by Ben Bridges
A moment passed and then I urged the horse forward. We skittered down into a dip of land and vanished into the trees, and when eventually the trees thinned, I saw the source of the smoke about a hundred yards directly ahead.
Once, this place had been a smallish ranch, but no more. Two ugly black smudges, stark against the emeralds and golds of the prairie, were all that remained of the little timber house and barn, two clusters of charred uprights and crossbeams that rose out of black embers and gray ashes, and still popped and snapped and glowed orange when the wind touched them just right.
I drew in and viewed the destruction with the breath held in my throat. The acrid stench assailed my nostrils and made the mustang fidget. I heeled him into motion again, and as we approached the ranch, the wind stirred at the piled ashes and sent them spiraling across the yard like chalky gray dust devils.
I looked from what was left of the house to what was left of the barn, to a scorched hulk that once had been a light wagon, a leaning, partly demolished windmill and lines of fencing that had been torn from the ground and smashed flat. In the distance beyond the yard, bulky shapes lay scattered across the plain: cows, slaughtered where they had stood.
I reined in and looked at it all and I wanted very badly to be sick.
And then I heard someone work the lever of a Winchester behind me, and the skin across my spine, neck and face drew tight.
‘Don’t move, damn you! Just don’t move or so help me, I’ll blow you to Hell!’
It was the hoarse, cracking voice of a woman who had been pushed to the edge.
I turned my head slowly sideways so that she would see my profile. ‘I mean you no harm, ma’am. I saw the smoke and—’
‘—and you thought you’d come back and make sure your men had done a thorough job!’ spat the woman. ‘Well, they did. There’s nothing left. Nothing! It’s all gone, everything. Even my poor Ernie’s more dead than alive.’
Realization struck me then, and I began to connect it all together. ‘Mrs. Franklin?’ I asked. ‘This is Ernie Franklin’s spread?’
‘As if you didn’t know.’
Cautiously I hipped around still further. ‘Mrs. Franklin, my name’s Colter. Your husband came to see me last night—’
‘You stay right where you are!’ she yelped.
I did, but kept on talking, urgently now because I could sense the tightening of her finger on the rifle’s trigger. ‘Didn’t he tell you, Mrs. Franklin? He came to my hotel room and tried to offer me a job. There was some trouble with a man named Jameson afterwards—’
She made a little shuddery breathing sound. With less hatred she murmured, ‘Colter, you say?’
‘Yes’m. Ash Colter.’
‘Mr... Mr. Colter,’ she breathed, and something new came into her voice, a sudden fatigue against which she could no longer fight. ‘Please...you must help us. Ernie...Ernie’s been shot!’
I dismounted and turned to face her. She was a short, slightly overweight woman in a torn calico dress and apron. I guessed she was of a similar age to her husband, about thirty, but right then she looked closer to a hundred. Her long fair hair was in disarray and her round, milk-white face was smudged and streaked by smoke and tears. I looked at the way the Winchester now hung slack at her side and walked towards her, leading the horse. Her brown eyes were bloodshot and moist, her very small, heart-shaped lips trembling with suppressed emotion.
I said, ‘Where is he?’
She didn’t tell me, she just turned and led me towards a stand of Douglas firs away to the west.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
She palmed her eyes and sniffed, fighting to get back in control. ‘What do you think happened?’ she countered bitterly. “They hit us around one o’clock this morning, burned us out, torched the barn, wrecked everything they could lay their stinking hands on and killed our stock.’
‘Who did it?’ I asked, already pretty much knowing the answer. ‘Did you recognize them?’
She nodded. ‘I recognized one of them, a man called Lawson.’
I remembered the name first. He was the man Jameson had told to give up his weapons belt for Tragg to use the day before. I remembered the man himself then—tall, slim, fortyish, with narrow blue eyes, a hooked nose and a clipped moustache that looked like white silk against the weathered bronze of his skin.
Something else grew clear in that same moment: that I’d been wrong to dismiss Jameson so easily. For while it was true that he still did not know for sure who had attacked him the night before, he knew well enough that Franklin had been there to see it, and so he had become the object of Jameson’s savage retribution.
Franklin’s wife led me into the timber just then, and when my eyes adjusted from the hard sunlight, I saw Franklin propped up against the bole of a tree, brown eyes closed, spare face held taut and wearing a frown, body still beneath a coarse gray blanket, pale skin a harsh contrast to the midnight-black of his beard.
I tied my horse to some brush. Three children sat around Franklin, all of them still in their nightclothes, wide-eyed and eerily silent: a girl of about eight who was holding a baby on her lap, and a boy who was perhaps six. They seemed to shrink in on themselves when they saw me, and after what they had been through, I didn’t blame them.
Mrs. Franklin told them not to be afraid, that I had come to help them. I looked at Franklin and hoped that I would not let them down. Franklin, hearing voices, cracked his glazed eyes open but saw nothing and no one.
I knelt beside him and peeled back the sheet. He was barefoot, dressed only in a bloodstained undershirt and hastily donned Levi pants. The blood was coming from a wound in his right side. Grimacing, I took off my hat and leaned forward, the better to examine the injury. He had been shot, all right, but it appeared to me that the bullet had lodged in the fat just above his hipbone. If the bullet could be removed quickly, if the flow of blood could be stanched and the wound cleaned against infection, he would live.
But the key element here was speed. He had already lost much blood. He needed surgery without further delay. I did not think I could ride back to Beaver Dam and fetch a doctor in the time he had left if he remained untreated.
I looked up at Mrs. Franklin, the baby in her arms now, the older children gathered protectively around her legs. Her face was filled with dread. She was almost afraid to hear what I had to say.
She whispered uncertainly, ‘Is he...will he … ?’
I stood up and shrugged out of my jacket, feeling scared myself now, scared of the awesome responsibility I was just about to assume. ‘I’ll need a narrow-bladed knife and a pan of water, ma’am. Do you think you or your little ones can find them in what’s left of your place?’
Her eyes went wide. ‘You’re going to operate?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know how?’
I nodded. Yes, I knew how, after a fashion. You did not live the kind of life I had led and not know how.
She propped the Winchester against a tree, then turned and started off. Suddenly she stopped and looked back at him. ‘You won’t let him die, will you?’ she whispered.
‘I’ll do the best I can,’ I replied.
While she was gone, I built a small fire and rehearsed in my head everything I had to do. I looked down at my hands and saw them shaking, and I swore at myself to calm down.
The Franklin children came back through the trees with their mother struggling along behind them, slopping water from an iron pail clasped in her work-rough hands. I rolled my sleeves up to the elbows, took the pail from her and balanced it on the fire to heat through. From her apron pocket she fetched a slightly buckled, fire-blackened knife and handed it over to me. I washed the soot off it, then positioned it in such a way that the tip of the blade was in the fire. All I could do then was wait for the water to heat.
‘I’ll need some clean rags, Mrs. Franklin,’ I said. ‘Have you got anything...’
Anxious to be of some help, she said, ‘My petticoat.’
She went and fetched it, and as we tore it up and her husband stirred and moaned weakly between us, I said, ‘Ernie tried to fight them off, did he?’
She bobbed her head. ‘When we came awake and realized what was happening, he just grabbed up the Winchester and hurried out after them. They cut him down more or less right away. He didn’t stand a chance.’
The water began to ripple and steam rose off its crystal surface. I washed my hands as thoroughly as I could, then pulled down a heavy breath and said, ‘You might care to take your children off a-ways, Mrs. Franklin.’
She did so, and left me alone with her husband.
He was unconscious, still stirring infrequently and moaning every so often. Carefully I tore the material of his undershirt away from the wound and studied it some more. The skin around the hole was blue and swollen. Dunking one of the rags into the water, I cleaned the flesh around the lesion as gently as I could. When the hole was more clearly exposed, I took the knife from out of the fire and dipped its red tip into the water. Steam rose into the stinking warmth of the afternoon air.
I looked at the wound once more, then went to work.
Holding my breath, focusing my attention on the wound, I reached out with my free hand, placed a finger and thumb to either side of the hole and gently prised it wider. Cautiously I brought the knife down to the hole, but my hand was still trembling and I had to straighten up again and pull myself together before I dared to try it again.
On the second attempt, I inserted the tip of the knife into the wound and began to probe for the bullet. Franklin groaned and wriggled slowly like a disturbed earthworm, but still I continued to search for the slug as more blood oozed out around the knife blade and over my fingers, paying him no heed.
I wanted to stop and shudder and turn my head and puke, but all that would take time, and time was the one thing I couldn’t spare right now. So I just kept searching, going ever deeper, knowing that the bullet was in there somewhere, and that it was my job to find it.
At last I felt the tip of the blade jar against something hard and metallic. Franklin winced and I looked over my shoulder and told his woman to come and hold him still. She came at a run, sank down beside him and put her hands on his shoulders.
What came next makes my blood run cold even today. Truly, there is only one thing as bad as putting a bullet into a man, and that is taking one out of him.
Maneuvering the knife by degrees, I worked it around under the now-flattened pebble of lead and levered upwards. Franklin’s eyes suddenly flew open and his scream was a frenzied, desperate howl that sliced through the copse. He lurched and stiffened against his wife’s restraining grip. I heard his wife sob, his children crying in the background.
Then the misshapen bullet popped out, driven up by a great, unexpected gout of blood, and Franklin went limp.
Shakily, I threw the knife aside, took a clean rag and held it to the wound, pressing as tight as I dared now, in order to slow the flow of blood. I was drenched in sweat. We all were. I lifted the rag away from the wound and saw that the blood was still flowing, but not as quickly as before. I threw the rag aside and pressed another clean one to the hole.
Mrs. Franklin was looking at me. She said bluntly, ‘Is he going to live?’
I glanced at her. ‘With any luck.’
I sat back on my haunches. I wished I had something with which to cleanse the wound, but I guessed the gushing blood would do as good a job as anything right now.
Suddenly I felt tired. Lord, so tired. But this wasn’t over yet, and for the Franklins it might never be over. I checked the wound again. Already the blood was congealing, and that was good.
As I leaned over the pail and washed my red hands again, I told the woman that I would ride back to town and fetch a doctor, because the wound would need purifying, then stitching or cauterizing. ‘While I’m there,’ I said, ‘I’ll, report this business to the sheriff.’
Her lips curled and she shook her head at my ignorance or naiveté. ‘Carr?’ she said. ‘You might as well save your breath, Mr. Colter. Carr is an Association man. What happens to the likes of us makes no never-mind at all to the likes of him. Not while the Association pays his wages.’
I opened my mouth to reply, but remained silent. I had sensed influence in that big blue house on the hill. I might have guessed that it would extend at least as far as the county sheriff.
‘Well,’ I said at length, getting up and running my damp hands down the legs of my pants to dry them, ‘I’ll report it anyway. What happens then will be up to him.’
‘As you will.’
She got up with me and thanked me for what I had done. Then, once she had assured herself that her sleeping husband would come to no further harm, she went to tend to her scared, crying children.
I put my jacket back on and went to my horse. The rough surgery had turned my stomach, but what had been done here to these innocent people turned it even more. Still I tried to tell myself that I wouldn’t get involved. But deep down I knew that I already was.
I swung up into my hull and settled myself more comfortably for riding. I was partly responsible for what had happened here. If the sheriff wouldn’t do anything to enforce the law, then maybe I would.
I turned the mustang, raised one hand to the woman and rode back to Beaver Dam at a gallop.
When I got to town, I tied up outside the single-storey sheriff’s office and went inside. The office was large and airy, with wood-paneled walls, barred windows, a chained weapons rack and a big, glass-fronted cabinet which held an assortment of box folders and statute books. A low picket fence sliced the room down the centre, and the two desks sitting on the far side were models of neatness and order.
I looked around. There was no sign of Jeffers, the tall, rail-slim deputy I’d encountered the day before, but the room was occupied by a broad-shouldered, granite-faced man in his early fifties, who was lounging in a chair behind the desk nearest the window.
I said, ‘Sheriff Carr?’
He had been busying himself with some administrative chore or other until I had disturbed his concentration. Now, his eyes evaluating me frankly, he gave a slow nod. ‘I’m Garr. And lessen I’m much mistaken, you’d be Colter.’
I was surprised. ‘You know me?’
He inclined his shoulders. ‘Word gets around. Help you?’
I pushed through the little gate in the fence and strode over to his desk. ‘There was some trouble out at Ernie Franklin’s spread last night,’ I explained. ‘Franklin was shot and his place was razed to the ground.’
Carr pursed his lips. He had a round face, very dark eyes that were set close together, a nose that heavy fists had reshaped many years earlier and a belligerent twist to his thickish mouth. He wore a plain white shirt under a gray vest, and a pair of trousers cut from the same material. What little hair he had left atop his head was oily and black.
‘Franklin dead?’ he asked.
‘No, but he came pretty close.’
‘Was he able to tell you who did it?’
‘He didn’t have to.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘They were Association men, Sheriff,’ I said quietly.
He blew air out through his teeth and shook his head and made some disapproving sounds with his tongue. ‘That’s a pretty strong charge you’re making, Colter,’ he allowed at last. ‘And I’ll tell you flat out, I don’t like it. Got any proof?’
I dipped my head. ‘As a matter of fact, I have.’ Enjoying his surprise, I said, ‘Franklin’s wife recognized one of them during the attack, an Association man by the name of Lawson.’
‘Tod Lawson?’
‘If that’s his full name.’
He shook his head some more. ‘Recognized him?’ he asked. ‘Or thought she recognized him?’
‘I saw no reason to doubt her,’ I said
defensively.
He raised his calloused palms. ‘Now, don’t misunderstand me, here. I’m not saying Franklin’s wife is lying. But I am saying she’s likely still confused and upset. And when folks are confused and upset, well...they can make mistakes. Errors of judgment.’
I studied him carefully in the light that fanned in through the window. ‘There’s one way to find out,’ I replied.
‘You mean find Lawson and ask him,’ he guessed.
‘Do you have any objections?’
‘Matter of fact, I do.’ Carr’s granity face congealed. ‘You’ve spoken to Linderman, so you know the score. This county’s on the verge of a full-scale range war. Everyone’s spoiling for a fight with everyone else. All it’d take to get it started is one careless or unfounded accusation.’
I shook my head. ‘So Lawson goes free? In order to keep what passes for the peace around here?’
He shuffled his papers importantly. ‘It’s not your problem, Colter, so don’t let it concern you any longer. Now, I appreciate you riding in to tell me what happened, but I’ll take it from here.’
‘I’ll tell the Franklins you’ll be out, then?’
He nodded, already turning back to his work. ‘You do that.’
‘Later today?’ I prodded.
He looked back at me, his eyes slitting down, the man himself getting the measure of me. ‘Whenever I can spare the time.’
Looking at him then, I knew that he was not only dismissing me, but dismissing the Franklins as well. As easily as that. I held his stare for a moment, then said, ‘Why don’t we just stop kidding around here, Sheriff?’
He stiffened. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re not going to do anything about this, are you? Not one single, damned thing.’
He said pointedly, ‘Close the door on your way out.’
I was so angry that I couldn’t trust myself to do or say anything right away. I had worn the star myself a time or two, and had always considered the enforcement of law a high and honorable calling—but only when the law was there for the good of all. In this town, though, and with this man... It was exactly as I had been forewarned. The only law here was Association law.