Quaternity

by Kenneth Mark Hoover

  Botis watched him a long time. “You know what I think,” he said at last. “I think you are a crazy old man who thought he could get a bounty on us. That’s what I think.”

  They saddled their horses and stamped out the fire. Spaw cut a branch and swept the ground where they had been trampling it before he climbed on his own horse.

  “We will leave you here,” Botis said. “You can walk back to Taos.” He pulled his gun and shot both burros. The somber old man watched them drop in their traces. The four horsemen wheeled their mounts around and rode away into the night.

  “We will keep to the high rocks so they can’t track us,” Botis said. “Then we will kick for Pueblo.”

  They rode through a long night and into a grey morning. The sky was filled with dark clouds threatening rain. Spaw rode beside Marwood, his face glum.

  “What’s wrong?” Marwood asked once Botis and Lovich had gotten a little ways ahead of them.

  Spaw chewed his bottom lip. “I got a standing warrant on me in Pueblo,” he said. “I can’t go back there.”

  “What happened?”

  “I shot a boy.” Spaw rode a little more before he started talking again. “It was an accident, but I killed him. I can’t go to Pueblo, Mar.”

  “We don’t have to go to Pueblo,” Marwood said. “We have to get clear of this posse chasing us. That’s all.”

  They rode hard, keeping to the Santa Fe Trail to make better time. It began to rain with great force. They pulled out their slickers, which were little more than capes and serapes hacked from raw leather. It was raining when they stopped in Trinidad, at the foot of the Ratón Pass, to buy food and extra gunpowder.

  As Lovich was coming out of a cooperage with his hands full of packages, two lawmen stepped around a corner and blasted his back open with double-barrelled shotguns. The Dutchman fell face down in the mud and did not move. Marwood was across the street sitting his blood bay. He pulled his Colt’s Dragoon and fanned five shots, giving Spaw the cover he needed to jump on his own horse and clear out.

  Botis walked out of the barbershop where he’d been getting his beard trimmed carrying a cocked gun in hand. He shot the two lawmen dead where they stood. The rain was heavy and freezing cold, and it poured like hell from the leaden sky.

  Someone opened up with another shotgun from a second-storey window in a clapboard hotel. Botis, in the middle of this ambush, took a pellet in his thigh, and two more in his left arm. The air was thick with buzzing lead flying in all directions and at oblique trajectories. The last Marwood saw Botis had reached Acheron and was racing up the Ratón Pass, back into New Mexico Territory. Spaw, on the other hand, had pulled north, opting for the quickest way out of Trinidad.

  Marwood went north, too.

  He paused under a tree long enough to reload the chambers of his gun, then kicked hard, trying to cut Spaw’s tracks. The rain was so heavy the ground was already washing out. He kept riding, looking for sign.

  The rain quit sometime around midnight. Marwood found the muddied tracks of Spaw’s horse. There were three others on his trail. Marwood pressed on.

  Dawn brightened. Marwood stopped in the pale light to feed and water his horse, and let it blow. He would be no good to Spaw with a dead horse on his hands. He ate a handful of parched corn himself and mounted back up.

  He tracked Spaw and his pursuers for two days. He was working his way over a pine-covered ridge when he spotted Spaw in a narrow rock valley a quarter mile below. Two riders were tearing across the wet ground after Spaw. The third rider had frog-jumped him during the night and was cutting off the only escape route with well-spaced pistol shots.

  It is nigh impossible to hit a crouched man on the back of a fleeing horse fifty yards away. Hitting the horse, however, was another matter entirely. Three good shots slammed into Spaw’s dun horse. Its head whipped up and to the left, and its legs buckled. It broke its neck when it hit the ground.

  Spaw was thrown hard. He rolled like a crushed doll in the soggy field. He tried to get up, but his right leg was bent sideways at the knee. The other two lawmen reined their horses around and drew to a full stop, mud flying from their horses’ hooves.

  One of the men slowly got off his horse and approached Spaw. Spaw scrambled over the grass, searching for his lost gun. The lawman pulled his pistol and shot Spaw in the head. The lawman stood over him and shot him five more times, spacing each shot so their echoes blended with one another.

  Marwood dismounted and draped the reins of his horse across a convenient tree branch. He pulled the Sharps from the scabbard and walked through the sparse treeline.

  The lawmen were standing around Spaw, talking to one another. One of them had lighted a pipe and was writing something down in a small book. They picked up Spaw’s body and tied it head down over a saddle. Marwood loaded the Sharps, not hurrying at all. Two lawmen had to double up on a single horse. The third led the horse carrying Spaw’s limp body.

  When they passed directly beneath him Marwood lifted the Sharps, sighted down the ladder, and killed the first man.

  The .52-calibre 475-grain slug knocked him clean off his horse—damn near took his head off his shoulders. While Marwood reloaded, one of the other two remaining laws jumped from double riding onto the now-empty horse. The second man fired his six in Marwood’s direction. Marwood heard bullets cut and chatter through the trees above him. The second man grabbed the reins of the horse carrying Spaw’s body, and they both raced free and clear out of the valley.

  Marwood walked back to his horse. He drank water out of his canteen and ate a piece of hardtack as he thought about the day. Then he gathered up the reins of his blood bay and mounted into saddle.

  He rode down and regarded the man he had killed. He had always been of the opinion if you were willing to do it you might as well look at it. The man was a bounty hunter out of Santa Fe. Marwood left him for the wolves and followed the tracks out of the secluded valley.

  The direction of their sign made it clear they were headed back for New Mexico Territory, and in one hell of a hurry. Marwood followed. Six hours later he shot the second man as they were watering their horses at a mountain stream.

  It was a good shot, well over 600 yards, and down a thirty-degree mountain slope, which made the trajectory more difficult to judge. By the time Marwood got the Sharps reloaded, the third bounty hunter had disappeared with Spaw’s body in a scraggly copse of young pine trees.

  Marwood mounted up and went after him.

  The day waned. Marwood eventually came to the horse with Spaw’s body. The animal was tied to a creosote bush and was browsing grass. A white sugar sack was knotted to the pommel.

  Marwood left Spaw’s body and went after the fleeing bounty hunter. He killed him from a quarter mile away as the man transversed a bald ridge, attempting to double back in hopes of losing Marwood in the high country.

  Marwood went back and retrieved the horse carrying Spaw’s body. He then rode north for two days, until arriving at Pueblo. He walked into the sheriff’s office.

  Spaw had a 500-dollar bounty on his head, dead or alive. Marwood signed for the bounty and the sheriff told him he had to wire for the money. To pass the time, Marwood went to a café and ordered coffee, ham, and eggs. While he was eating four lawmen came through the back door with their guns out and arrested him.

  He was held in a jail cell for several long days. They had taken his gun, boots, and belt. He sat on the edge of the bunk and thought about Spaw, and Botis, and the others. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the pieces of his past. He could not see how it all fit together. He felt alone, incomplete, and without direction. And for the first time in his life he felt as if he needed to change that in some real manner. An action or method that would give final meaning not only to his existence as a man, but his life—who and what he was, including his past. But how to find it?

  “Cibola,” he
said low.

  Or, if not Cibola, some other place. Some distant place meant only for him, waiting, maybe needing his presence.

  Two deputies came for him on the third day. He was given his boots, taken from the cell, and walked across the mud-torn street to a hotel and up a flight of dingy stairs. There was a door at the end of a long hallway, with oil cressets set in the wall. The sheriff used a skeleton key and opened the door, and Marwood walked inside.

  Judge Creighton sat at a low desk in front of a bright window, smoking a cigar.

  CHAPTER 24

  Marwood sat down in a straight-backed chair. Judge Creighton leaned sideways in his seat as if the angle afforded him a better view. He looked at Marwood with a deep critical gaze and no amount of wonderment.

  “It has been a while since we last saw each other,” Creighton said.

  “Yes,” Marwood said.

  “I suppose you know what this is about.”

  “I figure it’s about the bounty on that boy I brought in. I want it.”

  Creighton was not put off by Marwood’s abrupt tone. “We can start there if you like. We dug those bullets out. They were .45 calibres. You carry a .44 Colt’s Dragoon, and a .50 calibre Sharps. Can you explain the discrepancy?”

  “I lost that gun.”

  “Which gun?”

  “The .45 I killed him with,” Marwood said.

  “You lost that gun.”

  “That is what I said.”

  “Goddamn, you have sand.”

  “I want that bounty.”

  Judge Creighton got up from his desk. He took the cigar from his mouth and stared out the window. When he turned back around his face was grave.

  “You are not going to get that bounty.” He pushed aside a sheaf of papers on his desk, picked up a telegraph wire. “‘I am in Santa Fe.’” He looked up from the wire, pitched it fluttering back onto his desk.

  “That is the only time I heard from you,” he said. “Never expected it, to be frank. It was late reaching me because you sent it to Laredo. It took a while to catch up to me here. You don’t know this, but I’ve been reposted to a new territory.”

  Marwood said nothing.

  “I don’t know why you sent that telegram,” Judge Creighton said. “Or, maybe I do, but I don’t want to believe it.”

  “I don’t know why I did, either,” Marwood said. “I felt it was something I needed to do. Maybe for myself. I don’t know.”

  It was Judge Creighton’s turn to not speak.

  “I’m not trying to sull on you,” Marwood said. “I can’t explain why I sent that wire. Maybe because I don’t know anyone else. Judge, I want the bounty on that boy.”

  “You are not going to get that bounty. To get that bounty you need my approval, and I am not going to render it.”

  Judge Creighton came around the desk. He stood and smoked and remained silent.

  “If we are going to work together we have to trust one another,” Marwood said. The room was very quiet. He could hear the panes of glass in the windows rattle at a gust of wind. “I won’t work for a man I don’t trust.”

  “Are we going to work together?” Judge Creighton asked.

  “You wanted to. Your bastard sheriff down in Laredo made a fine point to tell me to ride north to a certain watering hole he knew.”

  “And that was as far as you took it.”

  Marwood motioned to the desktop. “Until I sent that wire. I didn’t have to do that much. The fact I met Spaw was more luck than anything else, and you know it. Judge, I am only one kind of man. I will never change. I was not going to betray the men I rode with, any more than I would betray the man who went out of his way to help me in Laredo.” Marwood got up from the chair and made to leave. “If that’s the kind of man you’re looking for, then you better look elsewhere. That has never been me. That will never be me.”

  “Despite the fact you killed squatters and land barons who made a pact with the devil and got what they deserved, I told you the chances you would end on my gallows,” Judge Creighton said. “Son, the trap door is under your feet. My hand is on the lever.”

  “I am not a lawman.”

  “I don’t want a lawman. I want a warm-blooded killer.”

  “I will be carrying a badge.”

  “John, what makes you think western law is anything other than an arm of civilization operating under the licence to kill? Maybe one day there will be schools and ice cream parlours in this part of the country. But we are not there yet. If history tells us anything, law and order are ever born out of chaos. Order is not a natural state of the world—it never will be where men are concerned. Law has to be built. It has to be killed for. Why are you grinning?”

  “You sound like somebody else I know,” Marwood said. “Look, I’ve never built nothing in my life except a reputation.”

  “That’s all I want from you. Make no mistake. I am going to send you against men like yourself. One day you will fall. The question is how far you tote up the other side of the board, so self-righteous chickenshits like John Calvin and Mary Hoopskirt don’t get their dainty hands dirty.”

  Creighton opened a side desk drawer. He pitched a U.S. Deputy Marshal’s badge. Marwood caught it in mid-air.

  “I will tell you something every judge and lawman knows,” Judge Creighton said. “That badge doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. History alone decides who is right, and who is wrong. We both will be long gone by the time those pages are written.”

  Marwood knew Judge Creighton was playing a role. He doubted the man felt as intensely about the uselessness of the law as he pretended. It was an act, and Marwood saw it was an act. But it was for his benefit, and he appreciated it.

  Creighton wanted him to understand the stakes, and the enormity of the decision that lay before Marwood.

  Marwood moved his things into the room beside Creighton, which the judge had booked for him. He stretched out on the bed, hands behind his head. As he stared at the ceiling he heard horses and wagons trundle past the open window. He listened for church bells, but there were none in Pueblo.

  He thought about what had transpired in Judge Creighton’s chambers. How he had taken the oath and signed his name to several official documents, and Judge Creighton sprinkling sand over the wet gall ink. He wondered if it all meant anything. He didn’t feel any different.

  He got up from the bed and went to the dresser. He stared at the badge resting on top of the polished wood, next to his gun and skinning knife, but didn’t touch it. He got back into bed.

  Maybe it did mean something, after all. Maybe this was something he was going to have to puzzle out on his own.

  The next week was spent in the company of Judge Creighton. They ate every meal together, and at night Creighton brought out a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and they drank and smoked cigars.

  Creighton expounded upon the law. He covered everything from Hammurabi to Moses to Manusmriti. He defined the difference between jurisprudence and jurisdiction. He touched on evidence, property, casuistry, and contracts.

  Their conversation turned to Marwood’s time along the Mexican border and up through Texas. He told Creighton all he knew about Abram Botis: the way the man thought, how he moved, his tactics.

  “You were in a good position to observe it all,” Creighton said, “even though you weren’t officially undercover. Come the day you ever pick up his trail again, you will have to bring him in. That will go a long way to afford you amnesty for the questionable actions you took while riding with Botis.” Creighton held up his hand to forestall Marwood’s response. “I know you don’t care about something like that, John. But considering your past with this man, is that going to be a problem for you?”

  Marwood thought it over. “It will not be a problem, Judge.”

  “Good. If anything does happen to you, is there someone I should contact?”
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  Marwood shook his head. “I have no one like that,” he said.

  Creighton leaned forward and refilled his glass. “That’s best,” he said. “A lawman can’t afford to have worries that slow him down. I’m not talking about your gun hand; I’m talking about your mind. Not being able to think yourself out of a tight situation, that, more than anything else, will get you killed.”

  “When am I going out?”

  “Very soon. I’m getting things together now.” Creighton ventured a tight smile. “You that eager to get shot at?”

  Marwood looked at the whiskey glass in his fist. “I figure if I’m going to wear this badge I might as well do the job right.”

  The following day Marwood went to the livery stable to see about his horse. The man there said, “That blood bay of yours isn’t going to hold up. He’s got a fractured coffin bone. I’ve got a bay gelding here you might want to look at instead.”

  “How much you want for him?”

  “Don’t worry about money. Judge Creighton will pick up the tab.”

  “All right, let’s take a look at him.”

  One night, when he and Creighton were finishing up, he asked Marwood, “What happened to you boys out on the Llano?”

  Marwood would not answer, for that was a bridge too far. He felt it was betraying a confidence to the men he had ridden with. Judge Creighton did not press him, and the matter was dropped.

  The next morning, following breakfast, Judge Creighton said, “I have had my jurisdiction amended. I am preparing to work Montana Territory now. Have you been up there?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s where you’re headed.”

  “That’s a long ride.”

  “You can catch a stage in Auraria.”

  Marwood packed his war bag and went downstairs to kit out coffee, salt, and gunpowder. The store clerk wore egg-shaped spectacles and had a tight collar that squeezed his fat throat. He licked a pencil nub and totted up the charges.