Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred, Thomas Pope (Introduction)

Overview

Here is a rich and serious novel of the violent West. Full of the authentic sounds and colors of Wyoming cattle country in the late nineteenth century, it tells the true story of a long-vanished time—the era of the cowhands and the bloody Johnson County range wars.

Riders of Judgment centers on the three Hammett brothers and their cousin Rosemary, whom all three love. To the oldest brother, Cain, falls the lot of avenging the murder of his father, grandfather, and brother. Cain—who is in a sense a cowboy Hamlet—is torn by conflicts within himself. He desires peace yet is forced to wear a gun. He is a law-abiding man by instinct yet has to take the law into his own hands. He is loved by a woman but rejects her because he feels unworthy of her love.

Then one spring morning the cattle barons invade his territory, and Cain’s hesitancy vanishes. One man’s inner struggle becomes a fight to turn the cattle kingdom into a free country for the small stockman.

Riders of Judgment is the final book in Frederick Manfred’s five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales.

 

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780803277441
Publisher:	UNP - Bison Books
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Series:	Bison Classic Editions
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	388
File size:	635 KB

About the Author

Frederick Manfred (1912–94) is the author of twenty-four novels, including the five-volume series The Buckskin Man Tales, which includes Conquering Horse, Lord Grizzly (finalist for the 1954 National Book Award), and Scarlet Plume, all available in Bison Books editions, as well as King of Spades.

Read an Excerpt

Riders of Judgment

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By Frederick Manfred

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 1951 Frederick Feikema Manfred
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7744-1

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CHAPTER 1

Part One

Cain

Cain came riding down through a cloud. He was still very high above the timberline in the Big Stonies. He rode a tall black gelding named Lonesome. Behind him sauntered Animal, his gray pack mule, tied to Lonesome's tail.

Cain let his horse pick the way down the steep slope. Sometimes Lonesome's iron shoes rang on scoured rock. The cloud gave way to clear air very slowly. From the horse's back Cain could occasionally make out varicolored ground: rock blotched over with moss, then bare rock, then carpets of mushy grass.

A single ponderosa pine suddenly appeared out of the mist. It came out of the cloud as if walking toward them. Its orange trunk was just barely visible, while its upper reaches were lost in drifting silver.

For late August the air was cold. Cain drew down his hat, making his stub ears splay out some. He tightened his bandanna snug around his neck. He shivered. He rolled his shoulders. His slicker rustled comfortingly. He walloped his arms around his chest, walloped until finger tips tingled inside his gloves.

Cain was a knobby-muscled fellow. His movements, though quick, were blunt. His face was rough-cut, as if slapped into form with the side of an ax. He had a black walrus mustache, and it gave his face a weathered walnut hue. He wore a black hat, with the wide brim shaped up on both sides against the crown, making points in front and in back. The two dents up front in the crown, into which his thumb and forefinger fit when he handled it, matched the two deep hollows in his cheeks exactly.

Except for a small red heart carved in the leather just below the pull strap, his boots were black too. So too were his .45 Colt and its holster and the cartridge belt, and his pants, shirt, and vest. His Cheyenne-style saddle, bridle, and reins were black. But blackest of all was the kingly horse Lonesome. Lonesome had a coat of somber powder-black and a curling mane and tail that glowed purple in the sun. Setting off all the striking blacks of Cain's rigging was the white sock above Lonesome's left rear hoof and the silver ornaments on the bridle and saddle and the hand-forged inlaid silver spurs.

Cain rode very light, for all his blunt body. He rode with much of his weight in the stirrups, knees taking up the spring, making it easy on the horse. To sit in the saddle like a bag of sand all day long was to kill the mount. He rarely used the reins; drove mostly with his knees. It hurt him to see men rein in their horses with vicious jerks. A horse frothing blood at the bit was enough to set him against the rider.

Behind him, on Animal the pack mule, under a tarp and balanced exactly, rode his bedroll and camp supplies and the remains of a whitetail bighorn sheep. Late the evening before, Cain had finally got his shot and dropped a young buck. He'd butchered in the dusk, shining up his skinning knife with a few quick strokes down his leather chaps, and disemboweling the sheep with easy strokes, the guts welling out like baby snakes, moist and sliding. He'd trimmed out the better meat, all of it smelling deliciously gamy, and wrapped it up in the dust-brown hide. The noble head, with its curling horns resembling hand-carved bench knobs, he'd also saved for mounting later on.

The trail lifted up, to the left, and then crossed over a low neck of rock. The rock was speckled over with various kinds of mosses: brown, green, red, black, orange. The cloud thickened. Old pocked snow lay melting on the left; tiny blue bell-like flowers grew on the right.

Cain smiled to himself. The grimace lifted the ends of his mustache. It creased wrinkles back through a five-day growth of beard. Here comes bachelor Cain Hammett, he thought, a snowball in his left hand and a posy of true flowers in his right.

They crossed a great open space. The ocher soil was matted over with blooming short grasses, with white and purple and gold flowers. Patches of miniature ferns rode above the grass like diaphanous green veils. Perfumes of the most delicate kind, yet each quite distinct, and weighted with the fresh scent of cloud dew, touched the inside of the nostril no matter which way a man turned his head. It was all a park, almost too good for grazing.

Again the trail sloped down. The cloud thinned out. As Cain came around the shoulder of a huge rock, the cloud suddenly vanished, evanescing up and away, making a solid bank above him and shrouding the blue peaks to the west.

Then for the first time he could see, far down to the east, vast throws of eternal rock away, the great Crimson Wall. Forty miles long, it stretched across his path like the Great Wall of China. It ranged from north to south and was as red as geranium-petal rust.

Beyond Crimson Wall the further valley spread out before him like a huge relief map. It was midforenoon, and the full sun struck it with a flood of brilliant light. He could trace the Bitterness River and all its branches as they trickled east through huge breaks in the blood-red Wall, down, down, the Red Fork where Dencil Jager had his horse ranch, the Shaken Grass where he had his own little spread, and then the Bitterness itself where Dale and Rory Hammett had their sheep ranch, all coming together in the violet color of a violent land called the Bad. The Bitterness flowed east, swinging and aggrading through gray alkali wastes, until at last, fifty miles away, it turned sharply north for the Yellowstone. Cain knew it all well, had seen it many times, and yet each time he saw it as a wonder again. This was the country all right. The big open.

Lonesome nickered low. Cain gave the horse its head, and Lonesome immediately headed for a small patch of succulent green growing out of sappy ground. Both Lonesome and Animal were hungry and they snapped at grass to all sides as if they couldn't get enough of it. It was the first good feeding they'd had since leaving the meadow beside the Shaken Grass. The horse moved under Cain, the high shoulders rocking the saddle, making the leather cinches creak. The mule's movements as it grazed stirred up the lifeless head of the bighorn. The horse and mule tromped around in the tender patch. Presently the air was sweet with the smell of crushed greens.

Cain relaxed in his saddle. He let his back hump some and the flesh over his belly fold up. He rolled himself a cigarette. He took a match out of his hatband and lit up. The forenoon sun became warm. After a bit he began to heat pleasantly inside his slicker. The sun also dried Lonesome's damp coat. It left gray streaks in the powder-black hair. Some of the streaks resembled the markings of coastlines on a map.

Once more Cain's eyes could not resist tracing out the great curving escarpment of Crimson Wall far below, scarves of rock sheering down from north to south, from where it curved in a bright red crescent out of the footslopes near Antelope to where it vanished in blue shadow near Hidden Country. Green flanks of land stretched to where Red Fork ran south; deep green hills rolled to where the Shaken Grass ran north. And where the grass ran thin, bare folds of soil lay skinned and fleshy red.

He found himself breathing heavy in the thin air. His nose stung from it. His eyes, seeing so sharply, so widely, and so alive to blood racing within, teared vaguely at the corners. Every now and then his lungs sucked deep of the searing air.

"So dummed high up here, when a fly lights for the night it has to settle on the ground."

Right in the middle of a bite, Lonesome suddenly snorted, once, and lifted his handsome head high, and his raven mane tumbled back, and his ears began to flick. The mule, Animal, jerked up his head too and stood with both of his long gray ears shot forward.

"What's the matter, boys? Somebody around after all?"

Quickly, deftly, with his left hand he opened his slicker and shifted his six-gun around ready to hand on the left, butt up. He also loosened his .38 Winchester in its scabbard under his right leg. With narrowed smoke-blue eyes Cain stared at the falling footslopes below, then up at the soaring cliffs behind. But search as he would he could see nothing. The only things moving were small black spots on a far bench just this side of the red Wall, and these he knew to be Dencil Jager's grazing horse herds.

Once more he examined every ravine, every canyon, every gulch, every cluster of pine caught on a cliff face. Could someone have trailed him this high into the Big Stonies? He'd been careful to double his trail in the waters of the Shaken Grass, and then later in the upper reaches of the Red Fork. He tossed back his hat to hear the better. Both he and the horse, and the mule, listened intently. The falling silence lay around them like a pause between psalms.

If someone had trailed him up that high in the Big Stonies, getting a bighorn for cousin Rory might turn out to be an expensive trip at that. Especially since he'd thought it a foolish whim in the first place. She for asking; he for agreeing to it. And then both saying it was really to be a treat for Gram Hammett.

He was staring down at a brow of black volcanic rock when he saw part of the rock detach itself and assume slow wings. The wings banked and beat up toward him. Eagle. Now what could have choused up that thing? Lonesome and Animal were right. Something or somebody, more than just a stray wild critter, was stirring around below.

Cain studied Lonesome's manner of standing; then Animal's pointing gray tuber ears. Yes. Both sensed another horse below. Both looked as if they were about to break out with a greeting whinny.

Cain checked his guns again; took off his left glove for better handling; had a quick look around. Better get down off the ridge. Against the blue sky they'd be easy pickings for a long-range rifle below. Best to circle home halfway up the sides of ravines and gulches. Though not too low or a man could get hung up in the bottom of some draw.

His wonderful country had lately been not quite so wonderful. Lately it had become full of long riders, full of solitary men who went on long spying expeditions armed with high-powered glasses and rifles. Everywhere a man looked he almost always saw a hatted head pricking out atop some high hill looking the country over.

"Hup up, Lonesome boy, let's be joggin'. And we'd best take a cross canyon here and streak it down the Red Fork. The same one them Cheyennes took to get out from under the guns of General Plunkett. It looks tough. It is tough. And nobody but a rustling Red Sasher takes it these days."

For all their curiosity about the unseen critter, both Lonesome and Animal were reluctant to leave the little island of green grass on the rock ledge. Cain had to remind Lonesome that he was boss with a very light rake of the rowels just under the quick. The touch made Lonesome crow-hop twice, which Cain rode easy, and then the horse settled into a steady swift single-foot with Animal following patiently along behind. After a bit, Cain slipped on his left glove again.

Once more rock rang under iron horseshoes, like notes struck from stone bells with brass clappers. They brushed around a thrust of light green rock. Again ponderosa pine crowded around them. Lonesome's hooves whispered across thick carpets of pine needles. The scent of rosin was sticky, cloying; it awakened memory of spilled molasses. Lupine bloomed purple in the open parks. A fallen old cottonwood, growing in too high an altitude and dying early, lay off to the left. Brilliant red paintbrush grew near it. Aspen trembled.

They passed through a sloping patch of greenish-gray mahogany brush. Next came a field of deep green juniper. Here and there individual bushes, both mahogany and juniper, had been threshed to bits by bull elk trying to rub velvet fuzz off their new horns.

Mahogany brush made great feed for elk, deer, sheep; they favored it the year round. A black butterfly with yellow trim fluttered around Cain for a ways. Petrified logs lay scattered to all sides. The sweet smell of morning rain rose from the ground; it made a man want to hug something.

Silently they rode down, down. The near footslopes of the valley rose toward them. The upthrust cliffs and peaks climbed behind them, rose into distant blue pinnacles frosted over with snow and cloud mist at the very top. There were touches of autumn on the high flanks: yellow and ocher and gold mixed in with the deep green of the pine. Swallows banked steeply over dark abysses. Swift fleeting mirages, like cities seen between eyeblinks, winked over the forests. They rode down into warmth and summer. It became easier to breathe. More and more the flittering leaves of aspen began to show. Buckbrush replaced juniper. And at last, as they rode into the head of Red Fork, sweet spring water welled out of the rocks on all sides and the medicinal smell of sage came up on the wind. The short-grass plains lay below. Both Lonesome and Animal quickened to it.

Cain couldn't help but croon the chorus of his favorite song to himself:

"When the Riders of Judgment come down from the sky
And the Big Boss fans wide his great circle drive
And critters come in from low and from high
And critters rise up both dead and alive — Will
you be ready for that Roundup of Ages?"

The lower end of Red Fork Canyon, where it widened out into a cozy valley, was beautiful. Bluebells and lupines grew thick and tall. Wild primroses and white purple clematis nodded on the low grassy benches. Most fragrant were the larkspur and lobelia. The orange berries of wild rosebushes tossed in the wind. And off in the sidedraws the chokecherries hung a ripened deep red, and the wild plums a turning red, and the wild raspberries a maidenlip red, and the gooseberries an opal blue. And all the while singing meadow larks and scolding magpies threaded through the trees.

Through some cedars Cain spotted the first cattle, most of them whitefaces, a breed of beef with a Texas Longhorn foundation, crossed with Shorthorn and topped off with Hereford bulls. This high on the footslopes of the Big Stonies the cattle were saucy and fat. Grass in the canyons at the base of the mountains was always good and the water was plentiful. During the summer months it was favorite grazing ground. Grass might be as nutritious down on the plains but cattle had to travel too far for water. The color of the cattle before him was deep, rich even, a blood-red with matted white, with sometimes the darker brown of the old Texas base showing through. It was easy to see, though, that the Hereford strain was going to win out. Money spent on the Hereford bulls had not been for nothing.

Cain examined the brands, burnt high on the shoulder so a rider could spot them from horseback, to see if maybe some of his cattle were among them. All he saw, however, were the various brands of Peter Caudle, the Earl of Humberwick: the Derby, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; the English pound, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]; and the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. There were no Mark-of-Cain cattle, as he jokingly called his own brand, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. He also looked to see if any of brother Harry's stuff was around. But look as he might there were no Rocking Hell, [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], cattle either. Good thing too. With someone looking for him he'd hardly have the time to throw them back toward the hills of Hidden Country to the south, where Harry lived.

The stream of the Red Fork deepened in the slowly opening canyon, at last became a noisy brook galloping from one red boulder to the next, surging up over and around, green over gray fieldstone and pink over slabs of scarlet scoria. The air was sweet with the smell of mountain water. Both Lonesome and Animal fluttered nostrils at it, loud.

"You sure got rollers in your nose today, ain't ye, boys? Well, all right, let's all have a drink then."

Cain threw over a leg and got down. He slipped out of his slicker and folded it up and tied it behind the cantle. He stretched, stretched long, stretched until with a jerk Lonesome, in a hurry to get at the water, pulled him out of it. Cain shifted his gun around and tightened his cartridge belt. He untied Animal's hitch from Lonesome's tail. Then all three went down for a drink, the horse and mule from high shoulders, Cain on his knees. Lonesome and Animal drank on the high side of the stream; Cain on the low. Cain didn't mind. There wasn't a sweeter mouth in all creation than a horse's or a mule's. That was because they ate grass, not meat boiled or rotten.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Riders of Judgment by Frederick Manfred. Copyright © 1951 Frederick Feikema Manfred. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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