Riders of Judgment

by Frederick Manfred

  “Ma! You ain’t thinkin’ a kissin’ me, are ye?”

  “Bah! My husband had that terrible habit too.”

  Dale raised a gaunt brow. He’d never heard her mention her husband before.

  “Yes,” Ma went on, pecking at the blue tablecloth before her with a fingernail, “yes, I was married once. But the son of a gun wouldn’t work.” Ma fixed her eyes on Dale. “You know what he did? He run off with one of them poxy whores across the street there. Sister Fannie’s.”

  Dale smiled, a drop of brown juice trickling out of one corner of his mouth. “I take it you didn’t get along then either.”

  “Naw, Bill always played hooky on me when he got the chance. He was always finding some pushover somewhere.”

  “Oh?” Dale’s eyes roved the room. Up on the shelf over the big black kitchen range the alarm clock showed eleven. A streak of soot went straight up to the ceiling where smoke had escaped from the stove.

  “And then too, Bill liked the open country. He was always traipsing off somewhere. Trappin’ wolves for Jesse. Hunting grizzlies in the Big Stonies. Me, I liked the city better.” Ma sighed out of her chubby fleshes. “Yes, I sure do like livin’ in the city better. Where I can look out of the window at night and see lights. Lights are a mighty comfortin’ thing to a lonesome woman.” Ma gave him a look.

  Dale chewed very slow. “You mind me of Rory. I think she’s sorry too she came out to live with me on the Bitterness there. She claims our valley looks like hell with the folks moved out. Except us.”

  “Well, Dale, all I got to say is—you got you a good woman there. Hang onto her, if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Don’t worry. I will. I think a lot of my little Rory.”

  “And throw that spit-maker away. I’ll give you a piece of raisin cake if you will.”

  “Cut the deck again?”

  “I say, throw that wad of tobacco away.”

  “Oh. That. Well…”

  “C’mon, throw it away.”

  “Oh, durn it, I suppose I better give in. All right.” Dale caught the chaw in a cupped hand and got up and dropped it in the stove. His lower lip set out some. “You’re about as bad as Rory at that.”

  “Well! If that ain’t a nice thing to say! Now you don’t get the raisin cake.”

  For a bit it looked like Ma would get mad and shoo him off to bed. But lonesomeness won out and pretty soon she was chattering away like a magpie that had discovered the season’s first ear of sweet com. She had something to say about everything in town: husbands, wives, lovers, whores, detectives, abortions, miscarriages, and many another item of female trouble.

  Ma talked about sex with as much sparkle as a cattleman might talk about bad weather. She hinted, with a duck of her tongue and a roll of her lively brown eyes, that she’d once been hot-blooded. Yes, and hot-blooded enough to keep Bill steady for the first while. She smiled too when she said that now in her middle years she had sex only as an accommodation for certain of her better friends.

  Ma had a juicy story to tell about Sister Fannie’s establishment of soiled doves across the street. It had to do with the swindle Sister Fannie had pulled on the lonesome cowboys the previous winter. It seems that on a trip to Sioux Falls, that burg known as the divorce colony of the Dakotas, she’d come across a pretty little kewpie of a girl, hardly more than four feet tall, just divorced yet looking for all the world like an innocent thirteen-year-old. Sister Fannie took her home with her, put her up in a fancy room in back, and casually let it be known around the saloons that Kewpie was her virgin sister. For twenty-five dollars she’d let the right cowboy buy her a friendly beer.

  Dale couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that. “By Grab, I’ve heard me many a windy on the trail, but that’s the first time I ever heard of a virgin in a whorehouse.”

  Dale and Ma laughed together a long time over that one.

  The next day, Dale awakened to the sound of trains down at the depot doing their usual morning chores, bumping and blowing. He got up; had a good breakfast with Ma of pancakes, ham, syrup, and coffee; and then went around town humping up his supplies.

  Antelope was a town of some thousand souls. It had one main street with frame houses and false-front stores lining both sides. It had a courthouse, three churches, a fire department with a hook-and-ladder company, a town marshal, a harness shop, a saddle shop, a hardware store, a post office, and a half-dozen saloons.

  Dale liked to go through the back alley and enter a store through the rear door. Dale knew more short cuts in Antelope than the townsfolks themselves did. And he got to see all kinds of things never seen otherwise: drunks sleeping it off, tomcats prowling for mice and rats, the contents of chamberpots dumped in a pail behind the hotel, cinnamon bears nosing through garbage cans, the latest shipment of Winchesters, a café hand turning an ice-cream freezer, huge piles of empty whisky bottles behind saloons, coils of new rope behind the harness shop, discarded corsets, and best yet the whores at Sister Fannie’s sunning themselves on the back porch. One day in town and Dale was up on stuff.

  By noon he was done. The spring wagon was so loaded down it looked like a small donkey carrying a haystack. He watered his bays in the town trough and tied them to a hitching post in front of the post office. With luck, he could be home by two in the morning.

  Thinking to fortify himself for the long ride home, through the dark night, he decided to drop in for a drink at Butcherknife Bain’s saloon.

  The moment he pushed through the hand-polished swinging double doors, he knew it was a mistake. A bunch of Jesse Jacklin’s boys stood lined up along the bar. All of them wore guns; all were dusty from a long ride in; all had an owly look. The rows of shells studding their flat wide cartridge belts glinted in the dim light. Their leather chaps stood out wide and stiff, shiny from use. Leather work gloves, rolled into tight packs, stuck out of hip pockets. All wore boots of the best make, exquisitely fitted, giving them a chosen look.

  The smell of whisky and the stink of decaying cigars in the cuspidors was strong in the saloon, strong enough almost to cut the breath. Green flies buzzed against the dusty green front window. The floor was worn all along the bar, with pine sawdust and bits of horse manure lying in the low hollows a quarter-inch thick. Two rows of tables and iron-rod chairs stood empty in the back of the place. A cat lay asleep above the mirror behind the bar. A framed liquor license hung on the corrugated tin wall beside the mirror. Only the bar looked new; its deep mahogany shone blood-brown from much polishing.

  The bartender was Butcherknife Bain, a big bald man dressed in leather apron and striped white shirt without collar. Down in Texas, Butcherknife was supposed to have cut off his wife’s nose for cuckolding him. Nobody had proof of it, however, and since Butcherknife was in another state, nobody bothered him about it. Folk were also careful not to use his nickname to his face.

  One of the cowpunchers, a wizened wiry runt who wore ’em low and who’d drunk just enough rye to be high lonesome, spoke up from the far curve of the bar. “Here comes that lamb-licker Hammett and his ewe stink.”

  Dale recognized the voice. Stalker Smith. Dale put a foot on the brass rail and stiffened to his full height.

  Butcherknife gave Dale a heavy look. “Well, what’ll it be?”

  “I’ll have some of your wet goods.”

  “Which?”

  “The one with the live snake in it. Something that’ll cut the dust in the throat.”

  “Sure thing.” Butcherknife set out a bottle of bourbon and a glass.

  Stalker shifted feet on the brass rail. His leathery lips curved back and down into a deep sneer. The bunch standing around him waited. Stalker said, “Bain, better you should give him your special booze. The one what makes a wolf out of a pet rabbit.”

  Dale ignored the taunt as he poured himself a shot.

  “Yeh, it’s like I always say, boys. Everything in front of a sheep is eaten off; everything behind is killed.”

  Dale quaffed the snort in on
e huge swallow and set his glass down with a whack. The whisky cut a glowing passage through the middle of his chest. He smacked his lips. “Good enough to raise a blood blister on a dried-up boot all right.”

  Butcherknife gave the mahogany bar a swipe with a weathered rag. “We aim to please. Nothing but the best gut-poison served here.”

  One of the hardrocks next to Dale, an incredibly sun-blackened young fellow, said to Butcherknife, “To go back to where we was before we was interrupted … when I first spotted me that crumble of old bones in the gulch, I knew it was time for me to roll my tail for home. I tell you, Bain, I pushed my hoss so fast he was kicking jack rabbits out of the trail.”

  “Yeh,” Butcherknife said, “I guess there’s plenty of riders on the skyline these days.”

  Stalker kept worrying it down at his end of the bar. Tipping back his dented hat, he snarled, “I reckon some folks just never get around to reading the Good Book. Even if they is Sunday School teachers.”

  Dale took another snort. He was quite aware of how his .45 lay hot against his thigh. He wasn’t the best shot in the county, but if it came to shooting he wasn’t going to duck it. He wiped his face in his pink handkerchief.

  “You’d think,” Stalker continued, “you’d think they’d know what they was reading when they was reading. Especially where it says: ‘Seems it a small thing when you eat up the good pasture and tread down the rest with your hooves? And drink of the deep water Mid foul what’s left with your arse?’ ”

  Silence.

  “That’s in Ezekiel,” Stalker added. “Or ain’t you come that fer yet?’’

  Silence.

  “Hah?” Stalker shot out.

  Leather chaps rustled. Green flies bumped against the front window.

  The hardrock next to Dale picked up his end of it once more. Remembering something, he started to laugh, and said, “That Grindstone Jen, what a stick she is.”

  Butcherknife smiled too, revealing big horse teeth with spaces between. “Yeh, Sister Fannie has her times with Jen.”

  “Nobody takes such a chance as us whores,” a bardog laughed.

  The sun-blackened fellow whacked his glass on the bar. “You know what that Jen did last week? She showed us a new dance. The can-can.”

  “What in blazes is that?” still another bardog wanted to know.

  “Well, it’s a dance where you …well, it’s a hell of a thing. You have to see it to believe it. Especially the way Grindstone Jen does it.” The fellow let fly another laugh. “Jen put so much into it Sister Fannie finally had to snub her down. ‘My God, Jen,’ she says,’ be careful. You’re showing all you got.’ ”

  Butcherknife laughed too. “Yeh, that Jen, there’s not much upstairs with her. Just a little whore with a big belly button.”

  There was a great laugh all up and down the bar. Even Stalker and Dale joined in.

  Everybody drank up; set out for another slug.

  One of the bardogs was helping himself pretty liberally to the peeled hard-boiled eggs in a bowl on the bar. Butcherknife had set them out for the hard drinkers, and custom decreed that two drinks got you one egg free. Butcherknife gave the bardog a hard look. “I think you killed the nickel you spent for that beer.”

  The bardog got hot. “What a short-change joint this is.”

  “Well, you can always get throwed out, you know.”

  The bardog shut up.

  Still Stalker worried it. “By Grab, when we get through with them noble shepherds of the Lord, there won’t be as much as a tail feather left of ’em anywhere in Bad Country. Or up in Crimson Wall. Yeh, and all their lousy Plymouth Rock chickens either. Let alone all their stinkin’ pink petunias.”

  Dale knew the time had come for him to make his move. His neck and back sweat frost. But before he could set down his glass, his eye caught something through the dusty green window and across the street.

  Getting down off a wet horse and climbing the steps into Great Western Outfitters was Link Keeler, past friend of the family who’d killed Gramp Hammett.

  Sudden hate boiled up in Dale. He threw a ringing silver dollar on the bar, and without a word more burst out through the swinging double doors. “Hey, you!” he bellowed into the sun-white dusty street. But the door to Great Western had closed. “Hell’s fire!”

  Dale hobbed on high heels across the rutted street. Hand to the rail, he leaped over the hitching rack, stirring up the waiting horses, and jumped up three wooden steps and pushed inside Great Western.

  He went in so fast it took him a moment to make out the dark interior, mounds of sacked saddles and coils of rope and masses of colored blankets. Blinking, he spotted proprietor Homer Fox sitting beside a roll-top desk near the window. Homer was fat and his mouth hung open.

  Dale’s eyes narrowed back to gimlets deep under gaunt brows. His mouth worked like a fish lipping new water. “Where’d the murderin’ son-of-a-gun go, Homer?”

  Homer’s black eyes rolled to the right.

  Dale wheeled, hand over his gun.

  Link Keeler smiled at him from between a pile of gleaming blue Winchesters and a stack of new blue Colts. “Something you want?” Link had a high piping voice.

  Dale’s long head slowly crooked forward. His hand gripped the butt of his .45. Set. For some reason, though, his hand didn’t draw. He had the bulge on the other man yet his hand just did not come up.

  “Something you want?” Link said again.

  Dale looked Link over from head to foot. He hadn’t seen him for some ten years, but so far as he could see Link hadn’t changed a particle—tall, lean, with as cold a smile under that black killer mustache of his as ever. Link’s clear gray eyes with their deep black lashes and strong bold black brows were still hard to hold up to. He was mean handsome and as softly velvet in his manners as a pet viper. From the sweat in the armpits of his gray shirt and in the seat of his brown pants, and the white-gray dust on his brown boots and brown vest, it was obvious he’d just come in from a long hard ride, probably from the alkali desert east of the Bitterness River. His gun and the shells in his belt, though, were shiny and clean.

  Dale’s lips drew back, showing more teeth to the back and sides of his mouth than in front. “You lookin’ for somebody else to murder now, Link?”

  The smile widened ever so little under the mustache. The gray eyes opened some, with the black around them sharpening.

  “Hah?” Dale shot next.

  Fat Homer behind them got up beside his roll-top desk. “Did you say’Link’?” Homer turned to Link. “I thought you said your name was Hunt?”

  “What?” Dale snapped. “’Hunt’? Ah, so the murderin’ bustard’s got himself a new name, has he? Well, well.”

  “Hunt?” Homer asked again. “Didn’t you?”

  Link’s smile widened another hair or two.

  Still leaning forward from the hips, Dale slowly started for him. “Shootin’ is too good for the likes of you.”

  Link’s black-trim eyes took on a hooded look. “Want to make it bare hands then?” For all his cool air, Link’s high voice gave him the sound of a man who was always in a scream inside.

  “ ‘Bare hands’? Never!” Dale spat it out. “If the Lord’d intended me to fight like a dog, he’d’ve give me longer teeth and claws to fight with.”

  Link smiled.

  “Link, or whatever you call yourself now, since you’re still probably stinkin’ for some kind of crazy-headed revenge on us Hammetts, come on, I’ll take you on with guns. You never yet killed you a man but what you shot him in the back. Come on, fight a man what’s lookin’ right at you.”

  Link smiled.

  “Hell’s fire, you are yeller, ain’t ye, like we always said. As yeller as mustard without the bite.”

  “Dale, I got a question to ask you.”

  “Yeh? Well, fire away. What is it?”

  “You sure no one ever did you a favor?”

  “What?” Dale’s eyes rolled in rapid thought. “Why, you cowardly son-of-a-
bitch, you can fill your hand now.”

  When Link still did not move, just stared back at him with glowing black-edged eyes, Dale started forward again, intending to slap him into action. Dale took two steps—and then fell flat on his face. His elbow hit the floor and his .45 popped from his hand. Cursing, Dale scrambled to his feet; saw that he’d tripped on a loose end of rope spilling off a nearby coil. He spotted his gun and dove for it. When he came up with it, set to blast, Link was gone. The aisle between the Winchesters and Colts was empty.

  Dale whirled around. “Where’d he go, Homer?”

  Homer’s fat eyes flicked toward the back door.

  Dale turned just in time to see the door close softly.

  “Why, the goddam big coward!” Dale shot out through the door after Link.

  But there was no one in sight in the alley. Dale next ran around the side of the building. Still no one. Then, coming around the front side, he was just in time to see dust settling in the street, and where the street curved to cross the bridge over Sweet Creek, he saw a fleeing black horsetail vanish behind a cottonwood. The throwing clop of horse hooves gradually faded away.

  “He ran from me. He ran from me,” Dale said to himself.

  The door to Great Western opened and Homer came out on the steps. “You see him?”

  “He ran from me, the low murdering coward. I guess he knew better than to fool with me.”

  Homer said, “You’re lucky your gun didn’t go off when you fell on your elbow.”

  Dale came to. “What?”

  “I said you could easy’ve shot yourself.”

  “Naw. I never carry more than five beans in the wheel. Hammer is always down on an empty chamber.”

  “Still was plumb lucky I’d say.”

  A thought came to Dale. “What’d you say he called himself?”

  “Hunt. Hunt Lawton.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Said he come from Texas, where he was marshal. He took on the job of inspector of cattle for Jesse Jacklin last week. A peace officer.”