Dakota Kill and the Romantics

by Peter Brandvold

  “Gordon’s not in his cabin,” he said to the door. “Let me know if you want help tracking him down.”

  He turned around and headed for the barn and his horse, feeling a stone grow in the pit of his stomach. Something told him that the next couple of days were going to put an end, once and for all, to any and all hopes he still entertained of finding peace.

  CHAPTER 14

  THAT AFTERNOON, JED Gibbon was nursing a beer in the Sundowner and reading The Saturday Evening Post when something caught his eye out the big window to the right of the front door. A cowboy had ridden up on a deep-chested claybank, and was looping his reins over the tie rail.

  His expression was grim, and his horse was blowing like he’d been ridden hard. The man had bad news written all over him.

  Darkly, Gibbon watched the man mount the porch and push through the door. When he’d closed the door behind him, stomping snow from his boots, he stood looking around. Gibbon knew the man was waiting for his eyes to adjust.

  “Howdy, Luke,” Fisk said from behind the bar, recognizing the cowboy.

  “Monty.”

  “What can I do ya for?”

  “The sheriff here?”

  Gibbon cleared his throat. Reluctantly he said, “Over here, Luke.”

  The man shuttled his eyes to his right, where Gibbon sat under a big elk head, in shadows cast by the stove and center post.

  “How’s things over to the Nixon place?” Gibbon said as the man’s eyes found him, trying a smile.

  Luke Waverly was tall and lean to the point of emaciation, with a thin, droopy mustache and deep-sunk eyes. His face looked like rawhide that had been soaked and dried too quickly over a hot fire. His eyes hung low in their sockets, like a chastised dog’s.

  “Mr. Nixon’s been shot.”

  Gibbon took a deep breath and ran a hand down his face. “Don’t tell me that, Luke. I don’t want to hear that.”

  “He didn’t come home last night,” the cowboy continued. “I went out lookin’ for him this mornin’ and found him behind a rock with half his head gone. Found this in his coat.”

  The cowboy stepped forward and laid a scrap of paper on the table before the sheriff. Gibbon lowered his eyes. On the paper was a big number one drawn boldly in pencil.

  Gibbon felt his bowels loosen, and he was afraid for a moment he would soil himself. It was starting again. If he’d entertained any doubts before, he didn’t now.

  He cursed and lifted a hand to his forehead, took the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger, and squeezed, trying to steady himself, trying to imagine what he should do, what he had the balls to do.

  “Bushwhacked?” he said at length, through a grimace.

  “Executed, more like. Just like Jack Thom. More of the Double X’s handiwork.” The cowboy’s voice quaked with emotion.

  “Where is he?”

  “At the cabin.”

  Gibbon fought off the very real urge to run. He stood, tipped back his beer, draining it, and wiped the foam from his mouth with the back of his hand. Turning to pluck his coat off the rack to his right, he said ominously, “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  An hour later Gibbon and the cowboy made the Nixon ranch, a motley collection of log and milled-lumber buildings and corrals scattered in a deep, wooded draw. High, rocky buttes poked up behind the trees. A yellow-brown mongrel ran out from the barn and scolded Gibbon’s horse.

  “Shut up and lay down, Buster!” the cowboy yelled.

  The dog put its head and tail down and slunk off to the middle of the yard, where it sat growling, ears flat against its head. Dismounting at the barn, Gibbon heard a woman’s muffled cries. He turned an ear to the cabin.

  “No,” she screamed in German over and over, the screams spaced about two seconds apart. “Nein!… Nein!… Nein!”

  It was a haunting refrain, pricking Gibbon’s spine. It even spooked his horse, which craned its neck to get a fix on it.

  The cowboy took Gibbon’s reins. “I took the kids over to the neighbors and gave the wife some whiskey to calm her down, but it don’t seem to be workin’.”

  “Mrs. Nixon?”

  Waverly nodded. “I haven’t heard her speak anything but English for years.” The man led the horses toward the corral. “I laid the boss out in the barn. You can go on in.”

  Gibbon didn’t really want to go into the barn alone—the dead always made him feel nightmarish and lonely—but he slid a heavy door open anyway and stepped inside.

  The air was heavy with the smell of hay and ammonia. A milk cow gave an inquisitive moo. Heavy stock—probably draft horses—knocked against their stalls. There were several windows along each wall, but the gray winter light was too weak to penetrate the afternoon shadows.

  Finding a hurricane lamp on a post, Gibbon lifted its globe and lit the wick. The light lifted shadows from an open-ended work wagon in which an inert body in tattered range clothes lay on its back, arms at its sides.

  Gibbon held the lamp high and moved toward the wagon’s spring seat. The light revealed the man’s head—or what was left of it. Most of the forehead had been blown away. One eye bulged hideously. The other was missing. Gibbon swallowed to keep his lunch and beer down.

  “Jesus Christ,” he murmured, needing a shot of something strong.

  “Big-caliber bul—”

  Gibbon jumped at the voice and turned to see the cowboy standing beside him. He hadn’t seen or heard the man enter the barn.

  “Sorry,” Waverly said. “I was gonna say it looks like a big-caliber bullet blew the top of his head clean off.”

  “I got eyes,” Gibbon said, testy, remembering the big gun Del Toro had carried away from the train. “Fifty caliber. I’ve seen their work before, and not just on buffalo. I see he took another one to the side.”

  The cowboy shook his head, eyes wide with foreboding. “What am I gonna do now? What’s the woman gonna do? She has five young’uns.”

  Trying to stay focused, Gibbon said, “Could you tell by the tracks in the snow how many men were after him?”

  “One as far as I could tell.”

  “Was Nixon armed?”

  “Yep.”

  “He return fire?”

  “Yep.”

  “You got anything else to say except yep, Luke?”

  “Yep.” The cowboy’s eyes slid to Gibbon’s. “Double X got him, Sheriff. Sure as shit up a cow’s ass. And him’s only the first,” the cowboy said.

  “The first killed by Del Toro anyways,” Gibbon said, remembering Jack Thom.

  “Who’s Del Toro?”

  “Let me put it this way, Luke. A blue-eyed bean eater decked out in wolf fur comes callin’, you shoot the son of a bitch out of his saddle. Blow him from here to old Mexico. No questions asked.”

  The cowboy rubbed his jaw and eyed Gibbon warily. “Where you goin’?” he said with an insinuating drawl. “Back to the saloon?”

  Gibbon stopped at the door and turned around. His face and ears flushed, as though he’d been slapped hard. A moment ago, he hadn’t really known where he was going; his mind was a mess of half-conceived ideas and very real fears that probably would have led, in the end, to a drink. But the cowboy’s barb pricked him, set a fire in his brain. He was tired of the jokes made at his expense. What’s more, he was tired of deserving them.

  He took a deep breath fighting panic and was nearly overcome by the unfamiliar sound of his own courage. “To talk with King Magnusson over to the Double X. Please relay my condolences to Mrs. Nixon, and assure her that I’ll bring her husband’s killer to justice.”

  Waverly tipped his hat back. “The Double X! By your lonesome?”

  “Posses take too long to gather. Besides, a bunch of trigger-happy cowboys would just touch off a powder keg. No, I’m gonna give old King Magnusson a nice, civilized ultimatum.”

  When Gibbon had mounted his horse and was riding away, the cowboy stood between the open barn doors watching him and scratching his head.


  “That son of a bitch is gonna get his ass shot off.”

  * * *

  As he made his way south along a thin wagon trace, Gibbon was thinking the same thing. While he’d been standing in the barn with Waverly, inspecting Nixon’s body, he’d felt something very close to courage seep into his veins. It was like a heady shot of liquor after you’d gone without for several days. It was a courage born of anger and shame. Magnusson was acting like he owned the whole damn country, and he paid as little heed to Gibbon as he would to a stable boy.

  Alhough he was still feeling plucky after ten miles of hard riding, his heart was starting to race by the time he made the ridge over St. Mary’s Creek, the Double X’s primary water source. He pointed the horse east along the game trail that twisted through the ponderosas above the draw, and felt his mouth dry up and his knees grow heavy with apprehension.

  “I’m liable to get shot out of my saddle and left to the wildcats,” he told himself. “This is a big country, and even if anyone came lookin’, they’d never find me.”

  But he was only about two miles from the Double X compound, and he could not turn back now. Not if he wanted to hold on to what little pride he had left.

  He stopped his horse behind a snowdrift at the lip of the ridge, rummaged in his saddlebags, and produced a whiskey bottle. Uncorking it, he lifted it high and felt a little of his nerve return almost instantly.

  He recorked the bottle and was about to return it to the saddlebags when he reconsidered. “Hell, I’m gonna need all the metal I can muster,” he mumbled, biting the cork from the bottle, spitting it out, and spurring the horse forward.

  He was good and soused by the time he made the two-track wagon trail climbing the tawny-snowy bench toward the Double X headquarters. It was the kind of drunk he used to feel back before the Old Trouble—a cocky, courageous drunk. A powerful, light-headed drunk that made him feel potent and vigorous and heroic.

  When the Magnusson mansion rose up on a knoll a half mile ahead, two riders appeared on either side of him. They each had a carbine resting on their hips, and they rode up fast—scruffy, duster-clad cowboys in Stetsons.

  Gibbon tossed his nearly empty bottle into a clump of sage.

  “State your name and business,” the cowboy on his right demanded.

  Gibbon told him who he was.

  “Mr. Magnusson expectin’ you, Sheriff?”

  “Should be if he ain’t,” Gibbon said, trying to steady himself. His tongue felt half a size larger than it was.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what I said. Now kindly get your hammerheads out of my way and let me through.”

  The men looked at each other knowingly, then reined their horses off the trail. They followed Gibbon through the open Texas gate, under the horizontal rail in which the Double X brand had been burned, and into the compound. They kept their distance, but they watched Gibbon with curious, wary eyes.

  When Gibbon was nearing the mansion, taking in the breadth of the place while trying to keep his nerve up, one of the men spurred ahead and dismounted near a cluster of cowboys that had gathered outside a corral. The corral sat to the right of the mansion, up a slight rise and near several wagon sheds and a blacksmith shop.

  Gibbon halted his horse before the mansion and waited, watching the group. A pretty girl and a horse seemed to be the center of attention. In a buffalo coat and round-brimmed, green-felt hat, King Magnusson stood near the girl, smiling down at her.

  “Oh, Papa, he’s beautiful! Where did you ever find such a horse?”

  “Had him shipped all the way up from Tennessee,” Magnusson said. Turning to the men crowding around, he added, “The conductor told me he nearly took his own private car apart board by board!”

  A whoop broke out from several men, and Gibbon figured it was instigated more by the girl than by Magnusson’s blabber or even by the horse. In a big wool poncho and riding hat, raven hair cascading down her back, she stroked the horse’s fine, arched neck. Gibbon could tell by the looks on the cowboys’ faces they were imagining her stroking something else.

  “He’s just a beauty, Papa, just a beauty,” the girl went on.

  Magnusson was about to say something else when Gibbon’s cowboy interrupted him. The man spoke to his boss, who frowned and lifted his head to look over the crowd at the sheriff. Gibbon tipped his hat and grinned.

  Magnusson’s big, ruddy face flushed. He turned sharply to the cowboy and moved his lips. The cowboy nodded and pushed through the crowd.

  Approaching Gibbon, he said, “Sorry, Sheriff. The boss is busy today. It’s Miss Suzanne’s birthday.”

  Gibbon lifted his eyes from the cowboy to Magnusson, laughing with his daughter and running his hand over the thoroughbred’s muscled shoulder. Gibbon touched his spurs to his mount’s flanks, moving toward the crowd.

  “Hey, where do you think you’re goin’?” the cowboy yelled.

  Gibbon ignored him and rode to the edge of the crowd. “Mr. Magnusson, I’ll thank you for a minute of your time.”

  The rancher turned sharply, frowning. “I’m busy here, Gibbon. You’re gonna have to come back some other time.”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “What’s that?”

  Gibbon’s anger burned at the man’s snide demeanor. He held on to the saddlehorn and yelled, “I said get your ass over here so we can talk in private!… Unless you want your lovely daughter to hear about the cold-blooded killin’s her father’s been committin’ on open range.”

  The girl turned to her father and wrinkled her nose, curious. She said something Gibbon couldn’t hear. Her father stared at the sheriff, his face turning red, then white, then red again.

  The girl said something else. Magnusson ignored her. He was staring at Gibbon with a demon’s eyes. The cowboys had turned to him, too, cutting looks between him and their boss, who did not appreciate getting read out before his hands, much less his daughter.

  “What do you say, King?” Gibbon asked, swaying a little in his saddle. It felt so good to air his spleen that he was finding it hard to shut up. He saw the holsters hanging beneath the cowboys’ coats, but he was unconcerned. He felt large—too large to kill—and teeming with saintly virtue.

  King turned to his daughter and moved his lips. She frowned and dropped her head, then handed the thoroughbred’s reins to one of the wranglers. The crowd parted as she moved toward the mansion.

  When she was safely inside, the men stepped back to form a corridor, and King Magnusson sauntered over to Gibbon. A man the sheriff recognized as Rag Donnelly followed him. Another man fell into step behind Donnelly.

  A stout man with a head like a broad chunk of oak and a red mustache that curved around to meet his sideburns, he looked like either a politician or an eastern financier. He puffed a stogie in the side of his mouth and stuffed his fists in the pockets of his calf-length beaver coat.

  Magnusson approached Gibbon. His face was set firm and frozen, like a gambler waiting to see his opponent’s busted flush. “All right, Gibbon, what’s on your mind?”

  “Two men have been killed on the Canaan Bench—that’s what’s on my mind, you son of a bitch.”

  Magnusson said nothing. He just stared at Gibbon. Humor crept into his eyes. Gibbon met the gaze head-on. He’d made it this far, and with each passing second he felt more and more fearless. More and more invincible.

  Magnusson cut his eyes to Rag Donnelly standing grimly beside him, then back to Gibbon. “What makes you think that has anything to do with me?”

  “Precedence,” Gibbon growled.

  “Precedence without evidence won’t get you very far in a court of law, Sheriff.”

  Gibbon leaned out from his saddle. “Call him off, King.”

  “Call who off?” Magnusson said, as though indulging the village idiot.

  It took a couple seconds for Gibbon to get his tongue around the words. “José del Toro. Your Mex gun for hire.”

  “José del who? I’m af
raid I didn’t catch the name.”

  “You know the name.”

  Magnusson turned to Donnelly. “Rag, do we have a greaser gunman named José—” He turned to Gibbon with an expression of mock perplexity. “What was this fella’s name again?”

  The well-dressed gent puffing the stogie gave a loud guffaw and clapped his kid-gloved hands.

  “Very goddamn funny, Magnusson, but if you don’t call him off the small ranchers on the Bench, the only one’s gonna be laughin’ is the hangman—as he’s escortin’ you to the gallows.”

  “My, what pluck we’re exhibiting here today, Mr. Gibbon! I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you in such rarefied form. It’s due to the alcohol, I suspect. Good Lord, man, you smell like a still!”

  Rag Donnelly said through tight lips, “Fairly reeks of it, he does.”

  Gibbon flushed. “I may have had a shot or two on the way out from town. It’s a long ride.” His features bunched with anger. “And anyway, my drinkin’ ain’t the point! The point is you’re breakin’ the law just like you did five years ago, only this time I ain’t gonna stand back and watch it happen. I ain’t gonna sit back and watch you kill to your heart’s content, until you’ve freed up every square foot of the Bench for your own beef. It’s murder, goddamnit, Magnusson. Cold-blooded murder!”

  Magnusson laughed. “Sheriff, I’m afraid your sympathies lie in the wrong camp. I’m certainly not condoning cold-blooded murder, but if certain men were caught stealing my beef, and my boys … well, that’s frontier justice. It may not be legal in the purest sense of the word, but I highly doubt any judge would rule in the favor of stock thieves.” Magnusson laughed again.

  Gibbon fairly shook with outrage. “Then it goes both ways. I’ve seen their brands in your holding pens.”

  “If their beef was in my pens it’s because they were eating my grass.”

  “What is your grass—the whole goddamn Bench?”

  “My grass is whatever I can rescue from those goddamn ignorant farm-stock sons of bitches—men like yourself, Gibbon. Drunkards, cowards, and common thieves.” Magnusson was angry now himself. His face had turned bright red, setting off the frosty blue of his eyes.