Hart the Regulator 7

by John B. Harvey

  Hart nodded. “I was.”

  Fagan rested one hand against the door frame. “When you get up there, tell him I sent you. That’s a favor I might need to call back some time.”

  “I’ll tell him.” Hart splashed back in the tub and waves of water slopped over the edges on to the floor. “If I go.”

  Fagan had stepped out of sight: for a moment he stepped back. “Next time you’re takin’ your yearly bath, be more careful where you leave that fancy Colt of yours.”

  Hart stared at the lawman’s sarcastic face, knowing that he was right. Not certain yet whether he’d take that ride north of Fort Smith up towards Cass and this Grant. He was choked to his craw with bankers and big ranchers and all kinds of investment men who were parceling up the land and getting it to work for them, sitting back in soft leather armchairs with brandy and cigars the size of six-guns. Not even in the country some of them – France, Scotland, Germany. Hart had had his fill.

  And yet. . .

  Bringing in that freight wagon had paid him twenty dollars. Wearing a US deputy marshal’s badge had brought seventy-five a month. To stay his own man he was going to have to sell his services to the highest bidder: and that more often than not meant working for folk he despised. Hart looked down at the surface of the tub, where the dirt was floating like thick grey scum across the water, sealing his body in. Angrily, he splashed it away and climbed out. By the time he’d toweled himself briskly down, his annoyance had tempered somewhat and he greeted the landlady with a hint of a smile and even a gruff thank-you as she handed him back his darned socks. Climbing the stairs he caught the smell of steak frying in the kitchen. Maybe the rest of the day wouldn’t be as bad. He could forget about Grant—until the morning.

  Chapter Four

  Hart followed the meandering path of the Mulberry River northeast out of Fort Smith. Cass was the best part of a day’s ride if he wasn’t going to drive the grey and himself too hard, there didn’t seem to be a great deal of point to that. Although the sun grazed through the clouds a few times, it remained overcast, a strong wind cutting down from the north and keeping Hart’s eyes narrowed and the brim of his flat-crowned hat pulled well down. The Navajo chief’s blanket that had been presented to him in gratitude by He Who Runs getting on twelve years back was draped diagonally across the top of his body and held in a knot below his left hip. Incongruously, he was also wearing his usual length of ragged woolen scarf which he pulled over the lower half of his face when the wind was strong enough to whip up dust. Scuffed leather gloves fitted tight on his fingers as he handled the reins.

  He stopped several times, down by the Mulberry so that the grey and himself could drink and he could throw the cold water up into his face. Once, he loosened the animal’s girth and took a piece of dried beef jerky from his bags, biting off a chunk and chewing it laboriously. He pulled out a bag of broken biscuits and shared them with the horse, the grey’s breath hot against the palm of his hand.

  Back in the saddle, Hart touched her lightly with his spurs and she stretched into a gallop, the ground thundering beneath them. Hart leaned low over the grey’s neck, enjoying the sensation of speed.

  “C’mon, Clay! C’mon!”

  After a mile or so, horse and rider tired and reverted to a pace which alternated between a walk and a steady trot. The higher land, away from the river, was spotted with blackjack oak, narrow-trunked and between twenty and thirty feet high. The leathery leaves, green and brown, stood out strongly from the black bark. More than once Hart loosened the .44 Henry sheathed under the left-side flap of the saddle, only to realize that what was emerging from the uppermost branches was nothing more than a common crow.

  The rifle stayed unused. On its opposite side, snug in a specially fashioned bucket holster, was Hart’s sawn-off, a Remington ten-gauge with its twin barrels no more than fourteen inches in length. It didn’t aim worth a dud two-bits, but in a crowded space and up against more than one man it was invaluable. Hart’s armory was completed by an Indian knife, double-bladed and so well-honed that it would slice through skin at the merest touch. This hung from the saddle pommel in a fringed buckskin sheath. At present. When he figured it might come in useful, he hung it round his neck beneath his shirt. It was often the last card and a good one.

  The sky was beginning to darken further when he came up to a wagon travelling the same road. With two flea-bitten mules drawing it and too much weight on board, it was going near slow enough to be heading backwards.

  Hart rode up alongside carefully and with a warning shout of greeting, anxious not to startle whoever was up front into any hasty action.

  He needn’t have worried.

  The driver was slumped forward on the bench seat, the reins loosely looped over the tall brake pole letting the mules find their own pace. He was a burly-looking man, the black coat he was wearing fashionable and smart perhaps twenty years earlier. The top hat that he wore at a rakish angle on his head was losing part of its crown and there was one cigarette burn through the near side. A pair of ageing brown boots sat on the seat beside him and his feet were calloused and bare.

  Hart looked back along the canvas side of the wagon:

  Seymore Hardcastle’s Cure-All

  The letters were shakily formed and already fading, elongated red lines down the yellowing canvas. Hart glanced back at the driver. It looked as if the one thing his cure-all didn’t tend to was sleeping sickness. He used his knees to bring Clay close alongside and reached out his left hand towards the unmoving man.

  Even through the rattle of the wheels he heard the unmistakable sound of the hammer being drawn back, a triple click that left him no alternative other than to freeze where he was.

  After a couple of seconds in which nothing else happened, Hart slowly turned his head. The barrel of a gun poked through the folds at the front of the wagon to meet him. Hart looked at it evenly, a small pistol, likely a .38. He held his breath. Still nothing happened. The mules and his own horse kept on at the same pace.

  “No call to be alarmed,” said Hart finally. “I was just—”

  “Fixin’ to steal Seymore’s wallet,” the voice finished for him.

  With a start Hart realized that the person holding a gun on him was a woman; it surprised him but it didn’t make him feel any easier.

  “Ma’am, that ain’t so. I.. .”

  “Don’t ma’am me!”

  “I was just tryin’ to explain what I was doin’. And if I don’t know your name, how can I...”

  “Never mind that. Just the rest and make it convincing.” She sounded about as pleasant as a wasp caught inside a poke bonnet.

  T was fixin’ to wake him is all.”

  “What for?”

  “Ask directions?”

  “Huh!” The snort was loud and effusive. The pistol trembled a little but not much. Hart was trying to picture the woman in his mind but it wasn’t easy.

  “Maybe,” said Hart placatingly, “if you was to come out from there, I could ask you instead.”

  This brought a slight shuffling, but no direct response. Hart looked aside at the driver, surprised that he should sleep so soundly through it all, and realized he was no longer asleep at all. True, his eyes were still closed beneath the brim of the top hat and he hadn’t altered his slumped position, but a small working of the mouth told Hart that he was indeed awake. Likely had been for some time, waiting to see which way things sprung.

  Hart leaned back in the saddle, straightening up. The .38 followed his movements, but nothing more. At last, the folds of the canvas were pushed back to reveal a woman of considerable size, a tattered fur coat draped over her ample shoulders. Her face was round but pretty, despite the fact that she was some way past what most folk would agree to as young. Her hair was an indeterminate brown and piled indecorously on top of her head, wisps falling down past her ears and across her forehead. None of this was particularly surprising.

  There was more. In her left arm she cradled a small baby, well under a
year, Hart guessed. The child had evidently fallen asleep suckling the woman’s left breast and now lay against it, mouth slightly open and a thin trail of spittle running down from the large brown nipple. Her right arm was folded at the elbow against her hip and it was this hand that held the gun. Steady.

  “Myra!” gasped the driver, shaking himself properly awake and turning round. “What in the good Lord’s name are you doin’ showin’ yourself off to all an’ sundry like that?”

  In case she missed the drift of what he said, the man nodded his top hat in the direction of her exposed chest.

  “Seymore,” she answered quickly, never taking her eyes off Hart, “in the first place I have serious doubts if the good Lord would be shocked by my body and in the second there ain’t no all and sundry, just this no-account who was on the point of liftin’ that wallet of yours out of your pocket.”

  Hardcastle patted his side pocket to make sure the wallet was still in place.

  “’Course,” she went on, “that ain’t what he says he was doin’. He says he wanted to ask some questions.” The look on her face and tone of her voice made it very clear just how much she believed him: not at all.

  “One question,” said Hart. That’s all. Let me get it asked and then I’ll be ridin’ on.” He looked at the woman, waiting for a response. “How’s that?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and the baby whimpered a little and his mouth closed over her breast. “You got a tongue in your head.”

  Hart nodded and turned towards the driver. “Feller name of Grant. Got a place close by here. Up near Cass. Pretty big by all accounts. Wondered if you knew exactly where.”

  Hardcastle chewed the inside of his mouth a little, spat out over the rear of the mules and wriggled in his seat. “Mile ahead,” he said eventually, “river forks an’ main stream heads on towards Cass. Follow the other up into the hills. Grant’s place is up through the woods there. Only rode up there the once, but you can’t miss it. Nothin’ else around, not like that anyways. Big an’...”

  “Seymore,” the woman interrupted, “he don’t want a description, just where to find it.”

  The man looked at her grudgingly and set his head so sharply to one side that it seemed as if his hat might tumble off. As it was it contented itself with leaning more precariously than ever.

  “Much obliged,” said Hart, pulling the grey clear of the wagon and touching his fingers to the underside of his own hat. “I’ll leave you to your journey.”

  The woman didn’t lower the pistol until Hart was a good hundred yards along the trail. As she did so, the child awoke and began to cry; she set down the gun and started to stroke its curly head. Hardcastle made a face as the noise set up, readjusted his top hat and unlooped the reins from the brake, shaking the mules into something more consistent with movement. Soon Hart and the grey were little more than a facing cloud of dust towards the horizon.

  ~*~

  The house was in a wide clearing, oaks and a few aspens in a high curve at its back and sides. It was a wide single-storey building and carting all the necessary materials up through the woods must have cost enough to have built a dozen places elsewhere. Above a brick foundation that came a foot or so off the ground, the main structure was of wood, white-painted boards that were beginning to look a little weather-beaten towards the corners. The roof sloped up gradually and was tiled, with a pair of chimneys towards either end. What struck Hart most was the front, which consisted of a high arch of white brick at the top of a broad flight of five steps. On each side of the arch, wooden railings formed the front of a long porch. There were tall windows beyond the porch, smaller ones behind, each divided into small squares of glass. Smoke spiraled lazily up from both chimneys, turning away in the wind towards the trees behind. There was some thirty yards of grass out front, cut so close that it looked like somebody’s daily task. Hart bet it wasn’t Grant’s.

  This side of the grass there was an iron fence, no more than a couple of feet high. The tops of the railings were bent into symmetrical curves and the narrow gate at the centre was part open. If you came up on anything more than a single horse, Hart figured you had to find another way in. He lightly touched the grey’s flanks and moved her through the gap, tipping back the brim of his Stetson as he did so. For a big place there didn’t seem to be much sign of life.

  A little way out from the porch, he reined in. There was a figure standing up close to the window at the far left, girl or woman, Hart couldn’t be certain. She seemed to hang against it, her print dress stuck to the glass. Her head was lowered, fair hair falling down to cover her face. She didn’t move and, for a few moments, neither did Hart. Then he shifted Clay on towards the house.

  Dismounting, he took the reins and looped them over the wooden railings at the porch front. He was two steps up when the heavy oak door swung slowly back and he was staring down the barrels of an American Arms shotgun. The man behind it bulked out the doorway, the vest of his dark grey suit straining and spotted with cigar ash. His face was round and with a tendency to hang jowls like an overweight and overfed pedigree dog. The eyes were almost shuttered in by creases and folds of fat but through all that they were bright enough. His hair was iron grey, harder and darker than the suit, almost the darkness of the railings by the gate.

  Hart looked at the man, taking it all in, glancing at his hands, the way they gripped the gun. The fingers were fleshy and the backs sprouted hair generously. The nails were a little too long, a little too well polished. But the hands grasped the shotgun firmly enough and from that range he wasn’t about to miss.

  “State your business fast,” he said with a growl somewhere at the back of his throat. “We don’t take on no hired hands, don’t give handouts and we ain’t buyin’ a damn thing.”

  Hart felt a tendency to smile, which he overcame. “Name’s Wes Hart,” he said.

  “Never heard of you.”

  “Well, okay,” shrugged Hart. “That don’t matter none.”

  “Then what in God’s name . . . ?”

  “The marshal said you might want to see me.”

  “Why should I. . . ?”

  “I don’t know and he didn’t say. If it’s all a mistake, all I’ve lost is a day’s ride.” Hart was turning away when the man’s voice stopped him.

  “You always interrupt a man that way?”

  “If it means gettin’ things closed quicker.” Hart was looking up the steps, his body still facing back down.

  “It don’t show a lot of respect,” snarled the man.

  Hart shrugged his shoulders again, lightly this time; he came round to face the shotgun and took another step towards it. “No,” he said, his voice tightening, “it don’t, does it?”

  “’Specially in the face of a gun.”

  Hart nodded. That’s right.”

  “You’re not frightened?”

  “If you were going to use it, you’d have done so by now. Less’n I try to get past you and into the house without bein’ asked, I don’t reckon you’ll use it now.”

  Hart watched as the overweight face went through a few fleshy contortions which suggested that the man was thinking something over. His fingers had slackened their grip on the shotgun and Hart could have taken it from him right then, except that there no longer seemed to be any point. He tried to see inside the house, but there was little eye space between the man’s body and the door frame.

  “You’re used to facing down a man with a gun?”

  Hart looked back squarely. “If I have to.”

  “And you say the marshal sent you?”

  “Fagan. United States Marshal James Fagan. I got the impression from him that you were looking for a man to do a job of work.”

  The eyes, deep in the florid face, flickered. “A gunman?”

  “A regulator.”

  The round face nodded, loose folds of fat under the chin wobbling on to the neck. “Fagan recommended you, that it?”

  Hart shrugged. “Looks like it. I rode as his deputy
a while back.”

  “He fired you?”

  “I turned in my badge.”

  “Why?”

  Hart hesitated slightly. “Seemed a good idea at the time.”

  “And now?”

  “Still seems a good idea.”

  The eyes were staring at the Colt in its holster, off to the side of the Indian blanket. A lot of assessing was going on, decisions being made which left less room for turning back. Eventually, the man lowered the shotgun until it was clasped against his left side. He stood to one side and prodded his empty hand towards the door.

  “We’ll talk inside.”

  Hart let his eyes turn towards the end window but the angle was too acute to see whether or not the figure was still close by the squared panes.

  ~*~

  Inside was wooden boards, wide and polished to a dull shine. Hand-woven rugs, some with Indian designs, were set here and there without apparent pattern. Doors led off in three directions from the hallway, two closed and the third open. It was through this that the man walked and Hart followed. The room they entered was long and high-ceilinged, three unlit kerosene lamps hanging at intervals. There were more rugs, furniture which had the appearance of being shipped upriver from St Louis or even New Orleans and then freighted overland. The chairs were fat and comfortable and upholstered in leather. A round table shone with a reddish sheen and the yellow and blue bowl at its centre was piled high with fruit. Above the fireplace there was a framed portrait of two children, a boy and a girl. The girl was sitting down, a bunch of gold flowers held in her lap; the boy, a lick of fair hair falling across his forehead, stood beside her, one hand resting lightly on her shoulder in a manner which suggested both love and protection.

  Logs were burning in the grate and the smell was sweet in the room.

  “Malcolm Grant.”

  Hart took a firm grasp of the fleshy hand. “Like I said, Wes Hart.”

  “You’ll take a drink?”

  Hart nodded. “Sure.”

  “Whiskey okay?”