Last Lawman (9781101611456)

by Brandvold, Peter

  “Might be better if you could ride another couple miles tonight,” Spurr said.

  Mason glanced at him. “You thinkin’ about Waylon Humpreys’s place on Cool Spring Creek?”

  “Mitchell would be a whole lot more comfortable there than on the ground.” The federal lawman turned to Mitchell. “And I know good ole Waylon’ll pad out your belly right nicely for you. He got to be a good cook after that harpy of a woman left him and his boy.”

  “Maybe for all of us, huh, Spurr?” This from the ever-sneering Calico Strang.

  “Yeah, for all of us,” Spurr said, sneering back at the uppity young Pinkerton.

  Mitchell extended his good arm to Gentry, who helped him to his feet. “I’ll make it. I’m so tired of you fellas’ cooking, I’d have to be a whole lot more beaten up than this not to make it.”

  While the others stood back to let Mitchell test out his land legs while holding his arm taut against his side and bent just a little, Spurr noticed Mason staring out toward the trail they’d ridden in on. Mason had a worried look.

  Spurr said, “What is it?”

  “This trail heads over into that canyon the Box Bar B’s in, don’t it? I mean, if you stay on this trail, it’ll take you right to Waylon’s front door, wouldn’t it?”

  Mason turned to Spurr. The sheriff’s look was like a sucker punch. Spurr thought of Waylon Humphreys and his boy, Paul, as he ran his hand along his jaw and over his mouth, his old ticker hiccupping tightly.

  Humphreys and his boy were likely alone at their place. Waylon usually only hired hands for the fall and spring roundups.

  “That it does…that it does…”

  He and Mason whipped around and hurried to their horses, Spurr yelling, “Come on, boys. Let’s shake a leg, damnit!”

  THIRTEEN

  Spurr’s group rode up and over a low pass and down into another, broader canyon sheathed in high, clay-colored ridges whose lower slopes were carpeted in firs and aspens. When they rode out of a pine forest, the old lawman and Mason reined up.

  Stockton and Gentry rode out to either side of them, staring ahead across a broad mountain park that was a murky pool of dusk under a dark green sky. Beyond, the sun was drifting down through a narrow gap between indigo peaks and casting long crimson bayonets across the canyon behind it.

  The only movement was a small herd of cattle, cow-calf pairs, grazing around Cool Spring Creek that ran along the base of the ridge to the right.

  The only sound was the call of a mourning dove.

  Spurr stared out from beneath his hat brim, dread tickling his belly. A hundred yards away lay the portal of Waylon Humphreys’s Box Bar B Ranch headquarters. Beyond the portal, the buildings were brown smudges against the spruce-green forest. Spurr could make out the cabin. No lights shone in the windows.

  Bill Stockton must have been reading his mind. “Getting late enough for a lamp or two.”

  A sound reached across the canyon from the direction of the cabin. Spurr pricked his ears, felt his blood warm. The sound came again—a loud grunt followed by a thud. At least, that’s how it seemed. His old ears could just barely pick it up beneath the mournful cry of the lone dove and the steady whisper of the creek yonder.

  It came again—a woman’s agonized grunting groan along with a dull thud. The lawmen looked around at each other skeptically. Finally, Spurr slid his Winchester out of its scabbard, cocked it one-handed, off cocked the hammer, and swung down from his saddle.

  “Mitchell, since you got an injured wing, you stay here with the horses while we walk in and check it out. Could be nothin’. Could be that the Vultures decided to hole up there in Waylon’s cabin for a time. Maybe they like his cookin’.”

  “Doubt it,” said Mason. “They’re from this country. They know the Elkhorn Creek Cavalry Outpost is just south of here and that I likely would have wired ahead to have soldiers on the scout. They were in too big a killing frenzy to cut my telegraph wires.”

  “Yeah, shit,” said Gentry, swinging down from his own saddle with a grunt, holding his carbine in one gloved hand and sliding a wad of chaw from one side of his mouth to the other. “They’re likely headed off to their lair. I for one would sure like to know where that is.”

  Spurr kept his voice low. “Nevertheless, pards, let’s step easy. Maybe Waylon and his boy are off herdin’ cattle, but I don’t like it that there’s no light on in that cabin.”

  He and the others gave their reins to Mitchell, who had fashioned a sling with his belt buckle and tucked his right arm through it. He held the reins of the group’s horses in his other hand and stood to one side of the trail, looking gaunt and pale as he frowned toward the ranch headquarters.

  As the men started walking abreast across the trail toward the portal, the sound came again—a puzzling grunting sound and a dull thud. To Spurr it almost sounded like someone splitting wood and giving a grunt with every swing of the mallet, like maybe they were angry or maybe the implement was too heavy for them.

  Spurr and Mason walked under the portal and into the ranch yard while Stockton, Gentry, and Calico Strang ducked through the fence on either side, old Gentry’s bones audibly cracking when he straightened. He gave a curse under his breath, sighed, shook his head, and continued walking forward, the young Strang snickering.

  “You’ll be old one day,” Stockton muttered at the young Pinkerton.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” muttered Gentry, his gravelly voice low-pitched with menace.

  That the person grunting inside the cabin was female became obvious after Spurr and the others had moved to within fifty yards of the place. It was also obvious that she was in trouble. Vaguely, Spurr wondered if maybe she was in labor. Damn puzzling. Humphreys’s wife had left him and the boy to head back East several years ago, having tired of the crude, lonely life out here—a common enough occurrence on the frontier—and Spurr hadn’t heard of the rancher getting hitched again. Could he have found another one much younger than himself and slipped a bun into the oven?

  Spurr stopped in the middle of the yard, staring at the windows that glinted dully in the last light, and waved to the others to hold their positions. He looked at Mason, who was standing about twelve feet to his right.

  “Let’s you an’ me check it out,” he said on the heels of another agonized grunt. They came in about ten- or fifteen-second intervals, not at all unlike the screams a woman gives when she’s in the throes of delivery.

  When the three others had taken cover behind a corral or off the corner of the main barn or behind a stock trough, Spurr and Mason moved quickly to the cabin. Spurr limped on his bowed legs; this was as far as he’d walked since he and Kenny Potter had taken down Philpot’s Dogs in New Mexico three weeks ago, and the ground hadn’t been kind to his feet in twenty years. He and Mason took up positions on either side of the half-open door.

  The woman’s screams—that’s what they sounded like now, screams more than grunts—sounded again. She seemed to be kicking something with each agonized cry. Spurr glanced at Morgan, who stood with a shoulder pressed to the log cabin’s front wall on the other side of the door.

  And then Spurr, squeezing his rifle in his hands, yelled, “Law out here! Whoever’s in there, you’re gonna need to show yourselves pronto!”

  He and Mason waited, staring at each other across the half-open door. The woman’s screams died. Only silence issued from the bowels of the dark cabin.

  “She must be alone,” Mason said.

  “Hold on!”

  Spurr hadn’t quite gotten that last out before Mason swung through the door and stepped to one side, crouching and loudly racking a shell into his Winchester’s breech. Spurr cursed and turned into the cabin himself, stepping to the left so he wouldn’t be outlined against the door. He thumbed his rifle’s hammer back and stood staring into the dusky shadows.

  Humphreys’s wife, as discontented as she may have been, had fixed the place up homily before she’d finally pulled out a coulple of years ago, and Humphreys and
the boy had kept it that way. At least, it had appeared a nice, tidy little hovel whenever Spurr had stopped through here over the past couple of years.

  Now it appeared a twister had ripped through it. The kitchen was on the left, the living area on the right, but it was hard now to distinguish one section from another. The eating table was overturned, as were all the hide-bottom chairs and standing cabinets. Pots, pans, and skillets lay everywhere. Flour and sugar and other dry goods had been dumped out on the floor, their tin canisters tossed aside like trash. Several empty whisky bottles lay amidst the mess, as well.

  The place smelled of tobacco smoke, whiskey, grease, and sweat. It smelled like a saloon.

  The only thing that hadn’t been turned asunder was the long, leather sofa in the living area, but someone had taken a knife to it, slicing the leather and pulling out the straw stuffing and tossing it every which way. The bull-horn rocker and two other armchairs and a grandfather clock lay in broken pieces upon the braided rope rug fronting the hearth at the back of the room.

  When it was obvious that no one was in this main part of the cabin, Mason ran toward a half-open door in the far wall to his and Spurr’s right. Spurr watched as Mason leapt the grandfather clock and crunched several of its broken boards before using his rifle butt to nudge open the door before him.

  The hinges squawked with menace.

  Then the sheriff froze. He just stood there in the doorway, his head turned slightly to his left. His rifle sagged, and his shoulders slumped.

  “What is it?”

  Spurr walked through the rubble of the living area. He stepped over the broken clock and several broken bird carvings that he knew Humphreys himself had whittled over the long mountain winters. Pitching his voice with annoyance, he shoved Mason aside as he stepped in around him. “I said, what the hell…?”

  He let his voice trail off when he saw the bed.

  Rather, the figure on the bed. A woman. Nude.

  She lay spread-eagle, her long hair a mess about her head. She was naked and spread wide, like a gutted deer, her wrists tied to the two brass posts at the head of the bed. Her ankles were tied to the two brass posts at its foot.

  She was a mess. They’d worked her over good. Her head was turned aside, facing away from Spurr and Mason. In the wan last rays of the sun pushing through the window on the far side of the room from the door, Spurr could see that her eyes were closed. Squeezed closed. Her naked belly rose and fell sharply as she breathed.

  At first, he’d thought she was dead. But she was alive.

  She was the first to speak. Her low-pitched, eerily calm voice almost made Spurr leap out of his boots.

  “Please free me.”

  Her belly rose and fell.

  “Please free me!” she screamed, keeping her head turned toward the window.

  Mason just stood there. “Mrs…. Wilde…?”

  “Please free me!” she cried again.

  Spurr set his rifle down against the wall, then pulled his bowie knife from the sheath in his right moccasin. Quickly, he cut the strips of white sheet binding her left ankle to the bottom bedpost. Then he hurried over and cut her other ankle free before moving up to the head of the bed, on the window side, and trying not to look down at her beaten and battered body, cut her right wrist free of its corresponding post. His heart fluttered and hammered against his ribs as he reached across her bare breasts to cut loose her other wrist.

  The pent-up air in the room was sour with the reek of what the Vultures had done to her.

  “How can I help you?” he asked her.

  She rolled away from him, raising her knees to her belly, crossing her arms on her chest, and lowering her head.

  “Please leave me,” she whispered.

  “Ma’am, if you’re hurt bad…”

  “Leave me,” she said, stronger this time.

  Spurr looked at Mason, who stared down dumbly, helplessly at the woman. Spurr moved to the sheriff, canted his head toward the door, then followed Mason out of the room and closed the door behind him.

  Both men stood in shock as they looked around the fast-darkening, ruined room. Spurr knew that Mason was as haunted as he himself was by the hollow look of agony in the woman’s pale face

  “Spurr, Mason!” Calico Strang called from the rear of the cabin.

  There was a rear door to the left of the fireplace. Spurr and Mason made their way through the cluttered mess, threw the door open, and walked outside to where Gentry, Stockton, and Strang stood at the back of the yard, looking up at a cottonwood tree near the creek running along the base of the northern ridge. A privy and a woodpile stood left of the tree.

  Two bodies hung from ropes from the same low branch.

  The bodies of Waylon Humphreys and his son, Paul. Both bodies were bloody from bullet wounds to their chests and heads. Their faces were slack-jawed, blank, lids drooping lightly down over their eyes. They turned slowly in the same direction at the ends of their ropes—father and son performing a bizarre death dance in the freshening evening breeze.

  Strang turned to Spurr. His usual mocking expression was gone. “Cut ’em down?”

  “They’re not goin’ anywhere,” Spurr said. “They can wait. You fellas bring in wood and start a fire in the range, and fetch water—lots of it—from the creek. And we’re gonna need to do a little house-cleanin’.”

  “What for?” asked Strang.

  “Don’t ask me what for,” Spurr said, turning back into the cabin. “Just do as you’re told, boy!”

  FOURTEEN

  Captain Davis Norbert twisted the quirley closed between his dirt-grimed thumbs and forefingers, then reached into a pocket of his dark blue cavalry tunic for a sulfur-tipped match and scratched the lucifer to life on his cartridge belt.

  He touched the match to the cigarette. Puffing smoke and dropping the match into the finely churned dust at his feet, he glanced around the dilapidated cavalry outpost on the banks of Elkhorn Creek, in a snake-belly bowl surrounded by several Wyoming mountain ranges.

  The sun was almost down, and the seven brush-roofed, adobe-brick buildings, including a bunkhouse for the enlisted men, an officer’s quarters no larger than a chicken coop, and a barn and stable, were painted pink and saffron by the fading light. The forlorn little outpost, all but abandoned by the U.S. Army in favor of heavier patrols along the Bozeman Trail, hunkered beneath a broad arch of sky that had been turning all colors of the rainbow for the past hour but was now a sort of purple-green.

  All but abandoned except when renegade Indians were rawhiding off their reserves. Or when a contingent from Fort Stambaugh was needed to quell a land or mining war, or, in this case, to help lasso desperadoes cutting a wide swath through this neck of still-wild Wyoming Territory. Norbert and his twelve men—ten privates, a corporal, and a seasoned career sergeant, Jake Pennyman—had arrived here at the Elkhorn Creek outpost in the midafternoon. On their way up from Fort Stambaugh, they’d scouted for sign of the notorious and slippery outlaw gang who called themselves the Vultures, apparently on the run from nefarious doings to the east.

  Having had no luck in that regard, and according to orders, Norbert and his men were now awaiting the arrival of Sheriff Dusty Mason from Willow City whom they were to assist by any means possible in running the killers to ground. When Mason would arrive was anyone’s guess. The Vultures, if headed this way through a long corridor between mountain ranges, might very well arrive here first. Most of the gang had originated in Wyoming, so they likely knew of the cavalry outpost, which, since its unofficial abandonment four years ago, was used as shelter by cowpunchers and scores of other passing pilgrims.

  Scores of rats, as well, Norbert thought. Drawing deeply on the quirley, he looked toward the long, low bunkhouse in which most of the men not on guard duty or tending the horses in the stable were now eating beans and hardtack or playing poker and shooting occasionally at the vermin who considered the bunkhouse home. Shots rang out occasionally, followed by a raucous stretch of cursing
by none other than Sergeant Pennyman himself.

  Such an incident had just happened a few minutes ago, and Norbert smiled at the memory. For all his earthy Scottish swagger, Pennyman was a cultured, somewhat pampered city boy at heart and did not cotton to rough conditions. Norbert, who had led the Forward Scouts of the Ninth Missouri Rifles in the War Between the States, harbored no such prejudices. The outpost didn’t bother him, despite he and his men having had to root a family of skunks out of the stable before putting their horses up for the night. He was just glad to have made it out of a certain Georgia prison alive…a prison in which he’d fought the rats for muddy drinking water so badly tainted that it had killed nine out of ten men who drank it.

  No, a rat or two, or skunks in his stable, would never bother him again as long as he had food, fresh water, and freedom. He would leave his own musty quarters to the heat and the rats, and sleep out here on the ground. Norbert found fresh air and starlight soothing.

  “Riders, Captain!”

  An adobe-brick wall partly surrounded the place, on the side facing Elkhorn Creek, from where trouble in the form of Indians had been most likely to come. Originally, the wall had been meant to surround the outpost, but the post had been abandoned before the wall had been finished.

  The stockade was only about six feet high, but it offered a modicum of cover for soldiers shooting from behind it. There was a fifteen-foot-high guard tower on each end of the fort, and on the end near where the stockade’s wooden doors used to be, before someone had used them for firewood, stood one of the towers.

  Private Homer Early was manning the tower while another guard patrolled the creek on foot and another held the scout on the fort’s northern end, which faced flat, open country rolling up toward the far eastern foothills of the Wind River mountains. Early was pointing beyond the creek now, his head turned toward Norbert, his slender body silhouetted against the sky, which had now turned purple and lime.