by Lauran Paine
“Everything which was in the possession of those three outlaws you shot,” he told Ladd Buckner. “But there was actually nothing much to be used to identify the men.” Enos shrugged and leaned upon the counter. The only light in the shop was coming through the rear doorway that led into the harness maker’s living quarters. “There are pictures of two of them among the flyers Tom kept at his jailhouse office, and an excellent description of the other one,” Enos Orcutt added. “They were vicious, unprincipled sons-of-bitches, Ladd, if that makes you feel any better.”
Buckner changed the subject. “Care for some coffee? I just made a fresh pot out back in the kitchen.”
Enos shook his head and continued to lean and study the younger man. “You’re not troubled, then, about having killed those three men?”
Ladd’s expression flattened a little, smoothed out in an expression of cold, unfriendly regard of the medical man. “There isn’t any way to kill people and not be troubled, Doctor. Even men like those three. But if you mean . . . has it ruined my appetite or did I lose sleep, or have I begun to fear retaliation from their friends or kinsmen . . . the answer is simply not one blessed bit.” When Orcutt was about to speak again, Ladd held up a hand to silence the older man. “But there is one thing that’s been bothering me, Doctor. You said while you were on your knees beside Tom Wharton that it looked to you as though someone had given a signal or something when he stepped out of my shop, that he had been shot down deliberately like maybe it had been planned that way.”
Orcutt did not drop his gaze as he replied to what sounded very much like an accusation. “That’s roughly what I said, indeed. Ladd, he was hit twice. You could place a playing card over both those holes, they are that close and that deadly.”
“What of that?”
“Ladd, all those men fired at you and they didn’t even come close enough to nick you.”
Buckner scowled. “You’ll have to make it plainer than that, Doctor.”
“Well, how would it have looked to you? Wharton walked out of your shop into the shadows under your wooden awning, and there was no reason for those outlaws up in front of the bank to expect him to do that, or to know he was the law, or even to see him in that shade the way they did at that distance. But, Ladd, they were completely ready, as though they were expecting him to appear and had their guns ready. Tom was shot down methodically. That is the only conclusion I can come up with. I’ve written it up in my medical report that way.”
Dr. Orcutt continued to lean and gaze at the younger man for a while, then he slowly hauled upright and fished in a pocket, brought out a crumpled, much-folded piece of paper, and shoved it across the counter toward Ladd Buckner.
“Read that,” he said. “It was in Tom’s right-hand shirt pocket when I prepared him for burial.”
It was the letter from the prison authorities up in Colorado and Ladd Buckner only read the letterhead and the first couple of paragraphs, then he slowly replaced the letter upon the counter top. “You believe I was somehow involved in that bank robbery?” he asked in a voice made reedy by his own incredulity.
Dr. Orcutt looked at his hands for a moment. “I don’t see why, if you knew those men were going to raid our bank, you would have deliberately sent Tom out to be shot down, and then why you would have followed him out to shoot it out with those renegades.” Orcutt raised his eyes. “Unless you are a homicidal maniac, Ladd. Unless you are the kind of human being I cannot possibly understand.” He pointed to the letter lying between them. “You served seven years in the federal penitentiary in Colorado for bank robbery . . . There is the whole record in black and white. And just in case you need to know how Tom got interested in your possible background, we both noticed that you stitched, knotted, and sewed exactly the way the rehabilitation people teach their pupils to work at the prison up in Colorado.”
Ladd glanced again at the letter, this time at the date it had been sent. “How long had Wharton had this information?” he asked, and the doctor did not know except to surmise that, since the letter had been dated two weeks earlier, and the usual mail delivery required only one week, that perhaps Tom Wharton had had that letter at least a full week.
Ladd was doubtful. “He didn’t so much as even hint about what he knew when he came in for coffee each morning.”
Orcutt conceded that. “You didn’t know Tom as well as some of the rest of us knew him. He wasn’t a man who would use something like this to hold over your head, and he never would have intimidated you with it. He would just keep it in mind, and, if you never forced him to make a case against you, he would never have mentioned it.” Dr. Orcutt’s voice changed slightly, turning brisk and more incisive as he went on. “But he’s dead, and so are a number of other people including our bank president. Maybe the cashier will die. It’s too early to determine that.”
Orcutt paused and Ladd, who was certain there had to be more coming, leaned there, waiting.
“If we had enough time maybe I could say this diplomatically,” averred the medical practitioner, and ruefully smiled a little. “Although I’ve never really had the knack for diplomacy.”
“Say what?” asked Ladd.
“Say that there is an old saying, Ladd. It takes a thief to catch a thief. We no longer have a law officer. No one I can think of offhand has your ability to face guns and to use them as well as you can.”
Ladd stared. “Me? Are you asking me to go after those renegades?”
“I’m asking you on behalf of the town council, which includes Reilly and Taylor and myself, to do something like that. The alternative is for the town to send out to the cow outfits for volunteers, and by the time they arrive back here those murderers will be out of the country . . . It’s your town, Ladd. You came down here, set up in business, and adopted it.”
“And a member of the town council believes I had a hand in the murder of Piñon’s lawman.”
“No,” stated Enos Orcutt, “I at no time said I believed that. I said it looked as though someone had set Tom up, and I still think that may have happened. On the other hand he could have simply walked out there coincidentally. Ladd, we can discuss this anytime, later.” Orcutt reached to pick up the letter lying between them and fold it. “Right now we have some dead men to avenge by law, and we have an awful lot of money, mostly the savings of folks around town, that needs to be recovered, and we need your help to accomplish those things.” Orcutt slowly pocketed the letter without taking his eyes off Ladd Buckner. “I’m making an appeal. You can refuse.”
Ladd nodded in the direction of the pocket Enos had just used. “Sure, just an appeal . . . and, if I don’t help you, the letter will be circulated around town.”
For a moment longer Enos Orcutt stood motionlessly, then he reached, withdrew the letter, tossed it over in front of the harness maker, and said: “Burn it, if you want to, do with it whatever you want.” He started to turn. “I’ll be down at the livery barn with the others saddling up, if you change your mind.”
“What others?” asked Ladd.
“Joe Reilly and Simon Terry, the blacksmith.”
Ladd scowled. “That’s all. Just the three of you?”
“Well, no, we were kind of figuring there would be a fourth fellow,” said the doctor, and walked on out of the shop.
Ladd looked from the empty doorway to the letter, picked it up, and read it, then balled up the letter and crossed over to pitch it into the little iron stove. He got his booted carbine and his belt weapon with its shell belt. He took his time about rigging out, and, when he moved across the room to pick his hat off the antler rack near the workbench, and a hostler from down at the livery barn walked in carrying some torn chain harness, Ladd pointed. “Dump it in the corner there,” he said, then, booted carbine across one shoulder, he herded the liveryman back outside. The hostler offered absolutely no objection. He looked from Ladd’s face to his weapons, then scuttled southward without a word.
Several cowboys were just stepping to the ground from their
saddles up in front of Reilly’s place. Ladd saw them without being the least bit interested. Elsewhere, as he walked forth, then turned back to lock his roadside door, he also saw those two gawky teenage pseudo-cowboys who had questioned him one time about the fight at Tomahawk Meadow. He ignored them, too, but they certainly did not ignore Ladd Buckner, who was armed to the teeth and who looked bitter-faced as he swung to hike southward down the roadway.
Apparently Dr. Orcutt had told his companions something about his conversation with the harness maker, because, although Joe Reilly would have normally been his customary loquacious self, this time, when Ladd appeared, all Reilly did was look up, nod his head, then look down again as he finished rigging out his saddle animal.
Dr. Orcutt was back nearer the wide front barn opening. He had been watching the northward roadway so Ladd’s appearance did not come to him as a surprise. He allowed the harness maker to get close, then he casually gestured toward the burly, dark, and bearded man. “Simon Terry,” he said by way of a curt introduction. “Simon, this is Ladd Buckner.”
The blacksmith shook Ladd’s hand in a grip that could have crushed bones, then unsmilingly went back to saddling and bridling his animal. Simon Terry was a powerfully muscular man, dark as a half-breed Indian, thick and hard as oak, and usually taciturn. He had been known to go for days at a time without ever more than grunting. But he was not a surly man, the way many taciturn individuals were. He was just not fond of talking.
The liveryman himself brought out Ladd’s animal and rigged it in silence. When he handed over the reins, he still said nothing, but he winked as he walked away.
They did not head northward up through town. Simon Terry, the blacksmith, led out, and Simon did not like ostentation of any kind, so he led them up the back alley out of town. That way they would not be viewed by the townsfolk as grim and relentless upholders of the law, which, although they might be, Simon did not like to have folks say about them. Also, if they came slinking back perhaps in the night having failed at their undertaking, it would be a lot easier to live with the failure if they hadn’t pretended to be mighty manhunters on their way out of town.
As far as Ladd Buckner was concerned, he wasn’t involved in any of this; he was only interested in studying the distant countryside and the even more distant mountain slopes, and trying to imagine where exactly those surviving outlaws had gone. The only thing he was certain of, as they angled back around and got atop the stage road northward beyond town, was that there had been only three survivors who had fled out of Piñon with their canvas sack full of bank money.
VIII
Because it was a moonless night with plenty of watery star shine, it was inevitable one of them would comment upon the visibility. Joe Reilly said: “I remember back during the war going out on a special patrol one night like this.” Maybe Joe had not meant to say more but the others waited and finally Joe finished it. “There was a bunch of Rebels in a spit of trees and they chased us two-thirds of the way back to our lines, shooting and hollering their darned heads off.” Joe smiled in the gloom. “I was never so afraid in my life.”
Dr. Orcutt smiled but neither the blacksmith nor the harness maker showed appreciation of Joe Reilly’s little tale.
“In the dark can’t no one see you very far ahead,” stated the blacksmith, and kept on leading the way up the road in the direction the outlaws had gone.
“Yeah,” said Ladd dryly, “and we can’t see very far ahead, either, Mister Terry. If those men turned off left or right, we’ll still be riding north come sunup.”
The blacksmith turned his bearded countenance to gaze darkly at the speaker before saying: “They didn’t turn off left or right, Mister Buckner.”
That was all he said; he did not explain how he knew they had not turned off, nor even whether he actually knew this or was simply guessing about it. But Dr. Orcutt offered an explanation. “A stage driver coming south only a couple of hours after the robbery saw three hard-riding men, one with a canvas sack slung over his shoulder, going northward up into the pass through the yonder hills.”
That was no certainty, but Ladd settled for it, and, if it turned out to be a fact that those had been the surviving outlaws, why then the posse men from Piñon were indeed on the right track and were also unlikely to be seen. Something had to be right; everything that had been done since the robbery and the killings could not have been wrong.
Simon and Joe Reilly knew the onward countryside the best, but Simon did not elaborate upon what lay ahead. Joe did. The nearest town was at the foot of the yonder hills upon the far side. Otherwise, there was nothing but cow country on both sides of the mountains, and the actual mountains themselves were of little value except for hunting and sometimes, at the higher elevations, also for fishing. Unless one considered their value as a hide-out. Joe Reilly recounted a tale of two fugitive renegades who had existed in the mountains by simply changing camps every four days, for three years, and even then, he said, they probably would not have been taken except that one of them developed appendicitis and his partner brought him out. The ill man died anyway, and his partner had been tried and sent to prison. Joe concluded this recitation with his own homily: “Since a man never knows what might happen to him, I guess the best thing is not to get into trouble with the law, eh?” No one answered.
The night turned chilly as they entered the distant foothills and began a steady ascent. It got colder each hundred yards or so they climbed toward the gunsight notch that served as the route from south to north, and from northward to southward in the direction of Piñon. Enos Orcutt dropped back to ride beside the fourth posse man, and to offer a cigar that Ladd refused in favor of a rolled cigarette of his own manufacture. With looped reins and a turned-up collar, he said: “Doctor, what do they have in this town we’re coming to directly? Boarding house, saloon, place for folks to put up tired horses?”
“All those things,” agreed the doctor. “And a town constable named Brennan who is . . . well, so I’ve heard anyway . . . purchasable.”
Ladd lit up and exhaled smoke. “Purchasable?”
“If you were three outlaws with nine thousand dollars in a sack and needed some rest and a place to put up your horses for a while, maybe for five or six hours, you could offer him a handful of greenbacks and he’d see to it that you got those things.”
Ladd’s gaze was saturnine. “Sure takes you a long while to say something, don’t it?”
Dr. Orcutt’s teeth shone in the silvery night. “I suppose it does.” He continued to grin. “Let you in on another of my secrets, Ladd. I’m probably the worst marksman in the entire Arizona Territory.”
“In that case, I’d appreciate it, Doctor, if you’d stay in front of me,” said the harness maker, and grinned back for the first time since seeing that letter Enos Orcutt had brought down to the harness shop with him.
Ladd glanced up ahead a few yards where silent Simon Terry was slouching along beside loquacious and burly Joe Reilly. He was slightly amused. If there were ever opposites on the trail, it had to be those two. Orcutt, guessing Ladd’s thought, sighed and softly spoke: “Different as they are, we couldn’t be riding on a mission of this kind in better company.”
There was an opportunity to ask for an elaboration of this statement but a distraction arrived in the form of a very large cougar whose tail alone was as long as most other cougars were in the body. All four horses reacted to the powerful scent of that killer cat in the same way, by shying violently and keeping their riders very busy for a number of uncertain moments, or until the astonished and frightened big cat had fled westerly across the road to disappear silently into the darkness without looking back.
Later, as they pushed steadily upward toward the top out of the pass, and the cold became more noticeable than ever, Joe Reilly produced a bottle of malt whiskey that he magnanimously passed around. It helped a little to keep chilled bodies warm.
Ladd considered asking how much farther they had to go before getting down upon
the far side of the pass, but in the end said nothing for the fundamental reason that knowing how many additional miles he had yet to traverse was not going to minimize them, and, whether there were a lot more of them, or a lot less, he was still going to keep riding along until they had been covered. On this kind of a ride, about the only thing that truly mattered was that the men did not stop any more often than they had to, and that they steadily and doggedly persevered, which they did, and were still doing when the cold, hushed, and rather dismal world through which they were passing in wraith-like silence began to pale out a little at a time until visibility improved enough for them to be able to look back and see the uneven, spiky rims behind them, and to look outward and downward and see a partially fog-shrouded immense valley and prairie ahead of them. They could not see the town at all but it was down there. As Joe Reilly said: “The folks that built Paso, the town we’re coming to, had their reasons for not advertising that they had a settlement out here. Back in those days these hills were alive with crawling bands of ragheads.”
“They still are,” grumbled the blacksmith, and as usual did not elaborate after making his statement.
Eventually, as the daylight began to strengthen even though there would be no sunrise for another hour or two, it became possible for the men dwarfed to ant size upon the high slope winding their way downward to see roof tops and uneven roads and several sets of more distant ruts heading toward the clutch of buildings, mostly made of logs, lying at the very base of the pass on the westerly side where the land was more open and amenable to settlement and to the kind of labor that went with creating a town, such as garden patches, little postage-stamp-size milk cow enclosures, and horse corrals. Paso, for all its relative age in this raw, new world, had not grown as had Piñon. Of course there was a reason for this, but to Ladd Buckner the reason was anything but obvious. In some ways he could see that Paso had advantages that Piñon did not possess. For example, Paso was sheltered in the lee of the mountains behind it from winter’s worst storms. Also, since it was shaded by those same peaks and slopes, it would be much cooler in summertime, which was always a major consideration in Arizona Territory.