Sliphammer

by Brian Garfield

  Rafe lifted his arm and pointed. “Somebody coming.”

  Sliphammer turned to follow his gaze. He had to tip his head to get the sun out of his eyes. A rider was coming down the blossoming slope, neither hurrying nor wasting time. Rafe said, “Looks like your boss.”

  It was in fact the sheriff, Bob Paul. He had a pinched, exasperated look on his heavy-jowled face. Paul had spent his whole life in the saddle but he still managed to look like a sack of potatoes on horseback. He was a rounded man, rounded everywhere: his thighs looked soft, his shoulders were matronly, his darkly beard-slurred face was puffy. He was a solemn, slow-moving man, a good sheriff, an acceptable boss, a casual friend.

  Paul’s greeting was dour. “The one day in the year I really need you, you’re galivant-ing way the hell out here. Don’t you thank I’ve got better thangs to do than chase all over Pima County thew this heat? H’are you, Wrangler? Missus Caroline?”

  Paul touched his hat. Sliphammer was smiling, not rising to the bait; he said mildly, “Even us slaves get a day off now and then.”

  Paul removed his hat and wiped his face in the crook of his sleeve. “My frin, I’m jis gonna have to hang a bell on you.”

  “I repeat,” Sliphammer said good-humoredly, “it’s my day off. You want to talk to me today, pay me an extra two dollars.”

  “Ain’t nothing like a loyal deputy,” Paul complained with a great show of indignation. “And as for these kin of yours, you ever notice how these young folks lose all their manners? Ain’t nobody invited me to step down and take a little drank.”

  Rafe said, “You’re welcome to light down. There’s nothing to drink here until somebody deans out the well. Or you can go down to the spring.”

  Paul climbed down with a fat man’s sigh. “Get that well fixed soon as somebody buys the place at auction next month. You still in the market?”

  “Bet your ass.”

  “Likely you’ll have to scramble some, then. Get yoseff plenty of money. Fellow from Prescott’s gonna brang me a bid of three thousand dollars, I hear.”

  Rafe’s face fell. Caroline said, “Three thousand?”

  “That’s what I heard,” said Paul, and turned toward Sliphammer. “Rat now you and me got binness.”

  “It’s still my day off.”

  “Neither one of us gonna get no more days off for a while, Jeremy. We got ourselves a little chore up to Colorado.”

  “Colorado?”

  Paul nodded. He tramped over to the shady corner of the house and sat down on the sagging edge of the porch, his face pearled with sweat. “Come acrosst here and set down.”

  Sliphammer went over and sat by him. Rafe and Caroline hovered, listening, and Paul made no effort to chase them off. He said, “Superior Court put out a fugitive bench warrant for the Stillwell murder last nat.”

  “On the Earp crowd?”

  “Just so. Wyatt Earp made a mistake pointing his fanger at Frank Stillwell—Stillwell had a lot of frinds and one or two of them got the Governor’s ear. Got a lot of Texas cowmen in Arizona that never did like the Earp gang, just lookin’ for an excuse like this. Now, Stillwell got killed in this jurisdiction, and that makes it our job to brang the Earps back from Colorado.”

  Paul looked up at him. His fat face seemed boyish and sorrowful. “It sets up like this, Jeremy. The gang busted up after Stillwell got killed. Texas Jack and a couple others got lynched to death over to New Mexico, which leaves three Earp brothers and Doc Holliday. Now, Virgil went on back to Ohio with Morgan’s body. Ain’t nobody interested in crucifying Virgil—he’s crippled up anyway, everybody knows he couldn’t of shot anybody. But I got these warrants for Doc Holliday and Wyatt and Warren Earp. They all up in Colorado—Holliday’s bucking faro in Denver and the other two, they over to Gunnison on the southwest slope of the Rockies. Up to you and me to serve the warrants, boy.”

  When Sliphammer didn’t speak, Paul glanced at him again and said morosely, “I can’t go both places at once, Jeremy.”

  “So I’m elected to arrest Doc Holliday?”

  “No. The Denver police will do that.”

  “Then—”

  “Aeah. I got to be the one to go to Denver, you see—I got to get the Governor of Colorado to sign the extradition papers before we can arrest anybody. You got to be the one goes to Gunnison, Jeremy.”

  Wyatt Earp. Tree studied the toes of his sunwhacked boots and wondered how much registered on his face. It was unthinkable—like trying to arrest Robin Hood or Ulysses or Buffalo Bill.

  Sheriff Paul’s voice droned on: “You ain’t to arrest them, not at first anyhow. While I’m dickering with the Governor I want you in Gunnison where you can keep your eye on Wyatt and his brother. Soon as I get the papers signed in Denver, I’ll send you a telegraph ware, you get the sheriff down there to hep you. I don’t know how many deputies he’s got but I reckon you’ll get plenty of hep. All you got to worry about is branging them back here and making damn sure they don’t bust loose.”

  “Uh-hunh,” Sliphammer said absently.

  Half the porch length away, Rafe was unable to contain himself: he blurted, “Sheriff, you think Wyatt Earp’ll take kindly to the idea of being brought back to Arizona to get hung?”

  The sheriff gave him a long, slow look. “Why, no, son, I don’t thank he’ll take kandly to it at all.”

  Caroline said, “You can’t mean this.”

  Paul shook his head mutely and got to his feet with a grunt.

  Sliphammer said, “I don’t take kindly to it either.”

  “Scared, boy?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I ain’t worried about you.”

  Sliphammer said, “That’s a comfort.”

  “You ain’t a frind of Wyatt’s, are you?”

  “I’ve never laid eyes on him.”

  “Then that’s dll rat,” said Paul. “Listen here—he uses a privy the same way you do.”

  “Yeah.”

  Paul nodded sagely, and walked toward his horse. Sliphammer kept his seat, and the sheriff looked back at him inquiringly.

  “Jeremy, I sure hope you ain’t thanking of refusing to do this little chore.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “No. Long as you work for me, Deputy, you take awders from me. I can’t have a deputy that only works when he feels lak it.”

  Caroline said, in awe, “But you’re talking about Wyatt Earp!”

  “I thought I was,” Paul agreed. “Now look here, Jeremy, it’s too hot to stand here arguing for ahrs and ahrs. How about you get yoseff acrosst that horse? We got some traveling to do.”

  Rafe was still on the porch with Caroline. He was frowning at Sliphammer, who got slowly to his feet. Rafe swung toward the sheriff and said abruptly, “They posted any reward on Wyatt Earp, Sheriff?”

  “I regret to say they have.”

  “How much?”

  “It ain’t my doing. Cochise County put twenty-five hundred dollars on Wyatt Earp and fifteen hundred each on. Warren Earp and Doc Holliday. I reckon they’ll throw in Wyatt’s wife for nothing.”

  “Then a man could get four thousand dollars for bringing Wyatt and Warren back.”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Rafe, your brother’s a peace officer. He ain’t entitled to collect no bounties.”

  “But a private citizen can,” Rafe said. “And I’m a private citizen. Woop!”

  Sliphammer wheeled toward him. He spoke flatly: “No.”

  “No what?”

  “Don’t even daydream like that, Rafe.”

  “Caroline and me need the money. I’m coming with you.”

  “The hell you are,” Sliphammer said. “In the first place you’re no match for the Earps. In the second place it wouldn’t be right to take blood money for a man like Wyatt Earp. And in the third place you haven’t got the money to pay the train fare to Colorado in the first place.”

  Rafe took one step forward. “We’re brothers, Jeremy. You owe me.”

  “We’re half brothers,�
� Jeremiah Tree growled. “And I don’t owe you anything you don’t earn, Rafe.”

  Caroline said, in a voice with a low husky quality to it, “You’re so damned honest, Jerr. Why do you have to be so damned honest?”

  Rafe said petulantly, “It ain’t fair!”

  Sliphammer looked at him. He said, “Fair, my ass.” He turned and walked to his horse.

  Rafe made both hands into fists and got up on his toes as if he were about to fall forward. The sheriff said to him, “Gentle down, Wrangler. You got no binness in this kind of thang. You two just go on being Mister-missus Tree and raise a pack of churiren and wrangle horses. It took your brother here fifteen years of professional Indian fighting to learn how to use a gun and even-he knows enough to be scared of Wyatt Earp.” Paul turned, gathering the reins, and heaved himself into the saddle with considerable ungainly effort.

  When Sliphammer stepped into his saddle, Caroline said to him, “Jerr, you be careful, hear?”

  He gave her a long look, as if to pin her image in his memory; he waved at the two of them on the porch and swung his horse in alongside the sheriff’s. They rode out of the yard together. Behind them Rafe and Caroline stood and watched, arms about each other’s waists. Sliphammer looked back until the corner of the sagging house cut them off from sight. As he turned forward he saw himself, his shadow on horseback, riding along by.

  The flayed landscape stretched away west across the great baking pan of the desert. On the far horizon he could see scattered clouds. He could smell a change in weather coming.

  Sheriff Paul’s voice startled him: “I don’t want you going into this thang all hetup. If you really don’t want the job you better quit now. I’ll get somebody else.”

  “Who’re you going to get to pin on a deputy doodad when they could do the same thing without it and collect four thousand dollars’ reward?”

  “Don’t fret yoseff none. Plenty of fools in the same barrel you come from.” Paul grinned at him. He had a lot of gold teeth.

  “I guess I’ll keep the joh.”

  Paul said, “I thought you would. I mean, if you quit, what you gonna do then? Go back to Indian fighting? The Indian wars are all over. What choice you got? Naw, you’ll do it. I never doubted you would.”

  There followed Paul’s short grunt. Sliphammer was thinking, a bit sourly, that it had always been his one incurable weakness—the infantile faith with which he always refused to fold a pair of jacks in the face of a big raise. The fact was, he wanted to meet Wyatt Earp.

  Three

  The train brought him up a green valley at dawn, with the sky brightening cobalt and full daylight just cresting the westward peaks, dazzling the snow caps. Up ahead, green meadows ran up curving slopes into forests of aspen and pine. Here and there on the mountains he saw the thick columns of mill and smelter smoke.

  The train threaded a field of brown-eyed yellow daisy buds and made a long, easy bend. Past the high, narrow locomotive he saw signs of civilization by the tracks: a dairy farm, a few houses, a deep-rutted ore wagon road, wooden mailboxes at graveled intersections. The train curled past a brewery and a small paint factory and a cement mill covered with gray powder. Sidings of polished rails began to proliferate beside the main line. Through the trees ahead he could make out the packed buildings of end-of-track Gunnison town. The bank of the river pushed close against the railroad yards; the train sighed and clanked and eased into the station gingerly.

  Gunnison was a new town: two years ago it hadn’t been here at all. Trees grew thick everywhere there wasn’t a building because there hadn’t been time to clear land that wasn’t needed for immediate use. A few trees even grew in the streets.

  Sliphammer Tree jumped down before the train had come to its full stop; he walked across the depot platform with a carpetbag in his right hand and a sheepskin-lined mackinaw under his arm. The sun’s rim sat on top of a mountain saddle. His lank, tall, striding body threw a long, skinny shadow.

  He went around to the front loading deck, built as high off the ground as a freight wagon’s tailboard. Four steps, cut into the platform, let him down onto the street. He looked both ways before he went on.

  The town was crowded together by trees and by the knees and elbows of mountains. It seemed without regular pattern; the center of activity seemed to be a few blocks north of him, signified by a cluster of two-story buildings with pitched roofs. He went that way. Sidewalks appeared, guarded by glassed-in gaslights on posts. He passed stores, an opera house, saloons, the Globe Theater, even a bookshop. Obviously the city fathers had foreverness in mind. The buildings were sturdy, some of them enormous, with the shambling, graceless opulence of Victorian splendor. The only giveaway that most of them had been thrown up hurriedly was that they were built of green lumber, already starting to warp and yaw.

  It was cool; a few pedestrians were abroad; a water wagon trundled along, spraying the street to keep the dust down. Here and there shopkeepers were opening their establishments. Smoke came from a Chinese café’s kitchen and hunger drove him that way.

  Procrastinating, he sat by the front window at a table hardly big enough for a plate and two elbows, wondering what Wyatt Earp was like. Steak, eggs, and coffee came; he knocked the flies off and began to eat. It was fresh-killed beef, not aged, and he had to work his teeth on it; the coffee was the chuckwagon variety—“If you put a horseshoe in it and the horseshoe sinks, it ain’t strong enough.” He paid for the two-dollar breakfast and wondered how long he would be able to survive these boom-town prices; gathered up his carpetbag and coat, and went out. The streets were busier than they had been. He threaded his way across the street through a traffic of ore wagons and buckboards and solitary horsemen, into the narrow lobby of a small hotel; awakened a drowsing night clerk and signed “Jeremiah R. Tree” in his crabbed hand; and found his way back to a first-floor room with a six-foot ceiling that made him stoop. The room was hardly big enough to accommodate the iron-frame, straw-tick bed and the commode. He filled the pitcher at the hallway pump,” washed in the commode basin, left his carpetbag and coat in the room, and locked the door when he left. Three paces down the hall his boot scuffed a hard object in the accumulated dust of the floor and he stooped to pick it up—a tenpenny nail. After a moment’s speculation he returned to the door of his room and wedged the nail between door and jamb, at a distance below the top that matched the length of his forearm from fingertip to bent elbow. If anyone opened the door, the nail would fall out, and even if the intruder noticed it and tried to replace it, he would not’ know exactly where it had been.

  It was habit, he thought; not that he owned anything worth stealing. But he didn’t want to be caught by surprise by someone waiting inside the room.

  By the time he reached the street the traffic was intense. Dairy and egg wagons crowded past huge ore rigs and ten-team freight outfits with riding mule skinners who whooped and cursed. Standing above the dust and din, he put the pipe in his mouth and struck a match to it, and squinted along the street, wondering which one of the buildings housed Wy att Earp and company.

  A block away, on the same side of the street, two men stood outside a doorway. They were looking at him. He stared back. One of the men pointed at Tree, spoke to his companion, received the man’s nod, and went away. The man who remained was tall, lean, and white-haired. He lifted a long arm and beckoned.

  Tree looked behind him, but there was no one else the man could have been signaling. With one eyebrow cocked, he left the hotel porch and walked upstreet toward the white-haired man, who waited without a smile, stirring slightly so that he came into the bladed edge of the sun falling past the corner of the building. A badge on his shirt picked up the light and lanced it into Tree’s eyes.

  Tree was still half a dozen paces away when the white-haired man spoke; the voice was deep and curiously well modulated: “I’ve got a pot of fresh coffee inside if you’d care to join me.”

  Without waiting an answer, the white-haired man turned inside. It was, T
ree saw now, the sheriff’s office; a little shingle sign above the door said GUNNISON COUNTY SHERIFF: O. J. McKESSON.

  When Tree went inside, the white-haired man was standing by a black iron stove whose chimney pipe staggered back to the ceiling corner in a series of steplike elbows. It made the room look more like a foundry boiler room than an office. A corridor of jail cells lay past an open door at the back of the room. There was a rolltop pigeon-hole desk against one wall, flap open and cluttered; there was the obligatory locked rack of guns; and there were three chairs and a spittoon. Otherwise the room was bare, uncluttered, and scrupulously clean, reflecting the careful dress and manicured appearance of the white-haired man himself. It didn’t remind Tree of Sheriff Paul’s office in Tucson, where every day for the past year and a half Tree had had to pick a path through an incredible litter.

  Tree absorbed it all in the time it took his alert eyes to sweep the room once. When he let the screen door slam behind him on its spring, the white-haired man was holding up a coffee pot andpouring into two tin cups both of which were hooked to one finger. The coffee steamed as it flowed out of the pot.

  The white-haired man put the pot on the stove, set one cup on a corner of the rolltop and gestured toward it. “Help yourself. You’re Tree?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m McKesson.” The white-haired man offered his hand. The fingers were long and brown; his handshake was hard and brief. Up close, the elegance of his face was marred by the rough pitting of an old skin disease.

  “Have a seat—let’s talk.” McKesson sat down, blew across his coffee, and watched Tree from under thick, white brows. He was obviously aware of the impressive effect of his suntanned face against the bright white thick hair. Every body movement was made with self-conscious poise. He had hawked, predatory features, fingers like the claws of a bird of prey, gleaming violet eyes that missed nothing.

  Tree said, “You know who I am, then you know why I’m here.”

  “I had a wire from Sheriff Paul.” McKesson had large white teeth; they formed an accidental smile when his lips peeled back from the too-hot coffee. He lowered the cup and licked his lips and said conversationally, “Personally, I’d advise you to forget it, young fellow.”