by Mark Henry
Clay shook his head back and forth mocking the marshal, grinning. If he was offended, he didn’t show it.
“I know Constable Steese,” Blake offered to the group. “I can go talk to him and see if he’s seen or heard of anything.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Ky said, working out all the possibilities of confrontation in his mind. “Better if we don’t ride in all together anyhow.”
“True enough,” said Clay. “You two badge-toters go and talk to your lawman friend while me and ol’ Trap saunter on over to do a little reconnoiter at the Snake Pit.” He made an X with a hand across his chest. “I promise I won’t go swingin’ from the branches while you’re away, Hezekiah.”
Ky looked at Trap, who shrugged.
“It might be worth a try, Captain,” O’Shannon said. “If there’s a woman there, she’s liable to tell him all she knows.”
“And some she doesn’t,” Ky agreed. “One thing you two need to know before you go.” He held out a gloved hand toward Blake, who’d ridden his Appy up beside him. The young deputy reached in his shirt pocket and produced a folded leather envelope. He passed it to Roman.
Ky cleared his throat. “By the authority vested in me . . .”
“Ain’t this nice.” Clay threw an arm around Trap’s shoulders as they sat stirrup to stirrup. “He’s gonna marry us.”
Trap knew what his old captain was up to, and shrugged off his friend’s arm.
Ky rolled his eyes and sighed, cutting to the meat of the matter. “I’m making you both my deputies. This isn’t my district, so I’m deputizing you for the Judicial District of Arizona. As long as we’re here and Blake needs the help, I think it best we’re all official. I’m certain President Taft would approve.”
* * *
Railroad agent and constable when it suited him, Fred Steese was only four days away from his seventy-first birthday. He was out cold in a drunken stupor, and Blake thought the old man might be dead when they first found him sprawled across a sagging cot in the small office next to the whistle stop. When they finally did rouse the old man, they found him stricken with such a bad case of the wheezing croup, it was difficult to understand a word he said.
The thick smoke that hung in the air like dirty quilt batting was hard on the old man. Each time Steese drew a breath to speak had him red-faced and sputtering to catch his breath. The two lawmen thought he might suffocate or burst a blood vessel at every word.
“Lucius,” he coughed. “Snake Pit,” he spewed. “Bald-faced killers.”
The old man pointed a bony finger out the greasy window in the direction of the Snake Pit roadhouse, and broke into a riotous fit of coughing that caused him to pound his fist on the edge of the mattress, and then collapse back on his pillow. His forehead was drenched in beads of sweat.
“Amazing how nothing else matters when you can’t get air,” Ky said when he put his hat back on outside the constable’s makeshift office. The marshal’s voice was strained, and it was plain he wanted to get over and check on his friends. “Don’t like the sound of this, son. Let’s go see what our two partners have gotten themselves into.”
CHAPTER 10
The new slab-wood door still oozed sticky amber sap in the heat of the evening. A long wooden frame covered with a canvas roof made up the building called the Snake Pit. Most of the lumber had been fresh cut no more than a few weeks before and thrown together with no time to cure. Every piece warped its own peculiar way, and this gave the frame a twisted, drunken appearance.
Anyone who wanted to get into the place bad enough could just cut through the canvas over the six-foot wooden walls. Several long rows of stitching showed that someone impatient for whiskey had done exactly that. Consequently, management didn’t spend too much of its profit on fancy doors. An establishment like the Snake Pit drew a rowdy clientele that could put them through three broken doors a week.
A crumpled drunk lay slumped in the canvas breezeway, propping open the sticky door. Spraddle-legged and drooling, the man sat with his mouth agape, exposing both of his two bottom teeth. A greasy pall of smoke drifted out on a shaft of yellow light, and mixed above the drunk’s head with the brown haze of smoke from the forest fires.
Trap tied his mule to a rusty iron ring on a stump beside Madsen’s bay. He had to step around the sprawling man to get through the door. It galled him that he had to go out of his way to get somewhere he didn’t particularly want to be in the first place.
His rifle nestled in the crook of his arm, Trap looked over at Clay as they crossed the threshold into the dingy bar. “As you get older do you have more trouble—”
“Peein’?” Clay finished. “Why, yes, I do now that you mention it. I reckon it’s just something we have to live with as we get on in our years.”
Trap shot a glance back to the entrance, remembering how a conversation with Clay was liable to lead any which direction if it wasn’t headed off quickly. “I was going to say with malingerers like that gump there in the doorway. Seems like I have less and less patience with lazy folks.”
Clay clapped a hand on his friend’s back. “Then go easy on me, my friend, because lest you forget, I’m likely the worst one of that sort you ever came across.” Madsen’s eyes sparkled in the dim lantern light of the bar. “Now Trap, I aim to order two beers, one for me and another for me. You don’t go drinkin’ anything. You get mighty mean when you drink.”
“I haven’t had a drink in years, you know that,” Trap said, his eyes trying to adjust to the smoky tavern.
Inside, the Snake Pit was just what the name implied: full of venomous creatures. In the long, thrown-together structure, there was just enough room to get one row of four tables down the left wall. Split pine slabs lay across squat barrels along the other wall. This served double duty as a bar and as a hiding place for the poisonous-looking man wiping dirty glasses with an even dirtier rag. The barkeep recoiled at the new arrivals and eyed them carefully. He stared hard under bushy black brows, and gave the odd assortment of greasy whiskey glasses a squeaky rub.
A short, stout woman with matted red hair, the color of a cigar coal, leaned on both elbows against the table across from the glaring man. A green summer dress clung heavily to a round rump as if she’d sweated through it. Her solid legs were set slightly apart over bare feet, roughened from life on a hard-packed dirt floor. Trap was a tracker. He noticed feet.
A glass, two times as large as the ones served to patrons, sat half-full of whiskey on the bar in front of the woman. If it weren’t for the hard-knock life she led, she might have been considered pretty by some—Clay surely would have chosen her in his early years. Trap smiled inside himself when he remembered how his partner used to describe his favorite woman.
“A fine woman is like a fine horse,” Madsen was fond of saying. “Fiery of spirit, round of hip, and pretty of face.”
This one met at least the first two criteria, and in a dim bar after a couple of drinks, Clay had been known to overlook some things.
The barkeep’s head swayed menacingly on the end of a long neck as the woman pushed up from her leaning position over the poor excuse for a bar. He tongued a fleck of something black out of his front teeth and muttered a spate of hissing, unintelligible words. It didn’t matter what he did; Clay had his eyes on the woman, and no foolish mumbling from an uppity barkeep was about to make him change his course.
The two had already begun the quiet eye-to-eye dance some folks came by naturally. Trap was never quite at ease around much of anyone, let alone women, and had never been able to muster such communication with anyone but Maggie. Clay was at ease with just about everyone, particularly this sort of woman. Trap had always known him to be fiercely faithful during his married years, but between wives, he’d been at ease with women of varied shapes, sizes, and moralities.
At the far end of the narrow room, three men in soot-covered shirts and ragged britches hunkered around a heavy table of split logs. The moth-eaten head of a mule deer buck hung just behind them
on an upright support post. Dusty cobwebs draped from the antler forks to the nappy forehead, and one of the ears was burned to little more than a singed nubbin. If you didn’t count the woman in the green dress, the dead deer was the only decoration in the bar.
Under this lone bit of barroom décor, the men sat bleary-eyed and exhausted, going through the motions of a card game. One looked up to give Trap a cursory glance; the others ignored him completely. They seemed no threat, though they might know some useful information.
Trap approached them surely, not quite as forcefully as a lawman might, but his words were direct for an inquisitive stranger.
“Looking for a girl,” he said while the men dealt a new hand.
One of the gamblers, an older fellow with an overbite and huge mustache to enhance it, looked up at Trap and nodded, before spitting on the floor. “There’s one over yonder, but I wouldn’t wait around for her if I was you. Franco, the barkeep, was about to have a go with her when you two came in. He’s wicked jealous for a man who runs a sport. Now that your friend’s laid claim on her, it’s liable to be a little wait. And that’s if there ain’t a fight.”
Trap nodded when he saw the woman had resumed her position leaning against the bar. Clay stood sidled up next to her, elbow to elbow. Franco stood a few feet away, eyeing Clay with dart eyes and a deadly look.
“I meant a particular girl,” Trap said.
All three of the men snickered. The bucktoothed spokesman arranged the cards in his hand and spit again. “Well, Cora ain’t particular. That’s for damn sure.” He winked at his friends.
Trap held his breath and chewed on the inside of his cheek. It had been so long since he talked to anyone at length besides Maggie, and much of their communication was unspoken. He felt out of his element with so many words coming out of his mouth. “Have you seen any other girls around here? Maybe earlier today?”
“Sorry, friend.” The old man stared at his cards. “We only snuck in from the fires not more than an hour ago. Fact is, we just had time to have a few minutes each with old Cora there and get this game goin’ before you came in. Ain’t seen nobody but you fellers.”
Trap’s stomach did a flip at the thought of Cora entertaining all the men in turn. He was grateful Clay was the one doing the talking to her. Convinced the three cardplayers had no useful information, he busied himself studying the cobwebs on the deer head to give Clay time to see what Cora knew. For a time, the two talked in hushed tones. Clay listened intently with his hat thrown back in that boyish way of his, every few moments giving an understanding nod. After a few dragging minutes, he counted some bills out on the bar before a wide-eyed Cora. Trap couldn’t hear the conversation, but he saw Franco throw his dirty towel down in disgust. Cora began to cry. Clay patted her on the back and then tilted her head up with his index finger so he could look her in the face. He dabbed at her eyes with his bandanna, kissed the round little woman on the end of her nose. She sniffed, took his bandanna, and kept talking, pointing out the back door. Clay stood up straight at whatever it was she told him and shot an excited look at Trap.
Clay kissed her again, this time on her forehead. He took something from his vest pocket and placed it in her hand, curling her fingers around it and holding her fist in both his beefy hands. She looked up at him, blinking with the wide eyes of a lapdog. Gently releasing her, he turned and shook a finger at the sullen bartender before rejoining Trap.
“Our man’s name is Lucius Feak. According to our new friend, he’s not above cutting the fingers off a woman.” Clay cast a nod over his shoulder as he started for the door. For the first time, Trap saw Cora was waving her good-byes minus the ring and little finger on her right hand.
“She allowed as how Mr. Feak got tired of her a few months ago. He’s taken up with a new woman named Moira Gumm—stays with her when he’s in town. She’s got a little shack a couple of stumps around the mountain, over behind what used to be the old Anheuser Hotel. Her place is one of the few that didn’t burn in July.” Clay shoved open the rickety door and nodded into the darkness behind the little tavern. “Cora was kind enough to give us directions. I didn’t get the impression she likes Miss Moira very much.”
Trap looked over his shoulder one last time before stepping into the smoky air. Compared to inside the Snake Pit, it seemed fresh as spring. “Looked to me like you gave her some money, then made her cry.”
Clay shrugged, absent his usual chuckle. “She’s dumber than a boot sole, Trap. Been used something awful—too many times. I gave her a little tortoise-shell comb I picked up down in Dallas a while back. You’d a thought I gave the poor girl a diamond, the way she looked at me so. Reckon no one ever gave her much but a hard time.” Madsen sniffed. “Whenever I meet a woman like her, I can’t help but ponder on what she’d be like if I’d found her before she was pushed so hard by whatever it was that pushed her and damaged her so. You ever wonder about things such as that?”
O’Shannon strained to see his old partner in the darkness. “Sorry, Clay, but my mind just don’t work that way.” Trap could see the big Texan’s eyes sparkled with tears in what little light sifted through the cracks in the dry lumber walls and amber tent fabric.
Clay wiped his nose and coughed to clear his throat. “The mean-eyed booger behind the bar was about to help himself to her when we showed up. If I’d had more time, I’d have knocked his head down into his shoulders. Instead, I bought her services for the rest of the night and told him to leave her be. If we have time tonight after we kill Feak and get the Kenworth girl back, I think I’ll stop in and check on his behavior. I might have an opportunity to swat him yet.”
“I hope we have the chance to get our hands on this Feak character and his men as soon as all that,” Trap whispered as they weaved in and out of the charred stump row. The entire settlement of Grand Forks was nothing more than a pile of tents and shacks nestled in the crook of a rock-strewn mountain.
“We’ll find out shortly.” Clay pointed with an open hand. “From Cora’s description, I believe that’s Moira’s place yonder.”
“I’m a little quieter than you in my moccasins. I’ll see if I can get up close enough to see how many there are.”
Clay nodded and wiped his nose with the back of his hand. “Sorry about that nonsense there. Didn’t mean to go all blubbery on you. I reckon I’m gettin’ a little emotional in my old age, especially when it comes to the womenfolk.”
Trap rested a sure hand on the Texan’s shoulder and gave him a wide smile. “You were always emotional when it came to womenfolk. That’s why my wife loves you enough to make me crazy.”
Clay opened his mouth to say more, but bit his lip instead. He took a deep breath and got back to business. “There’s a crack in that south wall a body could throw a cat through. You should be able to get a good look from there. Hopefully, Ky and Blake will see our horses out in front of the Snake Pit. Cora said she’d send them this way.” Clay had his pistol out in a relaxed hand.
Trap stooped to a crouch and glided off toward the cobwebs of light spilling out from the cracked walls of the tiny shack Moira Gumm called home. He kept his rifle low, even with his belt, but ready for action. Feak and his men faced hanging for what they did, and were sure to put up a fight.
The cabin walls were thin, and Trap heard muffled voices by the time he was twenty feet away. He couldn’t make out words, but there was definitely a man inside and he sounded mighty unhappy.
CHAPTER 11
In front of the Snake Pit, Blake patted Clay Madsen’s bay on the shoulder as he dismounted. He tied his own animal to the same hitching ring. The horses groaned quietly and the stout Appaloosa cocked a hind leg up to rest it. Roman stepped down next to him and froze in his tracks. Both men listened intently to the inside of the rough saloon.
The sound of breaking glass chattered through the canvas walls. A pitiful yelp cut the thickness of the night air and caused Blake to shudder. Ky’s eyes narrowed at the sound of another whimpering scream. Hack
les up, his long neck bowed like a horse ready to charge, the marshal set his jaw.
“One thing is certain,” Roman said, striding with deadly purpose toward the open saloon door. “Your father and Madsen aren’t alive if they’re in there. No woman would cry like that twice if they were.” The tall lawman hopped nimbly over the drunken body of the man in the threshold and shoved the door hard enough to loose it from its top hinge.
Blake followed closely on his heels, startled by the thought that something might have happened to his father. What he saw inside stopped him as surely as a stone wall.
Shards of broken glass mingled with puddles of spilled whiskey on the filthy floor. Two men, their yellowed teeth gleaming in the amber glow of coal-oil lamps, held a sobbing woman by each arm, facedown across a low wooden bar. Most of her ragged green skirt had been ripped away, and what was left was hiked up in a crumpled wad above her waist. A third man, with dark, raccoonlike circles under his eyes and a bartender’s apron, administered cruel blows to the bare skin of her buttocks with a leather razor strop.
The poor woman’s face was toward the door, and Blake could see her eyes clenched shut in fear and anticipation of the next blow.
The bartender stopped when he saw the two newcomers. His dark eyes blazed and the veins in his forehead bulged as he screamed at them in a high-pitched gurgle. The thick strop hung poised in the air. His face was flushed from the exertion from his beating. “Go out of here or you will be the next.” He had a thick Italian accent.
A maniacal growl erupted from somewhere deep within Hezekiah Roman, and he scooped up a tall wooden stool from beside the bar. Advancing on the team of men holding the woman, he never looked around.
The only other man in the place sat with his chair tipped back watching the show. Blake drew his pistol and gave him an eye to get an idea of his intentions. The grizzled man raised his hands and smiled. For him, one show was as good as another.
And Ky Roman gave him one.