The High Rocks

by Loren D. Estleman

  I was immersed to my chin in nearly scalding water when the doorknob began to turn. My gun, a .45 caliber Deane-Adams English five-shot revolver, was hanging in its holster on a chair beside the tub. I palmed it and drew a bead on the door between my bare feet, which I had braced against the tub’s cast-iron lip. I cocked it just as the door swung inward.

  The steam rising from the tub was so thick I could barely make out the dark smudge of a man’s form standing in the doorway, but that was enough. In my profession, when someone comes in on you without knocking first, you’ve got to figure he isn’t there on a friendly visit. I’d learned that the hard way; the same thing had happened to me twice before and two men were dead because they hadn’t taken that extra second to brush the door with their knuckles. My finger tightened on the trigger.

  “You still carrying that dandy’s gun, Page?” drawled a deep voice with a faint trace of Mississippi around the r’s.

  I held onto the gun. Boot Hill is full of those who put their weapons away when they heard a voice they recognized.

  “It’s this way, Henry,” I said. “Only two men in the West ever carried a gun like this one. The other was Bill Hickok. You figure it out.”

  He laughed then, and I knew it was going to be all right. Even so, I didn’t relax my grip on the revolver until he came farther into the room and I could see that his gun was safely in its holster. I let the hammer down gently and leathered the five-shot.

  Henry Goodnight hadn’t changed much since I’d seen him last, which was going on three years ago. Hatless, he wore his auburn hair shoulder-length, the way some of them still do up in the mountains, and he dressed like a banker, complete with Prince Albert coat and shiny beaverskin vest with a gold watch chain glittering across the front. The effect was somewhat marred by the silver star he had pinned to his belt. His gun was ivory-handled and rode waist-high in a cut-down holster designed to carve seconds off his draw. He had moist brown eyes, kind of gentle and slow-looking, that had fooled more than one self-styled fast draw into thinking he could take him. To date, none had. He had been elected sheriff of this isolated community of trappers, farmers and cattlemen eight years before and there had not been an election since. The locals recognized a good thing when they had one.

  “You’ve changed some,” he said, grinning behind his moustache. “Back on Ford Harper’s spread you wouldn’t take a bath but once a month, and then only when it rained.”

  I grinned back. I’d almost forgotten those days when we made our way from one cattle camp to another with one rope between us and a pair of backsides like buffalo skins. “What makes you think this isn’t my first this month?”

  “From the looks of the water, I’d say it was.”

  “There’s a lot of dust between here and Helena.” I extended a soapy hand, which he took in a grip usually reserved for the butt of his six-gun. “What’s on your mind, Henry? You know I would have showed up at your office sooner or later.”

  “More likely later.” He swung a black-booted foot up onto the seat of the chair and leaned forward with his forearms resting upon his thigh. This made him look casual but alert. It was one of a half-dozen or so poses he had practiced to the degree that he could go into any one of them without looking as if he were affecting it, which he was. Henry was vain as a bride. “Hobie Botts told me he saw you ride in half an hour ago. I need your help.”

  “Don’t tell me your prisoner got away.”

  His teeth glittered behind the reddish fringe along his upper lip. “You know me better than that, Page. When was the last time I let a prisoner escape?”

  I shrugged, soaping the back of my neck. “I haven’t seen you in three years, Henry.”

  “I suppose I deserved that,” he said. “What I’ve got is a drunk and disorderly over at Goddard’s who’s a mite more drunk than I can ignore and a damned sight more disorderly than I can tolerate. If you listen close you can hear the glass breaking clear over here. He’s got friends with him who are behaving themselves, more or less, but I can’t say I trust them if it comes down to me or him. The town doesn’t give me a deputy. How’d you like a part-time job? Say, fifteen minutes at the outside?”

  “Indian or white?”

  “Half-breed. His name’s Ira Longbow, and he’s hell with any weapon you put in his hand. Some folks say he’s the son of old Two Sisters himself, but no one knows for sure. He acts like he believes it. Can I count on you?”

  I sighed. “Hand me that towel.”

  Dressing, I ignored the change of clothing I’d laid out and put on the outfit I’d worn during the ride from the capital, stiff with dust and sweat. I didn’t want to get any blood on my fresh linen. I put on my holster without bothering to tie it down—my gun was going to be in my hand all the time anyway—and together we left the hotel and crossed the street in the direction of the mercantile, a long low building constructed of logs that served a dual purpose as general store and saloon, with a thin partition in between. Henry hadn’t exaggerated; the sounds of breaking glass and splintering wood were audible all over town.

  Something big fell apart with a tremendous crash as we neared the building. I winced. “Goddard won’t be happy with you for taking so long to investigate.”

  “Bart’s been acting lately like he owns me and everything else in town,” he said. “It won’t hurt him to be taken down a notch or two. Here he is now.”

  A beefy old man who had been pacing the boardwalk in front of the log building came storming over to meet us, pushing his way through a crowd of onlookers. He had thick white eyebrows and a great shock of hair of the same color which had a habit of tumbling over his forehead like an avalanche of fresh snow. It had been white as long as I’d known him, and I’d been born and raised in Staghorn. “Where the hell you been?” he demanded of the sheriff in a voice just short of a bellow. “That son-of-a-bitch breed is running me out of business!”

  “Hello, Bart,” I said.

  He glared at me in a preoccupied manner from beneath the shelves of his eyebrows. “Page Murdock,” he said. “I heard you grabbed a badge up at the capital.” Without waiting for an answer, he returned his attention to my companion. “What about it, Sheriff? Are you going to do something about that maniac, or do I go get my shotgun?”

  “Hold onto your hat, Bart,” drawled the other. “What got him started this time?”

  “How the hell should I know? I ain’t no injun. He come in falling-down drunk, and I refused to serve him. That could of been it.” Something struck a wall inside the building hard enough to knock the chinking loose from between a couple of logs. He jumped at the noise. “You going to stop him while I still got a place of business?”

  “Where’d he get drunk, if not here?” asked Henry.

  “What is this, for chrissake? Everything I own is being smashed to bits and you act like I’m the bastard that’s doing it. There’s a dozen families run stills up in them mountains that don’t care who they sell to; why else you think I got to operate a mercantile? The competition here is worse than in Virginia City!”

  The sheriff looked thoughtful. “I sure hope you’re telling the truth, Bart. I warned you last time if I ever caught you serving liquor to Indians, I’d close you down.”

  “You won’t have to. Two more minutes and Ira Longbow’ll do it for you!”

  We left him fuming in the street and stepped up onto the boardwalk. The crowd parted respectfully for the dashing figure of the sheriff, taking little notice of the dusty saddle tramp at his side. My gun was in my hand. Henry’s remained in his holster, but with him that was as good as holding it. With his left hand he gave the bat-wing doors on the saloon side a shove and stood back while they swung shut. When no bullets followed he cautiously led the way inside.

  It was a long room with a low ceiling, half again the length of a railroad car and several feet wider, leaving less than a third of the building for the mercantile on the other side of the partition. Red- and green-striped Indian rugs decorated the bare logs
that made up the walls. A number of hooded kerosene lamps swung from the ceiling. The glass had been broken out of two of them, which explained the oily tang that accompanied the normal saloon smells of cheap whiskey, stale sawdust, and sweat. Smashed tables, bottles, chairs and glasses formed a pile against the walls and bar. The big mirror on the wall behind the bar was a web of jagged cracks forking outward from a triangular hole in the center where something had struck it, giving me a fly’s eye view of the rest of the room and its contents.

  A trio of youths stood behind the bar, two of them drinking quietly while a third poured himself a tumbler full of amber liquid from a brown bottle in his left hand. They wore leather vests that had never touched cactus and narrow hats with cocked brims that had never held a horse’s fill of water. They dressed alike, looked alike, even wore their cartridge belts at the same low-slung level in imitation of a gunfighter in a dime novel. Kids. I treated them as I would any nest of baby rattlesnakes that blocked my way out of a cougar’s lair; I kept them covered. The fourth youth was Henry’s worry.

  Standing in the center of a cleared section, he was a scarecrow, bones and sinew covered by skin the dusky red shade of old barn siding. Dull black hair hung in lifeless wings on either side of his forehead from the part in the middle. The whites of his eyes, though bloodshot, were dazzling against the lackluster copper of his complexion, in the centers of which the irises were as black as his hair and as shiny as the buttons on an old maid’s shoe. His nose was fleshy, his lips thick and flat. Wisps of downy black beard clung like spun sugar to his cheeks and chin. His clothes were homespun and faded, his boots run down at the heels. He wore no gun belt. His hat, a black Spanish affair with a low flat crown, hung between his shoulder blades from a thong knotted at his throat.

  He stood with his legs spread apart and the upper half of his body bent forward at the waist, swaying slightly, as if the weight of the Dance six-shooter he held in his left hand was slowly pulling him over onto his face. The barrel showed a tendency to drift as well, but it remained pointed in the general direction of the sheriff.

  Somewhere along the line, Henry’s own gun, a Colt Peacemaker with the front sight filed off and the hammer shaved to ease the trigger pull, had leaped into his right hand. I hadn’t seen him draw, so he must have done it as we were entering and my attention was claimed by the three at the bar. Not that I would have seen it in any case. Eight men had died who hadn’t. He covered the half-breed.

  I could see that the boy with the bottle was going to go for his gun before he made a move. They get a special look on their faces when they’re thinking about it, kind of sly and frightened at the same time. I fired, there was a crash, and he was holding the neck of the bottle and nothing else.

  “Don’t,” I advised him. He took it in the right spirit. He raised his hands.

  “There’s two ways we can do this, Ira.” Henry spoke in his professionally tough voice. “I can take you to jail and you can sober up in a cell that’s not too dirty, or I can turn you over to Josh Booker. Your choice.”

  That meant something only to those who knew their way around Staghorn. Josh Booker was the local undertaker. If it meant anything to Ira Longbow, however, he didn’t show it. He maintained his unsteady stance, his gun barrel-to-barrel with Henry Goodnight’s.

  I decided to toss my own two bits into the pot. “You boys had better talk some sense into your partner,” I told the three at the bar. “If that Dance goes off, you’re next.”

  “You can’t shoot all of us,” muttered the youth at the far end. His tone was petulant, scarcely audible, like that of a boy talking back to his mother, but who wasn’t sure he wanted to be heard.

  “Why not? This gun holds five cartridges, and I’ve only fired one. That gives me one to play with.” None of them seemed to have an answer for that.

  Henry took control of the conversation. “What’s it going to be, Ira? I’m being paid by the month.”

  Ira seemed to be having trouble making up his mind. His black eyes shifted, glittering unnaturally in the light seeping in through the grimy front window past the blurred white faces pressed against the panes. “Go away, Sheriff,” he said at last. His voice was pitched low for his age, muddied slightly by his condition. “This ain’t your business. Me and my friends are just having some fun.”

  “At whose expense? Give me the gun before someone gets hurt.” Henry held out a steady left hand to receive the weapon.

  The boy at the far end of the bar snatched at the butt of his gun and I shot him. The bullet struck his left shoulder just below the collarbone, spun him around, and slammed him into the cracked mirror, bringing a cascade of glittering shards showering down around him. His revolver somersaulted from his grip and glided along the polished surface of the bar until it reached the edge, from where it dropped to the plank floor with a thud. In the same instant I recocked the Deane-Adams and brought it to bear on his two companions. They threw up their hands, shaking their heads frantically. The one closest to me still held the neck of the bottle my first bullet had shattered in one hand.

  The wounded youth stood with his back against the wreckage of the mirror, his right hand gripping his left shoulder, blood oozing between his fingers. His face was dead white.

  “Three left,” I told him, unnecessarily. His gun was beyond his reach and all the fight was gone from him.

  I glanced in Henry’s direction and was surprised to see that he was standing there alone. At his feet sprawled Ira Longbow, a purple bruise swelling on his left temple where the sheriff had brought the barrel of his six-shooter smashing against the half-breed’s skull. The youth’s gun lay two yards away where it had landed after leaving his hand. Henry wasn’t paying any attention to him. He was busy sighting down the muzzle of his Peacemaker and scowling.

  “Bent the barrel, damn it,” he growled.

  “You should’ve used the butt,” I told him. “Indians got hard heads.”

  Now that the danger was past, the room began to fill with people. The sheriff showed them his gun and they backed off, leaving a clearing around the scene of destruction. He fished a shining coin from his coat pocket and tossed it to a young boy dressed in threadbare homespun, who caught it in one hand. “Go fetch Ezra Wilson,” Henry directed him. “Tell him we got a wounded man here. Hurry!” The boy took off at a run, his leather worksoles clapping on bare wood.

  “What happened to Doc Bernstein?” I asked.

  The lawman regarded me dully for a moment, as if he’d forgotten all about me. “He’s dead. A small raiding party led by Two Sisters hit his place last year and burned it to the ground. They found Doc in the front yard and skewered him with a war lance. His wife and boy were in the cabin when they put the torch to it.”

  “Oh.”

  Ezra Wilson was a gray little man whose features, once out of sight, were impossible to recall. They were crowded in the middle of a face that seemed to grow straight out of his detachable collar with no neck in between, broader at the top than at the bottom and crowned by a head of washed-out red hair parted in the middle and pomaded to the extent that it looked as if he hadn’t grown it at all, just painted it on with a thick brush. He walked like a crab and carried a cylindrical black bag like a doctor’s. He was Staghorn’s barber.

  “See what you can do for him, Ez,” said Henry, indicating the young man with the hole in his shoulder.

  I watched as the barber directed the youth to take a seat in one of the few unbroken chairs and removed his vest and shirt. The wound was as large as a baby’s fist and glistened with blood, but no bone had been touched that I could see, there being no chips visible.

  “Passed clear through,” piped Ezra, reaching into his bag and withdrawing a bottle of alcohol and a roll of gauze, items most likely appropriated from the late Doc Bernstein’s effects. He proceeded to clean and dress the wound, not too gently. The young man whimpered and bit his lip a lot.

  “Why’d you do it?” I asked the patient. I had collected the guns fr
om all the parties involved and heaped them on what was left of the table in front of me.

  “I recognized you suddenly.” The petulance was still in his tone, tempered by pain. His breath came in gasps. He probably thought he was dying. I would too, after a quarter of an ounce of lead had slammed through me.

  “So what?”

  “You’re Page Murdock. Everyone says you’re fast. I wanted to see how fast.”

  “The hell with fast,” I said. “I already had my gun out. Anyway, Henry Goodnight’s faster than I am; why didn’t you try to take him?”

  “I wasn’t out to commit suicide.”

  “So instead you collected a bullet in your shoulder.”

  He shrugged, then regretted it. “I’m still alive, ain’t I?”

  “You’re damn lucky. I was aiming for your belly.”

  The barber finished dressing the wound and stood back, wiping alcohol off his hands with a broad white handkerchief. “What you want done with him now?” he asked Henry.

  The sheriff looked at me. “You pressing charges?”

  “If I do, does it mean I have to stick around for the trial?”

  “You know it does. You’re wearing a badge. Carrying one, anyway,” he corrected, noticing that I wasn’t sporting one of the tin targets Judge Black-thorne handed out.

  “Forget it,” I said. “Chalk it up to high spirits and let him go. Without his gun, of course.”

  “Of course.” There was a sneer in Henry’s tone.

  “You might as well turn the others loose too, if you’ve a mind. They haven’t done anything but watch anyway.”

  The lawman holstered his damaged weapon. Taking this as a cue, the two youths who had emerged unscathed from the shoot-out helped their wounded companion to his feet and left, supporting him between them.