“He must have spotted me following him,” Luke said, and once again that note of bitterness was in his voice. “He forced the girl to make the bedsprings bounce and squeal like they were busy. Then when I kicked the door in, he was ready and cut loose at me with that greener. I barely got out of the way.”
“Yeah, but Sheila didn’t,” the marshal said with a gloomy expression on his face. He shook his head.
“That was her name? Sheila?”
“Yeah. Not a bad sort, for a whore. She seemed to genuinely like folks. I reckon she probably would’ve stopped feelin’ like that if she’d stayed in the business long enough. Maybe it’s a blessin’ that she didn’t have the chance.”
Luke couldn’t bring himself to feel that way. Any life cut short before its time was a bad thing. But he wasn’t going to argue philosophy with the local badge-toter in an Arizona cowtown.
“We’d better get Kroll locked up while we’ve got the chance,” he said.
“Yeah, we don’t want the others to show up while we’re takin’ him down the street.” The marshal sounded like it would have been all right with him if Luke hadn’t captured the infamous outlaw. Now he had to worry about the rest of the Kroll gang riding into town to bust Mordecai out of jail. With a sigh, he added, “I’ll have to get the undertaker up here to take care of Sheila, too. Not to mention the damage to the hotel from the blood and the buckshot and the bullets and such.”
Luke would have been willing to bet that this wasn’t the first time blood had been spilled in the Sullivan House, nor were those bullet holes the first ones that had been put in the walls. He would pay the proprietor for the damages, though. With the rewards he would collect for capturing Mordecai, he could easily afford the expense.
He rolled Mordecai onto his belly and took a strip of rawhide from his pocket. Some bounty hunters carried handcuffs, and Luke had a pair of the metal bracelets in his saddlebags, but the rawhide served well for tying a prisoner’s wrists together, too, with the advantage of being compact and lightweight. It wouldn’t clink against something at a bad time and give away his presence when stealth was important, either.
Mordecai started to come around as Luke jerked his arms behind his back and lashed his wrists together with the rawhide. He pulled the knot good and tight and wasn’t any too gentle about it. Then he took hold of Mordecai’s arms and hauled the outlaw to his feet.
Mordecai yelped in pain and cursed.
“Careful,” he said.
“Like you were careful when you practically blew poor Sheila’s head off?”
“Was that her name? Hell, if she don’t have sense to duck, it ain’t my fault, is it?”
Luke drew his right-hand Remington, pressed the muzzle to Mordecai’s head just behind the right ear, and pulled back the hammer.
“If my thumb happens to slip, it’s not my fault, is it?” he grated. “Anyway, all the reward dodgers on you say dead or alive, so it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Mordecai stood stiff as a board now. He must have realized that his callous remark had pushed Luke a little too far.
The local lawman broke the tense spell by clearing his throat and saying, “Uh, Mr. Jensen . . . we said we were gonna lock him up. . . .”
“And so we are,” Luke agreed as he got control over his anger. He lowered the Remington’s hammer and slid the revolver back into leather. “But if you’re smart, Kroll, you’ll keep your mouth shut for a while. Just remember . . . dead or alive.”
Chapter 3
Marshal Jerome Dunlap sighed in obvious relief when the cell door clanged shut behind Mordecai Kroll. He had told Luke his name while they were marching the prisoner up the street and into the squat stone building that housed the local marshal’s office and jail.
Luke said, “Turn around and back up to the bars, Kroll, and I’ll untie your wrists.”
Kroll did as Luke told him. When his arms were free again, Mordecai brought them around in front of him and massaged his wrists as he glared at Luke.
“You’re gonna be mighty sorry you ever crossed trails with me, Jensen,” he said. “That was your name, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right,” Luke said.
With a sneer, Mordecai told Dunlap, “You better make a note of that, Marshal, so you can tell the undertaker what name to put on this dumb bastard’s grave marker.” Mordecai paused, and then went on. “No, wait, that’s right, you’ll be dead, too, so you won’t be able to tell the undertaker a damned thing.”
He laughed raucously. Luke ignored him and turned back to the marshal’s office.
Dunlap followed him out of the cell block and dropped the big ring of keys on the desk with a jangling thump.
“I’ll have to send to St. Johns for the sheriff,” he said. “That’s the county seat of Apache County. We can’t hope to hold Kroll here in this cracker box of a jail.”
Luke thought the marshal was underestimating the building’s strength, but Dunlap had no deputies and it was certain that just the two of them wouldn’t be able to withstand an attack in force by the entire Kroll gang. The sooner they could get Kroll to the county seat and surround him with armed, experienced deputies, the better.
“Have you got a telegraph office here?” he asked.
Dunlap shook his head.
“No, I’ll have to send a rider to St. Johns. Fella who owns the livery stable has a boy who carries messages for me sometimes. Got a fast horse, too.”
“How long will that take?”
“Start him first thing in the morning, the sheriff ought to be back here with a jail wagon and some men by nightfall.”
Luke nodded and said, “So we’ve got to wait less than twenty-four hours.”
“Twenty-four hours can be a mighty long time when you’ve got trouble rainin’ down on you,” Dunlap pointed out.
He was right about that, Luke thought. But all they could do was hope for the best.
“You mind stayin’ here while I go roust out the undertaker and tell Benji Porter I need him to ride to the county seat in the mornin’?”
“Go ahead, Marshal,” Luke said. “I’ll keep an eye on Kroll.”
Dunlap nodded. He looked like he would be glad to get out of the office. Luke wondered briefly if the marshal would come back tonight or manage to be occupied elsewhere. He didn’t think Dunlap would abandon his duty like that, but you never could be sure about people.
Once Luke was alone in the office, he looked at the few wanted posters that were pinned to the wall. He figured that Dunlap had to have more reward dodgers than that, unless the marshal had been using them for kindling, so he took a look in the scarred old desk. In the second drawer he found a big stack of the posters.
He didn’t have to flip through them for very long before he came across one with a drawing of Rudolph Kroll on it. The man staring out balefully from the penciled likeness was considerably older than Mordecai, but Luke could see a slight resemblance in their craggy faces. Rudolph was dark where his younger brother was fair. His nose was bigger, and underneath it was a thick, dark mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. If anything, Rudolph Kroll looked even meaner and more filled with hate than Mordecai, although such a thing didn’t seem possible at first glance.
Luke found posters on some of the other members of the Kroll gang in the stack: Fred Martin, Calvin Dodge, Pete Markwell, a handful more. All of them ruthless, hard-bitten, dangerous men, even if their reputations weren’t quite as bad as that of the Kroll brothers’. Luke had no doubt that any one of them would have killed him in an instant if given the chance.
He didn’t intend to provide them with that opportunity.
“Hey!” Mordecai called from the cell block. “Hey, Marshal, you still out there?”
Luke put the wanted posters back in the desk drawer and closed it. He stood up and went over to the cell block door to ask through the barred window in it, “What do you want, Kroll?”
“That you, Jensen? Where’s the marshal?”
“Busy. If you don’t want anything, shut up.”
“I didn’t say that. I could use some coffee. My head really hurts where some big dumb son of a bitch walloped it with a pistol.”
He chuckled at his own cleverness, or what he regarded as cleverness, anyway.
Luke had already noticed the coffeepot staying warm on a pot-bellied iron stove in a corner of the office. Several tin cups sat on a small shelf to the side. He supposed it wouldn’t do any harm, and since there was a good chance he would have to stay awake all night to guard the prisoner, he decided he ought to have a cup for himself.
“All right, but don’t try anything,” he told Mordecai. “I’d just as soon put a bullet in you as look at you.”
He poured thick, black coffee into one of the cups and took it over to the desk where he picked up the key ring. He had seen which key Dunlap used to lock the cell block, so it was simple to unlock it. He drew one of his guns as he used the other hand to carry the coffee into the cell block.
Mordecai was in the first cell on the left. Luke told him, “Back off all the way over there under the window. Take a step in this direction before I tell you to and I’ll blow your kneecap to hell. You’ll have a bad limp when you walk to the gallows.”
“You’re mighty confident,” Mordecai said as he backed over to the far wall. “I’m gonna enjoy watchin’ you die.”
Luke just grunted. He bent, reached through the bars, and placed the cup of coffee on the cell’s stone floor. Then he backed up well out of reach and said, “All right, you can go ahead and get it now.”
Mordecai did so. He took a sip and made a face, then said, “Has the marshal been boilin’ this stuff for a week? It tastes like it.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Luke said. “I can take it back—”
“No, no, that’s fine.”
Mordecai sat down on the bunk, took another sip, and sighed.
Luke had encountered scores of outlaws during his career as a bounty hunter, and few if any of them had ever given much thought to the havoc they wreaked in innocent lives. Despite knowing that, he asked, “Doesn’t it bother you that you killed that girl?”
“It wasn’t my intention that she come to any harm. I just planned on killin’ you.”
“Because you saw me following you?”
“Yeah. See, you thought I was drunk . . . and I was. But I got highly developed instincts, like a wolf, say. I can sense danger. And when I saw that some fella was skulkin’ along on the other side of the street, it got me curious. Figured you might be after the bounty on my head. So I decided to set a little trap for you.” Mordecai took another drink of the coffee and then added, “I can sober up in a hurry when I need to.”
“What if I hadn’t been after you?”
The lanky outlaw shrugged.
“If the gal had bounced that bed up and down for a few minutes without nothin’ else happenin’, I would’ve said that my suspicions was wrong, and then we would’ve put the bed to better use. But I wasn’t wrong, and you come bustin’ in, and . . . well, you know what happened after that.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “I do. Finish your coffee.”
Mordecai grinned and said, “Now, don’t rush a man. I’m a prisoner now. You got to treat me decent.” He sipped the coffee again. “You want to kill me, don’t you?”
“More than you could ever know.”
He didn’t say anything else, even though Mordecai took a couple more gibes at him. When the outlaw finished the coffee, Luke had him set the cup through the bars and back off again. Mordecai cooperated. He might be a loco animal in a lot of ways, but he had enough sense to know that if he gave Luke the slightest excuse, the bounty hunter would ventilate him.
Luke picked up the cup and went back into the office. He locked the cell block door and sat down at the desk again with a cup of the strong black brew for himself. A few minutes later, Marshal Dunlap came in.
“Got those chores taken care of,” the lawman reported, almost as if he were the deputy and Luke was the one in charge. “The undertaker’s collected Sheila’s body, and Benji Porter will be settin’ out to fetch the sheriff at first light. All we got to do is sit tight and wait for somebody to show up and take Kroll off our hands.”
“And hope it’s not his brother and the rest of the gang who show up,” Luke said.
“Mister, I’m not hopin’,” Dunlap said fervently. “I’m prayin’.”
Chapter 4
Despite the marshal’s worries, the night passed quietly with no sign of trouble. He and Luke took turns sleeping and napping on the old sofa on one side of the office, but nothing disturbed them. Early the next morning Dunlap went over to the café and brought back breakfast for both of them and for the prisoner.
“I went down to the stable, too,” he said as he and Luke were eating. “Abner Porter told me his boy left for St. Johns before dawn. He’s mighty excited to be helpin’ out in something like this, Abner said.”
Luke frowned over his flapjacks, eggs, and bacon.
“He’s not so excited that he’ll go spreading it all over town about Kroll being locked up here, is he?”
“Well, you know, I didn’t think to say anything to him about that. I might should’a told him not to say anything except to the sheriff.”
Luke bit back the sharp comment that tried to spring to his lips. Marshal Dunlap was just a small-town peace officer who probably never had to deal with anything much worse than a drunken cowboy or miner.
Luke stood up and went into the cell block. Mordecai sat on the bunk eating his breakfast. Luke looked at him through the bars and asked, “What were you doing here in town by yourself? Where’s your brother and the rest of the gang?”
“You think I’m gonna tell a no-good bounty hunter where to find Rudolph and the rest of the boys?” Mordecai laughed. “You’re plumb dumber than I thought, Jensen.”
“Yeah, I suppose you come and go as you please, don’t you? You want to come into town for a drink, maybe a poker game, and a little slap-and-tickle with a dove, you don’t have to ask your brother’s permission.”
Mordecai snorted and said, “Damn right I don’t. Rudolph knows better than to try to put a halter on me.”
“So he doesn’t know where you are.”
“Hell, no! I don’t have to tell him every time I—” Mordecai stopped short and frowned. “Blast it, Jensen, you’re tryin’ to trick me!”
Luke left the cell block without saying anything else. Even though Mordecai was probably a habitual liar like most outlaws, Luke thought his tweaking of the man’s pride had prompted him to tell the truth without thinking. Mordecai had slipped away from the gang on his own. He had probably done similar things before. With any luck, it might be several days before Rudolph Kroll got worried enough to go looking for his little brother.
By that time, Luke would have turned Mordecai over to the sheriff of Apache County and the outlaw wouldn’t be his responsibility anymore.
During the day Luke saw a number of townspeople lingering on the opposite boardwalk. They stared across the street at the jail and talked animatedly among themselves. He knew that word had gotten around town about the notorious Mordecai Kroll being locked up in there. It would have been difficult if not impossible to keep that quiet, he supposed, especially considering what had happened to the unfortunate, redheaded Sheila.
Since Mordecai’s capture was already a subject of much gossip in town, there was no point in saying anything to Dunlap about keeping such things quiet. Luke just kept his eyes open and waited for the sheriff to arrive.
As Dunlap had predicted, that happened late in the afternoon, after a long, thankfully boring day. The sheriff’s arrival brought even more excitement to the town, since he rode in at the head of a posse of a dozen deputies surrounding a sturdy jail wagon pulled by a team of six black horses.
Dunlap unlocked the marshal’s office door, and he and Luke stepped out to greet the newcomers. The sheriff, a tall, stern-looking man with iron-g
ray hair, swung down from his saddle and gave Dunlap a curt nod.
“Marshal,” he said. “I hear you’ve got a prisoner for me.”
“You make it sound mighty simple, sheriff,” Dunlap replied with a relieved smile. “This ain’t just any prisoner. It’s Mordecai Kroll.”
“So I’m told.” The sheriff turned to look at Luke and extended his hand. “Sheriff Wesley Rakestraw.”
“Luke Jensen,” Luke introduced himself as he shook hands with the lawman.
“I hear you’re a bounty hunter.”
“That’s right,” Luke said warily. Most lawmen didn’t care much for bounty hunters. He supposed they thought men like Luke were encroaching on their job of bringing lawbreakers to justice.
Rakestraw didn’t appear to be that sort, however. His expression was bland and noncommittal. Maybe he was more interested in the fact that a mighty bad hombre was locked up where he couldn’t hurt anybody else, rather than in who had brought him in.
“No sign of Rudolph Kroll or the rest of that bunch the Kroll brothers run with?”
Dunlap fielded that question. He said, “Nope, it’s been peaceful since last night, sheriff. Kroll’s locked up inside, and nobody’s tried to get him out.”
“Good,” Rakestraw said with a nod. “Tomorrow morning we’ll take him back to the county seat. It’s going to take some time and burning up the telegraph wires to sort out exactly who has first claim on him.” The sheriff smiled faintly. “There are plenty of people lining up for a crack at hanging Mordecai Kroll.”
Luke said, “It’s what, twenty miles to the county seat?”
“Twenty-two,” Rakestraw said.
“You brought enough men with you to get the prisoner there safely?”
“I think you’ll find that my deputies are the best in the territory, Jensen.” A smug look came over Rakestraw’s face. “We can handle anything that comes up.”
Luke wasn’t so sure of that. According to everything he’d heard, the Kroll gang numbered about a dozen men, the same size as the group of deputies Sheriff Rakestraw had brought with him.
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