Shawn O'Brien Town Tamer # 1

by W. , Johnstone, William

  His hands were bound behind his back, but Shannon kneed his mount forward and the blackness of his soul blazed in his eyes.

  “Whores, pimps, gamblers, goldbrick artists, drunks, dancehall loungers, wasters . . . we got rid of them all,” he said, grinning. “They weren’t fit to live.”

  Platt, small, slender and insignificant, nonetheless surprised Shawn by his sudden burst of violence.

  He jumped from his mule, stepped to Shannon’s horse, and like David toppling Goliath, he dragged the big man from the saddle.

  Shannon’s back hit the ground and Platt immediately put the boot in.

  Thud-thud-thud . . . kicks pounded into the gunman’s ribs and Shannon cried out in pain and rage.

  “Is the Wells Fargo driver among the skulls?” Platt’s lips snarled back from his teeth. “And is the dead passenger there?”

  Shannon was finding it hard to breathe. But he glared at his tormentor and managed, “Damn you, I’ll kill you.”

  “Are their skulls on posts?” Platt yelled. “Tell me!”

  “You go to hell,” Shannon said.

  The little man didn’t say anything, but he screamed like a wounded cougar.

  His Remington flashed from under his coat and he two-handed the revolver and aimed at Shannon’s head.

  “No!” Shawn hollered in sudden panic. “Ford, we need him!”

  Platt’s gun didn’t waver. Shannon’s eyes were as big and fear-shiny as silver dollars and he didn’t move a muscle.

  A tense moment passed . . . then another. . . .

  Platt’s stiff shoulders relaxed and he slid the gun into his shoulder holster. He was breathing hard and said to Shawn, who stood by his side, “I . . . I don’t get angry often because when I do, bad things happen.”

  “I can see that for my ownself,” Shawn said.

  “You, get the hell up,” Platt said to Shannon.

  His face wary, the big man struggled to his feet, his boot heels gouging the sandy gravel of the road in his haste.

  “Turn your back,” Platt said.

  His face like stone, he quickly untied the gunman’s hands, then said, “Now, get to work.”

  “Damn you, runt, doin’ what?” Shannon said.

  “You’ll walk ahead of us all the way to Holy Rood and remove the skulls from the posts. You’ll lay each one by the side of the road so they can be collected and later given a decent burial.”

  Platt read insolence and hesitation in Shannon’s eyes and said, “Please, give me any excuse to kill you. You’ve already run out of room on the dance floor.”

  Shannon stood for a moment, read signs he didn’t like, and then stepped to the nearest post.

  He removed the skull and threw it into the brush.

  “I said lay it by the side of the road,” Platt said. “Now pick that up carefully and do what I told you.”

  Shawn stared into the distance, where the Holy Rood buildings rode the heat waves like a white fleet bobbing at anchor.

  “Ford, this is going to take a lot of time,” he said.

  “We can spare it,” Platt said. “Cobb will be in no hurry to kill Jasper Wolfden. I’ve got the feeling he’ll want to draw it out and enjoy it.”

  Unfortunately, in that he was right.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Mink Morrow’s arrival in Holy Rood would have normally caused a stir among the citizens, but since Hank Cobb had every man, woman and child on the ridge scavenging for his money, the coming of the gunfighter went unnoticed.

  Morrow rode into a changed town.

  Gone were the monkish robes, the brotherly names, the pretense of religious fervor.

  The raw truth about Cobb’s plans for Holy Rood was now on display for all to see.

  The hard-faced gunmen who stood guard over the foragers on the ridge slope were no longer paladins of monkish virtue. Now they looked like what they were . . . hired guns who wouldn’t think twice about killing any man, woman or child so long as the money was right.

  Morrow dismounted outside the hotel and studied the empty street and the laboring throng on the hill.

  His eyes lingered on the guillotine, its triangular blade stained scarlet with fresh blood, then at a man’s sprawled, headless body thrown carelessly into the dirt.

  A far-hearing man, he made out the angry shouts of the gunmen on the ridge, barking dogs and the alarmed shrieks of women.

  And Morrow, a man who feared nothing and no one, felt a twinge of unease as he wondered what he’d gotten himself into.

  He glanced at the late morning sky. To the north, white, cumulus clouds piled high above the lonely land like gigantic boulders, but there was no hint of rain. The air was dry, musty, like mummy dust on the tongue.

  His eyes on fire from the sun glare, Morrow stepped into the cool shade of the hotel, palmed the clerk’s bell with a black-gloved hand and waited.

  The casual observer would be struck by the fact that everything about Mink Morrow was angular, as though the template for his shape had been cut from cardboard with a straight razor.

  His pockmarked face was lean to the point of gauntness, the cheeks sunken under, with prominent, square cheekbones. When seen from the front, his shoulders were perfectly horizontal, with no suggestion of a stoop, like the Jack of Spades on a playing card.

  His black frockcoat, worn with a boiled white shirt and string tie, had been tailored with sharp scissors and thin needles, cut straight and severe with no embellishment.

  The gunfighter’s eyes were hidden behind round, dark glasses. Bright light tormented him ever more brutally as he grew older and it was getting worse with every passing day.

  Morrow wore a plain, black cartridge belt and holster, the ivory-handled Colt on his right hip his only apparent vanity.

  That morning he looked what he was . . . a dangerous man and one to step around.

  Irritably, he slapped the bell a second time.

  The sharp ting! echoed into silence.

  “Is there anybody to home?” he called out.

  Even to his own ears his voice sounded hollow, like a man shouting in a sepulcher.

  Again there was no answer.

  Morrow stepped away from the desk and went outside into the sun-dazzled street.

  A little girl of about three years old toddled past. She wore a yellow dress that was grubby from play and carried a blackface rag doll in her arms. The child tripped and fell forward on her hands. She rose to her feet again and wiped her gritty palms on the yellow dress and picked up her doll.

  The girl stopped and stared at Morrow with round eyes the color of hazelnuts.

  Morrow ignored the child and led his horse, as tall and angular as himself, toward the sheriff’s office.

  To the north a golden light glimmered in the clouds but there was no sound of thunder. The wind had picked up and the skirts of the women searching the rim flapped and fluttered around their legs, as though they’d taken a short flight around the ridge and had just landed again.

  Morrow looped his horse to the hitching rail outside the sheriff’s office and stepped onto the boardwalk, his big-roweled spurs ringing.

  He opened the office door and went inside.

  The office was a typical lawman’s lair, with a desk and chair and a gun rack on one wall, wanted dodgers on the other. Morrow’s rawboned likeness was not among them.

  He stood in the middle of the floor for a while and listened.

  From beyond a door to his right he heard a steady thwack . . . thwack . . . thwack . . . and recognized it for what it was—the sound of a bullwhip cutting into a naked back.

  A burlap sack, rolled shut, lay on the desk. Morrow crossed the floor and opened it up.

  He looked inside, grabbed a handful of jewelry and smiled. His teeth were white under a mustache as carbon black as the hair that fell to his shoulders, each strand hanging straight and lank as wet string.

  Morrow shook his head and his shaggy eyebrows pinched together.

  Cheap baubles, as flash
y, chintzy and worthless as the tinhorn who’d stolen them.

  Was this all Hank Cobb had to show for the brilliant scheme he’d concocted to drain a town dry, squeeze it until it coughed up the last buffalo nickel?

  Morrow watched the jewelry cascade through his fingers and untidily onto the table.

  Thwack . . . thwack . . . thwack . . .

  The sound came from behind a door at the rear of the office that probably led to cells.

  Morrow’s boot heel crunched a garnet-and-silver brooch underfoot as he stepped to the door and opened it. Beyond was a barred, iron gate that stood ajar. Here the air was fetid, smelling of ancient vomit, piss and the faint, but unmistakable, smoky tang of blood.

  His hand dropped to his gun as he pushed the iron door wide . . . and stepped into a scene from hell.

  Mink Morrow had the professional gunfighter’s ability to take in a scene at a glance.

  To his right stood a couple of jail cells that looked out into a large, rectangular room, lit only by a small window in the far wall that cast a wash of dusty, gray light into the murk.

  But what arrested Morrow’s attention was the man, naked from the waist up, who hung from a beam by his wrists.

  The man’s back was cut to ribbons, white bone gleaming through scarlet runnels of blood. Near the man, at a distance of ten feet, a bullwhip snaking from his right hand stood . . . Satan himself.

  A few silent seconds slipped past, broken only by the soft moan of the hanging man.

  Then Hank Cobb ripped off the red devil mask he wore and said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Cobb’s face gleamed with sweat and spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth. His eyebrows crawled up his forehead like black caterpillars.

  “Answer me, damn you,” he said.

  “That’s a hell of a thing to do to a man,” Morrow said.

  “He a friend of your’n?” Cobb said.

  “Never seen him before.”

  “Then what is he to you?”

  “It’s still a hell of a thing to do to a man.”

  Cobb motioned with the whip.

  “I killed this sumbitch before, and I’ll kill him again.”

  “Seems to me, you’re halfway there,” Morrow said.

  “No, I ain’t. Not by a long shot. He’s gonna be a long time dying and this time I’ll make sure.”

  Cobb’s big-boned face hardened. “I’ll ask you again, Mink, what the hell are you doing here?”

  Morrow answered the question with one of his own.

  “Where’s the money from the Holy Rood bank?”

  “Who told you about that?”

  “A feller. The figure I heard was fifty thousand, give or take.”

  “And you want to elbow in on a share, huh? Is that why you’re here?”

  “That is my intention. If the story is true.”

  “Oh, the story is true enough. But the money’s scattered all over the ridge behind the town. If you want a share, go grab yourself a sack and join the rest of the pickers up on the slope.”

  “So that’s what all those people are doing,” Morrow said. “How did the money get up there?”

  Cobb again motioned with the whip.

  “He did it.”

  Morrow smiled. “I won’t ask his motive.”

  “Don’t. It’s none of your concern.”

  “So I can keep what I find. Is that the deal?”

  “No. You bring the money to me and I decide what you keep. How much did you have in mind? And remember, for old time’s sake only goes so far. I’m not in a giving mood today.”

  “Ten thousand.”

  Cobb grinned, an ugly twist of his lips.

  “In your dreams, Mink. Ride the hell on out of here and do your begging somewhere else.”

  Cobb couldn’t see Morrow’s eyes behind the shaded windows of his dark glasses, couldn’t read the man, and that irritated him.

  He said, “Still can’t stand the light, I see.”

  “It’s getting worse. That’s why I need the money. I reckon I’ll retire, maybe open an eating house.”

  “When I count the money, it will be in sunlight,” Cobb said, his grin still in place.

  “Day or night, I can still throw faster iron than you, Hank.”

  “Big talk from a blind man,” Cobb said. “If we fight with revolvers, it will also be in sunlight, the brighter the better.”

  “I could drop you here, Hank,” Morrow said. “Just draw and shoot. You understand?”

  “But you won’t, will you? Not so long as I’m your meal ticket.”

  Morrow’s response died on his lips as a tall, lanky man wearing a worried frown and an old cavalry bandana around his neck stepped through the doorway. “Boss, we got trouble,” he said.

  Sudden alarm showed on Cobb’s face. “On the ridge?”

  “Hell no. Them folks are rabbits. It’s that O’Brien ranny and another feller. They got Shannon outside, tied to his hoss.” He grinned. “Ol’ Shel looks all used up, like he done a day’s work for the first time in his life.”

  It didn’t take long for Cobb to think that through and guess at the implications.

  “Walsh, go get Lee Dorian off the ridge and round up Ed Bowen. Then you three join me in the street,” he said.

  “That’ll only leave Kane up there,” the man called Walsh said.

  “Kane can handle it. Now go do what I told you.”

  After Walsh left, Cobb said to Morrow, “You heading for the ridge or are you riding?”

  Morrow smiled. “I’ll stick with you, Hank, and impose on your generous nature, seeing as how we were friends once.”

  “We were never friends,” Cobb said. “Drawing gun wages from the same rancher didn’t make us compadres.”

  “Whatever you say, Hank,” Morrow said. “Whatever you say.”

  Cobb took a Barlow from his pocket and opened the blade. He turned his head and looked at Morrow.

  “I don’t want to kill you, Mink,” he said. “But don’t push me too hard.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” Morrow said.

  “And don’t pin your hopes of hanging up your gun and buying that eating house on me,” Cobb said. “Do that and you’ll starve to death, I guarantee it.”

  Cobb reached up and the Barlow’s keen blade slashed the ropes that held Wolfden. The man tumbled in a heap. His open mouth pressed into rough pine floor and saliva trickled from his lips.

  “Earn your keep, Mink,” Cobb said. “Help me drag this into the office.”

  “I’d say he’s about gone,” Morrow said.

  “Hell, he ain’t even half dead yet,” Cobb said. “If he survived the grave, he’ll survive a whipping long enough to have another.”

  Cobb shoved Wolfden onto his back and he and Morrow hauled the unconscious man into the sheriff’s office.

  They left a wide, snail track of blood on the floor behind him.

  Cobb let go of the man’s legs and Wolfden’s boots thudded onto the timber.

  “Cobb! Hank Cobb!”

  Shawn O’Brien’s voice came from the street.

  “What the hell do you want?” Cobb yelled.

  “You know what we want,” Shawn called back. “We want Jasper Wolfden.”

  Cobb stepped to the window.

  Walsh and Dorian were on the boardwalk on the opposite side of the street, working themselves into a position behind Shawn and the other man, a mouse-faced runt sitting a mule.

  He beamed. Both his men had rifles and they knew how to use them.

  “I’m coming out, O’Brien,” Cobb yelled.

  He smiled, his eyes calculating.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Hank Cobb stepped through the door onto the boardwalk, followed by Mink Morrow, who’d cleared his frockcoat from his gun.

  Shawn’s eyes were on the slope of the ridge above town where knots of people were bent over, as though they searched for something. A single rifleman kept a wary eye on them, like a prison guard over a chain g
ang.

  He exchanged a puzzled glance with Ford Platt, who shrugged and shook his head.

  Shawn was still in the saddle, but Shel Shannon stood in front of his horse, the rope around his neck attached to Platt’s saddle horn.

  Cobb glanced at Shannon, and then his eyes flicked to Shawn.

  “What’s your deal, O’Brien?” he said.

  “It should be obvious even to you, Cobb,” Shawn said. “Give me Wolfden and I’ll return your village idiot.”

  “I’m sorry, boss,” Shannon said, blinking. “I was took by surprise.”

  “He was took by surprise at your woman’s place, Cobb,” Shawn said. “That was a mite careless of you, leaving her around like that.”

  “He took Ruby too, boss,” Shannon said. His tongue touched his bottom lip. “O’Brien had the drop on me and I couldn’t stop him.”

  “Hell, the woman means nothing to me,” Cobb said. “A belly-warmer on a cold night is all. Keep her and welcome.”

  “Well, what’s your answer to my proposition?” Shawn said.

  He had a tight knot in the pit of his belly. Where were the rest of Cobb’s men?

  Cobb rubbed his chin and stared across the street at the white-painted storefronts that stood silent and forlorn like a flock of hobbled geese.

  “I’m studying on it,” he said. “I’m a slow-considering man.”

  “Boss!” Shannon yelled, a squawk of shocked disbelief and fear. “O’Brien plans to kill me if you don’t give him Wolfden.”

  “I said I’m studying on it, Shel,” Cobb said. He tugged on his earlobe. “I’m trying to figure how much you mean to me. So far I’m telling myself that it ain’t a whole lot.”

  “One way or the other, don’t take too long, Cobb,” Shawn said. “I’m not a patient man.”

  Shawn’s eyes flicked to Morrow.

  “You must be Mink Morrow,” he said.

  “I must be. And you’re Shawn O’Brien,” Morrow said.

  “My brother talked about you,” Shawn said.

  “Jake?”

  Morrow saw Shawn nod and said, “Is he still playing the piano?”

  “Last I heard.”

  “He should. He has a rare gift.”