Gaylord's Badge

by John Benteen

  Gruber said, “And you’ve misjudged me, Gaylord. I’ll tell you something now. You have a choice. Stay here and send Lang and Withers and keep on being sheriff. Or go out that door after Morrell and lose everything. And I mean everything. Your badge, Florence, the works.”

  “Like I told you before,” Gaylord said, “I’ve been scared by experts.” Loathing Ross Gruber in that moment, he turned and went out. And almost bumped into Florence, who obviously had been listening at the door.

  She jerked back, her face pale. “Frank, I heard— How dare you accuse my brother of such a thing?”

  For a moment, as he looked down at her, Gaylord’s resolve almost faltered. “Flo, I hope I’m wrong. But I got to find Morrell and learn the truth.”

  She seized his arms, pushed her body against his. “No, Frank. Please. Don’t you know what this means? If you defy Ross, he won’t let me marry you … ” Her voice thickened. He felt the pressure of her breasts on his chest. “What difference does it make about them anyway—a dance-hall floozy and a pair of rustlers? Don’t you see, Frank, what counts is us! Don’t throw our whole future away for them!”

  Gaylord felt a strange, cold sickness in his belly. “We wouldn’t have much future if you can’t understand why I got to go after Lew Morrell.”

  “Frank, I beg you—”

  He had never thought it possible. But now he pushed her away from him, roughly, and she brought up against the far wall of the hall. “Leave off, Flo. Either you love me or you don’t. Anyhow, I got to go.”

  She stared at him with lambent eyes, and her face changed; suddenly it was as if her brother’s face were somehow there beneath the lovely mask. “All right,” she husked. “Then go ahead. But”—she gestured toward the door—“if you walk out, don’t you come back. You hear? Don’t you come back to Florence Gruber and Chain Ranch! Go sleep with that slut you made up to before I came, that Doane woman!”

  Gaylord stepped backward. “That’s right,” she hissed. “You think I didn’t know? Well, everybody knows about Carla Doane! I was willing to forgive, but now— If you turn your back on Ross, you turn your back on me! And you’ll never lay a finger on me again!”

  It was strange. Gaylord, somehow, was not surprised. Sick with hurt, yes, but the grief he felt for Clint was so great that not even this could touch him. A pattern, he thought. Gruber never missed a bet to make a fool of me. And in that instant he no longer loved her, for he knew that she was as false as Lew Morrell. He said only, “All right, if that’s how it’s to be.” And he turned and went to the front door.

  As he opened it she screeched his name. “Frank!” But he was already mounted and heading toward the Big Horns.

  He had a long way to go and a lot of time to think. Uppermost in his mind was one imperative: get Morrell and make him talk. But there was more, much more: Carla Doane; Clint; himself; Gruber. And he began to see: he had his share of guilt. Morrell, Gruber, whoever had conspired in Clint and Joey’s killing was not more guilty than Gaylord himself. He was a conspirator, as well. Because if Gruber had not figured Gaylord as being his own kind, Clint would still be alive. And Gruber had figured right; he had been Gruber’s own kind for too long …

  On the long ride he thought about his father, the old lawman facing the Texas trail hands. He thought about all the hard towns he had been in, and the bribes he had been offered, and— A man got softer as he got older. Maybe he was too old to hack it anymore. But no. He could cut it until he found Morrell. After that, he would have to stop and think about what the law was all about.

  He pushed hard, and by mid-afternoon was out of his jurisdiction, across the Colter County line. Still far away, the Big Horns loomed, snow-capped, against a gunmetal sky. Powder River Pass crossed them at ten thousand feet, almost; there would be snow up there by now. Morrell might count on that to blot his trail. Surely one thing he had not counted on was Clint hanging on to life long enough to say where he was bound. He figured that Gaylord and Charlie Crippled Deer were still searching slowly, painfully, for his trail.

  So, with a good start, maybe he would not push. Maybe he would even linger in Ten Sleep, and Gaylord could catch him there. But Gaylord knew that that was a forlorn hope. Morrell was a professional; he would be out of the territory as soon as possible, maybe even out of the country. Swing up through Montana or the Dakotas, and then to Canada ... Gaylord spurred his mount.

  That night, in rough country, he halted only long enough to let the horse rest and graze; then he rode on through cold growing more bitter. Late sunrise found him working through the upshelving land near the mouth of Ten Sleep Canyon, and now the mountains towered over him.

  But the sorrel was dead beat, and it was mid-morning before Gaylord rode into Ten Sleep, a cluster of buildings along a single street at the end of a huge gorge cut by Ten Sleep Creek. His rifle across his saddle bow, he scanned the town alertly, despite his own fatigue, looking for the dun horse Morrell would be riding—or for the man himself.

  He saw nothing. He put the sorrel to the rack and entered the one cafe. Men looked curiously at the stranger in the sheepskin coat, eyes circled with weariness, star on his chest. At the counter, Gaylord ordered coffee, watching the door, and identified himself. His description of Morrell was terse but clear. And when the counter man nodded Gaylord’s heartbeat quickened. Morrell had been here; all right—and gone.

  “He pulled out ’fore daylight this mornin’,” said the man behind the counter. “First customer I had. Spent the night at the hotel, I think, then come here for breakfast. Didn’t talk much. I seen his kind before, thought somebody might be on his trail. So I watched which way he went. He rode up canyon.”

  Gaylord sat heavily on the stool. “Steak and eggs,” he said. “And rush ’em.” He gulped the scalding coffee. So Morrell had four hours’, maybe five, start up the climb toward the pass, thirty miles away. And his horse would be fresh and rested. When the food came Gaylord wolfed it down in five minutes, along with a second cup of Java.

  The town blacksmith dealt in horses and kept a corral and stables. Gaylord left the sorrel there and rented two sturdy, mountain-bred horses, packsaddle, and panniers. He bought grain, then, at the general store, food, cooking gear, extra matches, tobacco, and heavy Pendleton blankets. He had given Morrell another hour’s lead, but only a fool would climb the Big Horns without the necessary equipment. It was nearing noon when he headed out of Ten Sleep, bound up the tremendous canyon for the pass.

  It was a steep, hard climb, with the creek and sheer gorge walls on his right, high slopes clad with pine towering on his left. The wind whipping down from the mountains was like a blade of steel, and after an hour it began to snow, a thin, white dancing veil of it. Gaylord did not force the horses; he took time to scan the terrain ahead of him, scout every bend. Morrell was not the kind to forget to watch his back trail.

  Alert as he was, part of his mind was free to think about Florence Gruber. At first he had felt nothing, only a sort of numbness, like the shock after a sudden wound. Then, last night, riding through the darkness, there had been the pain. It had been rough, racking him as if wounded nerves had come back to life, but he had borne it. Now the worst of it was gone. What lingered was the memory of her furious face, so much like her brother’s, her hissing, rasping voice. And such memories left no room for regret, only the strange relief that he had felt in the beginning. She had played her brother’s game, all the way; he could see that now. And he did not hate her, could not, no more than he could think that she had ever really loved him. What she had loved was the picture Gruber had painted of Frank Gaylord’s future: big, rich, powerful in Wyoming.

  And maybe, he thought, he had not really loved her, either. Maybe he had needed someone to turn to after Carla, and she had been there, with all that blond, creamy loveliness. And there was no use crying over spilled milk. He was, perhaps, a lucky man. Then he grunted deep in his chest. But even there his luck had been bought by Clint and Joey’s death. He touched his horse wit
h his spurs, sent it up the grade a little faster.

  By late afternoon he had worked out of the gorge. Now he was in a sloping country of meadows and thick pine forest. The snow was heavier, not quite a blizzard yet, but the lodgepole pines on the slopes were bending with a burden of white wetness. Wind and snow had wiped out all trace of Morrell’s passing—but there was no other way for him to go. With his head start, he might be over the pass by nightfall; but he, Gaylord, would be lucky to make it before darkness settled in. And there was no chance of traveling at night up here in this weather. Already his hands and feet were icy, and he had bound the brim of his hat down over his ears with his bandanna. But, he told himself, he was, after all, enduring only what Wyoming cowboys hired through the winter were expected to suffer for a dollar a day and beans. Maybe, he thought, the Knights of Labor had a point; maybe a cowboy strike wouldn’t be such a bad idea …

  Now it was getting darker; and as Gaylord crossed a wide meadow the wind took on a different sound. He raised his head and looked toward the crest, almost obscured by driving snow. Up on the heights a blizzard howled, and it would work its way down the mountains soon. He had to get out of the open and find shelter in a hurry. There would be no more traveling once the full force of the storm hit him, and he needed a good place to ride it out.

  But, the thought struck him, for that matter, so did Morrell. Maybe the storm up there would work to his advantage; maybe it would not only slow the fugitive, but force him to turn back, run ahead of it and lose some of the ground he’d gained. Gaylord, driven by a sense of urgency, forced the horses to move briskly into the wind.

  Then he was off the meadow, in pine forest, and, despite the shelter, the wind was getting worse, the snow driving harder. He had gone as far as possible, and he turned all his attention now to finding a place to camp.

  Then he saw exactly what he sought. To his right, a vast pine forest spilled down the wooded slope. Its snow-shrouded depths were divided by an outcrop of rock, a kind of small escarpment, ranging from ten to thirty feet in height, like a big, jagged step. It ran on as far as Gaylord could see, vanishing in the woods. It was exactly what he needed: the rock would reflect the heat of a fire built before it and temper the wind against himself and his animals. Gaylord rode into its lee, dismounted, and tied the horses. They stamped gratefully in the shelter the rock face provided.

  He was off the trail far enough so that his fire would not be seen. The first thing, of course, was to gather all the wood he could lay his hands on—not fallen branches from the ground, but squaw wood, dead, but still on the tree and drier. He worked his way along the outcrop and through the woods, breaking every branch within his reach. He used the rock as guide and anchor, not daring to stray far from it; once out of sight of it, a man, in snow like this, could get turned around fifty yards from camp and die.

  It was slow work, though, gathering wood. There was plenty of trees near the rock face, which seemed to go on for hundreds of yards, but for some reason not as much squaw wood as he’d expected. It was almost as if some other traveler had just harvested it. As if—

  Gaylord halted and shook his head savagely. The cold, fatigue: they had numbed his wits. He was a fool, a goddamned careless fool. Did he think he was the only one who knew a place to make a blizzard camp when he saw it? Gaylord’s heart began to pound. He dropped what wood he’d gathered, turned, slogged quickly back to his horses, and yanked his saddle carbine from its holster. He worked its action until he was sure it was free, then replaced the jacked-out rounds. Holding the gun with both gloved paws around the receiver, barrel tilted slightly down, he edged forward, in the shelter of the escarpment, back to where he’d left the wood. He passed that by, and now he shifted his grip on the carbine, round in chamber, and placed his finger on the trigger. Slowly, blinking away the snow that settled in his eye sockets, he made his stalk along the side of the rock face.

  A hundred yards or so farther on, it bent sharply, almost at a right angle, away from Gaylord. He made no sound, was like a shadow in the swirling white as he worked his way toward that bend, then peered around it, looking down the line of the rock face until it vanished in the gloom of woods below. Then he tensed, and his breath went out in a little sigh.

  There it was, hard by the shelf another hundred yards down the mountainside: the orange flicker of a campfire barely visible through the driving veil of snow.

  And now there was no more weariness in Gaylord, no fatigue, only an old, wild exultance he had often felt before, but never with such intensity—the lawman’s knowledge that now he had his man.

  Carefully, deliberately, he restrained the eagerness and rage surging up within him. He wanted Morrell alive, unharmed. Morrell had a lot of talking to do—and he would talk. Gaylord would see to that, alone with him out here in the wilderness of the Big Horns. Whatever it took, he was, just now, capable of doing.

  With infinite patience he waited for it to get a little darker. Not much, just enough to mask his movements a little better, in case Morrell was sitting at an angle where he could watch his back trail, the approaches to the fire. He thought Morrell would be; he did not underrate the man.

  When Gaylord judged that the time was right he moved on, swinging out a little, taking shelter in the murk beneath the pines. The campfire grew in size, its blaze clearly visible now, as it was fed, gained strength. Gaylord changed his angle of approach, moving directly toward the orange light now. Then he was in position, behind a tree, directly opposite the fire. He saw it, built high and glowing brightly, and the blanket-wrapped figure huddled beneath the escarpment, big and bulky; no doubt about it, that was Lew Morrell. Gaylord’s wind-blistered lips peeled back from his teeth in a wolfish grin.

  Then he moved in to point-blank range. He lined the rifle on the figure, which, head down, laid another branch on the fire. The wind howled and whispered simultaneously in the pine woods. Gaylord’s voice rose above it in a shout that rang and echoed. “Morrell!” he yelled. “This is Gaylord! Stand up and keep your hands high! You’re covered, and you’re under arrest, you sonofabitch, for the murder of Clint and Joey Wallace! And Billy Dann! And if you break, by God, I’ll burn you down! Hands high and on your feet!”

  A kind of shiver ran through the blanketed figure. Through the swirling snow, Gaylord saw it hesitate, then rise, arms outspread, blanket-draped, looking like a giant bat in the firelight.

  Gaylord stepped forward, Winchester outthrust.

  Then the man behind the fire raised his head.

  “Whoever you are,” he said in a voice with an accent Gaylord knew from the speech of Sir Randolph Hart, “please don’t shoot. I assure you, I am not the man, Morrell. I am a traveler in a strange land and quite harmless.”

  Gaylord’s jaw dropped. He shifted position; now, through the swirl, he could see that it was not Morrell nor anyone he had ever seen before, though the man was tall and lithe. This was a total stranger.

  Something knotted within Frank Gaylord. “Who the hell are you?” he yelled hoarsely.

  The wind dropped for a moment and Gaylord saw a long, weather-beaten face, firelit. “My name is Swain, if you please, Mr. Gaylord. Lord Peter Swain, managing director of the British-Wyoming Land and Cattle Company, better known to you as Chain Ranch, perhaps. And I assure you I am innocent of any crime. I hope you will do me the favor of pointing that gun elsewhere. Because if you do not, my employee, Mr. Morrell, will most assuredly have to shoot you in the back.”

  Gaylord stiffened. “Your employee—”

  “That’s right,” said Morrell, close behind him. As he started to turn, the muzzle of a gun jammed hard against his spine, halting all movement. The gun barrel twisted against the sheepskin coat. “Lew Morrell, Sheriff. And if you don’t drop that rifle I’ll kill you.”

  Gaylord stood rigidly.

  “Drop it,” Morrell repeated.

  And Gaylord did.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You keep those hands up,” Lew Morrell said, “until
I git that Colt and belt knife.”

  Gaylord had no option, standing motionless as Morrell pulled his side gun from its holster, then the Bowie, which he had bought in Ten Sleep. “Now,” Morrell said, “down to the fire.”

  As they marched toward the blaze, the man who called himself Lord Peter Swain laid more wood on it. In the light of the flames swirling higher, a long, weather-beaten face inset with bright blue eyes looked at Gaylord from under a black fur cap. Swain, Gaylord judged, was in his middle forties, and, even in this uncertain light, did not look like a man to be trifled with.

  Swain asked crisply: “Have you taken all his weapons?”

  “He’s clean. But I’ll keep him covered. He’s hell on wheels.”

  “You may allow him to drop his hands.”

  “Put ’em down, Gaylord,” Morrell said. “But I shoot at the first bad break.”

  As Gaylord lowered his hands Morrell stepped out from behind him and faced him across the fire, Colt leveled. “Now!” he yelled above the wind’s howl, and his eyes glittered. “What was that you hollered about Clint and Joey? And why the hell you up here, stalkin’ me like an elk? Gruber find out about me and Lord Peter and send you to shoot us in the back?”

  Gaylord said, “Clint and Joey and Billy Dann are dead, and you damn well know it. You tried to rape Joey and they caught you at it and you shot both of ’em and then killed her, too. And then fogged out. But you made one mistake. Somehow Clint knew you were bound for Ten Sleep, and he lived long enough to say it.”

  He was startled by the impact of his words on Lew Morrell. The man’s face was suddenly stricken; he took a step backward, and the gun in his hand sagged off center. “You lie,” he whispered. “Clint ... Joey ... dead? Billy, too?” Then he jerked up the gun, mouth twisting savagely. “Goddamn you, Gaylord, you’d better give it to me straight!”