Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Eight thousand, seven hundred sixty cash,” announced Race, smoothing out the last twenty and laying it atop the finished stack.

  “What’s those?” Carroll pointed a crooked arthritic finger at the heap of neglected notes.

  “Bearer bonds,” said Merle. “You hand them to the cashier and he gives you money back. You don’t have to sign nothing nor show identification. There’s eleven thousand dollars’ worth there. Counted ‘em myself when I put them in the belt.”

  “Burn them.”

  All eyes turned to Race. He wasn’t smiling. Merle’s jaw dropped. “They’re good, I said! I unloaded a thousand bucks’ worth in Montana before they picked me up.”

  “Could be that’s why they picked you up.” His cousin spoke quietly. “They draw too much fire. Folks look too close at your face. You want to do the honors, Carroll?” He shoved the pile toward the old man, who grinned, showing tobacco-stained teeth with many gaps.

  “I sure as hell would! Make me feel like Vanderbilt.” He scooped up the notes.

  “It’s like burning money!” Merle moved to stop him.

  Race laid a firm hand on his cousin’s wrist. “There’s no leaders here,” Race said. “I vote we play safe and burn the paper. Who votes with me?”

  “I vote we don’t,” spoke up Shirley, after a moment. “Folks stare at me anyway.”

  “Carroll?” Race looked at the old man.

  He rubbed a fistful of notes over his beard. “I may be crazy, but I wouldn’t last six months behind no bars,” he said. “Let’s set fire to it.”

  “Appears we’re tied,” observed Merle.

  Race said, “The squaw ain’t voted.”

  “Injuns and women don’t vote!” Carroll was indignant.

  “She gets an equal cut for holding the horses. That entitles her.”

  “She votes with me,” said Shirley.

  Race studied him. “She ain’t even in the room.”

  “She votes with me anyway.”

  Merle was smug. “Well, I reckon that’s that. Divvy her up, Carroll. Twenty-two hunnert apiece.”

  “Horses!” His cousin closed a hand on that butt of the gun in his holster.

  The others started, looking around. The hut had no windows.

  “I didn’t hear nothing.” But Merle drew his Remington. Every man in the group carried the same make, except Shirley; it was a Buckner family custom that in Race had become an obsession.

  Carroll, who wasn’t wearing his, dropped the bonds he was holding and snatched the Springfield out of its corner. He tore aside the buffalo robe he had dropped down over the door after everyone had entered. Merle and Shirley pressed in close beside him. Only Race hung back.

  “There ain’t—” began Merle, then fell silent. He swung around.

  Race was standing empty-handed in front of the fireplace. The flames burned brightly, flicking long yellow fingers up the chimney. Merle’s eyes flew to the table. The bearer bonds were gone. “You son of a bitch!” He vaulted toward the hearth. Race stepped in front of it. Halting, his cousin raised his weapon. He was quivering with rage.

  “Move aside.”

  The other shook his head. “Reckon you’ll have to shoot, Merle. I done it for us all.”

  “Put it away,” Shirley said quietly.

  Merle turned just far enough to include the cripple in his field of vision. Recognizing the crossed-stumps stance, he rammed the Remington into its holster hard enough to pop a stitch on the belt. His face was as white as a clenched knuckle. Suddenly he spun and pushed his way out past the buffalo robe.

  “Let him be,” advised Race, when Carroll turned to follow him. “He’ll be back when he’s ready. Just like when he was little.”

  “Thought you said they wasn’t no leaders here.” Heavy-shouldered and coated to the knees, Carroll looked like a large gray bear. The rifle dangled at the end of his arm.

  “Didn’t like the way the vote went.” Race took up a crooked stick leaning next to the fireplace and broke up the ashes. A charred corner of paper bearing the inscription FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS ($500) floated out and drifted unnoticed to the earthen floor.

  The air was growing warm. The old man put away his rifle and started wriggling out of his overcoat. “Want help with yours?” he asked Shirley.

  “Woman’ll do it.”

  A few minutes later, the squaw called Woman Watching came in carrying two blanket rolls under each arm and dumped them against the wall next to the doorway. Her black eyes glittered from slits in her round, smooth face like those of a fat little boy. She was just twenty. Her pudgy fingers unfastened the buttons on Shirley’s coat with a mother’s swift efficiency, and when she had freed his stumps from the turned-back sleeves she folded the threadbare garment and hung it over the back of a wooden chair reverently as if it were a gentleman’s new ulster. Then she commenced to loosen the straps that anchored the modified Colt to his truncated limb.

  “Where’d he get her, anyways?” Carroll whispered to Race. With a rag wrapped around one hand he had lifted a chipped enamel coffee pot from its station in front of the hearth and was filling the second of two tin cups on the table.

  The younger Buckner was slouched in the only other chair, both legs stretched out toward the fire. His cup steamed on the table before him, daring him to pick it up. “Jim won’t say. He had her when I met him. I heard he bought her off a tinhorn in Oklahoma, but you can’t prove it by me. They appear to get on.”

  “You reckon them two ever—?” The old man looked genuinely curious.

  “I don’t know,” the other said irritably. “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “Think he’d mind?”

  Race looked at him, at his eager, ravaged face, and laughed quietly. The squaw, massaging Shirley’s shooting arm through his shirtsleeve where he sat in the chair that supported his coat, shot them a curious glance. “Uncle Carroll,” said Race, “you are a one.”

  “I don’t know what you’re gabbing about. And quit calling me Uncle.”

  “It was good enough when Merle and me was kids.”

  “Well, you ain’t kids no more. Just ‘cause I knowed your pa don’t make us blood relations.”

  Race sipped carefully from his cup. The coffee burned his tongue and scalded the roof of his mouth. But it felt warm and good in his stomach. He worked the stiffness out of his fingers, realizing for the first time how cold he had been. His thighs ached from straddling a horse for two days and his seat was numb. It had been a long time since he left ranch work. “Any visitors while we was gone?” he asked Carroll.

  Standing hunched with both hands around his cup, the old man shook his head fiercely, like a bull buffalo besieged by flies. “Gets lonesome as hell out here. I liked hanging around in Cheyenne waiting for the telephone to ring better. At least I got to jaw with folks passing by.”

  “We won’t use that one again for a spell. We was lucky to get out of it what we did. Had it to do over, I wouldn’t use it more than twice in a row.” He paused. “We pull out in the morning.”

  “How come? Law on your heels?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s good to think that way. I’m thinking we’ll split up for a little, meet in Casper after the first of the year.”

  “Never figured you to be one to rabbit for no good reason,” snarled Carroll.

  Race didn’t reply. Instead he drew a folded sheet of stiff paper from inside his coat and flipped it open under the other’s nose. It was a reward poster containing the Union Pacific’s five-thousand-dollar offer for the younger Buckner, dead or alive. The 1903 photograph smiled irrelevantly under the grim legend.

  Where’d you get-that?”

  “It was nailed to a telephone pole outside Cheyenne. I figure they got them posted all over the state.” He dropped it atop the money on the table. “Was just me, I might risk it one more time, but I’m like a brand on the butt of everyone with me.”

  “How much we got now?”

  “Counting this, about forty
thousand. That’s eight thousand apiece. Any man can sail through all that ‘twixt now and the end of the year is a sinful spendthrift.”

  “It’d make one hell of a stake for something really big.”

  Something in Carroll’s tone drew a thoughtful glance from Race. Then he tilted his hat brim forward over his eyes. “Don’t try to tempt me, old man,” he said. “Your job’s to get a good price for those worn-out horses after we leave. Nobody elected you ramrod.”

  “Who was the one told you about the banks in Wyoming and Colorado? Or the express office in Provo? Or the train stop at Elephant Crossing?”

  Race slid farther down in the chair so that he was all but reclining, his shoulders barely touching the back. “Forget it. You come up with all the ideas and we take all the risks.”

  “Let’s hear what he’s got.”

  Raising the hat, Race met Jim Shirley’s gaze across the table. The cripple was sitting up straight now, his murky eyes level. Behind him stood the squaw with her hands down at her sides, watching them impassively, fully understanding. Then Race saw his cousin in the doorway and levered himself upright.

  “Talk, Carroll,” he sighed.

  The sun lay nestled in a crook formed by two mountains like an orange coal in a blacksmith’s iron tongs. Dying violet light stole across the basin and stained the snow east of the soddy with viscous shadow. The horses in the corral huddled together for warmth, their breath curling milky white around their muzzles before the rising wind caught and shredded it like wet tissue. James Blame Shirley sat on the hut’s sunward side with his back to the damp wall and his knees drawn up under his coattails, the tip of a cheroot glowing violent red in the darkness between his hat and collar. Next to him sat Woman Watching, moving only to take the cheroot from between his lips at intervals and knock the ash off the end before replacing it. To the east an early coyote yipped twice and raised its voice in a tentative howl drawn thin as silver thread by the wind and cold. There was no answer and the call wasn’t repeated.

  “Get it out,” said Shirley.

  The squaw hesitated, then reached inside her coat and withdrew a hinged leather case from which she lifted a bronze star trailing a ribbon of red and blue silk. She held it up for his inspection. He was still looking at it through his smoke when Merle Buckner came out of the hut, saw what he was doing, and sat down on the other side of him.

  “All right,” Shirley told the woman.

  “None of my business,” said Merle, as the medal and case were tucked away, “but I’m wondering why you never hocked that thing. You had some lean times after the war.”

  “I tried. No one’d take it. It ain’t real gold.”

  “You know what? I don’t think you’d of went through with it if they made you an offer. I think you like carrying it.”

  Shirley smoked and said nothing.

  “What you think of Carroll’s big thing?” Merle asked. “It’s big.” He let the woman tap some more ash off the cheroot.

  “I like it. Race don’t. I think maybe he’s going yellow on us.”

  “He ain’t going yellow.”

  “You agree with him?”

  “What I think won’t buy coal.”

  “Your vote’s as good as mine.”

  Shirley chuckled, without mirth. “It is that.”

  Merle watched the sunset. Only a molten silver remained in the notch, forced down by layer upon layer of purple, each one darker than the one below it until they blended.

  “You miss them?” he asked suddenly.

  The squaw shot him a murderous look.

  “Miss what?” asked Shirley, knowing very well what. “Your hands.”

  “Would you miss yours?”

  “Yeah, for a while. But you got so you get along pretty good without them. I was just wondering if you still cared one way or the other.”

  Shirley spat out his cheroot. The glowing tip described a phosphorescent arc and died with a hiss when it hit the snow. The Cherokee woman watched it like a bored dog.

  “Call you next time I take a leak.”

  Merle said, “I never thought about that.”

  Chapter Eight

  Running Behind

  The only sign of life in Elephant Crossing at six-thirty in the morning was a pair of drifters loitering under the water tower, their wind-reddened eyes following the seven armed men as they alighted from the coach two cars behind the panting engine. It was still dark out and pump-handle cold. The snow creaked under their boots.

  Liquid lantern light glimmered forlornly through a window in the tar-paper-and-canvas saloon. As he followed St. John across the furrowed street toward the light, Wild Bill Edwards was conscious of dozens of pairs of eyes watching him from behind brown muslin curtains and the triangular shadows between buildings. Though he knew Colorado, this was his first visit to Elephant Crossing, and yet he had been there many times—in Texas and New Mexico and the Nations and on both sides of the Mexican border. Only the names were different, and some didn’t even have names, these sullen little towns that sprang up in desolate areas like carnivorous plants to devour the lone transient, the winning card player, the lawman foolish enough to follow his criminal spoor within range of their deadly spines. He had learned to tread softly in such places. All of his instincts rebelled against invading them in this manner, like federal troops invading enemy territory. If this was what being on the sunny side of the law was all about, he wanted no more part of it.

  The interior was an oval of dirty yellow light surrounded by shadow, in which stood a bar made from a spider-tracked plank laid across two barrels stood on end and one hand-hewn table, around which three men sat playing poker, gray men in ragged coats without a trace of humanity in their features. More barrels and kegs were stacked behind the bar against a bare wall. The stove in the corner had been fashioned from a boiler with a crooked pipe thrust through a caulked hole in the tar paper. Edwards smelled burning creosote, which explained the spaces he had seen along the railroad tracks where ties were missing. The visitors’ heels rang on the hard clay floor.

  A lean bartender wearing a red flannel shirt over a faded checked one over another of no discernible pattern or color was sitting on a barrel near the lower end of the bar, with his big, raw-knuckled hands resting on his knees. His shaggy brown hair spilled in an arc over his forehead and behind his ears to his collar. Black beard matted his face from eyes to jaw. He didn’t get up as the strangers entered.

  The Mexicans hung back at the door while Edwards and George American Horse strolled to the windows facing each other across the room, leaving St. John and Rawlings to approach the bar alone. Midian Pierce remained in the street. The bartender noted all this with dark, malevolent eyes and said nothing.

  “‘Morning.” greeted St. John.

  “Yeah.” The answering voice was flat and a trifle high. A double-barreled shotgun leaned against the wall within reach of the bartender’s left hand. “We don’t serve injuns or Mexicans.”

  “Who does?” St. John got out the Wichita circular and spread it on the bar next to the coal-oil lantern. “This face familiar?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t look at faces much.” The bartender was looking at St. John’s.

  “We think the fellow this face belongs to robbed the train here Monday.”

  “That’s too bad. For the goddamn railroad.”

  “The gang was still here when the train left. We think maybe someone noticed which way they rode out.”

  “No one notices much around here.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. Where’s the law in this town?”

  “Right there.” The bartender indicated the shotgun. Silent seconds piled up.

  “Well, thankee kindly,” said St. John and turned away, tucking the notice back inside his pocket.

  Confused, Rawlings remained at the bar a moment longer. Then he started to follow the old lawman out. He almost bumped into him at the door. The way was blocked.

  St. John, who was not
tall, had to tilt his chin a little to meet the gaze of the man standing on the threshold. He tapered upward and downward from a huge middle bound by a cartridge belt with a Schofield revolver in a worn holster and a sheathed bowie knife. His beard spilled halfway down his chest and his long hair met the shaggy nap of his floor-length buffalo coat so that he seemed to be - covered with coarse hair from hat to heels.

  “You law?” His voice rumbled from deep in his vitals.

  “You can call us that.”

  The reply came from behind him, where Pierce stood in the street with his Navy Colt trained on the big man’s kidneys.

  St. John moved. His victim expected him to lash out with his fists and raised his own. Instead the old lawman grasped the big man’s cartridge belt in both hands and heaved, lifting him while he turned his hip and spun on his left heel. The big man went up and past him, completing a shallow half-moon before he struck the bar and tipped it over. The lantern crashed to the floor. Flames lapped at the fragile black stuff of the wall.

  The bartender lunged for the shotgun. Edwards’ Colt snaked out of its holster, his thumb rolling back the hammer in the same movement. The bartender sat back down empty-handed. George produced a Starr double-action revolver and caught the poker players going for their own weapons. They froze, transfixed by its single eye. Rawlings kicked the Schofield out of the grasp of the man on the floor. St. John covered the latter with his Peacemaker while the Pinkerton retrieved the revolver and confiscated the shotgun. The Mexicans stood around looking mean.

  Almost as an afterthought, Midian Pierce strode in, scooped up a bucket of slops from the area behind the collapsed bar, and dashed its contents over the blaze. Black smoke billowed throughout the room.

  “Now let’s talk,” said St. John.

  Seated on the stump of a fallen elm long since gone to sawdust and kindling, Paco and Diego Menéndez were passing a hand-rolled cigarette back and forth in the firelight, speaking rapidly in their bastard Mexican-and-Indian dialect and laughing in hoarse wheezes. The shadows scooped hollows under their high cheekbones and in the sockets of their eyes. Eleven hours had passed since the excitement in Elephant Crossing. The posse was camped a day’s ride north.