A Century of Great Western Stories

by A Century of Great Western Stories (retail) (epub)

  Wargo’s nickel-plated revolver hung at his right hip, and his right hand was inches from it. He said, “You in this, Sheriff?”

  “I’m in it.”

  “Too bad,” Wargo murmured. “All right, then—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence; his gun came curling up.

  Paradise whipped his Colt forward; as it settled in his grasp he heard the sharp crack of Wargo’s revolver: The little gunman was fast, amazingly fast. The fist-sized blow of the bullet smashed Paradise half around in his tracks. He didn’t know exactly where he was hit, didn’t have time to care; he was still on his feet and as he turned his gun back toward target, he heard a mushroom roar of sound from his left.

  The old sheriff was fast, too: That was his gun roaring. Morgan’s bullet punched a hole in the front of Ernie Crouch’s shirt. Dust puffed up. Crouch hardly stirred. He had guns in both hands, rising, but Paradise had no time for that; all in the space of this tiny split second, Wargo was cocking his gun for another shot, taking his deliberate time about it.

  Paradise fired.

  In slack-jawed disbelief, Doc Wargo shuddered back. His body went loose, and he fell down and began to curl up like a piece of bacon in a hot frying pan.

  Morgan’s gun was booming methodically, and every shot found a place in his ample target; but none of it seemed to trouble Ernie Crouch. Both guns lifted irrevocably in his ham fists and both guns went off, once each, before Crouch finally tilted like an axed redwood tree and crashed to the earth with a blow that seemed to shake the town.

  The stink of powder smoke was acrid in Paradise’s nostrils. He had only fired one shot; the wind drifted Morgan’s smoke past his face. He looked down at himself and saw the long ugly bleeding slice, curving around his ribs, and he thought, If the damn fool had used something bigger than that .38, he’d have killed me with that bullet. The slug had been deflected by his rib.

  Wargo was dead and Crouch was down, evidently dying, coughing blood into the street. Five bullets in his chest, Crouch still found the energy to yank back his trigger and pour lead into the street. Then, finally, the guns were stilled.

  Paradise turned to look for Morgan.

  The sheriff was walking backward with slow little steps. He swayed back against the wall and came away, leaving behind a red smear; he eyed Paradise petulantly and sat down, clumsy.

  Paradise ran to him. Morgan looked up and said, “I guess that’s all.”

  “You’ll be all right, Sheriff.”

  “Not with two slugs in my lungs. So long Paradise. Like I said,” he grinned weakly, “the kind of son-in-law I always wanted.” He passed out, and Paradise knew he would never awaken.

  The crowd was gathering, gingerly coming closer, gathering boldness. When he looked up the street he saw the two slim women there, and he knew they had seen the whole thing. They walked forward now, breaking into a skirt-flying run.

  Paradise put his gun away in the holster and waited for them. They knelt over Morgan, and Paradise said, “I tolled him into this. It was my fault. If it didn’t sound hollow, I’d say I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Mrs. Morgan told him. “Don’t ever be sorry. He’s all right now. Nothing can hurt him any more.”

  Terry’s tears were glistening in the dawn light. Paradise lifted her by the shoulders and walked away with his arm around her. There was nothing that needed saying. She pulled his arm down off her shoulders and grasped him by the hand, and turned against him; he held her close and said, “Cry it out.”

  She said, “He died well?”

  “Yes.”

  She reached up and pulled his shaggy red head down. Her cheeks were wet. He held her silently while the sun came up.

  Ed Gorman is a Midwesterner, born in Iowa in 1941; growing up in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Marion, Iowa; and finally settling down in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. While primarily a suspense novelist, he was written half a dozen Western novels and published a collection of Western stories. His novel Wolf Moon was a Spur nominee for Best Paperback Original. About his Western novels, Publisher’s Weekly said, “Gorman writes Westerns for grown-ups,” which the author says he took as a high compliment, and was indeed his goal in writing his books.

  Wolf Moon

  Ed Gorman

  The wolves lived on a perch high in the mountains so that the leader of the pack could see anything that threatened his mate or their pups. Behind the perch was a cave that served as a den. It was a shared responsibility to bring their pups food. It was not easy. The land was filled with two-legs and their guns. That was why they lived so high up, near where the jagged peaks touched the clouds.

  Of course, the wolf knew that man was a devious foe. He did not always show himself when he meant to destroy the wolves.

  The leader remembered last spring, when four of the pups had wandered off to hunt and had found for themselves a piece of buffalo meat that a rancher had poisoned with strychnine. The pups had died long and terrible deaths cuddled up against the belly of their mother, while she cried for hours into the dark and indifferent night.

  Only one pup had lived, and about this last son the leader and his wife were protective to the point of mania. When the pup slept, the leader sat just outside the den, so that nobody could get inside without killing him first. When the pup accompanied the mother on a small hunt, she never once let him stray, despite the wolf ritual of letting the pups wander off and find their own food.

  By the time he was six months, and by the time the white and bitter snows came, the pup stood thirty inches high at the shoulder and measured six feet from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail. An Indian boy with a white man’s lasso managed to get the rope over the pup’s neck one day but, incredibly, the pup’s powerful jaws cleaved the rope with a single bite. The Indian boy ran off, convinced he had encountered a dire and supernatural being.

  By the summer, leader and mate began giving their huge and eager pup a little more freedom.

  Because of this, the pup was drinking from a winding mountain stream the day he heard the shots from up on the ledge where the den was.

  In fear and rage the pup made his way quickly up the shifting rocks of the mountain.

  He saw his mother lying dead, her head exploded from several bullets, her limp body hanging over the edge of a promontory.

  At this same moment, his father was being held up by his rear paws and a shaggy and filthy man was gutting him with a bowie knife.

  The shaggy man saw the pup. “Schroeder, look at that pup!”

  For the first time, the pup set eyes on the sleek and handsome human named Schroeder. He was everything the other man was not—well-attired in fancy hunting clothes, well-spoken, composed and radiating a self-confidence that was almost oppressive.

  Schroeder turned now and beheld the pup. His face showed true awe as he studied the imposing animal. He said, simply, “I don’t care how long it takes you, Greenleaf. I want that pup. Do you understand me?”

  And so the hunt began.

  It took the wolfer known as Greenleaf four days, but finally with the help of two Indian trackers, he captured the pup and turned him over to Schroeder. His reward was $1,000 cash and a night in a Denver whorehouse with a former slave girl named (by her madam) Esmerelda.

  Schroeder never saw Greenleaf again and didn’t care. He had the pup. And he had his very special plans for the pup.

  Part I

  The first thing I did after leaving the saloon was find an alley and throw up. We’d been two hard days riding and I still hadn’t gotten over the killing yet. I had never robbed a bank before, and I had certainly never seen a man die before, either, especially one of my own brothers. The man named Schroeder had killed him without hesitation or mercy.

  So tonight I’d had too much to drink, trying to forget how I’d been changed from eighteen-year-old farm boy to bank robber in the course of forty-eight hours. And trying to forget how Glen had looked dying there by the side of the road when we were dividing the money with Schr
oeder.

  After I finished in the alley, I went back to the dusty street. The water wagon had worked most of the afternoon, but by now, near midnight, the dust rose like ghosts from the grave. The eighty-degree temperature didn’t make things any more pleasant, either.

  The sleeping room Don and I rented was over the livery stable. The owner had built two small rooms up there and put in cots and a can to piss in and fancied himself in the hotel business. He wanted Yankee cash up front and he wanted a promise not to smoke in bed. All the hay in the stalls below would go up like tinder, he said. We wouldn’t have put up with his rules, Don and I, but there were no other rooms to be had.

  The livery was dark. You could hear the horses talking to themselves in their sleep. The windless air was sweet and suffocating with the aroma of their shit.

  I took the outside stairs leading up to the sleeping rooms. Halfway up I heard the moan. I stopped, just standing there, feeling my stomach and bowels do terrible things. Despite the fact that I looked like a big, jovial, sunbaked farm boy, I was given to nerves and the stomach of an old man.

  I eased my .45 from my holster.

  I’d recognized the moan as belonging to my older brother, Don. You don’t grow up with somebody and not know all the sounds he makes.

  The night sky was black and starry. The animals below were still jibbering and snorting as they slept. The saloon music was distant now, and lonely in the hot night air.

  I started climbing the stairs on tiptoes.

  When I got to the landing, I found the door leading to the hall was ajar. I eased it open, gripping my gun tighter.

  The shadows were so deep I had the momentary sense of going blind.

  He moaned again, Don did, behind the door down the hall and to the right.

  I tiptoed over, put my hand on the knob, and gave it an inward push.

  You could smell the dying on him. The blood and the seeping poisons.

  In the pale light of the moon-facing window he lay on his cot as if the undertaker had already done him up. He lay unmoving with his hands folded primly on his belly and his raw, naked feet arranged precisely side by side, sticking straight up in a way that was almost funny.

  Then I got foolish, because he was my brother and all, and because my other brother had passed on less than forty-eight hours ago.

  I went straight into the room without considering that somebody might be behind the door.

  Don moaned just as I reached his cot. I could see the wounds now, deep knife slashes across his neck and chest and arms. At least, I thought they were knife slashes.

  The growl came up from the gravelike darkness behind the door. Hearing it, Don made a whimpering dying-animal noise that scared me because I knew he had only minutes to go.

  I turned toward the growl and there they stood—a handsome, trim man in a dark suit much too hot for this kind of summer night, and a timber wolf so big and well-muscled he had to go at least one hundred eighty pounds. But size wasn’t the only thing that made the lobo remarkable. His coat glowed silver—there was no other way to think of it except glowing—and his eyes glowed yellow, the color of a midnight moon.

  The animal I’d never seen before. The man was plenty familiar. He was Schroeder, the man who’d hired us to rob the bank he was part owner of. Afterward we were supposed to split the money four ways—three for us brothers, one for Schroeder. But he’d double-crossed us, killing Glen in the process. But we’d been suspicious of Schroeder and had stashed the money under the foundation of a little white country church. It had taken Schroeder a day and a half to figure out that we’d double-crossed him right back.

  Now he was here to get the rest of the money.

  He used a few Indian words I didn’t understand. And then the lobo, growling again, sprang.

  He went right for my gun hand, teeth tearing into my wrist, knocking my gun to the floor before I could possibly fire a shot.

  The lobo then did to me what he’d done to my brother, whose wounds I now knew had been caused by teeth, not a knife.

  He came for me then. He was so well-trained he didn’t even make much noise. He just worked his slashing teeth and ripping claws over my face and chest and belly.

  I wasn’t awake long, of course, not with all the pain, not with all the blood.

  There was just the lobo, that glowing lunging body, and those haunted glowing eyes …

  For a time all I could hear was my own screaming. Then I couldn’t hear much of anything at all.

  Part 2

  Three months later, a judge named Emmanuel Byers sentenced me to twelve years in territorial prison for my part in the bank robbery.

  You hear a lot of stories about prison, and most of them, unfortunately, are true. I was put in a steel five-by-seven cell on the south wing. There were two canvas hammocks for sleeping and one chair for sitting. If you took instruction in reading and writing, as I did, you were allowed to keep a book in your cell. I learned to read and write so well that a lady reporter came out one time and wrote a piece about me. She was especially impressed with the fact that I could recite whole chunks of Shakespeare from memory.

  Most of the time I did what most prisoners did. I worked at the quarry. The owner paid the warden eighty cents a day per man. The warden, it was said, paid forty cents to the territorial government and kept the rest for himself. This was in the summer. In the winter I worked on the river, cutting and storing ice for the Union Pacific Railroad. The warden had a cousin who was some kind of railroad vice-president, and the cousin was said to pay plenty for us men, with the warden and himself dividing the spoils.

  The first man I bunked with was an Indian who had stabbed to death a man he insisted was a Negro. His lawyer eventually got an old Negro woman to swear that the dead man had been colored, which saved the Indian’s life. The judge, learning that the victim was only one more shabby black man, called off the Indian’s scheduled execution and let him go free after six months.

  During all this time, I wrote letters to Gillian, a young woman I’d known my last two years on the farm. Her father had run the general store. She’d been my partner at harvest moon dances and on the sledding hills near Christmas. I loved her, though I’d never been able to quite say that out loud, and she loved me, a sentiment she expressed frequently. The first three or four times I’d written her, she hadn’t responded. I imagined she was still upset over the fact that the man she loved was a bank robber, though as I pointed out in those letters, it was Don and Glen who’d been the robbers, I’d just sort of gone along this one time to see what it was like. Also to their credit, as I noted in those same letters, nobody had ever been killed or even shot during any of their robberies. Eventually she started writing back, though she admitted that she had to be careful her father didn’t find out. He was a typical townsman in his belief that criminals of any stripe should be hanged and utterly forgotten.

  About seven months into my sentence, I got a letter from Gillian with a new address. She said her father had found out about her writing me and had demanded that she stop. She’d refused. And so she was now living in the mountains in a gold-mining town where, after a few weeks, she’d met a dandy named Reeves, a man who reminded her an awful lot of Schroeder, at least as I’d described him. One day this Reeves got his photograph in the local paper. He’d just become co-owner of the town’s largest bank. The other owner was a retiring Yankee major named Styles. This Reeves fellow would run everything from now on. The photograph showed that Gillian had good instincts. It was Schroeder himself, back in the banking business under a new name and in a new town. I wondered how long it would take him to arrange a robbery of his new bank.

  ONE DAY AT the quarry a fierce murderer named Maples, a man nobody troubled, not even the guards, started making fun of a fifteen-year-old boy who was serving time for killing his father. The boy was pretty and slender as a girl. It was whispered that Maples was sweet on the boy but that the boy wouldn’t oblige him in any way. This day at the quarry Maples suddenly
went crazy. For no reason that anybody could see, he grabbed the boy and hurled him into the water. Then Maples, still crazed and angrier than anybody had seen him, ran down into the water himself and grabbed the boy, who was just now getting up, and held the boy down under the water till he drowned. Several times the boy surfaced, screaming and puking, but Maples just kept holding his head under until the deed was done. I started down into the water, but an old con who’d always looked out for me grabbed my arm and whispered, “Maples’ll just kill you next, kid, if ’n you go down there.” And I knew he was right. And so I just stood there like all the other men in that hot dusty quarry and watched one man kill another.

  My fourth year there tuberculosis walked up and down the cell blocks. More than two hundred men died in four months.

  In all my time inside I had only one fight, when a new man, trying to impress everybody, made fun of my face, how it was all scarred up from the wolf that time. I don’t know why it bothered me so much, but it did and I damned near killed him with my fists. For that I got what the guards called a “shower bath,” which meant stripping me naked and directing a stream of high-pressure water from a hose to my face, chest, and crotch. When you fell down, they kept spraying away, till your balls were numb and your nose and mouth ran with blood. I was so sick with diarrhea afterward, I lost twenty pounds in the next week and a half.

  In a way, even though I’d been angry when the warden told me I couldn’t grow a beard, I was grateful for how scarred my face was. Sure, people looked away when they first saw me—I was a monster now, not a human being—but my appearance always reminded me of why, lying there in the doc’s office right after the white wolf attacked me—why, despite the physical pain from the bites and slashes, and the mental pain of having seen both my brothers die—why I wanted to go on living.

  I wanted to repay Schroeder for how he’d betrayed us. That was my one reason for existing.

  Parole was not a major event. Early in the morning of a certain day, a guard took me forward to the warden’s office, where I received ten dollars, a suggestion that I read every day the Bible the warden had just handed me, and a plea to stay away from bad people like myself. When you wait so many years for something you expect to feel exuberant. I didn’t feel much of anything at all. I just wanted to see Gillian and hear more about Schroeder.