Backed to the Wall

by C. M. Wendelboe

  BACKED TO THE WALL

  A TUCKER ASHLEY WESTERN ADVENTURE

  BACKED TO THE WALL

  C. M. WENDELBOE

  FIVE STAR

  A part of Gale, Cengage Learning

  * * *

  Copyright © 2017 by C.M. Wendelboe

  Five Star™ Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this work covered by the copyright herein may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  The publisher bears no responsibility for the quality of information provided through author or third-party Web sites and does not have any control over, nor assume any responsibility for, information contained in these sites. Providing these sites should not be construed as an endorsement or approval by the publisher of these organizations or of the positions they may take on various issues.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Wendelboe, C. M., author.

  Title: Backed to the wall / C. M. Wendelboe.

  Description: First edition. | Waterville, Maine : Five Star Publishing, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, [2017] | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017013511 (print) | LCCN 2017019871 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432837112 (ebook) | ISBN 1432837117 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432837105 (ebook) | ISBN 1432837109 (ebook) | ISBN 9781432837327 (hardcover) | ISBN 143283732X (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Frontier and pioneer life—Fiction. | Outlaws—Fiction. | GSAFD: Western stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3623.E53 (ebook) | LCC PS3623.E53 B33 2017 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013511

  First Edition. First Printing: September 2017

  Find us on Facebook–https://www.facebook.com/FiveStarCengage

  Visit our website–http://www.gale.cengage.com/fivestar/

  Contact Five Star™ Publishing at FiveStar@cengage.com

  Printed in the United States of America

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  * * *

  I would like to thank Craig and Judy Johnson for their frequent help in this writing business; to my editor, Alice Duncan, for pushing me to make this project as good as it can be; for my wife, Heather, for always having faith in me and encouraging me to continue telling tales I think folks will enjoy.

  For Doris Rogers

  CHAPTER 1

  * * *

  Tucker Ashley awakened as if in a fog, his head thick, pounding. He rubbed his blood-caked eyes and tried to sit. But the room swirled around him as if he’d been caught in a rushing river eddy, and he dropped back down on the bunk. Feet shuffled in the next room. Metal-on-metal scraping echoed inside his pounding head, and he used the side of the bunk to sit once more.

  The odor of coffee brewing reached him then, just ahead of the smell of cooked hog fat. He sucked in a quick breath; the odor of the fat assaulted the whisky lying in his gullet like a stranded stray in a buffalo wallow.

  He forced an eye open and squinted against the morning light, only slightly brighter than the white-washed adobe walls his bunk was bolted to. Flat slat metal bars positioned equidistant from one another surrounded the tiny cell, all leading to the locked door. He was in a jail then; nothing new to Tucker. Except he remembered little about two nights ago, or how he got here.

  Footsteps approached. He lay back down and winced in pain as he closed his eyes.

  The outer door opened, and jingle bobs tinkled against large Spanish rowels that announced a man’s entry. “Too late to be wary now,” the voice said. “Time for caution was a couple nights ago before I put the grab on you.”

  Tucker turned over and cracked an eye. He gazed through shaggy black hair hanging over his forehead and ran his fingers through his mop. A large gash on top of his head caught his chipped fingernails, and he gently pulled hair stuck to the wound. Sunshine filtered through greased-paper window coverings, and he shielded his eyes as he wiped blood on his shirtfront.

  “You awake now?” The jingle bobs clinked as Aurand Forester turned on his heels. He left the door open while he walked into the outer room and sat at his desk. He picked up a fork and speared a piece of meat. He daintily chewed the bacon while he looked over his fork at Tucker. Aurand grinned and laid his fork on his plate while he dabbed at the corners of his mouth with a checked napkin. He sipped coffee and cocked his head while he spoke. “I thought you’d never wake up.”

  “What day is this?”

  “Tuesday,” Aurand chuckled. “You been on a bender since day before yesterday.”

  Tucker swung his legs over the feather ticking bunk. A grayback louse the size of his thumbnail scurried from beneath him. He swatted at it and nearly lost his balance before he dropped back onto the edge of the bunk. He felt his head again and came away with a bloody palm.

  “That wasn’t my doing,” Aurand said. He folded his napkin and laid it atop his empty plate. “I didn’t have to lay a hand on you. You were passed out when Philo and I grabbed you and carted you in here.”

  Tucker’s eyes began clearing as he watched Aurand walk to the Franklin stove in the middle of his marshal’s office. He refilled his cup from a warming pot and strolled through the door separating his office from the single cell that housed Tucker. Aurand stopped in front of the cell and tugged at his wispy, blond mustache. As if tugging at it would help it grow. For as long as Tucker had known Aurand, he had tried growing a ’stache. And failed. “Don’t seem likely that I’d arrest Tucker Ashley without winding up in the cemetery.” Aurand held up his coffee cup as if to offer a toast. “But I got nary a scratch.”

  “Why am I in here?”

  “Next you’ll say you don’t remember a thing.”

  “I don’t.”

  Aurand laughed. “They all say that.”

  “Enough!” Tucker lunged for the cell door, and Aurand stepped back. His hand went instinctively to the gun on his hip, his grin momentarily gone. When it returned, he nodded to Tucker’s arms groping through the bars inches from Aurand’s head. “Might as well relax, Tuck. You’re here for the duration.”

  “Duration of what?”

  Aurand slowly sipped his coffee, dragging his answer out. When he spoke, his smile was gone, and his gray eyes seemed to bore holes through Tucker. “Until the territorial judge rides in here next week and tells the hangman when to set the date.”

  “What are you rambling about?” Tucker’s dizziness returned, and he sat back down on the edge of the bunk. “What trumped-up charge you got me on now?”

  Aurand grabbed a chair and placed it in front of Tucker’s cell just out of reach of his long arms. Aurand sat backwards and rested his arm over the chair back. He studied his coffee like he were studying tea leaves. “You’re telling me you don’t recall killing that roustabout?”

  “What roustabout?”

  “The one you knifed after you robbed him night ’fore last.”

  Tucker held his head in his hands. “I didn’t rob or kill anyone.”

  “You just don’t remember it.” Aurand tossed the rest of his coffee onto the dirt floor and twirled the cup around his finger. “You killed a roustabout off the Belle of the Ball.”

  Tucker shook his head to clear his memory. Two nights ago he recalled passing the stern wheeler docked at the levee on the way to meeting Lorna Moore. Indian annuities sat unloaded on the padd
leboat, but Tucker had paid no mind to it as he walked past the boat on his way to the mercantile. He vaguely remembered Lorna stocking shelves behind the counter as he entered the trading store. And how pained he’d been when she told him they would have to cancel their dinner date just as Maynard Miles appeared from the back room. He’d stood close to her, and his ear-to-ear grin seemed to challenge Tucker for her affection.

  “We have work tonight, Lorna and me.” The shopkeeper moved closer to her. “I’m afraid it will take most of the night.” He winked. “Maybe most every night.”

  “ ’Member now?” Aurand asked.

  Tucker shook his head, and it felt as if marbles rattled inside his skull. He had stomped out of Moore’s Mercantile and directly to the Bucket of Blood. He bought the cheapest bottle of forty-rod whisky a half-broke army scout could afford and sat on the walkway outside the tent saloon. Roustabouts started off-loading the Belle of the Ball, but he’d ignored them. Men clomped along the wooden walkway, but he paid them no mind either as he drew on the bottle of whisky. And some time well past darkness—while he finished the second bottle he’d bought—he lost all memory of anything.

  “ ’Member now?” Aurand taunted.

  “Suppose you tell me.”

  Aurand stood and walked to the coffee pot warming on the Franklin.

  “How about a cup of that over here,” Tucker called after him.

  Aurand ignored him as he came back and sat in the chair in front of Tucker’s cell. “I’ll tell you how it happened, just ’cause we’re old pards.” He stroked his mustache. “Way me and Philo figured it, you waited outside the Bucket of Blood for a roustabout . . .”

  “For what reason?”

  “That’s the best part,” Aurand said. “And I’m coming to it.” He sipped his coffee. “You knew those roustabouts from that steamer had just finished off-loading those annuities. Knew they just got their pay, and that gold ladies would be jingling in their pockets. And the first roustabout that was drunker than you, you waylaid him. Drug him behind the saloon, and stole all the money he had.” Aurand leaned closer. “Only thing I don’t know is if you knifed him before or after you robbed him.”

  Tucker stood and gripped the bars, his bleeding head forgotten for the moment. “You’re a damn liar. I never stole—”

  “We found three double eagles in your pocket. Now how do you suppose an army scout making twenty a month would get himself three gold ladies? And who do you know besides roustabouts would be carting that much money around? This is Dakota Territory, not Chicago or St. Louis.”

  “You ever known me to steal?” Tucker asked. “We’ve known each other since . . .”

  “Ft. Laramie,” Aurand said. “Don’t remind me. And how the hell should I know if you’ve ever stole before? What I do know for certain is that you stole that roustabout’s pay. And that you’re a killer.”

  “As are you.”

  “This isn’t about me.” Aurand stood abruptly. His leg caught the chair, and it fell against the wall. “That roustabout’s throat was slit just like the Sioux are fond of doing to a man. Who do you know besides the Sioux would slit a man’s throat like that?”

  Tucker looked away. He knew where Aurand was going.

  “No answer, big man? Then I’ll answer for you—just like I’ll do in front of the circuit judge when he shows. I’ll testify that a man who’s friendly with those death-thirsty bastards would kill the same way they do.”

  “I’m not friends with the Dakota,” Tucker said, doubts creeping into his lost memory from that night. “I just respect them.”

  “And respect their ways of killing, no doubt.”

  Tucker bent over and held his head in his hands. The darkness of that night’s drunkenness was his only answer, and still he could not recall. “Get Major Reynolds. He’ll vouch for me. He’ll figure out what happened . . .” Tucker looked at Aurand’s grinning face. “You’re not going to get the major, are you?”

  “Ride to Ft. Sully?” Aurand said. “Not hardly. Nor will I get any of my deputies to get you out of this pickle. I’ve waited five long years to see you dangle from a stout piece of hemp.”

  Had it been five years since Tucker met him? Aurand had been a Confederate soldier, captured toward the war’s end, bushwhacking with Bill Anderson in Missouri. Faced with prison or becoming a galvanized Yankee, Aurand chose the Union army and was sent to Ft. Laramie. He’d worked himself up to captain, and his path crossed with the post’s chief scout, Tucker Ashley. When Aurand’s company rode into the Powder River country, Tucker scouted well ahead. He was miles away when G Troop stumbled across a Lakota family emaciated from starvation. Aurand had felt it his duty to interrogate them much as he interrogated Missourians or Kansans loyal to the Union during the war—by force. He spoke no Sioux, and they spoke no English, so when Aurand got no answers, he killed them. When Tucker rejoined the column, the other soldiers in the company told him what Captain Forester had done.

  Tucker lost his head that day, and it took a half-dozen troopers to pull Tucker off the captain. He later learned from soldiers at the Ft. Laramie guardhouse that Aurand had spent two months in the post hospital from that beating.

  These five years had been kind to Aurand. He’d somehow managed to get himself appointed as deputy marshal for the Dakota Territory, prancing around in his office wearing fancy stitched boots and a new felt hat that Lorna sold in her store.

  Five years hadn’t been so kind to Tucker, sitting on a lice-infested jail bunk, dressed in trail-worn dusty dungarees with more holes than cheesecloth. The only thing Tucker had to show for those five years was twelve dollars of army pay in his pocket, and more scrapes and scars from barroom brawls and Indian fights than he could count. At least he had Lorna, or so he thought until he went to pick her up for dinner two nights ago. He massaged his head. But he certainly wouldn’t have her today after she learned he was under arrest for a murder he himself did not remember committing.

  “When’s breakfast?” Tucker asked, suddenly famished.

  Aurand hitched his gun belt up. Twin Smith and Wesson .44s rode on each hip, reminding Tucker the man was truly ambidextrous, proficient with either. He sauntered over to the cell door, and his annoying grin reappeared. “You get no chow this morning. You woke up too late, pard. Maybe lunch. We’ll see how good of a boy you are.”

  Tucker sprang to his feet and lunged through the cell bars. Again, Aurand adeptly stepped back out of the reach of Tucker’s flailing arms. “If you had any guts you’d let me out of here. If only for a minute.”

  Aurand polished his five-star badge with his shirtsleeve. “I’m no fool. I wouldn’t let you out of there for all the money in Ft. Sully.” He rubbed his jaw, still misshapen from when it healed improperly after their last fight. “Unless you wanted to face me with your gun.” He jerked his thumb at Tucker’s gun belt hanging on a deer horn coatrack in the outer office.

  Tucker looked through the bars at the genuine hatred lining Aurand’s face, and it chilled him. Tucker knew that—given the chance—Aurand would gladly face him in the street. And although Tucker was fast, Aurand was faster. Faster, many said, than Bill Longley down in Texas, or Bill Hickok in Abilene. And most people seeing Aurand in action would later say he got more pleasure from killing than rumors claim the James boys did. The irony of Aurand wearing a badge sickened Tucker.

  Aurand finally broke the stare, and his grin returned. “A damn shame,” he said as he walked into the outer office. He grabbed his white Montana Peak from the coat rack and set it at a steep angle on his head. “I doubt you’ll live past that long drop at the end of the rope to find out who’s fastest. A damn shame is what it is.” And Aurand’s laughter grew fainter as he closed the door separating the office from the cell. “I got to go find some missing woman,” he called to Tucker. “Now don’t go away, hear?”

  CHAPTER 2

  * * *

  Someone in the outer office tipped over a chair and cursed. Tucker called as loud as his parched th
roat would allow to whoever stood guard on the other side of the door. But no one came, and he eyed the water bucket hanging on the far wall. Condensation dripped off the clay pot and onto the ladle hanging over the side, but it did Tucker no good. It hung just out of his reach.

  He dropped back onto his bunk. Perhaps it was the fact that if he didn’t get water soon, the hangman would be cheated. Perhaps it was not knowing if he had killed that roustabout or not. Either way, his throbbing head was forgotten among all his other worries. They made him wish his bloody head was his only problem right now.

  He took his bandana from his neck and wiped drops of sweat forming—and as quickly drying—on his face, running into his head wound, itching mightily. The stifling noonday heat inside the windless confines of the tiny cell made it hard to breathe if he moved, so he lay still on the bunk.

  But sleep evaded him, and only his own hoarse, labored breathing talked back. His mind would not allow himself to sleep, wondering if Aurand was right. If he were, then Tucker had no argument to give the circuit judge. The worst for him, though, was the look on Aurand’s face when he left the jailhouse this morning. He knew that confining a man like Tucker—so used to the open trail, so comfortable under the stars—might kill him just locked up in this stagnant jail cell. Either way, Aurand Forester would win. And that grated on Tucker.

  Sometime in the afternoon, exhaustion from lack of food and water and thinking too much got the better of him, and he drifted off. In his fitful sleep, a snake hissed at him. And hissed again. And called his name. But snakes didn’t talk, and Tucker sat upright on the bunk.

  “Tuck,” a voice whispered again. “Come to the winda’.”

  Tucker stood on the bunk and grabbed onto the window bars facing the alley in back of the jailhouse. Jack Worman balanced atop his paint pony, a leg hooked over the pommel. He clung to the bars while he looked nervously around the empty alley. “Got yourself in a fix this time,” Jack said. His horse snorted, and he stroked the gelding’s muzzle to quiet him. “What’s with that roustabout?”