Suddenly several birds flew out of the aspens behind Stillman, crying shrilly. Instinctively he dived to his left and rolled as two quick shots resounded, the bullets cutting the air where he'd been crouching.
Lifting his .44 and seeing a shadow bound through the trees, he squeezed off four shots so quickly they sounded like one. A man yelled. The yell was followed by the sound of something big hitting the ground.
Stillman scrambled to his feet and ran toward the form lying over a branch. He stopped a few feet away and moved in slowly, his eyes riveted on the prone figure.
It was Shambeau, all right, in hide breeches and a buffalo coat. He was a large, bearded man with long salt-and-pepper hair parted in the middle. His nose was broad, eyes sunk deep in his rawboned, deep-lined face. A ragged white scar crept from the bridge of his nose to his left temple.
Blood shone wetly on his chest, just below his shoulder. Not far away, an old Colt Navy with a brass trigger guard lay in the leaves.
Hearing the distant footfalls of McMannigle running toward him from the other side of the camp, Stillman stepped forward cautiously. He watched the trapper's inert face, the closed eyes not even twitching.
Sliding his gaze to the Colt Navy, Stillman took a step toward it, intending to kick it away, when his ears shuddered with a sudden cry. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flash of movement
Shambeau was rising, bounding toward him. Before Stillman could fire, the man was on him, and the gun was flying out of his hand.
The trapper bulled into Stillman from a crouched position, lifting him off his feet and throwing him over backward. Stillman hit the ground hard, the back of his head taking the brunt of the fall. It stunned him for a moment, his vision dancing.
When he saw the trapper reaching for a knife on his belt, Stillman lifted his right leg and kneed the man sideways, then swung his left fist, connecting soundly with the man's stony jaw. As Shambeau flew off of him, Stillman bolted to his feet and glanced around for his gun. Not seeing it, he returned his eyes to the trapper—too late. The man scissor-kicked Stillman's feet out from under him, and the ground came up hard against the sheriff's side, grieving both shoulders and collarbone.
In spite of the pain, he regained his legs quickly as Shambeau, snarling like a savage, dark eyes wide and shiny, bulled into him again, thrusting him into a tree, making his head pound and his ears ring.
The trapper pulled his arm back and brought his fist forward, sinking it deep in Stillman's gut. Trying to suck air back into his lungs, Stillman lowered his head and whipped it up quickly into Shambeau's jaw.
The man staggered backward. Stillman followed, swinging, connecting a roundhouse right with the man's cheekbone. Shambeau straightened and swung his own right. Stillman ducked under it, but when he came up, Shambeau gave him a hard left jab.
Dazed, vaguely amazed at the enormous strength behind the man's fists, Stillman floundered backward. Before he could recover, the trapper jabbed him again in the jaw, whipping Stillman's head back. Another hard right to the forehead buckled one of his knees, which sank to the ground.
When Stillman lifted his eyes, Shambeau was moving in for the kill, wielding not only a savage grin but a big, broad-bladed bowie with an edge sharp enough to cut a stout rope with a single slash. Shambeau whipped the knife sideways, cocking the arm to bring the blade forward across Stillman's neck.
It was a stillborn movement, ending just as the blade started forward. Stillman saw something move behind the trapper, whose head jerked forward, his chin bouncing off his chest.
The man stiffened and his eyes seemed to focus on something in the far distance behind Stillman. Then they rolled up and his face slackened, as if all the muscles had been cut, and the man sank to his knees. He fell forward with a resolute groan and lay still, his face in the grass.
"What in the hell took you so long?" Stillman said, staring up at the face of Leon McMannigle, who was still holding the rifle he'd used on Shambeau, butt forward.
"I tried to get here as fast as I could, Sheriff." Leon's sober face suddenly opened with a toothy grin. "How you feelin'?"
Chapter Seven
WHILE STILLMAN RUBBED his jaw and tried to recover his senses, McMannigle cuffed Shambeau's hands behind his back and tied his ankles loosely with rawhide. The trapper moaned and spat as he came out of it, turning his head from side to side.
Stillman climbed heavily to his feet, found his Stetson, dusted it off, and donned it. Then he reloaded his Colt and dropped it back in his holster. He stood looking down at the broad-backed trapper, who growled and spat like an animal caught in a snare.
Stillman turned to Leon, who was watching the trapper warily. "Why don't you get the horses? We'll camp here tonight, get an early start in the morning."
"He ain't happy," Leon said, watching the shaggy-headed Shambeau try to wrestle his wrists from the cuffs.
"No, but maybe I can hold him"—Stillman sighed, his expression wry—"now that you've brained and hogtied him."
Leon looked at Stillman and winced. "Your face looks like hamburger."
"You should see my pride."
Leon wagged his head and started walking toward the ridge, branches snapping under his feet.
Stillman squatted on his haunches beside the trapper. "No use fighting it, Louis. Those cuffs aren't going anywhere. Neither's the rawhide. You try to run, you won't get far."
Shambeau flopped onto his back and raged, "Let me go! Damn you to hell!"
Stillman shook his head. "You're not going anywhere. I'm Ben Stillman, sheriff of Hill County. I'm arresting you for the murder of two Bar 7 men and the assault on one more."
The man's features relaxed a little, and his eyes found the badge on Stillman's buckskin mackinaw. For the first time, the eyes lost their animal rage and cunning, and an intelligent light glowed dully, far back in their flinty hardness.
"They shot my mule."
His voice was flat and owned a peculiar accent—the nasality of French mixed with the hard, flat consonants of Indian.
"What's that?"
"The kid shot my mule." He pronounced kid "kit."
Stillman frowned. "Where? When?"
Shambeau was half sitting on his butt, head lifted off the ground, the cords in his neck straining as if to pull through his hide. "Yesterday. I passed them on my way to the creek"—he jutted his chin to indicate north—"to check my traps. They were cutting the wood. The kid shot my mule." He tensed suddenly, giving a look of intense pain and glanced down at his shoulder where the bloodstain was growing, matting the curly, cinnamon fur of his coat.
"The bullet go all the way through or is it still in there?" Stillman asked.
"She still in," Shambeau said with a sour look on his face.
"As soon as my deputy returns with the horses, I'll put a compress on it. We'll get you to a doctor tomorrow."
"I don't want a doctor. I got traplines to tend."
"That'll be a while, I'm afraid. That kid might've shot your mule, but you had no right to go on a rampage."
Shambeau looked at him, and the animal rage returned to his gaze. "They shot my mule! I had to build a cache in trees! To my cabin it is a three-day ride!"
Stillman scowled. "Sorry," he said. "I know how you feel, but that ain't enough to call what you did justifiable homicide. Not anymore, it isn't."
“To call... it is what?”
"Never mind. If you get to your feet, I'll help you back to your fire."
“Turn me loose, lawman!"
"Can't do that, Shambeau. You committed both murder and assault." Stillman stood. "Now get up, and I'll help you back to the fire. Any funny business, I'll leave you here to bleed to death."
Stillman helped the man back to the bivouac and eased him down beside the fire. He removed the charred rabbit from the spit and tossed it into the trees. Then he threw more wood on the fire and sat down on one of the deadfalls to wait for McMannigle and the horses.
Sitting there, he leaned forward, set
his elbows on his knees, and laced his hands together, watching the trapper. Shambeau sat with his back against the other deadfall, legs spread before him, breathing heavily, a perpetual snarl on his lips, his hair in his face.
The picture of defeat.
Stillman couldn't help feeling sorry for the man. Sorrier than he'd felt for the men he'd killed and the kid he'd scalped. The Bar 7 men had started the whole thing when the kid had shot the mule. Stillman suspected the two older gents had done little to discourage him before or to reprimand him after.
Shambeau was an inscrutable loner, a maverick mountain man, and a M6tis to boot. Any one of those things would have made him a black sheep, but all three together made him a renegade—a man to be feared and shunned. A man to treat as you would a wolf preying on your livestock, a coyote making the calving rounds.
So, they'd shot his mule for a joke or out of spite for the man and his outdated ways. Why else would they have done it?
Shambeau was just getting even the only way he knew. True, he'd done more than get even for a dead mule, but he was a frontiersman, and the only justice he knew was the frontier kind. Stillman, a frontiersman himself, knew that frontier justice was almost always swift and never pretty.
He did not personally hold the action against the trapper, but since the law held it against the man, and since Stillman represented the law, he had to hold it against him professionally. He had to take him in and haul him before a judge.
It occurred to him now, with a poignant sense of loss, that Fay had been right: This wasn't really the frontier anymore. While true frontiersmen still wandered here and there about the West, the West wasn't what it used to be. The railroad had come and the buffalo had gone and most of the Indians were subsisting on reservations. And men like Stillman, who'd grown up on the frontier and had changed with the times, had to haul men like Louis Shambeau, who had not, before a court of civilized law to answer for their crimes against civilization.
It was a hell of an ugly job, and Stillman had the undeniable urge to let the man go. But if he did that, he'd have to turn in his badge. While so-called "civilization" often made him feel like he'd chugged a quart of sour milk, he wasn't yet ready to throw in the towel. Especially not after he'd dragged Fay all the way out here from Denver.
No, there was no denying it, Stillman thought now, pondering the man who'd beaten him—he was a civilized man. And that meant that, like civilization, there was a lot about himself he didn't like.
Not the least of which, at the moment, was his job.
When McMannigle appeared with the horses, Stillman stood and retrieved a spare shirt from his saddlebags and tore it into strips.
"Sit still now, Shambeau. I'm going to apply a compress to that bullet wound."
The trapper said nothing, just stared into the flames, the sneer still curling his mouth.
When Stillman hunkered down on his haunches to slide the tunic off the man's shoulder, he could smell the skunky, gamey odor of his clothes, saw the translucent specs of lice in his hair down close to his scalp. It had been a long time since Stillman had been around a man who smelled this bad—probably not since his old hide-hunting days with his friend, Bill Harmon—and he couldn't help wrinkling his nose as he tended the man's shoulder. Aside from the smell of skunk, he smelled like a roast that had cured too long in the sun.
There were some things he didn't mind about civilization, thought the sheriff. Namely, baths.
When he'd finished the chore, he stood with what remained of his shirt and saw that Leon was stringing a picket line for the horses, both of which he'd unsaddled and rubbed down with grass. The trapper's spotted pony stood ground-staked nearby, nervous in the presence of strangers.
"Got any whiskey?" Stillman called to him. Stillman himself had given up hard liquor after a long bout with the bottle after that soiled dove had shot him in the back and he'd had to retire his Deputy U.S. Marshal's badge.
"In my saddlebags," Leon said.
Stillman fished the bottle and a tin cup out of the deputy's gear, poured a shot for Shambeau, and brought it to him. "Here you go," he said. "That should help with the pain."
"I don't want any of your stinking liquor," Shambeau spat, not looking at him.
"Have it your way," Stillman said.
He set the cup on a rock by the fire, knowing McMannigle would no doubt want it after his chores. Then he went to his own gear and fished out a pot and a bag of beans. As he prepared a meager supper of beans and coffee, he stole several glances at the trapper, who sat in the fading light, gazing sullenly into the fire.
As the dark closed in, the dancing fire found the hard, weather-scaled plains of the trapper's face. It shone in the dark eyes, which seemed to absorb everything, giving back nothing.
Stillman and McMannigle turned in early, rolling up in their soogans just after full dark. Stillman had lain several blankets beside the trapper, but the man ignored them, choosing instead to sit where Stillman had deposited him earlier, staring into the fire, brooding.
"Gives me the creeps," Leon said, glancing at the prisoner as he squirmed around in his blankets, getting comfortable.
"You tied him good and tight to the log, didn't you?"
Leon nodded. "He still gives me the creeps." He sighed, yawned, smacked his lips, and closed his eyes.
"Yeah ... me, too," Stillman said, tipping his Stetson over his face.
He woke up several times during the long, cold night and tossed wood on the fire. A few times he saw the trapper sleeping with his chin on his chest, but mostly he appeared awake and staring into the darkness beyond the fire's guttering glow.
What was he thinking about, anyway? Probably escape, Stillman figured, and made a mental note to keep an extra eye on the man tomorrow. Wounded or not, he had the strength of a grizzly bear and would no doubt try to escape at the first opportunity, no matter how slim his chance of success.
The next morning Stillman and McMannigle rose at first light. After a hurried breakfast of pan bread and coffee, which the trapper refused, the three men mounted their horses and headed north toward Clantick.
Stillman rode point, the trapper following on his spotted cayuse, his reins in Stillman's hand, his wrists tethered behind his back, his ankles bound to his stirrups. Leon rode behind the man, his rifle in his arms, his eyes skinned on the dangerous, brooding figure before him.
They stopped at noon for a half-hour lunch and to rest their horses. About four o'clock Clantick appeared on the horizon, smoke lifting from the shanties at the edge of town. Stillman sighed with relief. It had been a long ride. He was eager to have this ugly business finished, and to see Fay again.
When they hit town, several stray dogs ran out to nip at their horses' hocks. They took French Street past Stillman's white frame house to First Street, and hung a left westward toward Doc Evans's place, where they'd wait while Evans tended the trapper's shoulder.
As they rode down First, people halted on the boardwalks to stare at the two lawmen and their prisoner. The trapper rode crouched in his saddle, favoring his wounded shoulder. His long, greasy hair hid his face. He hadn't said a word the entire trip.
Evelyn Vincent, the waitress at Sam Wa's, stepped outside the cafe on Stillman's left and waved. Stillman tipped his hat to her. He was turning his gaze back westward when he saw several men pour out of the Drovers Saloon and step into the street before him.
There were over a half dozen men, he saw now, all dressed in battered drovers hats and chaps. All but the man in the lead, that was. He appeared younger and thinner than the others, and he wore a red bandanna over the top of his head and knotted at the base of his skull.
Sticking out around the bandanna were chestnut locks of full, rich hair.
"Oh, crap," Stillman heard Leon mutter behind him.
Oh crap, was right.
“Tommy," Stillman said, bringing his horse to a halt, trying to keep his voice even, "did you shoot this man's mule?"
The kid shrugged. "So what if
I did? It was just a mule. Ain't no excuse for what he did to us."
Stillman pondered the lad grimly, then nodded. "Well, we got him. Justice is served. Out of the way."
The kid had stopped in the street directly before Stillman, his face expressionless, his long hair ruffling in the cool spring breeze, his hand draped over the silver-plated pistol resting in his hand-tooled black holster. The other men had stopped in the street to the kid's right, their squinting, insolent eyes on the trapper, their thumbs hooked behind their cartridge belts. The breeze toyed with their chaps and their hat brims, fluttered the colored bandannas tied around their necks.
"Justice is served, is it?" the kid snarled. "I ain't got any hair on the top of my head."
One of the cowboys let loose a chuckle deep in his throat, but quickly stifled it. The kid turned to the man with a savage scowl.
Leon cleared his throat. "You know, I heard toupee makers are doin' just wonderful things with horsehair these days."
Stillman turned in his saddle and gave the deputy a scowl.
Leon shrugged. "Just tryin' to help."
"I'll tell you how justice is gonna be served," the kid sneered, drawing his revolver and turning to the trapper slouched in his saddle.
Stillman lifted his right leg over the saddle horn and slid down from his horse. He grabbed the kid's gun with his left hand and punched the side of the kid's head with his right. Releasing the gun, the kid went down on a knee, yelling, "Ow! Damn you—!"
The kid stood, staggering, and drew the knife from his belt sheath, wielding it menacingly at the sheriff. Stillman kicked the knife out of the kid's hand, stepped in, and slammed another right in the kid's face. The kid fell hard, screaming. Stillman crouched, grabbed the kid's collar, and held him with his left hand while he let him have it, over and over, with his right.
He lost all sense of himself, giving into a red-hot anger burning up from deep within. As if from far away he could hear the cowboys yelling their objections. From even farther off, he heard Leon.
"Ben! Ben! Damnit! Ben!”
Once a Renegade Page 5