Shotgun Charlie

by Ralph Compton

  He ran a big hand down his face again, as if the thick, stiff fingers could wash away the badness of the past few days. But no, the motion only served to remind him of how bad off he had it. The cold snicked into him like thin-bladed knife, from a hundred directions. What was he doing out here?

  His entire body ached, from his much-kicked ribs to his near-stoved-in head. He touched a fingertip to his right eye, still half-swollen shut, the left ear, a pulpy-feeling blob of crusted blood and gum rubber. He sighed, could hardly blame the townsfolk for reacting as they did. He was a stranger, after all, and he was holding the shotgun used by Grady Haskell. . . .

  Wait a minute, he thought. Who am I to be thinking this way? Before he could flip-flop back and forth, berating himself and excusing others, his horse, Nub, nickered. Charlie looked down at the back of the big beast’s head. He’d momentarily forgotten him.

  “Oh boy, I am a sorry one.” He swung down out of the saddle, ran a hand up and down the horse’s long neck.

  “Ho, now, ho, now. I expect you’re a tired beast, lugging me all night long.” Charlie looked around. They’d gotten a far piece from Bakersfield, he reckoned. Though being unfamiliar with this region, he wasn’t so sure he’d gotten far enough. Surely there would be a posse after him. Might be staring him down right now.

  The thought froze him, dispelling the real cold in favor of a frigid feeling conjured by his mind. He turned his head slowly. Nah, they’d not waste time eyeballing him. They’d likely commence to shooting. The thought didn’t chill him as much as he reckoned it ought to. He was cold and tired and sore and confused. But he wasn’t in a cell. He was alive and out on the trail . . . hunting Pap’s killer.

  He narrowed his eyes and scanned his surroundings. The terrain wasn’t much of a surprise to him. He was still in the low country. Judging from the early-morning sky, it had been light about an hour, no more than. The trees, a mix of scrub oaks and lodgepole pines from the looks of them, were growing in thicker, so he was still a piece from the mountains, from where he knew Grady to be. Or hoped like the dickens he was. Didn’t matter, Charlie had vowed to hunt him to the ends of the earth, and nothing was going to change that; nothing was going to make him snap that vow. Pap deserved at least that much from him.

  “Well, I’m out of the saddle, old boy,” he said to the horse in a low voice. “Might as well take stock of what we have, see if I can’t rustle up a bite, give you a rest, eh, Nub?”

  The horse had already become visibly relieved, at least temporarily, of no longer lugging the substantial burden that was Charlie’s big body. Now he set to work with vigor at cropping the wispy grasses and low-lying greens, most of which were dying off, losing the battle against shorter days and cooler nights.

  Charlie sniffed the cold air, one hand working the knots cinching down his gear behind the cantle. “Reckon it’s going to be winter before it’ll be summer again, eh, Nub?”

  The horse kept on cropping the grass, nosing for something toothsome amid the browning growth.

  Charlie turned his head back to his gear. What had possessed the old lawman to do this anyway? And how had he been savvy enough to get him his own gear and horse? The horse, Nub, might not be such a mystery. He was, as Pap had so indelicately put it, the only horse in the territory that could haul around Charlie’s beefy carcass.

  But his gear? Maybe someone had told the lawman where Charlie had stashed it. He remembered now, he’d dropped it by those stairs near that building to his right as he’d seen Pap in trouble.

  Maybe someone saw him do so. Charlie didn’t really care. He was hungry and thirsty. The first thing he did was plunge his hand into the small cloth sack Wickham had given him. He still had most of the apple left. “How about that?” he said as he rummaged in his gear as if he’d never seen the contents before.

  As he unrolled his blanket, he found his wool jumper, a thin, hand-knitted thing he’d traded labor for at a farmhouse; must have been one, no, two years before? Just as he’d taken to the road, as he recalled.

  The old woman had been happy to have the wood split. She hadn’t had any money, but she did have a dead husband and a few garments that had been his. From the looks of her, she’d been wearing a good many of them herself, just to keep warm. But there had been this one, a light blue yarn, that she hadn’t worn, for some reason.

  “Hubert was your size,” she’d said. “No, no, maybe bigger. . . .” She’d smiled then at the memory. Charlie remembered her face as she recalled her long-dead husband. They’d carved that little homestead out of the prairie. A windy place with that stand of bent poplars. Low, it was, and the trees had grown plentiful there at one time, but by the time he’d come along the trees were succumbing to their last seasons with the elements. He reckoned she’d lose the last few of the big old things that coming winter.

  He’d offered to stay on and help her, but with her few chickens and the sad remnants of her garden, and that cough that doubled her over every few minutes, he’d known she hadn’t wanted him around. Even if she had, he doubted he’d have been able to stay and not starve to death.

  No, he reckoned, as he had walked on out of there that following morning, leading Teacup. That was the way she wanted it. She’d practically begged him to leave then. And as he had walked on out of the old place’s dooryard, she called to him and shuffled out to meet him, coughing as she got to him. She held out a thick bundle of pretty blue. It had been the jumper.

  “I knitted it for my Hubert as we headed out West as young folks. So full of promise then. We thought we’d have a big family, many children, you know.”

  Charlie recalled she’d sounded Scandinavian, maybe Swedish, though in truth he had no idea what a Swede sounded like. But that had been all she’d said, even when he protested, told her she’d need it, that she could use it through the long winter to keep warm. He’d told her it was far too important for a fella like him to use. But she’d only shaken her old head, turned away, but not before he saw she was crying.

  He’d laid in a pile of wood for her, as much as he could in the few days he’d bunked with his mule in her old leaning barn. But he knew it hadn’t been enough to carry her for more than a month, maybe two if she’d been careful. But something told him she might not have lasted all that long anyway. And he was sure she knew it too.

  Charlie pulled the much-worn, stained, stretched, thin jumper from the bedroll and held it to his nose briefly. It smelled of the smoke of a hundred campfires, but he closed his eyes and smiled, thinking of the happy couple they must have been, the old Swedish woman and her husband. So full of promise when they were young.

  He tugged it on over his much-patched, tatty denim shirt that covered his worn long-handles. He’d been glad many a nippy night that he had the warmth of the wool garment. He’d helped an orphaned wagon train child for a week a few months before he’d met up with the old woman, and the near-wild young thing had up and run off with his old winter mackinaw. It had been his one decent, useful possession, save for his Green River knife. So he’d been doubly thankful when the old woman made a gift of the old jumper.

  Now more than ever, for though it was much worn, it was warm. And the chill weather was coming in. He rummaged, found his spare wool socks, and tugged them on his hands. The apple would have to do for now. He found no other food and though he owed the old lawman much for setting him free—though maybe he was also setting him up for a mighty tumble—he secretly wished the old man had seen fit to lay in a few more supplies for him.

  It had been a while since he’d snared a rabbit, but Charlie reckoned he could give it another go. Living with Pap and the boys had been easy, in certain ways. For there had been many of them and they’d all taken turns hunting for meat for “the family table,” as Pap had called their nightly gab sessions around the fire. Good times they had been.

  Charlie still marveled that the boys had been so taken in by Grady Haskell that the
y’d all but abandoned Pap for him and his promises of wealth. And now Mex was dead—and Ace, Dutchy, and Simp? What of them? He could hardly think of them as killers. Charlie didn’t trust Haskell as far as he could toss the bum, but he banished thoughts from his mind. Now he had to keep moving. Put distance between himself and the posse. For he was sure there would be one.

  He reckoned he only had to keep ahead of the posse enough to reach Haskell. That was all he would need—a little time. He glanced at the shotgun in the scabbard hanging from the saddle. Just a little time, that was all he would need.

  “Come on, Nub. We got us a cold trail and no time to waste.” He tugged the reins, and the big horse reluctantly fell in line behind the big man, both trudging northward toward the mountains, storm clouds boiling at the peaks.

  . . .

  The thin old man in the long black duster rubbed his gamey right leg with a leather-gloved hand and sighed. His breath rose in his face and vapored on the wind. His horse champed, bowed her head. “Missy,” he said in a low voice. “Enough.”

  Nearly a mile behind the big young man, Marshal Dodd Wickham resisted the urge to retrieve his pocket watch and pop it open. Surely the young fool had a sense of urgency? The more time he wasted standing by his horse, the more time that Haskell character had of getting away, far into the hills, apparently, if that was where the young man was unwittingly leading Wickham. He sighed again. It had been long years since he had to posse up and head out on the trail. And even longer still since he’d reached daylight without a cup of coffee in his hand. Even a skin-blistering tin cup from a campfire. The memory of so many fine meals and cups of coffee—spiked with ample slugs of gargle—brought a smile to his grizzled gray face.

  Wickham watched the big former prisoner, far up-trail and upwind of him, for a few moments more. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake. Hoped the boy knew, really knew, where to find the murderer and his gang. The money from the bank didn’t much bother Wickham. The suffering of the depositors was hardly his concern. Judging from the way they treated the one they’d caught, as well as the big young man up ahead of him on the trail, the depositors would get their blood money out of Tollinson, the banker. Wickham wouldn’t mind at all seeing the chunky man squirm under their fists and heels.

  But what he really wanted was to find the rapscallions who put a permanent black mark on his long career. The rogues who stamped all over his lifetime of service to communities throughout the Western territories. The filth who killed a child and more, all for the sake of pilfering a hardworking community because they were too lazy to work for a living themselves. Oh, that could not stand.

  He glanced once more at the big young man up ahead, now unstrapping his bedroll. Wickham reached into an inner coat pocket and lifted free the small flask he’d brought as his trail flask, his three bottles of precious whiskey wrapped snug in his spare clothes in his saddlebags. He upended the silver flask, the scrollwork and fancy lettering that bore his own initials, D.A.W., Dodd Aloysius Wickham, in a cameo-shaped center, emblazoned on the flask.

  He smiled as he swallowed, regarded the flask. It had been a gift to himself years before, as a young man when he was on a roll with law dog successes in Dodge City first, then Wyoming Territory, becoming known as something of a sure shot, someone who in hushed conversations it was said might even be a better shot than Wild Bill himself.

  Dodd had liked hearing that. Knowing that had put a spring in his youthful step. But he knew it had been little more than luck, little more than average skill with a gun, coupled with sobriety on his end and lack of it on his opponents’. And that, in his long experience, was what made the difference when lead flew.

  Maybe that was why he took to sampling whiskies. The finest at first, then the mediocre stuff as time wore on. And the years whistled by like lucky bullets, and the jobs the same, one after another, too many towns to count, grinding him to a fine powder of what had once been a promising young man.

  He sucked in breath through one unclogged nostril—dang cold weather always clogged his nasals. Same time of year, same month, maybe even the same week each year. He slipped the flask back in his pocket and nodded slightly in approval as the young man far ahead on the trail began walking forward into the mountains. If Wickham wasn’t mistaken, he fancied the boy now sported a determined drive to his long-legged step. Good, good. Sooner the better. End it all. And with a bang.

  Chapter 26

  Ace rounded a corner in the trail, a narrow twisting thing that had become more treacherous the closer he drew to the mountains. And there before him, on the edge of a boulder, sat Grady Haskell. “Well, I never . . . ,” said the perturbed man.

  “That’s right, you never did, and you never will,” said Haskell, toying with the ends of his leather reins, slapping them on his trouser leg, a grin cracking his stubbled face.

  “Didn’t expect to see you again.” Ace regarded the man.

  Haskell looked up, squinting and cracking a smile. “Hello, Ace. Been waiting on you.”

  “How’s that?” said Ace, cupping a grimy hand to his right ear. “I’m afraid I didn’t catch that, since all that gunfire back in Bakersfield near about ruined my hearing. Not to mention the screaming and crying and howling.”

  Haskell slid down off the rock face, dusted his palms against his legs. “Now, Ace,” he said, strolling over. “What gave you the notion that you wouldn’t never see me again?”

  Ace sighed, climbed down from his horse to face the man. He flexed his jaw muscles, then spoke. “Nothing but the way you up and left us not far from town. Shouted something about how we should stick to the trail, that you’d meet up with us.”

  “And ain’t I come through on everything I promised you so far?”

  Ace shook his head. “Not hardly, Grady.”

  Haskell shied back as if he’d been slapped. “Now, what’s that supposed to mean, Ace, old boy? I am heartily offended, I don’t mind telling you.”

  “Then why did you up and leave us? You know we didn’t really know the way to the rendezvous point. You said so yourself after you give us such sketchy directions that it would be best if we all stuck together. That way we could get to your hidey-hole and divvy up the money, then all be on our ways.”

  Haskell rubbed his chin, squinted. “Now that you mention it, I did say all that, didn’t I? Hmm. Could be I was overly proud of my abilities to get us there.”

  “Well?” said Ace, poking his hat brim back off his forehead. Despite the cool of the day, standing in the sun he was beginning to feel a little heated up. Or maybe it was that he was finally seeing Haskell for what Pap and Big Charlie had seen in him. And he didn’t like the notion one bit. He’d always prided himself on being a little swifter than the average fellow. But the hard truth was dawning, and it pained him.

  Haskell stepped in close. “Well what, Ace?” His voice was a low, gravelly thing, his eyes suddenly more snaky than they had seemed before.

  Ace couldn’t let Haskell wear him down. “Well . . .” He swallowed. “Where are the other boys? You catch up with them yet?”

  “Oh, the others?” said Haskell. “Nah, not yet.” Still he stood scarcely two hand lengths away, his voice lower and measured. “You got a message you want me to give them for you?”

  Ace swallowed again. “No . . . no need. I’ll ride along with you.”

  Grady shook his head slowly, his eyes locked on Ace’s.

  “No?”

  Grady still shook his head. Ace did not notice that while he was being mesmerized by the killer’s snaky eyes, with a move born of practiced ease, Haskell slid free a long, thin-bladed boning knife from its slit sheath along the outside seam of his trousers. It was positioned in such a way, its hilt hidden beneath his larger skinning knife’s wide sheath, that most folks who met him never saw it. Certainly Ace hadn’t noticed it. And that was a mistake.

  The knife punctured, fast and slick as
you please, through his wool outer coat, through his ratty wool vest, through his flannel shirt and long-handle undershirt, through the soft walnut-colored skin of his slightly pooched belly, and angled upward beneath his ribs. And then Ace noticed that he could no longer speak, but only for a moment before the hot flashing pain flowered upward from the deep-sunk blade.

  He tried to speak, but a warm, wet feeling bubbled up inside him, filled his gorge, and a gout of blood burst from his mouth.

  “What’s that? Huh?” Haskell leaned closer, ground the blade deeper. “You got to speak up, Ace, old boy. I know you can talk ’cause you just got through wasting a whole bunch of words about how I didn’t do this, didn’t do that.”

  Ace’s eyes widened, blood flowed down his chin, along his shirt, vest, and coat. Behind him his horse fidgeted, nickering, and worked itself wide, the reins slipping from Ace’s weakening grip.

  “Oh, I see,” said, Grady. “You want to know where I been. Well, that’s mighty thoughtful of you. You see, I had no intention of sharing any of that bank loot with you or the boys or anyone else. And there ain’t going to be anyone to save you, Ace. You’re a goner. Any minute now, matter of fact. And Pap? He’s gone too. And Mex? Yep, I reckon you didn’t see all that that I did, seeing as how I was last to leave Bakersfield.”

  Ace’s eyes widened impossibly then, as if what he’d heard shocked him. He was beginning to feel the clouding of death overcome him.

  “No?” said Haskell. “Not enough of an explanation for you to chew on, eh?” He spun Ace around as if they were dancing, one hand on the sagging man’s shoulder. Just before Ace’s legs gave out, Haskell leaned him back on the same boulder he’d been sitting on moments before.