Shawn O'Brien Town Tamer # 1

by W. , Johnstone, William

  Rhodes considered that, but judging by the pained expression on his face he obviously didn’t fancy its implications.

  He narrowed his eyes and said, “So, what kind of he’p?”

  “I’ll tell you inside, Matt,” Ruby said.

  “You’ll tell me out here or you won’t tell me at all,” Rhodes said.

  The grim, cranky old man was nobody’s idea of a doting grandfather . . . or any kind of grandfather.

  Short, shabby and gaunt, his hollow eyes and high, sunken cheekbones gave him the appearance of a skull. His voice was shrill and unpleasant, as though his every word was overgrown with thorns. When he spoke, his darting black eyes followed the movement of others like a suspicious raven.

  Matt Rhodes looked exactly what he was, a dried-out, bitter husk of a man who’d fought one war too many.

  “Matt,” Ruby said, “this is about Hank Cobb.”

  Rhodes considered that for a moment, and then said, “State your intentions.”

  “Our intention is that you and other decent men in this town give us the help we need,” Sedley said. “But if you’re a frightened sheep like the rest of them, then tell us and we’ll be on our way. And be damned to ye for a yellow-bellied Yankee.”

  “I’ve killed men for less than that,” Rhodes said. His eyes glittered.

  Sedley pushed his coat away from his holstered gun.

  “You ain’t marching through Georgia now, old man. So if you’ve a mind to get your work in, have at it.”

  “Hamp, let it go,” Ruby said. She glared at Rhodes. “I’m sorry to have troubled you.” She opened her purse. “How much to repair the door?”

  “I got no liking for Hank Cobb,” Rhodes said.

  “Then you’ll help us?” Ruby said.

  “I didn’t say that, but come inside,” Rhodes said. He looked at Sedley with open dislike. “You can bring the Reb with you.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Mink Morrow stepped into the sheriff’s office.

  Hank Cobb sat at his desk and Ed Bowen, a surly gun hand out of the Nevada Territory, stood at the window drinking coffee.

  Cobb looked up when Morrow entered and his expression soured.

  “What the hell do you want?” he said. “There ain’t no money yet.”

  Morrow let his eyes slowly adjust from the sunlight outside to the comparative dimness of the office. For the first time ever he’d been completely blind for a few seconds and the implication of that troubled him deeply.

  “And a big howdy to you too, Hank,” he said. “I’ve been up on the ridge, talking to the feller you have on guard up there.”

  “Jonas Kane ain’t a talking man,” Cobb said.

  “He talked enough. Told me them town folks of your’n ain’t gathering much money. He reckons they’re filling their own pockets.”

  Cobb smiled and sat back in his chair. He’d been cleaning his fingernails with a cow horn letter opener that he now tossed on the desk.

  “We’ll search them when they get down,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. When it gets too dark to see, I reckon.”

  “You’re mighty thin on the ground, Hank,” Morrow said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Way I figure it, you’ve only got four of your boys left.”

  “It’s enough.”

  “Not if the fine citizens of Holy Rood decide to think other wise.”

  “If that happens, you’ll throw in with us, Mink. You need the money for your eating house. Blind gunfighters don’t last long.”

  Bowen laughed. “That was funny, boss,” he said. “Blind gunfighters don’t last long . . . hah!”

  “Yeah, Hank, you’re a laugh a minute,” Morrow said.

  He stepped to the stove and hefted the coffeepot.

  “Make a joke about this—Kane says he reckons most of the money is lost. He says it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack up there.”

  “I’ll find it. Might take another day or two, but I’ll get back most of it.”

  “And then?”

  Cobb crossed his arms and grinned. “Then we burn this burg to the ground and skedaddle.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and the boys and maybe you. That is, if you play your cards right.”

  Morrow poured coffee into a cup. He took a sip and immediately steamed up his dark glasses, blurring his vision. Cobb didn’t appear to have noticed and he laid down the cup on the edge of the desk.

  “You’re the dealer, Hank,” he said. “What cards?”

  “For starters, get up on the ridge with Kane here and make sure the rubes are honestly searching for my money,” Cobb said. “Anybody who refuses to work or is putting coin in his pocket, shoot him.” He grinned. “Or her, as the case may be.”

  “Anything else?” Morrow said.

  Outside the wind picked up again and there was a sound of distant thunder.

  Cobb rose to his feet and adjusted his gun belt.

  “There will be two executions tonight,” he said. “While my money is still scattered all over the ridge, I want the whole town to attend. Keep them honest, like.”

  “The whole town? I guess that includes me,” Morrow said.

  “Especially you, Mink. You’ll be my assistant.”

  “What’s the contraption outside the church?” Morrow said. “I saw a man’s body lying near the thing and he didn’t have a head.”

  Cobb’s grin and the way he lifted himself onto his toes conveyed a warped sense of pride.

  “The French call it a guillotine,” he said.

  He waited for Morrow to speak, wanting to draw out the moment.

  “What the hell does it do?” the gunfighter said.

  “You saw the dead man. Do you mean you don’t know?”

  “I mean I don’t know, otherwise I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “It cuts heads off, of course,” Cobb said. “Clean as a whistle.” Then, “You’ll see it in operation come dark.”

  “That’s not my way,” Morrow said.

  Cobb nodded. Thunder boomed. Closer.

  “Make it your way, Mink.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Cobb smiled. “No cuttee . . . no monee. You catch my drift?”

  Morrow stared into Cobb’s eyes as though trying to find an answer to the question he hadn’t yet asked.

  “Why are you doing this, Hank?” he said finally. “Take the money you have and get out of here. Maybe you should head east, see the sights.”

  For a moment Morrow thought Cobb was considering that, but the man’s reply crushed him.

  “It ain’t about money, Mink. Well, it ain’t all about money,” he said. “It’s about power. You any idea what it’s like to have power?”

  Morrow nodded and tapped his Colt. “Yeah, I cottoned onto the idea the first time I strapped on this gun.”

  Cobb stepped to the window and Ed Bowen moved aside.

  “Thunderstorm coming,” Cobb said, looking at the sky. “Blowing down from the north. Big mountains up that way.”

  Cobb was silent for a while, and then said, “For a time, way back when, I guess I was exactly what they said I was—a cheap tinhorn who rolled drunks for a living. Granted, now and again I’d make some extry cash on the side, like when a woman would pay me to stick the shiv into her old man or a rooster would give me fifty dollars to do the same thing to a love rival or some such.”

  He turned his back to the window, his head and shoulders outlined against a sky the color of rusted gunmetal.

  “Pretty soon the word got around about who I was and how I made my living, and I got run out of town after town by the law the minute I stepped foot inside the city limits,” Cobb said. “‘We don’t want your kind here,’” they’d say. ‘Now you git and don’t come back.’”

  Cobb gave up trying to establish eye contact with Morrow, guarded behind his dark glasses and shrugged. “You see, I was pegged as a lowlife and an unde
sirable. Where was the power in that?”

  “Count your money, Hank,” Morrow said. “Money is power.”

  “Yeah, if you’re like that Vanderbilt feller and have millions,” Cobb said. “But I found real power right here in Holy Rood . . . the power over people. I’m a king, dammit, and all of a sudden I think I don’t want to let it go.”

  “You mean you’re thinking about staying here?”

  “That’s what I mean. I’m considering it. Remain where I’m at and continue to rule this town. I can pass laws, impose taxes, order executions. Do what any king does.”

  Cobb grinned. “It’s like them fellers, Wild Bill Hickok was one, who smoke opium. One taste of it and you never want to let it go. Well, I’ve had more than a taste, of power that is, and I’ve begun to think that I don’t want to give it up.”

  “The law will catch up to you sooner or later,” Morrow said. “You must know that.”

  “The law?” Cobb snorted his amusement. “All the law cares about is that Holy Rood is a peaceful town, a burg where outlaws and low persons are not tolerated and get short shrift. The law doesn’t care if a whore burns or a goldbrick artist is”—he drew his forefinger across his throat—“topped. So long as my town obeys the law, the law will leave me alone.”

  “But you’ve already made a big mistake, Hank, and you don’t even know it,” Morrow said.

  Cobb grinned. “You’re right. I’m damned if I can see it.”

  Morrow stepped to the desk and picked up a thin gold bracelet.

  “Look at this, Hank. You’ve taken their valuables down to the women’s wedding rings,” he said. “Now you’re grabbing all the money they put in the bank.”

  “So?” Cobb said. “What’s your gripe?”

  “Hank, you only have power over people when you don’t take everything they have away from them. Take everything a man has, and he’s free of you. It’s only a matter of time until the folks up on the ridge realize this, and when they do, they’ll come for you.”

  “Kill a few and they’ll toe the line again,” Cobb said. He waved a negligent hand. “They’re sheep. They’ve proved that time and time again. Ain’t that right, Ed?”

  “Just like you say, boss,” Bowen answered. “And sheep are bred to be fleeced. Everybody knows that.”

  Morrow glanced out the window where rain pattered on the panes. “Storm’s almost here, Hank,” he said. “It’s coming down fast.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The air inside the livery stable was thick with the musky tang of horses and the wet grass smell of baled hay.

  Above the door of Matt Rhodes’s office hung an oval tintype of William Tecumseh Sherman in the dress uniform of a major general. A black mourning ribbon on his left arm was for Abraham Lincoln.

  Hamp Sedley glanced at the image and made a face, but Ruby’s warning glare kept him silent.

  “If you’re hungry I keep a pot of beef stew going in my office,” Matt Rhodes said. “Back in the old days, drifting punchers would stop by for a bite, but it all ended when Hank Cobb took over the town.”

  “I could use some of that stew,” Sedley said. “How about you, Sally?”

  The girl nodded. “I’m sure sick of rabbit.”

  “Then he’p yourself, young lady,” Rhodes said.

  “You too, Johnny Reb. Just be careful you don’t choke on it.”

  After Sally followed Sedley into the small office, Rhodes’s gaze flicked over the two dozen horses in the barn. Then, his face a grizzled blank, he said, “All right, let’s hear it, Ruby.”

  The woman said, “A friend of mine came in to trade Shel Shannon—”

  “Yeah, I know. Your friend tried to trade Shannon for Jasper Wolfden, him Cobb kilt but didn’t bury deep enough,” Rhodes said. “Trying to trade with Cobb was a dumb play.”

  Ruby opened her mouth to speak, but the old man cut her off.

  “Shannon is dead,” he said. “Hank Cobb gunned him. Then he took your friend prisoner, him and another feller.”

  “Are they still alive?” Ruby said.

  “As far as I know,” Rhodes said.

  “Matt, you have to help us rescue them,” Ruby said.

  “That’s a tall order, Ruby.”

  “You’re our only hope.”

  A horse snorted and thumped its hoof on the timber floor. The tin rooster on the roof squeaked as the direction of the rising wind shifted and a suggestion of rain pattered on the roof.

  Ruby waited for a few seconds longer than she should have for Rhodes to respond.

  Finally, she said, “Matt, surely there are other men in town that’ll join us to get rid of Hank Cobb,” she said.

  “Maybe,” Rhodes said. He looked through the office window and stared at Sedley who was spooning stew into his mouth. “I don’t like that feller,” he said.

  “Matt . . . please.”

  The old man nodded.

  “All right, Ruby, I can think of a couple. But you got to keep in mind that Holy Rood is a town like no other. I’ve been in a heap o’ wild cow towns, livened up by buffalo hunters, railroad construction laborers, freighters, cowboys and more riff-raff and assorted hard cases than you could shake a stick at. But the folks who lived in those towns were just as tough, just as wild as them I’ve mentioned, and they hired fighting lawmen to keep the peace and backed them to the hilt.”

  Rhodes shrugged. “Holy Rood was never like that. It’s always been a gutless place. Not long before Cobb and me arrived, the town stood back and let an outlaw gang hang their sheriff, a young feller by the name of Bob Wickham. By all accounts he was a good man. I think Cobb got wind of the hanging and that’s why he chose Holy Rood as his place of residence. Probably reckoned he could do anything he wanted in this town.”

  Sedley had finished eating and he listened intently to what the old man was saying. “And he’s sure done anything he wanted,” he said.

  Rhodes nodded. “First sensible thing I’ve heard you say, Reb.”

  “How does a town get to be like this one?” Ruby said. “How can it exist?”

  “I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “A bunch of gutless folks happening to congregate in one place can only be called a freak of nature.”

  “And such a gathering attracts predators like Hank Cobb and his ilk,” Sally said.

  “You got that right, young lady,” Rhodes said.

  Ruby gave Rhodes a pained stare.

  “Is there nobody?”

  Rhodes took his time to answer, and then he said, “Ruby, I’ll he’p you any way I can, short of meeting Hank Cobb gun-to-gun in the street. And there’s Will Granger the blacksmith. Like me, Cobb leaves him alone, though he pays him to shackle prisoners. Will is a strong man who hates what this town has become. He just might throw in with us.”

  “Can you bring him here, Matt?” Ruby said.

  Thunder rumbled overhead and rain slanted across the open door of the livery.

  Rhodes nodded. “You stay here. I’ll go talk with Will.”

  Lightning filled the stable with shimmering light and then thunder banged again. The horses whinnied and kicked at their stalls.

  Rhodes took a yellow slicker from a hook and shrugged into it.

  “I can’t give any guarantees,” he said, picking up his rifle. “If Will says no, then there’s an end to it as far as I’m concerned.”

  He stepped to the door and turned his head, his eyes searching the ridge.

  “Cobb’s up there, keeping the folks at work,” he said.

  The old man stepped into the street then stopped as lightning flashed, followed almost immediately by a roar of thunder.

  “These summer storms can kill folks,” Rhodes said, water sluicing off the brim of his hat. “It must be hell up there on the ridge.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “He’s done for, Shawn, leave him be,” Ford Platt said.

  “He’s still breathing, and that means he isn’t dead yet,” Shawn O’Brien said.

  “No, but
he will be soon. What’s left of him,” Platt said.

  Jasper Wolfden lay facedown on the filthy cell bunk, his back a nightmare of shredded skin, gleaming bone and dry, crusted blood. His breathing was shallow and came and went, a bad sign.

  “Best think about getting out of here,” Platt said. “We can’t fret over a dead man.”

  Shawn nodded. “Last time I was here I was saved by a miracle I called Sammy. I reckon a man is allowed only one miracle in his life.”

  He looked at Platt, then, his voice toneless, he said, “Are we beat, Ford? Is it over?”

  “Maybe not. I’ve got another miracle up my sleeve.”

  The defeat drained out of Shawn’s face and he grinned from ear to ear.

  “Damn right you have!” he said. “I’d forgotten about your sneaky gun.”

  “Two shots,” Platt said. “We’re not exactly an army.”

  “Two bullets are enough if a man can place them right.”

  “You want the Remington, don’t you?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You think maybe you can shoot better than me?”

  “I didn’t say that either.”

  Platt flexed his hand and the derringer sprang into his palm.

  “I think you can,” he said. “Take it.”

  “Putting a lot of faith in me, aren’t you, Ford?” Shawn said.

  “You could say that. Hell, I’m putting my life in your hands and the peashooter,” Platt said.

  Shawn took the Remington.

  “Let’s hope your faith in me and the gun is justified,” he said.

  “And let’s hope you’re within kissin’ distance of Cobb when you decide to touch that thing off,” Platt said.

  Thunder rocked the sheriff’s office and the tiny cell window glared with sizzling light that briefly seared white as iron in the gloom.

  Jasper Wolfden groaned and muttered something that Shawn and Platt didn’t understand.

  “He’s far gone,” Platt said. “He isn’t coming back, not after the beating he took.”

  “Seems like,” Shawn said.

  “Another whipping will kill him for sure.”

  Shawn nodded. He had nothing to say. Platt had stated the obvious.

  “What time is it, you reckon?” the little man said.