Bloody Season

by Loren D. Estleman

  The lighted windows of the station were hanging ahead when he got the animals down to a canter. He reined in before the adobe building.

  “Bud?”

  Philpot was sitting with his chin inside his rough collar and his hat canted down in front of his face. Paul tore off the hat. The driver’s head drifted toward his shoulder and his body leaned over sideways. The front of his coat glittered with blood from a ragged hole over his heart. Paul left him there and climbed down. He was surrounded by a crowd, the station having emptied out at the noise of gunfire. It grew as the passengers helped one another down, everyone talking at once.

  “Stand away!” Paul jerked his shotgun at the newcomers. The coach contained eighty thousand in silver bullion bound for the railhead in Benson.

  “Who’s dead?” someone asked. “Is that Bob Paul?” He recognized the station keeper’s pockmarked face.

  “No, I’m Paul. Bud Philpot got it.” He started counting heads among the passengers. “Everybody all of a piece?” Someone said, “That fellow on top fell off back there.” Paul said, “I caught him. Not that the favor did him any kindness.”

  “Not him. The one in back.”

  He glanced up at the empty dickey seat.

  “He wasn’t moving when we left him.” The passenger speaking was an angular young man in a checked suit and chesterfield splashed with mud.

  “Christ.” Paul told the station keeper to watch the coach and started back on foot.

  “They’ll cut you down,” the keeper called.

  “Do I look like I’m carrying bullion? They are horseshit and pony tracks by now.”

  Snow fell with a sizzling noise. The big clean-faced man was a shadow, then a sensation of movement behind a curtain. After five minutes he returned, the shotgun dangling. The lights of the station shadowed the pouches in his broad face.

  “Wire Tombstone,” he told the station keeper. “Tell them the shipment is safe but we got two dead.”

  The snow slacked off after midnight. It had stopped falling when seven horsemen approached the station at a walk, iron shoes creaking on the fresh fall. At the base of the grade Bob Paul swung a lantern and they drew rein. He recognized Sheriff Behan’s big sombrero and greeted Billy Breakenridge, shook hands with Virgil Earp when he swung down with a grunt, and nodded to Wyatt and Morgan, both part-time fellow shotgun messengers. Marshall Williams, the Wells Fargo agent in Tombstone and a sunny entity by nature, smiled a greeting and rolled a cigarette. Paul didn’t know the seventh man, medium-built under a buffalo coat and slouch hat, with a round face, moustaches curled down on the ends, and kindly blue eyes that glinted in the lantern light as if hunting mischief. He was not thirty. All the men wore big hats and heavy coats and clanked when they moved. They had brought two packhorses with them. The fellow in the buffalo coat had a Sharps rifle in his scabbard.

  Virgil said, “Bob, this here is Bat Masterson. He is a good man to have on the road if you keep an eye on him and see he does not tie any tin cans to your tail.”

  Masterson pulled a small hand out of its glove to accept the shotgun messenger’s big paw. “Adobe Walls,” Paul said. “I heard about you. I thought you’d be older.”

  The glint deepened. “I came near to not getting that way on that occasion.”

  “Well, I cannot promise you Comanches, but there are four or five white men I would admire to turn over a mesquite flame. They murdered a good Wells Fargo man and a paying passenger.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Laid out up at the station. Coyotes this winter are thick as mosquito wigglers.”

  “What have you found?” Behan remained in the saddle with his arms folded on the pommel.

  Paul stepped off the road and raised his lantern. A scattering of brass cartridge shells caught fire in the glow. Wyatt picked one up and flicked snow off the flanged end. “Winchester short. They used up enough of them to kill just two.”

  “I count seventeen,” Paul said. “Here is where one of them waited with the horses.” He carried the light into the mesquite. The new snow lay bowl-shaped in depressions where the earlier fall had been trampled. He hooked something out of the brush and held it out.

  Virgil turned the item over and handed it to Wyatt. It was a triangle of black cloth with lengths of frayed rope sewed around the edges.

  Paul said, “I thought they was yellow whiskers. They each was wearing one.”

  “The trail is hours old,” said Behan, when the men returned to their animals. “The snow will melt come morning and we will have nothing but lathered horses to show for our trailing.”

  Wyatt mounted. “Bat can read sign like an Apache. I am no poor shakes at it myself and neither is Virgil.”

  First light was a metallic sliver over the Dragoons. Bob Paul swung a leg over the black he had brought back from Benson after delivering the stagecoach and the party set out, the horses shuddering and snorting milky vapor.

  The sky cleared at dawn. The sun warmed the earth and drew forth a fog that burned off by mid-morning, the droplets prisming into brilliant colors in the moment of dissipation. The snow dissolved into patches that became brown puddles in the afternoon. By then all of the riders except Behan, hanging back with Breakenridge, had shucked their coats and rolled them behind their cantles.

  Now and then they stopped while Masterson rode his paint around in a circle, leaning out of the saddle, or dismounted and went ahead on foot to study the ground. Sometimes he was joined by Wyatt.

  “These fellows are not new to life on the scout,” said Masterson, stepping into leather. “Doubling back and using riverbeds and rock face. Johnny would have lost this one thirty miles back.”

  Wyatt showed his teeth. “Johnny would lose his ass in a washtub unless it had a county ballot tattooed on it.” “You are still chewing over that appointment?”

  “He promised me undersheriff and then turned around and gave it to Harry Woods. The difference comes to twenty thousand a year. I guess I am still chewing over it.”

  They camped in the Dragoon foothills, where Masterson served Billy Breakenridge a plateful of beans and curled bacon with a hibernating scorpion on top of it and smiled when the deputy squealed and dropped the plate. The others howled, all except a scowling Behan. After supper Morgan shared a bottle with Masterson and Virgil, who offered it to Bob Paul, but it was declined. Wyatt smoked a pipe. Behan took off his sombrero and combed his spidery hair forward over his dome. They banked the fire and slept. Marshall Williams snored loudest.

  In the morning the trail bent north and then west past Tres Alamos, following the swollen San Pedro River up the valley. There it mingled with other, older tracks at sundown and Masterson lost it.

  “Rancher named Wheaton went bust sometime back,” Wyatt told him, separating a prickly pear from his chaparreras between thumb and forefinger. “His place is a day and a half upriver. If I was planning a holdup in the snow and wanted a place to shelter fresh mounts it would be there.”

  “It’s worth looking. That San Pedro crowd has pushed too many stole cattle through this country to track an ammo wagon after them.”

  Part of Wheaton’s roof had tipped in, the adobe beaten down to rubble on that side and the windows gaping. The barn, a solider construction, stood swaybacked a hundred yards away with sunlight streaming between leaden gray sideboards not yet carried off by scavengers in a region starved for wood. They rode down on the shack out of a lifting sun, six men unshaven and mortared from crowns to rowels with three days of dust and dried mud and their horses throwing lather. The two county men trailed behind. Dismounting before the door, Morgan Earp fisted his pistol and kicked apart the latch. But there was nothing inside to shoot except a huddled armadillo and he followed the others to the barn. It contained four caked saddle horses with their heads hanging on a floor of ammonia-smelling straw. Masterson let his rifle droop.

  “Well, we did not figure to beat them here.”

  “Any of them look familiar?” Virgil asked Paul.


  He shook his head. “I never saw their mounts.”

  Wyatt laid a hand on a shivering cow pony’s hollow flank. “I know this one. I saw Luther King riding it down Allen Street a week ago.”

  Masterson said, “It does not look to stand out that much.”

  “I’m telling you it’s King’s.”

  Virgil found a tick in his clothes and squashed it. “King is tight with Len Redfield, ain’t he?”

  “That is scarcely evidence.” Behan had just caught up, with Breakenridge behind. The sheriff’s gelding tried to pry loose a patch of trampled alfalfa from the bare earth with its muzzle.

  “I am a deputy U.S. marshal, not a judge.” Virgil mounted.

  “Stage robbery is county jurisdiction.”

  “Murder in the territory is federal. Hold your water, Johnny. You will get your slab of the glory.”

  “Johnny don’t want it,” Morgan said, grinning. “Him and the Redfields are old poker partners.”

  Len Redfield was a big man, yoke-shouldered, and balloon-knuckled from fights in the pasture and in town. He wore braces over a red-and-white-checked shirt gone pink from wearing and washing and gray dungarees glazed with dirt at the knees. He closed the door on his wife inside their whitewashed house in the lower valley and stepped off the porch to meet the riders. Wyatt got down without asking leave and the others watched Redfield’s square face darken.

  “We are looking for Luther King and the other men who tried to rob the Benson stage,” Wyatt said. “The trail leads here.”

  “Like hell it does.”

  “You are calling me a liar?”

  Redfield said, “You’re trespassing.”

  “This here is law business, Len.” Virgil stretched himself on his saddle horn.

  “I don’t know nothing about no holdups and I ain’t seen Luther this month.”

  Wyatt said, “You’re a liar.”

  The rancher’s face congested deeper and his right shoulder dropped. Wyatt turned his head, taking most of the blow along his jawline, scooped his big American out of his trousers, and laid the barrel behind Redfield’s left ear. Redfield went down, shying Virgil’s horse. Landing on his hands and knees, he started to push himself up. Virgil took his boot out of its stirrup and planted it against Redfield’s chest and shoved. The rancher sprawled on his back. Wyatt kicked him in the ribs. The snap was brittle in the clear air. He placed his foot across the fallen man’s throat and rolled back the pistol’s hammer and pointed the muzzle at his face.

  “Where is Luther King or I’ll blow your brains clear to China.”

  “Wyatt.”

  He kept his shooting arm straight and turned his head slightly. Morgan, astride his chestnut, was approaching from the corral. He had a hand wrapped around his Colt’s resting on his thigh and he was herding forward a lumpy-looking man in overalls and a dirty duster, shoving him stumbling ahead with the horse’s shoulder when he hesitated. Finally Morgan turned the horse hard and the man fell on his face with a rattling noise.

  “He dumb the far side of the corral when he saw me coming,” Morgan said. “He almost made it.”

  “Morning, Luther.” Wyatt elevated the Smith & Wesson’s muzzle and seated the hammer gently. Redfield breathed, catching his breath when his cracked rib pinched him.

  Bob Paul spurred his black in a wide loop around the corral, milling the horses around inside, and came back. “There’s two badly used animals in there,” he said.

  Belting his pistol, Wyatt left Redfield to place a heel against Luther King’s shoulder and rolled him over. Virgil said, “Look out,” and Wyatt kicked a Colt’s Navy out of the man’s hand. Then he kicked him in the face.

  Behan said, “There is no call for that.”

  “Luther, you’re putting on weight.” Wyatt took hold of the bib of the stunned man’s overalls and tore it loose from the buttons. Red-and-white cartridge boxes spilled out. He threw the boxes after the Navy, unbuckled two cartridge belts from around King’s waist and added them to the pile, found a short-barreled Colt’s Thunderer in a duster pocket and got rid of that. King looked a lot less lumpy now. “Luther, what if you fell in the San Pedro? I have saved you from drowning.”

  “Company.” Marshall Williams, one stovepipe-booted leg resting across his pommel, paused in the midst of building a cigarette to loosen his Winchester in its scabbard.

  Behan shielded his eyes and squinted at the rider coming in out of the sun. “It is Len’s brother Hank.”

  Wyatt said, “Bat.”

  Masterson quirted his mount and cantered out to intercept the rider. The other man drew rein and they conversed across ten feet of ground, gesturing. Finally they rode in. Hank was as tall as his brother but not as wide and wore big sad moustaches under the black pinch hat with a Spanish brim.

  Len was sitting on the porch steps now, a hand on his side. His wife had come out and squatted next to him with her skirt in the dust of the yard. She was bareheaded and her skin and dress and tied-back hair were all the same sand color. Her face was long and simian and she had large ears that stuck out.

  Virgil stepped down and told Masterson and Williams to search the outbuildings. “We will have a talk with Luther indoors.”

  Wyatt twisted a hand inside the collar of King’s duster and heaved him to his feet. He had to clutch his overalls with one hand to keep them from sliding down.

  Dismounting, Bob Paul followed the Earps and their prisoner into the house, leaving Behan and Breakenridge to watch the Redfields. Inside the small parlor Wyatt hurled King into a horsehair armchair pinned all over with doilies and antimacassars. An oval-framed picture fell off a wall, cracking the thick glass.

  “You are some bad road agent, Luther,” Wyatt said. “You should seek another line of work, the others too.”

  “I ain’t no road agent.”

  Wyatt backhanded him across the face. The noise was like a pistol shot in the room.

  “Why’d you run, Luther?” Virgil lowered himself onto a davenport that sighed under his weight. Troughs of dust curled up around him and settled on the flowered upholstery.

  “Fthzlwz.” King’s lip was swelling.

  “Talk plain.” Wyatt slapped him again.

  “I thought you was outlaws.” He grimaced out each word. “This country is full of them.”

  “Marsh Williams and Bat have guns to your friends’ heads,” Wyatt said. “They will shoot the woman first and then it is up to you whether Len or Hank gets it next.”

  King said nothing and Wyatt cocked his hand a third time. Virgil interrupted him.

  “You don’t want to be in Yuma with summer coming on.” He sat back with his knees spread and his hands on them and the palm-polished handle of his Army Colt’s turning out past his open greatcoat. “They stick you in a tin box in the sun like a sourdough biscuit and don’t let you out until you are baked down to skin and skeleton.”

  Bob Paul said, “He won’t see Yuma. When Doc Holliday hears about it he will be lucky to see a rope.”

  “Wzdk—” He pinched his torn lip. “What’s Holliday to do with it?”

  “Hell, his woman Kate was riding on that stage. All that hare-assed shooting got her killed. Doc is some taken with that Kate.”

  Wyatt snatched at it. “Three of you stood by the road, stuck up the stage and killed Philpot and Roerig and Kate Fisher. The other one held the horses in the brush. I don’t know which one he was, but whoever he was he is lucky. Dec will run down the others and cut off their wedding-tackles with that pig-sticker he carries and shove them down their craws and then shoot them for mumbling.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Doc is mean but fair,” Virgil said. “He will have no truck with whoever held the horses.”

  “I held the horses!”

  Wyatt, big and lean and sunburned and needing a shave, his jaw purpling where Len Redfield’s knuckles had raked it, looked at his brother. Virgil plucked a fresh tick off his neck and contemplated it before cracking it between thumb and forefi
nger. “Let’s get the others in here.”

  Morgan went out. Minutes later the room was crowded with three Earps, Bob Paul, Marshall Williams, Sheriff Behan, and Deputy Breakenridge. Masterson stayed outside with the Redfields. A sour-sweet mix of sweat and leather and horse and gun oil filled the house.

  Luther King spoke, pressing his lip at times to make his words clear and playing with a cigarette Williams had rolled for him. No one had given him a match.

  “It was Billy Leonard, Jim Crane, and Harry Head done the shooting. I held the horses like I said. I rid with them to Wheaton’s for fresh mounts and left them at Hank Redfield’s to get cartridges and money from Len. I was fixing to meet up with them when Morg catched me.”

  “They changed horses at Hank’s?” Wyatt asked. King nodded. “Where are they camped?”

  The prisoner smiled. Blood trickled down his chin. He had a bowl haircut and no hair on his face and the grin made him look like a schoolboy. “You won’t get them. I have talked all I am fixed to.”

  Wyatt said, “You will talk a blue streak when Doc commences to sawing on the family jewels.”

  King paled a shade but said nothing.

  Virgil stood, stretching and cracking some bones. “Doc’s woman was never on that stage, Luther,” he said. “Bob snookered you.”

  Before the other could react, Behan cleared his throat loudly. The sheriff’s sombrero was dusty and his neck had broken out in an angry rash under several days’ growth of beard. “King is my prisoner, Earp. I am arresting him for complicity in attempted stage robbery. That’s a county offense, not federal. I am taking him to Tombstone.”

  “I will go with you,” said Williams.

  “That won’t be necessary.”