by Bill Brooks
BILL BROOKS
LAW FOR HIRE:
SAVING MASTERSON
For Kattlynn, Kennedy, Ian, and Mackenzie
Contents
Prologue
Bat was suffering a storm that hadn’t yet hit the…
Chapter 1
They had been almost a year down in that country.
Chapter 2
Teddy and John shook hands and John said, “You be…
Chapter 3
Bone Butcher didn’t like the Masterson brothers one lick. Not…
Chapter 4
Dodge rose out of the plains suddenly. Teddy watched the…
Chapter 5
The weather had cleared after two stormy days. Sun broke…
Chapter 6
Gunshots announced night had fallen in Dodge. Teddy rose from…
Chapter 7
The Pepper twins were arguing over who should get first…
Chapter 8
Dog Kelly arrived almost with the sun. Early. Teddy opened…
Chapter 9
Dirty Dave Rudabaugh said, “Boys, I’m tired of running from…
Chapter 10
Teddy stopped by the Wright House after leaving the Lone…
Chapter 11
To John Sears, it seemed like time passed a lot…
Chapter 12
The Rose had come to Frenchy LeBreck that night seeking…
Chapter 13
When Teddy awoke the second time, the bed was empty…
Chapter 14
Bat was daydreaming of high-caliber places like Philadelphia and Boston…
Chapter 15
Frenchy LeBreck was toting the books when Teddy entered the…
Chapter 16
Bad Hand Frank had seen the shirt hanging in Hudson’s,…
Chapter 17
“Elvira, honey, I’m home.”
Chapter 18
Mae and Teddy made their way back to Dodge just…
Chapter 19
Charlotte’s daddy was beat black and blue still, but the…
Chapter 20
After that night’s performance at the opera house, Dog invited…
Chapter 21
Frenchy was waiting outside Teddy’s hotel. “We need to talk,…
Chapter 22
Wolves howled when they caught wind of him. Two Bits…
Chapter 23
Teddy opened his door and there they stood—Bat and…
Chapter 24
The boy came one hot evening and knocked on the…
Chapter 25
Hoodoo Brown’s mother had warned him when he was still…
Chapter 26
Bat unlocked the cell.
Chapter 27
Angus Bush stood behind the bar, the dim light long…
Chapter 28
Dusk descended like a cloud of fret. Two Bits had…
Chapter 29
She came again that night and knocked on his door…
Chapter 30
Bat was crossing the street to reach the Dodge House…
About the Author
Other Books by Bill Brooks
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
Bat was suffering a storm that hadn’t yet hit the prairies when Dog Kelly found him drinking his morning coffee.
“That damn Dirty Dave Rudabaugh and some others robbed the morning flier twenty miles outside of town.”
“You tell my brother Ed about this?” Bat said.
“Not yet, I figured he was with you.”
The bulldog pistol Bat liked to carry was lying on the table next to his coffee, there between his cup and the sugar bowl: pearl grips, nickel-plated, .38 Smith and Wesson, single-action. He liked its weight and feel and he liked looking at it when he wasn’t wearing it under his waistcoat. He liked its lethal beauty, thought it poetic.
“Shit, I hate to have to chase outlaws in a storm,” Bat muttered.
“Storm? Hell they ain’t no storm, it’s all sunshine and pretty outside,” Dog said.
“It won’t be for long.”
It was Bat’s hip that told him about storms yet to arrive. Sweetwater, Texas, two years previous was where he learned to be a storm prognosticator. He rubbed the hip now, trying to rub some of the ache out of it as he stood, took up the pistol and slipped it into his coat pocket.
“I’ll go find Ed and we’ll get after ’em.”
Dog Kelly followed alongside, explaining what the engineer had told him about which direction the gang was headed after they robbed the train. “South,” he said, “toward Liberal would be my guess.”
“They ain’t going to Liberal,” Bat said, crossing the street to the barbershop.
“Why ain’t they?”
“They’re headed for the pistol barrel of Oklahoma—no man’s land. They think if they can reach there, they’ll be safe, no law can touch ’em. Even the federal marshals are a bit shy about going into that country.”
“You think you and Ed can get ’em before they make it that far?”
“Well, if we can’t, they’ll most likely get themselves an early grave down in that country. Dirty Dave and anyone who’d run with him isn’t the same breed who habituates that territory. The true outlaws will pick those boys’ bones clean.”
Dog Kelly admired Bat for his use of two-bit words, like habituate. Bat was the sort of feller Dodge and Kansas in general needed more of. Educated, refined gentlemen who could also shoot the balls off a gnat.
“Habituate,” Dog said, tasting the word like it was hard candy.
Ed was getting a shave and reading an old edition of Harper’s Weekly when Bat and Dog came into the barbershop.
“Finish up, we got to go buy some oilskins before we go after Dirty Dave and his bunch,” Bat said.
Ed looked at him over the top of the magazine. Then he looked at Dog. Then he looked through the big plate-glass window at the clear blue sky and the sunshine that lay over all of Dodge.
“Why we going after Dirty Dave, and why the hell we need oilskins on such a pretty day?”
“Rudabaugh and his minions robbed the Katy out west of here, and it’s gone come a bad storm before we catch ’em.”
Minions, Dog repeated to himself.
“Goddamn, where’d they’d come up with such an idea? Dave don’t have the brains to pour piss out of a boot with the directions written on the heel, and I doubt anyone dumb enough to run with him would either.”
“They probably read about train robbing in Harper’s,” Bat said. “You know Harper’s is always running stories on outlaws like Jesse James.”
“I wouldn’t think Dave was educated enough to read.”
“We’re wasting time.”
Ed wiped the soap off his face and grabbed his coat, and he and Bat walked down to the stables where they kept saddle horses and told the kid working there to saddle them up and have them ready to go in ten minutes. Then they walked over to the mercantile and bought two boxes of cartridges—one box for each of their pistols and rifles—and a pair of oilskins on a line of credit Ed kept as city marshal.
Dog Kelly asked if they wanted him to round up a posse.
“No,” Bat said. “It’s just Dave Rudabaugh and some old boys of his. I doubt they’d throw up a fight if cornered. Ed and me can handle ’em.”
“You sure we’ll need these oilskins?” Ed asked.
“I’m taking mine, you do what you want.”
The kid had their mounts ready and they headed on out, riding cross-country to save time and try and cut off the outlaws before they reached the state line.
They rode hard most of the morning, pushing the horses as much as they could, figuring Dirty Dave and his bunch prob
ably wouldn’t be expecting a pursuit so early in the game. Outlaws by nature were generally lackadaisical types and not great thinkers.
The way his hip was aching, Bat figured that they were riding right into the front of the coming storm, for it felt like the storm’s teeth was gnawing on his bones. An hour later the first drops of cold rain thunked their hats.
The prairies had turned bleak under the now smudged autumn sky. Brown grass that had once stood tall as a man’s chest was swept by a hard west wind, and they could see a streaky curtain of rain in the distance, that Bat judged to be at least five miles wide.
They rode another half hour before they saw the Dutchman’s soddy. Emil Schirtz kept a consumptive wife and five or six kids who had turned him from being a part-time Lutheran preacher into a full-time alcoholic and trapper—wolf pelts mostly.
“You think we should stop at the Dutchman’s and take shelter until the storm blows over?” Ed asked.
“I’d sure hate to be cooped up with that sick wife and squalling kids of his, wouldn’t you?” Bat said. Bat was by nature a fastidious man who preferred a clean bed with fresh sheets to sleep in.
“We’d have to sleep on his dirt floor and probably end up with scorpions in our hair.”
Ed looked up at the sky. It was near black off to the west and north even though the rain that had thunked their hats had temporarily abated. It felt like some monster overhead just waiting to draw down on them.
Ed said, “It could come a cyclone like that one we saw that time we were buffalo hunting. You remember that?”
“How could I forget?”
“Come along and killed Tully and his boys, swept ’em clean up and blew ’em a mile—even their wagon full of hides.”
“Hell yes, I remember, but this don’t look like any cyclone could come of it.”
They weighed their decision as they rode their horses at a walk because earlier they’d run them pretty hard. Then suddenly they were pelted by hail the size of marbles.
“I’d rather sleep on a dirt floor with a roof over my head than get thumped by hail balls,” Ed said, remembering a storm he’d gotten caught in the previous spring, when hail the size of tomatoes fell from the sky. The hail had battered him pretty good and his body was a palette of bruises for a week.
“I reckon we could stop in at the Dutchman’s and see how the storm tracks,” Bat said.
“I don’t know of any other place out this way we could take shelter in, do you?”
Bat shook his head. His thoughts had been on other lives lived than the one he was living currently. He’d been reading articles in the local papers about the successes of Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill and others who were performing with their Wild West Combinations back East. I was made for a life more gentrified than riding after train robbers in a storm, he told himself. He’d long held the hankering to go East, to go live among a more civilized breed of men and see how his cork would float in such waters. But instead, he’d landed here in Dodge with his brothers Ed and Jim.
Still, he told himself, he should be grateful to have attained his current station in life at such a young age: sheriff of Ford County—not bad for only being twenty-two years old. But still it wasn’t the life he wanted. The bullet that had shattered his hip was more than a gentle reminder that his current profession generally didn’t carry a man to old age, or any real accomplishments. He had within him a yearning to travel to distant places and not simply across windswept prairies. He thought maybe he’d like to try his hand at writing.
“Listen,” Ed said.
They heard the first rumble of thunder, saw lightning snake through the clouds like tin flashing in the sun. It felt ominous; they both knew what lightning could do if it struck a feller.
They spurred their horses toward the Dutchman’s.
The wind picked up considerable by the time they crossed the quarter mile of prairie to where the soddy stood. The soddy looked crumbly under a roof of grass. It was a house essentially cut from the earth, and to the earth it was bound to return. It stood lonely and forlorn, as though lost.
There were several scrawny chickens pecking the ground around the building. There was an old single-blade plow lying over on its side in a patch of thistles, its blade rusting. There was a pile of empty tin cans stacked by the west wall, and just beyond was an outhouse with the door missing. The wind shifted and blew the outhouse stink their direction, causing them to wrinkle their noses. Hail tapped their hats and danced along the ground. There was an old plug horse standing in a poorly constructed corral, its head drooping. The nag, like everything else, looked like it was just waiting for a good excuse to fall over. Between house and corral was a buckboard with one of its wheels missing.
“I don’t know how a body can live like this,” Bat said.
“I don’t neither.”
“Hello this house!”
Bat and Ed both knew you just didn’t walk up and knock on a fellow’s door—not out in these parts you didn’t. Such incaution could get you shot.
They sat their horses, waiting for someone to open the door.
The thunder grew louder, the skies darker. The bellies of the clouds came in lower now over the prairies and moving fast. The hail started and stopped and started again.
“Hello the house!” Bat said a second time, louder.
Still nobody came to the door.
“Maybe they’re asleep,” Ed suggested.
“This time of day?”
Ed wanted to suggest that maybe the Schirtzes had packed up and moved, but the presence of the wagon, the chickens and that old horse told him otherwise.
Bat said, “Keep that shotgun of yours trained on things,” then dismounted and went to the door and, standing off to one side, knocked hard. It wasn’t much of a door, but it had a fancy porcelain knob you’d thought was right out of a St. Louis catalogue.
“Hey inside!”
Nothing.
Bat looked at Ed and Ed at him.
Then the wind shifted again and they both could smell an unmistakable stench leaking from inside the house. Ed dismounted, shotgun still in hand, and Bat drew his revolver and said, “You want to go around back and check things out?” and Ed nodded and slipped around to the back.
“I’m ready when you are,” Ed called above the increasing wind.
Bat’s hip ached bad as a rotted tooth, but what he figured was inside that house waiting to be discovered troubled him more.
Bat tried the doorknob, twisted it and the door just fell open and the stench came out like bad breath.
“You see anything back there?” he yelled to Ed.
“Nothing.”
“I’m going in, don’t shoot me with that scattergun.”
It was dark inside, just a thin shaft of light falling in through a window covered with an oilcloth. The smell alone would have knocked out a horse.
Then Bat saw them as his eyes adjusted to the light. He started counting until he counted all eight of them, the last being the Dutchman—a big old boy sitting in a chair, slumped over, his head resting on the table, his arms down to his sides, a pistol still hooked by one crooked finger.
Bat stepped back outside and sucked in all the prairie air he could get and fought back the sickness that’d risen bitterly in his throat. It was raining now, cold and heavy.
Ed came around because there wasn’t any back door or any windows to see in and he saw Bat standing there bent over, his hands on his knees, his color the same as the ashen sky.
“What is it?” Ed said.
“Everybody’s gone in there,” Bat said.
“Every one of ’em?”
The rain changed over to hail again and struck the earth and everything on it.
“Every one of ’em,” Bat said. “I guess the Dutchman just couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You sure it was him and not some other—Dirty Dave and his gang, maybe?”
Bat nodded. “It was him, he’s still holding his piece.”
“
That son of a bitch.”
“It’s forty miles back to Dodge,” Bat said. The hail became an icy rain and they could feel it was going to get a lot worse before it got better and cleared off the prairies. Thunder shook the ground.
They led their horses over to the corral and turned them out and then hurried back to the cabin; the icy rain had begun to collect. There wasn’t any way they were going to ride all the way back to Dodge in an ice storm.
They both stood just inside the doorjamb, neither of them wanting to go completely inside the soddy with the dead. They took off their bandannas and tied them around their noses and kept their faces toward the open air even as sleet crackled along the ground.
“Jesus,” Ed said. “I can’t believe none of this.”
Neither of them wanted to look at the dead.
“How long you reckon they been this way?”
“A week maybe, judging by the odor.”
“Them little kids…” Ed said.
The storm kept up for an hour then began to slacken some and it was about all either of them could take, so that when the hiatus came, they walked from the soddy to the corral and forked their mounts, Ed saying, “We best just head on back to Dodge and send out some men to bury ’em and forget about that goddamn Dirty Dave Rudabaugh for the time being, don’t you think?”
Bat didn’t put up an argument.
Dog Kelly found Bat and Ed drinking in the Lone Star, the frozen rain dripping off their oilskins into puddles at their feet. Dog’s hat was covered in ice. His ears stuck out red as beets. Bad weather meant bad business, and bad business meant empty pockets. As both mayor of Dodge and owner of one of its more respected saloons—the Alhambra—Dog was unhappy.
“I hear you boys found a house full of death out on them prairies,” Dog said.