Last Lawman (9781101611456)

by Brandvold, Peter

  Spurr studied the oldster moving toward him, felt his jaws loosen. Slowly, absently depressing his rifle’s hammer and lowering the piece, he said, “Chris? That you, you old scalawag?” Relief washed over him like a cool, refreshing breeze.

  “Sure as mad around a hornet’s nest!” Chris Nordegaard came hobbling up out of the brush, lowering his old Sharps carbine and poking the brim of his ragged leather hat back up off his broad, liver-spotted forehead. Before the war, he and Spurr had once worked for a stage line up along the Platte River, and they’d gotten together after the war to hunt game two summers for the Central Pacific Railroad. They’d run into each other a few times since, but it had been a good six, seven years since they’d seen each other last.

  Nordegaard stopped in front of Spurr, sniffed and snorted, and slid his gaze from Spurr to Erin and back again. “How you been, you ole lawdog? Still sportin’ that badge, I see. Still shootin’ up the territory.” Chuckling, he glanced down at Plowright, who was still struggling as though against invisible hands pinning him flat on his back. “What’d this one do?”

  “He’s done enough,” Spurr said. “What in the hell you doin’ out here, Chris? Last I seen you, you was homesteadin’ down around Camp Collins.”

  “Wildfire burned me out. My wife, Two Stabs, knew of a quiet spot left here in the shadow of the Wind Rivers, so we come out here to raise a few sheep and get old in peace. Been peaceful, too, till I heard you shootin’ up the place. Shoulda known it was you causin’ all that racket. Could hear that thunder all the way to my cabin yonder.” He glanced at a narrow ravine mouth gouged into the ridge on the opposite side of the stream.

  Both men fell silent as Erin walked around Plowright, glancing down at him stonily, then walked off toward where her and Spurr’s horses grazed off the side of the trail, about fifty yards away.

  Chris glanced sidelong and wolfishly at Spurr. “She, uh…yours, you old buzzard?”

  Spurr stared after the woman, who, with each step she took up the trail, favored her right ankle more and more, until she groaned and dropped to the opposite knee, wrapping both hands around the ankle in question.

  Spurr walked over to her, as did his old trail partner, Nordegaard, and crouched beside her, wrapping an arm around her shoulders. “Best rest that ankle, Erin. We’ll find you some shade over by the creek, wrap a bandage around it.”

  She looked up with chagrin at the old lawman. “I’m sorry I didn’t hold my position like you said. I guess I just lost patience. I have to get to Jimmy, Spurr. I don’t have time to rest this ankle. Will you fetch me my horse?”

  “Like ole Spurr says,” said Nordegaard, crouching on the other side of the the woman, “you’d best rest that ankle. Might be broken.”

  “It’s not broke.” Erin sucked a sharp, painful breath and squeezed the ankle once more, sobbing. “I have to keep moving. My son needs me! Please, Spurr—fetch my horse.”

  Spurr stared at her. He was on the verge of telling her that her son was not with the Vultures, but he wasn’t sure what the news would do to her. If she’d even believe it.

  “Come on, now, Erin. We’ve ridden far enough for one day. You can’t ride with that ankle. We’ll rest it a night, then…”

  “No!”

  “Now, Erin, them other Vultures might be close, and we can’t linger out here flappin’ our jaws. I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist we hightail it back to Chris’s cabin.” He glanced at his old friend, and when Chris didn’t object, he continued: “We’ll get us a blow and pick up their trail bright and early tomorrow.”

  “Damn!” the woman cried angrily. “They’re close, Spurr. They must be real close!”

  “If it’s the Vultures you two are after,” Nordegaard said, warily looking around, “they’re too close if they’re anywhere west of Denver.”

  Spurr glanced at his old partner. “You got a horse over yonder?”

  “I got a wagon and a horse over yonder.”

  “Good. Can you help Mrs. Wilde to it, and take her on back to your digs?” Spurr didn’t want to involve his old partner in his trouble with the Vultures, but the woman needed food and shelter, and she needed her ankle tended. In the back of Spurr’s mind he was hoping she wouldn’t be able to continue fogging the cutthroats’ trail. She’d be safer with Chris, and Spurr could continue trailing the Vultures without having to worry about her.

  “Sure, sure. My Two Stabs—don’t worry about the name; she’s over all that—will know just what to do about that ankle. Come on, honey. Just wrap your arms around ole Chris, and I’ll carry you over to my wagon. It ain’t much, but I got some buffler hides to make the ridin’ softer.”

  Spurr grabbed his friend’s beefy arm clad in a badly smoke-stained buckskin sleeve. “Chris,” he said, giving the man a grave look. “Might be trouble.”

  “With you, when’s there ever ain’t been trouble?” Chris scoffed as he picked up a sobbing Erin in his arms. “We’ll head on back to my cabin. If you can still track, you old catamount, you’ll find us.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Spurr looked down at Doc Plowright, who lay groaning and mewling and turning his head from side to side in agony. Blood dribbled from his ear, the lobe of which had been shot away, and from his upper right chest and both cheeks. The dirt and gravel beneath him was as red as a red-velvet settee in a plush whorehouse parlor.

  The killer stared dimly up at Spurr, who said, “I can’t do nothin’ for you, Doc. Even if I wanted to, which I don’t.”

  Plowright stopped moving his head to glare up at the old lawman. He spat a large gob of blood through his lips, then said as though around a mouthful of rocks, “Red dead?”

  “Red’s deader’n hell.”

  “You ever thought of retirin’, you old mosshorn?” Doc said, wincing as pain spasmed through him.

  “You know, Red asked me the same thing—just before I killed him.”

  A faint smile curled the desperado’s bloody lips.

  “No use you an’ him facin’ the fires of hell alone,” Spurr said. “Where’re the others headed? Where’s your hideout, Doc? The Wind Rivers, I’m guessin’.”

  Another little, dark smile curled Plowright’s upper lip. “You go to hell, you old bastard.”

  All at once, his eyes turned opaque, a long sigh gurgled up from his throat, and his body fell slack.

  “You first, Doc.” Spurr looked up the trail. No sign of the other Vultures. They must have been so sure that Red Ryan and Plowright could take Spurr and the woman down that they’d ridden on ahead.

  How far?

  Spurr and Erin had caught up to them unexpectedly. Lucky they hadn’t ridden right up on them. The gang must have taken their time after leaving Elkhorn Creek, maybe celebrated the killing of the soldiers as well as Mason and the other lawmen in one of the ravines they’d holed up in. Earlier that morning, Spurr had found several whiskey bottles along one such encampment.

  Good to know that now they were only a few hours away.

  Or was it? He thought of Erin and old Chris and the wife he’d mentioned. Best if Spurr didn’t linger here but rode on early the next morning. There was a good chance that when Red Ryan and Doc Plowright didn’t show up at their next camp, Stanhope would send more of his group back to look for them.

  Spurr thought about that as he dabbed at the bullet burn above his ear with his neckerchief, staring down at Plowright. He gave a little chuff of satisfaction, then walked up the trail and fetched Cochise from the patch of grama grass he was grazing on.

  Then he grabbed the reins of Erin’s steeldust. His extra bay was grazing along the stream down near where Spurr had told Erin to stay until he’d called for her. He’d pick up the army remount later. For now, he had a chore to finish out the afternoon with…

  A half hour later, he’d led Plowright’s and Ryan’s horses down the ridge, Red Ryan draped over his saddle and secured to the stirrups with ropes. Spurr swung down from Cochise’s back, took a hard pull from his brandy bottle, then bac
k-and-bellied Plowright over the cutthroat’s own saddle. When the exhausting chore was finished, the old lawman ate a nitroglycerin tablet washed down with whiskey, then slapped both horses’ asses.

  He dug in his pocket for his makings sack and rolled a smoke as he watched the mounts gallop on up the trail through the heart of the narrow canyon, along the picturesque little stream bubbling through wolf willows. The dead men’s heads and arms flopped stiffly down the horses’ sides. They drifted around a bend and disappeared.

  “There you go, Clell, you son of a bitch,” Spurr said, firing the quirley and sucking the acrid smoke deep into his tired lungs. He trickled the smoke out his leathery nostrils. “Now you don’t have to worry about ’em.”

  “She sleeps,” said Two Stabs, Nordegaard’s current wife in a long line of wives, most of them Indian women. This one was a Ute with cool brown eyes, a birthmark under her right eye, and a thin mouth that curved downward. Spurr figured she was about ten years younger than Chris, who was five years older than Spurr. “She will sleep the night with the tea I gave her.”

  “How’s her ankle?” Spurr asked the woman from the couple’s kitchen table. Chris sat across from him, smoking an Irish clay pipe.

  “Swollen,” said Two Stabs, taking the basin of water to the cabin’s open front door and tossing the water into the cool mountain night. “But the bone is not broken, I think.” She turned from the door and gave Spurr a direct look, odd for an Indian woman, as he’d usually found them shyly indirect. She’d probably learned Chris’s directness. “She fought the sleep, and she will try to walk on the ankle before it is ready. She keeps saying the name of a boy—Jimmy.” Two Stabs arched a brow. “Her son?”

  “Yeah.” Spurr sipped his coffee and poked a fork around on the tin plate littered with the leavings of the antelope steak and potatoes that the Ute woman had prepared and that had more than adequately filled the old lawman’s belly.

  Chris puffed his pipe and spoke around the stem. “Vultures got him?”

  “No.” Spurr shook his head. The coffee spiced with his own bourbon suddenly made his gut sour. “She thinks they got him, but the boy’s dead.”

  “The hell!”

  “Somehow she got it in her head the boy’s alive and ridin’ with the Vultures and she has to save him.” Spurr shook his head slowly and looked around at the spare, humble cabin outfitted with a hodgepodge of hand-hewn furniture and animal hides on the floor and stretched on the walls. There was the smell of wood smoke and the coal oil lantern flickering from a ceiling support post and hanging opposite a massive rack of elk horns. “I haven’t had the heart to tell her the boy’s dead. Seems to be all that’s keepin’ her alive—the prospect of gettin’ little Jim back.”

  Two Stabs had refilled the basin from a bucket of water and sat with a weary sigh in the hide-bottom chair next to Spurr. “Does she have a man?”

  “Dead, too.” Spurr lifted his quirley to his lips but jerked his hand back down when Two Stabs pressed a wet cloth to the side of his head. “What’re you doin’ there?”

  “I am cleaning your cut. Don’t be stubborn. It needs cleaning. You already have a barrelful of dirt in it, mixed with the blood.”

  Embarrassed by the woman’s ministrations, Spurr glanced at Chris, who smiled around his pipe. “If anyone needs tendin’ in this ole tipi, Two Stabs’s gonna tend ’im and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it but sit there and take it. Mind her name—she mighta got it long ago but she got it for a reason.”

  “Ouch!” Spurr hissed when the woman dabbed too hard at the burn.

  Two Stabs arched her black brows, regarding him dubiously. “What—you are going to start to cry now? That would be a display for a man who wears a badge.”

  Spurr submitted once more to the woman’s tending as he scowled across the table at Chris. “Where in hell’d you find this one?”

  “Hell, I didn’t find her. She found me—knocked me over me head, hog-tied me, and here I sit!”

  Chris slapped the table and laughed nearly silently, jerking his shoulders. Spurr snorted while the woman clucked and shook her head as she continued cleaning the shallow wound. When she finished, she retrieved a tin of homemade salve that smelled like coal oil and skunk piss—it probably was!—and rubbed it brusquely into the cut while Spurr scowled and ground his teeth while old Chris continued to laugh.

  When the woman tamped the lid back on the tin and rose from her chair, Chris winked at her. “Don’t expect me to be sharin’ my woman with you tonight, Spurr. I know it’s traditional amongst Two Stabs’s people, but it ain’t tradition in this house!”

  He slapped the table and started to howl, but Two Stabs sushed him with: “Hush, you old fool! The woman sleeps!”

  With a castigating chuff, but also wearing an embarrassed flush on her still-handsome face, she headed up the stairs that rose from the far right side of the cabin to a dark loft with a full-log rail. Spurr watched her as she climbed the stairs, holding the hem of her colorful skirt above her ankles, moving slowly, tender with age, the wooden steps creaking softly beneath her. Her long black hair, threaded by only a few strands of gray, fell straight down her back. At the top of the stairs she became a shadow melding with the loft’s darkness until she lit a red lamp.

  Watching her, Spurr felt sadness creep into him though he wasn’t sure why. Maybe he wouldn’t mind having a woman like Two Stabs—a woman he could watch retire at night, after he’d sipped coffee around the table with her, chatting about the day’s events and whatnot. Maybe that’s something he’d given up and regretted now, just as he regretted not lassoing Abilene when he’d had the opportunity.

  “Reckon I’ll sleep out yonder,” he said, rising with a grunt from his chair, pushing himself up with both hands on the table. Thrusting the regret back down deep inside him. “I’ll be able to keep watch out there, in case we have any unwanted visitors tonight.”

  “You’d best sleep, lawdog.”

  “I will sleep, like I always do.” Spurr grinned at his old friend, who looked a stranger now with his thick gray beard and only a few strands of coarse gray hair swept back from an age-spotted widow’s peak. “With one eye open!”

  But he didn’t sleep. Not right away. He sat back in one of the two rocking chairs on the cabin’s front stoop, his blanket roll pulled up to his chin, stockingfeet crossed on the porch rail before him, and stared at a distant storm flashing over the Wind River Range looming blackly in the north. He felt the refreshing chill in the air, smelled the rain.

  Long after the cabin’s lights had been extinguished, he heard someone moving around in there. The front door clicked. Chris Nordegaard stepped out wrapped in a robe, his white beard fairly glowing against the darkness, leaving the rest of him a murky silhouette.

  Instantly, Spurr smelled licorice. Chris had something in his hand. He walked over and held it out to Spurr.

  “What’s that?”

  “Medicine pouch. Two Stabs ground some roots and herbs for you.”

  Uncertainly, Spurr took the hide sack in his hands, the rawhide cord sewn into the pouch’s neck dangling down against his blanket.

  “She says it’s for your heart,” Chris said quietly, standing over Spurr, holding his hands together in front of the round paunch pushing out his bathrobe.

  Spurr looked up at the man, incredulous. The lawman hadn’t mentioned his ticker. A wave of emotion swept over him, making his tongue thick. He looked at the pouch, then lifted the rawhide thong over his head.

  “I’ll thank her in the morning,” he said hoarsely.

  Chris walked to the cabin door and stopped, glanced back at the old lawman. “We all gotta die, Spurr.”

  Spurr jerked a surprised look at him. Irritation slithered up out of the loneliness and regret, and the tenderness he was feeling toward Two Stabs, for going to so much work for him. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean, hoss?”

  “Ain’t that why you keep workin’—trailin’ gangs like the Vultures? ’Cause you’r
e afraid to hang up the irons? Well, you get you a woman, Spurr. Makes the process a whole lot easier.”

  Spurr saw his old friend give him a wink and a half grin before Chris opened the door and went inside, softly latching the door again behind him.

  Spurr blinked tears from his eyes, his chest heavy and raw. He thought of Abilene for a time, and he felt like a fool when he heard himself sobbing, but he finally managed to sleep. He woke surprised—how much later he didn’t know—to hear the door of the barn slide open on the other side of the yard.

  So much for sleeping with one eye open!

  Could it already be time for Chris’s morning chores?

  Hooves clomped, echoing woodenly inside the barn. Then the silhouette of a horse and rider passed out the open door before swerving sharply to Spurr’s left. The horse bounded off into the night.

  Spurr was still half asleep, fisting sleep from his eyes, wondering where in hell Chris was headed so early in such a hurry.

  The fact that the rider wasn’t Chris dawned on him at the same time the door opened and Chris’s voice said, “That Mrs. Wilde done slipped out the back, Spurr!”

  “Again?” the half-asleep lawman said, pushing to his feet. “Ah, hell!”

  TWENTY-SIX

  Erin dropped low over her horse’s neck and gave the mount its head. The wind blew her hair, caressed her face. The night air was cool. The stars swept a purple-blue swath across the heavens, so the horse had little trouble picking its way back along the trail that she and Mr. Nordegaard had taken in his wagon the previous afternoon.

  She couldn’t remember how far they’d come from the main canyon—she’d been too preoccupied with getting to Jim, as she was now. When the horse stumbled as they traced a particularly dark part of the trail, however, she checked it down to a trot. If the horse went down, her chance of retrieving Jim would be lost. She couldn’t walk far on her twisted ankle.