Blood at Sunset (A Sam Spur Western

by Matt Chisholm

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘go make yourself useful while I wash the dishes. Two horses each. I’ll take the dun and the bay. Food for a week on the mule. Ammunition for a war.’

  The Kid stood up. Suddenly, he was excited. This was the kind of work he was cut out for. When he had gone out to the corral, the stranger said: ‘You will come?’

  Ben grinned.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘we’ll come. Right this minute.’

  An hour later, three men rode down into the valley with a big ugly Kentucky mule following behind them. Ben had found a fresh horse for the Basque and a spare so that he could keep pace with them. He would guide them on the shortest way to Sunset. They would stop only when the weakness of men and beasts demanded.

  As he turned in the saddle and looked back at the cabin that had been his home for the past year, Ben couldn’t help wondering if he would ever be able to return to that kind of life again. It had been good while it lasted. Maybe for the rest of their lives he and Spur would be riding the ridges as outlaws. It was a daunting thought, but it didn’t change him from his course. His mind was made up. Spur would not hang. Not while he had breath in his body.

  Chapter Eight

  The day before the judge was due to arrive in town, the sheriff permitted Hansard Morley to interview his client. He found Spur in an emaciated condition and weak from his wound and the lack of food. He was allowed to be in the store-room with Spur for no longer than thirty minutes and that gave them time to no more than go over the events of the evening of the murder as Spur knew them. Spur swore that he had not committed the crime and the attorney believed him. The young man left his client and found that he was greatly distressed to have found Spur, whom he had seen previously in Crewsville, reduced to such a poor condition. This distress quickly grew to anger and he sought the sheriff out. He knew that talking to Gaylor would do little good, but he could not stop himself from expressing his indignation.

  He found the sheriff eating his noon meal in the hotel and told him straightway that he was not satisfied with the way in which the prisoner was being treated.

  There was a stout gentleman sitting at the table with Gaylor and this turned out to be the prosecuting attorney. He treated the young lawyer with a patronizing air and more or less told him to run away and mind his own business. Morley’s rage was fanned to a white-hot heat and he said several things which later he might regret, as the prosecutor pointed out. If he wanted to make a complaint he would have ample opportunity to do so before the presiding judge on the following day.

  ‘That,’ he added, ‘should be worth seeing.’

  Gaylor pointed out that he was having his lunch and that if Morley had business with him he could see him when he was through eating. Morley stormed out and took his rage back to Doolittle.

  The lank freighter was sanguine about Spur’s chances. He now knew who the judge would be and he knew that the man was a strangler. Doolittle was disappointed in himself. He thought that by bringing a lawyer in for Spur he had done all he could do. He had sent word to Spur’s friends, but they had not made their appearance. Even if they arrived before the trial, he now saw that there was little they could do. Gaylor was confident. He would have all the evidence that was necessary to bring Spur to the rope. Doolittle wondered what motive the sheriff had for his actions. He knew the man was vain and a bully, but he had never had evidence that he was dishonest in the extreme. Sure, he collected taxes in a high-handed manner and he drank free at the saloons, but there had, to his knowledge, never been more than that.

  The vague suspicion that the answer lay in Rube Daley’s diggings entered his mind. Had Rube found gold? He didn’t inform Morley of what was in his mind. The boy might have laughed at him.

  Manuel Morales came to him in the evening.

  ‘They are going to hang this Spur,’ he said.

  ‘I reckon you could be right at that, Manuel,’ Doolittle said. ‘Have a drink. There ain’t a damn thing we can do about it.’

  Morales poured himself a drink and sat.

  ‘I have been thinking,’ he said. ‘I have no proof. I am speaking only from my instincts. But this man Gaylor – he is bad.’

  ‘If you can judge him by those two roughs he uses as deputies, he’s bad all right,’ Doolittle said. ‘But how bad?’

  Morales waved a fat forefinger in the air.

  ‘How bad? That is what I have asked myself.’ He prodded his sweating forehead with the same forefinger. ‘It is convenient. A stranger comes to our town. He goes to visit Rube Daley. He asks for Rube at the saloon. So it is known where he is going. He is knocked on the head. We know that is true. The head itself is evidence. And like a miracle the sheriff is on the scene. How does the sheriff know that Rube is dead?’

  Doolittle nodded.

  ‘I’ve asked myself the same question. Hansard Morley will ask the same question in court. And I reckon he’ll get a pretty dusty answer. Gaylor’s got it all sewn up or he wouldn’t be so damned confident.’

  ‘But what can we do?’ Morales asked.

  ‘Why’re you interested in this man Spur all of a sudden?’ Doolittle demanded.

  Morales came as near as he could to blushing. He looked on either side of the freighter and then at him.

  ‘It is my daughter,’ he confessed. ‘At last Juanita is interested in a man. She is crazy to choose a man who is preparing his neck for the rope,’

  Doolittle started. What the hell had this man Spur that he didn’t have except a sentence of death hanging over him? Only two days before Lydia Carson had come to him and begged him to do something to save Spur. She had murmured a lot of nonsense about justice and all, but she didn’t have to spell it out to Doolittle. She had lost her head over the condemned man. She had taken just one look at him so far as Doolittle knew and here she was making a dream-hero out of the man. Doolittle ought to hate Spur’s guts. But he didn’t. Which said a good deal for Doolittle. He still wanted to help the man. But it was a mite galling to have the girl you had set your own heart on wanting to save the life of another man because she had fallen in love with him.

  Morales was saying: ‘She has lost her senses over the man. Each day she goes with food for him. Each day she endures the insults of the odious barbarians who guard him. It is hard for a father to bear. I think if it were not for her, this man would be dead by now.’

  What kind of a fellow was this Spur, Doolittle demanded of himself, that he could have two women like Lydia Carson and Juanita Morales panting over him? There wasn’t a scrap of justice in the world.

  His mind switched. He wondered if the Basque had found Spur’s two friends. He wondered what action they would take if they reached here in time. He also wondered if he had done the right thing. If the news ever leaked out that he had aided and abetted Spur it might go badly for him. What the hell, he thought. A man had to do what he thought was right. The thought of Cusie Ben and the Cimarron Kid somehow lifted his spirits. Maybe they would pull something spectacular. That might be nice, especially if it gave that strutting pig Wayne Gaylor his comeuppance.

  ‘You know, Manuel,’ he said, ‘I have a feelin’ in my water that Spur ain’t goin’ to hang.’

  ‘My friend,’ Morales said, creasing his fat face in a frown that spread from his forehead to his three chins, ‘it would take a miracle.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Doolittle said, ‘that’s what we’re goin’ to see.’

  Morales finished his drink, bid him good night and departed,

  Doolittle sat on, smoking and drinking, thinking about Lydia Carson. His last thought before he retired to his bed, however, was: I wonder if I could lend a hand if them two boys’re going to bust Spur out of there.

  He reminded himself that he was a respectable business man, but the thought lingered till he fell asleep.

  The following day, the Crewsville stage drove in bearing a dignitary of the court in the shape of Judge Hugh Maiden. Tradition has it that judges should look the part. That is, they should have white o
r at least gray hair, a dignity of mien befitting their station and an air of knowing if not of wisdom. The man who stepped down from the rocking stage-coach and cursed the driver in no uncertain terms for the needless speed of the drive, the roughness of the trail and his inept handling of the horses could have been a hardware salesman. The driver who was a man of standing in his chosen profession, if not in the eyes of his honor, replied in a manner demanded by the judge’s own. He spat with the skill of long practice and missed the judge’s boots by no more than an inch.

  Both the sheriff and the prosecutor were there to greet Maiden. He received their greetings with little more than a grunt and gazed around at the town of Sunset without enthusiasm, even with hostility. This was his natural look. He gazed upon the whole of mankind with neither love nor compassion and, habitually looking for sin and criminality in his fellows, seldom failed to find it.

  The town had turned out to see him. The coming of his honor was an event. He always provided first-class entertainment and drama. He belittled counsel and was the scourge of malefactors. His language was rich, to the point and sometimes downright vile. His court would be full and he would wield his power to the delight of those who would not suffer through it. He was, they all told each other, a real character and a holy terror. Even the sheriff and the prosecutor, men accustomed to having their own way and ruling their little worlds, found themselves insignificant in the presence of this undersized, large-headed man with protruding eyes and a mouth like a wolf-trap. It didn’t surprise anybody that Maiden was a bachelor and hated children. Women did not come into his scheme of things. The only pleasure he derived from life, one assumed, was administering what was laughingly called justice.

  He now demanded first a drink and then a room in the hotel to retire to. The journey had played hell with his constitution and he must rest. They escorted him to the hotel, the sheriff and a deputy carrying his grips, installed him in the best room in the place and put a whiskey and glass on the table. He took off his boots, sat at the table and filled his glass with whiskey. He offered nobody else a drink, declared that court would be convened in the saloon at ten a.m. the following morning and if anybody disturbed him before nine, he would have their entrails for galluses. Gaylor and Cantrell retired.

  Chapter Nine

  The day of the trial dawned clear. The town awoke and everybody felt the excitement in the air at once. As soon as breakfast had been consumed, men, women and children gathered in the streets to discuss the coming trial. A certain section of the male population showed some willingness to take bets on the issue. There were few takers because everybody had decided that Spur would hang. That didn’t mean that they felt sure that he was guilty. They would just bet their own lives that he would hang.

  By nine o’clock wagons and riders started to come in from the surrounding country. Pretty soon the town was swelled by four times its normal population. The air was full of excited talk. When a man like Sam Spur came to trial in a town like this, so small that it was not to be found on any map, then this was something to see and remember to tell one’s grandchildren. By God, sir, this was history. Sam Spur, top lawman, one of the great thief-takers of all time, former gunman of the first class and here he was ready to be hung by his neck till he was dead.

  Mystery was added to the proceedings by the fact that hardly a soul had set eyes on the man since he had come into town. Mangan Carson was plied with questions about him. Doolittle was stopped on the street by total strangers. What did the famous Spur look like? How was he going to behave? Was he going to give them a run for their money?

  Around twenty minutes after nine, three men rode into town. Now a hush fell over the gathered people. The three men were known. They were dressed much as any range riders would be dressed, but the fineness of their horseflesh gave them away. That and the way in which they wore their guns and carried themselves. There was a sureness and an insolence about them that were no part of run-of-the-mill cowhands.

  Their leader was Shad Morrow as everyone there knew. His name had been a byword on the Border for years from El Paso to Lower California. He was a tall dark man with pale eyes and there was about him the same hostility toward mankind as there was about Judge Hugh Maiden. He had lived in this world for some thirty years and sixteen of them had been dedicated to violence. Men said that his first killing had been that of a Mexican for the sake of a few pesos at an age when most boys are still at school and living under the watchful eyes of a mother and a father. He had progressed naturally from there, learning the morals of the barnyard and the justice of the jungle before he reached the age of sixteen. It was his boast that he had never earned an honest penny in his life and never intended to. He would, it could be safely predicted end his years in jail, from a bullet or at the end of a rope.

  In appearance he was a lean man with the look of a hungry wolf and the berserk eyes of a wolverine in anger. He moved with a deceptive slowness, except in moments of danger when he could go into action with the speed of an attacking cougar. There was about the man an enormous vanity, but this vanity did not extend to his clothes and he gave every indication that he despised neatness of dress and the sanitary application of water.

  His two companions, while quite different in appearance, plainly belonged to the same kind. The man who followed immediately behind him was Roily Damon, as famous along the Border as his leader, a shortish roly-poly man with a rolling gait and a humorous eye. There was nothing pleasant, however, about his humor and it covered such activities as dealing pain to his fellow men and suffering to mankind in general. As a child he must have taken exquisite pleasure in pulling wings from flies. He showed as much dislike of water as Morrow and on his smiling fleshy face were signs that he over-indulged his flesh in most ways conceivable to man.

  The third man, Seth Kruger, was the antithesis of the other two. He was older, pushing fifty, and his distinguished looks with his well-defined features and hair graying at the temples, were accentuated by the care he took with his dress. He was marked now by the dust of the trails he had ridden, but not even that could hide his natural elegance of dress. His eyes were mild and intelligent, his manner was quiet and modest until roused in drink, his speech cultured and his manner with women gentle. He was probably the most dangerous of the three, for, it was said, he remained cool and clear-headed in moments even of the greatest danger. It was hard to see why he followed the lead of a man like Shad Morrow, but follow he did. He was a man who liked to sit on the sidelines of life and watch with an air of almost aristocratic aloofness.

  As soon as they rode in and dismounted from their fine horses, speculation about the reason for their visit to Sunset was rife. The natural assumption, their being badmen and Spur having once ridden the owl-hoot trail with a reputation more terrible than all theirs put together, was that they had come to affect a rescue. The excitement of the little town at once increased and, as soon as they entered the saloon and disappeared from view, the talk roared. A certain apprehension took hold of the crowd. There was, it was decided, going to be a shoot-out to end all shoot-outs. As soon as the death sentence was passed on Spur their guns would be out and the lead would fly. They had no doubt at all that Judge Maiden would declare that justice demanded Spur’s life. They were now torn between a desire to witness the great drama and at the same time to be under good cover to preserve their own lives.

  When Sheriff Gaylor walked down the street from the hotel, gun on hip and a determined look on his face, speculation ran riot. It was noted that he was not accompanied by even a single deputy. It didn’t seem possible that the intrepid lawman would face these three desperate characters on his own. Yet that was what it looked like. Admiration for his foolhardy boldness was great. Men crowded the doors and windows of the saloon as he entered and headed straight for the three badmen standing drinking at the bar.

  To the astonishment of the onlookers, they saw Gaylor go up to the three men, greet them amicably and shake hands all around. It didn’t seem possib
le. His next action was even more incredible. From his pocket, he took three badges and before their very eyes, he pinned a badge on each one of them. There then followed a short but impressive ceremony during which he swore them in as deputy sheriffs. The townspeople and the visitors looked at each other in utter amazement. Gaylor had recruited these men to prevent Spur’s friends from busting him out, he was employing fire to fight fire. Their admiration for their sheriff might now be unbounded, but, at the same time, they could not help experiencing some misgivings. With lawmen’s badges on the vests of such characters as these, anything might happen.

  Doolittle expressed the thoughts of the majority when he said to Manuel Morales: ‘Now I’ve seen everything.’ His hopes of ever seeing Spur freed sank to zero. When the news reached Juanita Morales, she blazed with anger and indignation. When Lydia Carson heard, she burst into tears, greatly to the embarrassment and distress of her father who was already in a state of high indignation at the three disgraceful appointments.

  When at last Spur was brought from Carson’s store-room, now wearing irons only on his wrists, he was surrounded by these men, all armed with rifles and revolvers and with looks in their eyes that declared that anybody who made a wrong move in the direction of their prisoner would be suddenly and irrevocably dead.

  While deputies Tabor and Golite cleared a way through the crowd for them, they hustled Spur into the saloon and sat him down on a chair in front of the table that had been placed at one end of the room for the judge. The sheriff declared in a loud voice that the bar was closed and drinks would not be served until the proceedings were over. Men hastily downed their last drinks and the crowd packed itself into the place shoulder to shoulder so that there was room scarcely to breathe. Chairs were found for some of the ladies present and near the prisoner, on either side of him, sat both Juanita Morales and Lydia Carson, both there in spite of their fathers’ protests and commands.