“Big Injun? What do you think?”
The Indian stood up. “He good man…strong man. He ride far, I think. No drink. No smell. No bottle. Face strong…clean.”
Borden rubbed his jaw thoughtfully, studying the dead man again. Big Injun didn’t like it and neither did he. Something was wrong here.
“Murder,” Big Injun said. “This man…no know he would be shot. Sudden, I think.”
Uneasily, Borden Chantry stared at the dusty floor. Damn it, was he going to have problems now? Why couldn’t the dead man have been the drunken brawler he had expected?
Big Injun believed the man had been shot from ambush. Or, at least, shot when he did not expect it. Perhaps by someone he trusted…But in the street? Who? And the man was a stranger. Could someone have followed him?
It was a one-street town…one business street, at least, with a few side streets and back streets on which there were residences.
His small white house was rented from Hyatt Johnson, a square, four-room house with a white picket fence around it, a few feet of lawn, with some flowers carefully cultivated and watered by hand, and behind the house a small red barn and a corral.
Across the lane to the left there was a considerable pasture where he ran a dozen head of cattle and a few horses. Borden Chantry always kept a half-dozen horses, his best riding stock, in the corral at the barn.
He went down the lane and through the back gate. He could hear a faint rattle of dishes from the kitchen so he went up the steps.
“Oh, Borden! You’re back!” Bess came to him quickly. Her eyes scanned his face. “Was it bad? Is everything all right?”
“He’s in jail. I recovered the horses.”
“Are you all right?” She held his arms, looking up into his face.
“Sure. It was nothing.”
“Sit down. There’s coffee, and I’ll fix some eggs.”
“I’ll have the coffee, but I had breakfast with Lang. There’s been some shooting down there. A man’s been found dead in the street.”
“Another one? Oh, Borden! I wish…I wish we could move back east. Anywhere. I don’t want Tom growing up with all this shooting and killing. All this violence.”
It was an old discussion, and he merely shrugged. “You married a rancher, Bess, and when I can get on my feet, I’ll go back to ranching. This is my country and I belong here. As for being marshal…somebody has to do it.”
“But why does it have to be you?” she protested.
“I am good with a gun, and they know it. More than that, I know when not to use a gun, and they know that, too.”
The coffee tasted good, and it was pleasant here in the kitchen. Bess moved about, doing the usual things for breakfast, and he leaned back in his chair, still a little tired from the long, hard ride.
The man had taken two horses and had swapped saddles, that was what had fooled Kim Baca. He had good horses and he stopped only long enough to switch rigging, and so he had overtaken the horse thief before he could get far. Baca had expected no pursuit to catch him. That was half of it, of course, getting there fast and unexpected.
“This is no ordinary killin’, Bess. Leastwise it doesn’t look it. Nice lookin’ young man, maybe about my age or a mite older. Somebody shot him when he wasn’t expecting it. Laid for him, likely.”
“Will you be gone all day?”
“Most of it.” He finished his coffee and went into the bedroom to change his shirt. His mind kept returning to the dead man. Of course, he could simply bury him and that would be an end to it, but it wouldn’t be doing his job. Not doing it right. He’d been hired by the city fathers and it was his job to keep the peace and punish the evildoer…or hold them for judgment.
He frowned. The dead man had eaten at the Bon-Ton, had paid for his meal and left. He should have asked whether it was breakfast or dinner…or even supper. Anyway, it would seem, the man had been around town a few hours.
Well, what did he have? The victim had left the Bon-Ton. The next morning he had been found dead…So where had he been? Not that there were so many places to go.
Chantry came out of the bedroom, stuffing his shirt into his pants. Bess turned on him. “Borden? Where did the man come from?”
“We don’t know,” he said. “That’s something to find out.”
“And how did he get here?”
He glanced at her, grinning. “Now why didn’t I think of that? How did he get here? Pays to have a smart wife.”
“It’s just common sense, that’s all. If he did not come by stage, he had to ride horseback.”
He picked up his hat. “So where’s his horse? I’d pin my badge on you if I could find a place to pin it.”
She pushed him away. “You go find out how he got here. That will keep you out of mischief.”
He closed the gate behind him thoughtfully. There was one stage in and one stage out each day. If the stranger had come by stage he had arrived sometime around midday, which meant he had been around town…a town with less than six hundred people…for several hours. Somebody had to have seen him.
Strolling along the dusty street Chantry reached the boardwalk, paused and stamped dust from his boots. A girl was walking toward him, a pretty girl with a lively face, big blue eyes, and just a little overdressed and over-bangled.
“Lucy Marie?”
She paused, apprehensively. It was partly the badge, he suspected, and partly that he was known to be happily married.
“How’s Mary Ann?”
“Ailing. She don’t seem to get much better. I…I wish she could get away from here. She needs a rest.”
“Tell her I asked about her.”
Mary Ann Haley had lived in town for two years, occupying a house on a back street with Lucy Marie and a couple of others. Now she was ill…consumption, probably. A lot of the girls on the line seemed to pick it up.
Chantry returned to the barn and looked at the dead man on the table. He would have to be buried soon, yet the weather was cool to cold and they could wait a little while. Yet somehow he was reluctant to commit the man to the earth. Such a man must have a home…He kept himself too well to be just a drifter.
The door opened and Doc Terwilliger came in. “Is that the man?”
“It is. Look at him, Doc. There’s something wrong. That man’s mighty well dressed in frontier style. I mean his clothes fit…he’s had them made for him. He’s got a gun that’s seen use. He’s wearin’ spurs that look like Mexico or California, and most of the riders around here these days are Kansas or Missouri boys with a few drifters from Texas. He’s been out in the sun…you can see that. His gun ain’t been fired lately but it’s cared for. Seems to me the only thing that don’t look right is that shirt. I can’t see a man who dresses as careful as him wearin’ a shirt two sizes too big.”
Doc Terwilliger was forty-five, with twenty years of it in army service, and there was little he had not seen.
“I was just settin’ here, Doc, wondering how you’d get a shirt off a dead man who’s prob’ly started to stiffen up.”
“Let’s get the coat off first. He’s not as stiff as you’d expect. Here…lend a hand.”
Lifting the dead man they worked his arms from the sleeves and got the buckskin coat off. Doc examined it thoughtfully, then handed it to Borden Chantry.
He held the coat up. There was a little blood on the back, but very little, considering the wound had been in the front. And there was no bullet hole.
“I’ll be damned!” he said. “Looks like the bullet never got through.”
“It did though,” Doc said grimly. “Look here a minute.” With his surgical scissors he cut the shirt up the back and they took it off. Doc tilted the body on one side and they looked at it. Doc’s face was grim.
“Shot twice,” he said, “the first one in the back at point-blank range. See? The powder burns? And scattered grains of powder penetrated the skin.
“That shot was supposed to kill him, but it didn’t. See here? He was shot a sec
ond time, and from the trajectory the killer was either lying on the floor shooting up or he was standing up as the supposedly dead man started to rise off the floor. I’d say the latter.”
“Only one bullet hole in the shirt,” Borden said. “Doc, d’ you figure whoever it was shot this man, but not wanting it to look like he was shot in the back, he switched shirts, taking off the one the dead man had and substituting another that was too large? He was probably planning on shooting the dead man again, and then the victim started to sit up, and he shot him…killed him…although he would have died from the first shot.
“Then he put the man’s coat on him and dropped the body where it would look like he was killed in a drunken fight.”
Doc nodded. “That sounds right, Bord. This was deliberate, cold-blooded murder, the way I see it.”
“I reckon so…I reckon so.”
“What’re you going to do, Bord?”
Chantry shrugged. “Doc, a killin’ when both men are armed and responsible is one thing. Outright murder’s another. I’m never going to quit until we get this man in jail.”
“Bord, think of what you’re facing. We’ve only a few hundred people in town, but there’s over a hundred miners and prospectors around, and probably fifty or sixty cowboys and drifters. Why, the man who did this is long gone.”
“No,” Borden Chantry spoke slowly. “I don’t think so, Doc. No drifter would have bothered to cover it up like this. He’d just have run. He’d have got him a horse and pulled his stakes.
“This here is murder, all right, an’ I’m bettin’ the man who done it is still around!”
“Then be careful, Bord. Be very careful. When the murderer realizes you suspect somebody local, your number’s up. He’ll be running scared, Bord, and his only way out will be to kill you!”
Chapter 2
* * *
BORDEN CHANTRY, AT twenty-four, had been doing a man’s work since he was eleven. To shirk a job or sidestep a responsibility had never occurred to him, for in the life around there was no place for such things. A man was judged on how he did his work, not on what he had or where he came from. At eleven he had been riding herd on a bunch of cattle owned by a neighbor who had gone to Texas, and he took his payment in calves.
By the time he was sixteen he had thirty-two head wearing his own brand, and had sold about the same number. That was the year he rode to Texas to help bring a herd back to Colorado.
He had survived a brush with Comanches near Horse Head Crossing on the Pecos. At seventeen he had followed some horses stolen by the Kiowa and stole them back, along with all the mounts the Kiowas themselves had, setting them afoot.
Most of the time it was hard, brutal work, which he never considered either hard or brutal. It was simply his job, and he did it. From the time he was eleven until he was twenty-three, he could not recall a sunrise that did not find him in the saddle—nor a sunset, for that matter.
He grew tall and lean. He learned to read sign like an Apache and to use a gun. He was considered a top hand, not the best puncher around, but certainly up there among them.
When the town council made him marshal he was broke, still owning a wide spread of land, but nearly all his cattle were gone, and some of his horses. To keep his family alive meant moving to town and finding work.
As marshal his job was to enforce the law, and to him the laws were the rules that made civilization work. Without them there was chaos. They were not a restriction upon his freedom, but the doorway to greater freedom, for they established certain rules that men were not to transgress. In the land in which he had grown up it was customary to settle disputes with a gun. Consequently men, unless drunk, were cautious with their language and respectful of one another.
Murder was rare, although it did happen, and now he had a murder on his hands. Worst of all, he had no skills that would make easy the solving of such a crime. He was simply a common-sense sort of man who knew only one way, and he started coping with murder as he started anything else…one point at a time.
Who was the dead man? Identification was important, for then one might learn who might want him eliminated. Also, what was he doing in town? Where had he come from?
Bess had put her finger on his starting point: How did the man get here?
The stage office was open when Chantry arrived there, and he pushed the door open. The office was simply a counter across the room that cut off one third of it. Behind that was a desk, a swivel chair, and some filing cabinets, all much battered, all but the chair stacked with papers.
George Blazer, with a green eyeshade and sleeve garters, was at the desk.
“Howdy, Bord? Hear you got you a dead one!”
“He’s dead all right…Murdered.”
“Murdered?” George was startled. “Are you sure?”
“You recall a man coming in on the stage the last coupla days? Tall man, black hair. Nice lookin’ feller, wore a fringed buckskin coat with some Indian beadwork. Black broadcloth pants?”
“No. nobody like that, Bord. Travel’s been light the last few days. Hyatt was over to Denver, but he got in three, four days ago. No, I can surely say, no such man come in by stage.”
“Did you see him around?”
“Oh, sure! Three or four times. He was havin’ a drink down to the Corral when I first saw him. He was alone then, I did notice he seemed interested in folks along the street. I mean he was watching them…Women, mostly.”
“Well, that’s normal. Did he talk to anybody? See him with anybody at all?”
“Nope. Sure didn’t. I saw him there at the saloon, and walking across the street several times, or up and down the street.”
“Ever see him ridin’?”
“No, come to think of it, I didn’t. It was yesterday I saw him around. I’m out front a good deal, shifting trunks around, or loading mail sacks on the stage, or just takin’ the air. That’s how I seen him.”
Borden Chantry walked out front and leaned against the awning post. Some drunk might have potshotted an innocent stranger, although that was unlikely. But when somebody went to the trouble to murder a man and hide it…Well, there had to be a reason.
He took off his hat and wiped the sweatband. To think that even now the murderer might be watching him, wondering what he was thinking, gave him an eerie feeling. He was uneasy, not liking not knowing who his enemy might be. Always before, he had known. Indians, rustlers, horse thieves…They were tangible, and he knew how to cope with them. A murderer, who might be watching his every move, ready to try killing him if he got too close…well, that was something different.
He strolled about town, putting the question here and there. Several people remembered the man, nobody remembered anything in particular about him.
If he rode a horse he left it somewhere. Borden walked into the shadowed livery stable, a wide door at each end. It smelled of fresh hay, fresh manure, and harness leather. He walked down the wide aisle between the stalls, looking at the horses.
Lang’s big black was there. It rolled its eyes at him as he passed. And there were Hyatt’s matched bays which he drove to a buckboard. Hyatt rode astride from time to time, but preferred the buckboard.
There were no strange horses in the barn.
As he returned to the front entrance, Ab came from his tack room which was also his sleeping quarters. “Somethin’ fur ya, Marshal?”
“Checkin’ the horses. Did a tall man in a fringed buckskin coat come in here?”
“Nope…No strangers this week ’ceptin’ that drummer who was in here from Kansas City. He was sellin’ hair oil an’ such. Some ladies’ fixin’s. Nope, nobody.”
In a small town, people noticed strangers. In a small western town, they noticed horses. Yet few people seemed to have seen this man, and nobody had seen him with a horse. At least nobody Chantry had found.
It was likely the man had come in before daylight or after dusk…maybe at suppertime when nobody much was on the street. But if he came in at dusk he had to stay
somewhere. Borden crossed the street to the hotel.
The lobby was small with a desk at one side, an old cracked leather settee, two huge leather chairs, and another chair made entirely, except for the seat, of longhorn horns. On the walls there were several heads of antelope, deer, and buffalo, including at the back of the desk a longhorn steer head with nine-foot horns.
Elsie Carter was behind the desk, as she was most of the time.
“Yes, he was in. Asked me if I had a room for the night, and I told him I had. He said he’d be back for it.”
“Did he give you his name?”
“No, he didn’t. No name. I will say he was a right handsome man, however. Right handsome…Had a familiar look, too.”
“Familiar? Like somebody around here?”
“No…no, but like somebody I’ve seen. Been bothering me ever since he was in. He was like, yet not like. I dunno.”
“Elsie, you’ve been around towns like this since you was a kid, and in the hotel business most of the time. You’ve got a knowing way about folks. What would you say about him? Anything at all. I just got nothing to tie to.”
She touched a hand to her hair, then leaned a fat elbow on the counter. “Marshal, I can tell you one thing. That man was somebody. He had the manner, the style. I tell you something else. He was a man who was good with a gun. They got a way about them, Marshal. You got it yourself. You can tell it in a man…No swagger, no show-off, just a sort of assurance, confidence…I don’t know. But he had it.”
“You think he was gunnin’ for somebody?”
“No. He was looking for somebody, but not that way. I could tell the way he turned when somebody came in, and the way he looked when somebody went down the street. But he had that rawhide thong over his gun hammer and he never taken it off. Minute he walked in I spotted him, and I looked at that thong. You reckon he was a marshal hisself?”
“I don’t know, Elsie, I surely don’t.”
Borden walked out on the street. “Hell of a marshal you make!” he said, half-aloud, and with disgust. “A man rides into a town and you can’t even find his horse!”
Borden Chantry Page 2