Last Lawman (9781101611456)

by Brandvold, Peter

  Both were bearded. They were trailing pack mules loaded down with burlap supply sacks and picks and shovels and other mining implements. Prospectors. The man in the white shirt and black hat was staring toward Erin. He glanced at the smaller gent just now riding up beside him, facing the stream, and jerked his chin in her direction.

  Erin scrambled up out of the water, retrieved the serape, and dropped it over her head. The red-and-white-striped garment fell to mid-thigh. As she stooped to retrieve her oversized balbriggans, she saw the first man drop the lead rope of his pack mule and boot his horse into the stream and angle it toward her. He did not come quickly but held his horse at a walk. He canted his head to one side, his eyes slitted beneath the broad brim of his hat. He had a cold, lusty look on his face.

  An expression that Erin knew well.

  Her heart leapt, and her blood turned to ice.

  The snakes of slime were slithering over her again.

  She dropped the balbriggans and started running toward the steeldust. She stopped, looked toward the man riding toward her. The other, shorter man was following him. The smaller man had a red beard and a big grin on his thin face.

  Erin felt the ice thaw in her veins. Her blood warmed. She turned to where she’d dropped the gun in the grass, walked over to it, and picked it up. Her heartbeat slowed. Calm inched over her. Certainty. Confidence that she would never again be abused the way the Vultures had abused her. At least not without her pain coming at a very high price to her attackers.

  If she didn’t discourage these two men, they’d likely dog her as she trailed after the Vultures and reduce her chances of rescuing her boy from the killers’ savage clutches. Purposefully, feeling the strange calm steal over her just as the cold water had only a few minutes ago, Erin walked to the edge of the stream. The breeze nudged her wet hair. It tickled her shoulders and back.

  The rider was within twenty yards of her now, a little more than halfway across the stream, the other man a horse length behind him. Erin took the pistol in both her hands, raised it, and clicked the hammer back with both her thumbs and a slight curl of her upper lip.

  She felt her hands shake and willed the shaking to cease.

  The man’s eyes dropped to the gun pointed at him. He stopped his horse, as did the smaller man riding behind him. His mouth slackened inside his dark brown beard. His eyes grew hard. “Put that gun down,” he said above the stream’s even rush.

  “Just ride away, mister.”

  The man’s cheeks drew up into little red balls under his eyes, which crossed a little with anger. He jabbed a gloved finger at Erin.

  “You put that gun down, goddamnit! I won’t have no woman aimin’ a gun at me!”

  Erin was vaguely surprised by the almost serene tone of her voice. “Just ride away, mister.”

  She felt her lips curl a cordial smile.

  “Goddamnit!”

  The first man glanced at the second man. They shared a quick, conniving look.

  Then the first man rammed his heels into his horse’s flanks, and the mount lunged toward Erin, who squeezed the Remington’s trigger. The man grunted and jerked slightly back in his saddle, drawing his horse’s reins taut, using the ribbons to keep himself seated.

  When his horse had stopped, he looked down at the blood oozing from the hole in his grubby white shirt, just left of his heart. It bubbled frothily. His head bobbed as though he were having trouble lifting it, and he said with a weird chuckle, “Good lord—this little bitch done shot me, Bryce.”

  The smaller man shuttled his wide eyes between Erin and his partner, blinking, letting his jaw hang lower and lower, as though he wasn’t quite sure what had happened. He rode up beside his partner and turned to look at the front of the man’s shirt. He gasped, then jerked his exasperated, blue eyes at Erin, who had recocked the Remington and stood at the edge of the shoreline, bare feet spread shoulder-width apart. She drew air slowly, evenly into her lungs, and blew it out the same way.

  The congenial smile was still on her lips.

  “Just ride away, mister.”

  That seemed to enrage him. He pulled the pistol he wore wedged behind his broad brown belt and gigged his horse forward.

  As he raised the big Colt, Erin squeezed the Remington’s trigger a second time. The horse kept lunging toward her as the red-bearded man screamed and triggered his pistol off to the side and flew back over the mount’s left hip. He hit the stream with a splash, his head striking a rock with a hollow bark.

  His pinto gave a startled whinny as it galloped past Erin and up the bank and through the trees. The red-bearded man lolled facedown in the shallow water, blood spreading out around his torso and his cracked skull.

  Erin looked at the first man, whose horse had turned and was now carrying him across the stream. Slowly, the man slumped lower and lower until his head hit his horse’s neck. He rolled down his right stirrup and hit the water with a splash. The horse nickered and ran off across the river while the current grabbed its dead rider and carried him like so much flotsam downstream.

  “You should have just ridden away.”

  Erin lowered the pistol and turned to retrieve her clothes.

  EIGHTEEN

  A rifle cracked once, twice, three times.

  Spurr checked Cochise down and swung the horse around to gaze behind him. Mason, riding to Spurr’s right, did the same, both men sliding their Winchesters from their saddle boots. Gentry and Stockton were riding a couple of horse lengths back, and now they swung their own mounts around, Ed Gentry yelling, “Goddamnit—what’s that?”

  They were each trailing a spare horse taken from Humphreys’s Box Bar B.

  “What’s it sound like?” asked Stockton.

  Only Web Mitchell and his own extra mount were behind the two territorial marshals. Calico Strang was nowhere to be seen.

  Again, the rifle spoke, the report flatting out around the ridges of the canyon that Spurr’s group was riding through along the Sweetwater River. Spurr dropped his spare mount’s lead rope and rammed his heels against Cochise’s flanks and, levering a shell one-handed, galloped the big roan back down the trail. He set the rifle’s butt on his right thigh. The shooter fired twice more, and as Spurr rounded a bend in the trail, the other men in his group following close behind, he sawed back on his reins.

  Calico Strang was hunkered down behind a boulder just right of the trail, firing up the southern ridge. Spurr couldn’t see anything up the slope but rocks and pinyon pines, a few cedar. Strang’s bullets merely puffed dust up around the rim, near where a large thumb of limestone jutted toward the canyon.

  Spurr turned to Strang. “Hold your fire! Hold your fire, there, you goddamn dunderheaded tinhorn!”

  Crouching behind his covering boulder, his carbine resting atop the boulder itself, Strang turned toward Spurr. “I’m tired o’ that damned devil! It’s time he either comes down here and introduces himself or gets his ass drilled! He’s just tryin’ to get under our skins!”

  He pressed his cheek to the rifle’s stock once more and pulled the trigger. The hammer pinged on an empty chamber. Spurr swung down from Cochise’s back. He strode over to where Strang rose from behind his boulder, regarding the old lawman with open disdain.

  Strang held his carbine across his chest defensively. “What are we supposed to do—wait for him to bushwhack us?”

  Spurr bunched his lips and rapped the butt of his rifle across the young Pinkerton’s right cheek. Strang hadn’t seen it coming; he hadn’t expected such a quick move by the old federal. He gave an indignant scream as the hard blow threw him back and around. He lost his footing and hit the ground with a raucous ching of spurs, splayed out on his belly. Twisting back around, he glared up at Spurr, both his dung-brown eyes wide, his long red hair pasted across his pale cheeks.

  “You old bastard,” he spat out, sliding his hand to the Colt resting in its black, oiled holster strapped to Strang’s skinny thigh clad in checked wool.

  Spurr aimed the Winche
ster from his right hip and triggered it twice, blowing up dust and gravel to the right and left of the young Pinkerton. Sand blew across the younker’s store-bought three-piece suit and his face. He gave another indignant cry and sort of lurched backward on his heels and elbows, shielding his face with his hands.

  “You crazy old coot! What’re you tryin’ to do?”

  “Teach you a lesson, you cork-headed coon! If that fella up there was fixin’ to ambush us, he would have done so by now. He ain’t what we oughta be worried about. If you do anymore unsactioned shootin’, I’m gonna follow suit and drill you a third eye, then cut your damn head off, box it up, and send it via the U.S. Mail to Allan Pinkerton himself!”

  Mason had ridden up behind Spurr, and he glared at the young Pinkerton. “If the Vultures are anywhere within ten miles, they’d have heard your shots, you damn fool!”

  “Hell, they’re a day ahead of us, at least!”

  “We don’t know that!” Mason said, his eyes bright with exasperation. “For all we know, they’re holed up another half mile up trail, waitin’ to see who’s foggin’ em.”

  Spurr sighed heavily as he swung around and grabbed Cochise’s reins. He looked at Mason. “How far are we from the Elkhorn Creek outpost?”

  “’Bout two miles.”

  “You fellas push on ahead and pick up the soldiers. I’m gonna drift up this ridge and see if I can get a look at the fella ghostin’ us.”

  “What for?” asked Mason. “You yourself said if he had any bad intentions, we’d likely have knowed about ’em by now.”

  “’Cause he might not have had ’em before, but he might now!” Spurr threw another bright-angry glance at Strang. “Besides, I’m curious!”

  Red-faced, tired of riding with too damn many men when he was used to riding solo and not having to explain himself—or suffer fools like Calico Strang—Spurr swung into the leather. He reined the roan around, pinched his hat brim to Stockton and Gentry. “You boys pick up my spare hoss, will you?”

  When Gentry said they would, the old lawman galloped on up the trail. He came to a feeder ravine opening on the left and paused to look it over. The brushy cut rose at an easy angle toward the top of the southern ridge, along which the mysterious stranger who had saved Mason’s life back in Willow City had been keeping a close scout on Spurr’s posse. Or, at least, they thought it was the man who’d saved Mason’s hide.

  It was time to find out. And it was time to learn what in hell the man wanted—if that was possible now that Strang had tried to beef him.

  Spurr booted Cochise up the trail that ran along the side of the ravine—a game trail, possibly a cattle trail. He hadn’t ridden far before he spied the bones of a long-dead cow that had either expired from old age or coyotes, or had gotten hung up in the heavy buckbrush and wild currant shrubs, which the stupid beasts were wont to do now and then.

  As he rode, he kept an eye on the ridge above him, to which the ravine climbed to within about thirty feet, before it became a jumble of rock down which, judging by the abundant green around it, a spring likely seeped. He continued on up past the rocks and halted Cochise at the crest of the ridge, under a lone jack pine.

  A rider had passed recently in front of the pine. The tracks continued on down the other side of the ridge. Distant movement grabbed Spurr’s attention, and he lifted his gaze to see a rider riding up a far ridge at an angle from left to right. All Spurr could see from this distance of a quarter mile was a black horse and a man with a black hat.

  He reached back for his spyglass, raised it, telescoped it. When the single sphere of magnification had cleared, he caught a fleeting, jerky glimpse of the horse and rider—the rider with long, Indian-black hair wearing buckskin breeches and a calico shirt with what appeared claws or teeth of some kind hanging around his dark neck—cresting the ridge.

  Then all Spurr could see for about four seconds was the man’s broad back and the stallion’s black tail swishing from side to side before they disappeared down the other side of the ridge.

  Spurr stared at the opposite ridge for a time, wondering who in hell the man was and what he wanted. Possibly, he was one of the Vultures, but it was only an outside chance.

  Cochise gave a weary blow. Spurr looked at the horse. The roan’s neck was sweat-lathered. The late summer sun poured down like liquid gold, hot as a skillet. And the blackflies were buzzing.

  Remembering the thick grass and moss he’d seen in the rocks at the mouth of the ravine only a dozen yards away, he reined Cochise back down the way they’d come, then followed a deer and elk trail into the ravine’s bottom. Instantly, he felt the coolness here of the rocks and the water and the shade that the low, steep banks offered.

  A good place to rest his horse as well as his old, tired bones. He shouldn’t take the time—he had a job to do—but by god he’d take a breather. There were younger men on the trail ahead of him.

  He swung down from the saddle, dropped the reins, and loosened Cochise’s latigo, to give the horse a rest from the tight belly strap. Doffing his hat, he went over to where water slithered over the mossy stones spotted with mineral deposits. He set the hat under a slight ledge in the broken rock wall; a couple of slender streams trickled into it with ticking sounds. He sat back and rolled a cigarette. When he’d finished building the quirley, the hat was about a third full, so he set it down in front of Cochise, who lowered his snout to draw the fresh, cool water.

  Spurr set the quirley aside, leaned down near the rocks, and cupped his hands to a couple of good-sized trickles, then raised the water to his lips, drinking thirstily of the cold, pure brew. There wasn’t enough of a flow here to fill his canteen—he’d fill it later on at Elkhorn Creek—but there was enough to refresh himself.

  He sat back in the shade near the run out from the spring, crossed his ankles, smoked half his quirley, then drew his hat down over his eyes and allowed himself to doze. Good being away from the others. That Calico Strang needed a bullet in his ear. The others, including the other Pinkerton, Web, were good men, but there was no man so good that Spurr would enjoy riding with him for long.

  He and Mason had partnered up in Colorado and New Mexico, when they’d gone after the firebrand Cuno Massey. But it had just been him and Mason then, and the sheriff had turned out to be a passable partner, being as how he didn’t talk much and didn’t seem to mind that Spurr did.

  No, Mason was a good man. Spurr might even recommend him to take Spurr’s place when the old lawdog finally retired, if he ever did. Maybe he’d just die in the saddle.

  Half dozing, he watched the pretty, mature, brown-eyed face of Abilene float up out of the murk to smile at him from just behind his eyelids. Regret was a little white varmint nipping at his oysters.

  Damn, maybe he should have married her. God knew he’d had the chance. They could have gone to Mexico together and had a few good years before the iron crab in his chest got the better of him.

  Now she’d married some mucky-muck in a tailored suit who owned a ranch nearly as large as some eastern states, and Spurr had let the opportunity slip through his hands. A damn fool was what he was. When you got to be Spurr’s age, shots at new beginnings were few and far between.

  And he really had loved her. At least, he thought he had. Still did. Hard to tell. Could he merely be jealous of the rancher?

  “Well, shit,” the old lawdog said, poking his hat brim back up on his age-spotted forehead. “That’ll be enough of that! If you ain’t gonna sleep but just sit here and make yourself glum, you’d best haul your fuckin’ ass.”

  He leaned over, filled his cupped hands with the spring water, and washed his face and the back of his neck, then heaved himself to his feet. His ticker gave a hiccup, chugging almost audibly. He lost his breath, and black javelins swam in his eyes.

  He stumbled back against the brick-like wall, fumbled a pill from the pouch in his pocket, swallowed it, and held himself steady with his hands on the wall behind him, wincing, enduring the throbbing pain in his ch
est while he waited for the spell to pass.

  Gradually, the steel trap eased its grip on his heart. Then he just stood there, the image of Abilene fading in his head, looking around at the rocks and the sky. Hearing the wind, birds. He suddenly felt very old, looking back over all those years, all those faces and track downs, all the lonely nights in distant places, drinking whiskey and feeding brush to a fire.

  Yes, he was old. Back when he was a kid, he remembered an uncle returning from the Rocky Mountains after spending nine years fur trapping, and the man had been considered an old-timer though he’d not yet turned forty. Spurr was sixty. That was as old as dirt even for these modern times. What the hell was he still doing here?

  Turning down pretty women’s requests that he take them to Mexico…?

  He chuckled at that. He kept the mental quip in his head as he mounted up and rode back down the ravine to the main trail, a smile lifting the corners of chapped lips inside the patchy, ginger-gray beard. He looked back up the ridge for sign of the Indian or half-breed, possibly a Mex, who’d been trailing him and the others, then booted Cochise into a lope.

  A mile or so ahead, near where the trail curved to the north toward the outpost on Elkhorn Creek, the Vultures’ trail curved south. More recent tracks followed the trail toward the outpost. That would be Mason’s men.

  Spurr pondered the situation, then decided he’d scout the Vultures’ trail for a mile or two. It would likely take an hour for the cavalry boys to get mounted up and on the trail with Mason, anyway. Spurr would ride back to meet them when he was sure of the direction the killers were headed.

  He followed the Vultures’ trail until it curved back toward the Sweetwater River. But after the day-old trail reached the river, it swung back north, in the direction of the Wind Rivers looming huge on the northern horizon, Gannett Peak touched with the white of last winter’s snows.