Ralph Compton Blood on the Gallows

by Joseph A. West

  The incentives were there. Dora might have done it for power, Clare for money.

  Money and power could tempt any man—why should women be any different?

  Sammy was balanced on the front of the saddle, interested in the flight of white clouds overhead and the rustle of quail in the sagebrush. McBride rubbed the kitten’s warm back. ‘‘Right, Sammy,’’ he said, ‘‘here’s a question for you: why does Clare O’Neil want to kill me so bad? Is it just because she doesn’t like me anymore?’’

  The little cat lifted amber eyes to McBride and blinked like an owl.

  ‘‘You can’t figure it either, huh? Well, if you come up with something, let me know.’’

  It took McBride an hour-long search among the Capitan foothills before he was pretty sure he’d found the arroyo where Clare O’Neil had bush-whacked him. He was about a mile south of Sunset Peak and in the rainy darkness everything looked different. But a rock formation and a stunted juniper on top of one shoulder of the arroyo stirred a vague memory, as did the mesa that rose in the background.

  He drew rein and listened into the morning, but heard only the rush of the wind and the chirrup of Jerusalem crickets in the grass. The climbing sun bathed the entrance to the arroyo in light, but beyond shadows still gathered.

  Aware of his limitations with a rifle, McBride drew Boone’s Colt from his waistband. The revolver was engraved, nickel-plated and adorned with an ivory handle on either side of which steer skulls had been carved, rubies in their eye sockets. Boone had obviously taken great care of the Colt, yet he had crudely chopped eight notches into the right side of the handle where it met the frame.

  The fancy gun said much that was detestable about the man who owned it, and McBride was determined to replace it at the first opportunity.

  He set Sammy behind him where he was less likely to get hit by a bullet, then rode into the arroyo. The mustang picked its way through stands of prickly pear and cholla that littered the arroyo’s sand and gravel bottom. To McBride’s surprise, outcroppings of sandstone on the walls of the gulch showed signs of having been worked with hammer and chisel. The tool marks were weathered, so the work was not recent. McBride guessed that several hundred years ago the rock had been cut back to widen the arroyo for wagons.

  But why? It was a road to nowhere unless the animals that hauled the wagons could climb the sheer slopes of mountains.

  As McBride ventured deeper into the arroyo, the walls opened up until they were about thirty feet apart. Here the rock had been worked extensively and falling debris had formed a series of small talus slopes.

  The floor of the arroyo rose gradually in low, uneven steps and changed direction several times. Finally it opened out into a clearing strewn with gravel and chips of sandstone and directly ahead of McBride, half-hidden by a screen of juniper, was what looked like the entrance to a cave. But as he rode closer, he realized that this was not a natural feature. Someone had worked a hard-rock claim here and had dug a tunnel into the base of the mesa.

  McBride drew rein and looked around him. To his left, there was a wide overhang of limestone and under that the ash of a campfire. The ground around the fire had been flattened, cleared of rocks and was mostly sandy. Sheltered from the worst of the elements by the overhang, it was a good place for a man to spread his blankets. Or a woman.

  To his right, the wall of the arroyo climbed sharply upward, rising to a height of several hundred feet before it met the base of the mesa. The shoulder was covered in juniper and piñon and jays were quarreling noisily in the branches.

  The clearing was sheltered from the wind on all sides, and the heat was intense. McBride removed his plug hat and wiped the sweaty band with his fingers.

  He climbed out of the saddle and put Sammy on the ground. The kitten immediately began to explore and was soon involved in stalking a lizard. McBride left him to his own devices.

  The sun hung above McBride’s head and branded a white halo into the powder blue sky as he walked to the entrance to the mine. Behind him the mustang was grazing on a patch of bunchgrass and the jays had gone silent among the junipers. A big diamondback, as thick as a man’s wrist, unraveled itself from under a stand of prickly pear and twisted away from McBride, leaving S-shaped tracks in the sand.

  It was cooler inside the mine and the going was easy, the drift only slightly elevated. The tunnel was as wide as a freight wagon and it had been cut almost horizontally into the mesa. As McBride explored deeper, darkness blocked his path and he returned to the entrance, wary that the drift might suddenly end in a vertical rock shaft.

  Several lamps stood in a row just inside the entrance. He found one that still had oil in it, lit the wick and stepped into the darkness again. The lamp held high, he followed the drift around a sharp bend and immediately the tunnel narrowed to the width of his shoulders. On the rock wall to his left ran a wide seam of rotten quartz and McBride brought the lamp closer to examine it. He knew next to nothing about mining, but there were chunks of greenish rock embedded in the quartz that he took to be copper ore. He also found ore of a different kind, large, irregularly shaped pieces that looked like petrified ferns and gleamed in the lamplight.

  McBride found a rock and pounded chunks of the metals out of the quartz. He had no doubt about the copper ore. After examining it closely, he finally recognized the other metal as silver. And there seemed to be a lot of it. He made his way farther along the tunnel, and the quartz seam widened to a depth of several feel, heading straight as an arrow into the living rock of the mesa. With every step he took, the silver deposits grew more plentiful, the surrounding quartz so rotted, McBride was able to lift out a sizeable nugget with his fingers.

  Now he knew why Lance Josephine wanted the O’Neil ranch so badly that he’d kill for it. Even to McBride’s inexpert eye, it was obvious that here was a vast fortune in silver for the taking.

  And Clare now knew that as well. He suspected that she’d learned of the mine only recently, perhaps from Dora Ryan, who seemed to keep a finger on the pulse of all that was happening in Rest and Be Thankful.

  Clare had tried to kill him to keep him from learning about the silver. She had nothing against him personally, and had even saved his life, but she would not let anyone stand between her and a fortune.

  When she’d shot him in the belly it had been simply a matter of economics. ‘‘Take that, and no hard feelings, John, huh?’’

  McBride smiled, but there was no humor in him. He was not a man who hated, knowing well that hate was a cancer of the soul. But the urge was rising in him to destroy, smash the outlaw town and all who lived there.

  To Clare O’Neil, the life of John McBride had not even been worth thirty pieces of silver. And that he would never forgive.

  He followed the drift, but the seam did not narrow and continued to run perfectly straight. After a while he retraced his steps to the mine entrance, extinguished the lamp and bent to leave it with the others. It was then he saw something he’d missed before. Behind the lamps, half-buried in the sand, lay a brass cross.

  McBride lifted it free of the sand, the object heavy in his hand. Remembering his days as an altar boy at St. Mary’s Church in the Hell’s Kitchen slums of New York, he recognized it as a processional cross, the kind carried through the chapel by a priest on feast days.

  The cross was crudely made and was not jeweled, but showed signs of once having been covered in a thin gold wash. Scratched into its surface the words DIOS ES EL AMOR were still visible and McBride knew enough Spanish to translate the inscription as God is love.

  A priest had visited the mine many years back to tend to his flock, probably local Indians used by their Spanish masters as slave labor in the mine. Later the cross had been tossed aside hurriedly, maybe during an attack by the Mescalero Apaches who roamed this area. It was likely the priest and the Spanish soldiers had been killed and the mine had then been lost for many years.

  Somehow Lance Josephine had learned of the place and realized the value of t
he O’Neil ranch. He’d tried to force Clare into marriage, and when that failed had murdered her father to get it.

  When would he come to claim his property? And would Clare fight him to keep it? Or were they now in cahoots, agreeing to split the proceeds of their newfound mother lode?

  The suppressed anger in him bubbling to the surface, McBride turned his face to the sky and raised the cross in his hand. He yelled his vow that no one would profit from the mine, get rich on murder, as long as he had breath in his body.

  ‘‘So help me God!’’ he roared.

  Alarmed, the jays fluttered out of the junipers and the mustang jerked up its head, arcs of frightened white showing in its eyes.

  With no plan of action, McBride’s options were limited. He decided to camp at the mine that night and move on in the morning. Before darkness fell, he managed to build a fire under the overhang, a rare success that brought him considerable joy and lightened his mood.

  He had brought bacon from the cabin and enough flour, salt and baking powder to fry up some bannock bread. As cats tend to do, Sammy insisted on being fed first and while he worked on a strip of bacon McBride mixed his bread ingredients with water, lightly browned both sides of the flat, inch-thick cake he’d made in bacon grease, then set the pan next to the coals to bake.

  ‘‘After a while give the bread a good thump with your fist. If it sounds hollow, it’s ready.’’

  Bear Miller had told him that.

  As it turned out, McBride scorched the bread, but he was hungry and just ate around the burned bits. He had finished eating and was scouring out the fry pan with a handful of sand when a man’s voice called out from the arroyo.

  ‘‘Hello the camp!’’

  McBride froze. He dropped the pan and pulled the Colt from his pants.

  ‘‘Come on in, but keep your hands in sight,’’ he said, his voice carrying far in the stillness. ‘‘Be warned, mister, right now I’m scared, and when I get scared I get mean.’’

  A laugh from the gloom, then, ‘‘Well, that’s a fair enough caution. I’ll keep my hands where you can see them.’’

  The darkness parted and a man with long white hair, sitting astride a beautiful gray horse, rode into the clearing. He carried two Remington .44s in shoulder holsters and a Winchester was booted under his left knee.

  He looked dangerous. And he was.

  Chapter 19

  ‘‘Smelled your smoke and coffee,’’ the man said. ‘‘I figured it had to be coming from around this neck of the woods.’’

  McBride could not quite place the accent, but it was from back East, a long ways back East.

  An errant breeze lifted the rider’s white hair and above his head heat lightning flashed violet in the sky. The gray tossed its head, blowing through its nose, and the bit chimed.

  A few moments of silence passed as McBride summed up the rider in his mind. Despite the white hair he was young, probably in his early thirties, dressed in black broadcloth pants, fine boots of soft black leather and a collarless white shirt. The coat that matched the pants was draped over his saddle horn.

  ‘‘I come up from Texas way,’’ the rider said, an amused smile on his lips under his clipped mustache. ‘‘I’ve traveled far this day and your coffee smelled good.’’

  McBride roused himself, like a man waking from sleep. ‘‘Sorry, I’m forgetting my manners. Please, light and set. The coffee’s hot.’’

  ‘‘Obliged,’’ the rider said. He swung elegantly out of the saddle; then, the large-roweled spurs on his heels jingling, he stepped toward McBride and extended his hand. ‘‘Name’s the Reverend Saul Remorse.’’

  ‘‘John McBride.’’ He took Remorse’s hand and said, ‘‘I didn’t peg you for a preacher, not carrying those guns.’’ He pointed at the man’s throat. ‘‘And no . . .’’

  ‘‘Dog collar.’’ Remorse smiled. ‘‘It’s in my saddlebags. Just too dang hot to wear it.’’ The reverend’s eyes, the color of blade steel, lifted to McBride’s. ‘‘Heard your name before, down Laredo way and other places. They say you’re the man who killed Hack Burns.’’

  ‘‘He didn’t give me much choice. He had a gun in his hand.’’

  Remorse nodded. ‘‘Hack wore the mark of Cain on his cheek. He was damned the moment he was born. If you hadn’t gunned him somebody else would. He needed killing, so maybe that somebody would have been me.’’

  McBride was shocked. ‘‘That’s strange talk from a reverend.’’

  ‘‘Are you a reading man, John?’’

  ‘‘When I get the chance. I’m real fond of the dime novels about stalwart frontiersmen and blushing maidens.’’

  ‘‘Put those aside and read about the warrior monks of the Crusades and those of Japan and Cathay. Then maybe you will find my talk less strange.’’

  McBride realized he was being gently chided and he deeply regretted mentioning the stupid dime novels. If he survived, he resolved to read better books, big fat ones with long words and hard covers. For a moment he thought of mentioning this to Remorse, but in the end settled for ‘‘I’ll get you a cup.’’ Then, ‘‘Are you hungry?’’

  The reverend was not hungry, but wishful for coffee. ‘‘I’ll see to my horse first,’’ he said.

  Later, as they sat by the fire, Remorse studied McBride over the rim of his cup and said, ‘‘Fair piece off your home range, aren’t you, John? I’d say New York or thereabouts.’’

  ‘‘New York,’’ McBride said, uncomfortably aware that Remorse had his rifle across his thighs. The reverend was a careful man.

  ‘‘Tell me about it, John. New York, I mean, and what brought you West.’’

  ‘‘I was running.’’

  ‘‘We’re all running from something. What are you running from, John?’’

  The sky flamed with silent lightning that lit up the rocky slope of the mesa. McBride smelled ozone and rotting vegetation under the junipers. Remorse was rubbing the kitten’s little round head and was being rewarded with purrs.

  ‘‘I was exploring the mine back there,’’ McBride said. ‘‘You can’t see the entrance to the drift from here.’’

  ‘‘Nevertheless, I know it’s there,’’ Remorse said. ‘‘It’s a very old mine.’’ He poured himself more coffee, then surprised McBride again when he took out the makings and began to build a cigarette. Noting McBride’s expression, Remorse grinned. ‘‘A man can allow himself one vice. Smoking is mine.’’ He lit his smoke with a stick from the fire, then said, ‘‘You didn’t answer my question: what are you running from?’’

  ‘‘It’s a long story.’’

  ‘‘Ah, but then this night will also be long. God has sent it to us not for slumber, but for talk.’’

  McBride looked into the carbon steel of the man’s eyes and felt himself drawn to him, like iron filings to a magnet. He pulled his knees up to his chin and told Reverend Saul Remorse his story. It had its beginnings in New York, moved to his time in Rest and Be Thankful and then to the events of recent days.

  And when the story was over, he said, ‘‘If I live through this time, I plan to find work so I can keep my young Chinese wards in finishing school.’’

  The fire had burned lower and Remorse threw on a few more sticks, sending a spray of scarlet sparks into the thunderclouds. He lit another smoke and said, ‘‘You wonder if Clare O’Neil and Dora Ryan are now allies and plan to keep this mine to themselves?’’

  ‘‘Clare sure changed pretty abruptly. One day she saves my life, the next she tries to put a slug in my belly. Also, she and Dora are as different as night and day. Denver Dora Ryan is a woman with a dark past and Clare is a simple, and very poor, ranch girl. How do you explain them ever getting together?’’

  ‘‘Perhaps I can. I make periodic trips to Boston, and two years ago a poet friend of mine—Walt Whit-man. Have you heard of him?’’