Hawk tossed the big man the reins to Harvin’s horse, and then his own. He slipped his rifle from its saddle boot, swung his saddlebags and canvas war sack over his left shoulder, and stepped back away from the grulla.
The big man hurried up the street, jerking the cream and the grulla along behind him.
Harvin’s head and arms bobbed stiffly down the cream’s right side, his legs doing the same over the left saddle fender. Several people on both sides of Wyoming Street stopped to gawk at Reb’s grisly cargo. As the wind of the young man’s passing wafted against him, Hawk thought he’d detected the sour stench of beer on Reb’s breath, mixed with the smell of chewing tobacco.
Inwardly, he smiled.
“That’s Reb Winter.” Mayor Pennybacker tapped his temple with an index finger to indicate Reb’s obvious limitations. “Odd-jobber. Dependable when he doesn’t have his head in a beer bucket.” Having noted Hawk’s slight limp, he looked down at the Rogue Lawman’s right boot and frowned. “Do you need to see Doc Blackman, Mr. Hawk? Before we get down to business?”
Hawk shook his head and mounted the porch steps, and all four men stepped back, retreating as though from a bobcat that had wandered out of an open cage, sudden looks of apprehension on their faces. “I’ll get looked at later, if needed. At the moment, I could do with a plate of food and a beer.”
“That can certainly be arranged,” Pennybacker said, turning and following the other three men into the hotel, glancing back and up over his left shoulder at the Rogue Lawman following and towering over him. “The Poudre River is the best-appointed hotel in town, and its kitchen fare rivals any found in either Cheyenne or Laramie. The owner, Joe Lundy, moved up from Denver, where he managed the Larimer Street Saloon.”
“Nice to know,” Hawk said, wincing a little at the burn and lancing pain in his right calf.
He thought the wound had dried up, as he couldn’t detect any more fresh blood in his boot. He’d have gone ahead and seen the doctor, and gotten the wound sewn up if it needed it, but he didn’t want to be seen running to a sawbones first thing after pulling into town. Most wouldn’t think much about it, but sometimes the unconscious impressions were the most powerful.
He had no idea who might be watching. He’d show no sign of weakness to possible adversaries.
When they were inside the lobby’s dark foyer, with the varnished stairs climbing the rear wall beyond, and the desk to the left, Pennybacker turned to Hawk, tipping his head back to give the man the slow up-and-down. “You’re certainly a tall man—aren’t you, Mr. Hawk?”
Adjusting his round, wire-rimmed spectacles, he turned to the dark-haired, middle-aged woman smiling superciliously behind the desk. “Louise, would you please have Joe fix a plate for Mr. Hawk? And have an ale drawn, as well?”
The woman shifted her icy blue eyes to the Rogue Lawman, her face looking waxy in the light angling through the hotel’s front windows, her thin lips long and red. She wore several pounds of jewelry about her neck and on her wrists and fingers. “So you’re Mr. Hawk,” she said in a tone to match her expression.
Not waiting for a response, she said through the same varnished smile to Pennybacker, “Of course, Mayor,” and stepped out from behind her desk to make her way through the councilmen and Hawk, striding into the dining room ahead of them, her purple brocade skirt trimmed with large, gold-stitched flowers swishing about her legs and ample rump.
“Not everyone approves of town tamers, Mr. Hawk,” Pennybacker explained, holding his head up close to Hawk’s shoulder and glancing after Louise Lundy. “But the Lundys want Trinity reined in as bad as all the other respectable business folk in town.”
“Except Miss Mitchell, obviously.”
Pennybacker scowled and cleared his throat. “Yes, well, she’ll come around, too. This way, Mr. Hawk,” the mayor said, indicating the broad, arched doorway on the lobby’s right side through which the other councilmen were following Mrs. Lundy.
The dining room was all but deserted. There were only two afternoon diners—two elderly ladies sitting at a small table against the far wall, near the broad fieldstone hearth that resembled the inside of a dragon’s mouth and filled the room with wisps of blue smoke and the aromatic tang of piñon pine.
Nearer the room’s entrance, there was a lounge area outfitted with a leather couch and two deep, overstuffed chairs surrounding a coffee table. On the table were several brandy snifters and two cigars smoldering up from cut-glass ashtrays. While three of the councilmen took the seats they’d apparently occupied earlier while they’d waited for Hawk’s arrival, Pennybacker stood around hemming and hawing nervously, polishing a fist with a palm, not sure where to put Hawk since the prospective town tamer was about to dine.
Hawk took the decision out of the mayor’s hands by kicking a chair out from the small, round, white-clothed table that abutted the front wall, within conversational range of the councilmen. He dropped his rifle, war sack, and saddlebags on the floor at the base of lime-green wainscoting.
Hawk doffed his hat as he stood in front of the table, looking out the long row of clean windows before him, dropping his hat on the table and running his hands through his hair. He looked up the street to his right, started bringing his eyes back toward the hotel, then shuttled them up the street again.
His gaze held on a large wooden platform about a block away. It was partly concealed by the shadows of the tall buildings on the south side of the street, so that when he’d glimpsed it earlier he’d thought it the loading dock of a mercantile or feed store. But as he scrutinized it now, the three steps leading up to the main platform from the right, there was no doubting its significance.
“That it?” Hawk canted his head to indicate the platform.
“Say again, Mr. Hawk?” Pennybacker said, shuffling up beside Hawk with a painfully administering air and crouching to look out the window.
“Up the street there . . . That the gallows?”
Pennybacker cast his gaze in the direction Hawk had indicated and nodded. “Yes, that’s the gallows.”
“Where the sheriff was shot?”
“Yes, it is. It is at that. Where Tierney and Jack Wildhorn and their Two Troughs gang rode in and freed Tierney’s son.”
Both continued to study the gallows over which the shadow of the southern buildings lay. The nooses had been taken down, but Hawk could see where they would be strung from the scaffold’s overhanging beam. He felt a dry knot in his throat and tried to clear it as he asked, “And where . . . ?”
His mouth turned to dust, his tongue a scrap of parched leather, and the words dried like a single drop of water in sand. One of his own nightmare images flashed in front of his eyes—Linda hanging from the cottonwood tree in their backyard in Valoria, her body looking so pale and fragile there in her nightclothes, her lower jaw hanging slack—and Hawk blinked several times to sweep the memory away.
He felt his head go light, his body sway forward. He placed a hand on the table before him to steady himself while staring straight out the window, his jaws hard, his expression dark and grim.
“I’m sorry,” the mayor said, looking up at the taller man skeptically. “What was that last, Mr. Hawk?”
“Nothin’ .”
Hawk knew the answer to the question. There’d been no reason to ask it. Regan had told him that the sheriff’s wife had hanged herself on the same scaffold on which her husband had died. After killing their child . . .
Hawk shook his head and narrowed an eye, suppressing such thoughts and images that lanced his core and spread a hot, oily liquid up the back of his neck and head. “Just speculating aloud.”
“You look like you could use a drink, Mr. Hawk.”
Hawk looked over his left shoulder. A young man had come with a tray, and he was holding the tray out toward Hawk while the wild-haired mayor smiled up at the prospective town tamer witlessly, perhaps with a little concern in his own drink-bleary eyes.
Hawk took the beer schooner off the tray and, saggi
ng into his chair, sipped the foam off the top of the glass before taking a deep gulp. He’d taken one more draught, downing half the coffee-colored brew that owned a rich, hoppy tang, when the young man returned with a steaming, oval-shaped plate piled high with thick slices of roast beef and potatoes smothered in gravy, and an extra small dish of spinach boiled with ham.
“Thank you, thank you,” Hawk said with relief as the young man set the plate before him. Hawk’s stomach expanded and contracted at the delightful smells wafting up on the steam and diluting the grim recollection.
The young man indicated Hawk’s glass. “Another, sir?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
When the young man had gone, Hawk draped a napkin over a knee, shrugged out of his coat, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and got down to business with fork and knife. He glanced to his left, saw the mayor and the councilmen looking stiff and awkward as two sat on either end of the couch and two in the chairs fronting the couch and angled to face the coffee table.
“Don’t mind me,” Hawk said. “You men have questions to ask, go ahead and ask.”
He kept the men in the corner of his left eye as he shoveled food into his mouth, chewing and swallowing hungrily and washing down every second or third bite with a swig of the hoppy ale. The men looked around at each other, silently conferring, before the youngest of the four, Carson Tarwater, who sat on the right end of the couch facing Hawk over the coffee table, blew a long plume of smoke into the air, and said, “So, Mr. Hawk . . .” He narrowed his eyes in bemused speculation. “. . . You’re him.”
“What?” Hawk said, holding a forkful of food in front of his mouth. “You thought I’d be taller? Or shorter?”
10.
“THE TIERNEYS MUST BE STOPPED”
CARSON Tarwater had a haggard face pitted from what appeared a long-ago bout with smallpox. Still, it was a regally handsome countenance, broad of cheek and wide of jaw tapering to a resolute chin, with dark-brown hair graying at the temples and swept back from a prominent widow’s peak. The man stretched his long, thin limbs. He dimpled his clean-shaven cheeks.
“I must say I didn’t know what to expect. Some of the illustrated newspapers, I’m told—don’t read the trashy things myself—make you out to be a hero of the common folk whom the laws of the frontier are incapable of fully protecting against the badmen running rampant everywhere.”
The man’s slow, pleasant voice betrayed a soft southern accent. “Others, a hard-nosed criminal. A kill-hungry pistolero so tormented by the deaths of his family that he kills and keeps on killing merely to fill the void in his tortured world.”
Hawk slid the forkful of meat and potatoes into his mouth and sipped his beer. “You have an opinion yet?”
“I’m leaning toward the latter.”
Hawk stopped eating to arch a puzzled brow at the man, who stared back at him, cheeks dimpled.
Mayor Pennybacker shifted in his chair left of the couch. Leaning forward, he set his snifter on the end of the coffee table, rested his elbows on his knees, and entwined his short, bony fingers.
“You see, Mr. Hawk,” he said, “Carson here is the one who suggested we hire a town tamer. When we received a response from you, he was quite pleased.”
“I know what it takes to bring civilization to the frontier,” Tarwater said. “You see, I left my ranch in Texas to join the Confederacy. When I returned, carpetbaggers had moved onto my land, stolen all my horses and cattle—mavericks it had taken me six years to brand. My wife even married one of the Yankee devils. I couldn’t get those men off my property or to return my woman. Words, of course, wouldn’t sway them. And while I’d fought hard in the war with General Hood, I’d lost my stomach for bloodletting.”
He pinched his broadcloth trousers up at the knee, revealing a wooden ankle rising from a wooden foot painted to resemble a black shoe. “As well as my foot.”
“Blue Tierney must be stopped.” This from one of the two men who had not yet spoken—Romeo Pike, a rotund, jowly, dark-skinned man who obviously had some Spanish or Mexican blood. “Him and his son must be stopped, Mr. Hawk. They run wild throughout the county, rustling, claim-jumping, attacking the Poudre River Transport line, whose stages run once, sometimes twice a week through Trinity and often carry payroll pouches for area mines and ranches. They’re badly hurting my business.” He flushed slightly and glanced around at the other men. “All of our businesses. They must be stopped . . . at no risk to the good folks of Trinity, of course. . . .”
“What do you do, Mr. Pike?” Hawk asked, chewing slowly now that his stomach was finally getting full.
“I run the transport company and U.S. Post Office, kittycorner from the hotel.” Pike nodded at the front window.
“He’s not the only one getting hurt, Mr. Hawk,” Tarwater said. “It’s hard on my business, too. I have the tack and feed store over by the undertaker’s. And I do some horse selling.” He glanced at Mayor Pennybacker. “You wanna tell him what they did to you, Mayor?”
The Trinity mayor shifted around uneasily and lowered his watery eyes to the coffee table, off of which he scooped his brandy snifter with both hands and rolled it between his palms. “They found my granddaughter down by the creek last summer.” He grimaced and thumbed his spectacles up his nose. “Brazos and several other men abused her terribly.” He glanced up at Hawk, and a hardness entered the man’s gaze. “She’s . . . a simple girl, Mr. Hawk. A child in a young woman’s body. And now. Now, you see, she’s carrying a child. She’s being cared for by the Sisters of Saint Theresa’s in Cheyenne.”
The mayor threw his snifter back, draining it.
Hawk set his fork down softly, staring at his plate. He wasn’t sure if it had been the mayor’s story or the food he had so quickly consumed, but he was suddenly no longer famished.
Silence descended on the room. The only sounds were the mutterings of the old women sitting along the far wall, sipping tea, and the occasional clatter of a pan or stove lid in the kitchen. The fire popped and crackled.
“I run Learner Freighting,” said the other man who had remained silent till now as he sat on the other side of the coffee table from the mayor. “Two Troughs riders harass my wagons almost weekly. Last month, apparently to celebrate Tierney’s springing of his son from the gallows and killing Sheriff Stanley and his deputy, Matt Freeman, they ran one wagon and four mules into a canyon. The skinner, mules, freight, and wagon—all lost.”
“Not to mention . . .” Romeo Pike looked around and let his voice trail off as though chagrined.
Hawk turned on his chair to face the men and set the boot of his bullet-troughed calf onto his knee to get some weight off of it. He winced as he said, “Not to mention what?”
A brief, uncomfortable silence. All the men looked down or askance except for Tarwater, on whose haggardly handsome face a bitter smile quirked.
The mayor said quietly, “The preacher. Pastor Hawthorne. He was there . . . on the gallows. He didn’t take the shooting well.”
Tarwater snorted unabashedly and puffed his cigar, staring out the windows flanking Hawk. “I’ll say he didn’t.”
Benjamin Learner shook his head as if the current topic offended him. “Our trouble now is not only with Tierney’s men, though they’ve been running wilder than usual since they killed our lawmen. But other men—wild drifters and general ne’er-do-wells—run lawless here, too. Like packs of wild dogs, coming and going, doing what they please, taking what they please. It’s gotten so that decent men don’t dare patronize the saloons and whorehouses anymore after sundown.”
This evoked muffled laughter from the other men in the room. Hawk even gave a snort as he dug inside his sheepskin vest, which he wore with the leather facing out, for his makings sack. Learner’s face turned red.
Slowly, quietly, Hawk shaped a cigarette. With a sigh, he stuck the quirley between his teeth, scratched a lucifer on his right holster, and touched it to the quirley. Puffing smoke as he returned the makings sack to his shirt
pocket, he said, “How much you gonna pay me?”
“Thirty a month,” the mayor said.
They all looked at Hawk, waiting.
He shook his head as he drew a lungful of smoke. “Might not be here that long. I want a thousand dollars when I have both Brazos and Blue Tierney hanging from that gallows out there. Along with the other two men Tierney sprang. By that time, I’ll have the town back on its leash.”
“Hanging?” Tarwater was incredulous. “We don’t need to go through all that again. Kill ’em! That’s what you do, isn’t it, Hawk?”
“I do what needs to be done,” Hawk shot back at the man. “Since Stanley wanted them hanged, and he died trying to see them hanged so the town could take comfort and satisfaction in the law being upheld, I’m going to hang them.”
Tarwater laughed as he clapped his hands once and sagged back on the sofa, lifting his natural foot with false glee. “How ironic. Soon as we bring the bastard to Trinity, the Rogue Lawman’s going straight!”
Hawk blew smoke through his nostrils and eyed the man grimly. “I don’t see what difference it makes how I clean up your town, Mr. Tarwater. As long as it’s cleaned up.”
“I have to agree with Mr. Hawk,” said the mayor. “We’ll let him do it his way.”
“Tell me, Hawk,” Tarwater said, crossing his leg with the bizarre-looking wooden foot over the other knee, his cigar sending smoke curling toward the ceiling. “Why no alias? They tell me you used to ride by the name Hollis. George Hollis.”
Hawk shrugged. “Once everyone learns your alias, there’s really no reason to go on using it, now, is there, Tarwater?”
Of course, he could come up with another name. But, frankly, Hawk was tired of the charade. It was easier for bona fide lawmen to track him now, under his real name, but he simply no longer cared. He gave little consideration to his reasons, but what it boiled down to was that he no longer cared if he lived or died.
“Those are my terms, gentlemen,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”
He took another deep drag off his quirley, then dropped the stub in his empty ale schooner. Rising, trying to put the brunt of his weight on his left foot, he scooped his gear off the floor, draping the saddlebags over his back. He rested the Henry repeater over his shoulder.
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