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No other name. Just Crow. Dressed in black from head to toe. The meanest man in the bullet-scarred annals of the West. Nobody ever turned their back on him. A cold voice in the shadows, a vengeful angel of death …
Time was when Crow found himself in Rosa Cruz, Arizona. Down on his luck, stuck and stony broke. A time when the most menial of tasks would be welcome if it enabled him to eat. So when Ben Ford and the Spangel family ask Crow to guide them out west, he gladly agrees. He soon regrets his rashness, for the Reverend Spangel is a fiery, bible-thumping puritan, while his wife is half-witted. And almost all of Crow’s charges are blind …
ONE-EYED DEATH
CROW 7
By James W. Marvin
First Published in 1982 by Corgi Books
Copyright © 1982, 2014 by James W. Marvin
Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: August 2014
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Mike Stotter
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author.
This is for Joan and Dave White
Good friends who believe in the magic of rock and roll
Chapter One
The old-timer was sick.
His landlady had cabled the publisher, out East, as soon as she could. Rightly guessing that there might be a few dollars in it for her.
“Shouldn’t be goin’ round fightin’ - not at his age,” she said, through lips so thin and tight it was a wonder how the words ever managed to escape between them.
The publisher nodded to her, allowing her to take his hat and place it carefully on one of the polished knobs on the oak stand at the end of the hall, close by the door.
There was a panel of stained glass set in the center of the door, showing a red-sailed schooner with green whales sporting about it in a blue, foam-topped sea. The bright Kansas sun streamed in through it, throwing meaningless shapes of rich colors across the narrow hallway.
The publisher wished that he was still outside in the dusty heat of Abilene, rather than here, in a house that smelled of sickness. Overlaying the usual thick, fetid odor of old cabbage and older fish.
“I figured it was my Christian duty to cable you, sir. Knowin’ how you regarded the old man. And seem’ that you paid a deal towards his keep. Dollar and forty-seven cents the message cost me.” There was the soft chink of coins sliding into her white hand. Fingers clawing shut on it. “Why, I thank you kindly, and that’s the truth. I’ll show you up to …”
He shook his head. There was no need for her to do that. On previous visits she had sniffed her disapproval at the old man having anyone to call, looking at the Easterner as though he was something she’d just discovered on the sole of her high-button boots.
Her voice followed him up the stairs in an unpleasant mixture of toadying and distaste. “Shouldn’t have done what he done. Folks round here kind of look on him as some sort of a hero. Not me, mister.” Raising her voice. “I said not me, mister! Just a damned old fool been livin’ too long in the past so’s he can’t tell the difference.”
The door stood ajar and the publisher tapped softly on it with the knuckles of his gloved right hand. Getting no reply. Pushing it open and stepping inside, closing it behind him.
Receiving a momentary shock, seeing the old-timer was sprawled on his back on the narrow bed, trousers all creased and crumpled, the fly buttons undone. There was a bandage around the head, down over the right eye.
It would have been bad news if the old man was dead. He was the only living person who had actually met the strange, shadowy gunfighter called Crow. No other name. Just Crow. And the stories that the publisher had been coaxing out of him at intervals over the last two years had been turned into best-selling western novels by a skilled hack writer living in a cold-water flat on New York’s Lower East Side.
But the scrawny chest was moving and with the door shut the Easterner could hear the rasping of breath. An uneven, fluttering sound that involved the listener in its irregular beat. Waiting for the next breath, trying not to hold his own breath while he hung on. Finally sighing with relief as it came.
The publisher walked across the room, looking round at the poor possessions. It was better than the first time he’d visited Abilene, drawn by persistent rumors that there was an old shootist living there in poverty, the last of his breed. He’d found him, pushing a broom in return for the rent on a box that was six by six by six, without even the luxury of a window to see the sun through.
There was a watch chain with a cheap railwayman’s half-hunter lying on the washstand. A handful of loose change. A wallet, open, showing the ragged ends of a couple of bills and the faded picture of a girl in a door. With an address in Dallas, and nothing more on it.
The clothes were folded neatly, hanging over a rickety chair. A patched pair of combinations and a darned pile of socks in the corner.
Nothing else.
It wasn’t much to hold on to. Not a lot of possessions for a lifetime worth the pain of the mother that’d born him.
The publisher raised the blind and stared down into the quiet Abilene street. It was a late afternoon in summer, most folks home, readying themselves to eat their supper. The smell of ham hocks and greens hung around the town. Away in the distance he could hear a faint tapping and saw an elderly negro, in black glasses, feeling his way along the curb with a white stick.
The room was very still. He looked back once more at the old man snoring on the bed. Figuring that he must have been having some kind of dream about his violent past. The lips peeled back off the toothless gums in a snarl and the right hand lay against the hip, the fingers clenching as though there was the butt of a pistol between them.
The Easterner wrinkled his nostrils and looked round the room, finally moving a copy of yesterday’s paper and sitting in a wicker chair in the further corner of the room. He knew from past experience that there was little point in waking the old man before he was ready. His mind never functioned smoothly, darting from subject to subject and back again, skipping years and mixing up events from different fights.
So he contented himself with sitting quietly in the slumberous heat and thinking back to the earlier tales of the shootist called Crow. Ticking them off on his fingers as he recalled them.
Custer and the battle of the Little Big Horn, the desperate soldiers just failing to make the ridge that might have bought their lives against the Sioux. Crow had been there. The wives of soldiers, trapped in a train in the snows. The Zulu princeling and his arrogance and pride. And his white woman. The kidnapping out in Arizona and the deceit over the Black Bird Mine. Then there’d been those two girls and the grizzly bear up Montana way.
The figure on the bed stirred again and groaned. The one visible eye blinked open, unfocused, scanning the room. Seeing the dark-suited figure in the chair. Struggling to sit up.
“What the fuck do you want, mister? Who are you? I’m not so young as I was but by Hades I can still …”
The publisher calmed the old-timer, calling out who he was, seeing the trembling that was so severe that it made the metal frame of the bed rattle. It took several minutes before the old man was gentled down enough to sit up on the bed, propping himself against a long bolster, folded double.
&n
bsp; “Guess you spooked me, mister, comin’ in like that. Time was you’d have had three bullets through your belly creepin’ up like you done.” He coughed, putting a hand up to his temple, above the bandage. “Kind of cuts through like Cheyenne war lances up here. Stabbin’ into my brain. You heard what happened to me?”
The publisher nodded. The housekeeper had told him some of it, but he was interested to hear more. The old-timer didn’t need any encouragement.
“Three young boys.” He hawked up some spittle, looking round for somewhere to get rid of it. Standing up unsteadily and levering open the bottom half of the window. The Easterner could hear the tapping of the blind man’s cane, closer now. The old man gobbed noisily out of the window, hesitating before he looked back into the bedroom again.
“That nigra feelin’ his way along there puts me in mind of somethin’ that Crow once gotten hisself mixed into. Must have been …” then he stopped, his mind still cluttered from sleep.
The publisher managed to hide his irritation. The new stories came more rarely now, and he wondered what it could have been that had clicked for a moment in the old man’s brain. He knew better than to try and pressure him into remembering. When that happened all the doors in the old gunfighter’s memory slammed shut and bolted themselves tight.
“I was tellin’ you ’bout them three kids. I seen ’em five days back now, or was it six? A Friday, ’cos they had that lemon pie down where I eat and they only have it on Friday.” He paused. “Or Saturday? Anyways, the day don’t much matter, do it?”
The tall figure of the publisher, still sitting in the corner of the room, shook his head silently.
“They was tarry-hootin’ around outside that … can’t never recall what it’s called. Where they stable them gas buggies.” The Easterner prompted him. “Garage! Yeah, mister, that’s the word. Them boys was skylarkin’ around, pushing and jostlin’ folks off the sidewalk. Made me mad when I seen decent women havin’ to step aside. So I went up to stop them.”
The younger man shook his head in a grudging admiration of the old-timer. The shootist called Crow wasn’t likely to have done anything like that. Not unless someone had pressed a hatful of dollars on him. Like most men who lived by their wits and their guns, he wasn’t the most generous of people, taking care not to become involved in anything that didn’t affect him. Or wasn’t likely to show him a profit.
“Didn’t bother much with polite askin’. Knowed I’d be wastin’ my time. Slapped their fool heads. Open-hand, like that.” Demonstrating with a swing at the empty air, nearly losing his balance and falling sideways. Recovering himself with a visible effort, his right hand going to the bandaged eye.
While he recovered his breath, the publisher leaned back, wishing that he had some kind of fan to move the air around his face. His stiff Eastern suit was too hot and heavy for Kansas in summer. It was like being trapped in an unyielding tweed furnace.
“Knocked two down, one of them runnin’ off blubberin’ like his ma had whipped his ass. One gotten up, blood on his lip and nose. Figure they was round eighteen, all of ’em. I didn’t expect no fair fightin’. Crow said a man who fights fair wins six feet of dirt. But they broke palings off the fence and came at me, one each side. Took me round the legs. Never been so strong on my feet since the winter of ’eighty-seven. Comanche pony stamped on my ankle and broke it four places. I went down. Got in a good punch on one of them. Plumb in the kidneys. He pissed blood for three days, they said. Then I was down and they came in with their boots. Near took this eye out of my head. Doc says it’ll be a couple of weeks yet ’fore he knows whether I’ll see from it.”
By all accounts, Crow had been one of the most ruthless and lethal fighting machines in the checkered history of the West. Maybe not so fast as Jed Herne. Not so good with a knife as the left-handed Mimbreños Apache, Cuchillo Oro. But when it came down to living or dying, a lot of folk who knew about it said that Crow was the man you wanted there at your back.
Whispering Death was what one of the Indian tribes called Crow. On account of his skill as a hunter and also because he had a real quiet voice. Like a girl’s fingers stroking black velvet was how a fanciful writer had once described it. The wind in a midnight graveyard was what someone else had said. The old-timer had said the voice made you think about a deep well choked with corpses. And he wasn’t that fanciful, either.
The publisher wished that somewhere there’d been a reliable picture of Crow. There were a couple that some said might have been the shootist. Like there were pictures that some men claimed was Crazy Horse. But the old men knew that Crazy Horse never let anyone trap his image in one of the white men’s cameras.
But he held a picture in his mind’s eye of Crow, from the descriptions of the old man.
Six feet two, looking even taller on account of his lean build. Broad in the shoulder, but narrowing down in the hips. Dressed always in black, except for the old Cavalry bandana, gold at his throat. The hair fine and black, trailing down over his shoulders. Eyes narrow above high cheekbones, making him look a little like a breed. Not that many men said that to Crow’s face. Some said it once. None ever said it more than once.
His weapons weren’t those of a conventional hired gun. Not for him the tied down Mexican cutaway rig, low on the hip, with a greased Colt balanced there, trigger filed right down. Crow figured that the guns he carried were simply for killing with. So he wore tools for the job. For killing at fairly close range there was the 1868 ten-gauge Purdey scattergun. Heresy to a purist was that he’d sawn down the barrels to a mere four inches. But it was still enough gun to take out anything living within twenty feet.
Crow also carried a pistol. A Colt Peacemaker tucked out of the way in the back of his belt. And a seventy-three Winchester bucketed on the saddle of the black stallion that he habitually rode.
There was one other unusual weapon. Instead of a knife he wore his old Army saber. The 1860, brass-hilted model, still carrying the gold braid on the pommel. Honed down by the farrier at Fort Buford for him to a mere two feet and six inches, needle-sharp and keen enough to slice through a silk kerchief thrown in the air.
That was Crow.
The old man had been silent while the Easterner pursued his own train of thought. Then he rose and walked again to the window, peering lopsidedly out into the setting sun. Great blocks of black shadow hung across Abilene. The publisher could still hear the steady rapping of the blind negro’s cane, now fading into the evening.
“Could be I’ll end like that nigra,” said the old gun-fighter, suddenly.
The publisher tried to reassure him, saying that doctors nowadays could do miracles. The bandages weren’t due off the injured eye for another week.
“Then I guess we’ll see.” He laughed, hoarsely. “Kind of funny that. Maybe they’ll see and I won’t.”
The Easterner suddenly felt tired, wishing that he was back in his New Jersey home with his loving wife and two blonde daughters. Much as he needed the old man there were times like this that he regretted the need to travel across the country to Abilene. He’d just gotten himself a new editorial assistant. A young Englishman, named Howell. Maybe next time he could send him. But he knew in his heart that the relationship with the old gunfighter was his and his alone.
“That’s what I was goin’ to tell you about,” the old man exclaimed, turning away from the window. Because of the blanking out of the one eye he had to turn his head further than normal. That nigra made me recall what it was. Did I tell you about the blind folks?”
The publisher shook his head. Crow and some blind people? Could be interesting. He drew out his notepad and settled himself in the chair.
“Hot day, in summer, it was. Mighty like this. In Arizona …”
Chapter Two
The summer of ’seventy-eight.
The middle of a scorching July in Arizona.
Fifteen hundred miles north and west there was a battle between Army and Indians. Captain Evan Miles with seven companies of
the Twenty-First Infantry, two foot batteries of the Fourth Artillery and one troop of the First Cavalry was after a large band of Bannocks and Paiutes. The Indians had been cheated and forced to the edge of starvation by dishonest agents, but that meant little to the soldiers.
Miles made a march of thirty-five miles in a single day, breaking all records, and caught up with the hostiles on the early morning of the thirteenth, close to the Umatilla Agency in Oregon. With small losses he killed a dozen of the Indians and captured several hundred men, women and children and nearly three hundred ponies.
For the soldiers, it was a great victory.
Down in Arizona none of that meant a damn. The soldiers were around, moving across the baked land in sinuous, dusty columns, after stray bands of Apaches that were giving them sporadic trouble. Occasionally a wagon train might be hit in the night, or a lonely homesteader could wake up in the chill hours before first light and find his stock being ridden off.
That July the man called Crow was also down in the deep South-west. The cold north had held little attraction for him after the last chase, and he had decided to move back south, wanting to feel the sun on his shoulders again.
For a man who lived by the gun, the South-west was the place to be. There was always money to be picked up. Always wanted men heading for the border who could be taken before they crossed the Rio Grande. Or, in some cases, and if the money was right, pursued clean into Mexico. Though the rurales did not look kindly on any gringos who came into their territory.
The soldiers often wanted extra scouts and there were lawmen desperate for deputies who would take money for doing their own jobs.
On his way south Crow had run in with a party of half-breeds, riding with them for nearly a week. Rarely exchanging more than a few words, but sharing their company. Content to hunt with them and camp with them. Certain in the knowledge that if he’d been carrying anything worth stealing the breeds would have slit his throat for it.
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