Tascosa Gun

by Gene Shelton

  Charlie Bowdre’s widow had given up the fight. Jim caught a glimpse of her through the hospital doorway as the wagon sped past. She had flung herself onto her husband’s body, wailing and screaming in grief.

  A hundred yards later Jim eased the horses back to a trot. A low chuckle from beside him grew to a full-blown howl of glee. Jim glanced at Luis Bausman. The bulky LIT rider was bent over at the waist, laughing so hard he could hardly breathe. Despite the ache in his head, Jim felt a grin spread over his own face.

  “God—Jim —” Bausman gasped between peals of laughter, “you shoulda—seen your face—when she whopped you upside the—head with that brandin’ iron —”

  Jim chuckled aloud. “Guess it was quite a sight, at that,” he said. Finally he couldn’t hold it back any longer. He threw his head back and laughed along with Bausman.

  Jim had regained his composure by the time they reached Beaver Smith’s store. Bausman was reduced to high-pitched chuckles; tears streamed down his face as Jim reined in the team. “Guess it—wouldn’t of been so funny if —” Bausman hiccuped a brief chortle—”if she’d had her a ten-gauge smoothbore ‘stead of a branding iron.”

  Jim swung down from the wagon. His head hurt from the impact of the iron and his jaws ached from grinning. He knew it would be a long time before he heard the last of this. He looked up at Bausman. “I don’t guess you’d keep this quiet if I asked, Luis?” Bausman howled again. “No way, Mary Ann,” he finally managed to stammer. “Too good a yarn to waste. God, you shoulda seen —” Jim sighed and strode into the store, Bausman chuckling behind him.

  “What’s so funny, Jim?” the Kid asked. The question sent Bausman into another gale of glee. Jim told the story himself. Everybody in the store was doubled over in mirth by the time he had finished—at least everyone except Rudabaugh.

  Billy the Kid handed his empty dinner plate back to Jim East, stretched out on the dirt floor and sighed, contented.

  “Don’t get too comfortable, Billy,” Pat Garrett said. “We’ll be moving out for Las Vegas soon.”

  Jim East saw the color drain from Rudabaugh’s face. For a moment it looked as if he might speak, but his expression quickly subsided back to its normal scowl.

  Garrett looked up as an aging Navajo woman strode into the room. Jim picked up enough of the conversation to realize the woman had come to ask Garrett to allow the Kid to visit a sweetheart before being hauled off to prison and possibly to the hangman. The girl’s name was Paulita Maxwell, the daughter of a prominent Fort Sumner family.

  Garrett listened to the plea, then shrugged. “Guess it wouldn’t hurt anything,” he said. The lawman turned to Jim. “Jim, you and Hall take the Kid over to say his goodbyes.”

  “Has she got a branding iron?” Jim asked.

  Bausman started howling again.

  Garrett chuckled. “Keep a close eye on the Kid and Rudabaugh. Keep them shackled together, and don’t give them a chance to escape. Shoot them if they try anything, and don’t let it drag on too long. We move out in an hour.”

  Jim strode along the frozen street, threading his way through patches of ice and snowdrifts at the Kid’s side as they walked toward the Maxwell residence. Lee Hall flanked Dave Rudabaugh. The two prisoners had to march in lockstep to keep from tripping each other up. The Kid suddenly came to an abrupt halt, his face pale and eyes wide in fear as he stared down at his feet.

  “What is it, Billy?” Jim asked.

  “A bad sign.” The Kid pointed with manacled hands toward Rudabaugh’s leg irons. The shackle had come loose from the dirty outlaw’s ankle. Jim glanced at the parted chain, then studied the Kid’s face. The boy was obviously frightened. Jim had heard the Kid was superstitious, but he didn’t expect to see the young face twisted in terror over such an insignificant event.

  “It’s just a bad rivet,” Jim said.

  “No.” The Kid’s eyes darted about as if some monster were poised to pounce from a deserted adobe. “That’s a terrible bad sign. It means I’ll die and Dave will go free.”

  Jim saw there was no point in arguing. “Come on, Billy. We’ll get the leg iron fixed later. You haven’t much time to see your sweetheart.”

  The two Tascosa riders stood guard as the Kid and Paulita embraced in the parlor of the sprawling Maxwell home. Tears of despair streamed down the young girl’s face. Jim thought he saw moisture at the corner of the Kid’s eyes as well. The embrace dragged on, punctuated by passionate kisses, until Jim had to grab Billy’s arm and pull him from the girl’s grasp.

  “Come on, Billy,” Jim said, his voice soft. “You’ve already had more time with her than I’ve had with my own wife in the last few months.” He had to almost physically drag the Kid away. Jim glanced back once and saw Paulita leaning against the doorway of the house, her face buried in her hands.

  “I’ll see her again, Jim,” the Kid said, “if I don’t get killed first. That broken leg iron . . .” His voice trailed away.

  The Kid didn’t speak again until they had reached Beaver Smith’s store. Then he turned to Jim. “Jim, you’ve treated me right. I want you to have my rifle.” The Kid cocked an eyebrow at Garrett. “That all right with you, Pat?”

  Garrett shrugged. “Doesn’t matter to me.” He picked up the Kid’s Winchester and tossed it to Jim.

  “Just a goddamn minute!” Smith’s howl of outrage almost rattled the rafters of the low-roofed store. “As much money as them bastards owes me, I got a right to take anythin’ I want from ‘em, and I got a claim on that there rifle!”

  Jim looked at the Kid, felt his own face flush in anger, and then all but hurled the weapon at Smith. “Take it!” he snapped. “Put it toward what they owe you—and then shut the hell up!” Jim brought his temper under control with a physical effort. “Smith,” he said, his voice tight and cold now, “I figure that rifle is worth maybe a hundred dollars. You want to dispute that amount?”

  Beaver Smith started to sputter an answer, then saw the expression in Jim East’s eyes. The storekeeper was the first to drop his gaze. “I reckon that’s about right,” he muttered, “considerin’ whose gun it was.” Smith turned away and strode toward the back of the store.

  Jim watched him go. The flare of anger slowly faded. “Sorry about the gun, Billy,” Jim said, “but I just can’t stand a whiner. Thanks for offering it to me, anyway.”

  The Kid shrugged. “It’s just an old Winchester.” Then he grinned. “Worth it just to see somebody climb old Beaver’s tree.”

  “Smith had a point, Billy,” Jim said. “A man’s got to pay his debts.”

  “Yeah,” the Kid said, “I reckon that’s what’s got me a little worried right now.”

  By midafternoon all the prisoners were loaded into a wagon drawn by four mules. Lee Hall had the reins. Jim and Tom Emory rode in the wagon as guards, with Frank Stewart, Barney Mason and Pat Garrett as outriders. The lawman had given the Kid’s race mare to Stewart as compensation for his services. Jim noted that Garrett pointedly did not mention distributing shares of the five hundred dollar reward with any of the Texans. Jim didn’t dwell on the oversight long. He was there to do a job for the LX, not to collect bounty. Still, a few dollars would have helped buy that house in Tascosa for Hattie.

  “Pat, where we going to overnight?” The Kid asked.

  Garrett, riding alongside the wagon, shook his head. “We don’t. We’ll ride out the night. That’ll put us in Puerto de Luna by morning. We’ll rest up there and then head on into Las Vegas.”

  Las Vegas, New Mexico

  “Well, Jim,” Tom Emory said, “it looks like ol’ Pat has gone and stepped in it this time.”

  Jim East stared through the smoke-smudged window of the passenger train at the restless mob outside. “So it appears,” he said, “and I think he might have splattered some of it on us in the process.”

  The engine chuffed at idle at the Las Vegas station. The lynch mob had already pulled the engineer and brakeman from the cab. “You know how to drive a train, Tom?�
��

  Emory lowered a window and spat a stream of tobacco juice outside. The brown glob barely missed a Mexican holding an old Colt percussion pistol. “Nope. Hell, it’s all I can do to drive a horse.”

  Jim glanced around the passenger coach. There were a half dozen men, two women, three manacled prisoners, Tom Emory and himself trapped in the coach by the would-be lynch mob outside. The women’s faces were pale and anxious and a few of the men fidgeted on the unpadded seats.

  Garrett had made a mistake. He had dismissed all members of the posse but Jim and Tom, then tried to sneak the prisoners from the jail to the train without anyone finding out about it. Trying to do something on the quiet in a little New Mexico town’s like trying to walk on water , Jim thought, and as far as I know there’s not but one man in history been able to do that. His name wasn’t Garrett.

  The rumble of voices from the crowd damped the soft chuff of steam from the locomotive two cars ahead. Jim studied the faces of the prisoners. Dave Rudabaugh wore his usual scowl, but the swarthy, bearded face seemed a touch paler than usual. Jim saw the glitter of pure fear in Rudabaugh’s eyes. He knew he was the one the crowd wanted. He had killed a jailer here. The deputy had been Mexican. The faces in the crowd outside were all brown.

  The Kid leaned back in his seat, relaxed, a slight smile touching the corners of his mouth. He didn’t look the least bit worried, Jim noted, even if he was headed for a hemp necktie if that crowd managed to break in.

  Under pressure from the local law, Garrett had admitted he had no warrants or claims on Billy Wilson. The young outlaw now sat in the dank, cold cell of the Las Vegas jail. The third prisoner, Tom Pickett, sat slumped in his seat, eyes darting nervously around the coach. He was one scared young man, Jim thought.

  At the front of the coach Garrett stood, his hand on the Colt at his belt. The door swung open and the Mexican sheriff of Las Vegas, a big man with a florid face and a Smith & Wesson New Russian Model pistol holstered on a broad hip, stepped into the car.

  “We want the outlaws. Especially the one called Rudabaugh,” the sheriff demanded. Dark eyes snapped in the scowling face. “Give up the prisoners and the people outside will let you go, Garrett. If you don’t, I can’t stop this crowd.” The man spoke in Spanish, but Jim was able to follow the rapid- fire words well enough to know trouble was just a pull of a trigger away.

  Garrett studied the sheriff in silence for a moment. The rumble of the crowd outside grew louder, muffled only slightly by the gusty wind. Garrett shook his head. “You can’t have them. I promised these men safe passage to Santa Fe. I’m not going back on my word and turn them over to some lynch mob.”

  The sheriff’s hand dropped to the big pistol at his hip. “Then I guess we’ll just take them, Garrett,” he said.

  “I don’t think so.” Garrett whipped his own Colt from its holster and rammed the muzzle into the sheriff’s belly.

  The Mexican lawman swallowed hard and lifted his hand clear of the Smith & Wesson. The weight of a metal star on a man’s chest wasn’t nearly as heavy as the poke of a forty-five muzzle in the gut. “Get off my train,” Garrett said. There was an edge to his voice now. “I’m moving these prisoners and I’ll kill any man who stands in my way.”

  “You can’t move the train,” the sheriff sputtered. “We have the engineer and brakeman. You have no choice but to give us the prisoners.”

  “No. If I have to, I’ll hand every prisoner a gun and tell them to do their best to kill the whole damn mob.” Garrett’s words carried well throughout the passenger car.

  “Give me a gun,” the Kid called out. “If I had my Winchester I’d whip the whole lot of them!”

  “Shut up, Billy,” Jim said. “This whole thing could blow up any minute. Don’t make it worse than it is or you may get strung up along with your friend Dave.”

  The sheriff backed away, hands held palm-out. He almost tripped and fell as he went backward through the door. “I can’t stop them, Garrett,” Jim heard him say as the door started to close.

  “Then we’ll stop them,” Garrett replied. The lean marshal holstered his handgun and turned to face the passengers in the car. “Everybody better get off here. We’re going to have a fight and I don’t want any innocent people hurt.”

  Three of the men and both the women practically jumped from their seats and bolted for the door. They jostled each other on the way out. Jim reached out, clamped a hand on the Kid’s shoulder and jammed him back down into the seat. “I don’t think Pat meant you, Billy. Stick around for a while. Let’s see how this turns out.”

  Garrett raised an eyebrow at Jim. “East, you and Emory have done your job. I can’t order you to stay and face a lynch mob. You can go if you like.”

  Jim shook his head emphatically. “I didn’t ride all those miles, starve half to death, nearly freeze, and almost get my butt shot off to turn these men over to a dishonest lynching.” He cracked open the action of his Winchester, checked to make sure there was a round chambered, and looked at Garrett. “I’ll stay. The job isn’t done yet.”

  “Me, too,” Emory said. “Maybe Billy and the boys deserve hanging, sure enough. But it ought to be an honest hanging. With a judge and jury, not some bunch of mad Mexicans.” Emory nodded toward Rudabaugh. “Personally, I’d just as soon give ‘em old Dave here. But I reckon he’s part of the roundup and I ain’t one to split a herd.”

  Garrett nodded in satisfaction, then turned to the remaining three men. “How about you fellows? This isn’t your fight.”

  One of the men, a grizzled and weathered old-timer with a tobacco-stained beard, shifted his chew from one cheek to the other and shook his head. “I paid my fare to Santa Fe. Reckon I’ll stay on.” He cradled an ancient trapdoor Springfield rifle in his arms. His companion, a few years younger but just as weather-worn, nodded. “Me, too. Me and my partner here fought Apaches and grizzlies from Arizona to Montana. We ain’t scared of a few Messkins.”

  Garrett shifted his gaze to the third man, who pulled back his heavy coat to display a Colt Lightning forty-one caliber revolver in a shoulder holster. “Name’s J. F. Morley,” he said. “Post office inspector. There’s mail on this train. I’ll stick.”

  “Much obliged to you gentlemen,” Garrett said. He turned and walked back to the front of the coach.

  Jim lowered the smudged window at his side, winced at the blast of frigid air, and listened to the angry rumble of the crowd outside. Two rows ahead, Tom Emory also stared out an open window.

  “Tom, you see that big Mexican in the red mackinaw? The one holding that double shotgun with bores big enough to put a groundhog in?”

  “I see him, Jim.”

  “If they work up enough mad and enough guts to rush us,” Jim said, “I’ll take care of him. You pick out another target. No use both of us wasting lead on the same man.”

  J.F. Morley lowered his own window, leaned out and glanced around. “Rifle barrels sticking out from the woodpile yonder,” he said. “No sign of the engineer or brakeman.” Morley drew back inside and snorted in disgust. “No wonder the damn trains are never on time. Can’t get good help these days.”

  The rumble of the crowd outside grew louder, more angry.

  “Get set, boys,” Garrett said. “Looks like they’re going to come at us any minute.” He pulled his revolver.

  Jim centered the sights of his rifle on the chest of the man with the shotgun.

  The crowd started forward, then suddenly stopped. Some of the men at the rear turned, pointed, and jabbered in excitement.

  Garrett peered out a window. “Three white men coming up behind them,” he said. “I know a couple of those boys. Jim McIntyre and George Close. They’re carrying more artillery than the First Illinois.”

  Jim chanced a glance of his own. The three Anglos stood fanned out in the street, six feet apart, each man with a rifle or shotgun at the ready and revolvers buckled outside their heavy coats. The Mexican mob milled about, confused. Jim knew the reason for the sudden reluc
tance. With the Anglo men at their rear and several guns in the coach with the prisoners, they faced some heavy losses if they charged the train.

  Jim took his finger off the trigger. There was no predicting what a mob would do. A gang of men was as unpredictable as a herd of brush-wild South Texas Longhorns. But until they got things sorted out, there wasn’t any reason to shoot the man with the smoothbore.

  Morley strode to Garrett’s side. “Sheriff,” he said, “before I started working for the post office I was an engineer with the Chicago and Northwestern. While all this yammering’s going on, I could slip out, work my way to the cab, yank the throttle open and get us the hell out of here.”

  Garrett thought for a moment, then nodded. “Might be worth the risk if you can pull it off, Mister Morley.”

  The postal inspector cracked the door, peered outside and slipped from the coach.

  Ten minutes later the milling crowd scattered with yelps of surprise as a cloud of steam burst from the locomotive boiler and the whistle screamed. The drive wheels screeched against iron rails, spinning as they tried to find traction on the cold, slick iron. Then the wheels bit and the locomotive lurched forward. The jolt of slack yanked from couplings rocked Jim back in his seat.

  By the time the mob realized what was happening the train was gaining speed. Jim heaved a sigh of relief as the coach rumbled from the station. Through the window he saw the expressions on brown faces change from confusion to anger and disappointment.

  As the train passed the three heavily armed Anglos standing in the street behind the mob, Pat Garrett yelled through an open window, “Thanks, boys!”

  One of the trio waved a hand casually and yelled back, “Glad to help, Pat.”

  Jim glanced at Tom Emory. A broad grin creased the LIT cowboy’s stubbled face. “Morley must have the throttle jammed through the boiler,” Jim said.

  “Yeah. I just hope he remembers where the brakes are when we hit Santa Fe.”