By the Neck

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  An unexpected bonus in walking in to Main Street early each day had been in finding Nosey Parker making the same trek several days a week. Sometimes Wolfbait would walk along beside the younger man for several minutes before Nosey appeared to notice him.

  Sometimes that kid was numb as a thumb struck by a hammer, but for all that he was a good lad. Heart was in the right spot, and that’s more than Wolfbait felt he could say about a number of folks he’d met in his life. Rollie and Pops, too, were good men. Would have to be, he told himself, elsewise he wouldn’t bother with them. But he craved conversation nearly as much as he did coffee, and he could get a solid cuppa from Rollie and engaging chatter from Pops.

  On this day, Wolfbait had been pleased as always to see the young man sharing the trail.

  “Ease up there, son. I ain’t but half the man I used to be. ’Course, that’s about twice what most men amount to these days.” He chuckled and walked up alongside Nosey Parker, who was busy reading what looked to be a dime novel.

  It was so early that the lavender glow that usually washed over their valley, so called the gulch, had barely begun its show.

  “How can you see a blamed word in that little book you’re reading?”

  “Huh?” Nosey turned. “Oh, Wolfbait, good morning to you. I didn’t hear you sneak up on me.”

  “Sneak up? Boy, any louder and I’d be a cannon. I was saying you’re gonna go blind if you keep up that reading in the dark.”

  Nosey closed his novel and pushed his spectacles back up the bridge of his nose. “I don’t buy into that line of thought. In fact”—he raised a finger and paused in the graveled lane—“I read a treatise some months ago on this very topic. It was fascinating—”

  “Hold it, kid.” Wolfbait held up a hand. “I ain’t got time in my days nor breath enough in my body to listen to treatises. Don’t be offended, but I haven’t had a sip of coffee since I woke about an hour ago. Now, I make no promises, but you find me a cup of hot coffee and I suspect I’ll be more open to listening to this treatise you’re so excited about.”

  Nosey’s frown had barely begun before it was interrupted by a gunshot, then another and another, all from the direction of Main Street, not far ahead in the dim morning light.

  The two men ducked down, and looked at each other. “What do you reckon?” said Wolfbait, whose right hand had slipped down over his service revolver, ancient but in solid working order.

  Nosey was about to speak when Wolfbait slipped a gnarled hand over the younger man’s mouth and jerked his chin toward the trailside where boulders clustered along most of the route. The sound of hooves ahead on the trail’s hard-packed surface told Nosey what Wolfbait had already heard. Someone was coming.

  Not unusual, save for two things. In the course of their morning perambulations, the men had rarely if ever heard or seen a horse and rider out and about that early. And the shots they had heard moments before, coupled with the fact that these were especially tense times to be a Gulcher, given Rollie’s presence, made life in Boar Gulch an increasing worry.

  Trouble was, so much promising sign had been found of late that Boar Gulch was on the cusp of being considered and reported by every chinwagger as the next boomtown in Idaho Territory. With that slowly leaking news came a steady drip of newcomers. Because of Delia Holsapple’s notices in big-city papers about Rollie Finnegan’s whereabouts, the steady drip of newcomers to the gulch was polluted with folks seeking vengeance on the man who’d wronged them somehow in the past. At least that’s the way they saw it.

  The two men could hardly be blamed for rabbiting at the first sign of early-morning trouble. Within moments they would be glad they did.

  Wolfbait and Nosey had scrambled up over one jag of granite and tucked themselves behind its neighbor, a bigger jut half the size of a miner’s one-room cabin. They crouched behind it, peering around the near edge toward the trail. Wolfbait had his revolver out and cranked back. He reached over and patted Nosey’s brown wool coat with his left hand until his fingertips felt something hard by the young man’s chest. He patted it twice and nodded at Nosey, who nodded back.

  Nosey knew what Wolfbait meant. From within the coat he retrieved the two-shot derringer Pops had given him and held it in his right hand, though he was a left-handed writer. In truth, he had no idea which hand to hold the gun in. He’d never been much for the things, but since Rollie Finnegan had come to the Gulch, Nosey had had more than his share of guns and rough play. He had to admit he didn’t hate it.

  The sound of pounding hooves drew closer and then, with no warning, from around the corner ahead a striking Appaloosa galloped into view. Riding it was a swarthy-looking fellow with dark eyes, a dragoon mustache of flowing black, and a sugarloaf crown hat. The impressive man and beast thundered by, then reined to a stop a half-dozen yards back up the trail.

  While the horse blew, the rider muttered something in a thick voice, the words Spanish but too muted for the hidden men to decipher. The man appeared to be looking for something. He kept glancing down the trail toward where it forked, leading up over rock piles, down through ravines, and spidering off to various claims. He craned his neck, peering into the dim morning light, but appeared unsatisfied.

  “Bah!” he finally said, and with twin heel jabs, sunk vicious-looking rowels hard into the heaving horse’s barrel, forcing a grunted snort from the big beast even as it leapt forward, carrying the rider back toward town.

  As the sound of the drumming hooves faded, Nosey said in a whisper, “What do you reckon?” echoing Wolfbait’s question of moments before. Neither man looked at each other but continued to stare at the trail yards before them.

  Wolfbait finally shrugged. “Don’t know, but I bet you a beer it ain’t good.”

  “We have to get to town,” said Nosey, slipping the derringer back into his coat picket.

  “You didn’t cock that thing, did you boy?”

  Nosey patted himself. “No, that is to say I don’t think so.” He pulled it back out and held it, barrel pointed at Wolfbait’s face.

  “Good Lord, son, careful with that thing! I don’t have much but what I do have is among the living. I’d like to keep it that way a while longer.” He peered close at the little gun. “No, you’re good. Put that away. And remind me, when whatever this is is over with, that you need lessons in gun handling.”

  “And shooting,” said Nosey, looking up the trail, suddenly convinced that he was long overdue for what Pops had been trying to talk him into for weeks. Shooting lessons.

  “Yeah, that, too.”

  Nosey began walking, but Wolfbait clamped a horned old hand on his upper arm. “Hold on a minute, son. We best get a plan together before we wander into something we can’t wander out of.”

  Nosey nodded. “You’re right. I was thinking of Rollie and Pops and the others. Something’s going on, and it can’t be good. That fellow looked mean. Like he rode out of the pages of a dime novel and couldn’t wait to kill something.”

  “Or someone,” said Wolfbait, scratching his chin. “Okay, first things first. We’re closer to town than we are to either of our cabins. Like a fool, I left my scattergun at home. And from the looks of you, you don’t have one on you, either.”

  “No.” Nosey shook his head. “Pops told me I should take the one from the bar with me at night, but I forgot. As to strengths, I can run but I can’t shoot all that well. Whereas you, if you’ll permit me saying so, can shoot at marksman caliber. However, your running days, I’m sorry to say, are behind you.”

  A smile cracked Wolfbait’s bearded face. “Boy, if this writing thing doesn’t work out for you, you might want to try your hand at politicking. You got the slick palaver down fine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You delivered the kindest, most roundabout insult I have ever received. I plumb enjoyed it. Yes sir, I did.” Wolfbait nodded his head. “Now, about our predicament. I concur with your assessment of my infirmities.”

  Nosey looked at the o
ld man as if he hadn’t heard him right.

  “Don’t give me that look, kid. You ain’t the only one who can talk fancy. I don’t trot out the dollar words all that often ’cause it ends up costing me money and it makes me tired.”

  “Oh, well, yes, that is to say I . . .” Nosey turned a deeper shade of crimson and rubbed the back of his neck.

  “What I think you’re getting at is that together we make one useful fella. I’ll take that. I expect if we can figure out how to get you to run for us, and me to shoot for us, we’ll come out with a winning hand.”

  “Any thoughts as to how to accomplish this?” Nosey looked at Wolfbait.

  “No, but let’s stick close to the side of the trail as we walk, in case that dime-novel bandit decides to return.”

  The trail they were on branched left, connecting with the north road out of town that in turn became Main Street. The closer they walked, the slower they walked, instinct goading them into caution. They’d heard one more far-off gunshot since resuming their trek, and that had put a lid on their nervous chatter. Wolfbait told Nosey to put his derringer and spare bullets in whichever of his large side coat pockets was best for whichever hand he would consider his gun hand.

  This puzzled Nosey, but he settled on his left, as that was his writing hand. As to spare bullets, he hadn’t thought to bring the box of them that Pops had given him along with the gun. He knew there were two in the gun itself, because he’d watched Pops load them in.

  He did, however, have his used but stalwart two-blade Barlow folder that he had learned as a boy to keep as sharp as he was able. “A sharp knife will never cut you, boy,” his grandfather had told him.

  The notion had puzzled him until the old man had explained that a dull knife will not sink into the matter at hand, but will slide off and into soft flesh of a man’s fingers. But a sharp knife will find purchase in wood or meat or bone and do the job it was invented for, leaving a man’s fingers uncut and fit to flex another day.

  In addition to his service revolver, Wolfbait wore his Green River knife, a midsize, utilitarian skinning and all-around knife that he’d acquired off the atrophied body of a dead man on his journey west forty years before. He’d found the man more by stink than sight, having been curious and as yet unfamiliar with the smell of a greening carcass.

  As soon as he saw the man, he knew two things. Someone had been there before him—the dead man’s person had been rummaged; and he wished he hadn’t been curious. But now that he’d seen the man he felt an obligation to bury him.

  Whoever had gotten there before him had taken the man’s clothes, left him wearing naught but a death’s-head grimace—all sunken eyes, bared teeth and drawn lips—a pinked and critter-chewed set of longhandles, and no boots. Wolfbait, who at that time was going by his original given name of Reginald, wrapped a bandana twice about his mouth and nose and commenced to digging the man a grave right beside the laid-out corpse.

  Since Reginald was on his way west to make his fortune digging for gold, he had a decent shovel strapped to his pack. It came in useful that day. When he’d tipped the dead man up with his gloved hands to flop him into the shallow grave, he noticed a badly puckered leather belt wadded beneath his back.

  He finished laying the man out in the grave and before he covered him over, nudged the knot of belt with a boot toe. The handle of a sheathed knife appeared, partially covered in the gravel beneath the belt. Reg tugged the affair free of the earth, pulled the blade from the sheath, and was pleased to see it was a good, stout, carbon steel blade.

  Payment for my efforts, he thought piously as he set it to the side along with the stiff, puckered leather belt, which he thought might be saved with diligent effort and enough bear grease.

  From that day forward, he’d rarely seen the sun set on a day when he’d not called on the fine blade’s service in its original sheath which hung on its original belt. All this ancient history flitted through his mind as his hand rested on the butt of the knife’s walnut handle.

  However, that was all the inventory of weapons the two men could rely on, at least until they could make it to The Last Drop and the relative security of Rollie and Pops’ arsenal.

  It took them another twenty minutes to get to the end of town behind Chauncey’s mercantile. They hid once more behind boulders and eyed the back of the building, which prevented them from seeing down the length of Main Street.

  “If it weren’t for these things,” said Wolfbait, patting a big hunk of rock with a gnarled old hand, “we’d be dead right now.”

  If Nosey agreed or if he even heard him, he never said. They hunkered there for a few quiet moments, hearing shouts from seemingly all directions throughout the little downtown, random gunshots punctuating them.

  “We can’t hide here!” whispered Nosey without looking at his companion.

  “I agree. I don’t want to sit here doing nothing, either, but until we know what’s waiting for us on the other side of that building, I don’t think it’d be too wise of us to go rampaging in there until we know what’s what.”

  Nosey’s face grew tight and he ground his teeth together. “Fine. In the meantime, our friends could be in danger. You heard those shouts, didn’t you? Those are the shouts of frightened people, not from whoever it is perpetrating the crimes going on here!”

  “While I tend to agree with you, Nosey, we don’t have any proof that crimes are taking place up there.”

  “You have to be joking, Wolfbait. Did you hear those shots? That shouting? Did you see that rogue on the pretty speckled horse?”

  “Appaloosa.”

  “Huh?”

  “The horse,” said Wolfbait. “He was riding an Appaloosa.”

  “Oh, okay. I don’t care. I need to get to the tent, see what Pops and Rollie make of all this.”

  “I think it’s more likely that Rollie’s the reason for whatever this is, don’t you?”

  “All the more reason to get over there. We might be of use to them.”

  Wolfbait sighed and said, “Okay, Nosey. You win. I don’t have strength enough to keep you from running out there and getting yourself shot full of holes. At least wait for me. I think if we cut to the right, kept to the trees, we can get close enough to throw something at the tent, maybe get their attention. But if I know those boys, they won’t stay put. They’ll be more curious than we are to figure out what’s going on.”

  They made it to the corner of Chauncey’s mercantile and peered up the street.

  The first flaw in Wolfbait’s plan happened when they darted across the mouth of the roadway to the right of the mercantile. They made it across the lane and made use of six stacked barrels in differing degrees of rupture, and were about to peer down the long main street when shooting opened up from the slope flanking the east side of the street.

  Smoke clouds drifted up into the morning air from at least four different spots. Their shots seemed to be directed at . . . The Last Drop, from which a number of shots were being lobbed back.

  The boys were pinned down.

  Nosey said, “Oh no.”

  Just then a voice behind them said, “Hey, you!”

  Wolfbait and Nosey turned to see the very man they’d seen earlier, the swarthy Mexican with the impressive mustache and sugarloaf hat. He stood on the bottom step of the three steps that led to the small loading dock out the back door of the mercantile’s storeroom.

  In one hand he held a long-barrel revolver that gleamed along its length, even that early in the day before the sun committed to shining full down on Boar Gulch. In the other hand he held a healthy nub of cured sausage, the muslin wrap hanging down in shreds. His mouth was full, and he was chewing with it open. Even from across the lane, the men could see the masticated mess in his mouth.

  Wolfbait had his own pistol drawn, but because he was angled, it hung, hammer back, at his side, blocked from the Mexican’s view.

  Nosey stood to his side, trying to use the old man’s body to shield his left hand from sli
pping into his coat pocket to retrieve his derringer.

  “Don’t do it, boy,” whispered Wolfbait out the side of his mouth. “Get ready to dive behind that last barrel, then run hell for leather for that pile of wood the mayor says will be a hotel.”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “You got to. Only way to go get more guns from the boys.”

  “I said, ‘Hey, you!’” The Mexican sneered at them through a mouthful of half-chewed meat. He tossed the hunk of uneaten sausage to the dirt, stepped down, and advanced, his gun held up, the snout aimed in their direction.

  “We heard you, you oaf!” Wolfbait bared his teeth as if he were an old, bearded dog.

  “What are you doing?” whispered Nosey, trying to figure out how to loop an arm around the old man’s neck without breaking it, then dragging him backward behind the barrels. He guessed the Mexican would likely get off three or four shots in the time it would take him to do that.

  “Trust me,” said Wolfbait. “I’m calling him out. He’ll respond. Because he’s an oaf.”

  “I think you made that fact plain,” said Nosey.

  “What did you call me, mister?” As the Mexican said it, he stepped closer, his large yellow horse teeth showing beneath his big mustache. “I think you are going to die, old man.”

  “When I say so, you tuck low and scamper!” whispered Wolfbait to Nosey. To the Mexican he said, “Would you like me to tell you how many men have told me that?”

  The swarthy man advanced another three feet and stood in the middle of the lane, about twenty feet from Nosey and Wolfbait. He thumbed back the hammer of his gun and kept walking toward them, slow and steady.

  “Yeah, go ahead, old man. Tell me.”

  Wolfbait pooched out his lower lip, barely visible buried beneath the curly hairs of the wiry beard growing around his mouth. “Oh . . . let’s see. What day is it today?”

  That did what Wolfbait had hoped it would.

  The Mexican’s eyebrows rose. “Huh?” he said, unnerved for the brief moment the old man needed.