He ground the ends of his fists against the deep, soft mattress. “An’ this is the thanks I get!”
“Yes,” Dahl muttered, wryly. “Ungrateful yellowbelly, that Buchanon.”
“Please tell me you ain’t gonna cut off my leg, Doc!”
Just then the door behind Dahl clicked open. He glanced over his shoulder to see Sheriff Frank Stillwell limp into the room on his tender hip. His left hand was wrapped in a thick white bandage. “Got a minute, Doc?”
“Got a minute?” Dahl said, gesturing at the writhing Willie Heaton. “Does it look like I got a minute? This man has contracted gangrene in his leg!”
Stillwell shook his head as he closed the door behind him. “I’m gonna need a minute, Doc.” He limped over to a brocade-upholstered armchair in the room’s corner, sagged gently into it, wincing a little at the pain in his hip not to mention in his hand, then dug a long nine out of the breast pocket of his black frock coat. “Just a minute.”
He scratched a match to life on his thumbnail and gazed steely-eyed through the flame at the doctor. “Gonna have to insist, I’m afraid.”
CHAPTER 37
“Sheriff, I might very well have to amputate this man’s leg!” Dahl said in exasperation.
“No, Doc!” Willie Heaton cried. “Please don’t cut my leg off!” He bawled like a baby.
Stillwell took a drag off the long nine and blew smoke into the room. “I’ll let you get right to it, Doc. Christ, that leg stinks to high heaven, don’t it? Phew! I just need to know where Hunter Buchanon is holed up with his old man and Ludlow’s daughter. Just tell me that, an’ throw in some good directions, and I’ll be out of your hair pronto. You can saw away to your heart’s delight!”
“No!” Heaton wailed.
Miss Minnie knelt down beside him, cooing to the horrified patient while holding one of his hands and glaring at the sheriff.
“Forget it,” Dahl said. “I’ll never tell. Just so more men can be brought to me in this condition?” He gestured at the sobbing Heaton. “Just so more men can die?” He shook his head adamantly. “Nope. Not going to do it. You’re wasting your time, Stillwell. What’s more, I’m not afraid of you. If you do anything to me, who’s going to tend your own wounds?”
He dropped his chin to indicate the man’s bullet-torn hand, which Dahl had sutured along with his hip. He turned to Minnie and said, “Dear, would you please fetch my surgical kit from . . . ?”
He stopped when he saw Stillwell rise from the chair. The sheriff moved toward the bed. Dahl stared at him, incredulous. Minnie rose, frowning curiously, as Stillwell stepped past her to stand over the bed and stare down at the sobbing Willie Heaton.
“Willie, I’m gonna do you a big favor, my friend. I’m gonna save you from a life of one-legged hell.”
Before Heaton could say anything, Stillwell grabbed the pillow out from beneath the wounded man’s head. He held the pillow over Heaton’s face, shucked his Colt from its holster, and fired two rounds through the pillow.
Minnie screamed and fell backward against the dresser, dropping to her knees. She screamed again.
Stillwell triggered one more round through the pillow. Again, Minnie screamed. Bloody goose feathers snowed down over the bed. Heaton’s body quivered violently on the bed.
“Oh . . . oh God!” Minnie cupped both hands over her mouth and sobbed.
Dahl clawed his way out of his shock to say, “Stillwell, you crazy chucklehead!”
The sheriff turned to face the doctor. His eyes were dark. He raised the Colt, and, keeping his dark, threatening gaze on Dahl, extended the revolver out from his right shoulder and pressed the round steel maw against Minnie’s head.
He cocked it loudly. “I’m gonna ask you just one more time, Doc!”
* * *
Riding into Tigerville bright and early the next day, Graham Ludlow drew back on his stallion’s reins while raising his left hand, halting the dozen Broken Heart men riding behind him on their dusty horses.
As Ludlow and the other men drew up in front of the sheriff’s office, the rancher shuttled his gaze to the sheriff dropping tenderly down his veranda steps. Stillwell winced with each movement. He held his bandage-wrapped left hand across his belly, as though it were an injured bird.
Two other men filed out the office’s open door behind him, saddlebags slung over their shoulders, Winchesters in their hands. Each man wore a five-pointed deputy sheriff’s star.
“Good God, man,” Ludlow said, frowning at Stillwell. “You’re a sorry sight!”
Stillwell stopped and glared up at the older man, who wore two pistols on his hips and had his own Winchester Yellowboy repeater shoved down in its freshly soaped and oiled saddle scabbard. Likewise, his dozen riders were all armed for bear.
Or Graybacks . . .
“You ride all this way to take my temperature, Mr. Ludlow? You want me to turn around, drop my drawers, and bend over?”
Ludlow drew a lungful of air, beating down the anger rising inside him. He glanced at his foreman, C. J. Bonner, sitting his paint gelding to Ludlow’s right. Bonner turned to Stillwell and started to reprimand the lackey for his insolence, but Ludlow cut him off with a raised right hand.
He jerked his chin toward the other two men dropping down the steps behind Stillwell, grinning at the sheriff’s barb. He’d seen them in the saloon the day before, standing at the bar.
“Who’re your new deputies?” the rancher asked. “I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced.”
Stillwell turned away from the rancher and stepped over to his claybank tied to a near hitchrack. “That there’s Weed Zorn and Klaus Steinbach.”
Tossing their saddlebags over their horses’ backs or adjusting saddle straps and buckles, Zorn and Steinbach turned toward Ludlow and dipped their chins by way of a cursory howdy-do.
“Ah, I see.” Ludlow knew both men by their names and reputations. He’d never been introduced to either, however. Again, he frowned, glancing around. “Where’s Dakota Jack Patterson?”
“Jack had him a pill he couldn’t digest,” said the man Ludlow assumed was Zorn—shorter and wiry and with a gunman’s hard stare. Steinbach was tall and black bearded, and he wore a long duster the same black shade as his beard and eyes. Probably the same black shade as his soul. “Just been a ton of misery all the way around.” He glanced at Stillwell.
“Dakota Jack’s dead?” Ludlow said, genuinely surprised at Stillwell’s failure to inform him yesterday at the Dakota Territorial. When he’d absorbed the startling information, he turned his thoughts to the business at hand. “Speaking of pills, did you ask Dahl about Buchanon?”
Stillwell turned from his horse and, still holding his bandaged left hand across his belly, used his right hand to dig a long nine from his shirt pocket, inside his black frock coat. “Yeah,” the sheriff said, snapping a match to life on his thumbnail. He gave an acidic grin.
“Tell me you didn’t kill the town’s only doctor!” Ludlow said with not entirely genuine exasperation and mainly for the benefit of the onlookers. Dahl had had valuable information that had needed to be extracted at all costs, even if it meant severe damage to the sawbones’ person.
Stillwell grinned as he puffed the cigar, causing the flame to expand and contract in front of his face. “Nah, I didn’t kill him. In fact, last time I saw him, he was getting good and drunk in the Purple Garter. Really crying in his whiskey. The whores were cooing to him like he’d just lost his best friend.” The sheriff flicked the match into the street. “Stupid sot.”
Stillwell turned to his horse. He removed the reins from the hitchrack and reached up with his right hand to grab his saddle horn. As he lifted his left boot toward his stirrup, his right hand slipped off the apple. He reached out automatically with his bandaged left hand to break his forward fall, and whacked it against a stirrup fender.
“Oh!” Stillwell turned to face the street, leaning back against his horse and cradling the injured appendage taut against his belly. Th
e hand quivered. Stillwell closed his eyes, moving his lips but not saying anything, his face turning as pale as an onionskin.
“You okay, Sheriff?” Ludlow said, casting Bonner a quick, furtive half smile. “Maybe you better stay here in town. Rest up. Me an’ my boys from the Broken Heart and your two eager deputies will put an end to the, uh, trouble”—he glanced again at his foreman—“and bring my daughter home safely.”
Stillwell opened his eyes. They were cold and hard. A little color started to return to his face. “Your concern warms my heart, Ludlow. Your daughter ain’t home yet, eh? I’d have thought she’d have come to her senses by now. I wonder what it is about that big Grayback she likes so much . . .”
He glanced over his horse at Zorn and Steinbach, who’d swung up into their saddles. They returned his grin, cutting their mocking gazes at the rancher. Ludlow’s fleshy, deeply seamed face flushed, and his broad nose turned bright red in anger. “Let’s go, Stillwell. We’re burning daylight!”
Stillwell cast another conspiratorial grin at his deputies, then managed to successfully, albeit gingerly and awkwardly, climb onto his claybank’s back. As Ludlow and the other Broken Heart men waited for him to take the lead, he swung his horse into the street and did just that, Zorn and Steinbach moving up to either side.
Ludlow glanced at Bonner, said, “All right . . . let’s finish this damn thing!”
He booted his horse on down the street after the cocky sheriff and his two cocky deputies. As they neared the south end of town, heading for the western trail, Ludlow saw a badly disheveled man step out from a break between two buildings. It was Dr. Dahl. The man’s thin hair was splayed across his bulbous forehead and down over his ears. He looked sweaty and greasy, as though he hadn’t slept at all but only drank himself pie-eyed.
His spectacles sat crooked on his nose. He stumbled over some trash between the buildings and nearly fell onto the boardwalk before him.
“Stillwell!” he called in a taut, raspy voice. “Ludlow!” He sidled up to a post holding up the awning over the boardwalk. He slid off the post and wrapped an arm around it to keep from falling. “Don’t do this! End it now! No more . . . no more killing!”
“Go back to bed, Doctor!” Ludlow called as he rode past the drunken sawbones.
“Please!” Dahl pleaded.
“Don’t you worry, Doc!” Stillwell called, hipping around in his saddle to keep his gaze on Dahl as he continued on out of town. “After today, all the killin’ will be done for a while, and you can stop pissin’ down your leg!”
Zorn and Steinbach threw their heads back, laughing.
* * *
Nearly two hours later, Stillwell reined his mount to a halt between two haystack buttes. The others, including Ludlow, checked their horses down behind him, blinking against the dust catching up to them.
Stillwell looked around as though trying to get his bearings.
“Well?” the rancher said, impatient and generally annoyed with Stillwell. “Do you know where you are, Sheriff, or have you gotten yourself... and us . . . lost?”
Stillwell had proven himself a coward and a fool so many times that Ludlow wasn’t even sure why he’d invited the man along on what the rancher hoped would be his final assault on Hunter Buchanon and the old man’s father—if old Angus was even still alive. No, Ludlow did know why he’d invited him.
Dahl was the only man in town who knew where the Buchanons and Annabelle were holed up. Ludlow knew that Stillwell could get that information out of the doctor, if anyone could. Ludlow himself hadn’t wanted to perform the grisly task and risk having folks in the town and the surrounding hills holding it against him if he had to get rough.
Stillwell, however, had played out his hand here in Tigerville. He no longer cared what anyone thought of him. Now he just wanted to finish what he’d started, exact some revenge for the humiliation he’d suffered, leave the hills to find some distant corner of the west that maybe hadn’t heard of what had happened here, and get to work restoring his pride and honor to some semblance of its former self.
At least, that’s all Ludlow thought the man wanted. It was hard to tell with Stillwell. The law-for-hire was as hard to read as the face of a flat boulder. He was that way now as he looked around, his back to Ludlow, ignoring the man’s question. His shoulders were set stubbornly beneath the broadcloth of his black coat.
Finally, Stillwell glanced at Zorn and Steinbach both sitting their horses to his right and said, “Stay here.”
He gave a quiet grunt in protest of the pain in his hip and hand as he swung down from the clay’s back. He dipped a hand into his saddlebags, pulled out his field glasses, then started to climb the left-most haystack butte before them.
“I asked you a question, Sheriff,” Ludlow said from his saddle.
Unless he’d suddenly gone deaf, again Stillwell ignored the question as he ambled slowly up the side of the butte.
Ludlow glanced at Bonner, who gave him a crooked smile.
“Stay with the men,” the rancher said with a disgusted chuff.
He stepped down from his stallion’s back, tossed the reins up to Bonner, then pulled his own field glasses out of his saddlebags. He followed Stillwell up the side of the butte. After only a few climbing steps, his lungs seemed to shrink, and he had to work hard, sucking air in and out of them, wincing against the raking pain. He felt as though a rat were in his chest, gnawing on his sternum.
By the time he got near the top, where Stillwell was dropping to his knees, grunting and sighing with his discomfort, Ludlow was breathing like a bellows and sweating through his clothes. The hot sun burned against the back of his neck.
Stillwell snugged himself belly flat against the butte, lifted his field glasses, and stared across the top of it toward the southwest. Ludlow spat, doffed his hat, and lifted his own glasses, directing them toward where the sullen sheriff was directing his own. The rancher adjusted the focus, sweeping the hills and forest with the single, round magnified field of vision, expecting to spy a cabin out there somewhere—something two men and a young woman might be holed up in.
All he saw was blond grass and the irregular angle of hills and mountains and blue-black forest shimmering in the mid-day sunshine.
“See it?” Stillwell grunted to Ludlow’s right.
Ludlow glanced at the man and then peered through his glasses again. “See what?”
“Cave.”
CHAPTER 38
Ludlow adjusted the focus, swept a deep fold nearly cloaked in shadows about a mile beyond, at the base of a steep rock wall and at the crest of a pine-choked ridge sloping up like a table lying on its side. As Ludlow stared, squinting through the lenses, stretching his lips back from his teeth in concentration, he saw the dark, egg-shaped feature at the base of the rock ridge.
“That’s a cave?”
Stillwell pulled his own glasses down and stared straight ahead through his naked eyes. “Remember them three half-breed woodcutters from Deadwood I chased . . . for you . . . last summer?” The sheriff didn’t wait for an answer; his tone made Ludlow bristle. “That’s where me and Buck Fowler found ’em—happy as clams dinin’ on one of your freshly butchered steers!”
He chuckled sneeringly.
“That’s where you think . . . ?”
Stillwell quickly raised his glasses, gazed in the direction of the cave. “I know it is. Look there.”
Ludlow raised his binoculars again. A human figure had just stepped out of the cave before which now Ludlow could see gray smoke curling from small, flickering orange flames nearly concealed by the cave’s overhang. A slender figure capped in thick red hair walked out behind the larger, taller figure. As Ludlow tightened the focus, straining his eyes, he watched as Hunter Buchanon turned back around to face the cave and accept Ludlow’s daughter into his arms.
Ludlow’s heartbeat picked up.
It kept picking up as the two appeared to draw their heads together, likely kissing.
Stillwell lowered hi
s binoculars and turned to Ludlow, shaping a mock heartfelt expression. “Ain’t that sweet?” He pretended to brush a tear from his cheek with his bandaged hand.
Ludlow told him to do something physically impossible to himself and continued staring through the binoculars. Buchanon and Annabelle separated. Buchanon turned around and, picking up what appeared to be a saddle and a rifle, made his way down the steep shelf of rock fronting the cave and threw his saddle over one of the two horses standing at the edge of the dark pine forest.
“He’s leaving,” the rancher said through gritted teeth, turning to Stillwell. “That’ll leave just my daughter and the old man—if Angus is still breathing—in the cave!”
Stillwell continued to stare through his binoculars. “It does, it does . . .”
“Now, you see how easy a thing like this can be when you actually think it through and don’t go off half-cocked!”
Stillwell grimaced, turned to the rancher with fire in his eyes.
Ludlow grinned. Finally, he’d gotten the upper hand.
“Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll—”
Bonner’s voice cut him off. “Boss?”
Angrily, Ludlow turned to yell, “What is it? The sheriff and I are—”
Bonner and the other men were all looking along their back trail, toward something Ludlow couldn’t see from his vantage. “Rider.”
“What?”
“Rider comin’!”
“Well, who is it?”
Silence. All the men including Stillwell’s two deputies continued to stare off in the direction from which they’d come.
Ludlow cursed and yelled, “Bonner?”
The foreman turned to Ludlow. “You’d better step down here, boss. See this.”
Ludlow heaved himself to his feet, grunting and sweating with the effort. Stillwell did the same, sounding even older than the rancher, though the sheriff was his junior by a good twenty years.
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