said Seth Walker from alongside, ‘I’m goin’ to watch you do that trick an’ see all the makin’s spill out your fingers leavin’ you with nothin’ more than a scrap of paper. When that happens, Jay, I’ll laugh fit to bust.’

Jay cupped the cigarette in his left hand. ‘Seth, you’re such a jackass, you’d bust your fat gut watchin’ a mule piss on a fire in the middle of winter.’

‘Huh!’ Seth Walker rocked a little in the saddle and scowled at his partner, but Jay wasn’t paying him mind any longer.

Seth had been riding with Jay Cambridge, one way or another, for close on three years. They’d drifted into southern Kansas round the same time, Jay with a posse not far behind and Seth on the run from an angry wife and five kids. They’d got thrown together and neither of them had ever bothered to part; they just carried on insulting one another and occasionally the cussing would turn to fighting, but when the next job came round they’d sign on one after the other.

They’d ridden herd and they’d built mile after mile of fencing; even hammered steel for the Santa Fe Railroad until Seth had made one too many remarks about the Irish and after that it was dangerous for them to get too close to any of the work gangs. Now they were riding guard on high-and-mighty Andrew Fairburn, nurse-maiding him to Wichita and back for the meager sum of twenty dollars. Hell, it was a job!

Jay drew on the cigarette and swung his head slowly round; his eyes swept over the tapering plain, the tall grass that bent this way and that according to the wind. Westward it was just possible to see the beginnings of the hills and to know that beyond them, back out of sight, were the mountains. Jay turned in his saddle and looked at the carriage and at the slumped figure of Nesty forty or fifty yards behind that.

No one in Caldwell knew for sure why the old boy was called Nesty, but one of the rumors Jay favored was that it was on account of his beard. Never but combed it out once a year and one of those times he found a whole family of birds inside, been there since the spring. Nesty hung around the stable, occasionally helping Barcroft to shift hay or currycomb, fetch feed and water for the horses. When there wasn’t any work he loafed around there just the same, keeping warm, scrounging beer, playing a hand of cards when any of the boys was feeling kindly and asked him over to sit in. One of the big problems with a tangle of hair and beard the way Nesty had it was that in any kind of heat he stunk more than somewhat.

Jay was glad he was riding up front with Seth and that Nesty was back there on his own; at least he knew for a fact that Seth had a bath every month or so.

If Nesty knew or cared that he was being looked at and thought about, he gave no sign. He rode with his body folded forward over the pommel of his saddle, head angled down towards the trail. He had an old Spencer carbine that had seen service in the War between the States crooked under his right arm, the barrel resting on the worn saddle leather and poking out past his left side.

For all the attention he seemed to be paying to what was going on, Nesty could have been asleep. Perhaps he was.

‘Whoa!’ Seth reined in and lifted his right hand, the animal stammering sideways under him, slewing its rump round and tossing its head. There it is,’ Seth said, pointing. ‘There’s the river.’

Jay reined in his mount also and looked down, shaking his head. ‘Damn, I mind a time when you had to swim through that beauty with water ‘bove waist high.’

‘Ain’t that a fact.’

The Chikaskia was a bank of cracked mud, sloping haphazardly down towards a central channel which ran sluggishly with a stream of water no more than a couple of feet wide and less than half a dozen inches in depth. The winter just past, the winter of seventy-nine, had brought with it a bastard of a drought which had clammed the country up tight. Stock had withered and died, hands scouring the ranges for carcasses of beefs that offered little more than a bag of worms and wind and brittle bones. The soil turned to dust and washed over the parched land.

Gradually, now, things seemed to be returning to normal. That two-foot width of water might not be a whole lot, but it was a whole lot better than nothing.

The far bank was lined with straggly young trees, just breaking from bud. Behind those the trail wound eastwards, the swerve of direction taking it around a low, stubby hill crowned by an outcrop of iron-grey rock. Seth and Jay turned and looked back at the carriage, which had also stopped.

‘Trouble?’ Fairburn had asked anxiously, bending towards the attaché case.

Barcroft waited a while, watching the two men up front; finally he wrinkled his face and slowly shook his head from side to side. ‘No. We reached the river is all.’

As Fairburn relaxed and sat back again, Seth and Jay began to move once more. Their horses quickened their pace, eager for the water which they could smell clearly. The two men were content to let the animals trot down to the mud of the bank at speed, wanting themselves to slake their thirst and wash the dust from their throats.

Thirty yards short of the river Seth pushed his Stetson back on his head and grinned across at Jay, feeling good.

Twenty-five yards short a .44 Winchester slug ripped through the thick flesh at the top of his left thigh. Seth screamed and the shrill surprise of his voice merged with the rifle report. His horse reared on its hind legs, whinnying with fright. Seth started to reach for his sidearm, hesitated, stared at Jay who was now ten yards adrift to his right and finally down at his leg.

‘Jesus above!’

Several inches of grey wool had been torn away and a good thickness of flesh with it. Fiber and tissue welled with blood that was all too bright and through it Seth could see the white hardness of the bone.

‘Hell almighty, Jay! Look at this bastard leg!’

Jay had other things to attend to. The rifleman hadn’t shifted from his position in the trees and it was reasonable to suppose that having put a shell through his partner, he was lined up for the next one himself. But quite apart from that, a group of riders