Marshal Jeremy Six #3

by Brian Garfield

  “No. But there’s no point in standing around here making targets out of yourselves. I expect some of the bravos to show up sometime today. They’ve got to, to prove they’re not scared of me. All right—let them come. You people can post yourselves in windows and on rooftops. Cover the street, and when the shooting starts, cut them down. It’s what they asked for by coming here.”

  Lionel was frowning. He was a hefty man with thick eyebrows and thoughtful brown eyes. “That smacks of drygulching.”

  “Sing out first, then. Let them know where you are. But keep yourselves behind cover. That’s no more than any soldier does.”

  “All right,” Lionel agreed. “Any objections, men?” No one spoke. Lionel said, “Come on, then.” He moved off down the street with a rifle over the bend of his elbow.

  Rafferty was coming across the street. He had his gun buckled on. “I heard most of that,” he said. Up street the crowd was dispersing, each man heading for a post of his own choice.

  Rafferty followed Six into the office. Six said, “Take that damned gun off before you hurt yourself.”

  “You saved my life the other day. I owe you a turn.”

  “You don’t owe it to me to get yourself shot.”

  “Again.”

  “Yes. Again.”

  “Well, I guess that choice is up to me,” Rafferty said. He was chewing on a hard roll. “You had breakfast?”

  “Two hours ago.”

  Rafferty sat down, hipshot, on a corner of the desk. “How about those townspeople. Guts. That change your mind any about human nature, Six?”

  “Maybe,” Six said. He was putting the gun together. Then he stopped and looked at Rafferty. “Maybe it does, at that.”

  Rafferty grinned. “I always figured you weren’t all bad, Six. Nobody could be as bad as you pretended to be for a while there.” He finished the roll and wiped crumbs off his hand. “The doctor put a new dressing on this wound of mine. It’s healing up so fast, I’m just about ready for a new one.”

  “Uh-huh,” Six muttered. He loaded the rifle-shotgun and set the hammers on safety-cock.

  Rafferty said abruptly, “You know, it’s all lots of fun and all to sit around here and make jokes, but if you want to know the truth, I’m scared purple. God knows how many gunmen are riding up toward this town right now, this minute. God knows how many people will get killed here today. Doesn’t that scare you at all, Six?”

  “It scares me,” said Six. He went to the door and stood in the opening, making a tall silhouette with the long-barreled rifle-shotgun in his left hand. Rafferty got up, went behind the desk and sat down. He took out his notebook and started writing in it.

  Twenty minutes later he put the notebook away and came to the door. Six was out on the porch, smoking a cigar. His eyes looked like ice; he was watching the lower end of the street. Sunlight blasted down through the trees; it was warm here and down in the Concho Basin proper, it was probably near one hundred degrees. The street was caked after last night’s rain. Gun muzzles sprouted from windows and rooftops. The town was silent.

  Rafferty indicated a woman and a little girl going down the opposite side of the street toward the drygoods store. “That’s Lockyear’s wife and child. I saw her in town yesterday, too.”

  Six nodded. He stepped off the walk and crossed the street. He intercepted the woman and touched his hat. “Ma’am?”

  She stopped. Six smiled at the little girl and then said to the woman, “I’d recommend you and the child stay off the street.”

  Her eyes became round. The woman picked up the little girl and carried her as far as the small hotel, where she went inside.

  A gust of wind made the branches rustle. Six started to go back across the street toward the office. Someone came running on foot into the lower end of the street. Six turned his attention that way. The running man wore overalls—it was one of the men who had been with Lionel’s party.

  The man was panting for breath. “Bunch of riders headed this way, Sheriff. Looked like some of the Lance Head crew.”

  “Get to cover,” Six told him. He watched the man dash off the street. Rafferty was still on the sheriff’s office porch. Six waved him inside.

  Then Six began walking down the street. He glanced up at the buildings to either side. Now and then a man nodded to him. He went on until he reached the foot of the street, and stood there with the over-and-under gun cocked and lying across his forearm.

  They came up the road in a tight-packed bunch, ten or twelve of them. Six dug in his heels. The sun was almost straight overhead. He lifted the gun, not aiming it at anyone in particular. The horsemen cantered up the hill, closing down the distance; and when they drew closer, Six saw with surprise that none of them wore guns.

  Their saddlebags bulged; that must be their guns. Puzzled, Six waited for them. They stopped not far below him and one of them raised his hands. “We’re on our way out of the Basin, Six. Ain’t no more war down there. Lockyear’s dead, him and Tom Monday with him. They shot each other all to pieces. We put our guns away, you can see that. Can we get by?”

  Six stepped over to the side of the road. “Ride straight on through, boys. Keep on going till you’re over the mountains.”

  He turned and shouted toward town: “Let them pass!”

  The bravos trotted through town, keeping to the center of the street; they went on by, and presently all sound of their passage died.

  Six went up the street to the middle of town, and turned in at the hotel. He found Mrs. Lockyear in the lobby.

  “I’ve got to say something to you, ma’am.”

  The woman regarded him curiously for a moment. Then she said, “Carolyn, please leave us alone for a moment, dear.”

  The little girl went obediently across the lobby to the front window and stood on tiptoe, looking out over the sash.

  “I’m Jeremy Six, the new sheriff here. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Lockyear, but your husband—”

  “Is dead,” she cut him off rapidly. She nodded. Her eyes were dry. Then, quickly, she bowed her head. “Poor, poor Nick.”

  “What’s that, ma’am?”

  “Nothing.” She raised her face. “Thank you for telling me.”

  Six looked across the room at the little girl. Mrs. Lockyear said, “I’ll tell her, Sheriff. You’ve done enough.”

  Wordlessly, because there was nothing he could say to her, Six went out of the place and tramped to the center of the street. “The war’s over,” he called out. “The Lance Head boss is dead.”

  Then he went back to the office.

  The townspeople went back to their shops and put away their guns, and afterward gathered in the saloon to celebrate. Six was not there; he was down in the sheriff’s office. Steve Rafferty said to him, “So that’s how it ends. It fizzles out.”

  “Something to be thankful for,” said Six.

  “Yeah, it is. It sure is. For a while there I was afraid that—”

  “Hold it,” Six said sharply.

  “Huh?”

  Six snatched up the rifle-shotgun and reached the door in two long strides. He flung it open. There was a thunder of hoof beat sound rolling up the road below town.

  “Singletree. Maybe they don’t know about Lockyear. Get inside.”

  “And miss the whole show? Not on your life.”

  Six ran down toward the foot of the street. The saloon was in back of him at the far end of town; he hoped the crowd would stay there, inside. He reached the hardware store, which was the last building at the lower end of Rifle Gap, and saw the Singletree crew come around the bend in the road, in a swell and a rush, with big Britt Hazlitt in the lead.

  They rode with the determination of men thirsty for blood. Six saw Hazlitt’s arm rise—Hazlitt had recognized him and now Hazlitt’s cry of triumph rang out. Someone fired a shot, and that started the ball. Six ducked into the hardware store. He sprawled on the floor and rolled forward beneath the sill of the front window; glass cascaded down from the
smashing windows, and a sliver sliced into the back of his hand. He flung it off, smashed the rest of the glass out of the lowest pane, and poked the snout of the double-gun through. The bravos were leaping from their horses, dropping to a crouch, aiming a concentrated barrage of fire at the store. Six braced his shoulder against the weapon and pulled trigger.

  The shotgun roared, overriding the lighter snapping of pistols. Six broke the breech and slapped a fresh cartridge into the seat. The shotgun blast had silenced some of the guns outside; when he risked another look, he saw them scrambling for cover in the trees and across the street. One of them was dragging a wounded leg.

  He fired the second shotgun charge into a running man’s back. The man shot forward as if struck by a cannonball, and fell flat. Six dropped the long gun and brought up his revolver; he emptied it through the window, then crouched down to reload. Someone was moaning across the road. He heard men shouting uptown; there was a gathering roar of voices up there.

  “Stay out of this,” he muttered. Blood oozed from the cut on his hand. He saw a figure awkwardly running down the far side of the street, toward the fight—Rafferty, lifting his revolver in his good hand. Someone fired at Rafferty from the trees, and Rafferty ducked into a store. His pistol started talking from the shelter of the doorway.

  Britt Hazlitt’s voice was calling out: “Hold it—hold it!”

  The shooting died out. Hazlitt called, “Six—hey, Six. You hear me?”

  “I hear you, Britt.”

  “Let’s even it up, Jeremy. Just you and me.”

  “Britt, the war’s over. Lockyear’s dead. Give it up and clear out You’ve got nothing left that needs fighting for.”

  “What? Wait a minute.” There was a silent interval—a conference going on, over in the trees. Finally Hazlitt called out:

  “It doesn’t matter, Jeremy. You called me, and no man is tough enough to post me out of any town. The rest of these boys will stay out of it. Just you and me. How about it?”

  “I don’t make deals, Britt. Throw out your guns first. Then you can all go.”

  “Go to hell, Jeremy.”

  Six ducked down then and waited for it. It was not a long time coming. The guns opened up again. Bullets streaked into the store above and around him; metal clanged and something fell to the floor. He heard more glass breaking. Rafferty’s gun began to speak again in hard, sudden echoes from the far doorway. And now there were new guns moving forward—the citizens, moving down the street from building to building. Some of them were back in the trees, circling; he could hear firing on both sides of the town.

  His position in the store was no good; he was pinned down here. He crawled back through the room to the back. From there, he put several shots forward through the window; then he reloaded and flung the back door open.

  No shots answered his move. Gun up, he wheeled out through the doorway and flattened himself against the outside wall.

  That was when a voice spoke calmly from the trees twenty feet away. “Put it away in the holster, Jeremy.”

  Six froze. Hazlitt said, “I’ve got the drop on you. Cold turkey. Don’t be a fool.”

  Six slowly slid the gun down into its holster. He turned, then, and watched Hazlitt come out of the timber. Hazlitt said, “I figured you’d try the back way. All right, Jeremy. We’ll see who’s the better man.” He holstered his gun and planted his feet. “Go ahead.”

  “What in hell are you trying to prove, Hazlitt?”

  “This!” Hazlitt cried. His hand whacked his holster; the gun came up in his fist. There was a dead gleam in his eyes.

  Six palmed his gun up with all the old speed of habit and training. It rode up, cocked, and the gunsight settled on Hazlitt; Hazlitt’s gun went off—Six saw the muzzle flame—but somehow Hazlitt’s shot missed, and Six felt his own gun rock back against his palm when the heavy slug went out of it.

  Hazlitt collapsed slowly. Six reached him and bent down. “You wanted it this way,” Six said. “You pulled that shot wide.”

  “The hell I did,” Hazlitt said, and died.

  Six left the dead man’s side and ran, crouching, through a semicircle of trees. As he approached the street he slowed his pace. The gunfire was loud and heavy in the street; it had become a pitched gun battle between townspeople and Singletree gunmen, but both sides were firing from behind cover and it was mostly blind shooting.

  The sound of their approach covered by the gunfire, two riders galloped up the road and halted their horses. Matthew Dane started bellowing hoarsely; Six could not make out the words. Then a citizen’s bullet knocked Dane off his horse. The other rider, Nick Story, did not wait to call for peace; he wheeled his big palomino off the road into the trees.

  Six circled the back of the freight corrals and reached the street. From the corner of the building he called out: “Stop shooting. Cease fire!”

  He kept calling, and presently the volume of fire began to subside. There was a ragged after-volley, and then the town fell silent. In the sudden quiet, Six could hear several horses galloping away. Some of the bravos, probably.

  He let his voice sing out:

  “All right—all right. Hazlitt is dead and Dane is down. How many of you want to die?”

  A ragged white cloth appeared at the edge of the trees. A bearded man stepped out, holding the truce flag in the air. “There’s only a few of us left in here. We’ve had enough, Six. You and this goddamn town can go plumb to hell. We’re riding out.”

  Fifteen

  Six stood in the street with his head down and his feet wide apart, like a man suffering from acute fatigue. The storekeeper Lionel was talking in a dull voice. “Hazlitt’s the only dead one, him and that one you shotgunned in the back. The rest of them must’ve cleared out. Dane will probably live. He’s got some lead in his gut. I got two injured men back here, both of them still on their feet though. Wait a minute—they’re bringing a body up, ain’t it?”

  Six looked up. Two men were carrying a loose, dead figure out of the trees. It was Nick Story.

  Rafferty came away from the crowd, pocketing his notebook. His manner was subdued. He touched Six’s shoulder and rested his hand there. “I just don’t understand it. At the last it was just like a bunch of animals. Nobody knew what he was shooting at. Even me. I heard shooting so I shot back. Never once had a clear target—but I went ahead shooting anyway. God.”

  Six said nothing. Rafferty shook his head. “I know one thing. It’s to prevent things like this that we’ve got to have law.”

  Up the street, they had laid Nick Story’s body out beside the others. Mrs. Lockyear was bending over Story. Six remembered her words when he had told her of her husband’s death: Poor, poor Nick. He approached her and when she stood up, he saw tears in her eyes. Someone said, “No way to tell who shot him.”

  The woman said, “It doesn’t matter. Nobody can hurt him anymore. That’s all that matters.”

  Six had a few words with Dan Latourette’s widow. Then he put his horse onto the road, heading up into the mountains away from Rifle Gap and the Concho Basin.

  Rafferty caught up with him on the trail. “Mind if I ride along as far as the forks?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Rafferty said, “I guess they’ll never find out who killed Nick Story, or why. Maybe a stray bullet. But like she said, it can’t make much difference. He bought into the war and I guess you have to expect that. I wonder if I can write the end of the story. Matthew Dane probably won’t ever get out of his bed—paralysis is a hell of a thing. You think Hash Knife’s really going to buy the Basin? I imagine it won’t matter to Dane now whether they do or not. But the rest of it, that’s what’s so hard to make sense out of. Everything fell apart. Like Nick Story. I guess he had to get killed that way, just to prove something to the rest of us.”

  “I haven’t got the answers either, Rafferty.”

  The mountains were cool and dry; the air was crystal. Rafferty said, “Where do you go from here?”

&nbs
p; “Back where I came from,” Six said. “A town called Spanish Flat.”

  “Is that a good town?”

  “No better or worse than this town back here. Or any other town.”

  Rafferty nodded. After a quarter-hour of silent riding, he mused, “Lockyear’s widow said she was taking her little girl to San Francisco. Maybe I’ll look her up there. Damned good-looking woman.” He took a drink from his canteen and put it back. “Funny. I don’t even know how I’m going to write the story.”

  Six said, “Put one thing in it for me, Rafferty. Put this. People came out here from settled backgrounds in civilized countries. In no time at all, they forgot all of that. They got to be animals again—the Hazlitts and the Jeremy Sixes and all the rest of them with guns. They start to believe a gun in the hand is worth the world by the tail. They hire out to be gunfighters or lawmen, and maybe the lawmen wind up like me with nothing to show for it but two holes in my shirt where my badge used to hang. But no matter what his reasons are, a lawman is a man who’s willing to die so that the law may live. He may be a mixed-up ex-gambler and he may not know what the hell he’s doing, but you saw back there what happens without him. Write your piece and say what you have to say, but be kind to the lawmen, Rafferty, and be kind to the law. We need it.”

  Rafferty said, “I’ll do that.”

  They camped in the mountains that night. The next day, they rode down the back of the range. Rafferty said, “Have you got a girl back there where you’re going?”

  “I hope I do.”

  They had reached the crossroads. The brass sun shafted down against a tawny stretch of earth; the mountains crested high behind them. Rafferty put out his good hand. “Good luck to you.”

  “So long, Rafferty.”

  Six sat his horse and watched the reporter ride away. After a while, Six turned the horse and went down the road at an easy trot. The sun was hot and he removed his vest and tied it behind the saddle. The earth was wide and glistened under the sun. The earth would continue to abide.

  MARSHAL JEREMY SIX 3: THE BRAVOS