The Smoking Iron

by Brett Halliday

  “I don’t want any man killed. Not on my ranch.” She avoided his eyes.

  He said, “That’s no good reason for me hidin’ here,” turned and started away.

  “Wait,” Katie cried wretchedly. He turned and surprised tears in her eyes. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “Isn’t it enough that I’m begging you not to go out there to face him?”

  Dusty said, “I reckon it is.” His voice was humble. He dropped into one of the chairs at the table. “I won’t make any more bother.”

  There was a loud knocking on the front door. They could hear Juana waddling down the hall to answer it. Katie said breathlessly, “Stay right here and be quiet.” She sped out of the room, closing the door softly behind her.

  Dusty got out his cigarette papers and carefully creased one. He poured tobacco into the crease and his fingers tore the paper as he tried to roll it. He could hear the faint sound of voices in the front of the house. He tried hard not to listen. He went to work on another cigarette paper and tore that one also, then gave it up. He could still hear the voices out front.

  He broke a biscuit and buttered it. He forced himself to eat it slowly, wiping out the last traces of honey in his plate.

  He wouldn’t let himself think about Lon Boxley. He had promised Katie that he would remain quiet and let her handle the man.

  The sound of voices stopped after a time. He waited to hear the hoofbeats of Boxley’s horse going away. But there was only silence.

  He rolled a cigarette without mutilating the paper, and lit it. He smoked it very slowly, savoring the smoke and making the cigarette last.

  Waiting became intolerable. But he had promised Katie. He strained his ears for some indication of what was taking place beyond the closed door, but could not hear a sound.

  He smoked the cigarette down to a tiny nubbin that burned his fingertips, and then dropped it in his coffee cup. He hadn’t heard Boxley ride away. And certainly Katie would come to tell him as soon as the man left. No. The neighboring rancher must still be here at the K T.

  He cursed himself for having promised her and then grew angry at Katie for making him promise. What had her last remark meant? When she asked him if it wasn’t enough that she was begging him not to go out.

  At that moment, he had thought … Hell! He didn’t know what he had thought. The sight of tears in her eyes had unnerved him temporarily.

  He rolled another cigarette. He smoked this one swiftly, taking long nervous drags on it and pulling the smoke deep into his lungs. He knew he couldn’t sit still much longer. No man could. Not without knowing what was going on.

  He jerked around and came half out of the chair when he heard the door open. He saw the fat body of Juana instead of the girl he expected to see.

  The Mexican woman was beaming placidly. She came to the table and started to stack up the dishes. Dusty asked her, “Where’s Miss Katie? And her company?”

  Juana looked at him in surprise and rounded her eyes. “She is go with Señor Boxley. She is not tell you, no?”

  Dusty said, “No.” His voice sounded far-away in his own ears. There was a queer drumming in his head. He pushed his chair back carefully and got up. He said gruffly, “Thanks for a good dinner,” and then stalked out.

  He went around to the front of the house and saw that Boxley’s horse was gone. There was no indication of life around the outside of the ranch or the outbuildings.

  He walked stiffly toward the barn. The only way was not to do any thinking. Just keep yore mind a blank, you damned fool. A man didn’t have to think if he willed his mind to be a blank. He’d be all right as long as he didn’t think.

  As he neared the barn, Miguel came out to meet him, leading a saddled black horse. The old Mexican looked troubled and his voice was deep with sadness as he explained, “Mees Katie ees tal me you weel not to stay. I am saddle thees horse for you to ride. She ees tal me to say Boracho ees yonder, señor.” He gestured vaguely toward the Rio Grande.

  Dusty nodded curtly. “You saddled a hawse for her, I reckon?”

  “Sí señor. She ees ride weeth the Señor Boxley.” Miguel turned his head to spit on the ground. He extended the bridle reins to Dusty.

  Dusty took the reins and threw one over the black’s neck. He tested the stirrups and found them about the right length, swung into the saddle. He nodded good-by to Miguel and reined the black around in the indicated direction of Boracho, cesspool of the Big Bend, gathering place of fugitives and outlaws of all races.

  He put the black to a lope and rode away from the K T ranch without looking back.

  10

  In the Lone Star Hotel in Marfa, Pat Stevens grinned at Ezra with irritating calm when the big, one-eyed man grumbled about this newest complication after being told the sheriff was dead with a bullet in his back.

  “A man’d think you didn’t like messes,” Pat told him.

  “You know I never minded trouble. Not if it got us anywhere,” Ezra panted loudly, tugging on his boot. “But I don’t hanker after this bein’ cooped up on the top floor of a hotel helpin’ a murderer git away jest for the plumb hell of it.”

  A heavy voice shouted up the stairway from below, “Better throw your gun down here and foller it with your hands up in the air. We’re campin’ right here till you do come down.”

  “There y’are,” Ezra said witheringly. “Dusty’s gone out the winder an’ we’re still here.”

  “But everybody knows we didn’t kill the sheriff. We’ve been right here in our room all the time.”

  “Fat lot of good that’ll do us. You fixed it for Dusty to skin out … an’ we’re left. Obstructin’ justice, that’s what we been doin’. Yessir.” Ezra waggled his shaggy head mournfully and repeated the words as though they pleased him. “Obstructin’ justice. An’ you a sheriff. You had orta be plumb ashamed of yoreself, Pat.”

  “I ain’t so sure we’ve been obstructin’ justice. Dusty says he didn’t kill the sheriff.”

  “Does, huh? Then why’re they after him an’ what’d he run out for?”

  Soberly, Pat explained the circumstances of the sheriff’s death to Ezra. “So all we got to do is hang around an’ find out who did shoot him,” he concluded. “Then we we can take Dusty’s hawses to him in Boracho an’ tell him he don’t need to hide out no more.”

  He heard a cautious movement on the stairway below them and sent a warning slug down into the landing.

  “So that’s all we got to do?” said Ezra sarcastically. “An’ how we gonna do that while we’re cooped up here an’ dassent show our faces?”

  “We could go out the window, too. One at a time,” Pat suggested with a frown.

  “We’d git shot on sight an’ you know it. Everybody knows we’re upstairs here with that Dusty feller.”

  “That’s right,” Pat admitted uncomfortably. “I didn’t think that far ahead when I was helpin’ Dusty get away. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Tell you what we’ll do.” His face brightened suddenly. “Pull them boots off.”

  “I jest got ’em pulled on. An’ my feet swole up,” Ezra groaned.

  “Take ’em off, again.” Pat got up, promising, “I’ll be right back.”

  He hurried down the hall to their room, went inside and pulled off his own boots. Then he swiftly undressed down to his underwear, got a gun from its holster and went back to the top of the stairway.

  Ezra goggled at him speechlessly with his one eye when Pat said crisply, “I’ll keep guard here while you go back and undress. Crawl into bed an’ make like yo’re asleep.”

  “You want both of us to git shot in bed?”

  “Nothin’ like that’ll happen When you start snorin’ loud, I’ll slip back an’ crawl in with you. It’ll be some time before they try comin’ up again. When they find they don’t get shot at no more, they’ll come a-running and they’ll find both of us cozy in bed and pretendin’ to be asleep. An’ Dusty’s door’ll be standin’ open and the rope hangin’ out the window.”


  “What good’ll that do?”

  “They can’t shoot us for bein’ sound sleepers,” Pat snapped. “All we got to do is claim we haven’t heard nothin’. They’ll think it was Dusty here shootin’ at ’em all the time an’ that he’s slipped away while they were hangin’ around down there afraid to stick their heads up.”

  “They’ll never believe we slept through it all,” Ezra sighed.

  “But they won’t have no proof we didn’t. An’ if they hear you doin’ an honest-to-God job of snorin’ when they open our door they’ll believe it all right.”

  “How can I snore if I ain’t asleep?”

  “You can do it. Go on an’ start practicing.” Pat gave Ezra a little shove down the hall. Ezra went reluctantly, shaking his head and vowing to himself that if they got out of this scrape alive he was never going to tag along with Pat Stevens again when he started out on a quiet little buying trip for heifers.

  Pat crouched at the head of the stairs in his underwear and waited for Ezra to signal that he was securely in bed. He could hear a lot of loud talking from the lobby underneath. It sounded like some of the men were trying to persuade others to make a sortie in force up the stairway. He hoped they wouldn’t try it for awhile yet. They would be more likely to believe it had been Dusty holding them at bay if a good length of time elasped between the last shot to be fired from above and the moment when they came up and discovered the stairway unguarded.

  At last he heard the welcome sound of simulated snoring coming from room number nineteen. Ezra was doing a commendable job of pretending, but it was nothing like the noise that came from him when he really got going in his sleep.

  Pat got up and tiptoed cautiously down the hallway. He closed the door as he went in, slid his gun under the pillow and lay down beside Ezra, pulling the blanket up over him. Ezra stopped pretending to snore and asked drowsily, “How’m I doin?”

  “Keep it up,” Pat encouraged him. “Won’t be long now, I reckon. They were gettin’ up nerve to rush the stairs when I left.”

  Ezra grunted something and buried his face in the pillow. He started up with his snoring again, and then it slowly faded to a gentle wheezing. With the door closed, Pat could hear nothing at all from outside the room. He knew it might be a long time before anyone ventured up the stairs. He tried to relax and go to sleep. It would be lots better if he didn’t have to pretend to wake up when they finally came in to number nineteen. But his mind was too busy for sleep.

  Ezra wasn’t bothered that way. His gentle wheezing slowly gained in volume and harshness. It began to sound like the distant rumble of thunder, and Pat knew the big man was asleep.

  He listened with the same awed fascination that Ezra’s snoring always aroused in him. It sounded as though he were tearing the top of his head off with each indrawn breath, and the very walls of the room seemed to buckle outward under the terrific pressure.

  Yet, it was a lulling sound to one who was accustomed to it. It had the virtue of obliterating everything else. You couldn’t do much thinking closed in a room with those unceasing reverberations. So, after a time, Pat Stevens slept also.

  He awoke with the sound of the door being flung open. He sat upright with his gun out from under the pillow, blinking studpidly at men crowding into the room. Ezra grunted and stopped snoring. He made a little bubbling noise with his lips as he continued to breathe heavily.

  “All right, you fellers,” the man in the lead said authoritatively, “quit your possumin’ and come out of that bed.”

  Pat drew his legs up under him and kept the muzzle of his gun pointed forward. “What the hell’s all this about? What you mean by comin’ in an’ waking us up?”

  Ezra surged up from his side of the bed and glared around angrily with his one eye. “What’s doin’, Pat? Who’re these fellers?”

  “Damned if I know,” Pat growled, “but I aim to drill some of ’em if they don’t start talkin’ fast.”

  “By Gawd,” a man in the doorway muttered, “I swan if I don’t b’lieve they was asleep.”

  “You better put your gun away,” Pat was told by the leader. “We want to know where your friend has gone. That’s all.”

  “Our friend?”

  “You know. Feller in the room acrost from you.”

  “How the hell do we know who’s in the room across from us. Make sense or get out, mister.”

  “Look here. You trying to make us believe you two galoots has slep’ through all the shooting?”

  “I don’t give a damn what you believe. We’ve been asleep. Sure. That’s what we hired this room for. What shootin’?” Pat added as an afterthought and as though it didn’t matter particularly.

  “You know good enough there’s been shooting up and down the hall. You helped him get away.”

  Pat threw the covers back and swung his bare legs over the edge of the bed. “We don’t know nothing about nothing,” he retorted. “What kinda hotel is this? There’ll be some shootin’ pretty quick if you-all don’t get out of here.”

  The spokesman for the group exchanged puzzled glances with the men behind him. One of them said, “If that big feller’s been snorin’ that-away all the time, danged if I reckon they coulda heerd the shootin’.”

  “Feller in the room next door killed the sheriff an’ run back here to the hotel,” the leader told Pat succinctly. “Holed up here and threw lead down the stairway so’s we couldn’t get up. We figgered you two was in on it with him, and was keeping us back while he made a getaway.”

  “Killed the sheriff,” Pat muttered. “How’d he get away?”

  “Tore his blanket into strips and slid out the window to the alley. You’re the ones that helped him when he had that run-in with the sheriff in the Topaz earlier in the evenin’.”

  “Oh, him? You mean that feller? The wringy one that jumped me ’cause I kep’ the sheriff from killing him there in the saloon.”

  “Yeh. That’s the one.”

  “You hear that, Ezra? You think we’d waste any sleep helping a fool like him?” Pat demanded in an injured tone. “We don’t know nothing about what happened after we left the Topaz.”

  “Mebby not. But it looks mighty damned funny … sleeping right here across the hall an’ not hearing the shooting even.”

  Pat reached for his pants and started to pull them on. “If you’d ever slept with Ezra you wouldn’t be surprised at not hearin’ just some shootin’. It wasn’t a cannon, was it?”

  A couple of men in the doorway snickered. “Come on, Tom,” they demanded. “We’re wastin’ time here. Orta be gettin’ up a posse an’ ridin’ after him.”

  “Wait a minute,” Pat ejaculated as an exodus of the room began. “Hurry up an’ get dressed, Ezra. I wanta know about this. We traded hawses with that young fellow this evenin’. You reckon he rode our hawses off … or his?”

  “We don’t know what he rode, nor which way. We had just found out he was gone a minute before we come in here to ask you-all. Mebby you’re on the square. I swear I dunno. But watch your step around Marfa. We don’t take good to havin’ our sheriff shot in the back. And carrying a unloaded gun too. One that you unloaded at the Topaz,” he flung at Pat as a parting shot.

  They were backing out of the door, trooping down the hall, talking loudly about organizing a posse.

  Pat winked at Ezra and stood up to put on his shirt. Ezra gave him a sour grimace and went to work pulling on his boots again, muttering, “What’re we gettin’ dressed for again? I was jest gettin’ to sleep good.”

  “We got to get out an’ see what this is all about. Me, I don’t believe Dusty never shot nobody in the back. An’ I reckon it’s up to us to prove different. I don’t reckon there’s nobody else around town that’s bothering much to find out the truth about it.”

  “Can’t see how it’s any bother of ours.” Ezra stood up and stomped his boots on.

  Pat said, “Come on,” and led the way out the door.

  Some men were still hanging around the upper hall
way outside. They glanced at the Powder Valley pair curiously but said nothing to them.

  There were more men lingering in the lobby downstairs. Pat and Ezra stalked past them and out onto the boardwalk. Two or three saloons were still lighted up and were doing a rushing business while men excitedly discussed the details of the crime. The Topaz was one of those.

  Pat led the way across to the Topaz. The fat bartender with the wart on the end of his nose came to take their order. Recognizing Pat he nodded significantly and said, “What’d I tell you, mister. Ought to run that girl, Rosa, out of town.”

  Pat said, “Fill up a couple.” He leaned his elbow on the bar. “How long did Dusty hang around here after we went out?”

  “Dusty? Who’s he?”

  “The young fellow that was makin’ his play for Rosa.”

  “Oh him. Didn’t know his name. You mean after he had that run-in with the sheriff an’ you emptied the sheriff’s gun?”

  “Yeh.”

  “You ortn’t to of did that,” the bartender reproved him. “Sheriff might still be alive if his gun’d been loaded.”

  Pat shrugged his shoulders irritably. “I was preventin’ murder. He had plenty of time to load it again.”

  “Yeh. But he was with Rosa in her room.” The bartender winked lewdly. “He had other things to think about than loadin’ his gun again.”

  “I’m askin’ how long Dusty stayed here.”

  “He was in here all off an’ on up till midnight. Drinkin’ and struttin’ about how no sheriff could run him out of town.”

  “Did he know the sheriff was in with Rosa?”

  “I don’t reckon he knowed it, rightly. He had his suspicions though. He stayed around here pretty clost waitin’ for the sheriff to come out.”

  “Did the sheriff come out?”

  “Not prezactly. Rosa did. Round about midnight. By herself. He was here. That Dusty feller. An’ he jumped her about where the sheriff was. She wouldn’t say at first. Then he got tough an’ made her mad an’ she tol’ him off proper.” The bartender chuckled ghoulishly. “She tol’ she’d been with the sheriff an’ he’d just left out the back way to go home. An’ he rushed out with his face black as death an’ his eyes blazin’ an ran around to the alley an’ kilt him.” The bartender paused to catch his breath, said, “I’ll be back with you in a minute,” and hurried down the bar to fill some other empty glasses.