Boomer took another big bite and chewed, groaning and shaking his head. “I will say this, though—you make one hell of a breakfast sandwich, partner!”
FOURTEEN
Spurr sat back and ate his biscuits that he washed down with coffee strong enough to melt an andiron.
He kept an eye on both horses as he ate, not liking how the hair under his collars was pricking. That usually meant trouble, and it wasn’t unlikely. He’d sensed someone on their back trail earlier.
Could be nerves, but he didn’t think so. He’d never been one for bad nerves, unless old age had brought them on. But he was pretty sure that someone had been riding the trail out from Diamond Fire, maybe a mile, a mile and a half behind himself and Drago.
When he’d stretched a look back along the trail earlier, he thought he’d glimpsed the brown speck of a rider moving through an aspen-studded valley that he and his prisoner had crossed a half an hour before.
He’d thought it might have been a deer or an elk. Maybe a mountain man looking for game. Drago’s men would have been moving faster. And there would probably have been more than just one.
Spurr resisted the urge to roll a smoke and sit here with another cup of coffee. The temptation was old age speaking to him. He didn’t have time to lounge around, not when Drago’s men might or might not be after him. He answered Boomer’s plea for more of the black brew by filling the old outlaw’s cup with a caustic grunt.
Then he set the pot down and heaved himself to his feet. His ankle was sore for no good reason, and he limped over to where he’d leaned his rifle against a tree and racked a fresh round into the breech.
He worked the kink out of his ankle.
Holding the smoking cup in his hands, Drago watched Spurr darkly, a shrewd kind of fatefulness in the haggard outlaw’s lone eye. The sun peeked out between high, fluffy clouds, offering a wan-golden mountain light, and it reflected dully off the old outlaw’s battered bowler pancaked to his head by his red scarf, and caused the scarf to glow like fresh blood.
The chill wind blew the man’s grizzled, coffee-colored beard.
“We ain’t as young as we once was,” he said.
“How’d you lose your eye?” Spurr asked him, kicking dirt on the fire, which they no longer needed.
“Got trapped in a bank in Whiskey Creek, California. We was shootin’ it out with the town marshal and his deputies. Big shard from one of the windows cut into it.” With one hand, he lifted the patch from over the bad eye. It was bad, all right—eggshell white and sort of shriveled in the scarred socket. “Funny how I can see just as good through just the one.”
“I reckon we adapt.”
“Adapt or die. That’s the whole story, ain’t it?” Drago sighed and glanced at Spurr’s rifle. “Where you goin’?”
“Gonna take a look around. Settle back, have a nap. I catch you up to anything, I’ll gut-shoot you.”
Boomer’s eye glinted behind the steam rising from his coffee cup. “But then you’ll have to listen to my caterwaulin’!”
Spurr headed for the creek. He knew that, shackled and cuffed as he was, Drago wasn’t going anywhere. He couldn’t walk and he couldn’t ride, and there were no weapons lying around. At least none that Spurr was worried about. He’d check the man later to see if he’d squirreled away a fork or a butter knife with the intent of sticking it in Spurr’s back.
The old lawman crossed the creek via a beaver dam. His moccasin slipped off the dam and soaked his ankle. Drago laughed jeeringly behind him. Spurr threw up an arm in salute and then angled his way up the gully’s far slope.
He was winded by the time he reached the top. The slope wasn’t that high, but his old ticker wasn’t much good at this altitude. It beat fast and then slow and sputtered and hiccupped, and he felt it tighten up on him like a clenched fist in his chest.
When he finally got some wind, he walked through a stand of pines, squirrels chittering around him. At the edge of the trees he stopped, shouldered up against a fir, still breathing hard, and cast his gaze back along the long, gradual incline up which Spurr had come when he’d left the main trail.
It was a tan-and-green valley, the tan being broom grass and occasional clumps of chokecherry and wild mahogany. The green were pine copses fingering out from the slopes on both side of the valley. To the left jutted a low ridge capped with gray rock. More, taller ridges with pine-studded apron slopes lay far away to the north.
It was a big, forbidding country. Cold and windblown and swept by cloud shadows. The chill bespoke the coming winter when the snow would be ten feet deep, fifteen to thirty in ravines and the valley bottoms. Diamond Fire lay just over the next ridge straight out away from Spurr, a treeless, wind-scoured saddleback that dropped into another broad valley. It didn’t look that far away from Spurr’s vantage, but then nothing did in this lens-clear light.
It was so clear, in fact, that even his old eyes could make out the single rider wending slowly along the outside edge of a distant copse of mixed evergreens and autumn gold aspens. From this distance of a good mile, the rider was a mere light brown speck, but by the way it moved, it was a man on a horse, all right.
And since he was following the same route Spurr had taken right down to passing to the right of a small boulder field pushed out of the ground by the last glacier, he was shadowing Spurr and Drago.
One of Drago’s men? Possibly a scout rider?
Spurr had to assume so.
Spurr continued to stare as the rider rode toward him, just walking his horse, in no big hurry, following the sign. A cloud shadow swept over the rider, hiding him for a few seconds, and then there he was again, riding out of the cloud shadow and into the salmon-gold sunlight.
The wind rushed off the slopes around Spurr, carrying the occasional crackling of a falling branch.
Spurr turned and made his way back through the trees. He descended the gully slope carefully, not wanting to twist or break an ankle out here. If he did, he was crowbait. Drago would dance a jig over him.
He crossed the dam without slipping off this time. When he got to the other side, he saw that Boomer was asleep against the boulder, head thrown back and to one side. His empty cup was turned over by his right thigh. Drago’s mouth was open, and beneath the wind’s steady rush his snores sounded like a dull whipsaw.
Spurr started forward. Drago jerked awake with a start. He stared at Spurr, wide-eyed for about five seconds, and then recognition dawned in his lone eye, and he drew a long breath.
“I was dreamin’ I forgot to feed the chickens.”
“What chickens?” Spurr said.
“Chickens back home on our old Texas ranch, I guess. I dream about ’em from time to time, more lately. It was my job to make sure the chickens got fed and watered and to pen ’em up at night and to make sure no foxes got in the pen. Every once in a while I dream I left ’em out or I forgot to feed ’em or both and I got this feelin’ my old man is gonna wale the holy hell out of me.”
Spurr walked down to fetch the horses.
“They’re back there, ain’t they?” Drago asked him.
“Yep,” Spurr said, bending down to remove Cochise’s hobbles.
Drago drew another ragged breath. “Wish you woulda listened to me. Cause hell’s sure enough gonna pop now, partner.”
* * *
Later, after Spurr and Drago had stopped for the night, and Spurr had built a fire in the shelter of a mountain wall, the old lawman took his rifle and walked back in the direction from which they’d come.
They’d followed a deer trail up from the floor of a narrow, deep valley to the base of the stony cliff—high ground from where Spurr thought he could keep a better watch on his back trail below and from where he’d have a better chance against attackers. He followed the deer trail down the open slope and into aspens, holding his rifle up high across his chest in both hands, walking slowly, c
autiously, alert for the sounds of stalkers.
The sun had gone down but there was still an hour’s worth of wan green light left in the sky. The steely breeze sliced across Spurr’s cheeks. The wind was out of the south, facing Spurr now, which was good because it blew the smoke of his and Drago’s campfire back against the northern cliff face rather than into the valley, where Spurr had spied the flicker of a campfire after he had finished building his own.
He’d left Drago bound and gagged this time, in case the man got the notion to call out for his old gang. Spurr had left his prisoner in a spitting, grunting, red-faced rage. Spurr didn’t trust the old outlaw any farther than he could throw him uphill against a stiff west wind.
Spurr descended the slope at a slant, which was easier on his old knees. Below lay the creek, its dark water splashing over rocks in its narrow, tree– and shrub-lined bed.
Spurr could smell the freshness of the water and the rocks and the green of the damp trees. As he approached the game trail that ran along the bottom of the slope, beside the stream, he cast his gaze downstream about fifty yards and into the woods on the creek’s far side.
A campfire flickered orange in the dense shadows. The camp was likely butted up against the base of the cliff on that side of the canyon.
Spurr was only a few feet above the game trail when his left moccasin boot slipped out from beneath him. He gave a grunt as both feet flew out from beneath him, and he dropped his rifle as he lowered both hands to break his fall, which they hardly did at all.
“Shit!” he exclaimed under his breath as the ground came up to smack his butt and back hard, jarring his breath from his lungs. He rolled several times to his left and ended up on the damp game trail, belly down, raking air in and out of his lungs.
When the shock of the sudden tumble had passed, he jerked his head up and looked over his shoulder to see if anyone had heard and come running from the direction of the campfire. What a way to go out—falling on his ancient ass and lifting a silly din to alert a dozen or so hard cases to his presence. He imagined Drago’s unwashed horde running out from the direction of the fire, pistols and rifles raised, whooping and hollering like coyotes.
He scanned the trees, lips stretched back from his teeth, thin hair hanging in his eyes.
Nothing stirred but a squirrel peering over a branch on the other side of the chugging, gurgling stream and chitting raucously as though jeering at the clumsy human interloper.
“Shut up, ya pesky rodent!” Spurr snarled when he was satisfied he hadn’t been heard. Drago’s tough nuts might not have heard him but the squirrel’s tirade could certainly be heard as far away as the fire.
If it was Drago’s men over there. Spurr had no idea, but who else could it be? He had to find out, learn what he was up against.
The squirrel flicked its tail and, continuing to glare down at Spurr, stopped chittering.
“Thank you,” the old lawman said, rolling onto his back to take stock.
He didn’t think anything was broken. His ass was mighty sore. The back of his head throbbed dully. His left ankle ached. He’d twisted it slightly but he didn’t think it was broken. As he lay there, he was glad to feel a gradual cessation of his miseries.
Finally, he hauled himself to his feet, walked back up the slope to where he’d dropped his rifle, and scooped it and his hat off the ground. He donned the hat and brushed the dirt from the Winchester’s stock, vaguely noting a fresh scratch on the already well-scratched and scuffed walnut forestock. He’d have to rub bear grease into the wood when he got back to his cabin west of Denver.
He was just damn lucky the old popper hadn’t gone off. He’d had an old lawman friend who’d dropped his rifle, and the damn thing had triggered, sounding like a detonated dynamite keg, alerting the cutthroats he’d been stalking.
Ben Ryan never stalked another cutthroat again. He’d been buried down along the Arkansas River, going on twelve years now. Nothing more than a few shovelfuls of dust . . .
Spurr set out once more, ambling downstream along the deer trail, wincing against the pain in his ankle as well as that in several other joints and his tailbone. Should have known that grass would be wet down here along the creek, damn fool . . .
The creek was shallow enough that he made it across the rocks without getting his boots wet. On the southern side of the stream he began moving through the forest in the direction of the flickering flames. He’d just pushed through some ferns when a man shouted loudly, angrily. The voice echoed around the canyon.
Spurr froze as a girl screamed.
A gun barked. It was the hollow pop of a small-caliber pistol.
Spurr crouched and scowled. “What in tarnation?”
FIFTEEN
A man bellowed as though the slug had struck its target.
The girl shouted again, and then another man shouted. There was the snap of a twig beneath a heavy foot.
Spurr dropped to a knee and stared through the dark foliage toward the fire’s glow in the trees about sixty, seventy yards away and up the incline toward the base of the cliff. As the man continued shouting, Spurr heaved himself to his feet, and hoping the shouting covered his footsteps, he bulled through the brush and ducked under and around pine branches, the firelight growing in front of him.
He stopped behind a tree at the edge of the firelight, and heard a man yell, “. . . Told you what would happen if you ran out on me, you stubborn wench!”
Another man was groaning while the first man shouted.
Spurr doffed his hat and edged a look around the tree, the girl shouting, “You don’t own me, you bastard!”
Her voice broke on that last and she sobbed as Spurr cast his gaze around the side of the tree and into the slight clearing amongst the tall pines and firs forming a horseshoe around the boulder-strewn base of the southern cliff. The girl was on the ground to Spurr’s left, facing a tall man in a long, sheepskin coat with a wool collar. Another man was on one knee behind the tall man, holding a gloved hand to his bloody ear.
The tall man held a small, pearl-gripped over/under derringer butt forward, and shook it at the girl threateningly as he gritted his teeth and said, “I do own you, Greta. I paid good money for you from Giff Montgomery, and by god you’re gonna earn back every penny, or I’m gonna—!”
He’d been walking toward the girl, swinging his hand holding the gun back behind his left shoulder as though he were going to lay the popper across her face. Now he stopped suddenly and turned toward Spurr as the old lawman stepped out from behind the pine. Spurr loudly racked a fresh cartridge into the Winchester’s breech, aiming the long gun straight out from his right hip.
“Your momma never taught you it wasn’t nice to hit girls, I reckon.”
The girl turned to him, and even in the dark shadows that the dancing orange flames shunted around the camp he recognized her from the second-floor balcony of the brothel in Diamond Fire. Only now she was sporting a split lip from which blood trickled down over her chin. Her gray-blue eyes were bright with fear and anger.
The man hardened his jaws and furled his brows. “Who the hell are you?” His voice sort of trailed off when his eyes flicked down to the moon-and-star badge pinned to Spurr’s buckskin mackinaw. He was a tall, handsome man in whipcord trousers and tall, black boots with silver spurs. His beard and mustache were impeccably trimmed. The high-crowned Stetson on his head appeared to never have been rained on.
“Spurr Morgan, Deputy United States Marshal. It ain’t no federal offense, hittin’ a woman, but just the same I’m gonna drill you another belly button if you don’t drop that little popper in the dirt there, Steve. Then take three steps back to your friend with the ugly ear and tell me what the hell this is all about.”
“He hit me!” the girl said in a pinched voice. “He thinks he owns me!”
“I do own her, lawman,” the fancy Steve said as he angrily tossed the
pearl-gripped derringer onto the ground to Spurr’s right. “I paid good money for her from a saloon owner in Deadwood and brought her out here at my own expense.”
“I didn’t want to come out here!” the girl yelled at Fancy Steve.
“You agreed to the proposition that I pay Montgomery a flat fee and give you free room and board and two percent of all profits for two full years!”
“But you didn’t share any of the profits!”
“That’s because you hadn’t yet earned back the flat fee I paid to Montgomery!” Fancy Steve shouted back at the girl, leaning forward on his long legs.
“Now, this doesn’t sound like a very fair business venture for the girl, who does most of the work,” Spurr interjected. He shifted his gaze to the man with the bloody ear—a short, dark-haired gent who was furtively dipping his right hand into the coat pocket on the far side of his person from Spurr. “And I’ll thank you to go ahead and fish out of that pocket there whatever you’re fishing for, friend. Do it real slow. I’m talking slow as a glacier. One fast move and you’ll be sportin’ a new ear hole.”
The shorter man bunched up his large, rawboned, thick-nosed face, and slowly lifted his right hand. He held a nickel-plated Bisley revolver between his thumb and index finger.
Scowling at Spurr, he tossed the pistol into the dirt near the tall man’s derringer, which Spurr assumed had started out with the girl. In fact, it was probably a bullet from the little popper that had taken the lobe off the shorter gent’s left ear.
“Any more pistols on either one of you?”
“No,” Fancy Steve said.
“Liar!” the girl yelled at the tall man, jutting her pretty chin at him.
Spurr locked gazes with the tall man and grinned. When the Fancy Steve and the stocky gent had both produced two more pistols of varying calibers apiece, and tossed them down with the others near Spurr, Spurr said, “Well, now that we’re all friendly . . . are you all right, young lady?”
The Old Wolves Page 11