Shawn O'Brien Town Tamer # 1

by W. , Johnstone, William

  Shannon’s eyes rolled in his head, still out of it.

  “Let’s go,” Shawn said.

  He held Shannon’s collar in his left fist, his Colt in the right.

  Ruby opened the door and together they walked outside into the star-bright night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The night was cool and the wind was in the trees as Shawn and Ruby left the cabin and made their way toward the northern edge of town.

  The smell of the tall pines to the west was in the air and a drift of wood smoke and the tang of coffee and frying bacon as some of the citizens of Holy Rood had apparently decided that after being awake all night there was no point in going back to bed.

  Keeping away from the ridge where there were still sounds of activity and moving lanterns, Shawn let Ruby lead the way since she was more familiar with the town than he was.

  They kept to the east of the now dark street and Shawn noticed that light gleamed around the window blinds of the sheriff’s office.

  What that boded for the fate of Jasper Wolfden he did not know.

  Shawn pushed the stumbling Shannon in front of him, but the terrain made for easy going, as flat as a dance floor, tufted with sparse grass and a few scattered junipers.

  Ahead of him, a bottle clanked into another as Ruby took a misstep, and she froze as the sound rang loud and sharp in the silence.

  Shawn stopped and glanced around him. The entire area was littered with empty bottles and he guessed they were walking behind what had once been a saloon.

  Shannon groaned and sank to his knees and Shawn let him stay there.

  It seemed that the sound had gone unnoticed because the darkness lay silent and unbroken around them.

  Jumpy, and irritated with himself for being so, Shawn whispered, “Damn it, Ruby, can’t you be more careful?”

  The woman turned, angled at him one of those angry female looks that can freeze a man’s blood, and walked on.

  Feeling foolish, Shawn took it out on Shannon.

  He roughly yanked the man to his feet and pushed him forward.

  Shannon shook his body, trying to free himself from Shawn’s iron grasp, and then made an attempt to talk around his gag. He failed, but his furious eyes said it all . . . black with anger and filled with murder.

  To Shawn’s relief, he and Ruby left Holy Rood behind them without further incident.

  His horse was still tied to the bush in a grassy patch where Shawn had left it and displayed no ill will at being left for so long.

  Shannon was fully conscious but was quiet. Something cold and ugly had settled inside of him and he was content to bide his time.

  But Shawn had other plans for him.

  He untied the gunman’s gag and said, “All right, what happened to Jasper Wolfden?”

  Shannon stretched his mouth open and shut for a few moments, then smiled and said, “You go to hell, O’Brien.”

  Shawn’s sainted mother Saraid had been a sweet, gentle person, but his father and the sons he’d raised were the very opposite, neither sweet, gentle or forgiving.

  Shawn’s fist crashed into Shannon’s mouth and the man dropped as though he’d been pole-axed.

  After he dragged the gunman to his feet, Shawn said, “I asked you politely, Shel, but you gave me a most impolite answer. I’m really surprised at you.”

  He smiled and patted Shannon’s hairy cheek.

  “Now here’s how it’s going to work, just so you know,” he said. “I’ll ask the question again, and if you still give me an impolite answer I’ll shoot off your left thumb. Then I’ll ask the question a second time, and if the result is the same, I’ll shoot off your right thumb. And then will come the third time, and you know what I’ll shoot off then, don’t you, amigo? The ladies will hate me for it, but what else can I do?”

  Shannon saw determination and a distinct lack of sympathy in Shawn’s eyes. The man was prepared to do exactly what he’d promised.

  “Wolfden is alive, damn you,” he said. “But he’ll be dead soon, and so will you.”

  Shawn smiled. “You’re such a pleasure to be around, Shel.”

  He made a noose at the end of sheet, looped it around Shannon’s neck, then stepped into the saddle. He leaned over and offered Ruby a hand and a stirrup.

  When the woman was settled behind him, he said, “Shel, I reckon you had those Texas boots of yours made on a narrow last. You’ve got some walking to do, so I hope they don’t punish you too much.”

  Shannon’s face was black with rage. “I’m gonna kill you, O’Brien,” he said. “I swear to God I’ll tear you apart. . . . I’ll skin you alive.”

  “A wise precaution, Shel. Never trust a wolf until it’s skun, they say.”

  Shawn jerked on the rope and kneed his horse into a walk.

  Behind him, Shannon stumbled forward and turned the moon-dappled air blue with his curses.

  “My witch-finder idea didn’t work worth a damn,” Shawn said. “Hank Cobb has Jasper Wolfden”—he nodded in Shannon’s direction—“and I’ve got his idiot.”

  “There’s still coffee in the pot,” Ford Platt said.

  “Is that all you have to say?” Shawn said. “There’s coffee in the pot?”

  “What else is there to say?” Platt said. “You tried something that didn’t work and now we’re back to square one. What else can I add?”

  Shawn frustration showed. “I don’t know . . . say something . . . anything.” Then, after a few moments of reflection, he said, “Hell, I owe Jasper Wolfden my life.”

  “And now you have the idea of trading Shannon for him?” Platt said. “That’s a wild guess.”

  “Well, you’re right. It’s my plan exactly.”

  Platt moodily poked at the fire with a stick. “Might work. But it might not. Kinda like the last plan you had.” Platt smiled. “No offense.”

  “Hank doesn’t care about Shannon. He doesn’t care about anybody but himself,” Ruby said. “If he wants to kill Wolfden bad enough, he won’t trade.”

  “He wants to kill him bad, all right,” Shawn said.

  “Then all you’ll do is take cards in a rigged game,” Ruby said. “A game you can only lose.”

  Hamp Sedley poured coffee into the only cup and handed it to Ruby.

  “Share that with O’Brien,” he said. “He looks like he could use it.”

  Then, to Platt he said, “You’d better tell him.”

  “Tell me what?” Shawn said.

  Platt sighed, as though telling the story would be an unpleasant chore.

  Finally, he said, “I’m a restless man, and I don’t sleep much. After you left, Shawn, I saddled the mule and rode down to the wagon road.”

  “Why?” Shawn said.

  Platt shook his head. “Hell, if I know. Well, studying on it, I do know. I half-expected to see you riding hell for leather away from Holy Rood with Cobb and his boys right behind you.”

  “Not too wild a stretch,” Shawn said, accepting the coffee from Ruby.

  “No, I guess not,” Platt said. “But who do I meet on the road but a traveling preacher, a Reverend Micah something or other.” The little man waited until Shawn drank some coffee, then said, “He had a story to tell.”

  “Then tell it, Platt,” Sedley said. “Damn, but you’re a slow-talking man.”

  Sally chided the gambler. “In his own time, Hamp, please.”

  “It’s not too long in the telling,” Platt said. “But I’ll make it even shorter.”

  He glanced into the pines where arrowheads of green pierced the pale pink of the dawn sky, then said, “The little reverend told me that Mink Morrow is headed for Holy Rood.”

  Shawn smiled. “Even a little reverend can tell a big windy. Mink never leaves the Mogollon Rim country. Everybody knows that.”

  “Everybody but Mink, I guess,” Platt said.

  “Where did the preacher get his information?” Shawn said.

  “He says he was in a saloon in Silver Reef, lecturing the drunks on
the evils of demon drink, when he struck up a conversation with a feller you mentioned, Shawn, by the name of Nathan Scruggs.”

  “You can’t have a conversation with Scruggs,” Sedley said. “He’s as deaf as a cow skull.”

  Platt said, “He may be deaf, but he’s a talking man and he told Mink Morrow about Hank Cobb and the good thing he’s got going in Holy Rood. Well, Mink listens and then says, and this according to the reverend, ‘Hell, I’m gonna cut me off a piece of that action.’ As I said, that’s what the reverend told me he said, and I don’t figure he’d any reason to lie.”

  Shawn thought about the implications of that for a while, then said, “Mink Morrow is a gun for hire. Plenty of work for a man with his talents in a boomtown like Silver Reef. Why leave a sure thing and buck Hank Cobb, who isn’t any man’s bargain?”

  “There’s a tough sheriff in Silver Reef who’s mighty sudden with the iron his ownself,” Platt said. “Maybe ol’ Mink decided to up stakes and head for pastures anew.”

  “Or he isn’t as fast as people say,” Sedley said.

  “Mink Morrow is a friend of my brother Jake’s,” Shawn said. “That ought to tell you something about how good he is with a gun.”

  He turned and stared at Shannon.

  “Hey, Shel,” he said, “Mink Morrow is headed for Holy Rood. What’s your opinion on that?”

  “You’re a damned liar, O’Brien,” Shannon said. “Mink never leaves the Rim.”

  “He’s left it,” Shawn said. “He wants ol’ Hank to cut him in on the Holy Rood action.”

  “There is no Holy Rood action. The bank money is scattered to hell and gone and what’s left wouldn’t keep Mink in whiskey and whores for a month.”

  “Better tell Mink that,” Shawn said.

  “Hank will. Hell, he can shade Morrow.”

  “No, he can’t, not on any day of the week.”

  “Why tell me this, O’Brien?” Shannon said. “I can’t do anything about it sitting here.”

  “No, you can’t, Shel,” Shawn said. “But you’re my bargaining chip. That’s why you’re still breathing. Even though you’re an idiot, I’m just bringing you up to date on the current situation.”

  “I’m not gonna help you, O’Brien. You can kiss my ass.”

  Shawn rose to his feet. He drew his gun, stepped to Shannon, shoved the muzzle between his eyes and thumbed back the hammer.

  “I had this here iron set up with a two-pound trigger pull, and I want to kill you real bad, Shel,” he said. “If a fly lands on my finger, this thing will go bang. You catching my drift?”

  “Damn you, O’Brien, you’d do it, wouldn’t you?” Shannon said.

  He looked like a man who’d just been taken with the seasickness on an ocean steamer bucking a force ten gale.

  “Tell me to kiss your ass again, Shel. See what happens,” Shawn said. “Let me hear if you’re as stupid as I think you are.”

  It didn’t take Shannon long to think that through.

  “All right, O’Brien, I’ll play ball for now,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing much, Shel. Just be a good boy and behave yourself until we get to Holy Rood.”

  “Sure, sure, but after that, all bets are off,” Shannon said. “I still plan to kill you, O’Brien, lay to that.”

  “You’re true blue, Shel,” Shawn said. He eased down the hammer of the Colt. “You said exactly the right words at the right time. I’ll play ball was music to my ears. Just as well, otherwise you’d be dead right now.”

  The muscles of Shannon’s jaw bunched, but he said nothing.

  Shawn sat by the fire again and Platt said, “How do you want to play this, Shawn? I mean with Shannon.”

  “Nothing complicated like the last time,” Shawn said. “Good ol’ Shel and I will ride into . . .”

  He stopped abruptly as a realization hit him like a blow.

  He hadn’t thought about Judith in . . . my God, how long?

  Days? A week?

  He closed his eyes and again recalled her face in his mind, but hazy, as though he saw her reflection in a steamed-up mirror.

  It hurt. And that helped.

  He needed to hurt. Judith deserved that much.

  Then the pain was replaced by anxiety.

  “Dear God in heaven, don’t let me forget her this easily.”

  Shawn didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud.

  He opened his eyes and Ford Platt was staring at him in puzzlement. So was Sedley and the women and even Shannon looked bemused.

  “You all right, O’Brien?” Sedley said.

  Shawn pulled his mind into the present.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I’m fine, just fine. I . . . I just remembered something.”

  Sally Bailey’s eyes met his, searched deep and saw inside him.

  The woman had the Celtic gift, Shawn knew. And what he saw in his mind, she saw.

  His eyes broke from Sally’s steady gaze and he said to Platt, “Where was I? Oh, yeah, we ride into Holy Rood and dicker with Cobb for Wolfden.”

  The little man’s gaze was just as intense as Sally’s had been.

  “You having second thoughts? You were acting kind of strange there for a minute.”

  “No second thoughts. This is how I want to play it,” Shawn said.

  Shannon sneered. “Listen to the dead man talk.”

  “If O’Brien dies, you will too, Shannon,” Platt said. His eyes glittered cold, like a flicker of light along a steel blade. “Depend on it.”

  For the second time that morning, Shannon bit his tongue.

  Platt looked like a bank teller, but there was something dangerous about the little man that Shannon couldn’t pin down.

  Then it dawned on him.

  It was Ford Platt’s eyes, brown, soft as a woman’s. . . .

  Yet now they stared at Shannon as though they were tangled in barbed wire . . . the eyes of an avenging angel . . . or a killer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The morning was brightening into afternoon as Shawn O’Brien and Platt took the trail to Holy Rood. Behind them, tied up like a bale of cotton, Shel Shannon sat astride Wolfden’s white horse, a permanent scowl on his face.

  “I could’ve handled this by myself, Ford,” Shawn O’Brien said. “In fact, it’s high time I did.”

  “Could be. But Wells Fargo isn’t paying me to sit on my butt,” Platt said. “I want to find out what I’m facing in Holy Rood and then get the job done. I was deputized by a U.S. marshal to make arrests, and to dig a grave for them that don’t cotton to being arrested.”

  “It’s not difficult to sum it up for you,” Shawn said. “What you’re facing is Hank Cobb and his hired guns.”

  “And Mink Morrow, do you think?”

  “Maybe. If he throws in with Cobb.”

  Platt’s skin tightened on his face. “He could be riding a reputation he doesn’t deserve, you know. A lot of gunmen like Morrow aren’t near as good as folks say they are. You ever see him shoot?”

  Shawn thought on that, but only for a moment.

  “No, I never saw him shoot, but my brother Jake did. Do you recollect a feller by the name of Scrap Page out of Gonzalez County, Texas?” Shawn said.

  “Can’t say as I do,” Platt said.

  “Scrap was a gun hand, ran with John Wesley Hardin and the Taylors and that hard crowd, and the word going around was that he’d killed eight white men.”

  Platt’s mule decided to act up and when he finally convinced the animal who was boss, Shawn resumed his story.

  “Well, one time down in the Colorado River country, Mink and my brother Jake were in a saloon, and Scrap stood with his back to the bar, bragging to all and sundry that he was the fastest man with the iron south of the Red.”

  “Was he?” Platt said.

  “I’m coming to that,” Shawn said.

  “Figured you would.”

  “Now Jake was playing a Chopin nocturne on the piano and didn’t pay Scrap any mind, but Min
k was losing at poker and the man’s boasting began to irritate him. Finally, he got to his feet, called Scrap for a braggart and a Texas jackass, and then the two of them had it out.”

  “And what happened?” Platt said.

  “Well, just before he died that night, Scrap Page found out that he was the second fastest man south of the Red.”

  “So Mink really is good with a gun like folks say, huh?” Platt said, frowning, as though that realization troubled him.

  “Damn it, let me finish my story,” Shawn said. “I’m getting to the best part.”

  “Oh, sure, sorry,” Platt said. “Finish away.”

  “Well, my brother Jake got real mad, told Mink that his damned shooting had ruined the nocturne’s last movement for everybody.”

  “Is that a natural fact?” Platt said.

  “Yeah, it’s a natural fact. Mink was so sorry about kicking Chopin up the ass, he set up the bar and he bought Jake a shirt.”

  “A shirt?”

  “Shawn nodded. “Jake is always kind of raggedy, so Mink bought him a new shirt.”

  “All things considered, that was playing the white man,” Platt said.

  “I guess so. But it all happened a good few years ago and a man changes,” Shawn said.

  “Let’s hope it’s for the better,” Platt said. “But I doubt it.”

  Behind them, astride Wolfden’s white horse, a scowling Shel Shannon said, “Hell, that ain’t a good story. There ain’t no whores in it and what kind of man who plays a pianny needs a shirt?”

  “I could tell you what kind of man, Shel,” Shawn said, “But I don’t think you’d understand.”

  He turned to Platt. “What do you—”

  But Shawn didn’t finish his sentence.

  Platt stared straight ahead of him, his sharp little features chalky.

  “This is an obscenity, and outrage,” he said, drawing rein on his mule.

  They’d ridden up on the skulls lining the wagon road. The skulls grinned at them amid a vast silence.

  “Who are they?” he said to Shawn.

  “Folks Hank Cobb and the good people of Holy Rood deemed undesirables,” Shawn said.