The Leslie Ernenwein Western by Leslie Ernenwein

Author:Leslie Ernenwein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: western, cowboy, gunslinger, indians, outlaws
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

TRIGGER JUSTICE

(aka Rebels Ride Proudly)

Copyright © 1947, 1975 by Leslie Ernenwein.

DEDICATION

To Slim, who shared the Shack Of Dreams

CHAPTER 1

Tall and Tough

This was late autumn with Tonto Flats turned tawny by sun-cured grama grass. Mesquite beans in the thickets along Commissary Creek were brittle dry, so that the slightest breeze set them to rattling. It occurred to Jeff Tennant that the beans were the exact ivory color they’d been the last time he crossed this creek and that the same wheel-scarred boulders protruded above the water here at the ford. While his sorrel gelding drank leisurely, Tennant recalled the occasion of that crossing three years ago. He had been driving his first beef gather to Quadrille, twenty fat steers bearing his Roman Four brand…

A whimsical smile loosened Tennant’s lips, changing his angular face and giving it a youthfulness that was in keeping with his twenty-eight years. But the smile didn’t change his gray eyes; it didn’t touch them at all.

“Three years,” he said. He cursed, and built a cigarette, and said again, “Three years.”

So sitting, with the brim of his sweat-stained hat cuffed back and his long black hair merging with the four-day stubble of whiskers that shagged his jaws, Jeff Tennant looked like a saddle tramp. He wore a faded cotton shirt which had once been blue; his riding pants showed bachelor patches in both knees and his brush-scabbed boots had run-over heels. But his gun belt and holster were new, the tooled leather store yellow and store stiff.

When his horse finished drinking Tennant rode on across the ford; he was topping the north bank when a girl rode out of the brush so near that he recognized her at once as being Leona Bell, whose father owned one of the two large ranches in Bunchgrass Basin. Tennant discarded his cigarette; he showed her a frugal courtesy by nudging his hat brim, and said, “Howdy, ma’am.”

Leona Bell nodded acknowledgement. She halted her horse and sat with both gloved hands on saddle horn in the contemplative fashion of a cattle buyer calculating the weight of a steer. Sunlight gave her brown eyes an amber shine; her jet-black hair, showing beneath the brim of a gray Stetson, accentuated the pallor of a composed, cameo-smooth face that now had an up-chinned tilt, so that she seemed to be looking down at him.

Tennant thought, She always was prouder than seven peacocks, and recalled that she had attended a fashionable Eastern school. Now, he guessed, she was showing him how folks in Bunchgrass Basin treated an ex-convict…

A devil-be-damned grin creased Tennant’s stubbled cheeks. He said brashly, “Take a good look,” and, deliberately regarding the curves of her body, added, “While I do the same.”

He thought that would end her silence. And her appraisal. But it didn’t. She glanced at his new gun gear, at the sack of provisions tied behind his saddle, and at the brand on the bronc’s left shoulder. Finally she asked, “Just riding through?”

Tennant understood now that she hadn’t recognized him. Which

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