Fatal Justice

by Ralph Compton

  When the trough was empty Ash took the horses to the last building in Selby, the livery. The double doors were open, the shade inside a welcome relief from the relentless sun. Only one stall was occupied, by a cow. “Anyone here?” he called out.

  From the back shuffled a man with white whiskers. He used a cane thick enough to serve as a cudgel. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like to put these animals up,” Ash informed him.” Any chance I might be able to sell the grulla? I’ll throw in the saddle if I’m offered enough.”

  The man scratched his whiskers. “I have no need for a horse. Can’t think of anyone who does. But if you stay the night I can put out the word and maybe one of the farmers will be interested.”

  “You’d go to that much trouble?”

  “For a dollar I will.”

  “You folks hereabouts sure do love money.”

  “Can’t live without mammon,” the old man said. “Need it for our vices. I have two. Tobacco and coffin varnish.”

  Ash’s interest perked. “I thought this is a dry town. Where do you get your drinks?”

  The old man reached behind him and produced a flask. Uncapping it, he took a sip, then held it out to Ash. “A swallow is free. Any more than that and I’ll have to charge you.”

  “A swallow it is. I’m obliged.” Ash grinned as the whiskey burned down his throat and exploded in the pit of his stomach. Reluctantly he gave the flask back.

  “You drink good whiskey.”

  The old man chuckled. “Don’t tell the mayor. He’s a teetotaler and thinks the rest of the world should be the same.”

  “One of those.”

  “Oh, he’s a good man at heart. He always does what he thinks is best for the town.”

  Ash handed over the reins. He was bone weary. “I could use some sleep. I don’t suppose you rent out the hayloft?”

  “Now there’s an idea. Why didn’t I think of that?” The old man winked. “Climb on up if you want. I’ll strip your animals and rub them down but it will cost you extra.”

  “It won’t surprise me if I leave this town broke.”

  Ash made the old man promise to wake him if any strangers showed up.

  Then, braced for another attack, Ash scaled the ladder. He made it to the top without incident. As a precaution he opened the hayloft door and piled hay near it so he could see the entire length of the street. He placed the Winchester and his saddlebags next to him.

  Lying on his back with his head in his hands Ash wondered how long it would be before Ben Sharkey showed. He hoped to high heaven the boy hadn’t lied. Not when it would take weeks if not months to track Sharkey down.

  Ash needed the hunt to be over with. He didn’t possess the stamina he used to. He tired too easily. Doc Peters had warned him that might be a consequence and once again the sawbones was right.

  Ash stared at his chest. It appeared normal. No one could tell by looking at him that a fingernail-sized chunk of lead was slowly, inevitably, boring into his heart. He almost regretted not going to Boston to see the famous surgeon. Then he thought of Ben Sharkey and how much he yearned to curl Sharkey’s toes and his regret faded.

  A man had to have his priorities.

  On that ironic note Ash drifted into limbo. He dreamed he was being chased by a bull buffalo, only the buffalo was made of lead. It clanked as it ran, its hooves so heavy they sank into the earth. He flew with all his speed but the bull slowly gained. Just when it was about to trample him he woke up with a start and lay panting, his body covered with sweat.

  That was another thing. Ash was having a lot more nightmares than he ever did. Doc Peters hadn’t mentioned he would but it had to be due to his condition.

  Ash gazed down the dusty street—and couldn’t believe his eyes. Six horses were tied to the hitch rail in front of the general store. Six horses caked with dust from miles on the trail.

  Swearing, Ash sat up. He jammed on his hat and moved to the ladder. The old man was nowhere in sight. Ash should have known better than to rely on him.

  Quickly descending, he moved to the double doors.

  Selby was as quiet and still as a cemetery. As Ash looked on a farmer came out of the bank and walked to a wagon. Presently both rattled out of town.

  Four men came out of the general store and watched it leave. The stamp of the hard case was on each face. Each had a revolver on his hip.

  Sharkey’s men, Ash reckoned. He was proven right a moment later when the door opened again and out strolled a fifth two-legged wolf and Ben Sharkey himself.

  Ash snapped the Winchester to his shoulder but he didn’t shoot. He might not kill with the first shot. Better to wait until they were closer.

  Sharkey had his thumbs hooked in his gun belt. He favored spurs with large rowels and they glinted in the sun as he came out into the middle of the street and moved toward the bank. Three of his men flanked him. The other two stayed in front of the general store.

  They were about to rob the bank.

  Ash centered his sights on Sharkey. They were coming in his direction; another dozen steps and he would shoot Sharkey where the man had shot him. He wished Sharkey could suffer as he was suffering, wished that by some miracle his slug would lodge in Sharkey’s heart as Sharkey’s damnable slug had lodged in his. He thumbed back the hammer and lightly curled his finger to the trigger. He was set.

  The pain hit him like a hammer blow to the chest. The pressure was worse than ever and Ash doubled over. He tried to take aim but he couldn’t straighten. His blood began pounding in his temples and he thought he would be sick.

  Ash needed morphine. The kit was up in the hayloft in his saddlebags. He turned and tried to walk to the ladder but had managed only a couple of steps when he fell onto his side. He looked for the proprietor. Desperate, he used the Winchester as a crutch and rose halfway. The pressure proved too much.

  Ash groaned. He hated being helpless. From down the street came shouts and a commotion. Guns boomed. A woman screamed.

  Ben Sharkey had struck the bank.

  God, no, Ash thought. He pushed against the ground but he was too weak to rise more than a few inches. He had to lie there and listen to the uproar as the man who was to blame for his helplessness, the man he had come so far to kill, blasted his way out of Selby.

  From the sounds of things some of the townspeople were fighting back. Rifles cracked. A shotgun mimicked a cannon.

  It occurred to Ash that someone might make a lucky shot and bring Sharkey down. He groaned louder, not because of the pain but because he feared his vengeance would be thwarted. He clawed at the dirt and got nowhere.

  Another scream pierced the air. A horse whinnied. The gunfire reached a crescendo as hooves drummed and someone shouted, “Stop them! They took all the money!”

  Pouring sweat, Ash crawled. The pressure had eased a trifle, enough that he made it to the bottom of the ladder. He reached up, took hold of a rung and sought to pull to his feet but only made it to his knees. Exhausted, he rested his forehead against the ladder.

  Hands gripped his shoulders, gentle hands that turned him and propped him up. “Are you shot, Mister?” the old man asked.

  “No,” Ash got out.

  “What’s wrong, then?”

  “Sick,” Ash said.

  The man pressed a palm to his forehead. “You look awful. Rest easy and I’ll fetch help.” He rose and limped out on his cane.

  Ash’s craving for morphine became overwhelming. He hooked an elbow over a rung and thrust himself erect. He would swear his chest was about to explode. He raised his right boot, then his left. Clinging by one hand, he swayed. The kit was so near yet so far. He vowed that from now on he would keep it with him always. The hypodermic, at least, filled and ready to be injected. He climbed higher and it taxed him to where the livery spun and his head seemed to turn inside out.

  “I don’t deserve this,” Ash protested his fate. Undaunted, he raised a boot . . . and fell. His strength completely gave out. He landed h
ard on his left shoulder. Pain on top of pain now, and him a travesty. It was enough to make him sob in frustration and humiliation.

  “Not this way,” Ash said, and would have sat up except for a black wave that washed over him and left him floundering in despair.

  Then came nothing, nothing at all.

  Chapter 8

  They told him that if he ever came back to Selby they would shoot him. It was a hell of a thing to say to an ex-lawman.

  Mayor Quilby had summed up their sentiments in a manner befitting a politician. “We’re appalled and shocked at your behavior. You knew these men were coming to rob our bank. Yet you didn’t say anything. You didn’t warn us. You rode in and slaked your thirst with our water and boarded your horses at our livery, but not one word. You took advantage of our hospitality but kept quiet about our peaceful community being in dire danger. Now the clerk at our bank is dead and a farmer is dead and three others are gravely wounded. For a small town like ours this is a calamity and it didn’t have to happen.”

  Ash had been sitting in the livery at the time, regaining his strength. He had told them everything when they revived him. A stupid thing to do, now that he looked back on it. He had been in so much pain, mentally he wasn’t quite himself.

  Eight or nine people were there with the mayor, and the looks they gave him were looks of utter and total contempt. The mayor had gone on.

  “No, this horror didn’t have to happen. You’re as much to blame as this Sharkey desperado because you had it in your power to prevent it. Why didn’t you? I’ll tell you why. You didn’t warn us because your revenge was more important to you than our lives. That you were a marshal makes it all the more reprehensible. Lawmen take oaths to uphold the law. They protect lives. They watch out for the innocent. You threw all that aside for self-interest. The blood on the floor of our bank and in our street was shed because you are a despicable human being.”

  The words stung. Ash had tried to get them to understand but they kept on giving him those disdainful looks. Finally he recovered and the liveryman saddled the roan and the grulla and the good townsfolk of Selby escorted him to the edge of town and sent him on his way with a warning to never, ever come back.

  “You just don’t understand,” was Ash’s parting remark.

  Now it was the middle of the afternoon and he was following the trail left by the outlaws. It was plain enough that a ten-year-old could do it. He hadn’t had an attack since he left Selby. In his jacket, ready for use, was the hypodermic, just in case.

  Ash saw the bodies on his way out of town. They were laid out in front of the bank. The clerk had been a little mouse, the farmer a burly man of the earth with a beard down to his waist. Ash had felt nothing. Why should he when he didn’t know them? A woman was on her knees, wailing over the dead farmer, and other women were trying to comfort her.

  Ash’s conscience pricked him but he shrugged it off. He had done what he had to.

  The trail led to the northwest, toward the border. Ash guessed that Sharkey was getting the hell out of Texas before the Rangers showed up. Sharkey was as mean as they came but he was no fool. No one ever tangled with the Texas Rangers and won. Oh, a Ranger was killed now and again, but other Rangers always dealt with the killers. They were death on horseback for lawbreakers, and Sharkey knew it.

  Ash was glad he hadn’t sold the grulla. By switching horses when one or the other tired, he was covering twice the ground. He aimed to overtake the outlaws before too long, a tall order given his affliction.

  Evening found Ash miles from anywhere, alone in the vastness of the rolling hills. He made camp in a dry wash so his fire wouldn’t be seen. He craved coffee but water was scarce and he didn’t know how long his canteen had to last. Supper consisted of jerky and a few Saratoga chips he’d come across in Lonnie’s saddlebags.

  The gray of twilight gave way to the pitch mantle of night. Stars blossomed and the breeze picked up. Off among the hills a coyote yipped and was answered by another.

  Ash gazed at the stars and listened to the cries. In the vastness of things he was a miserable little speck. What did it matter that he was hovering at death’s brink? It mattered not one tiny whit.

  Depressed, Ash munched and settled into his blankets. For some reason he thought of the women he had known.

  There had been Darcy. Sweet, nimble, playful Darcy, who at sixteen had been his first love. Her ripe body held such promise that Ash almost married her. Wan derlust had proven stronger than plain lust and he struck off to see the world, leaving her heartbroken.

  After Darcy came more fallen doves than Ash could remember even if he cared to. He’d gone through a spell where he visited every bawdy house he came across. He’d been up to his armpits in whores and loved it.

  The luster wore off the faded roses, though, and Ash had cast about for a steady bed warmer. That was when he met Claire. She worked for her father at a feed and grain. Ash had nearly collided with her as she was coming out of a millinery, and he was smitten at first sight. She was quiet and shy and much too thin but there was something about her that stirred him where no other woman ever did. He courted her and won her heart. The happiest day of his life was the day she stood in front of a parson and said “I do.”

  Ash had his future all worked out. They would have kids and raise their family in a nice home and grow old together and die.

  Six months after they were wed the coughing began. At first she coughed only a little. She tried herbs and her grandmother’s remedy but the cough persisted and became worse. Ash tried to talk her into going to see a doctor. She insisted it was nothing and she would be fine.

  Then she began coughing up blood.

  Consumption, they called it. The doctor said it killed thousands every year. No cure existed although a dry climate was supposed to lessen the torment. Ash wanted to take Claire to Arizona but she insisted on staying in Kansas, where she had friends and was comfortable.

  Ash did all he could. He stayed by her side the last couple of weeks when she was bedridden and too weak to lift a cup to her lips. He’d held her cold hand and looked down at her and wanted to scream.

  Claire wasted away until she was a breathing skeleton. Her skin clung to her bones and her eyes were sunken pits. Yet through it all she smiled and told him how much she loved him and thanked him for being the best husband any woman could have.

  Burying her was the low point in Ash’s life. He went on a binge, drinking himself senseless every night. He visited bawdy houses but for the life of him he couldn’t remember a single woman he bedded. He was trying to forget but it didn’t work. Some sorrows ran too deep.

  A friend pulled him up by his bootstraps. That friend happened to be the town marshal in Salina, and once Ash was sober and stayed sober, the friend pinned a deputy’s badge on him.

  Ash liked enforcing the law. He liked helping people. He gave up the bawdy houses and hardly ever touched a bottle and life was good again. Deep down, though, was an emptiness that could never be filled. It didn’t help that everywhere he went, everything he saw, reminded him of Claire. Finally he decided a change of scenery was in order. He drifted south into Texas and fate brought him to Mobeetie, a town in need of a lawman.

  Since then he’d enjoyed a steady job and a steady life. He was reasonably content. He figured to stay on as marshal until he was ready for a rocking chair.

  Then along came Ben Sharkey.

  Ash was so engrossed in his past that he was slow to react to the crunch of a twig. Belatedly, he sat up. Something was out there in the dark. An animal, he reckoned, although animals generally shied from campfires. He started to turn and glimpsed a streak of movement out of the corner of his eye. Heaving off his blanket, he grabbed for the Winchester but he barely got hold of it when a heavy body slammed into his with the impact of a battering ram. He was hurled onto his back but scrambled up and clawed for the Remington revolver.

  A second attacker came at him from behind. The first inkling Ash had was a blow to his ba
ck that nearly snapped his spine. Flung forward onto his belly, he twisted and had the Remington half out when a kick sent it spinning from his fingers. He pushed up onto his elbow, only to receive another blow from the side that smashed him to the earth, dazed and gasping for breath.

  Ash looked up. There were two of them, swarthy and stocky, with black hair down to their shoulders. He took them for Comanches but they might be Apaches or some other tribe. He’d had little dealings with Indians and couldn’t tell one from the other.

  Their faces were cold, almost hateful. Bows were slung over their backs and they had long-bladed knives in their hands, which fortunately they hadn’t used. One of them bent and jabbed him and said something in their tongue that brought a wicked grin to the other.

  Ash realized they’d deliberately taken him alive. They could easily have killed him. He envisioned the tortures they might inflict and swallowed. They were two cats who had caught a mouse and they would make the mouse squeak before it died.

  “White man,” the warrior bent over him said in guttural English.

  “Indian,” Ash replied.

  “You pick wrong night, wrong place, eh?” The warrior jabbed him again, harder.

  “Why did you attack me?” Ash asked. “I’m not your enemy.”

  “You white,” the warrior said, as if that alone were ample reason.

  “You attack all whites? Even when they’ve done you no harm?” Ash was stalling.

  The warrior raised the knife close to Ash’s eyes. “Whites take land. Whites kill buffalo. Whites say only good Indian dead Indian. I say only good white dead white.” He sliced the tip into Ash’s cheek.

  Ash flinched but showed no fear. Blood trickled over his chin to his neck.

  “I’m a lawman on the trail of an outlaw. Kill me and you’ll have the army after you.”

  “Law-man,” the warrior repeated, his brow puckered. His friend said something in their tongue and the warrior answered. He poked Ash in the chest. “You law-man?”

  “That’s what I just said.” Ash slid his right hand to the inner edge of his jacket.