Last Lawman (9781101611456) (14 page)

Mason turned to Crawford sharply. “Wilde? Erin Wilde’s boy?”

“Sure enough. Shot the boy down on the mercantile’s loading dock. After they finished ransacking that store as well as several others, and stole around five thousand dollars from the bank—after shooting poor Thornberg here!—Stanhope himself grabbed Erin and rode off with her kickin’ and screamin’ over his saddle horn!”

“Good
Christ
!” Mason said, pausing a moment to take it all in, his horse leaping around beneath him as though sensing the sheriff’s exapseration.

“We’re waitin’ to bury the boy,” the undertaker said, “hopin’ his ma returns home first.”

“Mercer go after ’em?”

“Hell, no,” said yet another man from the funeral procession. “Mercer’s back here!”

Spurr turned to follow the man’s hooked thumb toward another wagon, this one a buckboard. It was driven by a grizzled oldster in a threadbare suit. Mason heeled his grulla on back to the buckboard, and Spurr followed him.

He and the sheriff looked down at the open coffin riding in the buckboard’s box. The coffin was open, and a suited gent lay inside, holding a spray of wildflowers in his knobby, sun-browned hands against his chest. A silver watch and a bowie knife with a carved bone handle rested in the coffin beside him. His brown eyes were half open and staring straight up at the sky. His salt-and-pepper hair, shiny and fragrant with pomade, was parted in the middle. He had a puckered, dark blue hole the size of a silver cartwheel in his forehead.

Spurr vaguely noted that his blue-checked suitcoat didn’t match his brown broadcloth trousers that bore one patched knee. A middle-aged woman stood in the trail behind the
wagon. She was dark, appearing to have some Mexican blood, and dressed all in black, with a black mantilla. She was leaning forward against the tailgate, both hands hooked over the top of the tailgate, sobbing as she stared at the man in the coffin. In one of her hands was a worn, leather-covered Bible. In the other she clutched a crucifix.

Mason opened his mouth to speak to the woman. Apparently seeing that there were no words that could comfort a woman so obviously bereaved, he turned to the townsfolk who’d formed a ragged semicircle around him and Spurr, regarding both lawmen expectantly, a little angrily.

Mason stared at the crowd, not saying anything. He looked chagrined; he didn’t seem to know what to say. Spurr felt the burn of anger and stepped Cochise forward and a little in front of the sheriff.

The old lawman raised his voice as he said, “Did anyone back this man?” He canted his head to indicate the dead town marshal of Sweetwater.

The men and the women just scowled at him, their expressions growing faintly skeptical, as though they weren’t quite sure what he’d said.

“I take it that’s a ‘no,’” Spurr said. “
Anyone
go after this group
at all
?”

A light hum rose from the crowd. Finally, a man several yards away raised his voice to yell, “Hell, no! Them’s the Vultures, fer chrissakes! They shot ole Mercer down like he was a duck on a millpond! Besides, we ain’t gettin’ paid to go after ’em!”

“It’s you’s gettin’ paid to risk your necks!” shouted another man from somewhere off Spurr’s right shoulder. “If you was doin’ your jobs, they wouldn’t be runnin’ around like a pack of wild wolves, anyhow!”

Spurr sighed.

Mason said, “Let it go, Spurr. Let’s ride.” He started walking his grulla forward.

Spurr ignored him as he hardened his jaws and cast his
angry gaze at the well-dressed crowd milling around him. The Mexican woman sobbed uncontrollably against the tailgate of the wagon hauling her dead husband.

“That gang rode through here and killed a boy,” Spurr said, feeling his old ticker skipping beats. “They kidnapped a woman whom they likely promptly raped and are still rapin’ every chance they get…”

Several women in the crowd gasped.

One of the men said with an air of self-righteous indignation, “Now, look here, sir!”

“You look here, you little pipsqueak!”

The pipsqueak stepped back. His wife closed her hands over the ears of her pigtailed daughter.

Spurr pointed a gloved finger at the pipsqueak. “You and every man in this town who didn’t do nothin’ to back the play of your lawman is a yellow-livered coward. The law is only as strong as the citizens who stand behind it—especially when you got only one man wearin’ a badge. The wolves outnumber us one hundred to one, and the only way we can keep a foot forward is if everyone does their part, and if that means risking your lives by formin’ a posse, so be it!”

“We heard what happened to that posse over in Willow City!” the pipsqueak shouted. “Word spread like wildfire!”

Spurr looked at Mason, who had ridden slowly through the crowd and curveted his horse at the far edge of it, scowling impatiently over the hatted, bonneted heads toward Spurr.

“That’s right,” Spurr told the pipsqueak. “They paid the price for attempting to keep their loved ones safe, for standin’ up against evil and maintainin’ a foothold on their freedom. What you boys done—lettin’ the Vultures run off with an innocent woman and not even makin’ a decent
effort
to
track
’em at the risk of your own sorry hides…hell, you all
deserve
what happened to the posse over to Willow City. Cowards, every damn one of you!”

He snapped the words like a whip, causing the men and even the women to collectively wince. The old lawman cursed and ground his moccasined heels against Cochise’s ribs. The crowd parted in a sudden panic, making way for the enraged lawman, and Spurr trotted on up the trail and past Mason staring at him skeptically.

“Come on, Sheriff!” Spurr snarled. “What the hell we wastin’ our time on these hoopleheads for?”

Mason decided to wait until they were on the other side of town and had picked up the two-day-old trail of nearly a dozen galloping shod horses before, riding abreast of the older lawman, he said, “You gotta remember you’re from another time, Spurr.”

“I been reminded of that every goddamn day of my life, Sheriff!”

The sun was almost down later that same day when, having ridden a good thirty miles west of Sweetwater, Spurr and Mason both reined their horses down sharply.

“What in hell was that?” Mason said.

As if in reply, the sound came again—a man’s agonized scream. Spurr thought the scream was enough answer of its own, so he merely booted Cochise on down the grade they’d been descending between ever-darkening walls of evergreen forest. He couldn’t run the horse too fast, because while the grade wasn’t particularly steep, it was rocky, with here and there a blowdown they had to skirt and plenty of fallen branches.

The scream sounded once more, much nearer now. It was followed by several voices, and Spurr looked to his left where a stream threaded through the forest and crossed the trail he was on by way of a crude wooden bridge. Four horses stood along the edge of the stream, idly cropping grass, while four men were milling nearby. They appeared to have one man down and were working him over pretty good.

A bushwhack and robbery, Spurr thought.

He’d just reached for the butt of his Winchester when one of the men with a shelflike chin turned toward him, and he saw the round, brown-eyed face of Bill Stockton. Then he saw Ed Gentry standing over the man on the ground, tugging on one of the downed man’s arms while Gentry braced himself with a boot on the man’s chest.

The down man was one of the two Pinkertons—the older one, Web Mitchell. The younger detective, Calico Strang, stood a ways back from his partner and Gentry who, Spurr realized now, was trying to pop Mitchell’s arm back in place. Judging by the shrill scream that loosed itself from Mitchell’s wide-open mouth, and the faint wooden pop that accompanied it, Gentry finally got the shoulder bone yanked back in its socket.

“What happened?” Spurr asked as he swung down from his saddle with a grunt.

Bill Stockton was smoking a cigar butt, the aromatic blue smoke wafting around his gray head. His silver-streaked, dark brown hair hung to his shoulders. “The Pinkerton was attacked by a serpent. Downright biblical.”

Gentry was breathing hard as he glanced at Spurr and Mason approaching the group. “Struck at him from atop a flat rock, and his horse spooked—threw him clear to last Sunday. That shoulder was damn near hangin’ down the middle of his back.”

“Woulda had an easier time wipin’ your ass that way, eh, Mitchell?” Stockton said through a cloud of cigar smoke, prodding the white-faced Pinkerton’s hip with his boot and laughing.

“He’ll be fine now,” Gentry said as he walked over to his horse and fished around in one of his saddlebag pouches.

He popped the cork, took a pull, then carried the bottle over to Mitchell. “Here ya go, Detective. Take you a swig of that. You’ll be feelin’ like you’re shittin’ in high cotton again in no time.”

“Forget about shittin’,” Spurr said as the detective took a hard pull off the bourbon bottle. “Can he ride?”

“We’d probably best camp here,” said Gentry. “Give him a few hours to mend, then send him back to his home office.”

The Pinkerton lowered the whiskey bottle and glared at the older men around him. His thick dark hair was mussed, a wing of it hanging over one gray-blue eye. “I’m just busted up a little, not dead,” he said, taking another sip of the healing elixir. “And I’m not going back. The Pinkertons have a sizeable stake in running the Vultures to ground. I’ll make a sling for this arm and be good as new.”

“Might be better if you could ride another couple miles tonight,” Spurr said.

Mason glanced at him. “You thinkin’ about Waylon Humpreys’s place on Cool Spring Creek?”

“Mitchell would be a whole lot more comfortable there than on the ground.” The federal lawman turned to Mitchell. “And I know good ole Waylon’ll pad out your belly right nicely for you. He got to be a good cook after that harpy of a woman left him and his boy.”

“Maybe for all of us, huh, Spurr?” This from the ever-sneering Calico Strang.

“Yeah, for all of us,” Spurr said, sneering back at the uppity young Pinkerton.

Mitchell extended his good arm to Gentry, who helped him to his feet. “I’ll make it. I’m so tired of you fellas’ cooking, I’d have to be a whole lot more beaten up than this
not
to make it.”

While the others stood back to let Mitchell test out his land legs while holding his arm taut against his side and bent just a little, Spurr noticed Mason staring out toward the trail they’d ridden in on. Mason had a worried look.

Spurr said, “What is it?”

“This trail heads over into that canyon the Box Bar B’s in, don’t it? I mean, if you stay on this trail, it’ll take you right to Waylon’s front door, wouldn’t it?”

Mason turned to Spurr. The sheriff’s look was like a sucker punch. Spurr thought of Waylon Humphreys and his boy, Paul, as he ran his hand along his jaw and over his mouth, his old ticker hiccupping tightly.

Humphreys and his boy were likely alone at their place. Waylon usually only hired hands for the fall and spring roundups.

“That it does…that it does…”

He and Mason whipped around and hurried to their horses, Spurr yelling, “Come on, boys. Let’s shake a leg, damnit!”

Spurr’s group rode up and over a low pass and down into another, broader canyon sheathed in high, clay-colored ridges whose lower slopes were carpeted in firs and aspens. When they rode out of a pine forest, the old lawman and Mason reined up.

Stockton and Gentry rode out to either side of them, staring ahead across a broad mountain park that was a murky pool of dusk under a dark green sky. Beyond, the sun was drifting down through a narrow gap between indigo peaks and casting long crimson bayonets across the canyon behind it.

The only movement was a small herd of cattle, cow-calf pairs, grazing around Cool Spring Creek that ran along the base of the ridge to the right.

The only sound was the call of a mourning dove.

Spurr stared out from beneath his hat brim, dread tickling his belly. A hundred yards away lay the portal of Waylon Humphreys’s Box Bar B Ranch headquarters. Beyond the portal, the buildings were brown smudges against the
spruce-green forest. Spurr could make out the cabin. No lights shone in the windows.

Bill Stockton must have been reading his mind. “Getting late enough for a lamp or two.”

A sound reached across the canyon from the direction of the cabin. Spurr pricked his ears, felt his blood warm. The sound came again—a loud grunt followed by a thud. At least, that’s how it seemed. His old ears could just barely pick it up beneath the mournful cry of the lone dove and the steady whisper of the creek yonder.

It came again—a woman’s agonized grunting groan along with a dull thud. The lawmen looked around at each other skeptically. Finally, Spurr slid his Winchester out of its scabbard, cocked it one-handed, off cocked the hammer, and swung down from his saddle.

“Mitchell, since you got an injured wing, you stay here with the horses while we walk in and check it out. Could be nothin’. Could be that the Vultures decided to hole up there in Waylon’s cabin for a time. Maybe they like his cookin’.”