Rope Burn

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  He leveled an accusing finger at Ace.

  “Me?” Ace said, his eyes widening. “I didn’t do anything—”

  The marshal said, “All of you, shut up. I’ll get to the bottom of this.” Without taking his eyes off Ace, Chance, and the other men, he said to the girl, “Honey, what happened here?”

  “It . . . it wasn’t my fault, Marshal—”

  “I didn’t say it was. Just tell me what happened.”

  Honey took a deep breath, which lifted the creamy half-moons of her breasts that showed above the low neckline of her short, spangled dress. “It was just a normal evening,” she began. “Sergeant MacDonald and those other troopers from the fort came in, and those two fellas I don’t know”—nodding toward Ace and Chance—“and some other men from here in town. Vince—Sergeant MacDonald—and the others seemed to be in kind of a hurry at first, but then they started drinking and they weren’t in as much of a rush after that. Vince wanted me to sit with them . . . he’s kind of sweet on me, I think . . . and I didn’t mind, but then he pulled me onto his lap and he was getting kind of rough, and . . . and I kind of let out a yelp—”

  “He was mauling her,” Chance interrupted before Ace could stop him. “And I can’t stand to see a woman being mistreated like that.”

  “It was none of your business,” a trooper snapped at him.

  “I made it my business,” Chance responded defiantly.

  “Anyway,” Honey went on, “that stranger told Vince to leave me alone, and Vince didn’t take it kindly . . . Vince never took many things kindly, you know . . . and that was how the trouble started. Pretty soon they were all fighting, all the soldiers against those two young strangers. I . . . I really don’t know what happened after that. It was all a blur.”

  “You didn’t see Putnam get killed?”

  Honey shook her head emphatically as she bit at her bottom lip. “I saw that soldier fall on him, but that’s all. I didn’t have any idea he . . . he . . .”

  She covered her face with her hands again. Ace wasn’t sure she was really quite as grief-stricken as she was acting, but she did seem to be genuinely shaken up.

  The soldier who had blamed Ace for the saloonkeeper’s death spoke up again. “I can tell you what happened, Marshal. It’s this man’s fault, right here.” Again he pointed an accusing finger at Ace.

  “How’s that possible, when it’s Private Haygood layin’ on top of Putnam?” the marshal wanted to know. “He’s got to be the one who knocked him down and broke his neck.”

  “Yeah, but it was this young peckerwood who pushed Haygood and made him fall on Putnam. Poor ol’ Haygood just climbed up on the bar to try to get away from these two loco coyotes.”

  “What!” Chance couldn’t hold in the startled exclamation. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  “He wasn’t trying to get away,” Ace said. “He climbed up there so he could try to kick me in the head. And I didn’t push him. He slipped in a puddle of beer. What happened to Mr. Putnam was a tragic accident, Marshal.”

  The three soldiers started clamoring otherwise, taking up the first one’s claim that Ace was responsible for the saloonkeeper’s death. The others were starting to come around now, including Sergeant MacDonald, and as they staggered to their feet, they added their voices to the commotion even though they probably didn’t know what they were agreeing to. But they stuck together and made Ace and Chance out to be the villains of the whole affair.

  “All of you, shut your yaps!” the marshal roared after a moment. Nobody was going to argue with a man holding a shotgun, so silence fell on the barroom. The lawman went on, “I’m gonna have to talk to the other men who were in here when the trouble started. Honey, you’re gonna give me their names, as best you can remember. But until then, I’m lockin’ up the whole lot of you!”

  “You can’t do that!” MacDonald said. “We’re cavalry troopers. You got no authority over us!”

  “You’re wrong about that, Sergeant. My jurisdiction covers everybody in this settlement, army and civilian alike.”

  MacDonald’s mouth twisted in a snarl that pulled the scar on his face even tighter. “There’s eight of us and one of you, old man.”

  “Yeah, and at this range, more than likely I can only kill two or three of you with this Greener. But that’ll give me time to get my Colt out and kill two or three more of you. You want to bet that you’ll be one of the few left alive?”

  Clearly, this veteran lawman still had plenty of bark on him, and none of the soldiers wanted to make that wager. The marshal took the shotgun in his left hand and drew the revolver on his hip with his right.

  “Everybody put your hardware on the bar,” he ordered. “Just look like you’re thinkin’ about doing anything foolish, and you’ll get a slug for your trouble.”

  Ace and Chance exchanged a glance. Ace said, “Once he talks to the other witnesses, they’ll clear us of any wrongdoing.”

  “You’ve got more faith in your fellow man than I do, Ace,” Chance said sourly, “but I suppose we don’t have much choice.”

  Other than a gun battle with a lawman—something neither of them wanted—that was true. Ace unbuckled the gunbelt around his hips and put it and the holstered Colt on the bar. Chance followed suit, removing the crossdraw rig he wore and the ivory-handled. 38 caliber Smith & Wesson Second Model revolver in its holster.

  As a noncommissioned officer, Sergeant MacDonald was the only one of the troopers to have a handgun. With a surly glare on his face, he placed it on the bar. The soldiers gathered up their forage caps while Ace picked up his brown Stetson and Chance found his cream-colored hat on the floor. Chance made a face as he brushed sawdust from it.

  “Move,” the marshal ordered. The ten prisoners filed out of the saloon with the lawman following.

  “What about poor Mr. Putnam?” Honey called from behind them.

  “I’ll send the undertaker to collect him,” the marshal replied. He chuckled dryly. “You boys ought to know what’s comin’ next. March!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ace and Chance Jensen were twins, although most folks wouldn’t think so to look at them because they were fraternal twins, not identical. Ace, born a few minutes earlier, had dark hair and broader shoulders and preferred to dress in simple range clothes. Chance, slender and sandy-haired, had a fancier taste in his garb, running toward tan suits, stylish cravats, and stickpins.

  Their taste in other things differed as well. Chance had more of an eye for a pretty girl, liked to spend most of his time playing cards in saloons, and could be reckless and impulsive. Ace sometimes worried that he was too level-headed and boring, but he supposed that he and Chance balanced each other out fairly well.

  Well enough, at any rate, that they had survived several years of drifting around the frontier, working when they had to, and displaying an alarming tendency, as Ace had noted, of winding up in some sort of trouble.

  The cell door clanged as Marshal Hank Glennon slammed it shut behind them. Ace knew the lawman’s name because he had spotted it on some correspondence on Glennon’s desk as he goaded the prisoners through the marshal’s office into the cell block.

  At least Glennon hadn’t locked them in the same cell as those troopers. There were four cells back here, two on either side of a short center aisle. The soldiers were in the cells across the way, four prisoners in each enclosure. Several of them, including Sergeant Vince MacDonald, gripped the bars and glared murderously at the Jensen brothers.

  “You’ll pay for what you done,” MacDonald said. “You’ve ruined everything!”

  “We were just looking for a peaceful drink, maybe a card game,” Chance said. “Don’t blame us for you being a hotheaded brute.”

  MacDonald snarled and looked like he wanted to rip the bars of the cell door apart.

  “Don’t waste your breath arguing with him,” Ace told his brother. “You’re not going to change anybody’s mind. Let’s just hope the marshal rounds up enough witne
sses to clear us of any wrongdoing and lets us out of here.”

  “He’s got to, because we didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The cell had two bunks in it. Chance went over and sat down on one of them. He looked down at his suit and sighed. The breast pocket was ripped, and brown stains blotched the fabric here and there.

  “I think a spittoon must have gotten knocked over during the fight,” he said as he made a face.

  “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  Ace sat down on the other bunk. He and his brother had drifted west from Texas, and they’d made it all the way through New Mexico Territory without encountering any problems. That had been encouraging enough to make Ace hope that maybe their luck had changed. They were fiddlefooted sorts, never content to stay in any one place for too long, but it would be nice if they could indulge their wandering ways without having to fight all the time.

  Now, on their first night in Arizona Territory, they had wound up behind bars. So much for a change of luck.

  Marshal Glennon had left the heavy door between the office and the cell block open, but now he closed it, plunging the cell block into darkness except for what light came through a small, barred window in the door. A moment later, Ace heard the office’s outer door close.

  “He’s going out to round up those witnesses now,” Ace said. “We’ll probably be stuck in here until tomorrow morning. The marshal will charge us with disturbing the peace, and the local judge will levy a fine against us and make us pay for some of the damages to the saloon.”

  “You predicting the future now, Ace?” Chance asked dryly.

  “Well, it’s not like we’ve never been through this sort of thing before.” Ace stretched out on the bunk and put his hands behind his head, lacing the fingers together. “We might as well try to get some rest. And look on the bright side . . . we didn’t have to pay for a hotel room.”

  On the other side of the aisle, the soldiers had gathered together on both sides of the bars that separated the two cells. They talked in low, urgent voices. Ace couldn’t make out any of the words, but they sounded upset. More upset than spending a night in jail for disturbing the peace ought to make them, Ace thought with a frown. Maybe they were worried that Private Haygood would be charged with causing the death of Putnam, the saloonkeeper. Ace wasn’t sure that would be fair. As he had told Marshal Glennon, Putnam’s death had been a tragic accident. He was confident the witnesses would bear that out.

  But were there any witnesses to that part of the fight? Or had they all fled from the saloon by that time, except for Honey? Ace wasn’t sure about that. Maybe, as far as Glennon was concerned, the facts of the case weren’t as cut-and-dried as they appeared to Ace. And that was a mite worrisome . . .

  “You just keep looking on the bright side, Ace,” Chance said into the gloom from the other bunk. “But me . . . I’ve got a bad feeling we may have wound up on the road to hell.”

  * * *

  Eventually, the troopers in the other cells fell silent—until they started snoring. At times the racket seemed loud enough to rattle the iron bars in the windows. Ace and Chance dozed off, resigned to the fact that the marshal wasn’t going to release them tonight, and slept some, but not well.

  In the morning, as the gray light of a new day brightened the windows, MacDonald and the other soldiers were even more sullen, because now they were hung over as well as locked up. One of the men directed a low, monotous drone of obscenity at Ace and Chance. They ignored him as best they could.

  The cell block door opened, and an old man in overalls and a battered straw hat limped in. He had a coffeepot in one hand, using a thick piece of leather to hold its handle, and a wicker basket with tin cups in it in the other hand. He held out the basket and the men reached through the bars and helped themselves to the cups. Then the old-timer began filling them from the coffeepot.

  “Ain’t we gonna get anything to eat, Turley?” a trooper asked.

  The old-timer snorted and said in a wheezy voice, “It ain’t the jailer’s job to feed you varmints. That’s up to the marshal, if’n he wants to, and I don’t reckon he figures you boys are worth the trouble. You’re lucky I was feelin’ generous and brewed up this pot o’ coffee.”

  MacDonald took a sip, grimaced, and said, “You used yesterday’s grounds!”

  Old Turley sneered through the bars. “Like I said, consider yourself lucky you’re gettin’ anything at all.”

  He turned to the cell on the other side of the aisle to let Ace and Chance claim the remaining two cups in the basket.

  “We’re much obliged to you, mister,” Ace said as Turley poured the brown liquid in his cup. When he tasted it, it wasn’t very good, but better than nothing, he supposed.

  “You know when the marshal’s going to let us out of here?” Chance asked.

  “He don’t tell me nothin’ about that.” Turley cackled a laugh. “I wouldn’t go gettin’ your hopes up, though!”

  Ace said, “What do you mean by that? We’re prepared to pay a fine for disturbing the peace and our share of the damages to the saloon, but—”

  “Don’t bother me with all that,” Turley said. “None o’ my business. Now drink up, the lot o’ ya, so’s I can have them cups back.”

  The soldiers slurped the rest of their coffee and dropped the empty cups back in the basket. Ace and Chance finished theirs as well, and as Ace put his cup in the basket, he said, “You didn’t seem worried about any of the prisoners trying to throw hot coffee in your face and escape.”

  “Why in tarnation would I worry about that? Scaldin’ me wouldn’t do nobody a durned bit o’ good. I ain’t got the keys to these cells. They’re out in the office. And folks around here know that if you mess with me while you’re locked up, I’ll fetch my varmint gun and dust your britches with rock salt. I’ve blasted many a unruly critter right through them bars.”

  “Well, we’re not going to give you any trouble,” Ace said.

  “That’s right,” Chance said. “We just want to put this mess behind us, along with this sorry settlement!”

  Turley slapped his overalled thigh and whooped with laughter. “You just go on a-thinkin’ that, son, you just go on a-thinkin’ that!”

  The old jailer was still laughing as he left the cell block, and Ace didn’t like the sound of it at all. He and Chance exchanged a worried glance.

  Ace didn’t think it would do any good, but he went to the cell door, looked across at the other prisoners, and asked, “Do you know what the old man was talking about? He seems to think we might be in some real trouble.”

  Sergeant MacDonald sneered at him. “Yeah, that’s generally what happens when you kill a man.”

  “But we didn’t kill him. Mr. Putnam’s death was an accident. If anyone’s to blame, it’s—”

  Ace stopped short. MacDonald and the others wouldn’t want to hear anything about it being Private Haygood’s fault that the saloonkeeper died. They would all swear it hadn’t happened that way, and there were eight of them against the word of the two Jensen brothers.

  His and Chance’s fate might well be riding on the testimony of that saloon girl, Honey, Ace realized, and it was a sobering thought. He had no idea what the girl might do. She might be grateful because Chance had tried to help her, but she might be angry that the whole thing was going to cause her trouble, or too afraid of MacDonald and the others to tell the truth.

  Half an hour dragged by, and then a key rattled again in the lock of the cell block door. It swung back and Marshal Glennon came in, shotgun tucked under his arm. Three men followed him, and each of them carried a Greener, too. Two went to the far end of the aisle and took up positions there, while the other man posted himself next to Glennon, who said over his shoulder, “All right, Turley, let them out.”

  Turley came in, grumbling. “That’s right, send the old man to unlock the cells so if them varmints try to escape, he’ll get mowed down right along with ’em. You boys better behave yourselves, ’cause if I get k
illed on account o’ you, I’ll be waitin’ right there at the Devil’s right hand to torment you for all eternity when you get down yonder to the fiery pit!”

  “Shut up, you old pelican,” Glennon snapped. “Nobody’s going to try anything with four shotguns pointed at them, not even this bunch. And not those two saddle tramps, either.”

  Turley unlocked the cells and scurried out with his crablike gait. Glennon motioned with his shotgun and ordered, “Come on. You fellas have all got a date with the judge.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Packsaddle wasn’t the county seat, so there was no courthouse. A town hall was located down the street from the marshal’s office and jail, though, so that was where Glennon and his deputies herded the prisoners. Glennon led the way, with a man on either side of the group and one bringing up the rear. Surrounded by shotguns that way, the prisoners had no opportunity to try anything.

  Quite a few townspeople watched from the boardwalks as the procession went by. Saloon brawls were nothing unusual, but a man had died in this one, a prominent local businessman, at that. Ace saw expressions of avid interest on the faces of those they passed.

  No sympathy, though, except from one elderly, white-haired woman with a wrinkled face under a sunbonnet, who looked at the prisoners as if they were her wayward grandchildren.

  The town hall was set up as a courtroom, with a table in the front of the big room for the judge and ladderback chairs arranged in rows facing it. Marshal Glennon motioned for the prisoners to arrange themselves along the front row of chairs and told them, “Stay on your feet. Judge Bannister will be here in a minute, so there ain’t no point in you sittin’ down.”

  Some of the townspeople filed into the hall behind them and filled the rest of the seats as spectators.

  True to the marshal’s prediction, a door in the back of the room opened a couple of minutes later and a portly figure with a round face and smooth brown hair came out. The man wore a black robe and carried a gavel and a Bible.