.45-Caliber Desperado (27 page)

Spurr leaned back to reach into his pants pocket.

She stretched a waylaying hand on the table between them. “I certainly want no money from you . . . aside from what you owe me for doctoring your friend in there. I suspect from the coin I found in his pockets, he'll be paying for that himself.”

She sat back in her chair, drawing a deep breath that lifted her bosom again. “Shall I get started on that bath?”

“No, ma'am.” Spurr had taken another sip of his tea, which was beginning to taste better, and set the cup back down in its saucer with both hands. “I gotta go find the telegraph office, send a telegram to Hackberry Creek.”

She was looking at him, faintly incredulous, skeptical.

Spurr smiled warmly and winked. “Then I'll be back for that bath and them vittles.” He slid his chair back and rose, grabbing his hat off the table. “Don't look like the storm's gonna let up any time soon, an' I figure I can keep an eye on the town from here as well as anywhere.”

“You don't think me brazen, inviting a strange man into my house?”

“Brazen? I find you nothing less than a saint, Mrs. Dickinson.”

“I reckon you might as well call me June, Spurr.”

“June,” Spurr said with a smile. “I like that. See you in an hour or so, June.”

He turned reluctantly away from the woman, grabbed his rifle, and left.

AS JUNE HAD said it would be, the telegraph office sat on the far side of the creek from Diamondback, just east of a sprawling, dead cottonwood.

It was an unpainted shack of rough lumber and a shake roof, several of the shakes appearing to have been blown away by the wind. Several others fluttered like paper as Spurr approached, tramping across the crude pine bridge traversing the creekbed.

Spurr had figured the creek would be dry, but several inches of adobe-colored water swirled down it. He looked upstream, to the west, and beyond the flying grit he saw that a bank of charcoal clouds edged with cottony gray had settled over the Organ Range. Thunder rumbled and lightning flashed wanly.

Spurr stopped to consider the storm, which, judging by the direction of the wind, was moving toward Diamondback. The chill air was spiced with the smell of sage and brimstone. That deluge would likely be upon the town in an hour or so.

That would keep the de Cava bunch sitting tight. The problem was it would probably also keep Captain Wilson hunkered down at his Hackberry Creek outpost.

There was a cracking sound. Like a gunshot, ripped and torn and nearly drowned by the gale. Spurr jerked his head toward the telegraph office.

Realizing the shot had come from the little shack off both ends of which telegraph wires trailed away on tall pine poles, he dropped to one knee on the plankboard bridge. An especially heavy gust of wind blew up dust and sand in front of him, momentarily blotting the unpainted shack from his view.

He closed his eyes against the grit, and lowered his head, wincing and muttering curses.

When the gust relented, he looked at the shack again. There was only the shack and the blowing dust and tumbleweeds and the whipping telegraph wire. He saw no one around. Pushing up off his knee with a grunt, he broke into a shamble-footed stride, crouching and holding his Winchester up high across his chest. Weaving around boulders and rabbitbrush and sage clumps, he gained the building's west wall, pressed his shoulder against it. He looked ahead and behind him, making sure no one had gotten around him, then strode cautiously up to the shack's west front corner.

He took a second to listen for any unnatural sounds emanating from inside the shack or in front of it, then stepped out away from the corner, bringing his Winchester's barrel to bear on the unroofed stoop running along the south wall.

Nothing.

Only, now the telegraph wire was sagging from a post that stood about twenty feet off the shack's far side.

“Well, I'll be a shit-house rat.”

Spurr stood gaping at the sagging cable that was buffeted by the chill wind. He looked around wildly, swinging his rifle's barrel around, as well. It was as though a ghost riding the teeth of the wind had cut the wire. For a moment, he wondered if indeed the cable had been cut by the wind. Then he walked over to it, pinned the end down with a moccasin, and inspected it.

A clean slice that had undoubtedly been made by a large wire cutter.

Spurr looked toward town, then jerked his rifle up once more. Three vague figures were striding away from him—dark shadows wavering amidst the veils of blowing sand and growing gradually smaller as they crossed another bridge, heading toward Diamondback. One was wearing a duster, which flapped wildly about his legs.

Flickering in and out of the sand curtains, the three figures were finally swallowed by the storm. Spurr lowered his rifle and looked down once more at the cut cable.

“You bastards,” he said, running a gloved hand across his bearded cheek. “Now, why in the hell did you have to go and do that?”

That was all right, Spurr thought, hope rising in him. He'd spliced cut telegraph wire before. Indians were forever cutting telegraph wire. If he could climb that pine post, which might not be so easy now in his later years, he could repair the wire and get the telegraph operational again.

If he could climb that damn post . . .

He remembered the gun crack. Raising the Winchester once more, he strode on back to the door of the telegraph shack.

The door was open, swinging back and forth in the wind. Sand and bits of tumbleweeds lay strewn across the crude wood puncheons just beyond the doorjam. A man lay there, as well. An older gent in a wash-yellowed dress shirt, the sleeves rolled up his freckled arms, and brown wool broadcloth trousers. He wore armbands and a green eyeshade. He had a pale, craggy face with a pencil-thin mustache and a chin like the mouth of a whiskey bottle.

He also wore a bloody hole in the middle of his chest. Blood was pooling on the floor around him. His sightless, wide-open eyes stared at the low ceiling. His teeth were gritted, his jaws clenched as though against the death that was consuming him.

Had
comsumed him. He lay perfectly still.

A cat meowed from somewhere back in the room's shadows. It sounded loud in the quiet building despite the wind's howling outside, and Spurr jerked his head and rifle up, his heart thudding irregularly.

“Shit, pussy. Don't do that to ole Spurr.”

He moved forward and stepped away from the door, habitually wary, so that the outside light wouldn't silhouette him. He couldn't see the cat until he'd moved a ways into the shed, toward a cage and wicket that stood on the shack's opposite side.

The liver-colored cat sat atop the narrow counter running along the front of the cage, hunkered down and curling its tail anxiously, its yellow eyes glowing. It was a fat cat, well fed. It had probably belonged to poor, dead Constiner, who'd been killed most likely only because he'd been Diamondback's telegrapher and he'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time. The killers had wanted to cut the telegraph wires, and they hadn't wanted anyone in town knowing about it.

Why?

Speculation careened haplessly across Spurr's brain as he looked around the small shack outfitted with a charcoal brazier and a rocking chair in a corner, a knitted afghan draped over the back of the chair. There was a half-eaten sandwich, glass of milk, and small whiskey flask on a table beside the chair, with a saucer of milk on the floor beneath the table.

The telegrapher's cage was outfitted with a small desk and a small filing cabinet. The telegraph key sat on a small, tin table against a dirty sashed window in the outside wall.

A yellow-covered codebook sat beside the key, which had been smashed all to hell by the outlaws so that it was hardly recognizable. Springs and weights from the badly smashed instrument were spread out across the codebook and on the floor all around the cage.

So much for sending a telegraph. He could possibly repair the cable, but the key was finished. And he doubted Diamondback had any spare ones lying around.

The cat meowed again. Spur turned to it. It jumped off the counter, hitting the floor with a soft thud, then hurried over to the dead man on the floor and, curling its tail, sniffed the man's forehead. It sniffed the blood, as well, then gave a baleful yowl and padded back over to the counter, pressing its side against it and curling its tail up high above its head.

“Poor puss,” Spurr said. “You got anywhere else to go?”

Thunder rumbled in the distance, louder than before. The wind seemed to be lightening slightly, judging by the diminished creaking in the whipsawed timbers of the telegrapher's shack.

The cat sat, curled its tail to one side, looked at the dead Constiner, and gave its head a quick shake of revulsion and fear.

“You'll get by,” Spurr said. “Someone from town's likely to take you in. If not, hell, I'm sure there's plenty of rats around here. Rats love a town.”

He stepped around Constiner and moved to the door. He went out and then reached back inside for the door handle. Glancing at the cat again, he frowned. The cat was watching him. It looked desperate, frightened, worried.

All alone in the cold, cold world.

“Christ,” Spurr grumbled. He had far more worse things to worry about than a damn orphaned cat. Just the same, he moved around the dead man again and dropped to a knee beside the liver-colored puss. “If I pick you up, you won't scratch me, will you?”

Spurr removed his right glove and stuck his hand out toward the cat's nose, giving the frightened little beast a whiff. Like most animals, cats could tell if they'd trust someone by smelling them. Spurr hoped the cat wouldn't hold his gamey trail sweat and horse lather fetor against him.

The cat was too preoccupied with the dead man on the floor to pay much attention to Spurr's proffered hand, however. So Spurr reached around the cat carefully, slowly, and when he had his arm crooked around the beast, he picked it up and nestled it against his side.

“There, there, now, pussy-puss,” Spurr said. “How 'bout if I see about findin' you a home? I bet Mrs. Dickinson likes cats. Smart, purty women like cats, and she's about as purty an' smart as they come. If not, maybe Mrs. Winters, though she ain't half so purty . . .”

Sort of cradling the cat against his side and gripping his rifle in his left hand, Spurr left the shack and the dead man inside, closing and latching the door, then retraced his steps back in the direction from which he'd come.

Rain started pelting him by the time he reached the bridge crossing the creek. Small, cold drops were hurled slantwise by the biting wind. The creek itself was far from a dry wash. The depth of the water had more than doubled since Spurr had first crossed, and small branches and bits of cactus were swirling down the tea-colored stream that caught and eddied around rocks and sage roots.

“Holy shit in the nun's privy, cat,” Spurr said, quickening his pace, “we're in for a gully washer!”

By the time he reached the Dickinson house, the sky had turned murky and the rain was hammering in earnest, turning the roads of Diamondback into veritable creeks, with the silver raindrops drilling into clay-colored puddles like small-caliber rifle fire. The wind had indeed lightened some, but its former ferocity was matched by the thunder and lightning of the fast-approaching storm.

Thunderclaps sounded like near cannon fire, causing the earth to leap beneath Spurr's soaked moccasins as he hurried up the nearly submerged cobbled walk to the Dickinson front gallery. Lightning lit the entire sky from horizon to horizon. During such flashes, Spurr could see low clouds being hurled every which way and not all that far above the Diamondback rooftops.

He opened the screen door with the same hand with which he was holding his rifle, and held it open with his left foot. He didn't have to open the inside door. It swung open, and June Dickinson was there, looking at him worriedly as she stepped back, drawing the door wide, her brown eyes sliding to the sodden cat in Spurr's arm.

“What on earth?”

Spurr walked inside, and June closed the door behind him. He said, “Is this the telegrapher's cat?”

“Homer Constiner's. Indeed. What're you doing with it?”

“Poor thing don't have a home no more. Leastways, not the telegraph office.”

She narrowed her eyes at him.

Spurr set the cat down and, avoiding the woman's gaze, leaned his rifle in the corner near the door. “I was hoping you could take him. They say you never have rats if—”

“What's happening, Spurr?” June's voice was quietly insistent. “Who killed Homer?”

Spurr sighed and held his hat down so it could drip onto the rug at his feet and not on the woman's polished oak floor. “There's a bunch in town, June.” He brushed rainwater from his brows with his wet shirtsleeve. “The de Cava bunch. Led by a border rat named Mateo de Cava. They sprung a prisoner from the Arkansas River Federal Pen up in Colorado, turned all the prisoners loose, and . . .”

“And they're why you and Sheriff Mason are here in Diamondback.”

“That's right. We followed them here.”

“And they killed Homer Constiner.” June sounded as though she couldn't believe what she was saying as, frowning in befuddlement, she bent down and picked up the wet cat. “Oh, poor dear Josie,” she cooed, holding the cat against her despite how wet it was. To Spurr, she said, “I'll find Josie some milk. The sheriff is awake and has asked for you. He's in my room, the door off the parlor.” She tossed her head at the doorway opposite the kitchen.

Spurr held his arms out away from himself and grunted in frustration as he looked down at his wet, muddy moccasins. “I'll get you a robe. We can dry your clothes out in front of the stove. I've stoked it for supper. Your bath is waiting for you upstairs when you're ready.”