Shotgun Charlie

by Ralph Compton

  From behind, a soft swishing sound as though someone was running through the granular snow. Grady spun again, completing a circle, snow pelting his face, catching in his eyelashes, his mustaches. There! A dark shape disappearing around the far corner of the shack.

  It was not a large structure and Grady covered the span in three strides. Scowling, he looked down at his feet, bent low as she shuffled forward. The snow had drifted deeper on this side of the shack. Sure enough, there was a ragged trail, as though someone had run along before him.

  “Come and get it, you dog!” Grady howled his seething rage into the wind’s own snapping bite. All he received for his efforts was more laughter trailing to him from the far side of the shack. Grady bellowed wordless oaths, growled as he drove forward through the snow, stumbling and spitting snow.

  Before he made a full circuit of the shack, he thought he saw movement far off to his right, where the land dipped low and away to a narrow wash, the site of many rummagings in the past by old dirt hounds looking for color among the rocky outcroppings of the jumbled landscape. And leading back to him from that far-off point of motion, a thin trail through the snow was visible.

  In a flash, he realized what it meant. Already running around the last side of the shack, Grady let out a long, thin moan and lunged for the gaping doorway. Snow had been kicked in. Had to be more than he’d let in when he exited. . . .

  But his main concern led him to the bunk, to the sacks of money. There had been seven when he left—the three he’d ridden off with, plus two each from Ace and Simp—and as he groped, his heart pounding, clawing its way up out of his throat, he felt two, then two more, then . . . “No! No, no, no!”

  Grady swept the bunk free, the four sacks thudding to the floor, his blankets and saddlebags flopping down by his feet. He kicked them, clawed at them, scrabbled on the earthen floor, seeing almost nothing, but knowing, after seconds of fruitless searching, the truth.

  “Gaaaah!” His shouts as he bolted from the shack drowned out the storm’s whistling winds. He kept up the shouts as he bolted, half tripping, half lunging down the trail. Not easy to see, but plain enough for a dedicated, haunted man, the footprints were spread far apart, made by a man in a hasty retreat.

  Haskell ran, falling every few feet, driving his knees into hidden wedges of rock. The pain bloomed sharp and searing, but he didn’t care. It was all he could do to lift a revolver and crank the hammer back. But he did. “Dutchy!” Blam! “Dutchy, I will catch you!” Blam! “And I will gut you!” Blam! Blam!

  Soon he lost all sense of direction, realized he’d likely strayed from the trail. Breath came in stuttering gasps. He couldn’t pull it in fast enough, and when he did, it only trickled. His heart pounded like the fists of ten angry men against his chest, neck, and throat. Grady bent over, rested his palms on his knees, and gasped, spittle stringing from his mouth.

  The snow swirled about him, and the entire time he shouted, “Dutchy!” over and over. But soon he realized he wasn’t really shouting, rather chanting the name of the cursed thief. He was sure there was humor in that somehow. A thief who steals from thieves. But not now. Now there was nothing funny in this.

  When Haskell’s breath had begun to dribble back into his throat, a new thought seized him, stopped the breath in his throat. The money, the rest of the money.

  He was barely aware of the desperate whimpering noises rising out of his mouth as he scrabbled in the snow, sometimes on his hands and knees, looking for his own trail back to the miner’s shack. As he rummaged in the snow, following his own blustering false trails, a far-off sound stilled him for a moment—a cackling laugh.

  He looked toward where he thought the sound might be coming from, a ridge across the ravine down which he’d stumbled, and, yes, there it was, a flare of light as if a match had been struck. A match for one purpose—to taunt him.

  Haskell sagged into the snow, his teeth grinding into powder. As the laughter whirled away on the wind, he staggered to his feet and slowly made his way back up the hill down which he’d stumbled. Yes, of course, he thought. That’s the direction. And he made his way back as fast as he was able.

  The four remaining sacks were still there. And though he was too tired to rage, Grady managed to slowly put the mess back to rights once again. He retrieved his rifle from the floor and checked it over. Fine, just wet from the snow. Then he sat on the bunk, rifle across his lap, and gritted his teeth, listening to the storm and waiting for a second attack. Sure that Dutchy now felt he was an easy target.

  Most of all, Grady Haskell stewed over the fact that Dutchy the thief now had three more bags of cash to add to his initial two, giving him five. That left Grady with only four. Only four, blast it!

  Chapter 39

  Despite Marshal Wickham’s protests, Charlie insisted on pressing forward the next morning. “Lay around enough for the last couple of days, so you tell me. And I’m grateful for your help, I truly am. But I been wronged, Pap’s been wronged, and most of all, there’s a whole town of folks been wronged, some of them terribly. And all by one man.” Charlie leaned against Nub. “I can’t let that be.”

  “But, Charlie,” said the marshal, still hunkered over the campfire, rubbing his hands together and shaking his head. “You’re barely able to stand. Look at you, man.”

  “I got to try. Marshal, don’t you . . . don’t you feel nothin’ for them folks?” As soon as Charlie said it, he knew it stung the old man, who slowly looked up at him with wet eyes.

  “Yeah, Charlie. I reckon so.” He hung his head for a moment, then scratched his chin and pushed to his feet. “Okay, let’s go.” He ambled toward his gear and began stuffing it into the saddlebags, rolling his blankets. “I still say you’re off your bean. There’s no way Haskell will be anywhere but gone.”

  “Might be,” said Charlie, “but at least then we’ll know. I ain’t sure about you, but I can’t abide the thought of knowing there was a chance and I didn’t take it.”

  “Okay, okay, you made your point. Now stop yammering and let’s get on the trail.”

  Within their first hour on the trail, the snow had dwindled to little more than a scant pelting nuisance. By the time nearly four hours passed, the low gray sky, which for two days had felt like a massive wet wool blanket pressing down on the world, had begun to show signs of fraying and splitting apart, revealing slices of lighter gray glowing through.

  “In luck, eh, pard?”

  It was the first time in an hour that either of them had spoken.

  “How’s that, Marshal?”

  Wickham looked up, then back to Charlie, who was riding behind. “The weather. We’re in for some honest-to-goodness sunlight, methinks.”

  Charlie looked up. “I reckon. Be a nice change to this gloominess.” He was smiling when he looked back to the marshal. But his smile faded as he saw the man had stopped at a bend in the trail up ahead. It looked as if it was opening up, widening. “What’s wrong?”

  The marshal took a few seconds to respond, then said, “Charlie, you’d best gird your loins, son.”

  “What?” Charlie didn’t know what that meant, but from the man’s tone, it couldn’t be a good thing. “What are you seeing there?”

  Marshal Wickham looked back. “Charlie. I think we may have found another of your friends.”

  “Oh, Lord no.”

  The marshal nodded, beckoned the big man to ride up beside him.

  The scene before them was odd. A man was laid out on his back. Small drifts of snow had sculpted against his outstretched legs. At first glance it looked to Charlie as if Simp—for, from the coat and hat, the side of the face he could see, that was who it appeared to be—was stretched out, feet toward a campfire, taking a nap.

  Surely the marshal was wrong. As Charlie recalled, ol’ Simp was always a little dozey. But something prevented him from shouting, “Ho the camp!” And then he saw it, saw
the scene for what it was. The fire wasn’t smoking. The man’s legs were akimbo. Blood stained his front.

  “Aw, no. . . .” Charlie urged Nub forward.

  “Charlie, hold up there!” The lawman had drawn a revolver and rode ahead of the big man, eyes scanning, neck swiveling. “Won’t do to get ourselves killed, now, would it?”

  But Charlie didn’t hear him. He’d already dismounted and was making his way to Simp’s side. But the man was stone cold.

  Marshal Wickham came up beside him. “Ah, another one. Too bad, too bad.” He bent, nosed the man’s coat with the barrel of his gun. “Killed before the snow came.” He stood, looked around the little clearing. “Dang snow, can’t get a good set of tracks off fresh, untrod snow.”

  “Don’t need tracks,” said Charlie.

  “How’s that?”

  Charlie nodded down the trail toward a long narrow cleft in the ragged hills flanking them. In the distance, rising from the center, stood a tall rock spire, nature-made, but unmistakable to anyone searching for something called the Needle.

  “Huh,” said Wickham. “That’s where Haskell’s headed, eh?”

  “That’s what he said. Said to head to the Needle. Said there was the remnants of a little mine camp. The shack he’d be at would be a ways beyond that, off by itself. Near a draw, I think he said.”

  Wickham nodded, said nothing.

  Charlie began kicking snow off stones, prying them loose.

  “Don’t tell me . . .”

  “Can’t leave him this way, Marshal. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Wickham sighed, nodded. “At least let’s drag him over there to that crevice, see if we can’t make our work a little easier.”

  They did, and then Wickham suggested Charlie go through the man’s pockets in case there was something they might use to contact Simp’s next of kin. Charlie’s eyes widened.

  “Charlie, if you don’t want to, I’ll do it. Ain’t like I haven’t dealt with the dead before.”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s that . . . I forgot to do that for Ace.”

  “Well, you said so yourself that the man didn’t speak much of kin. It’s likely he was alone in the world. You did the best a man could for him, Charlie. Take comfort in that.”

  Charlie nodded glumly, and they dragged Simp to the gully in the rocks. As they gently piled stones atop him, Wickham said, “How come he trusted you with all this information anyway, Charlie? You don’t mind me saying so, for an innocent man—and I’m not doubting you one bit, mind you—you seem to hold a whole lot of rare information.”

  Charlie stood, stretched, and sighed. “I been asking myself that same question. I think he didn’t know what to make of me. I told Pap all I could remember, not that it did much good.”

  “It must have, Charlie. He didn’t join them.”

  “He wouldn’t have anyway. I thought maybe I could get Pap away from them. But Pap, he up and told me to get gone.”

  Wickham nodded. “He was saving you, Charlie. Plain as the nose on my face. He was making sure you weren’t part of the mess.”

  “I reckon. I did see Haskell one more time, though. That night, I left camp, and he followed me. We had words and I laid into him. Thought for sure he was going to shoot me, but he didn’t. Now I see that his weapon of choice is a knife. We was close enough he could have used it on me.”

  “Providence was with you, Charlie. That’s all I can say.”

  “If I knew what that meant, I might agree with you, Marshal.”

  Wickham smiled. “Let’s finish up here, say a few words, and then we best get going. There’s another storm boiling up and we want to close in on this rascal before he comes to his senses and decides to vamoose.”

  Chapter 40

  “What you suppose got into them so they named this town Tickle?” said Marshal Wickham, holding a jagged-edged plank at an angle, reading the crudely carved inscription: . . . ELCOME TO TICKLE. He set it aside, decided not to burn it. “What sort of notion would come into a man’s head to make him do such a thing?” Then a slow smile spread across Wickham’s face. He snapped a finger and leaned forward. “Well, now, it occurs to me I might know what they named it after. A sporting girl! Had to be.”

  Charlie’s face bloomed bright red.

  The old lawman looked at him and smiled. “Aha! Weren’t so dark out, I’d guess your face looks like a hammer-struck thumb, Charlie. I was you I’d spend a little more time with a sporting girl or two, wear off that modest edge you got built up since birth, I’d wager. A woman has a way of softening the edges of a man, taking the mean and irritable out of him, if’n the man allows for it.”

  Charlie cleared his throat, looked away. Finally he said, “I . . . I wouldn’t know about such things, but I do know you remind me of a man I knew . . . man who said the same sorts of embarrassing things.”

  The marshal let it lie for a few quiet minutes, then said, “I’m guessing you mean that fella Pap you talked about.”

  “Yessir, I do. He was a good man, you know. I know all those folks back in Bakersfield think they know what they know, but they’re flat wrong, that’s all.”

  Wickham nodded. “I’m sure they are, Charlie. You tally up all the times a man thinks he’s right, then isn’t, in this life, you come up with a bigger number than when he’s pure-dee right.”

  “Could be.”

  Wickham unscrewed the cap of his flask, took a last pull, and stared into the small, comforting fire. He, for one, was glad when they’d decided to call it a day and build a fire. After burying that poor fella Haskell gutted, why, it was all they could do to cover more ground. They’d made it another hour and a half before the storm came in hard and fast. It was a howler. That snow of the day before had been a mere tease.

  He’d known women like that, not many, but it was enough to give him pause. They had to be close to Haskell, if as Charlie said the man would be waiting. But could he trust the boy’s gut feeling? Why on earth would a man like Haskell, who’d left nothing but a trail of vicious, mindless slaughter in his wake, want to stay put and wait for the posse? Made no sense, but Charlie was convinced.

  He sighed and leaned forward toward the cook fire at the front edge of the makeshift lean-to they’d constructed. There was an ample supply of downed and living pines that grew in thick patches hereabouts. They would not be investigating the trail anymore tonight. The weather had made sure of that. Well, the weather and the dead man Haskell had left behind.

  As if reading his mind, Charlie said, “One more.”

  “How’s that?”

  “One more to go. Fella by the name of Dutchy. Like I said with the others, I don’t see him hurting someone for money.”

  “I know, Charlie,” said Wickham, leaning in to stir the nearly bubbling pot of beans. “But sometimes when a man gets all caught up in a heated moment, he doesn’t think so good for himself. He starts to think about what he could do with all that money and then he sees all the people who are in his way, and sometimes he commences to shooting.”

  “But the boys . . .”

  “Now, I’m not saying they would do such a thing, Charlie. I’m only telling you what I’ve seen in my years as a lawman.”

  They were both silent a moment longer. Then the marshal said, “Goes by the name of Dutchy, eh?”

  “Yes, sir. I don’t know why. He don’t look Dutch to me. Not that I know what that is.”

  Wickham laughed, ran a finger under his eyes. “Charlie Chilton, if you don’t beat all. I doubt even people who are Dutch know what it is they are.”

  Chapter 41

  “And there’s something else too, Charlie,” said the marshal, ladling up a dripping spoonful of beans and juice. “That first man you found, the one you know.”

  “Yeah, Ace. I told you all I know about him.”

  “I know, I know, but look.” The old
man wagged the spoon at Charlie for emphasis. “What didn’t you find when you found him?”

  Charlie scrunched his eyes. “All due respect, but what sort of a question is that, Marshal?”

  The marshal tapped the spoon against his hat brim. “Think, Charlie. Think.” He resumed eating.

  Charlie shrugged. “I dunno. I reckon he should have had a hat. He wore a gray one, I recollect.”

  “A hat? Charlie, the man was a bank robber and all you can come up with is a hat?”

  Charlie snapped a finger and pointed at the marshal, smiling. “I got it, I got it. Money. He should have had money on him.”

  “Now you’re cooking with lard. But how much? What’d it look like? And how did he get it out of town?”

  Charlie’s brow knitted again. “A horse, he had a horse.”

  “Yep, and where was it when you found him?”

  Charlie shrugged. “I kind of figured it run off somewhere.”

  “Not hardly, Charlie. Not up here and not for too far. Odds are it was taken.”

  “Taken? By who? Indians?”

  “Charlie, were you born this thick or is this something you picked up on the trail?”

  “No need to get all rough-and-tumble with me, Marshal. Some of us ain’t natural-born lawmen, you know.”

  “Oh, I know Charlie, I know. I’m funnin’ you.” He leaned forward. “Look. It’s plain to me as the nose on my face, so I’ll tell you what I think. We know this Haskell fella killed your friends, right? And he took the horses and he took the money those men had carried with them away from the bank heist. You see? Simple.”

  “What’s he want with all those horses?”

  “To carry the money for a while. One horse would tire out. Likely he’ll bundle it all up and put it on a packhorse, take one with him. He’s been collecting them so far, though, you see?”

  Then a fresh thought occurred to Charlie. “If he’s only set on bringing a horse to ride and a packhorse, what’ll he do with the others?”