by Chuck Tyrell
“I must tend to the beans and wash the dirty dishes,” she said, and whirled away.
Lester Dent’s horn-hard left hand caught hold of her right arm. He jerked, spinning her around. As she turned, his doubled fist broke her nose and splattered blood down her dress. “Ye’d best listen to me,” he said, and smashed his fist into her face again.
Chapter Two
Stryker saw smoke his second day out of Globe City. Not Apache smoke and not the smoke of some cowboy’s careless fire, but the smoke of burning buildings, house and barn, maybe something more. And the only thing that lay due south of Muleback Mountain and Signal Butte was the Ridges and Hale stage stop at Miller’s Well. Smoke spelled danger anywhere in the desert, but smoke from burning buildings meant much more than either an Apache signal or a lightning strike. Besides, there’d been hardly a cloud in the sky for a week, much less a thunderstorm.
“Something odiferous about this,” Stryker said. He swiped at the line of tears leaking from his left eye with the corner of his neckerchief.
Saif, his Arabian stallion, waggled an ear as if to say Stryker didn’t need to state the obvious.
Stryker rode off to one side. He left the stage road and took to the western flats. Anything using the smoke as bait wanted whatever it might be fishing for to come right on up the stage road. Stryker wasn’t about to do that. But he wasn’t about to let the smoke disappear without him finding out what caused it, either.
Going west added a day to the time it took him to get to Miller’s well. But on the morning of the third day after sighting the smoke, Matt Stryker bellied down on a hogback that overlooked Miller’s Well from about two miles off.
The view through his field glasses showed nothing hopeful. The station house had one wall standing. Molly’s Royal stove stood among the smoldering remains of the house. Stryker focused on the mounds in front of the station. Dead horses. Looked shot down in their traces. Steel rims showed where wheels once were. The body of the stagecoach was little more than a pile of ashes.
Nothing moved but the zopilote vultures tearing at the dead horses with hooked beaks. Stryker scanned along the path to the granary and tack room. Curls of smoke from the ashes said the barley was still smoldering. The barn and its hayloft also lay in ashes, but the pole corral still stood. Stryker studied it. No tack hung from the top poles. No horses waited to be harnessed to the next stage. No movement of any kind, except for the buzzards.
He used a shoulder to get the tears off his face.
A wash gouged through the land behind the corral. A man might could use it to get close without being seen—a man like Matt Stryker. He tethered Saif to a mesquite bush and made his way to the bottom of the wash. The sun was just about at its meridian. Its heat burned into the land around Miller’s Well, only those with something bigger to do than just filling their bellies moved. A small striped lizard moved, else Stryker would have stepped on it. A red-tailed hawk moved, his pinions spread to catch the thermal rising from the heat of the land. A man moved, Matt Stryker, and worked his way up the wash to the granary that smoldered in the heat. Maybe he’d find something, maybe not.
He lay against the lip of the wash for a long time. Too much hurry can get a man killed. Little left standing. The corral. A wall of the house. The outhouse. Stryker came up and over the bank of the wash, keeping a paloverde between himself and the burned out buildings. Nothing moved. He couldn’t see the zopilote. He held his Winchester ’76 cocked and ready. The Parker shotgun, he left in its saddle boot on Saif. The red-tail screeched.
Stryker slowly turned a full three-sixty as he eased up to the burnt-out station. Molly’s Royal stove still had a pot on it. The buzzards flapped away as Stryker approached, landed no more than ten yards away, and stood watching, wings held high and ready to carry them back to the dead horses. In the ashes of the house, Stryker found four bodies. Burned and shriveled, they showed teeth in macabre smiles through burnt-away lips
Three men and a woman. Driver and shotgunner? Passengers? Molly? Dodge Miller? The bodies were so badly burned that Stryker couldn’t tell who they were.
Only one structure stood. A small outhouse located behind the ashes of the station. Small, but probably at least three holes. Stryker moved toward it with careful steps, his eyes sweeping the ground, then the horizon, then the far hills, then the nearby desert growth. Dark splotches led to the outhouse door. Blood.
“You touch that door, mister, and you’ve got a .56 caliber slug through your guts.” The voice cracked, like its owner’d not had a drink in days.
“I’ve got water,” Stryker said. “I’m Matt Stryker.”
“You following someone?”
“Who’s in there? Dodge? That you?”
“It is, and I got goldam holes in me. All the way through.”
“I’m gonna open the door, Dodge. Don’t you shoot me with that Creedmoor.”
Dodge Miller didn’t answer, he just groaned. Stryker tried the door handle but the door wouldn’t budge. “You’re gonna have to lift the toggle, Dodge. Can you do that?”
“Cain’t move, Matt. Bust the damn thing.”
Stryker took his Bowie from its sheath and used its point to lift the toggle. The door swung out and Stryker got his first look at Dodge Miller. The stationmaster lay sprawled over the lids of the three-seater, his shoulders against the wall. Blood pooled on the lids and on the floor. “You bled a bunch, Dodge. Reckon it’s stopped?”
“Dunno,” Miller croaked.
Been in here for a couple a days, I reckon.”
“Sumpin like that.”
You hang on. I’ll be back.” Stryker shut the door, turned, and jogged back to Saif. “We got work to do, old son,” he said. He loosened the reins from the mesquite, mounted, and rode back to the outhouse at Miller’s Well at a walk.
He didn’t bother drawing water from the well, just unlooped his canteen from the saddle horn and took it into the outhouse. Dodge gulped at the lukewarm water. Some ran down his chin, spreading when it hit his stubble. Dodge Miller wore his face clean shaven, but it had not seen a razor for four or five days. Stryker wiped the leaking tears from his face.
“That’s enough for now,” Stryker said. “Let’s see about where you’ve been shot.”
Miller gulped some air. “Got holes in me. Three. One in the leg, ‘bout midway up from the knee. One through m’shoulder, outside, just below the joint. Din’t hit no bone. One in the side, just above the hipbone. Tore the hell outta me, but no guts come out. Bled like a stuck hog, though.”
“I reckon we’d better get you outside so I can get at them shot spots. Lucky whoever shot you didn’t look too close. They’d a shot you dead.”
“Four of ‘em, Matt. Old man and three younger ones. The old man sent one of the youngsters over to check me. ‘Wee Willy’ he called the boy. Big. Really big. He come. Shoved me with his toe. I flopped. He stood there looking for a long time, then he want back. ‘Dead’ I heard him say. But I figure he knew I was still breathing. Wee Willy. That’s what they called him.”
“Wee Willy.” Stryker stored the name in his head. “You hang on, now. I’ll get stuff for your shot places.” A clump of prickly pear grew across the stage road and halfway up the hill from Miller’s Well. Stryker lopped three pads from the cactus and carried them back to where Miller lay.
“What ya gonna do?”
“Just hang tight, Dodge. Prickly pear is good for cuts ‘n stuff, and it’ll keep the blowflies off.” Stryker built a very small fire, singed the spines off the pads, and split them in half with his Bowie. He cut Miller’s pant leg away from the thigh wound. “Went right through,” he said. He slapped a pad on the entrance wound and another on the exit, then tied them down with Miller’s own bandana. “Be sore for a while, likely,” he said. “Looks clean, though. No maggots. Yet.”
“I’ll make it,” Miller said. “I gotta make it.”
“Be a while,” Stryker said. He went to work on the wound in Miller’s side. This one needs
sewing,” he said, “but I don’t have what it takes to do the job. I’ll pack it up with cloth and that’ll have to do until we get you to Tucson.” He got his extra shirt from the offside saddlebag, made pads from the sleeves and ripped the rest into strips. He smeared the pads with prickly pear juice and jelly, and put them on the wound.
Miller took a ragged breath. “Smarts,” he said.
“Gunshot wounds’ll do that,” Stryker said. He cut Miller’s shirt and union suit away from the shoulder wound. A smaller caliber bullet, maybe a .36, had plowed its way through the deltoid muscle. Clean entry and exit, without hitting any bone or cartilage. “Lucky,” he said.
Miller said nothing.
Stryker used the rest of the shirt strips to bind prickly pear pads to the shoulder wound. “There. That’s about as good as I can do.”
Miller turned a tortured face to Stryker. “Matt. None a my business, but what brung you to this neck of the woods?”
“Ness Havelock told me that the government would give me a thousand to bring in Bart Penington. People seen him in Globe City. I figured he might be headed for Tucson and points south.”
“Matt. They got my Molly. They hurt her, Matt. I seen her before they shot me. Her face, Matt. Someone’d pounded on her face. Not slaps, Matt, bare knuckles. Her dress had black blood streaks on it. She breathed through her mouth like her nose was busted. Her eyes was swole and all black and blue. Her spirit was gone, Matt. And while they was getting ready to leave, Matt, while I was lying dead, after the horses was loaded and the stage ones killed, when they was ready to go, one of the boys said, ‘Hold up a minute, pa,’ and he made my Molly grab hold of the edge of the well so she was leaning over with her rear sticking out.”
Miller choked up for a moment, then continued, “He lifted her dress, Matt, right out there in the open, just lifted it up and pulled his peeder outta his trousers and he took her right there, Matt, like a mongrel dog’d take a bitch. That’s what he did. I was dead, Matt, but I swore to get them what hurt my Molly. I swore.”
“I hear ya, Dodge, but you need first-hand doctoring. What I done is just Injun stuff. Besides, you can’t chase them without horses.”
Miller stared at the ground. “I swore, Matt.”
“Let’s get you doctored and get some horses.”
“Whattaya mean, ‘Let’s?’”
“That bunch needs trimming down,” Stryker said. “If it’s all right with you, I’ll ride along.”
“I ain’t got money to pay a bounty man,” Miller said.
“It ain’t the money. Men oughta respect women, and I can see those Dents have no respect. But first off, we need to get you to Tucson for some proper doctoring. We’ll get some horses there, too.”
Saif rode double fine, and Stryker and Miller made it to Tucson in two days, with no one on their back trail. Stryker made sure of that.
Stryker left Miller at Doc Singleton’s place on 5th Avenue, behind the Congress Hotel. “I’ll be back as soon as I’ve talked to Bob Paul,” he said. “Then we can go see Gil Steiner. He’s the best horse trader in these parts.”
He rode Saif down Pennington, past front of the courthouse to North Court. He looped Saif’s reins over the hitching rack and went into the courthouse side entrance looking for Pima County Sheriff Robert Paul’s office. He heard Paul long before he saw him. Standing six foot six inches in his sock feet and weighing out at nearly two hundred fifty pounds, Robert Paul dominated any gathering he was in. In this case, a gaggle of four newspapermen who stood around the door to his office.
“Listen. You’d better hear what I’m saying.” Paul folded his arms and looked down on the newsmen. “The judge said the land deal is legal, and for the moment, that’s all there is to it. Now shove off. Let me be.”
Stryker raised his voice. “Hey Bob. You getting in over your head?”
Paul pushed his way through the newsmen. “Matt Stryker. What in heaven’s name are you doing in Tucson? Thought you’d have had enough of this country after that little fiasco down in Sonora.”
“Can we talk in your office?”
“You men leave us alone. We got bad men to catch. Crimes to solve. Fair maidens to save.” He opened the door. “Come on in, Matt.”
“Obliged.”
“Grab a chair.”
Stryker took one off to the side of the huge desk. For Robert Paul, everything had to be huge just to look natural. Stryker got right to the point. “I reckon you’ve got word by now, but the stage station at Miller’s Well got burnt down. Four bodies. No way of telling who they were. Three men. One woman.”
“No shit.”
“I saw it. I brought Dodge Miller into town with me. He’s over to Doc Singleton’s place. Dodge says the ones who done it were called Dent. Old man and three youngsters. They took Molly with them, and whatever loot the stage was carrying.”
“Ridges and Hale said the telegraph was down between Globe City and Old Camp Grant somewhere. They said the stage was late. A day over. Could mean anything, they said. Stages ain’t county business, so I let ‘em be.”
“Bob, you got any wanted flyers on anybody named Dent?”
“Gol. Who knows? Pile of them damn things over there,” Paul waved at a card table on the far side of the big office. “I shuffle through them once in a while, but never pay much attention. Help yourself.”
“Obliged.” Stryker hitched his chair over to the card table and started sorting through the dodgers. Some he knew had been apprehended, so he put them aside. He had a three-inch stack of wanted flyers before he found a Dent. On a flyer out of Kansas, of all places.
Wanted for murder and robbery. Lester Dent.
The flyer showed a drawing of a gangly, oldish man with scraggly whiskers that might or might not look like the real Lester Dent.
Still, according to the wanted dodger, he’d held up trains and stagecoaches and done his share of killing. The reward was set at five hundred dollars.
“They’re here,” Stryker said. “Reward’s five hundred.”
“Doesn’t sound like enough for you to mess with,” Paul said.
“Knowing they’re wanted is enough, Bob. Plenty enough. Me and Dodge’ll ride after them soon as he’s able.”
“If the stage was carrying enough, the reward might be jacked up.”
“Don’t matter. We gotta get Molly. If we can bring the Dents back alive, we will. If not, they’ll come back belly down over their saddles.”
Robert Paul nodded. “Your call, Matt. I’ll be here when you get back.”
Stryker folded the wanted flyer and put it in his vest pocket. “I’ll be back,” he said. “And I’ll have the Dents. I swear.”
Chapter Three
The wanted flyer came out of Wolf Creek, Kansas, a railend that shipped big herds of Texas cattle to Chicago in its heyday. Stryker knew a man in Wolf Creek, a gambler by the name of Samuel Jones. Naturally, Matt Stryker’s next stop was the Western Union office on 12th Street. He sent a telegram to the Lucky Break, the saloon where Jones had a table.
“No telling when you’ll get an answer back,” the clerk said.
“I’ll check later,” Stryker said. He’d been in Tucson since early morning and still hadn’t taken time to eat. He and Catherine had eaten at Chez Bennie many times, and it seemed Saif pulled up in front of the little restaurant of his own volition.
Stryker grinned. The smile put more pressure on the tear gland near the corner of his left eye, and he had to swipe away the water it exuded. He dismounted and wrapped Saif’s reins around the hitching rack twice. “Be back after breakfast, old chum, then we’ll get you a good bait of corn.”
“Bonjour, Matthew.”
“Good morning to you, Marie. How’s business been since they took the capitol north to Phoenix?”
“My dear Matthew. As you well know, people drive a hundred miles to taste Marcel’s food. Why, Doctor George Goodfellow was here just a few days ago.”
Stryker chuckled. “I’ll wager Doc Goodfello
w drank more than he ate.”
Marie shared Stryker’s chuckle. “Quite so. He has good appetite for Korbel champagne. It’s the best vintage from California and we keep several bottles cool in the cellar. Would you like a bottle?”
Stryker held his hands up, palms out. “Not me. Not now,” he said. “How about Marcel whipping me up a good omelet?”
“Excellent, Matthew. With coffee, I presume.”
“Bring the coffee now, if you would, please.” Stryker chuckled again as he wiped the tears from his left cheek. “Even if I didn’t order a single thing to eat, I’d want some of that good coffee.”
Marie disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Stryker alone in the dining room. All the tables were covered with white tablecloths, and a tiny crystal vase stood in the center of each. The one on Stryker’s table held a single Indian paintbrush—dusty green leaves topped by sunset-orange flower petals. Marie brought a celadon porcelain cup and saucer, then filled it with Marcel’s special coffee.
“Smells outstanding. Beats Arbuckle’s all to holler,” Stryker said.
“You must roast the beans with hazelnuts,” Marie said. “Only a few people know how.”
“Marcel’s got it down pat.” Stryker tipped some coffee off into the saucer and raised it to slurp the cooled java.
“Mind your manners, Matthew Stryker. You know better than to slurp good coffee from the saucer.” Marie stomped her foot in mock anger.
“Too hot straight out of the cup,” he said, but didn’t use the saucer again. “All-fired good, that’s what it is.” He dabbed at the tears on his cheek with the corner of the napkin Marie’d put down with the silverware. “Damn glad you all stayed in Tucson when the capitol went to Phoenix,” he said.
“It’s not easy just to take leave of a place where you’ve put down roots,” Marie said. “We have roots. Chez Bennie is part of Tucson, not some faraway place we know nothing of.”
Stryker nodded. “Anyway. Damn glad of it.” He risked another sip of Marcel’s hazelnut-flavored coffee. The sip turned into a healthy gulp. “Aaaah,” he said.