“Every one of them was a deputy United States marshal killed in the line of duty, and those are just a few of the names I remember men talking about. There were many others I don’t recollect. But I know this—all of them wore a badge just like yours and it didn’t protect them from bullets.”
Maxie ground out her cigarette under a high-heeled shoe, then said, “By this time I’m betting that Hollister has it figured. If he kills you and Paul, there won’t be a big hue and cry because people vanish in the Comstock all the time, and lawmen are not immune. Besides, everybody is so busy making money they won’t care.”
Crane creaked back on his chair, waves of tiredness washing over him, as Maxie reached for the makings again. “Any idea where Paul and Walsh might be?”
“They’re on foot, so he’s right here in Rawhide Flat. Paul has a few friends in town, not many, but a few. He could be with any one of them.”
“I need names.”
The woman smiled. “Later, after you’ve had some sleep. You’re about dead on your feet.”
Maxie rose, the cigarette burning low between her fingers. She took a last puff and dropped the butt on the floor. “I’ll be back this evening.”
Crane nodded. “Ol’ Paul lit out and threw me to the wolves, didn’t he?”
Maxie shook her head. “I guess he figures you’re all growed up and can take care of yourself.”
The marshal smiled. “Take care of your ownself, Maxie.”
“You too, Gus. Yeah, you too.”
Chapter 9
Crane woke, the lumpy straw mattress on his cot paining him. He swung his feet onto the floor, then sat in the thin beam of watery dawn light blading through the cell window. Despite the knots of pain in his back he felt refreshed, though he figured he had slept only four or five hours.
The marshal rose, stretched, put on his hat and boots, then walked into the office. There was still a dull red glow of life in the stove and he added a few pieces of wood. He thumbed open the lid of the coffeepot and glanced inside. Empty.
Where did Masterson keep his coffee?
A search of the desk revealed a small sack of Arbuckle, and Crane laid it on the table. He remembered that there was an iron water pump out back.
Walking into the fine-spun glow of morning he looked around carefully, but there was little to see. The town seemed deserted, the boys sleeping off their drunks, postponing the raw-whiskey headache that would come aborning with the day. The Pine Nut Mountains were a far purple to the east, the vast sky arching over the peaks streaked with scarlet.
His tanned face bronzed by the fire in the sky, Crane took time to light a cigarette, then stepped to the pump where he rinsed out the pot and filled it. He returned to the jail, threw a handful of coffee into the pot, then set it to boil.
Crane ran a hand over his stubbled chin and remembered that his razor and spare shirt were in his saddlebags back at the livery. He’d get them later. Right now all he wanted was coffee and a quiet hour.
It is said that a watched pot never boils, and that was Crane’s experience as he sat at the table and watched for signs of bubbling life from the coffee on the stove. Several times he checked the pot, only to find the brew simmering but not yet on the boil.
A few slow minutes dragged past and Crane got to his feet again. But he never reached the coffee. Running steps sounded in the street outside; then the door burst open. A small, breathless man wearing a white apron and an expression of horror rushed inside.
“Marshal . . . the livery stable,” he gasped. “Oh my God, come quick.”
Crane reached for his gun belt. “What’s happened?” he demanded.
But the man’s hand flew to his mouth, his cheeks bulged, his eyes popped and he ran outside. Crane heard him throwing up against the wall of the jail.
The marshal stepped into the street and miserably the retching man pointed a shaking finger in the direction of the barn. “Go . . . go,” he said, frantically laboring for breath. “Oh my God . . .”
Crane glanced along the street. Already a dozen people, mostly the town’s respectable element, were hurrying toward the livery stable. After one last glance at the suffering man, the marshal followed them.
About thirty people were jammed into the barn and Crane had to push his way through a shield wall of backs before he saw what they were seeing.
The crowd was keeping a respectful distance between them and Maxie Starr. All had a look of fascinated revulsion on their faces, but none were there to mourn. The fate of a nameless saloon whore meant nothing to them except as a delightfully shivering diversion in a day that had promised to be as dull as any other.
The only light in the barn came from the door and the open hayloft, but Maxie’s naked body, a slender, white marble column streaked with crimson, gleamed with its own unearthly radiance.
Maxie had been hung by her wrists from a beam, a gag banded tightly over her mouth, her unbound hair falling over her shoulders.
The woman’s back and hips had been flayed with a whip until the flesh had been stripped from her bones in ribbons of scarlet. The ribs showed white as did parts of her shoulder blades and spine.
The woman had died hard, screaming soundlessly under an attack so frenzied and full of hate it looked like the work of a madman.
Crane stepped closer to Maxie’s body.
A crudely lettered sign, scrawled by a bullet on the back of an old dance hall poster, had been hung around the woman’s neck.
THUS DEATH TO
ALL THE WHORES
OF BABYLON
Crane removed the placard, then studied the bandanna that had been tied at the back of the woman’s head. The ends showed wrinkled twists that suggested the gag had been released, then retied several times.
After an initial whipping, the gag had been untied, probably to answer her tormentor’s questions. By then, Maxie would have been too weak and shocked to cry out for help.
The repeated whipping and questioning had gone on for a long time before death had extended to her its small mercy.
Now the people behind Crane began to chatter excitedly among themselves, the women letting out delighted little squeals of horror. A man in broadcloth, pince-nez glasses perched on the end of an imbiber’s nose, stepped beside the marshal.
His eyes were shining, eager. “Who done for her, Marshal, huh? Who do you reckon whupped her?”
A black depression settled on Crane, then quickly turned inward, becoming a blazing rage. He grabbed the man by the lapels of his coat and pushed him away. “Get the hell out of here!”
He turned, his face stiff with fury, darkness narrowing his vision to a tunnel streaked with red. “All of you out, now!”
“Here, that won’t do,” a gray-haired man protested. “You can’t treat us like this.”
Other voices joined in loud agreement.
Crane pulled his gun and fired two shots over the heads of the crowd. “Get out!” he yelled. “In two seconds I’ll kill any man or woman who isn’t gone from here.”
The expression on the lawman’s face and the smoking Colt in his hand convinced the mob that he’d summed up his feelings and meant what he said.
A stampede for the door followed and a few moments later Crane stood alone.
He punched the empty shells from his gun and reloaded, his face settling into grim, hard lines.
Right then he wanted to kill Ben Hollister real bad. Even if the man hadn’t flogged Maxie to death himself, he had given the order. Hollister figured the woman knew where Paul Masterson was holed up and he’d killed her trying to get information that she did not have.
Looking at Maxie’s torn body, Crane made up his mind. Before the sun reached its highest point in the sky, Hollister would be dead. There would be no grant of mercy, no appeal to higher authority. The rancher would die like a yellow dog with Crane’s bullet in him.
That, the marshal swore.
Right now, Crane had an unpleasant task ahead of him. He took a small, folding knif
e from his pocket and was about to cut Maxie’s bonds when he was stopped by someone calling his name. A woman’s voice.
The marshal swung around and to his surprise saw four nuns standing at the door, one of them with a folded, clean white sheet over her arm.
“We will take care of her,” Sister Marie Celeste said. She passed the sheet to one of the other nuns.
“She’s nothing to you,” Crane said, a brutal rage still raking him with spurs that dug deep and hurt intensely.
“She is one of God’s children,” the nun said. “She is everything to us.” Sister Marie Celeste’s cool dark eyes leveled on Crane’s. “The body must be washed and prepared for burial and prayers for her immortal soul must be said over her. Can you fulfill that function, Marshal?”
All the pent-up anger drained from Crane. “I’ll cut her down,” he said.
“No, we will do that.”
The nun took the knife from Crane’s hand, then nodded to the other sisters. The women silently wrapped the sheet around Maxie’s naked body and held her as Sister Marie Celeste cut the ropes.
Carefully, so she would not touch the ground, the nuns lifted Maxie’s body between them, then carried her from the barn.
Aware that Sister Marie Celeste was still looking at him with cool appraisal, Crane said, “Thank you, Sister.”
His response was inadequate and the marshal knew it, but he did not have the words to say more.
The nun nodded. “You have your duty, Marshal, and I have mine.”
She turned and left, the rosary beads hanging from the belt of her habit clicking.
Crane stepped to the door and looked down the street. A few of the respectable townspeople were crossing from one boardwalk to the other, but there was no sign of cowboys or miners.
The sun had only just begun its climb into the sky, but the blue morning was already warm, threaded with gold light.
An overloaded brewer’s dray with staked sides creaked and swayed past the stable, its mule team straining into the harness. A cloud of gray, alkali dust followed the wagon’s progress and drifted in the breeze like a flock of ghosts.
The marshal had been in haste to kill a man. Now he decided that Hollister could wait until he’d had his coffee. Besides, if it came to a draw and shoot, the coffee would help give him an edge.
Crane left the sheriff’s office at eleven o’clock, walking into a day so burning hot that just taking a breath of the thick, dry air felt like eating a spoonful of scalding soup.
The sky was the color of washed-out denim and the still sun held no promise that there was relief from the heat to come. Only the mountains, their lower slopes green as mint in a glass of iced tea, looked cool, but they were aloof and impossibly distant.
The marshal walked purposefully in the direction of the Texas Belle. He had come to kill Ben Hollister, his earlier anger of the morning replaced by a slow fire in his belly and death in his eye.
A rust-colored dog glanced at Crane, looked longer, then slunk away, its tail between its legs. Half a dozen hogs rooted noisily among the restaurant waste tossed in an alley, and somewhere a late-rising rooster crowed with hollow pride that the new day had begun.
There was something in Crane’s walk and face that caused people to stop and watch him pass. None showed the admiration due a resolute lawman, only puzzlement and a shadow of fear. The marshal was wearing the gunfighter’s mantle and such men were best avoided.
Crane was halfway to the saloon when the sound of a gunshot stopped him in his tracks. Then he started running. . . .
Chapter 10
Crane burst through the door of the Texas Belle, then stopped, assessing the situation, his Colt already in his hand. Years of dangerous living by the gun had taught him to sum up a scene in an instant, and he did now, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
The bartender had been bending over the slumped body of a dead man and he straightened as the marshal entered.
“Bill Moore,” he said.
The name meant nothing to Crane.
His eyes flicked to the back door of the saloon. Ben Hollister stood just outside, looking around him, gun in hand.
Crane stepped to the body. The man was sprawled over a table, his face in a plate that held the remains of his breakfast. He had knocked the coffeepot over and brown liquid, stained with his blood, seeped, steaming across the tabletop.
Bill Moore, whoever he was, had been shot in the back of the skull, his blond hair already matted red. Crane pushed the man back in the chair and his head lolled onto his chest.
The bullet had exited just above his right eyebrow, punching out a hole as big as a silver dollar. His eye was gone, leaving a sightless socket.
Crane turned to the bartender. “How did it come about?”
The man opened his mouth, tried to speak but shut it again. There was a tormented expression in his eyes as he tried to form words that refused to come.
Hollister had stepped inside. He holstered his gun as he walked closer to Crane.
“Whoever he was, he’s long gone,” Hollister said.
“Tell me about it,” Crane said.
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Obvious or no, you tell me, Hollister.” The man fought down the urge to drive his fist into the big rancher’s face. The time for violence would come soon, but not right then.
Hollister was also on the prod, his angry blue eyes bleary from the kind of rotgut hangover that would have made a lesser man yearn only for death.
The rancher swung the upper part of his body around and pointed to an open window at the rear of the saloon. “Shot came from over there.”
“I open the windows in the morning to get rid of the stink in here,” the bartender said. He’d added nothing of interest to the conversation, but had found his voice.
Crane nodded in the direction of the dead man. “The bartender says his name is Bill Moore. Who was he?”
“One of my hands,” Hollister said. “Trailed with ol’ Charlie Goodnight back in the day, then tried to build his own spread down the Castle Mountains way. After two years of drought and one of locusts, he gave up and came to work for me.”
“Who would want to kill him?”
“Nobody. He was all right.”
“Then why is he dead?”
“He was mistook for me, I reckon.”
Hollister saw the shadow of disbelief in Crane’s eyes, and decided to spell it out.
“I’m a drinking man, and sometimes I can’t face bacon and eggs first thing in the morning. Moore was here, and he was a chowhound. I told him to sit down and finish my breakfast. He did, and a minute or two later somebody shot him.”
Crane glanced around the saloon. Hollister’s broadcloth coat was draped over a chair. He wore a white shirt, as did the dead man, and his hair was the same shade of blond. From the back Moore could have easily been mistaken for Hollister, especially by a bush-whacker who only had time for a quick, snap shot.
“You got a lot of enemies, Hollister?”
“Only two: you and Paul Masterson.”
Crane nodded. “I can’t talk for Masterson, but you’re right. I’m your worst enemy.”
“You plan on finishing the job Masterson started? The big difference is that I’m facing you, Crane. I won’t go down as easy as Bill Moore.”
The marshal let that go. He said, “Did you hear about Maxie Starr?”
“Yeah, from maybe ten different people this morning who—” Suddenly a look of horror chased the anger from the big rancher’s face. “Hey, wait, back down there, Marshal. You don’t think I had anything to do with that? I never left the saloon all night. Ask the bartender here.” Hollister turned. “Sam, tell him.”
The man called Sam looked at Crane. “He’s telling the truth, Marshal. Mr. Hollister was at the bar all night. He never even sat down until I brought him his breakfast this morning, and that’s a natural fact.”
“You could have given the order, Hollister. Let somebody else do your
dirty work.”
Now a clean anger was back in the rancher’s face. “Crane, I don’t make war on women. I liked Maxie. I was good to her and I’d never have done anything to harm her.”
“Maybe you thought she knew where Masterson was holed up.”
“If Maxie had known that, she would have told me. Like I said, I was good to her. Not many men were.”
“Then who flogged her to death? You tell me, Hollister.”
“I don’t know, Crane. But as sure as God is in his heaven, I aim to find out.”
There comes a point when a man’s talking is over. Hollister, arrogant and belligerent, had reached it.
“Crane, I’ve told you the truth.” The man stiffened. “I think Masterson blames me for Maxie’s death, just like you do and that’s why he tried to kill me this morning. Now, if all that don’t set well with you, skin that hog leg and let’s have at it.”
Doubt nagged at Crane. His years as a lawman had taught him to recognize the truth when he heard it.
Hollister seemed genuinely saddened, or at least concerned, by the woman’s death and the marshal doubted he was a good enough actor to fake it. It’s one thing to kill a guilty man; quite another to gun down one who may be innocent. And Crane felt conflicting emotions tug at him.
If not Hollister, then who had brutally murdered Maxie? Only a crazed man would . . .
A disturbing thought came, unbidden, into the marshal’s head: where was Reuben Stark, the man with the dog whip?”
He asked Hollister the question.
It took the rancher a while to answer. Hollister had been ready for a gunfight he was not sure he could win and every taut-strung nerve in his body had to loosen, bring him down and clear the tunnel vision that had seen only Crane.
Finally he said, his voice steady, “Last I heard he was riding out with his sons hunting Masterson.”
“When did he leave the saloon?”
Hollister shook his head, then looked to the bartender for help.
“Near as I can remember, Stark and his boys left around two, said they were going for their horses and then they’d kill themselves a sheriff.”
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