Matt Jensen: The Last Mountain Man Purgatory

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Matt Jensen: The Last Mountain Man Purgatory Page 17

by William W. Johnstone


  The coach stopped in front of the depot at the far end of the street, and half-a-dozen people crowded around it. Matt turned his attention back to the task at hand, and checking the pistol in his holster, he went into the saloon.

  The shadows made the saloon seem cooler inside, but that was illusory. It was nearly as hot inside as out, and without the benefit of a breath of air, it was even more stifling. The customers were sweating in their drinks and wiping their faces with bandannas. Matt looked for Bates, but he didn’t see him.

  The bartender was wearing an apron that might have been white at one time, but was now soiled and stained. On the bar in front of him were two abandoned glasses in which a little whiskey remained. One of the glasses had been used to extinguish the last dregs of a rolled cigarette. Picking out the little pieces of paper with his fingers, the bartender poured it, tobacco bits and all, into the other glass, then poured that back into a bottle. Corking the bottle, he put it on the shelf behind the bar. He wiped the glasses out with his stained apron, and set them back among the unused glasses. Seeing Matt step up to the bar, the bartender moved down toward him.

  “Whiskey,” Matt said.

  The barman reached for the bottle he had just poured the whiskey back into, but Matt pointed to an unopened bottle.

  “That one,” he said.

  Shrugging, the saloon keeper pulled the cork from the fresh bottle.

  “I’m looking for a man named Odom,” Matt said. “Cletus Odom.”

  “Mister, if you want whiskey or beer, I’m your man. If you want anything else, I can’t help you,” the bartender replied.

  “How about a man named Bates? He’s a big man. He isn’t wearing a hat.”

  The bartender poured the whiskey into a glass.

  “Bates’ horse is tied up out front,” Matt continued.

  “Is he wanted?”

  “I know Odom is. Bates might be.”

  “You the law?”

  “No,” Matt said.

  “You a bounty hunter?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you lookin’ for him?”

  “It’s personal,” Matt said.

  “Mister, maybe you don’t know it but with the clientele I get in here, it ain’t a good idea to go around blabbing everything I know. Hell, I could wind up gettin’ myself kilt if I was to do somethin’ like that,” the bartender said.

  Matt took out a ten-dollar bill and, though he wasn’t obvious about it, he made certain that the bartender saw it.

  “You say Bates is a big man. We have a lot of big men who come in here, so that doesn’t tell me much. What about the other one you were talking about? What does he look like?”

  “He’s uglier than a toad,” Matt said. “He has a purple scar on his face and a misshapen eyelid.”

  Matt did notice a slight reaction to his description.

  “He is here, isn’t he?” Matt asked.

  The bartender said nothing, but looking around to make certain no one saw the transaction, he took the money, raised his eyes, and looked toward the stairs at the back of the room.

  “Thanks,” Matt said.

  At the back of the saloon, a flight of wooden stairs led up to an enclosed loft. Matt guessed that the two doors at the head of the stairs led to the rooms used by the prostitutes who worked in the saloon. Pulling his pistol, he started up the stairs.

  The few men in the saloon had been talking and laughing among themselves. When they saw Matt pull his gun, their conversation died, and they watched him walk quietly up the steps.

  From the rooms above him, Matt could hear muffled sounds that left little doubt as to what was going on behind the closed doors. He tried to open the first door, but it was locked. He knocked on it.

  “Go ’way,” a voice called from the other side of the door.

  Matt raised his foot and kicked the door hard. It flew open with a crash and the woman inside the room screamed.

  “What the hell?” the man shouted. He stood up quickly, and Matt saw that it was the big man, Bates. He heard a crash of glass from the next room and he dashed to the window and looked down. He saw a naked Odom just getting to his feet from the leap to the alley below.

  “Who the hell are you?” Bates shouted from behind him in the room.

  Matt smiled at him. “Where’s your hat, Bates?”

  “It’s you!” Bates yelled. Bates grabbed his knife from a bedside table. “You son of a bitch, I’m going to gut you like a hog!”

  Bates lunged toward Matt, making a long, stomach-opening swipe. Matt barely managed to avoid the point of the knife. One inch closer and he would have been disemboweled.

  Bates swung again and Matt jumped deftly to one side, then brought the barrel of his pistol down, sharply, on Bates’s knife hand. That caused Bates to drop his knife and when it hit the floor, Matt kicked it so that it slid across the floor and under the bed.

  Inexplicably, Bates smiled.

  “Well, I’d rather kill you with my bare hands anyway,” he said, lunging toward Matt.

  Again, Matt stepped to one side, but this time he grabbed Bates and pushed him in the same direction that Bates had lunged, thus using Bates’s own momentum against him. Bates slammed headfirst through the window, breaking the glass. With a sharp, gurgling sound, he pulled away from the window, staggered back a few paces, then fell to his knees. A large shard of glass was protruding from his neck. The glass had severed his carotid artery, causing bright red blood to spill from the wound down onto his naked chest.

  “Where are the others?” Matt asked, kneeling beside the wounded man. “The others who robbed the train. Where are they?”

  “You—go—to—hell,” Bates said. Blood bubbled at his lips when he spoke.

  Matt heard a horse galloping away, and hurrying back to the broken and now bloodied window, he saw Odom, still naked, riding hard out of town, lashing the animal on both sides of his neck with the ends of the reins, urging him to greater speed.

  Matt stood up angrily. He had lost valuable time trying to get the outlaw to talk. He turned and ran from the room, down the stairs, and out the front, then urged Spirit into a gallop in the direction Odom had gone.

  Matt found the horse Odom had been riding about five miles out of town, contentedly cropping grass. He also found the body of a man who had been stripped naked. Odom now had clothes and a different horse.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As soon as the track was repaired and service restored, Marshal Kyle took the nine p.m. train, which was the first eastbound train from Sentinel. Deputy Hayes was in a pine box in the baggage car ahead. Kyle was taking him back to Purgatory, though he had no idea where to deliver the body, other than to the office of the city marshal.

  The train was crowded because several eastbound passengers had waited for rail service to be restored, preferring to wait in the comfort of a Sentinel hotel to the long and uncomfortable ride in a stagecoach. Kyle managed to find a window seat halfway back in the second car, and once the train was under way, he watched the little yellow squares of light slide by on the ground outside the night train as he listened to the rhythmic click of the wheels passing over the rail joints.

  In addition to Hayes’s body, Kyle was carrying several wanted posters for Matt Jensen. This time, the wanted posters had a woodcut likeness of Jensen that was so accurate that several of the people who had been passengers on that ill-fated train remembered seeing him.

  “I sure can’t see this fella as a murderer, though,” one of the injured passengers told Kyle. “He pulled me and two others from the wreckage. I don’t reckon I’d be alive today, if it weren’t for him.”

  That passenger’s story was not unique, as it was repeated by at least a dozen others, if not from personal experience, then from observation.

  “What kind of man are you, Matt Jensen?” Kyle asked quietly as he studied the picture. “On the one hand, you shoot a man down in cold blood. On the other, you go out of your way to save the lives of perfect strangers w
hen you could have used the confusion of the train wreck as an opportunity to get away.”

  It was Kyle’s intention to leave the packet of wanted posters with Marshal Cummins so they could be distributed, not only around Purgatory, but all over Maricopa County.

  The run from Sentinel to Purgatory, which took almost six hours by stagecoach, took just over an hour by train. Even though he was on the train for such a short time, the gentle rocking of the car, the click of wheels over rail joints, and the rush of wind had combined to put Kyle asleep. He was awakened by the conductor’s call.

  “Purgatory, Purgatory!” he called. “Folks, if you are going on through, don’t get off the train because we will only be here long enough to let off some passengers and pick up a few more. We will not be here more than a couple of minutes. This here is Purgatory,” he repeated. The conductor stopped beside Kyle.

  “Marshal, I believe you said you were going to Purgatory?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Kyle replied. “Thanks for waking me up.”

  “Well, you only paid as far as Purgatory,” the conductor said. “I couldn’t let you go any farther now, could I?” He laughed at his own joke.

  “I reckon not,” Kyle replied. “Conductor, you understand I have something that has to be unloaded from the baggage car, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, Marshal, don’t you worry none,” the conductor said. “We won’t leave till that’s all taken care of.”

  “Thanks.”

  Kyle felt the train beginning to lose speed, a gradual slowing at first, then slower, and slower still, until by the time they reached Purgatory, the train was traveling at a virtual crawl. Looking through the window, he saw the dark, or at best dimly lit, houses sliding by outside until, finally, the train came to the much more brightly lit depot. There, the train stopped with the screech of steel on steel, and a final jerk, which left them motionless. The few who were getting off here got up from their seats, reached into the overhead bins for their packages, then began shuffling toward the end of the car in order to detrain. The passengers who were going on remained in their seats, some dozing, some reading, others looking through the window.

  Stepping down from the train, Kyle stood on a wooden platform that was adequately, if not brightly, lit by several kerosene lanterns. While the train snapped and popped and hissed alongside him, he watched as Hayes’s coffin was taken down.

  “What have we got here?” the station agent asked, coming over to look at the coffin.

  “Who are you?” Kyle asked.

  “I’m Colin Randall. I’m the Southern Pacific agent in charge of this depot. Who are you?”

  “I’m U.S. Marshal Ben Kyle. This is Deputy Hayes,” he said, pointing to the box. “He is one of yours, I believe.”

  “Hardly one of mine, Marshal,” Randall said disdainfully. He sighed. “However, he does belong to Marshal Cummins.”

  “Do you know where I can hire a wagon at this hour?”

  Randall held up his finger as if asking Kyle to give him a moment. “Bustamante!” he called.

  “Sí, señor?” A short, stubby, gray-haired Mexican shuffled out from the freight section of the depot.

  “Hitch up the wagon and take the marshal where he wants to go.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  Kyle waited for a few minutes; then he heard the creaking sound of a wheel in need of lubrication. A moment later, he saw the wagon appear from the side of the depot. Bustamante drove up to Marshal Kyle, then stopped.

  “Grab that end, will you?” Kyle ordered, standing at one end of the coffin.

  “Sí, señor.”

  Because there were only two of them, it was a heavy lift to put the box containing Hayes’s body on the back of the wagon, but they were able to do so. Then Kyle climbed up onto the seat.

  “Where to, Señor?” Bustamante asked.

  “The city marshal’s office,” Kyle answered.

  “Sí.”

  They were the only traffic on the street as they drove from the railroad depot to the city marshal’s office. Behind them the train, after a few blasts on the whistle, got under way with the puffing of steam and the sound of the coupling slack being taken up as, one by one, the cars were jerked into motion. There were a few moments of train noise. Then, as the train noise faded, the only sounds remaining were that of the wagon, the hollow sound of the horse’s hoofbeats, and the incessant squeaking of the wheel that Kyle had determined was the left front one.

  “You need to do something about that wheel,” Kyle said.

  “Sí, señor,” Bustamante replied, staring straight ahead and with no change of facial expression. It seemed fairly obvious to Kyle that this subject had been broached with Bustamante before, and probably responded to in the same way.

  The wagon pulled up to the front of the city marshal’s office, then stopped.

  “Wait here,” Kyle told Busatamante.

  “For how long, Señor?”

  “For as long as it takes,” Kyle said resolutely.

  “Sí, señor.”

  Going inside, he saw someone sitting in a chair behind a desk. The chair was tilted back, so that the man’s head was resting against the wall. His eyes were closed, his mouth was open, and Kyle could hear the deep, rhythmic breathing of sleep.

  “Excuse me,” Kyle said.

  The response was a quiet snore.

  “Excuse me,” Kyle said, louder this time.

  The man’s eyes popped open.

  “Yeah, what do you want?”

  “Are you Marshal Cummins?”

  “No, I’m his deputy.”

  “Do you have a name?”

  “Yeah, I have a name,” the deputy answered with a snarl. “Do you have a name?”

  “I’m United States Marshal Ben Kyle,” Kyle said pointedly. “What is your name, Deputy?”

  The deputy tipped his chair forward, then stood up. “The name is Warren. Deputy Ted Warren, Marshal. What can I do for you?”

  “I have Deputy Hayes’ body on a wagon out front,” Kyle said. “I want you to take care of it.”

  “What? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

  “I don’t care what you do with it,” Kyle said. “I brought the body back, now it’s your problem. Get it off the wagon.”

  “How’m I goin’ to do that? I’m all by myself here.”

  “Like I said, that’s your problem,” Kyle repeated.

  “I’ve got some men in jail, I’ll have them help me,” Warren said.

  “Fine, you do that. Where can I find the marshal?”

  “More’n likely he’s down at the Pair O Dice.”

  “The what?”

  “The Pair O Dice. It’s the saloon, just down the street. He ’n’ all the other deputies hang out down there.”

  “All the other deputies? How many deputies are there?”

  “Eight—well, no, only six now, seein’ as both Gillis and Hayes has been kilt.”

  “Six deputies in a town of less than three hundred?” Kyle said, surprised at the number. “My God, man, that’s one deputy for every fifty people.”

  “Yes, sir, well, Marshal Cummins, he likes to keep order,” Warren said.

  “You get Hayes’ body taken care of,” Kyle ordered. “I’m going to find the marshal.”

  “Yes, sir,” Warren said. He took a large key ring off a hook on the wall behind the desk. Walking over to the cell, he opened the door and called out to the two prisoners who were inside.

  “Poke, Casper, come help me get somethin’ off a wagon.”

  As the two prisoners struggled with the coffin containing Hayes’s body, Kyle left the marshal’s office and walked up the street to the saloon.

  The Pair O Dice was the most substantial-looking building in the entire town. There was a drunk passed out on the steps in front of the place, and Kyle had to step over him in order to go inside. Because all the chimneys of all the lanterns were soot-covered, what light there was was dingy and filtered through drifting smoke.
The place smelled of sour whiskey, stale beer, and strong tobacco. There was a long bar on the left, with dirty towels hanging on hooks about every five feet along its front. A large mirror was behind the bar, but like everything else about the saloon, it was so dirty that Kyle could scarcely see any images in it, and what he could see was distorted by imperfections in the glass.

  Over against the back wall, near the foot of the stairs, a cigar-scarred, beer-stained upright piano was being played by a bald-headed musician. The tune was “Buffalo Gals,” and one of the girls who was a buffalo gal stood alongside, swaying to the music. Kyle was once told that this song was now very popular back East, and was often sung by the most genteel ladies. The Easterners had no idea that the term buffalo gal referred to doxies who, during the rapid expansion of the railroad, had to ply their trade on buffalo robes thrown out on the ground. This was because there were few beds and fewer buildings.

  Kyle couldn’t help but make a comparison between this saloon and the Ox Bow back in Sentinel. The Pair O Dice did not come out well in the comparison.

  Out on the floor of the saloon, nearly all the tables were filled. A half-dozen or so buffalo gals were flitting about, pushing drinks and promising more than they really intended to deliver. A few card games were in progress, but most of the patrons were just drinking and talking.

  An exceptionally loud burst of laughter came from one of the tables and, looking toward it, Kyle saw that all the men were wearing stars on their shirts or vests. There were six men and three girls at the table, which was the largest table in the saloon.

  Kyle walked over toward them, then dropped the bundle of wanted posters on the table.

  “What the hell is this?” one of the men asked.

  “What does it look like?” Kyle replied.

  “I’ll ask the ques—” the man at the table began, but looking up, he saw Kyle’s badge. “You’re a U.S. marshal?” he asked.

  “I am. The name is Kyle. You’re Marshal Cummins, I take it?”

  “Yeah,” Cummins said. He looked at the bundle, then smiled. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “How’d you get a picture of him?”

 

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