Blood at Bear Lake

by Gary Franklin

  “You ever take in a fur trapper’s rendezvous?” Joe asked.

  “No, sir, I can’t say that I have. Why?”

  “Because you learn to sleep through plenty of noise at those things. It’s only when some son of a bitch is tryin’ to sneak up on me all quiet that I come awake. But noise, that don’t bother me none.”

  “Then pick a spot up there and welcome.”

  “Thank you, friend. I’m beholden.”

  Joe stripped his saddle off the Palouse and turned it into the stall, where it promptly dropped to its knees and rolled, squirming in the dry straw. He dipped water from a trough behind the barn and filled a pail that he found in the stall. A small bunk in one corner of the stall was already full of good-quality grass hay—Joe pulled out a handful and smelled it to be sure. Then he gave the horse a half gallon of oats from a bin beside the tack room. While the animal ate, he scrubbed its back with a curry comb and completed the grooming with a soft dandybrush. When finally he was done settling the horse in for its rest, Joe gratefully climbed the ladder into the cavernous loft overhead.

  The loft had hay piled on one side of the trapdoor, and straw on the other. Joe went to the far back end of the barn and stretched out on top of a pile of soft, sweet-smelling hay.

  He was asleep practically before he had time enough to close his eyes.

  “You Yankee son of a bitch!”

  Joe woke to the sounds of scuffling feet and the thud of fists on flesh. He heard grunts of pain and the crash of breakingwood. It sounded like rendezvous all over again as he sat bold upright, tomahawk in hand to defend himself if need be.

  The noise was coming from the barn floor below. There was no threat to him.

  Someone, though, was getting the shit beaten out of him. The noises continued for several minutes, thumping and banging and muttered curses.

  Whoever it was down there, this was not Joe’s fight and he had no inclination to step in. Besides, he was not done sleeping.

  Satisfied that no one was interested in his scalp, he returned the tomahawk to his sash, rolled over on his side, and prepared to go back to sleep.

  “You can stop now,” a different voice said. “I think you kil’t him.”

  “Old bastard,” another answered. “Serves him right.”

  “C’mon. Let’s get outa here before someone sees us. No, dammit, not that way. We’ll go out the back. Far as anybody knows, we ain’t been here today.” There was a slight pause, then, “Are you about damn done? I don’t wanta be here when somebody comes.”

  “I’m done. Let’s go.”

  Joe listened closely, wide awake now. The footsteps, like the voices, were those of two men. There was nothing distinctive about the footsteps, as there would have been had one of the men been the friendly hostler, but he would remember those voices.

  Sure of what he would find even before he got down there, he went down the ladder to the floor beneath. The hostler lay slumped against the tack room wall. A pitchfork lay close by. The man’s head was oddly shaped, the skull obviously crushed, probably by a heavy wooden bucket that lay in a corner several feet away from the body. The hostler’s pockets were turned inside out.

  That pissed Joe off. It was one thing to kill a man. Hell, he had killed plenty enough himself, some of them for reasons that others might not think justified. But petty theft to him was not a justifiable cause to kill.

  He did not bother going over to touch the hostler or see if he was still breathing. He was not. Not with a head that looked like that. The eye on the good side of his face had popped halfway out of its socket, and was sightlessly staring toward the hayloft where Joe had just been. There was blood seeping out of the one ear that Joe could see, and a little from his nose and mouth as well.

  The flies that can always be found around barns had abandoned the manure pile and were beginning to swarm to the corpse.

  “Sorry, fellow,” Joe said softly.

  8

  “YOU! WHAT ARE you doing there?”

  Joe turned to see who was shouting. It was a large man wearing sleeve garters and a derby hat. When he saw Joe looking at him, his voice rose into a shriek. “Help! Help! Murder! Help!”

  Joe tried to walk outside and ask where he could find the local law so he could report this to somebody, but the man in the derby screamed again and fled before Joe could open his mouth to speak.

  There were perhaps half-a-dozen people in view, and all the running and screaming certainly had their attention. Several of them started toward the livery, and within moments there were more citizens poking their heads out of windows and through doorways looking to see what the commotion was all about.

  “He killed Sam. He killed Sam. That man. He done it. I seen him standing over the body. He done it,” the excitable fellow in the derby yelped.

  “Now just hold on here a minute,” Joe said soothingly to the first of the townspeople to arrive on the scene. “Don’t get yourselves all het up here. I ain’t done nothing for you t’ be excited about.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said a tall, slender man wearing an apron. “Just don’t be thinking you can get away. Just . . . just stand right there and don’t move.”

  “I was just trying to . . .”

  “Shut up, you piece of shit!” another man snarled.

  Joe bristled at the son of a bitch’s tone of voice as much as the language he used. “You got no call t’ talk to me like that, damn you. Take it back or I’m like to bust your skull open.”

  It was, under the circumstances, a poor choice of words. He realized that—and regretted it—virtually as soon as the words left his tongue. Too late to call them back, though.

  “Like you busted Sam’s skull, is that it?”

  People were crowding near now. Surrounding Joe. Staring at the hostler, whose named seemed to have been Sam something. Pressing closer and closer around Joe.

  Had the Palouse been saddled, he would have made a break for it and tried to explain the truth afterward.

  There were too many in the crowd now to fight.

  Or anyway, too many for him to have a hope of winning a fight.

  On the other hand, long odds had never stopped him before.

  These town gents with their town ways might take him down—more than a few of them had guns in their hands— but they would not take him easy.

  Joe balled his powerful hands into fists, raised his face to the sky, and let out a bloodcurdling savage war cry.

  The crowd parted before him.

  Joe felt a moment of relief. Then another of puzzlement. Why would they—?

  Then he saw.

  A big man—a big man who happened to be wearing a star on his chest—was approaching. The man with the star held a double-barreled shotgun in his fists. It was for him that the crowd was melting back.

  Not that Joe blamed them. He would gladly have gotten the hell out of the way of that scattergun, too, if he could. If the tubes of the damn thing didn’t of a sudden swing right on line with his belly. If those twin hammers hadn’t been eared back to what looked like full cock.

  Joe Moss was willing to enter a fray with anybody or anything, either man or beast. But he would for damned sure rather not go up against a shotgun, thank you very much.

  “I’m mighty glad you showed up here,” Joe said as the lawman reached him. “There’s been murder committed here, and I was wantin’ to tell you about it.”

  The lawman grunted and glanced past Joe to the body that lay on the barn floor behind him.

  Without warning, the butt end of the shotgun flashed around and connected with the side of Joe’s head.

  He heard a dull sound like a watermelon being dropped from a great height. For one brief instant, he had the sensation that he was falling, and then the world went suddenly dark.

  9

  “LORDY, MY HEAD hurts.” Joe sat up. His head was pounding, throbbing in bumps and waves in time with his heartbeat. He felt worse than after a two-week-long drunk, an experience that
he had come to know rather well in his rowdy youth.

  “It ought to,” a voice answered. “It was our blacksmith that clouted you. I deputized him to help bring you in peaceable. It worked, too. He laid you out right proper. There was a time when I wasn’t at all sure you was gonna wake up again.”

  “What’d the son of a bitch hit me with? One of his hammers?”

  “If he’d done that, he would have killed you sure. The butt of his shotgun was enough, but like Samson he did smite you a mighty blow.”

  “Remind me not to get in no fights with that man,” Joe said. He blinked, having to struggle for a moment to convince his eyes that they should focus.

  He was seated on the side of a steel platform that served as a bunk. There was no mattress, no pillow, no comforts. Between him and the man with the badge on his chest was a rank of floor-to-ceiling iron bars. The floor was paved with stone. But the walls were wood—sawed lumber, not logs—and there was a window. If it came to that, if these sons of bitches thought they were going to hang him or anything like that, Joe was fairly confident that he could get out. Eventually.

  “Who are you?” he asked, careful not to move his head much when he spoke. This man with a star on his chest was not the same one he was starting to remember from before he was hit. That fellow had been burly and had a bushy beard. This one was slender, with a look of quickness and wiry strength. He was a little long in the tooth, though, for someone in the badge-packing business. Probably in his sixties, judging from his white, thinning hair and weathered features. He was clean-shaven except for a huge, carefully waxed and trimmed, snowy white mustache.

  “My name is Tolbert Wilcox. I’m the town marshal.”

  “Your friends call you Bert?”

  “It doesn’t matter what my friends call me. You aren’t one of them. You can call me Marshal Wilcox.”

  “Yes, sir.” Joe took a deep breath and closed his eyes. To make him feel better, he imagined the sound of Marshal Wilcox’s scalp ripping away from his head. It might be a pleasure to lift that hank of hair, he thought. And yes, the thought did make him feel better.

  Joe smiled and opened his eyes. “I been out long?”

  “Long enough. You slept the whole night through.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Joe said.

  “You may well be. That is between you and the Lord. Do you want to see a preacher or a priest?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Joe said.

  “I know the way you meant it, but the offer stands. If you want comfort, let me know. I’ll have someone come in and read to you. Would you like a Bible? I allow the Good Book in my cells. Not much of anything else, though.”

  “Why am I here?” Then he remembered. The hostler at that livery. They thought he killed that man. “Hey, I’m innocent,” Joe protested.

  “In the eyes of the Lord we all are,” Wilcox said, “but you are being judged by man.”

  “Judged? I didn’ see much in the way o’ judging out there. Those bastards woulda strung me up like a piñata an’ laughed while I strangled.”

  “You will be judged in a duly constituted court of law. I will see to that. Then you will be hanged,” Wilcox said. His smile held no mirth. “And if I have anything to do about it, the knot will come up behind your head and not beside it. Instead of your neck breaking to give you a quick end, you will indeed strangle slowly while you dance and gurgle. You see, Sam Farnsworth was a friend of mine and a deacon in our church.”

  “Farnsworth,” Joe repeated. “That’d be the fella at the livery?”

  “That’s right, and a better man there never has been.”

  “Funny thing,” Joe said. “I’ve noticed it time an’ again. A man dies an’ suddenly he’s a saint. Might be a son of a bitch while he’s alive, but soon as he goes belly-up, he’s nigh onto bein’ perfect.”

  “Sam was no sinner. He was a good man.”

  “Well, I got to admit,” Joe said, “he was nice to me.”

  “Yet you killed him for the meager few dollars he had in his pockets.”

  “Is that what you figure happened?”

  “Of course. I saw the body, you know. You turned his pockets inside out and took whatever you found there. It could not have been much. Sam was not a wealthy man. Not in world terms, he was not.”

  “I seen the body,” Joe agreed, “but I never touched him.” He reached into his britches and turned his own pockets inside out. They were empty, of course. Taking everything out of them would be standard procedure. At least, it had been in every other jail Joe had ever been in. “You took my stuff. Did you find any small change when you did?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, think about it. A man running a business like that livery. What kinda money is he most likely to collect? Coins, right? Small change. Nickels, dimes, mostly quarters. D’you have a bank here in town?”

  “What a strange question.”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Have a bank? Yes. Of course we do.”

  “Ask the banker about this Sam fella’s deposits. I bet he mostly came in with small change, maybe to turn in for currency or gold coin, but nobody likes t’ walk around weighed down by ten pounds o’ metal dragging at his pockets. An’ there’s not many customers will be paying a ten-cent bill with folding money. A livery deals mostly in small coin.”

  “I don’t understand your point,” the marshal said.

  “My point is that you will not have found any such on me. You seem t’ think I killed that man so I could rob him o’ the few dollars he had on him. If that’s so, where’s them coins now? You didn’t find more’n a couple small coins on me an’ some gold coin an’ currency. If I robbed that man, what d’you say I done with all his money?”

  “You hid it perhaps.”

  Joe stood, his head aching all the more when he did so, and crossed the small cell to the bars that separated him from Wilcox. “Those folk thought they walked in on me in the commission of my crime. They thought I just done the killing. If that was so an’ I intended to slip away before I was caught, I wouldn’t of had time enough to hide all them coins. Nor, for that matter, no reason to. Remember, you’re saying I was about to sneak off. If I done that, I surely woulda taken my loot with me. Fine. So where the fuck is it?” Joe demanded, his voice rising. “Did you find it on me? In my possibles bag? In my saddlebags? In my bedroll?”

  “I haven’t, uh . . .”

  “You haven’t looked in those? Haven’t even looked?”

  “Well, um . . .”

  “You haven’t. All right. Fine. Go look. Go through everything. You did bring it all in here when you brought me in, didn’t you? So go take a look through it, then come back an’ tell me what you found.”

  For the first time since Joe woke, Wilcox looked troubled. “I don’t think . . .”

  Whatever he intended to say, he changed his mind. He said nothing.

  The marshal clamped his jaw shut, turned around, and left the cell area, closing a stout wooden door behind him.

  10

  JOE LOOKED UP at the sound of the door hinges creaking open. He had been sitting on the hard bunk—it was the only place in the cell where he could sit—trying to be patient.

  It was a funny thing about that. When it came to waiting beside a game trail or waiting to ambush some son of a bitch who wanted to take his hair, Joe had the patience of a bronze statue. Yet when he was forced to deal with mental midgets like town folk, he had trouble forcing himself to hold still more than a few minutes at a time. Right now he wanted to rip the bars off this cell and hit somebody with them. Instead, he sat. And fumed.

  Then the door opened and the marshal . . .

  Damn! No Marshal Wilcox. Instead, it was a gray-haired, scrawny woman who came in, carrying a tray in one hand and both a key ring and a pewter pitcher in the other.

  Joe immediately rose and tried to remove his hat, then remembered too late that he was not wearing one at the moment. “Ma’am.” He nodded a gre
eting.

  “Tolbert asked me to bring this to you. He would have brought it himself except he is meeting with the town council now.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Joe was not sure just why he was supposed to care about that. But whatever the woman had underneath the dish towel that covered her tray surely did smell good. It got his mouth to watering.

  “Wait just a minute while I get the door unlocked. The tray won’t fit through unless I open it.”

  “Yes’m.”

  The lady was in the cell area by herself, and by her own admission the marshal was nowhere near. She did not appear to be armed. If Joe wanted to break out, it would take only one backhanded blow to very likely break her neck.

  But then, dammit, Joe was not much in favor of killing women. Not without provocation anyway. And this lady was smiling and fumbling with the tray, trying to balance it with one hand while she tried to manipulate the keys with the other. She scraped at the lock a little, but accomplished nothing except to spill a little coffee out of the pitcher she held in that same hand.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  “Yes, please.” And—incredibly—when he reached through the bars, she handed him not the tray, as he expected, but the key ring. “Can you reach through and unlock that for me, please?”

  He did so easily enough, then stepped back and swung the door open.

  “Thank you.” She came in and carefully set the tray on the foot of the bunk, turning her back to Joe when she did so. He still had the jail keys in his hand. “There,” she said when she straightened upright. “If there is anything else you need, call out. My name is Christine, by the way. I’m the marshal’s wife.”

  “Pleased t’ meet you, Miz Wilcox.” Joe bobbed his head.

  “Likewise, Mr. Moss.” She smiled, then gathered her skirts. “I will leave you alone now so you can enjoy your dinner in peace.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

  Christine started for the cell door, but Joe stopped her, saying, “You might want t’ take these with you, ma’am.” He held out the key ring.