Last Lawman (9781101611456)

by Brandvold, Peter

  The sheriff, all business as usual, looked at Spurr. “You ready for a hard pull?”

  Spurr swung into the leather and turned Cochise away from the hitchrack. “What do you think I came out here for—pie and coffee?” He was surprised—no, stunned—at Mason’s having stuck up for him. Not that he needed the sheriff’s help with these two Pinkerton tinhorns. He could have pistol-whipped the pair till their brains dribbled out their ears. It just wasn’t like Mason to come to the aid of a man whom Mason saw as old and washed up.

  At least, that’s how Spurr had figured the younger sheriff regarded him after their testy, often outright argumentative partnership during their long ride to the Mexican border a year ago. Mason, who Spurr saw as an unproven lawman often blinded by his distrust of federals and too pigheaded to take direction from a far more experienced badge toter, had fared little better in Spurr’s eyes.

  The Pinkertons were flushed, their eyes indignant.

  Spurr looked all the men over. “Your horses need a rest, water?”

  “We gave ’em a blow and water at the Mud Creek Stage Station,” said Ed Gentry. “But me—I could use a bottle.” He was eyeing the saloon yonder with interest.

  “No time for that,” Mason said.

  Gentry, a skinny oldster about ten years Mason’s senior and Spurr’s junior, a good lawman from what Spurr remembered, spat a thick wad of chew onto a fresh horse apple. “Maybe no time to sit and play cards, but I’ll be damned if I’m ridin’ dry. Spurr, your holds got slosh?”

  “I ain’t no juniper, Ed.” Spurr reached back to pat one of his saddlebag pouches, then offered the man a brotherly smile.

  “You boys go on ahead,” Gentry said. “I’ll be along shortly.”

  As the territorial marshal trotted his claybank off toward the saloon, Mason cursed, then tipped his cream Stetson down low over his high forehead as he swung his buckskin out into the street and touched its flanks with his spurs. Spurr pulled Cochise up beside the sheriff’s mount. Stockton rode to Mason’s other side, rolling chew behind his lower lip. The two Pinkertons, looking ornery after Mason’s verbal assault, fell in behind.

  As they rode past the saloon before which old Ed Gentry was just now dismounting, Spurr scrutinized the young sheriff riding on his left. Mason looked even more grim and serious than Spurr remembered. Spurr figured the man had a right. The worst that could happen to any lawman had happened to Mason. His jail and his town had been sacked. His prisoner, a notorious killer, had been freed by his equally notorious gang. They’d killed several innocent bystanders and kidnapped another.

  Those were all the details that Chief Marshal Brackett had shared with Spurr. They were all he’d needed to know on the front end of the assignment. He knew the Vultures’ reputation, had even tracked them, in vain, twice before. He figured Mason would eventually fill him in on the rest of their most recent depradations.

  “Go easy, Dusty,” Spurr said, staring straight ahead over his horse’s ears as they trotted on out of the fledgling town.

  Mason glowered at him. “What’d you say?”

  “I said go easy. Bring them beans in your pot back to a simmer. You goin’ off on a full boil like this ain’t the way to track killers of Clell Stanhope’s ilk.”

  “You know about Stanhope?”

  “Hell, Stanhope’s been runnin’ off his leash for nigh on ten years now. I once took down two members of his gang, but never did get close to the rest.” Spurr looked at Mason, who was still glowering at him. “I know his reputation.” He paused. “I also know what he did to your town.”

  Mason looked straight off over the old horse trail they were following through a long valley hemmed in by ridges in all directions. They’d ridden nearly a quarter mile before the sheriff turned back to Spurr, his pale blue eyes brightly anguished beneath his hat brim. “They shot down a whole posse, Spurr. Men—citizens of my town—who helped me run Stanhope down.”

  His lips quivered a little as he spoke through gritted teeth. “They shot ’em down in front of their wives and children. I was on my knees. Handcuffed. I watched the whole goddamn thing and couldn’t do nothin’ about it. Nothin’.”

  The sheriff stretched his lips, showing more of his teeth. “So don’t tell me you know his reputation. And please spare me all your sage advice. I didn’t request you for that. I requested you because, though you’re older than them mountains yonder and you’ll likely die on me tomorrow, you can track. And that’s what I need—a tracker.”

  Mason turned his head forward, pulled his hat brim still lower on his forehead, and rammed his heels into his buckskin’s loins. The horse gave a whinny as it put its head down and stretched its stride into a full gallop. Spurr squinted against Mason’s dust, shaking his head.

  The surly sheriff had amazed him once again.

  “You requested me, didja?” he muttered. “Well, if that don’t beat all.”

  Spurr held Cochise to a trot, knowing they had a long trail to fog. The Pinkertons passed him, Calico Strang glancing back, his long, dark red hair bouncing over his collar as he sneered. “What’s the matter, old man—can’t you keep up?”

  Spurr only grinned and shook his head as the two Pinkertons booted their own mounts into gallops after Mason. Bill Stockton held his horse back to a more reasonable pace. He met Spurr’s gaze, then shook his head in defeat and continued on up the trail.

  After a time, when all four had disappeared over the far side of a hill a good half mile away, Spurr followed the trail halfway up a low hill, then stopped Cochise and curveted the horse so that he was facing south. He glanced behind, saw Ed Gentry loping along Spurr’s back trail, about a half mile away.

  Out of long habit, Spurr scrutinized the broad valley rolling between high, dark mountains. As Gentry and his dapple gray meandered toward Spurr along the curving trail, growing gradually larger so that Spurr could begin making out the man’s features, including his black wool coat that whipped out behind him in the wind, and his checked wool shirt and brown leather vest, Spurr spied movement behind the man.

  Spurr’s eyes weren’t what they once were, but as he narrowed the blue orbs beneath his grizzled brows, he thought he could make out a dust plume along Gentry’s back trail. Gradually, as Gentry continued toward Spurr, who could now begin hearing the dapple gray’s footfalls, Spurr saw the two indistinct figures of what were most likely horseback riders.

  He reached into one of his saddlebag pouches and pulled out his spyglass sheathed in elk hide worn soft as mountain ferns. He removed the old, brass-chased glass from the leather, brushed the lens across his neckerchief, and telescoped it. Holding it to his right eye, following the growing dust plume on Gentry’s back trail, he heard Gentry say dryly beneath the clomps of his horse, “You waitin’ on me or the busthead?”

  Spurr lowered the spyglass slightly to the old, gray-beareded lawman coming up the hill, holding his reins loosely in his black-gloved hands above his saddle horn. Spurr was glad Gentry and Stockton were included in Mason’s posse. They were old, familiar faces, and there were getting to be fewer and fewer men he knew on this younger man’s frontier.

  Spurr snorted. “What do you think, Ed?”

  “I’m thinkin’ you look like you need a drink, you old mossyhorn.”

  “Don’t normally imbibe this time of the day, but I’d take a snort to be sociable. Since you got a fresh new bottle an’ all.”

  Grinning, Gentry pulled the dapple gray up beside Spurr, on the downside of the hill, and reached back with a grunt into his left saddlebag pouch. “Where’s the others?”

  “Lightin’ a shuck like there’s a passel of high-priced whores givin’ free pokes in the Wind Rivers.”

  Gentry wrapped his reins around his saddle horn and pried the cork out of the bottle labeled Old Kentucky, with a low hill and a lone oak etched just beneath the words. “He won’t slow down till his horse throws a shoe or comes up lame.”

  “No, he won’t.”

  “Bill said he’d stay as clos
e as he could, to keep him from gettin’ dry-gulched.”

  Spurr was still staring through his spyglass, smiling with concentration.

  “What you see back there?” Gentry asked him, holding out the bottle.

  “You grew two extra shadows, Ed.”

  The territorial marshal was indignant. “The hell I did.”

  Spurr traded Gentry’s bottle for his spyglass. While Spurr tipped the bottle back, enjoying the burn as the southern bourbon washed down his throat and over his tonsils, instantly quelling his sundry and customary aches and pains in his rickety body, Gentry held the spyglass to his eye with both hands, adjusting it.

  “I’ll be goddamned.”

  Spurr took another drink, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You didn’t stir up any trouble in the saloon back there, did ya, partner?”

  “Hell, no. Weren’t nobody in there but some paper collars off the local ranches.”

  Spurr thought of the paper collar that Abilene had married. Abilene…or Martha? He preferred to think of her as Abilene, however, and he would forevermore.

  “Probably just a couple of punchers headin’ back to their spreads.” Spurr gave the bottle back to Gentry and replaced his spyglass in its sheath, then returned it to its saddlebag pouch. “We’d best get to bobbasheelyin’ after Mason.”

  When they’d ridden up the trail a ways, Spurr said, “How’d you an’ Bill get involved in this mess, Ed?”

  “Mason sent us a telegram over to Buffaloville, where we been tryin’ to rustle us up some long loopers who been twistin’ the panties of some ranchers over there. We rode over to Willow City the next day, picked up Mason, and started trackin’ them Vultures west through the Stony Butte country. That’s where the two Pinkertons were waitin’ on us. Mason had sent a telegram to their office up in Thunder City, and ole Bryan Rand sent them two—Strang and Mitchell—because the Vultures been puttin’ a nice dent in their business, don’t ya know.”

  “I do know.”

  “Web ain’t so bad for a Pinkerton, but you can take that Calico Strang and hang him from the nearest tree.”

  “I’d like to take Strang.”

  Gentry chuckled, then he shook his head. “Willow City’s a damn mess, I tall ya, Spurr. Them Vultures killed Mason’s entire posse. Hanged the hangman.”

  “So I heard.”

  “He didn’t even ask any of the citizens up there to posse up this time. I don’t reckon it woulda done any good. Shit, you ride through there, you can still hear the women cryin’ and the little ones squallin’. Awful damn mess. Never see the like since you and me put the kibosh on that land war up in Dakota—what was it, three, four years ago?”

  Spurr laughed as he and Gentry angled around the base of a flat-topped butte. “More like eight or nine, you old wildcat!”

  “Can’t be that long!” Gentry said, rolling his brown eyes toward Spurr in expasperation.

  Spurr just laughed and changed the subject. “Is Mason on the Vultures’ trail? I sure ain’t pickin’ up any fresh sign this way.”

  “We lost it yesterday. Came on down this way to meet you, but we’re thinkin’ they swung west just north of where we picked you up. They’ll probably come out where the Cottonwood Valley meets the North Fork of Dead Woman Creek. We’re only two, maybe three days behind ’em. Sure is lucky you was able to get up from Denver so fast. Mason—he seems to fancy your trackin’ skills, though I done informed him I taught you everything you know.”

  Gentry maintained an expression of exaggerated seriousness for about five seconds. Then he turned toward Spurr and stretched his lips back from his large, yellow teeth. One of his front teeth was capped, and it sparkled in the westering sun.

  “You’re still so full of shit your eyes are brown,” Spurr noted. “But I’m obliged for that bourbon. I don’t know what it is, but a good label of busthead just invigorates this old devil!”

  “Probably that and your visit with Mrs. Chandler.”

  Spurr jerked a surprised look at his gray-bearded partner, who said, “I seen you through the window.”

  “You know Mr. Chandler, do you?”

  “This here is my stompin’ ground. Chandler was one of the paper collars in the Bighorn.”

  “Is he a good man, Ed?”

  “He’s got a closetful of silver-headed walkin’ sticks—I’ll give him that.” Gentry held Spurr’s gaze with a serious one of his own. “But I doubt he’d ever hit her with one of ’em.”

  “Well, hell,” Spurr said, frowning pensively, pooching out his lips as he booted Cochise into a lope across a broad flat between rock-rimmed mesas. “I reckon he’ll do, then.”

  NINE

  White smoke curled up from a grove of cottonwoods along a creek about a hundred yards off the trail’s right side. Sandstone walls had risen along the trail, forming a canyon about a half a mile wide. It was dusk here in the canyon though the sky above it was still blue. The tops of the canyon walls shone golden with the waning rays of the west-falling sun.

  Spurr scrutinized the ground. Mason’s gang of four had left the trail here, and the prints of the shod hooves angled off through the rock and sage toward the smoke.

  “Well, he finally stopped,” Gentry said. “I thought he was gonna ride all night.”

  “I tell you one thing, Ed, ole Sheriff Dusty might have a giant burr under his blanket, but he won’t be pullin’ this kind of shit no more. Not if he wants me trackin’ for him he won’t.”

  “If you say so, Spurr.”

  “I say so!”

  Spurr cursed and booted Cochise off the trail and along the tracks of the four shod horses. There was a small escarpment off to the right, and from here came the sudden, loud metallic rasp of a rifle being cocked. Spurr turned to see Calico Strang grinning at him and Gentry as he lifted his bowler-hatted head from his nest near the top of the scarp.

  “Show off,” Gentry muttered.

  Spurr swung Cochise over to the escarpment and stopped, staring up at Strang still grinning down at him from his night guard position. “You might find yourself a better spot from which to keep watch,” Spurr suggested.

  The smile faded from the young Pinkerton’s face. “What’s wrong with this one?”

  “If you look to your right, you’ll see what.”

  Strang turned his head to see the diamondback dropping straight down out of a hole in the scarp about even with the Pinkerton’s position. The snake’s head and about a foot of its stone-gray body were visible. In the faint pink light of the sunset, it flicked its forked tongue hungrily.

  Strang jerked with a start. “Shit!”

  “Likely a nest of ’em in there,” Spurr said.

  Gentry chuckled.

  Spurr said, “Keep your eyes peeled on our back trail. Two fellas been shadowin’ us. Don’t get excited when you see ’em, just make sure they know you see ’em.”

  “Yeah…yeah, all right,” Strang said, still staring, hang-jawed, at the snake still slithering out of its hole.

  As the young Pinkerton began scrambling around, looking for another night watch position, Spurr and Gentry gigged their horses toward the cottonwoods. Spurr could smell the smoke of cedar and cottonwood and the aroma of boiling beans.

  “Hello, the camp,” he called when he saw the low flames dancing amongst the trunks, and the figures of Mason, Bill Stockton, and Web Mitchell hunkered around the cookfire. A pot was bubbling on a flat rock inside the fire ring.

  The men’s horses were tied to a picket line off to the left of the fire, just inside the cottonwood grove and near a shallow ravine that angled along the backside of the grove toward the creek. The creek muttered in the distance—a cool, pleasant sound. The air was cooling now, too, as the sun quickly fell.

  Spurr did not feel cool, though. He was hot with anger at Mason’s way of going after the Vultures. When he saw the state of Mason’s horse—the beast was obviously blown, standing hang-headed and droopy-eyed at the picket line to which it was tied—he was even angrie
r. Mason was not a tinhorn. Spurr knew that from having ridden with the man. The sheriff took himself too seriously most of the time, and he had little sense of humor whatever, but he was too good a lawman to let himself get goaded into a bear trap like this.

  Spurr and Gentry tended their horses, letting them cool and rubbing them down before leading them over to the creek to draw water. When both horses had had their fill, the two men grained them and tied them to the picket line with the other four, where grama and bluestem grew around the cottonwoods. Then they hauled their gear including their sheathed rifles over to the fire.

  Mason sat on a rock, his hat on the ground beside him, his cup in his hands. He did not look up as Spurr and Gentry approached and threw down their gear. The others—Stockton and Mitchell—nodded as they smoked or sipped their coffee, but no one said anything. It was a grim crew.

  Spurr consciously cooled himself. When dealing with a prideful son of a bitch like Dusty Mason, whose icy demeanor had a fiery flipside that Spurr had seen explode a time or two down in Colorado and New Mexico, it was wise to carefully choose one’s words.

  He didn’t say anything until he and Gentry each had a cup of coffee and were sitting on a log on the creek side of the fire from Mason and Web. Stockton lay back against a tree, hat off, ankles crossed, a long, thin black cheroot smoldering between his long, knob-knuckled brown fingers.

  “Well, I’ll tell you one thing,” Spurr said over the rim of his smoking cup to Mason, “if this was a horse race, you’d have won you a new saddle and the first dance at the do-si-do with the mayor’s plain-faced daughter.”

  Mason was like a scolded but stubborn child. Fidgeting uncomfortably, he glanced up at the sky that was spruce green and then at the creek beyond Spurr and Gentry, and then he said, “I should have brought a spare. We all should’ve.”