Rockwell mounted, slung the bags across the saddle horn in front of him as Beardsley had. "Take care," he told the old man.
"Adiós."
The old man had it right, he realized. The wind had shifted. It was at his back as Rockwell started out of Tartarus, or what remained of it. Lord willing, it would hasten him along to Salt Lake City, sparing him from snow until he had a roof over his head.
And after that?
He faced the future grim-faced, stoic. Thinking to himself, Thy will be done.
About the Author
Michael Newton has published 263 books since 1977, with 19 more scheduled for release from various houses through 2014. His work includes 200 novels (published under his own name and various pen names), plus 82 nonfiction books in the fields of true crime, history and cryptozoology. His history of the Florida Ku Klux Klan (The Invisible Empire, University Press of Florida) won the Florida Historical Society's Rembert Patrick Award as Best Book in Florida History for 2002. In 2006 the American Library Association chose his Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology (McFarland Publishing) as one of the years 12 Outstanding Reference Books. His novel Manhunt (written as "Lyle Brandt" for Berkley Books) won the Western Fictioneers Peacemaker Award for Best Western Novel in 2010. Newton lives in Indiana with his wife, Heather. Visit him on Facebook, or at his Web site at www.michaelnewton.homestead.com.
Western Fictioneers Presents
West of the Big River
The Artist
A Western Tale of Charles M.
Jackson Lowry
Dedication:
For my crazy artist friend, Dennis Liberty, who suggested that Charlie Russell would make a great hero. For once you were right, Dennis!
Waiting for a Chinook
Chapter One
"Kin I have this here dance?"
I looked up at about the ugliest galoot I'd ever laid eyes on. He was more a scarecrow than a wrangler, but my opinion formed more because of his shabby clothes, which looked as if he had stripped them from said scarecrow out in some granger's cornfield. The red-and-black checked flannel shirt could have been used as a checkerboard, if you didn't mind the pieces getting greasy while they waited to be jumped around and turned into kings. His voice screeched above the tune the piano player hammered out with less skill than enthusiasm.
Nobody else in Gus' Watering Hole cared that the piano player missed every other note in The Boogaboo. For my part, I appreciated that he hit that many. In the past he had missed most notes 'til the song about the poor girl fearing a man's parts sounded more like a scalded cat dancing across the keys than a talented musician plying his trade. His voice had been sandpapered down to a hoarse croak easily drowned out by his piano work, which was likely a good thing. But I appreciated his sprightliness.
"I ain't much the dancin' sort." I watched his face cloud over at the insult. "Not sayin' you ain't my type, mind you, but you'd have to let me lead."
"Won't do that," he said, hitching up his gun belt, more to show off his brand spanking new .32 caliber Lemon Squeezer than to be menacing. He wore that double action Smith & Wesson high on his right hip in a soft leather holster. Not a shootist but a wrangler like me. Unfortunately I had left my iron back at the bunkhouse. All I had was a knife shoved into the broad rainbow colored nine-foot-long Hudson's Bay sash I wore wrapped around my middle.
"Aw, go on, Charlie," my partner said, reaching over to nudge me hard. "You jist sit and suck up Gus' tarantula juice scratchin' pitchers into the table. Have yerse'f some fun fer a change."
Rusty Rawlins brushed away some spilled foam from my beer that had hidden the latest effort I'd made with my knife point in the wood tabletop. Since I had lost my drawing pencil I had to make do with whatever came to hand. His stubby fingers traced over a carved likeness of the best looking whore in town. Or had been in town until a week ago Thursday when she climbed on the stagecoach. Most men in town had lined the streets, hats doffed and heads bowed like they were at a funeral. I was pining for Maggie something fierce myself, but she and most all of the other soiled doves had gone south for the winter because Montana winters could freeze the balls off a brass bull. She had asked me to go along with her, but I couldn't let down Jesse Phillips, the owner of the OH Ranch, who had been so good to me. As much as I longed to share Maggie's bed all winter long, loyalty to Mr. Phillips was greater than lust.
Ever since I'd got a job riding night herd from Horace Brewster, nothing but wrangling interested me. Well, not like Maggie interested me, but I don't talk about women much, even if I have a way with them. More than one of the whores in the same crib as Maggie showered their affections on me in exchange for a little drawing of them. I always was careful to make sure they showed up in fancy dresses. They liked that. Maggie, well, Maggie I did a few for her naked as a jaybird because she enjoyed showing them to other customers. Truth is, I didn't mind her posing for me like that one little bit.
But I was a tad ashamed of the etching I'd put into the table.
The drover who'd asked me to dance leaned over. His mouth fell open and a drop of chaw spattered onto the table. Rusty hastily wiped it away since it had fallen right on Maggie's likeness.
"You and her, you do that to her? She let you do that to her?" The wrangler moved closer and poked his S&W in my ear, crowding to get a better look. The new gun oil made my nostrils flare.
"Naw," I said, lying like an Indian rug. I wished I hadn't added the extra details — me — along with the scratching. "Wanted to but never did."
The wrangler stared hard at me, then stepped back and squared off, like he was fixing on throwing down.
"You're a liar. And you don't wanna dance with me."
The piano player had finished butchering The Boogaboo and moved on to the even raunchier The Keyhole in the Door. I'd always appreciated that one, having taken some pleasure myself spying on Maggie when she wasn't wearing even "a sky blue garter."
"You gonna dance with me? Or are you too consarned good for that, you who's done that with a woman?" He glanced toward the etching in the wood, then he shot a gob of tobacco juice in the direction of Gus' fine cherrywood bar.
The gob hit the corner and trickled down. I stood and pointed.
"See that brass turtle on the floor? That there's a cuspidor."
"What?" He looked confused at the way I'd gone from denying him the pleasure of a dance, our spurs clinking and our boots tromping on one another's toes, to the cuspidor.
"I designed that brass turtle for Gus." I stepped over, applied the toe of my boot on its tail and the shell stood upright to reveal a right fine spittoon. Gus hadn't bothered cleaning it out in a while, so even the brass was corroding. "You want to dance, you got to act polite."
He spilled again, this time with incredible accuracy considering how he was so drunk. His gob splashed dead center of the sea of tobacco juice and caused tiny ripples. If his aim with the Lemon Squeezer was half as good as his aim with the chaw, he might just build me a new belly button.
"Don't want to dance now, not if you can do me a drawing. Like that." His eyes darted to the table.
"Hell and damnation, fella, why didn't you say you fancied Charlie's work and not his company?" Rusty stood, judged distances and then drove his elbow down hard onto the table.
Gus protested the loss of so many glasses, then silenced when I caught his eye. He knew I'd make the damage right, and avoiding lead flying around inside the Watering Hole, drunks crowded shoulder to shoulder, was something to be cherished. Rusty whacked the table again and broke off the panel with my tribute to Maggie, then thrust it in the wrangler's direction so that he had to reach for it with his gun hand.
Rusty was giving me the chance to use my knife on an exposed belly if it suited me. I never was one for fights, much less against a galoot who wanted nothing more than to dance with me. He was scrawny, but whipcord strong. I stood half a head taller, was stocky and not a speck of it was fat. The way Texas Pete cooked on the trail was something of a crime, and I spent more time telling
my stories than eating. Once, Rusty tossed his burnt steak over his shoulder, a coyote ate it and got so almighty sick, the marshal rode out from town and threatened to arrest him for abusin' the wildlife.
Fact was, in a brawl this wrangler didn't stand much of a chance against me, but I'm a lover, not a fighter. Except for the one time when —
I looked up fast when a gust of cold Montana wind whipped through the smoke and beer fumes as the door opened. A quick glance at Rusty confirmed what I couldn't quite tell. Horace Brewster about filled the door frame, side to side, but lacked a full foot of reaching the lintel, even with his floppy brimmed hat pushed back to show off his weathered forehead. Simply shoving it back another few inches wouldn't reveal any of the spindly crop of blond hair he sported. He moved fast into the room and finally got to a spot where a lamp lit up his creased face.
He wasn't bringing us good news.
"All OH cowpokes, gather round," he rasped out.
His voice had gone all hoarse from the cold night air and maybe from the way he gasped. Rumor had it he was a lunger, though I never had seen him coughing up the black gobs that betrayed a man with tuberculosis. As nervy as Horace was, nobody was likely to ask him if he was sick. Me, I think he had smoked too many of the quirlies he favored. The potent tobacco he rolled up was worse than floor sweepings, even in the Watering Hole. I'd seen him set down at a campfire and smoke a dozen of them one after another, as fast as he could build them. Where he got the tobacco was something of a mystery, but more 'n one of us reckoned he laced it with loco weed.
A man's got to have his vices, I reckon. I'd never seen Horace touch a drop of liquor nor heard a whisper of him using his wages to buy himself a woman.
He hacked a couple times but didn't have anything to spit, then launched into why he had ridden into town to fetch us.
"Rustlers," was all he said. Horace was never a man to build the suspense in a good story. That was why he tolerated me riding night herd and spinning tales around the campfire for the men.
"How many of 'em?" Rusty was always the practical one in the crew. He touched his old black powder Remington thrust into his belt. His fingers tapped out a nervous tattoo in a Morse code anyone could understand. He was itching to wrap his finger around the trigger and shoot him some cattle thieves.
"Don't know. The boss spotted them just east of here, maybe driving some OH beeves." I pushed back the fringed buckskin I wore and showed him I wasn't carrying my pistol. "Got an extra iron in my saddlebags, Russell." That concluded his call to the OH crew. Horace turned and stomped out, his bowed legs whipping up the smoke like an eggbeater.
We followed. The saloon had gone quiet when Horace busted in, but now the buzz rose 'til it was almost deafening. One of the men might roust the marshal, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen. It wasn't that Marshal Toms was a bad sort. He just protested all the time how he wasn't paid enough to keep the streets clean of horseshit and dead animals and go riding off into the night after desperados, too. The town council didn't have enough money to pay any lawman to do that. Push come to shove, the marshal would take dragging off dead horses to the lime pit outside town to getting his head shot off by a gang of rustlers any day of the week.
Can't say I blame him much, but me and the boys weren't deputies. We were cowpokes working for about the best rancher in all Montana. If Mr. Phillips asked me to walk through hell barefoot, all I'd ask is when he wanted me back to ride night herd. Rusty and Horace and all the rest felt the same way.
Even in the years when the OH didn't bring in much money due to drought or disease, the punchers always got paid. I'd been working as a wrangler eleven years, eight of it for him, and not once did he short my pay, bawl me out for something stupid I'd done, and once had posted bail after an unfortunate incident with the marshal's dog and a string of firecrackers. The only thing I can fault him for as a boss is keeping Texas Pete on to poison us all — and I suspect he does that since Pete'd never find a job with any other outfit. Even when Mr. Phillips is at his worst, he's doing it for a good reason.
"Charlie." I turned at my name and clumsily caught a Colt tossed my direction. Horace never glanced back to see if I'd caught it. He assumed I had. I tucked it into my sash.
"We'll catch up with you, Horace," Rusty said. "We left our horses down the street."
"In front of an empty whorehouse? Good thing your dicks are nailed on or you'd have lost 'em a long time back." Horace shook his head sadly, then mounted. The cold night swallowed him up before he had ridden a hundred yards.
"That's about the most I've heard Horace say in one sentence since I signed on," Rusty said.
"Tells me how serious this is. The beeves disappearing are going to drive Mr. Phillips into the poorhouse, us with them. It's going to be a fierce winter and the more he loses now, the worse it'll be later on."
Rusty nodded. "Reckon we'll lose more 'n usual. Best to start into the winter with as many head as possible."
I lengthened my stride, forcing Rusty to half run to keep up. His hat blew back in a sudden gust of wind, kept from flying away by the string fastened under his chin. The reason for his nickname fluttered in the breeze, a rusty red banner that needed clipping. A quick grab pulled his hat back down. He cursed the wind and the growing bite to it that spelled out a winter none of us wanted.
He got to his horse first. Rusty, like most of the other cowboys working for the OH, had a dozen or more head to choose from. Me, I preferred my own pinto. Monte and me go back a long ways, from the time I blowed into Montana. I don't know how it's possible, but I fell in love with that pinto at first sight. He was a spotted white bay and brown with black legs and a midnight mane that was about the finest I'd ever seen when he was flat out galloping. It floated back and looked like that of a racehorse. I'd traded two big brutes of horses for Monte. The Paygan Indian had wanted them, and I'd wanted Monte. But I hadn't let the Indian know that and had dickered hard and long, spending most of one humid summer afternoon haggling until I got not only Monte but another pony.
I don't even remember what became of that one. But Monte and me became inseparable. Reflecting on the matter a great deal while I ride night herd hasn't given me any definite answer. Can a horse be as devoted to a man as I was to him? I liked to think so. But it might just be the occasional lumps of sugar I give him or his favorite, a fresh carrot. I don't even have to brush off the dirt. Monte gobbles it up, earth and all.
Monte tried to crow hop when I stepped up to show his displeasure at being ridden again so soon. It was close to an hour into town from the spread, and I hadn't been in Gus' longer than an hour. Monte had gotten used to me spending a considerable longer time inside the cathouse in front of us, but that had been when Maggie was spreading out her picnic lunch of treats inside. With a twinge of regret, I turned Monte's head and got him galloping off after Rusty and his gelding.
We caught up with Horace and a half dozen other hands from the OH a mile outside town. The wind picked up and carried all the scents of night on it I expected. A quick glance overhead worried me a mite, though. I didn't catch any hint of rain or snow on the wind, but the heavy clouds moving in from the mountains warned of a late fall turning into an early winter. The grass all through the summer had been good, and the cows had fattened up nicely. Decent amounts of greenery still stretched across the prairie and would provide good grazing if the snow didn't pile up too deep.
What worried me more than a storm right now was how the thick, roiling clouds hid the stars. On a normal night in Montana, the stars lit the land almost as bright as during the day. Eerie bogeys formed to spook a high-strung horse, but I had Monte under me. He didn't bolt at starry shadows or anything less than a wolf creeping up on a sleeping steer.
"We're going to blunder around in the dark and end up shooting each other, 'less you know perzactly where them rustlers are," Rusty said, putting words to my distress over the growing darkness. "You have a good fix on them, Horace?"
"Ahead," wa
s all the foreman said. That was good enough to keep us riding, collars turned up to the increasingly frigid wind.
As I rode, I worked the borrowed Colt around so its hammer wouldn't cut into my belly. The long sash worked better than a holster to cushion the weapon, but back at the bunkhouse I have my own pistol and a decent holster for it. The only time I ever wore it slung at my side was on night herd to scare off wolves or to turn a stampede, should one start. Cattle are stupid critters at the best of times and run at the slightest provocation. Sometimes they don't even have any provocation. They just light out on their own for no reason other than they are stupid critters. It's the night wrangler's duty to keep them soothed and not running breakneck across a darkened prairie where they will surely kill one another by trampling or legs breaking from blundering through prairie dog burrows.
The longer we rode, the more I wondered if Horace had only twigged onto some strays from the main herd. The wind blew steadily, but I didn't catch any hint of sound on it that shouldn't have been there. I didn't have much experience with rustlers — well, none, this being my first encounter — but there ought to have been some shouting from one cow thief to the another. No drover rode without shouting to his buddies. If they were a bunch of deaf mutes, they'd likely use bullwhips to get the stolen herd moving. Firing off their pistols would create more havoc than any self-respecting rustler could handle, if rustlers were self-respecting.
"There. See? In the draw."
Horace had drawn rein, stood in the stirrups and pointed toward a spot where intense darkness blotted out mere darkness. I started to snort in derision. He had to be jumping at nothing. Then I heard beeves lowing. And horses neighing. Finally came a man shouting to another. This made me proud that I had figured out how rustlers would act. They weren't any different from the OH Ranch drovers, only we didn't steal cattle. We legally moved them from pasture to pasture and to market when the boss told us to.
West of the Big River: Boxed Set of Eight Western Novels Page 20