“How many?” Norbert called.
“Can’t tell fer sure. Looks like three horses. Comin’ at a trot.”
“Call Scarborough in,” Norbert ordered. Turning toward the bunkhouse, he yelled, “Pennyman!”
When the sergeant’s bulky body appeared in silhouette against the open doorway lit by yellow lamplight, Norbert said, “Riders headed this way. Just three, but bring your men.”
Pennyman saluted with the same hand in which he held a smoldering, half-smoked cigar. Norbert walked into his quarters that stood a ways off from the bunkhouse and barn with its connecting corral, near a springhouse. He stopped just inside the doorway and heard a sharp breath leap out of his throat.
He’d dropped his hand to the Colt .44 holstered on his right hip, but stayed his hand when he saw the yellow eyes of the coyote standing atop his small, square eating table staring back at him. The coyote’s back legs were on Norbert’s chair, its front legs on the table, on either side of the plate on which the captain had left a few scraps of food before he’d wandered out to the parade ground for air.
The coyote gave a low, guttural mewl, then leapt up onto the table and then out the open window on the table’s far side. Its fur glowed tawny gold in a vagrant ray of light before it dropped down beneath the window. It hit the ground outside with a soft grunt and ran toward a clump of brush. It stopped suddenly. Norbert watched it, frowning. The beast growled and sort of mewled, hackles raised, as it stared into the brush. Suddenly, it switched course and ran off around the stables, as though it had been afraid of something in the shrubs.
Norbert blew a relieved breath, chuckling to himself sheepishly at the start the beast had given him. He’d fought so many Indians in the past out here that he supposed he was still looking for a wild-assed Sioux or Arapaho behind every rock and sage shrub.
He grabbed his tan kepi off the table and his Sharps carbine from where he’d leaned it against the wall near his cot and the tack he’d piled on the earthen floor. He opened the Sharps’s breech, making sure it showed brass, then quickly adjusted his kepi on his head and headed outside to see what the fuss was about.
Probably just drifting punchers, but in this country, you never knew…
FIFTEEN
As Norbert strode toward the stockade wall, Pennyman and six or seven enlisted men were streaming out of the bunkhouse, some tucking their shirts into their trousers, others making sure their carbines were loaded.
They were a good-looking lot as far as today’s frontier cavalry went—no cottontails amongst them. Norbert had handpicked the contingent himself. Most soldiers posted as remotely as Fort Stambaugh would desert first chance they got, but this crew took their jobs relatively seriously—mostly, Norbert guessed, because they’d been on the dodge from one thing or another in their civilian lives and had enlisted into the cavalry because they’d heard it was a good place to hide.
“You men stay inside the wall,” the captain told the soldiers, then turned to Pennyman, whom he was on a first-name basis with, often carousing with the sergeant during furloughs in Laramie or Rawlins.
“Jake, join me outside the wall,” Norbert said, smoothing down his salt-and-pepper, dragoon-style mustache with his fingers. “Probably no one of any significance out there, but since the Vultures are supposed to be on the prod in these parts, no point in getting caught with our pants down.”
“Like to have me a shot at one o’ them,” said Pennyman, smoothing down his long, thick tangle of hair and then setting his leather-billed forage hat on his big-eared, rocklike skull.
The two men walked toward the opening in the wall.
“Just approaching the creek now, Cap,” said the private standing atop the guard tower, holding his Sharps carbine up high across his chest, ready.
“Thank you, Private,” said Norbert as he and Pennyman walked out through the gap in the wall.
Private Scarborough, short and squat but good with horses and not one to scare in a Sioux attack, stood just ahead, at the lip of the creek that was mostly brush-lined sandbars this late in the year. Norbert heard the thuds of the oncoming riders before he picked them out of the dark stretch of sage-stippled desert beyond the creek.
Two men leading a riderless horse. One of the men held what to be appeared a straw-haired woman in front of him, the woman’s head flopping against his chest. Norbert squinted, vaguely incredulous. The woman’s body was a pale smudge in the growing darkness.
Could she be nude?
As the three riders approached the creek, Norbert raised his pistol and triggered a round into the air, the maw sparking in the purple shadows.
“Hold on, there!” he shouted, making his presence known. “I’m Captain Davis Norbert. Who goes there?”
The riders reined their horses to skidding halts atop the shallow creek’s opposite bank. “Holy shit—you spooked the devil’s own hell out of us!” The voice of the rider riding single was loud in the dusky silence.
“You occupyin’ the outpost, Captain?” asked the rider who was carrying what did indeed appear to be a naked woman.
“What’s it look like? You didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m Lawton. This is Burns. Line riders for the Tilted W. We got an injured girl here. Found her along the trail a ways back. She’s messed up good. You got a medico with you, Captain?”
“Of sorts,” Norbert said, nodding, his blood quickening when he saw the girl’s obvious dire condition. “Bring her on over!”
Norbert holstered his Colt as the rider with the woman booted his buckskin down the draw’s opposite bank. He galloped across, then up the side near Norbert, Sergeant Pennyman, and Private Scarborough. The second rider followed, both horses blowing and kicking up dirt and gravel.
The lone rider was tall and thin but vaguely Comanche-featured and not an attractive hombre by anyone’s standards. He was dressed nearly entirely in black but with a red vest under his black wool coat. But there were few good-looking men this far out on the devil’s backside, and you didn’t need to be a dude to be good at punching cows. The man holding the girl was sandy-whiskered and built like a bull, with close-set eyes and no neck to speak of and a broad-brimmed tan hat with a torn brim.
He looked down at Norbert and Pennyman moving up to him, and his eyes flashed anxiously beneath his hat brim. “Found her out yonder near her torn dress and this hoss standing over her.”
“Jayzus H.,” muttered Pennyman in his faint Scottish brogue. “Looks like she’s been shot.”
Norbert’s eyes had taken their natural man’s look at the blonde’s voluptuous body before straying to the bloody hole in her right side. The blood flashed wetly in the fading light. It trickled down her side, across her hip, and down her naked right thigh. She lay back against the bull’s broad chest, eyes squeezed shut, groaning and sort of whimpering as she shook her head from side to side. Her heavy, sloping breasts rose and fell sharply as she breathed. Her eyes opened slightly, and she pinned Norbert with a look of fierce agony and—something else—fear? Vaguely, the captain thought the look was almost like one of warning, but then the girl squeezed her eyes closed once more as pain visibly rippled through her, and the captain let the thought go.
Norbert looked at the bull, Lawton. “You don’t know her?”
“Not from Adam’s off ox. Just know she’s gonna die we keep jabberin’.”
Norbert turned toward the opening in the stockade wall in which a half-dozen soldiers stood, all holding rifles and staring toward the captain and the naked blonde. “Donner over there?”
“Here, Captain,” said the medico, Donner, as the stringbean corporal stepped out away from the group, handing his rifle to one of the others.
Donner walked over to Lawton’s horse. He paused a moment, flushing a little behind his round-rimmed spectacles, as he looked at the girl’s lush body.
“Go ahead, Donner—take a look at her,” Norbert said. “You think there’s somethin’ you can do?”
“We’ll need to ge
t her into the bunkhouse so’s I can examine her,” said Donner, his voice quaking nervously.
He wasn’t really a medico, just a farm kid who’d helped out his hometown doctor a few times and was fairly adept at setting broken bones and tending the usual bruises, lice-infestations, snakebites, heat stroke, and minor wounds that were part and parcel to military life on the frontier. His skills were mostly only used on details like this, away from the main pill roller at Fort Stambaugh.
Norbert looked up at Lawton. “Ride her on up to the bunkhouse. Make way, men!”
“Yes, sir,” said the bull-like man, whipping his rein ends across the flanks of his mount.
He and the other rider lunged through the gate as the small cavvy of soldiers made way for them, staring in awe at the naked woman in Lawton’s arms. As though they’d never seen a nude girl before. Maybe some of them hadn’t, silently mused the captain as he and Pennyman jogged after the horses. Donner overtook them both, nudging his glasses up his nose as he ran like a kid late for school, pumping his arms and legs, eager to recuse the naked damsel in dire distress.
When the riders hauled up in front of the bunkhouse, whose open windows were lit from within, Donner was hot on their horses’ heels. Breathless, he reached up to take the blonde out of Lawton’s hands. Then the kid carried her through the low door and into the bunkhouse, both Lawton and Burns dropping their reins and anxiously following.
Norbert and Pennyman, both breathless, walked in behind them. Norbert removed his hat out of habit in the presence of ladies—even unconscious ones—and watched as Pennyman hurried over to help the other two men clear the long eating table of tin plates and forks and other paraphernalia left from the men’s supper, swiping it all onto the floor with a raucous clatter.
Then Burns helped the young medico lay the girl onto the table, where Donner nudged his glasses up his nose once more, then nervously wiped his hands on his pale blue trousers before crouching over the wound in the moaning girl’s side.
Once again, Norbert, standing back by the door, his hat in his hands, noted how comely she was. Big-breasted, with rounded hips and a waist not overly thin nor round. A nice, soft belly—one a man, especially a lonely soldier, could really bury his face in while he kneaded her big…
The captain shook his head with chagrin as he realized the direction his thoughts had taken. Christ, what was wrong with him? Too long this far out in Wyoming, he reckoned. Few whores in Laramie or Rawlins looked anything like the golden-haired, round-faced young creature moaning and groaning on the table before him.
Who in hell was she, anyway? Norbert had never seen her before though he figured he’d seen most everyone who lived in these parts—and that wasn’t very many folks at all. There were way more cattle than people. Maybe she was some rancher’s daughter run down by brigands, roughed up and shot and left to die so she couldn’t identify her abusers.
Donner lifted his head from the girl’s bloody side. The young man’s eyes were dark behind his spectacle lenses winking in the dull light from the three flickering lanterns. “Doesn’t look good, Cap. Appears she was shot at close range. I think the ball went all the way through, but she’s most likely scrambled up pretty ba…”
The medico let his voice trail off. His eyes went to the door flanking Norbert. Norbert turned to see all the rest of the soldiers crowding close to the open doorway, nudging against each other like penned cattle, trying their best to see over and around each other at the naked girl on the table.
Norbert raised his hands to shoo the men away, but his eyes caught on something behind them.
Not something.
Someone.
Men moving around, their shadows long and thick in the twilight as they walked spread out in a line from the direction of the barn and corral. By ones and twos, the young soldiers turned around to follow the captain’s puzzled gaze with their own, until they saw the men walking toward them.
“What is it, Cap?” Pennyman said behind Norbert.
The captain felt a thousand reptiles of dread crawling up his legs and back. He glanced at the sergeant beside him and saw Lawton and Burns standing around Donner and the naked girl on the table. They were looking at Norbert.
They were both smiling greasily.
As Norbert heard the chinging spurs of the men walking toward the bunkhouse, he shared a horrified glance with Pennyman. And knew then that Pennyman knew what had suddenly dawned on him, as well.
That Lawton, Burns, and the girl were merely a distraction—a mighty effective one, too—so that the other Vultures could steal into the outpost from the open country to the north.
At the same time, Norbert and Pennyman reached for their sidearms.
Too late.
Burns and Lawton had already drawn theirs. They shot the captain and Pennyman twice each before swinging their pistols toward Donner, who screamed as he backed toward the small sheet-iron stove behind him. Three bullets plunked through his chest and sent him howling over the stove to pile up at the base of the wall, where a rat watched him hungrily from a ragged hole in the disintegrating bricks.
The other soldiers had stood frozen in shock at the mind-numbing vision of the feral gang of unshaven gun wolves strolling toward them, the pistols in their fists glinting redly in the light from the bunkhouse. Just as the privates and one corporal started yelling and slapping leather, the Vultures opened fire.
Their pistols flashed, flames lapping toward the jerking soldiers. The young men were blown into the open doorway or back against the bunkhouse’s front wall. A few were merely wounded during the first barrage and tried to make a run in several opposite directions only to be cut down, howling, before any had made it more than a few hobbling strides.
Aside from a couple of soldiers groaning as they died, silence descended. Gunsmoke wafted on the still, cool air of the Wyoming night.
The Vultures stopped to peer down at their handiwork. Hector Debo stepped in front of one near-dead soldier who was trying to crawl away and rammed his spur down on the soldier’s left hand, grinding the rowel deep into the knuckle. The soldier stopped crawling and, lifting his head and arching his back, loosed one last scream until Lester shot him through the eye. Debo laughed as the man’s brains spurted out the back of his head, toward the hole the bullet had made in the dirt beneath him after it had missiled through his skull.
Chuckling, Clell Stanhope stepped over a couple of dead soldiers clogging the doorway and entered the bunkhouse. Doc Plowright, aka Lawton, and Magpie Quint, aka Burns, stood grinning with satisfaction as they plucked empty shells from their pistols to refill the empty cylinders from their cartridge belts.
Stanhope looked down at the soldier with the captain’s bars on the shoulders of his dark blue tunic. The man sat against the wall near the door, head canted to one shoulder, eyes open. A thick mustache mantled his mouth. Dark muttonchops framed his cheeks. Blood dribbled from a bullet hole one inch in front of his left ear, and continued making a red line down his unshaven neck. There was another hole in his high, dome-like forehead, which was white down to the edge of his hat line. The wound oozed blood down his thick nose and into his mustache.
The bigger man with sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeves lay twisted facedown on the bunkhouse floor. His legs jerked. He farted loudly, and Stanhope, Magpie Quint, and Doc Plowright laughed.
Then Stanhope turned to the naked blonde on the table.
“Ah, dear Trixie,” he said, raising his sawed-off shotgun and ratcheting one of its two hammers back. The girl’s eyes opened halfway.
They were pain-racked, terrified. “No,” she begged, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. “Please, don’t kill me.”
“You finally did earn your keep, after all,” Stanhope said, aiming the savage popper at the girl’s head. “For that, I thank ye.”
SIXTEEN
Spurr set one bucket of steaming water and one bucket of cold water down in front of the closed bedroom door.
Hesitating, he wiped his hand
s on his buckskin breeches, then lightly rapped the knuckles of his right hand against the halved-log door.
He turned an ear to the door, listened for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Uh…uh, ma’am…I set some water down here outside the door. Some hot, some cold.”
Spurr paused, stared in consternation at the door, trying to think of something else to say. On the other side of the door rose no sound whatever. Finally, the old lawman ran a hand down his patch-bearded jaw, turned away, and walked back across the living area that he and the other men had straightened as best as they could.
Mason was the last one at the eating table in the kitchen section of the house. The others had eaten and were now sitting outside in chairs they’d hauled out from the cabin. They weren’t saying anything though above the crackling of the fire in the kitchen range Spurr could hear the occasional gurgling of a bottle being tipped back, the wooden squawk of the chairs as the men shifted around.
None of the others had said much of anything since they’d found the woman. They’d gone about their chores of straightening the cabin to make it liveable for themselves for one night, and out of respect for Mrs. Wilde. They’d buried Waylon Humphreys and his son, Paul. Then Spurr had cut some steaks off the side of beef he’d found in the root cellar outside and fried them up along with some potatoes.
This, despite the fact no one was really hungry. Finding the dead rancher and his boy, and the woman, had hit them all hard. It had cast a dark pall over the dark mountain night.
Mostly, they’d all just wanted to drink. But they knew they had to eat.
Spurr looked from Mason to the raw chunk of steak he’d left in a pan on the plank cupboard near the dry sink. He’d fetched it for Mrs. Wilde, in case she wanted to eat something. But they hadn’t heard a peep out of her since Spurr and Mason had left her in the room they’d found her in.
Last Lawman (9781101611456) Page 12