ONE
Nine parts pistol and one part scattergun. Claude Duval judged his Le Mat grapeshot revolver the showpiece of his collection. He sat on the porch and tinkered with it as rain washed the pine-studded hills of his ranch and cooled the Laramie Plains below.
His finger drew the trigger in, his thumb holding the hammer back, easing it down on the firing pin. The action sounded like a clicking symphony of machined parts to Claude’s ears, accompanied by the patter of raindrops on the shakes. His nostrils flared and took in the clean aroma of rain come down from the thunderclouds, pierced by the bite of gun oil.
Reaching under the bench, he touched the whiskey bottle but passed it over for the oil can. In his younger years he might have been well lit by this hour on a lazy day like today. But, at thirty-six, Claude Duval was finally learning to temper his bad habits. His fingers took in the oil can and let the whiskey bottle lie.
He put the hummingbird spout of the can to the revolving cylinder of the Le Mat and clicked the bottom of the can once, applying a single drop with restrained precision. To spread the oil, he turned the cylinder—an odd oversize design that chambered nine .42-caliber pistol rounds. The Le Mat didn’t pack the knockdown power of a Smith & Wesson Russian or a Colt Peacemaker, but it chambered nine rounds instead of six. Three extra shots could come in handy these days, Claude thought, with every gun-lugging rustler on the range thinking six-shooters.
And the Le Mat still had a wild card to play. Instead of a solid steel pin, its cylinder revolved around a short, smoothbore, twenty-gauge shotgun barrel loaded with a blast of double aught. It was twice-barreled, over and under, the pistol barrel on top, the shot barrel underneath. The weapon was like a six-shooter and a half, with a sawed-off shotgun thrown in for grins.
Claude knew why the grapeshot revolver had never caught on. It had a movable tang on the hammer that the shooter flipped one way to fire the pistol rounds and the other way to fire the shotgun barrel. Under rough use, the tang had a tendency to break off, and then the hammer wouldn’t fire anything. Still, it was the kind of piece Claude liked—one with unusual features.
He owned a Cooper’s ring-trigger pepperbox, a six-shooter with six barrels; a Sharps carbine with a coffee mill built into the stock; a Jarre pinfire harmonica gun with a sliding magazine that looked like a mouth harp … They weren’t worth much, but he didn’t collect them for their pecuniary value. He just liked guns. He kept them in mint condition, the finest pieces hidden under the floorboards of his new frame house.
The Le Mat grapeshot revolver was his favorite. He loved to feel it work in his hand, yet every time he did, he wanted to kick himself for not thinking of the idea on his own. A shotgun barrel in the middle of the cylinder. Genius.
Claude had dreamed for years of inventing some firearm that would carry his name into posterity, but the only idea he had ever come up with was a thing he called the Duval Derringer—a pocket pistol that could be made to shoot backward as well as forward.
The idea had come to him a few years ago down in Texas when a cow thief he had been tracking snuck up on him in camp, disarmed him, and shot him with his own Colt. He remembered thinking just before the slug hit him in the chest that if his pistol could have been rigged to shoot backward at the flip of a lever or something, the rustler would have shot himself right in the eye. As it happened, though, he was lung-shot with his own gun and left for dead. Luckily, a couple of cowboys hunting strays had heard the shot and came to investigate. They took him to Mobeetie, where an army doctor from Fort Elliott announced he would probably die overnight. When Claude came around, he found a pine box at his bedside. They were efficient at burials in Mobeetie, but Claude had disappointed them.
Of course, the Duval Derringer would never reach production. Too dangerous. Some innocent fool would flip the switch the wrong way and shoot himself, sure as the world. Claude would have to think of something better.
He put the oil can down and pulled his watch from his vest pocket. Three minutes past the half hour. Time for a swallow. He picked up the whiskey bottle, pulled the stopper, and smelled the aroma as he put the spout to his lips. He doled the liquor out as he would oil on a fine collectible. Too much lubrication could break down a good grip, ruin one’s stock.
Claude was forever thinking guns, hoping an idea for a new weapon would strike him one day. A patent in his name would sure show the folks back home.
Every man in the Duval family of Texas—except Claude—claimed a title of some kind. His father was Judge Duval, his brothers Senator and Major Duval. The only word he had ever heard spoken before his name was “Sabinal.” And that wasn’t a title, just a nickname given to him by his old friend Dusty Sanderson. He and Dusty had once owned a small ranch on the Sabinal River, west of San Antonio. Pretty place. Part of the Lost Maples woods grew on the ranch and turned beautiful colors in the fall. But they had lost that place to creditors.
A few years after that, he lost Dusty, too, and his life took some turns he had never planned.
Claude may not have cared where he stood with the Duval family—Dusty had never cared—but he was thankful to have his clan’s good looks. He measured over six feet with his boots on, filled out the shoulders of his riding jacket, and looked at the world through twinkling sky-blue eyes. Those eyes were sprouting a lot of crow’s-feet these days, but he had squinted at a lot of horizons. His eagle’s nose was a Duval trademark, and his jaw was perhaps the finest in the family.
He knew his kin disapproved of him and the life he had chosen, so he had cultivated his own appearance, as if to set himself apart from the other Duval men. They were fond of ostentatious whiskers, so Claude had made a ritual of shaving. His brothers cropped their hair short, so he grew his in waving locks that fell on his shoulders.
He didn’t even pronounce the family name the way his kin did. With the judge and the senator and the major, it was dyu-VALLE. With Sabinal Claude, it was just plain old DOO-val.
“You know, Sabinal,” Dusty had told him one hot day on the trail to Dodge, both of them riding drag in the wake of the herd, “you could have stayed home and sat in the shade of your family tree. But look at you now, ridin’ out in the sunshine.”
“Yeah,” Claude had replied, “if only I could see it through all this damned alkali dust.”
When they were fifteen, Claude and Dusty had quit school in Austin, left their homes, and hired on with a South Texas ranch. After the war, when the big trail drives began, they had both made top hands, driving beeves as far north as Montana. It was on a return trip from Montana that they had first stumbled upon these pine-studded hills between the Laramie Plains and the Medicine Bow Mountains.
“If I could make a ranch go,” Dusty had said, “this is where I’d put it. A man could tolerate poverty in a pretty place like this.”
That had been more than a dozen years ago. It had taken him that long to make up his mind to leave Texas. Too many Dyu-VALLES down there looking down their Roman noses at him. Texas had never been the same, anyway, after Dusty’s murder.
Of course, the deciding factor had nothing to do with his partner’s death or his family. He had simply gotten nervous about some back-shooter slipping up on him. He had crossed a lot of hard cases over the years in Texas.
Claude had never intended to go into the stock detective business. It had happened by accident. The first winter after Dusty died, a gang of rustlers stole a herd out from under his nose near a line camp he was in charge of on a Panhandle ranch. Claude had taken out after them without even going for help, figuring the outlaw Giff Dearborn was ramrodding the rustlers. Dearborn was part of the reason Dusty had been murdered, and Claude wanted his scalp.
He trailed the rustlers until he caught them drunk in camp in New Mexico. They had already lost most of the cattle to stampede. It wasn’t Giff Dearborn’s bunch, but Claude brought them back to Texas, anyway, spending two sleepless days in the saddle guarding them. Most of the stolen cattle drifted back to home range. The affair made him look real good and started a lot of talk.
The next time a bunch of cattle turned up missing, the boss came looking for Claude Duval. “Sabinal,” he said, “rustlers damn near cleaned out that herd down on the South Branch. I want you to go after ’em.”
“Hell, boss, call the Texas Rangers. I ain’t no regulator.”
“You’re a Duval, aren’t you?”
“Damned if I ain’t. What’s that got to do with anything?”
“We need your kind of Duval backbone. Some of the other outfits have agreed to throw in for your wages. A hundred dollars for every cow thief you can kill or put in jail.”
He could no more pass up earnings like those than he could let his family name get the better of him. His brothers had been Confederate heroes, his father a decorated volunteer in the war with Mexico. Claude’s would be a range war.
He had only killed a couple of rustlers over the years, and then only to save his own skin. But he had sent dozens to jail. Maybe that was his mistake. Men tended to get out of prison sooner or later and drift back to their old ranges. Things had gotten hot for Claude down in Texas. It was well that he had come north.
He was starting something new in Wyoming. No more chasing rustlers. He had bought the section Dusty had been particularly fond of, here in the foothills of the Medicine Bows. He planned to run a few cattle and train some horses through the summer, maybe do a little gunsmithing.
When fall came, he would guide hunters into the Medicine Bows. A lot of those rich easterners were looking for sport out West nowadays. This was the perfect place to give them their taste of it. Laramie was only twenty miles to the northeast. He could pick them up at the Union Pacific depot and bunk them here before starting into the mountains. The Medicine Bows teemed with game: elk, deer, bear, lion, even mountain sheep.
He had a lot to do before the best fall hunting began. He had barns and corrals to build, horses and pack mules to buy. He needed to get up into the mountains to scout for the best hunting. But today he was content to sit on the porch and tinker with his guns. He wasn’t going to stand out in the rain and dig post holes.
Looking down the irons of the Le Mat, Claude swept the Laramie Plains until a moving figure caught his eye. A yellow slicker emerged from the mist about half a mile away, the rider coming at a lope up the road.
“Now, who the hell is that?” he said to himself. He rose, shoved the Le Mat under his belt, and went into the house to choose a couple of weapons. He picked a Model 76 Winchester and a double-barreled shotgun. It didn’t hurt to be careful. He didn’t know anybody around here yet.
When he stepped back out onto the porch, the rider was within rifle range and still coming in plain view. The man obviously wasn’t looking for trouble. Probably a social call. Some friendly neighbor wanting to sip a little whiskey on a rainy day.
But as the yellow slicker neared, Claude began to see recognizable features. By the time the visitor pulled rein in front of the house, he knew who it was.
The Snowy Range Gang copyright © 1991, 1996 by Mike Blakely
Vendetta Gold copyright © 1990 by Mike Blakely
