Hot Lead, Cold Justice

by Mickey Spillane

  Colson was tall for a cowboy, rail-thin, with a bony, Lincoln-esque face on which rode a handlebar mustache, currently an iced-over thing under his prominent nose. His eyes were dark blue and barely visible in slits and his eyebrows, also ice-encrusted, were shaggy caterpillars. He stumbled into the living room, still in the duster, but when York rose to offer help, the cowboy shook his head and waved that off. He fell into the other chair, drawing it even closer to the fire.

  Willa had slipped away to get him a cup of coffee, which she took from a tray with refills for herself and York. She handed the new cup to her foreman, who said, “Many thanks, ma’am.”

  York sat on the edge of his chair, turned toward the man, whose face was frozen with something that, despite the circumstances, had little if anything to do with cold. The ice on his eyebrows and mustache was already melting, and it was as if everything on his face was weeping, except those dark blue eyes themselves.

  Willa sat perched on the edge of the stone hearth, but leaving most of the fire exposed, to give her foreman the benefit of its warmth. The cowboy’s stare seemed to York, at first, meant for Willa; but then Caleb realized the man’s eyes were on the fire itself, almost transfixed by it.

  “Hell ain’t that color,” Colson finally said, with the barest nod at the flames. “Not orange nor red nor blue nor combinations thereof. It’s white. It’s the color of nothing at all.”

  Willa’s hands held the coffee cup in her lap; her frown was so taut, her eyes almost disappeared. “What’s happening out there, Earl?”

  The tall cowboy swallowed. “Never seen wind the like of it . . . snow stackin’ up in drifts higher than a man. And the sleet! Clouds of the stuff, stingin’ you, blindin’ you.”

  Colson shuddered, eyes unblinking and haunted reflected orange shimmering on his face, moisture hanging from his eyebrows and mustache.

  He went on: “Horses’ feet all cut to ribbons, lopin’ through ice-crusted drifts. Beeves with hide and hair wore off from hoof to knee, just staggerin’ along like they was drunk . . . others not even staggerin’. Just froze there solid, like statues.”

  Willa asked, “Are the men all right?”

  Without looking at her, the foreman shrugged. “Can’t rightly say. For a while they all did their best to keep them steers from piling up at fences. Finally some give up on it, got themselves sheltered as best they could in gulches and canyons. My guess? Come the thaw, we’ll find a good share froze to death near their dead horses, right there where they took ‘shelter.’ Me, I was lucky to find my way here.”

  “What can I do, Earl? What can we do?”

  “Not a damn thing, Miz Cullen.” He shrugged. “Wait it out.” Something like a laugh rattled out of his throat like a few coins shaken in a can. “Ridin’ over here I seen the damnedest things. I been punchin’ cows since just after the war, but never saw the like. Banks so deep steers’re stuck in it—livin’, breathin’, but stuck in one spot, and sorta . . . screamin’. Like some horrible horn blowin’ from someplace inside ’em! Not able to move and get themselves clear. Miz Cullen, it’s so deep in some places, the cows are buried, only their horns stickin’ out of the snow to mark their graves.”

  Willa was bent over, her hands on her face. York watched the foreman, who was staring, staring, staring at the fire.

  After a while, the foreman said, “I’d take it kindly, Miz Cullen, if I could head to the bunkhouse and stretch out some. I don’t think I’m helpin’ out there. Not no more. And we got a good potbellied stove in there, and plenty a wood and it’s a-goin’. I know, ’cause I can make out the smoke from the chimney, nice and gray and not white at all.”

  “Please do,” Willa said with a supportive little smile.

  The foreman had trouble getting to his feet and York was right there, helping him.

  “Can you walk okay?” York asked.

  “All them hours in the saddle,” the foreman said with an embarrassed grin, “a man’s feet in his boots can get froze so stiff, walkin’ don’t come all that easy.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  York took the man in the duster by the arm and kept him upright, then leaned him against the wall. After getting back into his black frock coat and hat (again tying it down with the muffler) and gloves and boots, York opened the door and walked the foreman out into the hungry storm.

  As Colson had said, gray smoke from the bunkhouse stood out in the swirling white, and that allowed York to help the foreman make it over there. Also, night had fallen, and lamplight from within the Dog House, as the cowboys’ quarters were often called, stood out in the dark, not completely blotted out by the squall.

  York stepped inside with him. The familiar bunkhouse bouquet of sweat, manure, chaw, unwashed socks, and smoke from coal-oil lamps greeted them. A number of other cowboys were already under blankets in their bunks or huddled around the potbellied stove. Their faces looked damn near as white as the world outside, their eyes wide and unblinking, shrouded in shock. But it was warm in there, considering.

  The foreman said, “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  “You need to do something for that frostbite.”

  “I’ll get an Irish potato from the cookhouse,” Colson said.

  “What for?”

  “You scrape it raw and rub it on your fingers and feet and ears. Be fine.”

  York didn’t have any better advice, although he wondered, the next time he saw Colson, whether the foreman would have any of those appendages left.

  Within fifteen minutes, York and Willa were again together in their chair in the fireplace warmth. She was snuggled close, but her words weren’t of love.

  “It will never be the same,” she said.

  “The cattle business?”

  She nodded. “The Bar-O. We’ll need to have more feed for the cattle in winter. We’ll need more fencing, to rotate pastures, and grow plenty of hay. Seems crazy to say it, but we have too much land. We need smaller herds. We need to be”—she sighed—“not just ranchers, but farmers.”

  “You think a man like Colson will trade his rifle and pony for a pitchfork?”

  She laughed a little. “Does sound unlikely. How about you, Caleb? Care to turn in your badge and six-gun for a posthole digger?”

  They sat and stared at the crackling, snapping fire.

  “This blizzard won’t last forever,” York said, “and like I said before—we’re not getting the worst of it here.”

  “It’s bad enough.”

  “It surely is. And your cattle were in better shape than many, when the snow came. The future will come, too, like it always does, and we’ll deal with it.”

  She was looking at him now. “Together?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Well . . . I don’t know that I want you heading back to town, after dark, in this blizzard.”

  He shrugged. “I know where your father’s bedroom is. I could camp out there. That’d be most hospitable of you.”

  She slipped out of the chair and stood before him, back to the fireplace. She was in relative darkness but the edges of her were fiery. One by one, she unbuttoned the plaid shirt. Then she undid her belt and undid the denims and let them drop to the floor. She stepped from them . . .

  . . . a woman in red long-johns and low-riding cowboy boots.

  York was smiling, laughing a little.

  He stood. Stripped down to his long-johns while she stood on one leg at a time and pulled off first one, then the other boot.

  “Two fools,” he said, “in their union suits.”

  Her hands were on her hips. Yet, covered neck to ankle, she was in a way naked, every curve showing, every peaked hill, every lush valley.

  Rather shyly, she said, “It’s only right I tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “. . . I’m not a virgin.”

  York shrugged. “Neither am I.”

  He smiled and she smiled.

  “Do you know where my bedroom is?” she asked.

 
“No,” he said.

  “I’ll show you.”

  She held her hand out to him, and did.

  Most hospitable indeed.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Luke Burnham and his boys went from the bank they’d robbed—and the men they’d killed—to the stable where their horses waited, which, thanks to Burnham’s careful planning, was an easy walk even in the falling, gathering snow.

  In the stalls, out of the stable man’s view, they transferred the money from the canvas bank bag into their saddlebags. They did not count their take, just divided it up so that it would fit in four saddlebags, with the coin distributed evenly as to weight.

  Their Missouri Fox Trotters were fed and rested; the only sign of the ordeal of the ride from Trinidad to Las Vegas last night was the worn-away hair on the ankles of the steeds. But the animals seemed up to the return trip, though Burnham almost envied the dumb beasts’ lack of awareness of the trials that lay ahead.

  The four men—dusters over their coats, their hats tied down with woolen scarfs, looking like they were suffering terrible toothaches—rode south with the Blue Norther at their backs. Almost immediately the snowfall lessened from what they’d experienced in Las Vegas, though it remained steady. The Burnham bunch would be well shy of Las Vegas by the time any discovery was made. No one was pursuing them yet—the emptied bank and the dead banker and guard were inside a building with a CLOSED sign on the door.

  No one human was pursuing them, that is. They raced against Nature, staying ahead of the blizzard that built behind them like an inferno of white, a conflagration not of fire but of ice.

  And by the time the squall caught up with them, midafternoon, their pace had already slowed. Even riding single file, spaced close together, each rider would lose sight of his fellow travelers for endless, unsettling minutes at a time.

  For all the dangerous raids on which Luke “Burn ’Em” Burnham had followed Captain Quantrill to hell and back, none compared to this chill peril. Burnham rode as hard as he dared, in the lead, spurring his little band on, but—within the cold cavern of his mind—he was chastising himself for mistakes too late to unmake.

  He should have bought or stolen new steeds for the journey. He should never have allowed that damn lunger Sivley along, the man’s coughs so frequent and hacking that they rose above the banshee wind. And of course he should have made certain that it was Caleb York he’d shot down in the street in Trinidad.

  But that latter failure kept him going, kept driving himself and his steed forward. If they could make it back to Trinidad and into hiding until this goddamn storm let up, he would have his long dreamed of revenge before riding on to a life of ease in Mexico.

  Time became a meaningless thing as they rode in the ever-dropping cold and the swirling snow, with its cutting sleet finding whatever exposed flesh it could, tiny bees anxious to sting. They were in limbo, in purgatory with hell at their heels, with the whistle and howl and moan around them like tortured, damned souls warning and welcoming them at once.

  With no landmarks to guide them, other than the telegraph poles along the road, they had no sense of where they were, and how far—or how not far—they had come.

  The visibility was so poor, they rode past the Brentwood Junction relay station without realizing it. There they could have bought (or stolen) fresh mounts, or just taken shelter and had the station man and his wife give them food and drink. Even in this weather, they would have been facing only an hour or so more of the torture.

  But the storm, consuming them now, denied them that mercy. And Burnham was starting to think they would die out here, their money unspent, his revenge not taken, an ignominious defeat for a warrior who (in his own humble opinion) had shown such high valor and done so very much for a noble cause.

  They slowed to a crawl. Sivley, in fourth position, was either coughing softer or falling even farther behind. Burnham had long since thought that the lunger needed killing, but didn’t bother, because the man wasn’t slowing them down. He was coming to the conclusion, though, that putting the scarecrow out of his misery would be a thing of mercy for all four of them.

  And if the lunger’s hacking cough grew so faint that Burnham and the others lost track of him, then Sivley’s saddlebag of money would also be lost track of. Couldn’t have that.

  He raised a hand and yelled, “Whoa!” loud enough that even the whipping wind couldn’t blot it out. Behind Burnham, Jake Warlow brought his horse to a stop, yelled “Whoa!” also, and behind him Moody Fender did the same, and Ned Sivley, weaving in his saddle, came to a halt as well.

  Burnham climbed down from his animal. Moving through the eddying white, he walked past Warlow, nodding at him, then Fender, and as he looked up at Sivley, Burnham had his right glove hand through the slit pocket of the duster to rest that hand on the butt of his holstered Colt Lightning revolver.

  “We’re almost there, Ned,” Burnham said, though of course he had no idea of where the hell they were. “You gonna make it?”

  His cough an awful, lung-shredding thing, Sivley nodded. Even this close up, the lunger looked like a ghost in the swirl of snow, with only the red of his blood on the scarf wrapping his lower face giving him any color at all.

  “You need to keep up, Ned,” Burnham said. “If not, you get left behind. But the money won’t.”

  “You . . . you’d kill me, Luke?”

  “Wouldn’t have to, Ned. This Blue Whistler of a storm would do the job, ’less you did yourself in, to stop your sufferin’. Now. Can . . . you . . . keep . . . up?”

  “I can . . .” He coughed. “. . . I can, Luke. You can count on me.”

  Burnham had to shout to be heard, not just by Sivley but the other two. “Okay! But I want you and that animal to come around and fall in behind me! I need to keep my eye on you!”

  “Yessir!”

  Burnham walked Sivley’s trembling, struggling Trotter by the bridle and guided the mount and its pathetic master into second position, Warlow making room.

  “Don’t despair!” Burnham yelled to his men. “We have to be close to Trinidad!”

  But of course he had no real idea if that were true.

  And, ironically, it was Burnham’s own horse that brought things to a head. The animal began to weave, and as it went over sideways, landing hard and sending up a powdery blast of white, Burnham managed to slip off the animal in the opposite direction. He stood standing in what, if the telegraph poles could be trusted, was the middle of the road.

  The rest of the little group had jerked their horses to a halt, and now Burnham looked up at the mounted Sivley, contemplating shooting him and stepping up into his saddle, when the lunger’s horse collapsed as well. Somehow Sivley, perhaps having seen what had happened with Burnham and his ride, managed to slip off on the opposite side, too. Otherwise he would have had a leg crushed under the heavy steed.

  Burnham examined both his horse and Sivley’s, assuming he would have to put a merciful bullet in the head of each. But both animals were already dead, their snouts covered in ice crystals, their eyes cold, wide-open marbles. Even a dumb beast, it seemed, could feel terror.

  Suddenly Sivley was beside him. “What do we do now, Luke? Ride two to a horse?”

  Burnham was thinking, but it didn’t take long to realize he would have to kill Sivley and then take out one of his two boys—he’d make it Moody, because of the man’s sour attitude—and then he and second-in-command Warlow would take the surviving mounts. After transferring the money from the saddlebags of the dead animals to those of the two live ones, they would ride on alone. Yes. That was the best plan of action.

  Then Warlow’s animal collapsed, and he too managed to hop off.

  “Hell!” the outlaw shouted.

  That left Fender the only man still on horseback, with three other men standing knee-deep in the white that had a road under it. Fender’s right hand with a gun in it came out quick, and then Burnham’s gun was out, too—both had settled a hand on their gun butts under thei
r dusters when this fuss over horses began, thanks to the damn horses themselves dying on them.

  It seemed like a long time, but was only a few seconds before Fender’s animal—perhaps reacting to what the other Trotters had done—also collapsed on his side, with Moody awkwardly slipping off.

  Burnham went over. This horse was still breathing, but obviously useless. He shot it in the head. The snow cut off the sound of the report like a hand going over a scream.

  Now, in an awkward row, lay four dead horses, with four men just standing there looking down at them as motionless as the flurries surrounding them were not.

  As motionless as the dead beasts themselves.

  Another few seconds dragged by, and the outlaw leader said, “Saddles and saddlebags. We walk the rest of the way.”

  They did walk, each with a saddle over his back and saddlebags over an arm. With the telegraph poles to guide them, they walked. Night fell, though they barely noticed. What seemed an eternity passed before they abandoned their saddles but still clung to their money-stuffed saddlebags.

  Burnham’s eyes stayed on the horizon, where he hoped Trinidad would present itself, perhaps by way of lamps on in the windows of buildings. No sign of that. The eternity they experienced lasted less than an hour, but what an awful hour it was.

  They were walking side by side now, like the Earps and Doc Holliday heading for their showdown with the Clantons, but not looking nearly as menacing. Washed in white, coated in ice, they walked. The storm had beaten these boys like whipped puppies, and they shambled along pitifully, skirting drifts, but seldom in snow any less deep than to their knees.

  But Burnham was impressed that Sivley hadn’t given in to the storm. All of these men were having thoughts of curling up in the snow and just sleeping a while, just get a little rest before moving on . . . and had they done that, of course, they really would have moved on....

  Burnham was in the best shape of this bad lot—bad men in a bad way—and was the first to hear the squeak and rattle rise over the wind.

  He put a hand on Warlow’s shoulder and said, “Listen!”