The sheriff nodded his agreement. This lady detective had now killed two outlaws. She apparently was no slouch with a shotgun or revolver. And, likely to be more disciplined in a firefight than most of his out of work cowboy and shopkeeper possemen.
Sheriff Seth Sharples was quite aware most cowboys were lousy shots with anything but a rifle or shotgun. Some were not even accurate with those.
Pope considered her not only his partner, but an equal. Sarah joined the posse. Both were sworn-in with the Goodman part of the posse.
“Men, we don’t know if we are facing four or twenty. Here’s what we are going to do. Deputy Akin and Detective Pope are going to ride a half mile ahead and pick the trail. When they come on the outlaw camp, they are going to try to get as much information as possible and ride back to us. We will work a strategy. It might be to flank them from both sides, or just go straight in. We will wait ‘til we see the lay of the land. If the two trackers ride up on them too quick and shots are exchanged, we will ride like hell to join the fray.
Now, this is real important, so I want you to listen careful-like. If you are going to be shooting from your horses, spread out. Don’t shoot any of us in front of you. Especially me! It can happen real easy. Same if we flank them. Make sure you don’t shoot a fellow posseman on the other flank! Detective Pope, you got anything you want to add?”
“Thanks, Sheriff. I believe you covered it all. I would only emphasize what the sheriff said about watching where you shoot. Don’t shoot a good man. Only shoot a bad one,” Pope said.
It was a cold dark morning and dawn was still almost two hours off.
Pope and Akin rode off. When they got about a half mile ahead, the posse moved out. The sheriff and Sarah rode in front.
Pope decided he did not need the Dietz lantern. He knew where he was going. They rode at a walk for over an hour.
It was a black, windy day on the prairie. Pope would stop periodically and sniff. He was attempting to catch the smell of a wood fire, or coffee, or bacon. Anything revealing the presence of men.
An hour and a half into the ride, Pope stopped.
“Wood smoke!” he said to Akin in a low voice which would not carry as far as whispers did.
“I cannot smell it,” the deputy said.
“It takes training and experience. It took me a long time. But it’s up ahead and not far. Walk your horse back to the posse. I’ll tie this horse off and walk forward and scout. With luck, only the cook is awake, but the coffee will get everybody going shortly, I bet.”
Akin turned his horse as Pope dismounted and tied his to a branch. He did not know this particular horse well enough to just drop the reins and certainly did not want to hobble it. He saw how jumping on a hobbled horse almost got the rustler watching him killed.
There was a thin line of trees along the slight trail. Pope moved to the right and skirted the trees as he reconnoitered the camp.
One man was tending the fire and another was getting coffee beans, bacon and flour ready. Pope counted six still sleeping. Eight in total. He heard cattle lowing in the distance. There would be a cowboy or two watching them, he thought. Maybe ten in total now. Before the sheriff announced, somebody would have to move around the camp and get ready to simultaneously take custody of the ones watching the herd.
He quietly ran back to his horse and met the posse.
“Two cooking, six sleeping, and I am guessing another two tending the stolen cattle. They are grazing in a bowl a couple hundred yards beyond the camp. Just to the left.
I was thinking of sneaking around there and getting ready to take them when I hear you announce your presence.”
“Sounds good. Boys, angle any shots to the right as much as possible so as not to hit the detective!” Sharples said.
“Sheriff, I think I can be in position in five minutes, then you go ahead and announce your presence to the ones in camp,” Pope said. Sarah looked at him in the dark and flashed her famous smile.
He rode out in a wide circle to the right, drawing the rifle from its scabbard as he rode.
When Sheriff Sharples drew his Sharps rifle and Sarah her double barrel shotgun, the deputy and his possemen followed suit. They remained quiet as the sheriff tried to see his watch.
Finally, he dismounted and stood behind his horse and struck a Lucifer on the heel of his boot. Under the light of the match, he saw four minutes had passed.
Sharples remounted and nodded to Sarah. He waited, then began to ride forward.
The sheriff, using sweeping arm movements, moved half his posse to the right and half to the left when a hundred yards from the camp. They had a semi-circle flanking around the camp.
“Hello, the camp! This is Laramie County Sheriff Sharples with a posse. You are surrounded! Stand and throw up your hands. Any man with a gun in his hand dies on the spot!”
Nobody was stupid. At least yet. All complied and the posse moved in.
Over a hundred yards away, the two cowboys tending the stolen herd had been chatting. They heard the sheriff. They froze, then realized their only option was to ride like hell in the other direction.
Immediately after coming to their conclusion, they heard a lever action operated.
“It’s a .45-70 men. And I can drop both of you where you sit on your horses. Unbuckle your gun belts and let them fall to the ground,” Pope said.
“Now, dismount and move away from where your guns dropped. One of you moves towards the rifle butts I see on your saddles and you both die.”
They complied. Pope drew his left Colt as he sheathed the rifle. He covered them as he draped their gunbelts over his saddle horn.
“Now, slowly lead your horses back to the camp,” he ordered.
The sheriff had the rustlers lined up in a clearing a short distance away from the camp. Akin was supervising the possemen in searching the suspects. Sarah watched his back.
Pope added his two to the number.
Pope saw a quick eye movement by Sarah and then she drew and fired her .44 Russian. The third man from the end bent in the middle and tumbled forward.
He dropped a Remington .41 Derringer as he fell.
The sheriff walked over and picked up the gun and handed it to Sarah.
“Nice work!” he said. He bent and checked the man on the ground.
“Dead,” he said.
A short rustler who had been running his mouth throughout the process spoke up.
“Pretty bitch, I could tame you, iffen you didn’t have your big gun. I could tame you real fast!”
Pope walked over to him.
The rustler had his shirt buttoned up to his neck and was wearing a bandana as a tie. It was knotted at the top button.
Pope’s hand flew out and he grasped knot and shirt and pulled the man in to within a foot of his chest.
“If she took off her guns, she could beat your ass in less than a minute. You’d never know what hit you!” he said in a low growl to the man, face-to-face.
Pope then flexed his big right arm and the man slowly lifted. Only the toes of his boots touched the dirt. The man kicked at Pope.
Pope extended his arm until it was almost straight up. The man’s feet were well above the ground. Pope slowly turned his fist halfway around and shoved. The man flew several feet through the air. He landed in a pile of horse manure. Even the astounded rustlers watching broke out in laughter at their companion’s expense.
Without looking back, Pope walked over to the camp and began to search for some of the stolen money. A quiet, but smiling Sarah joined him searching.
They thought they hit a bonanza when they found a green Wells Fargo strong box.
It only had four thousand dollars in it when opened and counted.
“Twenty-three thousand was the total treasure taken. Where is the other nineteen thousand?” Pope asked.
“Maybe some has been distributed to the individual rustlers?” Sarah speculated.
“Probably, but not enough to add up to the full amount. You know
what else?” he asked.
“I do. Where’s Cigar Man. And Appalachia? Nobody here seems to fit.”
He turned to the sheriff who had walked up.
“Sheriff, any of those prisoners have a bullet crease on the top of the head? I shot the hat off one the other day and it had blood in it. It’s his .45 I confiscated. Sarah and I will compare a bullet fired from it with the one which killed Eb Carson. If they match, you have a murder solved.”
It was a disappointment, but the rest of the searches did not turn up a box of the Key West-rolled cigars. And none of the men had the strong Appalachia accent. The watcher Pope creased was identified. His accent was Southern, but not a strong one.
“He’s not the robbery shooter. We’ll see soon enough if he’s Eb Carson’s murderer, though,” Pope said.
He assigned the two cowboys to watch the ranch. The rancher’s son, Bob Goodwin, with several men from his ranch, cut the Goodwin cattle out of the stolen herd. They headed their cattle home.
Pope and Sarah rode into Cheyenne with the lawmen and their prisoners.
“We’ll put the nippers on one at a time and bring a man out of the cells and to a room to question him. Want to start with the one with the new part in his hair you gave him?” Akin asked.
“Good idea. But, first let’s have you and the sheriff watch Sarah and me perform the ballistics test. We’ll see if his gun killed Eb Carson. Then, if the prosecutor agrees, you can charge him with capital murder in the commission of a felony after the questioning.”
“I’ll go over and talk with the territorial district attorney for this county. Horatio can stand in for me to observe the test,” Sheriff Sharples said. He walked up to the prosecutor’s office and the other three walked outside to the watering trough.
Again, Pope aimed so the bullet had almost seven feet of water to pass through, before bumping off the end of the trough.
Everyone stood back and Pope fired two shots with the cartridges they found in the gun when the shooter dropped it.
Pope collected the two bullets and they went into the conference room where the interviews would take place.
Pope put his investigative bag on the table. He got his leather notebook, pen, magnifying glass and a sheet of plain white paper out.
He placed the paper on the table and drew three two-inch circles. One to the left, two further over to the right.
He wrote “murder bullet” under the left and “test bullets” and the date under the right-hand circles.
Pope then placed the respective bullets in their circles.
He put the murder bullet on a blank space and one of the new ones next to it. Using the magnifying glass, he studied the striations from the revolver barrel’s rifling on each.
They were identical. He pointed to the matching striations with his pen.
Pope repeated with the second new bullet. Same result.
The sheriff had walked in and leaned over to observe.
“Sheriff, you have a murder suspect. I will testify I shot him, he got away but left his gun. We then followed him to where he was arrested. I will then be pleased to explain to the judge and or the jury the ballistic process proving his left behind gun was the murder weapon. Let them make the final decision,” Pope said.
“The prosecutor said if you find the bullets match, I can charge him with murder. Along with rustling. He will likely hang,” the sheriff said.
“One other question for the prosecutor before we talk with this man. If he helps us and tells where the rest of the money went, can the prosecutor maybe request life instead of hanging? It would give us something to bargain with,” Sarah asked.
“I will ask and let you know before we talk to him. You all and Horatio get started on the interviews. I suspect you will have a day or two’s worth of questioning to do,” Sharples responded.
The sheriff was correct. The three, sometimes joined by the sheriff, took a break for lunch. They had only fully interviewed one of the rustlers. These men were looking at five to seven years for rustling alone. The stage and train robberies could double it.
The only incentive would be dropping one charge or the other.
Sarah sent a crypto-coded telegram to Hume. She explained what they had and asked if the company had to have train and or stage convictions, or just long-term convictions on the perpetrators, regardless of charge.
Hume responded back he had spoken with his management. They wanted as much of the treasure recovered as possible. If the questioning resulted in a greater recovery, they did not care what the charges were. Incarceration for any reason would suffice.
The second suspect to be questioned was the man with the big mouth. He was known as “Shorty,” for apparent reasons.
“Mr. Haldeman,” Sarah started, “you are facing charges of armed robbery of a train, of a stage and commission of cattle theft resulting in murder,” she lied.
“We might be able to get the last charge—the one which would stretch your neck—dropped. If we did, you may get by with five to seven years in the Laramie Federal Penitentiary. The reason you would go to a federal prison is because Wyoming is a US Territory and not yet a state.
I will also suggest you answer our questions without being a smart Aleck. Your answers and how you give them will be part of the evidence against you. Understand?” she said.
Shorty shook his head. Pope asked the first question.
“Mr. Haldeman, which train and stage robberies were you on?”
“The first stage robbery where there was no shooting.”
“Where did it occur?” Pope continued knowing the best interrogation question was one where you already knew the answer.
“By the creek northeast of Cheyenne.”
“What was the total take?”
“About fifteen hundred bucks,” he said. Pope knew the answer was very close to his information.
“Did you participate in any other stage robbery?”
“The one where Cletus shot the driver. It was after the first train robbery”
“Tell me about train robberies. Were you on both?”
“No. We did a train robbery near Cheyenne and got our share of the money. Then, we did another stage robbery. We were hot. But Cletus shot the driver for no reason. He was crazy. Half the gang, including me, took our share and kicked out the leader and Cletus. They took about half with them. We headed up here and started to look for cattle to appropriate. We was gonna get ourselves a ranch over to Nebraska. Move the cattle over after the winter. You messed up our plans.”
“Are you aware of other train robberies?”
“Nope.”
“Tell me Cletus’s name and describe him to us,” Sarah asked.
“Cletus Hazeltine. He was from the Caddo Mountains in Arkansas. A hick, but a killer hick. He’d as soon shoot you as look at you. This bunch you got is cowboys. We ain’t killers. So we separated from the crazies.”
“How about the man who drew a Derringer on my partner?” Pope asked.
“He was just stupid. I guess he panicked. He wasn’t so stupid most of the time.”
“You mentioned the leader. Who is he?”
“Name of Rufus Black. Older man.”
“How old?” Akin asked.
“Mebbe forty-five or fifty,” Shorty said.
“Did he smoke?” Pope asked.
“He didn’t roll no cigarettes. He just smoked cigars.”
“Was he missing a tooth, right here?” Pope asked, pointing to an upper right molar in his own mouth.
“I don’t know.”
“Did he plan the robberies?”
“Yep.”
“You name and describe the men who left with Rufus and Cletus after the gang split up. I will copy down what you say,” Pope said.
He did. Pope and Sarah took pages of notes. The notes described men, horses, and weapons. They now had two lists of suspects, the ones how kicked Black and Hazeltine out and the ones who left with him.
“We’re almost done for
now,” Sarah started. “Did Rufus or Cletus say where the gang was going?”
“Nope. They was close-mouthed after we decided to split up.”
“Where was Rufus from before he got here?” Pope asked.
“He come here from Kansas City. But he said he couldn’t go back. He never said where he was born. Talked a lot about New Mexico,” Shorty said.
“When did the split off gang with Rufus leave your group?” Pope asked.
“About four days ago.”
“Which way did they head?” Akin asked.
“Due north.”
“Alright. We will make sure the prosecutor knows you have cooperated and will request they drop the murder charge,” the senior deputy said.
“You telling me true?” he asked.
“We will make those requests. The prosecutor has to decide, but he seems to be open to our suggestions, based on cooperation,” Sarah said and Akin agreed.
A deputy took Shorty back to his cell and the three stepped outside so Akin could smoke.
“Man! Look at the sky! And feel how the temperature has dropped. It feels like a blizzard is coming in,” Akin said.
“Well, if they left from north of here, they must already be in the thick of the storm. I don’t have the feeling they have the type of gear to build a dugout and weather a blizzard and the rest of the winter. I’m worried even we don’t have enough firewood and supplies at the Carson ranch,” Pope said.
“Are there any homesteaders north of where we arrested the gang? Maybe several days north? Sarah asked.
“Not as I know of,” Akin replied.
“How deep does the snow get up there?” Pope asked.
“It seldom gets more than two feet in the eastern half of the state. Move west of center and it gets real serious,” Akin said.
“So, the shooting part of the gang could still ride through it?” Sarah asked.
“Yep, but they’d play havoc finding a decent camp and have to be pretty good woodsmen to construct a shelter, kill game and find usable firewood. They may have a woodsman in the gang. Or they may just be found out there frozen and dead with their horses. Remember, we asked one of the rustlers what kind of gear the ones who left had. He said canteens, coats, a bedroll and saddlebags. No axe, tarps, food, or feed for their animals if things got real bad. They could literally freeze to death out there.”
Wyoming Shootout (Gun For Wells Fargo Book 2) Page 8