McClain

by Will Keen

  The boy watched him go. He was still holding on to the shotgun.

  He would keep a firm grip on that, McClain figured, because right now there was very little else for him to hold on to and he was a scared youngster thrust into doing a man’s job.

  The woman, Sarah Crane, had told McClain that the nearest town was Red Creek. Describing it with rare eloquence, she said that it was a settlement of wooden shacks sprawling like huge discarded crates on both sides of a creek snaking down from the foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains. At one time the earth over which the creek flowed had turned its waters red, giving the town its name. But this was Arizona Territory. That watercourse had been bone dry for years and the red sand of its bed long bleached by the relentless sun to blend with the endless dun landscape.

  McClain had been told that the town was an hour’s ride from the Crane spread. He rode those miles at a leisurely pace, so time was inching towards a moonlit midnight when he came across the upper reaches of the dry creek and turned the chestnut mare to follow its course downhill.

  Another mile and the uninhabited houses he encountered on the town’s fringes were well spaced and half-hidden in wild growths of mesquite and chaparral, doors hanging askew, the unpainted timbers of the walls warped and split. There was no sign of any life. After a quarter-mile or so that air of hopelessness and despair changed. The track veered away from the dry creek and dilapidated dwellings and became a rutted but usable dirt road leading downhill into the town.

  There was no sophistication. Tombstone was pretentious, claiming lofty superiority where there was none. Macedo’s Flat stubbornly denied its own insignificance. Red Creek couldn’t give a damn, and showed it. Uneven plank-walks on either side of the steeply sloping main street were lit by smoking oil lamps hanging on rusting brackets, the weak light reflecting from the filthy windows of business premises closed for the night. The first was a hotel, with several horses at the hitch rail. A short way down the hill a general store offered groceries and provisions; another shop sold wines and liquors; there was a drug store, and another much bigger establishment with a high false front selling guns and ammunition and the necessary belts, holsters, saddles and saddle boots for the long rifles.

  And a saloon.

  This one was also a big building, the biggest in town. Wooden walls blackened by coal oil daubed to preserve, no windows, a heavy and ill-fitting sliding door hung on iron wheels running in channelled angle iron. An old grain store, McClain reckoned, converted into a den of iniquity when the previous business failed, the enterprising owner figuring this time he was on a sure thing.

  The moon’s light touched the building’s iron roof gingerly. Street lighting cast a yellow sheen on the stark black exterior, and light from the interior leaked through the gaps around the door. There was a lot of noise, the sound of breaking glass and an out-of-tune piano with a woman’s shrill voice trying unsuccessfully to follow the off-key jangling. A male voice roared with laughter. The woman, or another, squealed. A discord so far off key it put teeth on edge ended in a cacophony, followed by a loud bang and an instant of silence. Someone, McClain figured, had slammed the piano’s lid down on the player’s fingers – not before time. A sudden belated howl of pain breaking the silence seemed to prove him right.

  But McClain, easing the late Jed Crane’s chestnut mare at a walk across the street and closer to those slivers of bright light leaking around the door’s edges, was only half listening. His attention had been attracted to the hitch rail fronting the saloon. He had been looking along the row of dozing creatures for a roan that might sense his approach, would certainly turn with pricked ears at his whistle. Instead, what had caught his eye was a particularly handsome sorrel that was as out of place amongst the ragged broncs as a bewhiskered range tramp at a society wedding.

  A horse McClain thought maybe he recognized.

  He swung out of the saddle at the rail, half-hitched the mare’s reins and patted it absently before taking a slow walk over to the sorrel. It turned its head to look at him, eyes dark and liquid, something alight in them that upped McClain’s pulse. Was this recognition mutual? He ran a hand down the horse’s silky, warm muzzle and moved to take a closer look at the saddle, the saddle-bags and the empty saddle boot where a Winchester ’73 might have rested.

  If he had the right horse.

  Maybe. But one saddle being much the same as another, and sorrels of this high quality much favoured by men savvy about horseflesh, there was only one way to find out for sure if this unbranded horse spelled trouble.

  It would, of course, be trouble of an entirely different kind from that awaiting him if the horse at the rail had been his own blue roan. But, one step at a time, McClain thought, and he instinctively touched the borrowed Peacemaker lying holstered on his right thigh as he walked away from the sorrel.

  It was just a couple of dusty strides around the hitch rail to the saloon’s door, and at McClain’s muscular heave it slid easily on oiled runners. Once the door was open, the noise, heat and light hit him in the face: the smell of tobacco smoke, stale liquor, unwashed bodies and cheap perfume, and the sudden unsettling feeling of being the centre of attention. Unwelcome, but not unusual in a land where strangers were looked on with suspicion.

  The room was long but not too wide, stretching away from the big sliding doors like an oversized corridor. Beneath the high rafters, horizontal oaken crosses fashioned into crude chandeliers hung from iron chains and bore yet more smoking oil lamps. The bar – rough timber – stretched the full length of the wall to McClain’s left. Behind it bottles glittered on plank shelves nailed to the wall. In front, men in rough trail or work garb, all wearing hats stained by sweat and time, sat on tall stools nursing glasses of varying sizes. Most of them had half-turned to look at McClain, careful not to make their scrutiny too obvious.

  Tables and chairs took up the space closest to McClain. A gaming table with a faro layout, and another probably reserved for poker or blackjack, were at the far end of the room, neither in use. The battered upright piano was set against the right-hand wall beneath an oil painting brown with age, in an ornate gold frame shedding its glitter. The bald man in a white shirt and armbands sitting on the stool before the piano was noisily sucking his fingers. A woman with long blonde ringlets, face painted and thickly powdered, and wearing a sequinned red dress that was a sight to behold was clutching his good hand, her red lips twisted in a grimace of what might have been sympathy.

  The noise, which had dropped considerably when McClain entered through the sliding door, now picked up. Those who’d been weighing him up turned away, having seen in his presence nothing of menace or even mild interest; he was a man in rough western garb, he wore a gun, so what was new?

  The woman leaning over the man with the damaged fingers said something brittle and seemed to lose patience. She dropped his hand, lifted the piano’s lid and ran her long painted fingernails back and forth across the yellowed ivory keys. The impromptu arpeggios died on a high C and she turned away with a flounce and headed for the bar.

  She made straight for a big man sitting at the far end. His broad back was turned to McClain so he had blended in, just another of the drinkers sitting there with elbows on the crude boards. But now, as the blonde in the red frock sashayed over, McClain’s gaze followed her.

  Yes, he thought, Goddammit, yes – and a nerve twitched in his cheek. The sorrel at the hitch rail belonged to Deputy Frank Norris. The man who had left a cell door open so McClain could walk to freedom was here, in Red Creek – and, though it defied logic, made nonsense of those previous actions, he could surely be here for only one reason.

  Move, McClain thought. The big deputy draws a gun faster than most men draw breath, so move now, get the hell out of here, and fast, because the way that woman’s heading she’ll put herself between you and Norris and buy you precious seconds.

  Instead, perversely, McClain used the woman’s diversion not to make himself scarce but to get up close to the big dep
uty. He timed it well, skirting the tables, brushing close enough to the drinkers lined along the bar to draw protests that were lost in the general hum of conversation. They could have been protestations directed elsewhere as, on the other side of the room, the piano player with the damaged hand discovered that he could still play with all his old skill.

  That charitable thought drew a smile from McClain who was hurrying without haste, and the ear-splitting jangle of the ivories helped his cause by causing both Norris and the woman to turn towards the piano.

  And then McClain had reached them. He moved in close enough to feel the woman’s heat and breathe in her heady perfume, took hold of her soft rounded shoulder, and held her still with his grip and a hard look when she turned her head to glare. With his right hand he gripped the butt of the Peacemaker, kept the weapon firm in its holster, but cocked the hammer. The metallic sound was one no murmur of saloon conversation, nor the tune of Golden Slippers murdered by the worst piano player in the West, could muffle or hide. Especially, McClain knew, from the sharp perceptions and ears of an experienced lawman. It got the expected reaction.

  Norris grabbed a handful of material at the woman’s waist, flung her bodily to one side and went for his six-gun. His move was fluid, fast. The woman was still falling when his six-gun cleared leather. She hit one of the tables hard and sent it clattering across the room, then flopped into the sawdust in a flurry of red skirts and silk-stockinged legs.

  A second metallic click acted like a blanket thrown over a fire to still the crackling. The saloon went silent.

  Norris had cocked his six-gun. The pistol was up, pointing. Then, as his finger prepared the squeeze on the trigger that would drop the hammer and send a bullet between McClain’s eyes, some sixth sense held him in check. A gaze that had been blank when all his senses were concentrated on the fast draw that could save his life now focussed on McClain. In that instant of recognition, he became still. Slowly he let the muzzle of his six-gun tilt towards the ceiling as he lowered the hammer. And he was shaking his head when he looked ruefully at McClain.

  ‘One of these days,’ he said softly, ‘that fool trick with a loaded six-gun cocked in its holster will see you with nothing left of your kneecap but blood and splinters of bone.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘I knew you were here in Red Creek,’ Norris said, ‘and the only thing I don’t recognize now is the shirt. What the hell happened?’

  ‘It’s a long story, concerns me and two hard cusses, and a chance encounter on the high ground that went badly wrong.’

  ‘Anything to do with a dead horse damn near eaten away by vultures? I came over the top and caught the stench of that animal before I saw it – or what was left of it.’

  ‘It began there. If I’d been thinking anywhere near straight I would have taken it as a warning and kept my eyes skinned.’ McClain shrugged, dismissing the incident. ‘I walked down from that high ground, Norris, through the foothills, out onto the flat and there were many more miles ahead of me and no sign of life.’

  Norris looked baffled. ‘Walked, you say?’

  ‘No choice. And you must have been riding in my footsteps and passed me by at some point. What I don’t understand is why, or how.’

  ‘The how is easy. You knew I was awake when you walked out. I watched from the door when you crossed to the livery, took some care over following you when you left town, took a lucky guess on where you were headed. I dropped well back, rode nice and easy and didn’t bother keeping you in sight.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Maybe I’m still trying to work that one out.’ Norris’s eyes gave nothing away. ‘But, go on, you walked, you say?’

  ‘Walked, and got lucky. Came across a friendly homestead, got food and water, clothing, borrowed a weapon.’ He watched Norris, remembered his earlier remark. ‘You knew I was here, you said. How was that?’

  ‘Hell, there’s no mistaking that big roan of yours, I could pick it out of a dozen the same size, same colour.’

  ‘So what would you say if I told you that when I walked into this place I’d been in town no more than a couple of minutes, on a chestnut horse borrowed from the same homestead I got the shirt and the six-gun?’

  Norris tilted his head, looked at McClain with a puzzled frown. ‘I told you, there could be no mistake, it was your roan I saw at the hitch rail,’ he said. ‘You know what horses are like. The recognition was mutual. That roan’s ears pricked, it whickered a greeting, and looked at me with real disappointment when I rode by.’

  ‘I’m inclined to believe you,’ McClain said. ‘And if it really was my horse you saw, it being here comes as no surprise.’

  ‘Then . . . d’you mind telling me what’s going on?’

  ‘When I blundered on those two hard cusses up there in the hills, my mind was back in the Flat with Emma, and my six-gun in Lane Dexter’s office. One of those fellers had been thrown when his horse broke a leg. Yeah, that same dead horse you saw lying stinking. So they were in need of a mount and, to men of that kind, horse thieving would come natural. I was alone and unarmed; they took advantage. Knocked me cold. When I came to, I was lying half across their campfire and my horse had gone.’

  ‘And now it’s here, in Red Creek,’ Norris said. ‘And it didn’t get here all on its own.’

  ‘Yes, but where here? Where did you see it?’ McClain asked softly.

  ‘There’s a tired rooming house masquerading as a hotel. Got most of a shingle roof, a couple of its windows unbroken. It’s up the hill a way. You passed it on the way in: must have missed spotting your own damn horse.’

  ‘I passed that place,’ McClain said, ‘as any man must when riding into Red Creek. I saw horses, didn’t pay much attention. And now I’m feeling offended. The roan recognized you when you rode by, but ignored me.’

  ‘We should go up there,’ Norris said. ‘Maybe it had gone by the time you rode in. Maybe your luck’s run out and those horse thieves have already left town.’

  McClain had gone with Norris to a table away from the bar when the raddled blonde with ringlets had picked herself up, brushed sawdust and sequins from her red frock and stalked off to whisper wetly in the pianist’s ear.

  She was still leaning over him when a lean man walked in through the sliding door and seemed to sense tension in the air instantly. He was tall, bent like a sapling fighting a gallant battle against prevailing winds, had a Stetson of indeterminate shape pulled down on long grey hair that matched the colour of a drooping moustache, and eyes that missed nothing. He had a tarnished badge pinned to his vest. A drink was waiting for him at the bar. He took the glass, downed the whiskey without a perceptible swallow, and turned to survey the room.

  ‘If those fellers rode in and rode out again,’ Norris said, watching the newcomer, ‘that old timer with the eagle eye will have watched them both ways and got them pegged at first glance.’

  ‘So maybe we should talk to him.’

  ‘As fellow officers of the law?’

  ‘I was meaning to ask you about that, while trying to figure out what you’re doing here,’ McClain said. ‘You still a deputy?’

  Norris grinned sardonically. ‘You really think Dexter would have kept me on after letting you walk out of his jail?’

  ‘So, again, why are you here?’

  ‘Work it out, or toss a coin. Maybe even I don’t know for sure. I’m after you or, like you, on the run.’

  ‘With a hunk of metal in your pocket as a keepsake that could come in very handy,’ McClain said.

  ‘Is that how you got those nesters to help?’

  ‘I used it, but the woman had already recognized me.’

  Norris was up out of his chair.

  ‘Well, the way that town marshal over at the bar is pretending not to watch us I’ve got a feeling he’s seen us at some time. That could be a help, so let’s call him over.’

  Chapter Seven

  His name was Don Carter and he’d drifted north and west from southern Texas wh
en the small cantina he was running with a Mexican partner on the Gulf coast had been burned down by local riffraff the worse for drink. He’d crossed into New Mexico after a long stop in El Paso to drown sorrows and anger. Arizona had been looked on as one more territory to cross before California and the blue Pacific, Red Creek an overnight stop with a warm bed instead of a succession of nights spent in thin blankets on hard ground, the sky for a roof. It hadn’t worked out that way. He’d stopped a late-night fight in the saloon without raising a sweat or doing much damage other than bruises, and been pleasantly surprised to find the action had done more than all the strong drink to quell his unrest. And it transpired that there never had been a town marshal in Red Creek. When offered the job, he’d accepted without a second thought. No law officer meant no premises, so he’d converted a disused lawyer’s office into a jail. With just one room and that scarcely big enough for desk, filing cabinet and a cupboard for guns, he had no cells and had used his imagination to figure out other methods of punishment for lawbreakers.

  He grinned at that one, let their imagination work, and then admitted he’d had an extension tacked on behind the office. ‘About as big as a walk-in larder, in truth too damn small for a cell, but, hell, that in itself acts as a deterrent. So that’s my sad story, fellers, and now I’m waiting for yours. Bearing in mind that I do have prior knowledge.’

  ‘Meaning you know us,’ Norris said.

  ‘Know is taking it a bit far,’ Carter said. ‘You’re McClain and Norris, Lane Dexter’s deputies, that much I worked out; I’ve seen you a couple of times when I had business with him in Macedo’s Flat. Now I’m wondering what the hell you two are doing here in Red Creek.’

  ‘Two men stole my horse up on the high ground east of Sulphur Spring Valley,’ McClain said.

  ‘That account for the damage to your face?’

  ‘No. What the two fellers I encountered did is covered by my hat and a borrowed shirt. The shorter of the two hit me from behind with a heavy pistol. Looked like an old Colt Dragoon. Laid me out cold.’