Last Lawman (9781101611456)

by Brandvold, Peter

  He continued to yell, his voice cracking desperately, as Stanhope kicked him up onto the platform. Near the noose dangling from its beam, LaForge dropped to his knees and raised his long arms and opened his hands in supplication. “Please! I beg you! Don’t do this!”

  His voice turned shrill as a rusty saw, and he began sobbing, his craggy face crumpling, thin lips quivering.

  Stanhope laughed. “You’re crow bait, hangman!”

  He set his carbine on the platform, then crouched over LaForge, wrapping an arm around his lean waist and hauling the hysterical man to his feet. When he had him standing on his skinny legs, he pushed him over to the noose and, while the hangman continued to plead for his life, sobbing, cords of sinew stretching beneath his chin, tears dribbling down his paper-pale cheeks, Stanhope drew the noose down over his gray head and tightened the knot around his skinny neck.

  LaForge howled and mewled and danced atop the trapdoor, clawing at the noose with his long spidery fingers.

  Mason stared in disbelief, as did the rest of the crowd. A few of the mothers, clad in sunbonnets and Mother Hubbards, were ushering their children off down alleys and away from the scene of the hangman’s imminent demise. Most everyone else, including several women, held their ground, staring up in eerie fascination as the hangman bawled and danced, his coarse gray hair blowing in the breeze. Piss darkened his trousers as it oozed down his legs and darkened the door leaping in its frame around his black, thumping half boots.

  “Don’t do it, Clell!” Mason’s shout was too low to be heard above the hangman’s cries, so he raised it several decibels. “Clell…let him go! LaForge was just doin’ his job! I’m the one you oughta hang—not him!”

  Stanhope turned toward Mason, grinning. “I’m savin’ you fer later, Sheriff!”

  He glanced at one of the other Vultures, a big, red-bearded man called Red Ryan, who stood with one hand on the brake-like handle rigged to the trapdoor. Stanhope nodded. Red Ryan grinned, showing his yellow teeth inside his heavy beard, and a collective gasp rose like a distant thunder peal from the crowd.

  Red Ryan threw the lever.

  The trapdoor opened with a wooden rasp.

  LaForge dropped straight down to the end of the rope and jerked back up with a crack like the report of a small-caliber pistol. His hands that had continued to claw at the rope now dropped to his sides. His long, lean body stiffened as it swung from side to side on the creaking rope.

  His feet continued to dance. His fingers twitched. His eyes bulged in his skull and he worked his thin lips as though he were trying to say something but couldn’t get the words out.

  Then his body slackened. The light left his eyes over which his papery lids drooped halfway down.

  Mason’s knees buckled. He dropped to the street. “Ah, Christ.”

  Stanhope, standing alone on the gallows now, holding his carbine in one hand, his sawed-off gut shredder in the other, turned back to him. “Don’t pass out, Sheriff. We ain’t done yet. Nope. We ain’t done by a long shot!”

  The next half-hour passed as though in an excruciatingly drawn-out nightmare while Mason watched from his knees, hands cuffed behind his back. Stanhope ordered each man who’d ridden in the posse that had hunted him down to step out away from the crowd or Stanhope and his men would rape all the women and shoot all the children in town, then burn Willow City to the ground.

  There was much crying and yelling, but finally the six innocent townsmen who’d ridden with Mason were lined up in front of the gallows and shot by the Vultures, who in turn had lined up ten feet away to form a firing squad. While the posse men’s wives and children ran to where the men lay quivering with death spasms, one of the Vultures led a small horse herd out of an alley, and the gang members, including Mark Finn, all mounted, firing their guns in the air in celebration.

  While cries of terror continued to rise from the dispersing, wildly shifting crowd, Clell Stanhope rode over to where Trixie Tate knelt near Burt Givens’s beer keg, sobbing. Givens himself had taken cover inside the saloon. The leader of the Vultures grabbed the stricken whore’s arm and pulled her, kicking and screaming, over the pommels of his saddle.

  While the rest of the gang galloped on out of town to the north, Stanhope trotted his grulla gelding over to Mason. Trixie screamed and kicked her legs down one side of the horse while trying to pound her fists against Stanhope’s right leg with the other, her long blond hair brushing across the ground.

  The vultures on Stanhope’s cheeks spread their wings as the outlaw leader extended his sawed-off popper toward Mason and ratcheted back one of the two hammers. “Been nice palaverin’ with you, Sheriff. Hope ya don’t take none of this personal!”

  He laughed. Mason watched the man’s thick, red-brown finger with its dirt-encrusted nail tighten inside the shotgun’s trigger guard. The lawman slowly closed his eyes. His shoulders jerked when the blast came. It hadn’t sounded as loud as Mason would have expected from a double-bore shotgun loaded with ten-gauge buck.

  It came again, and finding himself oddly still alive, Mason opened his eyes to see dust puff ten feet in front of him. Stanhope was galloping away, glaring back over his shoulder but not at Mason. He was looking up toward the rooftops somewhere to Mason’s left, one eye narrowed, the shotgun half extended in his right hand, the hammer still cocked.

  A rifle cracked again. The bullet plunked into the street to the right of Stanhope’s grulla. The outlaw flinched, spat a curse, then turned forward, let the popper hang against his belly, took his reins in both hands, and booted the horse on up the street toward the north edge of town.

  Trixie continued to scream and kick and flail her fists as she lay draped across his saddle.

  Mason turned to stare in the direction from which the rifle had spoken. He ran his gaze across a couple of peaked roofs until he spied a silhouetted figure crouched atop the roof of the Laramie House Hotel, half hidden by the tall false facade.

  It was a long-haired figure with a low-crowned, flat-brimmed hat. A claw necklace hung around the man’s neck. He was too far away for Mason to tell for sure, but the rifle in his hands looked like a brass-cased Yellowboy repeater. From what Mason could see, the man looked Indian. Maybe a half-breed.

  Holding his rifle barrel-up in both hands, the man held Mason’s gaze for about three seconds, then pulled his head back behind the facade and was gone.

  Mason looked away from his unknown benefactor, saw the women screaming over the bodies of their dead husbands in front of the gallows. He saw LaForge twisting at the end of his own rope. Regus Bone lay sprawled in the street to his right, blood glistening across every inch of the old deputy’s upper body and dribbling down his gray-bristled cheeks.

  Shock lay like a heavy yoke on Mason’s shoulders. Shaking it off, he rose to his feet, trying to jerk his hands free of the steel bracelets and raging, and yelled, “Someone get me out of these goddamn cuffs!”

  He looked once more toward where the rifleman who’d saved him from Stanhope’s bullet had shown himself briefly and disappeared.

  FIVE

  “Come on, Cochise,” Spurr said to his horse. “Let’s rustle us up a drink.”

  The old lawman started down the stock car’s ramp in his high-topped Indian moccasins, and the big roan’s shod hooves clomped on the worn boards behind him, its bridle bit dangling below its long snout. At the bottom of the ramp, Spurr stopped and looked toward the little jerkwater town sitting along a two-track trail that paralleled the recently laid rails of the spur line about a hundred yards north of the tracks and the depot building that appeared little larger than a chicken coop.

  A wooden sign nailed to a cottonwood post in front of the hovel announced the name of the town as ALKALI FLATS.

  The shake-shingled building sat on a sun-bleached bed of graded gravel to Spurr’s left. On the far side of it stood a water tank, and at the moment the train’s engineer and fireman were swinging the tank’s canvas spigot toward the Baldwin locomotive that sat panting
like some exhausted, parched beast in dire need of a long, cold drink. There were no other disembarking passengers except for Spurr and a young, sullen saddle tramp, who had already ridden off with his horse probably in search of work on one of the area ranches in this big, empty, grassy country south of Willow City—a vast sage-stippled bowl hemmed in by high, misty blue mountains in all directions.

  At least, that was Spurr’s guess about the youngster’s business. He didn’t know for certain-sure, because while he and the lad had ridden the Burlington Flyer up from Denver, and then the spur line west from Chugwater, the kid had rebuffed any and all of Spurr’s attempts at friendly, boredom-relieving conversation. He’d merely gazed out the stock car’s open door and yawned and grunted or chewed his fingernails or sat dangling his legs toward the tracks and staring at his big right toe sticking out of the hole in his boot as though it were some complicated problem he was forever trying to solve.

  That was a cowpuncher, for you. Too stupid to talk. Probably an east Texan. Spurr had known horses smarter than most of the cowpunchers he’d known, and he’d known many, having been one himself back in his younger days down in the Texas brasada country and on the Oklahoma panhandle.

  Spurr stared after the cowboy loping off into the western distance along the rails. Coal smoke and briefly glowing cinders puffed from the engine’s diamond-shaped stack, obscuring Spurr’s view for a moment before billowing toward Wyoming’s high-arching, faultless blue sky.

  Since the train carried so few passengers on this leg, the depot master had time to gas with the two trainsmen, rising up and down on the toes of his black brogans, jingling the change in his pockets and chuckling and shaking his head—likely a poor, lonely soul this far out in the tall and uncut.

  The town beyond the depot appeared to have a total of eight buildings—three business establishments and five cottonwood log cabins that had turned the silver of a newly minted nickel in the unforgiving Wyoming summer sun. Spurr hoped at least one of those establishments had a drink in it. Intending to find out, he pushed Cochise’s bit into the horse’s mouth, tightened the latigo strap beneath his belly, then toed a stirrup, grabbed the apple, and pushed and pulled his old, withered carcass into the leather.

  He’d just gotten seated when his breath grew short and the dun prairie and blue sky began to pitch and swirl around him.

  “Shit!” he rasped through gritted teeth, his heart hiccupping in his ears. “Goddamn, you old…!”

  Spurr quickly wrapped his reins around his saddlehorn. That steel crab had closed a pincher over his pumper again. His left arm grew heavy, so he used his right hand to dig into an inside pocket of his elkskin vest for a small leather sack.

  One-handed, he pulled the sack open, plucked out a small, gold tablet that his sawbones called a “heart starter” but that Spurr knew was nitroglycerin, and popped it into his mouth. He threw his head back and swallowed hard before leaning forward against the saddle horn to wait for the nitro pill to give his old ticker the kick in the pants it needed and to shrug off the crab’s assault.

  “You all right over there, mister?”

  Spurr looked to his left. The depot agent had turned away from the men busy filling the locomotive’s boiler to give his concerned gaze to the old lawman sitting crouched atop the big roan. The agent wavered drunkenly from side to side, only Spurr knew that it wasn’t the man himself staggering but Spurr’s oxygen-starved image of him. The blue-uniformed man shifted around a few more times before he gradually steadied, standing where he was off the far front corner of the shack, his hands in his pockets.

  Then the lawman’s old heart stopped buck kicking like a broomtail bronc in his chest. It settled down and started beating more slowly, regularly, and without the ache stretching across his chest and into his left shoulder and arm.

  One time, likely soon, he knew, it would kick him right on out of here and off to storied Glory, wherever in hell that was. But for now, once more, the pill had done its job. Spurr straightened in his saddle, extended his left arm before him, flexed his fingers, and drew a long, refreshing breath. His throat opened to welcome the life-sustaining substance into his chest.

  Air never tasted as wonderful as on the heels of one of his “colicky pumper spells.”

  “Sir?” the agent said, frowning beneath the leather bill of his uniform cap.

  Spurr looked at him. He appeared around thirty, half Spurr’s age. He had a big, open, clear-eyed face. The face of a midwestern farmboy, most likely. A juniper. A hayseed. There was no touch of gray in his blond sideburns or blond mustache. He had a paunch, but his shoulders were straight and strong.

  Spurr didn’t recognize him. Once, he’d known all the railroaders in this neck of the West. Now, most of the men with whom he’d drifted to the wild and wooly frontier in the years preceding the war, and then again after the war, were either dead or holed up in a rooming house somewhere, playing checkers, filing their dentures, or sneaking off to the nearest saloon for a proscribed shot of red-eye to dull the pain of their syphilis.

  Spurr chuckled at the thought. He raised his gloved hand to the depot agent. “Son,” Spurr said, “it was just the devil reachin’ up to tickle my toes there for a minute. He’ll do that just to remind me what’s comin’.”

  “You’re lookin’ a little pale, mister.”

  “Will I find a drink over yonder?”

  The depot agent canted his head toward the small collection of buildings to the north. “The Bighorn Saloon will set you up right nicely.”

  “That’ll bring the color back to these old cheeks. Much obliged.” Spurr slanted a stiff finger against his tan hat brim and touched his heels to Cochise’s flanks.

  As the horse sauntered off toward the single-track trail leading away from the rails and the depot toward the buildings beyond, the agent called behind him, “Hey, wait a minute, mister.”

  Spurr drew back on Cochise’s reins, curveted the horse, and looked back at the depot agent.

  The man frowned more curiously than before and gave a wry, disbelieving chuckle. “Ain’t you Spurr Morgan? The lawman?”

  Spurr touched his fingers to the thin gray-brown beard hanging off his wart-studded chin and looked off. “Am I?” He returned his blue-eyed gaze to the agent regarding him with a half-skeptical grin. “You know—I might just be. When you get to be my age, you’re lucky if you remember to wear your underwear.”

  He reined Cochise up the trail and threw up a parting hand. “Word to the wise, young man—don’t ever get old!”

  Cochise clomped slowly along the trail toward the collection of mismatched buildings comprising the jerkwater stop of Alkali Flats. Some of the log buildings were obviously older, probably built well before the spur line had been laid. A couple, including a large, white, Victorian-style hotel, looked far newer.

  Spurr was in no hurry. It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and he wasn’t due to meet Sheriff Dusty Mason here for another hour. He’d returned to Denver from New Mexico three days ago, having polished off Hector Philpot’s bunch and buried poor Kenny Potter near the cabin where he’d been shot. He’d no sooner written his report, sort of fudging the details of how Philpot himself had died just a tad, and turned it in to Chief Marshal Henry Brackett’s office than the old chief marshal had laid this new assignment on his most veteran deputy.

  Funny, Spurr thought, how the chief marshal always prefaced each assignment with the obligatory recommendation that Spurr retire down in Mexico. Brackett never pushed the matter, however. It seemed to please him just to mention it and have Spurr snort and chuckle and brush his fist across his warty nose.

  Spurr might have been the oldest lawdog in Brackett’s stable, but Brackett, no spring chicken himself, knew the value of a keeping a lawman of Spurr’s experience in his cavvy of commissioned deputy marshals. A pious man, Brackett knew Spurr’s reputation for strong drink and whoremongering. Spurr thought the wise old Civil War veteran, once an adjutant for Grant himself, probably suspected that Spurr
occasionally blurred the lines between what was lawful and what was unlawful in running evildoers to ground.

  Even so, the chief marshal always reserved the trickiest, nastiest assignments for the long-toothed veteran, who’d had his federal commission for over ten years but who’d worn several other badges, including county sheriff and town marshal before that. He’d even spent some time in western Dakota as a range detective. Anything to make a living without having to punch cattle who were only marginally more stupid than the men who punched them.

  This current assignment looked no different.

  It involved a gang known as the Vultures for one, led by the notorious killer Clell Stanhope. Stanhope’s gang had busted their kill-crazy leader out of jail before hanging the executioner who’d been sent to play cat’s cradle with Stanhope’s own neck. They’d executed every man in the posse of the sheriff who’d run him to ground, and they’d kidnapped a whore.

  That sheriff was Dusty Mason of Willow City, a small county seat situated about eighty miles north of Alkali Flats. Spurr had dusted trail with the sheriff a year ago when they’d both been tracking a young firebrand who’d broken out of a federal pen in southern Colorado—Cuno Massey. Spurr and Mason had been partnered up for several weeks, and while Spurr had eventually warmed to the taciturn, steely-eyed lawman a good twenty years Spurr’s junior, Mason wasn’t exactly Spurr’s brand of hombre.

  Spurr appreciated a good joke and a soft whore now and then, whereas he’d found Mason relatively humorless and guarded. If he enjoyed a mattress dance on occasion, the sheriff sure hadn’t chinned about it.

  Spurr wasn’t comfortable with a man who didn’t admit to a few frivolities, a man who couldn’t bust out with a hearty laugh now and then. The old federal deputy had little time for a man who took himself and life too seriously, for life sure as hell didn’t return the favor, given how the winds of fate blew fickle and rampant, toying with each and every one of us willy-nilly.