Ralph Compton Guns of the Greenhorn

by Matthew P. Mayo

  Fletcher stepped closer and eyed the rock face. Yes, there were letters, but they weren’t from some language of old, nor from the dead man.

  The message, scratched in jagged, hand-height letters, read:

  GUNNAR, WHERE ARE YOU? FIND ME OR I WILL FIND YOU.

  Fletcher thought about the message a moment, stepped closer, and read it a second, third time. There was no getting it wrong. It had to be Skin Varney. Who else? And that meant he was after Gunnar.

  “Gunnar.”

  The old man didn’t respond, just sat hunched like a small old vulture beside his friend, one old horned hand atop the dead man’s chest, same as it had been minutes before.

  “Gunnar.”

  “What?”

  “The rock, to your left.”

  Tibbs didn’t even look up.

  “Gunnar, I . . . I think it’s a message from Skin Varney.”

  That got the old buck’s attention. His gray head swiveled around and his eyes squinted. Fletcher almost asked Gunnar if he wanted him to read the note to him. But then he recalled the two filled bookshelves in Gunnar’s cabin and his occasional lapses into something akin to literary discourse, and Fletcher knew it would be a mighty insulting thing to ask. And yet not but a week before he would surely have done just that without thinking.

  Maybe I am changing, he thought. Maybe Gunnar is right and there is hope for me, after all. The notion almost made him smile, for he thought he’d been just fine before he discovered the peculiarity that was Promise and all it had revealed itself to be to him.

  “You’re damn straight it’s from Skin Varney.” Gunnar shoved up from his knees to stand glaring at the message scratched in the rock.

  Fletcher looked around them. “How worried should we be?”

  Gunnar shrugged. “Varney’s a game player. Used to be anyways. Seems like he ain’t changed.” He gestured at the message.

  “What if you’re wrong?”

  Gunnar shrugged. “Then he’ll shoot us anytime now.”

  Fletcher retrieved the old man’s revolver. “Here.” He handed it back to Gunnar. “I’d feel safer if you kept this close at hand.”

  “Thanks, boy. I was overcome with a fit of disgust for the violence men do to one another. Plumb tired of it, I am.” He sighed. “Come on, boy.” Gunnar dragged a rawhide cuff across his face beneath his nose and didn’t disguise the sodden look his eyes had taken on.

  “Where to?” said Fletcher.

  “Got to get a pick and shovel.” Then Gunnar stopped. “On second thought, no, I’m not thinking right. Help me with Horton.” He moved up toward his friend’s head. “You take his feet. We’ll bring him back to his favorite spot, bury him there.”

  “Where was that?”

  “Take a guess.”

  They stopped, as Fletcher had suspected, close by the open-fronted outhouse.

  “Now we need a shovel and pick,” Gunnar said.

  “I’ll go back to the cabin. I saw his tools in that lean-to off to the side. It’ll give you time to spend with him,” said Fletcher.

  “Appreciate that, boy. I surely do. And if I knew ol’ Horton—and I guess I alone knew him about as good as a fellow can know a friend who was like a brother—why, he’d be thankful, too.”

  Fletcher offered a quick nod. “Of course,” he said, and lifted out his revolver and walked away.

  “Boy,” said Gunnar, “keep an eye.” He pointed to his own eye, then to the landscape surrounding them.

  It was as if Fletcher were seeing it for the first time. All the same gray and tan boulders, the towering Ponderosas, the beaten trail. It all looked suddenly filled with shadowed nooks and outright hiding spots large enough for a big leering grown man to hide in and level his revolver and rifle and shotgun on them, on him. Then the brute would squeeze the trigger. . . .

  “Stop it, Fletcher,” he told himself as he hustled along the trail back toward the cabin. Gunnar seemed to think Varney wouldn’t still be around, so he had to take that as a fact and keep moving. Otherwise he’d work himself into a frenzy of foolish behavior—good for no one.

  As he walked, eyeing the terrain, it came to him that he did not know what Varney looked like. Gunnar had never given him a satisfactory answer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  They buried Horton Meader and Gunnar mumbled low words over the rocked-over mound. Then Fletcher followed in silence as the old man trudged back to his cabin. Later, over coffee gone cold, Gunnar growled, then spoke to the ceiling. “That’s twice now when I wasn’t where I should have been. Well, it ain’t gonna happen a third time.” Gunnar looked to Fletcher to be holding back a gush of rage.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Tibbs. I don’t understand.”

  “Happened first when I wasn’t there for Millie, and again when poor ol’ Horton met his end with nary a friendly face in sight.”

  “What can you do about that now?”

  “Retribution for my friends, boy! Payback, revenge, a reckoning. Call it what you will—it’s what I had in mind when you first came stumbling up my mountainside. I let training you lull me too much. Now, I ain’t blaming you, but it’s high time I get back to the plan. Now . . . out of my way.”

  Gunnar shoved past Fletcher, knocking the table and flinging scraps of firewood, half-whittled spoons, stray socks, and stale biscuits.

  “I’ll take out after him,” said the grim-faced old man to himself as if he’d forgotten Fletcher was there with him. “It’s down to me and him now. I’m the one he wants next. He’s bound to continue on his vengeance ride and he won’t be happy until he kills everyone in Promise. I got to stop him.”

  Fletcher shook his head at the old man. He was impressed with the old-timer’s anger and eagerness, but he knew this was likely a short-lived spur-of-the-moment decision fueled by the quick flame of raw hate. And that was exactly what Varney wanted.

  “You can’t do it alone.”

  “Huh?” said Gunnar.

  Fletcher knew he wasn’t listening. Still, he tried to explain his logic to the old-timer, but Gunnar shook his head and continued storming about the cabin, selecting items and tossing others over his shoulder.

  After a few moments of no response, Fletcher tried once more. “At least let me go with you. To back you up, if nothing else.”

  “No, sir. No, I say. Don’t you see? Can’t be that way. Just can’t. Don’t ask me why.” Gunnar stood in the middle of the rubble of his usually tidy cabin. In the past few minutes, he’d pulled everything in sight from hooks on the walls, cleared entire shelves, and rummaged in his clothing chest, upending everything in the cabin in the process.

  “What are you looking for anyway?” said Fletcher, flummoxed because Gunnar wouldn’t stop and talk with him, let alone listen to reason.

  “I’m looking for my lucky socks. You ain’t seen them, have you?” It was the first time he’d looked at Fletcher in many long minutes.

  “What? Socks? No, I don’t think so.” Fletcher stared at the old man, whose head was ringed by a frazzled nest of long gray twiglike hair, his beard and mustaches a dervish-twisted nest, his eyes wide and wet and red. Gunnar stood in the midst of the cabin, a torn old undershirt in his right hand, now more rag than shirt, and a moccasin with holes in his left.

  “Don’t you throw anything out?” said Fletcher.

  “Course not. I work for my money. Ain’t had nobody ever send me money nor much else but a letter now and then from a sister of mine back in Maine. She’s passed now. Oh, I see what you’re up to—changing the topic so I’ll forget myself! No, sir, won’t work this time.” He pointed the floppy old moccasin at the young man. “Now where are those socks?”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Look like? Oh, they’re green with red about the toe.”

  “Like those?” said Fletcher, nodding at Gunnar’s feet.
>
  The old man looked down, wiggled his toes. “Yep, them’s the ones. Phew.”

  “Why are you worried about socks?”

  “Worried? Why, boy, these socks are filled to the brim with luck, that’s why.”

  “I thought they were filled with your bony legs.”

  “Don’t mock things you don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry. What makes them so lucky, then?”

  “Why, I was wearing them when I captured Varney so long ago. I give up wearing them for years. Then when I heard Varney was released from prison and would be among us once more, I dragged them out of the storage trunk. They’re about worn through, though. No heels to speak of. I darned them so often, they’re mostly new all over, but it’s the spirit of the originals, the ghost of them that’s important.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t care if you see or not. Point is, I was wearing them then and the cards fell in my favor, so why change a thing? In life, if you are successful doing something a certain way, why, it only makes good sense that a man keeps on the same path if he wants that success to continue, right?”

  Fletcher nodded. “I admit it’s not a thread of logic I’d ever have thought to follow, but it makes sense when you put it that way. Nothing in my life has worked out lately as I expected, so I might as well defer to alternative ways of considering my situation.”

  “Well, whatever you said, I’m sure it makes sense to you. Best leave it at that.”

  “Now that your socks have been found, let’s get back to the initial point of the discussion, which is that I should go with you.”

  “No, that’s your thinking, not mine. You stay here. I can’t be nursemaiding you and track that vicious killer at the same time. No, no, and no!”

  “But . . .”

  “Look, boy. Varney’s a brute. He don’t know no other way but to kill. He’s already laid low my Millie. He’s killed off the biggest pain in my ass, Reg, and his poor wife, Edna.”

  “Oh, my word!” said Fletcher.

  “Yep. And now he’s kilt my best and only friend, ol’ Horton Meader. We come to these hills about the same time. We been scratching out a living out here so long, you’d think we were brothers—twins! And sometimes I ain’t so sure we wasn’t one and the same person. I reckon I knew him longer than most anybody else I know.”

  “I understand, Mr. Tibbs, and I am sorry, truly, but you said we were going to do this together to clear my name and to avenge Millie’s death.”

  “I did. But that was before Varney went on a killing rampage. Now I know I’m next. He’s drawing me out, boy, and I don’t want you to get caught on accident—you hear me?”

  Fletcher opened his mouth and the old man shook his head and held up a callused palm. “Enough talking. Now leave me be.”

  Twenty minutes later, Gunnar was packed with the barest of essentials, light enough to travel easy on foot: matches, a hip knife, a revolver, a tomahawk, a shoulder pack slung bandolier-style across his back with jerky enough to last a week, a dozen flat hard biscuits—holdouts from Fletcher’s first attempt at biscuit making—plus a waterskin. Last, he hefted Millie’s shotgun and filled a leather pouch full of shells.

  “No coffeepot?”

  Gunnar shook his head. “I’ll be camping dry, dark, and light. No fires.”

  “But . . . no coffee? No offense, Gunnar, but I’ve seen you without your coffee.”

  The old buck held up another pouch. “Full of coffee beans. I chew them. Serve me fine. But I appreciate your concern, Mr. Ralston.”

  “What about me?” said Fletcher. “What’ll I do?”

  “I been thinking on that, and I think you should go to town.”

  “What? But . . .”

  Gunnar nodded. “I know. But I think you should ride back into Promise. Tell them about Horton, and tell them . . . oh, hell, tell them whatever you like. I’m through with the palaver.” He turned and walked out the door, leaving Fletcher staring wide-eyed after him, standing in the midst of the old man’s cabin, confused and unsure of what he was supposed to do.

  He ran outside shouting, “Hey! Mr. Tibbs!”

  Gunnar stopped in the trail that led toward Horton’s and beyond. He didn’t turn around.

  “Good luck, Mr. Tibbs. It’s been . . . interesting getting to know you. And thank you.”

  Gunnar stood still a moment. Fletcher expected him to turn back, say he was wrong, that Fletcher should accompany him. Anything at all, but instead, Gunnar raised the blunt sawed-off shotgun over his head, shook it once, and walked on.

  Fletcher didn’t know what to make of that. He figured the man was so far into his grief that he might never come out. He also figured that it would get the old man killed.

  He didn’t know whether to follow him or to take his advice and go to town. If he followed Gunnar into the mountains, he’d be ill-equipped and outmatched in any skill he needed, from feeding himself to defending himself to navigating. And Gunnar would surely know he was being followed.

  Or he could go into Promise and . . . what? Nobody there thought him anything other than the killer of an old woman and likely that, too, of the marshal and his wife. He might be set upon by the angry townsfolk themselves. Wasn’t that how people in small towns on the frontier operated?

  Was there a third alternative? Yes, he realized with surprise. Without saying so, the old man had given him an unspoken third option. He could leave it all behind, get away from the madness that was Promise.

  But that would mean never knowing if Varney had succeeded in killing Gunnar Tibbs and exacting his revenge on the town. It would mean throwing away everything that Millicent Jessup and his own mother, Rose, and even his father, Samuel Thorne, had done for him.

  No, that was not an option; he realized that now. If only because he could not let down his friend. Odd as it sounded to Fletcher, Gunnar Tibbs, that crusty old mountain goat of a man, was indeed his friend, the truest friend he had ever really known in his entire life. And the only one.

  Fletcher stared at the empty trail’s forked paths. The left led sharply away toward Horton’s cabin and into the wooded hills, where his only friend had ventured off with purpose. And where a killer lurked.

  The right trail led back toward town, the town of Promise, the place of his birth, the place where the only people who had ever really known him, known who he really, truly was, had lived and died. The place where so much treachery, some of it on his behalf, had taken place.

  And right then he made his decision. He ducked back into the low door of the cabin and gathered what he needed of his things. He tucked the letter from Millie into his inner coat pocket, pulled on his battered bowler, tugged on his one remaining spat and his ridiculous holey gloves, and swatted away the dust from his dirt-shiny vest and trousers.

  Next, he filled the bullet loops on his father’s gun belt and strapped it and its shiny nickel-plated guns with the pearl grips about his waist. He noted with surprise once more that it fit to perfection in the one worn hole in the belt. Perhaps he was more like Samuel Thorne the elder than he knew.

  Fletcher slid the little derringer—what Gunnar called a hideout gun—inside his coat’s inner pocket. Last, he pulled out the locket by its slender gold chain, fastened it about his neck, tucked it beneath his collar and shirtfront, and patted his chest once to ensure it rode there. Then he strode out of the cabin.

  A squawking sound pulled his gaze back toward the cabin. Mort the crow sat atop the old antlers at the roof’s peak. He bobbed twice and cawed once more.

  “If you’re wishing me good luck, Mort, I’ll take it.” Fletcher saluted the bird once and resumed walking toward Promise, hoping the presence of a crow meant good fortune and not anything else.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Skin hadn’t intended to kill Horton Meader as quick as he had. The moment had caught him by surprise
. There was a flicker of time when he saw Meader standing there before his silly little tunnel where Skin could have sworn the man was Gunnar Tibbs, the bastard he really wanted to lay low. The sight had made him giddy.

  But he hadn’t wanted to do it in haste. No, he’d wanted to make it last, draw out the juice of it, like biting into a bloody, hardly cooked slice of meat off the flank of a young deer, so young it ain’t had time enough to work its muscles into something tougher than a boot sole. Skin envisioned himself taking a bite, the blood squirting hot into his mouth, running down over his chin. . . . That was how he wanted killing Gunnar Tibbs to feel. Slow and enjoyable.

  He’d had long enough to think on it. His biggest fear for the last few years while jammed up in Tin Falls Prison was that Tibbs would somehow give up the ghost before he could get out of prison and track him down.

  He wasn’t a fool—he realized that his anger had shifted from finding that fiend Sam Thorne and the money to tracking down Gunnar Tibbs and making him squeal out his last as if he were being crushed slowly by a boulder, from the toes up.

  In fact, that had been one of his most cherished dreams, a way to help himself fall asleep in the wee hours, as his gran used to call the darkest minutes between nightfall and dawn. He wanted to crush Tibbs slowly until his squeals were drowned in a gush of his own blood. Or maybe slice him apart with a dull knife, one little hack at a time, until he was nothing more than a bleeding, screaming mess of meat and bone, topped with two eyeballs watching the whole thing happen to him. Such thoughts had brought Skin Varney much pleasure over the years.

  It hadn’t taken him long to find out where Tibbs lived. He’d never really known all those years back, had no more notion of the spot than a general direction. But first he’d had to find out if he was still about.

  He’d asked a youngish-looking fellow outside of town the first day he’d reached it on his stolen nag if a fellow by the name of Tibbs (“Gunnar, was it?”) still lived around these parts. Been a long while, Skin had said, but he was an old friend, from years and years before, and he wanted to pay him a visit, say hello, and catch up on old times.